Upon opening his eyes, the first thing Loren knew was cold.  The surface he was on, realizing after a few moments he was lying down, was smooth and freezing, making him think of twenty below winters and tongues stuck on metal poles.  The second thing he knew was darkness.  When he managed to open his marble eyelids his pupils dilated with an effort to see something, anything, and he found himself thinking, ‘blind’, but once rational thought returned to his low functioning brain, he knew this was not true because his nerve endings were finally losing their numbness and he could feel cloth, cotton, along his skin. 

            Joints cracked and muscles stretched as if they hadn’t been used in years as he sat up, the sheet over his head dropping to his waist.  His eyes adjusted to the low lighting of the room, and he noted that he was completely naked save for the sheet before looking around.  White, cold tiles greeted him along with linoleum floors worn in strategic paths around the tables littered through the room, the table he was laying on being one of them.  Instruments of all kinds and uses he couldn’t name or didn’t care to remember lined trays around the room, and when he recognized the substances littering those tools, the ones in glass beakers sitting by the sink on the opposite end of the room, he felt his stomach twist into knots and lurch in such a way that if there were anything in it at all it would’ve been on the floor beside him, but nothing other than acid and saliva were choked out, and it left his mouth burning and his tongue grimy.

            It took relatively a half an hour for him to be able to regain the use of his legs, and while he did so, he stressed his brain, trying to remember how he ended up in this room, because, really, the last thing he remembered was a night out at the bar, celebrating the jump in sales his clothing company had experienced since a major band started wearing his threads.  He did not, however, remember ending up here.  Hell, he didn’t really know where here was, even though if he was honest with himself he had an inkling, but he would not under any circumstances let himself believe, because it was just so…outlandish.

            Knowing that someone could enter through the door on the wall behind him to his left at any moment, he jumped down from the table, feet landing unsteadily on the cold, hard linoleum.  He stood there for a few moments, getting his balance and letting his legs get used to carrying his weight which they, from the feel of things, hadn’t done in a while.  There were several more tables covered in sheets in the room, and immediately Loren knew they were bodies, just like himself.  He wondered if any of them would be getting up and walking out the door, like he planned to do, and the thought made him shudder and think of all the zombie movies he had watched in his life.  He looked around at all the tables and watched them for a few seconds in case they decided to rise and eat his flesh.  When they didn’t, he resumed his quest for the door with the sheet clenched around his waist and dusting the floor behind him, only to be stopped at the next table when something odd and excruciating caught his eye.

            He fought the heart wrenching sob that threatened to escape his lungs because this couldn’t be true.  There was no way he was seeing what he was seeing, it must be a mistake.  It was some horrible nightmare that he was having, sweating under the cool sheets of his bed while laying next to her in his two story, three bedroom house, his three dogs sleeping on the floor, and she would wake him up when his cries transcended into the real world and he would instantly forget what it was that he was dreaming about the second he looked into her concerned and calming eyes.

            With trembling hand and rapid heart, he touched the white sheet that covered the body next to him, hoping against hope that the name on the tag attached to the table was not this body owned.  Slowly, carefully, he lifted the corner of the sheet before closing his eyes and thrusting it back quickly but gently before removing his hand as if he had been burned.  And when he opened his eyes he wished that he had been burned instead, burned alive with gasoline accelerant on an ancient pyre so that he wouldn’t have to be witness to this, to her, lying on a cold, steel table, probably stainless, that matched his own, complete with sunken features, blue lips, and lifeless skin.

            He broke. 

            Knees giving out, he landed on the harsh floor with a resounding thud, the pain only added fuel to the fire in his heart as he rested his head against to table, her table, because when his forehead hit the cold and dead skin of her arm he wanted to cut it open with one of those tools he saw sitting in the red water by the sink just to get some blood flowing and some feeling in his own skin and possibly even vomit acid again.

