The Great Wall of China13. And When the Sky Was Opened

I remember waking up in an unfamiliar room. It was either nighttime or all the lights were off. No one else was in the room, but I could tell I was in a hospital. In a hotel, I would have been lying on my side or curled up. Here, I was lying down while halfway sitting up, with my legs stretched out flat. There was a hospital curtain next to my bed and the kind of machines you do not normally see in a hotel room.

A second later, I woke up in a bright room with people rushing around. It was all noise and general chaos. Everyone was talking at the same time in what sounded like a dozen different languages. I would swear that at least one person was speaking Klingon.

The first time I realized that a nurse was giving me a sponge bath, I thought I was dreaming. We call it a sponge bath, but there were no sponges involved. It was also not nearly as exciting for me as it would be for men watching with the remote in one hand. It bothered me that the nurse never washed my hair, but I thought I was dreaming, so I never said anything. I don't want to consider myself vain, but I like to think I have nice hair. I use a Chinese shampoo that gives Asian women that silky shine. Where I come from, my hair color is nothing special, but here, women often dye and fail to match it.

The first time I woke up with any certainty that I was actually awake, I had no idea where I was. It was like the first morning on vacation when you wake up in a hotel unsure exactly where you are for a second. Only this lasted longer. I had no concept of where I was, what time of day it was, how I got there or what I was doing. I could see everything around me, but nothing made any sense. It was like an important system file was missing from my hard drive. When I realized I was lying upright in a bed, it still did not make any sense. It was obviously not my bed or a hotel bed. It did not even feel like a bed.

Eventually, I decided that I was in a hospital. I could not imagine why I would be in a hospital, and hospitals have a distinct iodoform smell. This one did not. But everything around me looked like a hospital. There is a Nicolas Cage movie where he wakes up in what looks like a hospital room, but it's actually a rooftop freight container. He should have been able to smell the difference. But he was part of an elaborate con. I was relatively certain that I was not. The time of day, or even what day it was, felt unimportant under the circumstances. Something put me in a hospital.