Deathfear and Dreamscape

By Frank R. Freemon

The narrator of this book, although blind, deaf, and paralyzed, interacts with a strange set of fictional characters who move about the fictional city of Nashville, Tennessee. A car salesman loves the smell of napalm in the morning. A sergeant pushes everyone out of his flying machine. A doctor finds two people living in the same body. A teacher forces a student to undergo an eyeball transplantation. A theologian claims that Jesus loves lesbians best of all. A cheerleader has a melon where her head should be. A pedophile exorcizes a demon. A minister fights evil by stabbing sinners to death. One man fathers a thousand children but his family does not show up for Sunday dinner. Real people mix with the fictional characters. Bob Hope holds the narrator's hand. James Earle Ray spends the night with a minister. Dinah Shore blows kisses and Jack Palance guns down a farmer. Kronos and his brothers move to Nashville to play football. Lamar Alexander digs up a coffin, pries open the lid, and shouts, "It's alive." Romance softens the gore. One character rejects Prince Charming while her brother falls deeply in love with a woman who does not exist. Two lovebirds pitch woo by drilling holes in each other's skulls. A grand denouement weaves all these storylines together in a beautiful tapestry, but the reader must avoid the splatter of bright red blood.

This is the best book written in English since Dante's Towering Inferno.
Professor, School of Letters, University of the South

This book is so complicated that it makes Tolstoy's War and Peace read like a Marvel comic book.
Henry Hammer, Department of Neurology, Gorrie School of Medicine

• Language: English
• Publisher: WestBow Press
• Release date: Apr 27, 2011
• ISBN: 9781449715533

Frank R. Freemon

The author studied medicine and neurology at the University of Florida in Gainesville. He was a neurologist at the Nashville Veterans Hospital and at Vanderbilt School of Medicine for many years. After semi-retirement, he studied law and divinity. He obtained a Master of Fine Arts degree from the Unversity of the South, writing about medicine (all too true) and murder (all fiction thankfully). During his 72 years he has met many interesting people, most of whom have morphed into fictional characters for this book. He now works as the only neurologist at a Christian clinic which only sees people who have no medical insurance. He appreciates the ironies of life; for example, the number of patients at the clinic increased after the passage of a law that guaranteed free medical insurance to everyone. Those who use their rational minds and see ironies experience life as a comedy, a series of hilarious anecdotes. Those who feel find life an unrelenting, unbearable tragedy.

Book preview

Chapter 1

Waking Up Dead

Everything is dark. I can see nothing. I cannot move either arm. I cannot open and close my fingers. When I try to wiggle my toes, I do not feel them move. I cannot shout out for help, because I cannot move my mouth. My tongue does not move. I try to produce a sound, any sound. I feel my throat vibrate but I can hear nothing. I see nothing, I hear nothing, I cannot move, I cannot speak.

I must be dead.

Time passes but nothing changes. I lie silently in the darkness. If I am dead, this must be hell. People in heaven are not blind, deaf, and paralyzed.

What did my preacher say about life after death? I can remember him standing in the pulpit. I cannot recall his name. He asked me to stand. The congregation applauded.

Christians, he said, see the resurrection of Jesus as a sample or example of what our life after death will be like. My post-resurrection body will be something like the post-resurrection body of Jesus. But in that same sermon he said the Hebrews went to a dark and silent place beneath the earth. They existed without knowledge of the world above, without influence on the land of the living. What did they call this place?

My memory is weak.

Jesus said, I am the resurrection and the life.

It is much later. Was I asleep?

Sheol.

The Hebrews called the place of the dead Sheol. Reverend Lund told us.

The dead lie quietly, without energy, in a dark and quiet place . In those days, Hermes guided the souls of the dead to the River Styx. They were ferried across the river to the underworld. My memory of my childhood is coming back to me. I was sick in bed with measles and my mother brought me a book about Greek mythology. The ruler of the underworld was Hades, brother of Zeus.

I am in Hades. I am in Sheol.

The Greeks had it right. The Hebrews had it right. The Christians have it wrong. What a vicious trick to play on generations of Christians.