            The tears that he wept onto that linoleum floor, with his face scrunched up as if every limb on his body had been sawed off with a butter knife and every organ sucked out with a large syringe, which, when he thinks back on it, wasn’t far from the truth, were like liquid ice that burned like liquid fire.  And though he didn’t believe in God, he prayed; prayed that she would wake up, same as him, and she would look at him with those concerned and calming eyes of hers and ask him what was wrong, and he would forget the reason he was crying at all the second he saw them, and they would walk out of this white, but not clean, room and laugh about this over a cup of hot coffee and maybe a little hot and steamy sex.

            But apparently, as he had suspected, God didn’t exist, or he was listening, because he sat there praying for another hour, and not once did she move, breathe, speak, or open her eyes, and that, that hurt more than any bullet or any blow ever could, because she wasn’t going to walk out of that door with him, and they’d never have that cup of hot coffee or partake in a little hot and steamy sex.

            He had the urge to drag her body out with him, but he decided against it in the end, knowing that it would make him look even more suspicious.  So instead, he grabbed her hand in his, caressing the once warm and soft flesh of her palms, knuckles, fingertips, while she just lay there, not acknowledging him or letting words of endearment slip past her supple lips.  He kissed the back of her hand, her palm, her fingers, before his lips found the way to her blue ones, feeling like the Juliet to her Romeo, searching for a drop of poison on her lips so that he may join her in death, and not caring if he had emasculated himself through this analogy.  Never before had he known what it was like to want to die so badly that he remembered those tools in the red water by the sink.  His lips trailed to her forehead, pressing one last, soft kiss to her flesh before pulling away for the last time and pulling the sheet back over her head.  He hadn’t failed to notice the long gaping wound on her abdomen, or the smaller gashes and light bruises along her chest and arms.  He didn’t want to know how that happened.  He didn’t think he could handle it, not now.

            On shaky legs, Loren walked unsteadily toward the door that looked like it led out of this place.  The other door, from what he could see through the small window, had a wall full of drawers, and he knew from years of watching television that they were filled with dead bodies.  Like he was supposed to be; like her.  He felt his skin for a moment and noted that it was just as cold and hard as hers had been.  He couldn’t keep the stray thought from passing through his brain: I belong there.

            Before he could turn back and coddle his love’s dead and lifeless body, his cold hand touched the equally cold door handle that would inevitably lead to his life without her, his own personal Hell.

            The door led into another white room filled with boxes of latex gloves and lockers full of clothes and lab coats.  He looked through them and upon finding a pair of jeans that might fit him, put them on, along with a plain red t-shirt from the same locker.  Silently, he walked to the other door, hoping it would lead out.  It did.

            He finally made his way onto the dirty streets of Chicago through a back door after having to slide down its hallway when footsteps steadily approached him.  He was glad no it was there, because he was sure no one would be okay with a supposed dead person walking around and stealing people’s clothes.

            Now, however, that he had finally escaped, he didn’t know what to do with himself.  Could he go to his family?  His friends?  Surely they all thought he was dead; he had been in a morgue after all.  And that realization caused another one to broadside him so hard he almost shook out of his skin right there on the chilly sidewalk in the middle of the night:  Why wasn’t he dead?  He was supposed to have died, he was sure, but why had he woken up?  Why was he alive?

            Checking to see if he had a craving for human flesh, and finding that he didn’t, he quickly ruled out the possibility of him being a zombie, but that still didn’t give him any answers other than the fact that he wasn’t a cannibal bent on eating the brains of the next passerby.  And though he was somewhat relieved at this new found knowledge, he was still thoroughly confused.

            After a few more moments of huddling there awkwardly in the alleyway, Loren decided he should get going.  They were bound to notice a missing corpse in the morgue, and he didn’t want to be anywhere near when they did.  He wasn’t sure where he should go, but the only place he could think of was their apartment, if only for the night.  So, out of pure reflex, because he wasn’t as affected by it as he thought he should be, he wrapped his arms around himself to block out the crisp wind, noticing later that he had forgotten shoes, in the direction of his home, though he was sure he had left it back in that cold, white room.