Dying in the Water - Chapter 6: Wake Up

      “Wake up... Anthony, please, wake up...”
      No, I don’t want to.
      “You have to wake up, Anthony.  We don’t have much time.”
      But I feel so peaceful.  So at ease.
      “That’s because you’re dying.”
My eyes snapped open and I sucked air into my lungs.  Every inch of my body was in horrible pain, but when I looked down, I didn’t see a scratch on me.  My surroundings came into view and I was in the small, rusted room again.  Anxiety replaced pain and my heartbeat began to rise rapidly.
      “No, not this place again.  I thought we were past this.  Let me out, please, let me out!” I shouted at nobody.
      “Lie down, Anthony,” a voice came from behind me.  I turned around to see Elizabeth standing by what looked like a stretcher.
      “What?  Why?” I asked, still a little disoriented.  But at the same time, I felt my legs moving on their own, carrying me toward the empty hospital bed.  It felt like my whole body was numbing over as I sat on the stretcher and felt nothing against my posterior.
      “Your mind wasn’t ready before.  We had to resolve the conflict that I introduced before it was safe to try and pull you out.  Otherwise it could have caused... damage.  That’s why you kept having hallucinations and kept fainting,” Elizabeth said, in a soothing, almost echoing voice.  It sounded unnatural for the acoustics of the room, but I had more important things to worry about at this moment.
      “What do you mean?  Why am I back here?  Please, Elizabeth, no more riddles and mystery.  What is happening to me?” I looked up at her, feeling cold and helpless as I lied back against the bed.
      “Shh, it’s okay, sweetie.  I want you to listen very carefully to me, Anthony,” Elizabeth continued slowly, placing her hands on either side of my head and lowering her face to match mine.  “This is not real.  You are in a coma.”
      “Wh-What?  A coma?  So I survived the explosion?” I asked, but as she spoke, there was a distant rumbling that filled the room.  I started to feel very lightheaded.
      “No, Anthony.  There never was an explosion.  There never was a plot to steal compounds from Suchong’s lab.  There never was an Aaronson or a bank account or even a Rapture.  There was only a car crash.” The deep rumbling began to come closer.  Images flashed before my eyes.  The laptop.  The girl in my head.  The brooch.  The car.  The truck horn followed by a sickening, metallic bang.  I was breathing faster now, but I couldn’t feel the air going in and out of my lungs.  I could only hear it.
      “My nightmares... They were real?  All of them?” I said weakly, starting to shiver.
      “Stay with me, Anthony.  I’m right here.  Please, just hold on a little longer,” Elizabeth spoke a little more sharply, bringing her face closer so that her nose was mere centimeters away from mine and all I could do was look into her bright, ocean-blue eyes.  “You’ve only had one nightmare.  The life you thought you had was all fabricated.  By me.  You are unconscious and dying in a hospital bed and you’ve been that way for months.  It’s been an incredibly slow process, but you are dying.  And the only way to fix you was to create this world, this plot, these characters, from your memory.  And once it was over, I could wake you up.  Your mind was completely inactive except for one little sliver.  That was me.”
      “How did you do it?  What do you mean ‘one little sliver’?” I started feeling incredibly tired.  Now my breathing was abnormally slow.  I felt cold and faint, and Elizabeth’s face had started to blur.
      “Remember the dream, Anthony.  There was a girl in your head.  A tulpa.  A sentient imaginary friend.  That’s me.  I am your tulpa.  It took me months to create all of this for you.  I was there before you woke up this morning.  You looked so terrified, writhing there while you relived those awful memories... But it all worked out.  Or it will, once you wake up.” The rumbling sounded like it was coming from the other side of the wall, and I was feeling weaker and weaker.  My eyelids started to droop.  I could hear the sounds of beeping and mechanic whirring from far away.
      “Elizabeth, I’m scared,” I murmured, in a higher octave than I would have liked.  She smiled and began to whisper softly as everything began to fade to white and the last of my senses started to ebb away.
      “I’ll be right there by your side when you open your eyes.  I promise.”

      The sound of machinery buzzing away had become very clear now.  The white had turned to black, which then split across the middle to reveal a sterile, white ceiling with fluorescent lightbulbs screwed in.  I blinked once.  Twice.  On the third time, a woman had appeared in my field of view.  One who looked so familiar, with her long hair that ended in bouncy curls, her dolled-up, pale face, her ruby-red lips, and her breathtaking blue eyes.  With great effort, I willed the muscles in the backs of my eyeballs to turn towards her.  I tried to say her name, but it came out as a few guttural, weak groans.  I couldn’t close my mouth properly.
      “Don’t panic, Anthony, but there’s a tube connected to that machine going down your throat.  You can’t talk with it in right now,” Elizabeth said, placing a hand reassuringly on my forehead and stroking it gently.  But I couldn’t feel it, for some reason.  She also sounded abnormally quiet and distant.
      I can hardly hear you, Elizabeth.  What’s wrong? I thought to her, using my mind to speak instead of my mouth.
      “Remember when I said it took me months to put together your dream?  It took a lot out of me, Anthony.  And waking you up was even tougher than that.  I’m... fading.” As she spoke, Elizabeth seemed to start turning fuzzy and a little transparent, like she was a picture coming from a poorly-tuned projector.  The word “fading” left a stabbing feeling in my chest, and suddenly I could feel everything.  The extraordinary pain covering the entire left half of my body.  The weakness and muscle atrophy of the right half.  But above all else, I felt piercing sorrow.  I knew what that word had meant.  It was a tulpa's equivalent to dying.
      You... You can’t fade.  You can’t go, Elizabeth.  Please, don’t do this to me.
      “Anthony, it was the only way.  If I didn’t do what I had done, we would have spent the rest of your days wasting away in that bed with no chance of recovery.  I knew the consequences of my actions.  I knew it would end this way.  I just wanted you to live,” she sighed, tears beginning to well up in her eyes.
      I’m so sorry, Elizabeth.  I should have listened to you from the beginning.  Stayed home that day.  You were right all along and I was a fool to ignore you.
      “Shhh.  Please, Anthony.  Let’s not look at things in hindsight.  What happened has happened, and there’s no changing it.” She sounded so faint, almost static-y.  Like her voice was coming from an old-fashioned radio that needed fixing.
      I love you, Elizabeth.  Not the way a man loves his family or his wife or his children, but the way a man loves part of himself.  The way a man loves his tulpa.
      “I love you too, Anthony.  Promise me you won’t forget me...” Her words trailed off and then came nothing but silence as her visage finally vanished.  I was staring at a blank wall.  There was nobody there.  I broke down and began to sob, and my feeble, weak choking noises drew the attention of a passing nurse who walked into the room and began calling someone on a nearby telephone, no doubt alerting the staff that I had woken up.