I was sitting in a chair. I can recall that. I was wearing only an undershirt. I was frantically pulling down the shirt to cover my genitals. I think my arms were moving but the memory of this is rapidly fading. Now awake, I try to move my arms but nothing happens. In Sheol, the dead lie quietly and do not even try to move. I try very hard but can generate no form of movement. I strain and strain, as though I were lifting a heavy weight, but nothing happens. I am obviously dead.

I smell something. At first it is just a whiff, an obvious odor but one that cannot be identified. It is something unpleasant. The odor becomes a stench. A dog turd is being held right under my nose. Then the smell lessens and slowly drifts away.

Time passes. The odor or its memory remains barely discernible.

If I can smell dog waste, I must be alive. I may be blind, deaf, and paralyzed, but I am not dead. The dead cannot identify odors. The dead cannot smell dog shit.

My first emotion comes like a brilliant light. I am alive. I am alive. I am alive!

It is followed almost immediately by an overwhelming embarrassment. I need a dog turd in order to know I am alive.

Somebody famous said, I think, therefore I am. I have topped him with the conclusion, I can smell turds, therefore I am alive.

Where am I? I am in a place that contains a dog that does his business.

Time has passed. Perhaps I fell asleep and am just waking up. I have proven that I am alive because I can detect odors. Now I must carefully take stock of my situation. My name is Bob Sampson. I am from Clarksville, Tennessee. I can smell turds.

I can feel a pain in my back. The pain is just to the left of the backbone in the small of the back. It is not severe. I can stand it easily, even without aspirin. But the existence of the pain is good. Dead people do not feel pain.

I will take stock of all my body parts, all my body functions.

I can feel my scalp, but there is no pain, no itching. My left ear has something pressing against it. I try to move my head and it seems to rock back and forth just a tiny bit. My left ear feels a change. I feel the weight of my upper body upon my left shoulder. I am lying on my left side. When I try to move my eyes, I think I can feel them moving up and down. I think I can feel them opening but I see no light. I cannot feel my tongue moving. When I try to speak, I can feel a vibration in my throat. I think I can hum. Jingle bells, jingle bells. I can feel three beats of throat movement with each verse, jingle bells, one-two-three. But I hear nothing.

Moving down my body, I can feel nothing in the skin over the chest or back. I think I can take a deep breath. I can push the air all the way out of my lungs. But I cannot move my arms, my shoulders, my wrists, my fingers. I can feel something between my left knee and my right knee. I try to squeeze this object between my legs but there is no movement. If I had nerve damage causing paralysis, I should feel numbness somewhere, but there is no numbness.

I am blind. I am deaf. I am paralyzed. I have the ability to smell. I may be able to move my eyes. I can move my larynx to hum and I can take a deep breath and force the air out of my throat. But I cannot move my mouth or tongue. I cannot speak.

My memory is working. I can remember my parents and my sister. I think I can remember more about my family, but this is too painful. I will let my mind drift.

Running across the field in my bare feet. My legs are churning as I am zipping over the field. Ahead of me is a girl. She looks over her shoulder. She is smiling. She is a girlfriend from college. Wait, it is my sister, Laurie. She falls down, laughing. Then, suddenly, the laughter stops. She disappears, along with the field. Again, there is nothing but darkness and absolute silence. My memory for the dream fades away to nothing. Did I actually see Laurie?

I have discovered another ability, besides smelling and feeling. I can dream. If I let my mind run loose, I can fall asleep again. I can dream again. I need to improve my memory so that I can remember my dreams.

What can I remember? Reverend Lund is the pastor who preached the day I left. Jesus is the resurrection and the light. When the Hebrews die, they go to Sheol. What else did he say? He said that each person must ask himself five questions. The first is, who am I? The second is, how did I get where I am? The third is, where am I going? The last is, what happens to me after I die? I cannot remember the fourth. Perhaps it will come to me.

Who am I? My name is Bob Sampson. How did I get here? Does he mean my genealogy? My grandfather worked in a store in Clarksville. Later, my father worked in the same store . He became the manager. He worked hard to be able to send me to Jackson Academy and Austin Peay. I was the first in the family to go to college. My mother’s father was in the personnel department of the L & N Railroad. That is where I came from, as far as genes go.

I grew up near Clarksville in Montgomery County. I had a younger sister. I went to Jackson Academy, all boys. This is the best school in Middle Tennessee, my mother told me. You must work very, very hard. You only have one life to live. At Austin Peay, I was pre-med. I wanted to be a doctor, but the required courses were too difficult. Chemistry and physics seemed impossible. I did pretty well in psychology and I thought about becoming a psychologist.

I dated a gorgeous girl, but I cannot remember her name. She drifted away from me and started dating a Fort Campbell soldier. Is that why I joined up?

What do I remember most about my time in the military? Riding in helicopters. Our squad was jammed into a Huey, shoulder to shoulder. Hot LZ! Hot LZ! The sergeant was shouting but I could not hear him. Lou Aten turned to me and shouted in my ear, Hot LZ! I turned to Teddy Clarke and shouted into his ear, Hot LZ. We are coming into a landing zone under fire. Randy Bork is in front of me with his legs hanging out into space. Beyond him, I see green trees. The door gunner begins blasting.

This is too intense. I should let my mind wander.

Ouranos, the sky, lay upon Gaia, the earth. The earth was fertile. Ouranos knew that the fates had decreed that his son would replace him as ruler of the universe. As each of his children was born, he pushed the infant back up into Gaia. Ouranos rested, knowing he had escaped his fate. But when Ouranos slept, Gaia whispered into her vagina, Take this knife, my son, and do what you must. A tiny hand reached out. Gaia pressed the tiny fingers around the handle of the knife. When Ouranos mated with his wife, his unborn son sliced off his genitals. Ouranos retreated to the dome of the sky, where he remains to this day. The dome of the sky is a god of past ages, neutered but still alive because gods never die. The son who castrated Ouranos was called Kronos. Kronos and his siblings, the Titans, lived in the space that formed between Gaia, their mother, and their father the sky.

But Kronos feared the same fate. His son would replace him just as Kronos had replaced his father. When his sister Rhea, who was also his wife, became pregnant, Kronos allowed the births to occur but he ate each infant. The children remained within his belly, and Kronos ruled the universe. Why were the children not digested? Because gods do not die. With her tenth child, the mother wrapped a boulder in a blanket and said to Kronos, Here is your son. He devoured the stone in one gulp and did not see his son Zeus slip away.

I think I was dreaming. A girl, a young woman, was definitely present. The dream is fading.

I cannot remember the details, but this dream involved romance. There is another ability that has not gone away. I still have a libido. My mind is intact. I can think. I can remember. I can imagine. I can picture things in my mind. I can dream. I have a libido.

What about the rest of me? I am laying on my right side. I feel something up against my right ear, but my left is open to the air. If I concentrate I can occasionally feel something pass my left ear, something like a breeze. I have a minor pain in my back. This is a different pain than before; this pain is in the upper back, between the shoulder blades. I feel if I could move my body just a tiny bit, I could erase this pain. But no movement is possible, and the pain continues. I can feel something touching the inner aspects of both knees.

I can detect smells, mixtures of alcohol, soap, perhaps perfume. Every so often I am engulfed by the smell of dog turds.

If I try very hard, I can move my head just a bit. I may be able to move my eyes up and down. I try to speak but cannot move my mouth. I try to hum and can feel a vibration in my throat, but hear nothing. I can control my breathing. I can take a deep breath and hold it. I can blow out the contents of my lungs and hold my breath. Am I able to hold my breath long enough to die? God does not die. The Greek gods do not die.

When Zeus was grown, he returned and induced vomiting in his father with medicines. First the stone came up, then each of the brothers and sisters of Zeus. The earth and sky shook with the great battle when the forces of Zeus, called the Olympians, fought the forces of Kronos, the Titans. The defeated Titans were banished to a great cavern beneath the earth. Zeus placed his brother Hades to watch over the Titans and they remain in Sheol to this day.

Zeus and his siblings produced another generation, but this was the final generation of the gods. They never age, never die. The messenger of the gods was Hermes, son of Zeus and Maia, grandson of Kronos and Rhea, great-grandson of Ouranos and Gaia, who became the sky and the earth.

Human beings were created to serve the gods. The humans offered sacrifices and the gods were pleased by the sweet smell. But the Olympians worried because the humans increased in number and began to use up the fertility of the earth.

Humans will remain but few upon the earth, Zeus reassured them. Their bodies are intrinsically defective. They all grow old and die.

Mighty Zeus, said Hermes to his father. What if the humans eat of the tree in the midst of the garden? They will be like us. They will be gods, and gods never die.

I awake. I am paralyzed and silent but I can remember dreams, even confusing dreams about ancient Greece. These are the generations of the heavens and the earth. I can relive events from my life. I can rehearse movies in my mind. My favorite film is Shane. Jack Palance guns down the farmer; his dead body falls into the mud. How will I know when I die? Jack Palance fires one shot and the farmer dies. At the end, Alan Ladd kills Jack Palance. Everybody dies.

The door gunner fires. The tip of the barrel pumps bullets into the trees and the high grass. The breech ejects the spent shells in a continuous stream. The gunner’s hands grip the weapon with great force. His face is deformed by an intense grimace. His teeth are stark white against his dark black skin. This is not a grimace. It is a smile. He has only seconds to live, but he does his duty to the end. Everybody dies.

Sarge is standing near the door, holding onto the overhead stanchion with his left hand and waving his right wildly. Hot LZ! Hot LZ! he is shouting. The rotors drown out his words but I can read his lips. Lou shouts into my right ear. Hot LZ! I shout into Clarke’s ear, Hot LZ.

We are taking hits. Bullets ping through the chopper. The tops of the trees are bright green. The Huey begins to spin. The smell of smoke mixes with the smell of gunpowder.

Out, out, out! Sarge yells, flinging his right hand, gnarled forefinger extended, at the doorway. The chopper is spinning. The gunner is firing. Bork goes out the door, leaving nothing between me and open air. Green trees and blue sky. The sergeant is screaming. Out, out, out! The gunner is smiling. I leap into space. Bork is falling down before me. I will land upon him. He is firing his weapon as he falls. Lou and Clarke are behind me. They will land upon me. Down we go. I bend my knees so that when I hit, I will roll. My legs will not break.

Down. Down. Down. Like Alice falling down the rabbit hole. Is this my memory or a fantasy? Down we go. I look back at the spinning chopper. Flame pours out the door. Down we go. When will I hit the ground?

I never did hit the ground.

I remember Reverend Lund’s sermon. Five questions, or were there four? Who am I? I am Bob Sampson, or what is left of him. Where am I? I can recall hands holding my body, many hands, two hands on my head. They roll me from my left side to my right and put a pillow between my legs. I feel a wipe upon my behind and smell dog shit. I guess it is my own feces. Where am I? I am in a hospital bed, blind, deaf, and paralyzed. Where is the hospital? Da Nang? A hospital ship? Yekooska? Bethesda? How did I get here?

The third question: Where am I going? Nowhere. I am paralyzed and can go no where. Will I ever recover? No. Will I die? Yes. I will die and perhaps soon. Maybe I can hold my breath and end this dreadful existence. Where will I spend eternity? Sheol? Wherever I spend eternity cannot be worse than here. Hades? What will I do with the rest of my life? Nothing. I will lie here. I can think. I can remember church and movies and college. I can dream. I can smell.

If I am in a hospital, there are people around me. They touch me. They roll me from side to side. How can I contact these people? That is the big question. Reverend Lund did not list that one. Can I have any influence on the people around me, the people who touch me?

In boot camp, they taught us morse code. All I remember is SOS. Three dashes for S, three dots for O. Or is it the other way around? It makes no difference, because the signal is repeated alternations of three dashes and three dots. When you see lights flash this signal, or hear it, you know someone is in trouble. SOS. I can hum these sounds. Humm. Humm. Humm. Hum-hum-hum. Humm. Humm. Humm.

Can anyone hear this?

missing image file

The narrator of this book lies deaf, blind, paralyzed, and speechless. Are his experiences real or are they dreams? Does he have a vivid imagination or is he insane?

Chapter 2

Observation and Objectivity

Henry Hammer leaned back in his recliner. He always watched the news on channel 4 because he enjoyed the engaging personality of the weatherman, a young fellow named Pat Sajak. Telecast of the bicentennial celebration in New York harbor followed the local news. A huge fireworks display celebrated the 200th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Masted ships from 19 different nations were present in the harbor. I really can’t appreciate fireworks on TV, Hammer said to his wife. See if there anything else on. Elizabeth tried all four channels but they all had exactly the same picture.

He wanted a drink, but he held the duty, as they called it, at the Nashville Veterans Hospital. For this month, Dr. Hammer held the legal and moral responsibility for all neurology patients admitted to this institution. Residents saw the patients, but if one needed help he called the attending physician. Most attendings did not skip a glass of wine just because they might have to go in and see a patient, but Hammer always had difficulty stopping at one. During the entire month of July, Hammer drank no alcohol.

The other major duty of the attending physician was education. One resident in the neurology residency training program of the Gorrie School of Medicine was assigned to the veterans hospital. All medical students at the medical school spent three weeks studying clinical neurology; half of the students were assigned to Veterans Hospital, the remainder to Gorrie Medical Center. You cannot appreciate fireworks on TV, thought Hammer, just like you cannot learn medicine from books and lectures. These students came to medical school straight from four successful years in college; if they had not been overachievers in college, they would not have gotten into medical school. The first two years of medical training were just like college only more intense, more reading, more lectures, more laboratory exercises, more memorization, more tests.

On July 1 of each year, the third year of medical school began. The medical students, full of knowledge about human physiology and pathophysiology, started on the wards. They were assigned by rotation to each patient who might come into the hospital. In the world of practical medicine, they were lost, barely sure of their names or how to find the john. My job, thought Hammer, is to turn college kids into doctors.

The day after the world’s greatest fireworks display was a Monday and federal employees, including the doctor in charge of the intensive care unit at the Nashville Veterans Hospital, took the day off. The covering physician noted that the patient in bed 4 had been in coma for several years because of a head injury. This patient, Robert Sampson, was a special VIP because he was the only patient in the hospital with a combat injury. All the others were military veterans, and some had seen combat, but they were hospitalized for a heart attack or bleeding ulcers just like the patients across the street at the Gorrie Medical Center. This covering physician noted that no report of an electroencephalogram was in Sampson’s chart, so he ordered one, starting a series of events that led to the surprising discovery that a thinking person was hiding in the ICU.

On the morning of Tuesday, July 6th, Dr. Hammer entered the tiny room where the neurology resident and five students were gathered.

What have we got today? asked Hammer.

Got one case, boss, replied the resident, David Drysdale.

Let’s see him.

They walked down the long hallway of ward 4C. There was no sound except the footfalls of seven men.

The resident was David Drysdale. He had been a literature major in college and punctuated every patient presentation by comparing the patient to a literary character. This patient reminds me of … he would begin, ending with a comparison of appearance or personality. Only rarely was his literary observation related to the patient’s medical condition.

The five students looked alike, all white males in their early 20s, short hair and serious faces. Each wore a short, starched white coat. Their names were Josh Crandall, Matt Houston, Larry Judah, George Sestak, and Brian Dohrmeier. If you had time to get to know them, which Hammer did not, you would find all sorts of different abilities and interests. Crandall, for example, was married to another medical student in the same class, in a different group. Hammer recognized Houston’s name. He was the son of a justice of the state supreme court. Hammer never revealed this knowledge, although on one occasion, when they were talking about lawyers, he asked Houston why he had gone into medicine and not a field like law. Law deals with paper, he responded, I want to deal with people. Hammer treated the students exactly alike as though they were interchangeable parts of a complex machine.

As they entered the sixteen bed ward at the end of the hall, Hammer noted a group of visitors huddled around one bed in the corner. The seven men gathered around a different bed and Larry Judah introduced the patient to Dr. Hammer. Dr. Hammer, meet James Carter, no relation to the presidential candidate. He began the formal presentation. Mr. Carter is a 62 year old white male who was in good health until …

Dr. Hammer held up his hand to indicate a pause. If you don’t mind, sir, Dr. Hammer said to the patient, I want to quiz these guys just a bit.

Turning to the students, he continued. Don’t be obvious, but just glance over at the folks around that bed over there. Do you see that fellow wearing the green shirt?

With