隨筆7
Phantasmagorical scenes flashed in his sight one after another throughout the time of his distant childhood and all his adulthood and each of the instantaneous scenes reminded him of the past and when a memorable clip of his life appeared and disappeared in an ephemeral fashion, he cried out thunderously at the hero or heroine in the picture but could stay nothing but emptiness. The situation repeated from moment to moment and with time wearing on, he despaired as was cast down in Slough of Despond and gradually, he lost his consciousness and was pushing forth in the direction of the great arch unawares by a mysterious force. His last cry of invocation for divine help was not made as his vocal system failed and slowly, his wide eyes turned narrow to be like a slot and soon, the last gleam of hope vanished from his sight as pitch-darkness swallowed everything in his vision, a drop of hot tears of sorrow trickling down to the ground where blood streams were crisscross. Something shook him violently and to his huge disbelief, he managed to open his eyes once again and he was in a different place than that dark place with a strange gigantic arch, something liquid still streaming slowly into his veins. A man who was so familiar but at this very moment he could not even name appeared before him, shaking him violently to make him sensible again. The place was not completely strange as his foggy memory apprised him that he had been to the place not long afore. He tried to call the man much younger than he but the words eluded him at the tips of his tongue. The younger man summoned a woman clad in a terribly white robe as though she was a phantom to come to him and requested her to disentangle the elder man’s arm from the long cord hanging down from a transparent plastic bottle inside which there was unknown liquid, of which the younger man was deeply suspicious. He made up his decision to put an end to the service and asked the elder man to leave the site with him. Thereafter, with the aid of the younger man, the elder man rose from the chair in an extremely hard fashion as if he was another person, half-cripple, even knowing not where the exit was, and whether he was still in that world of darkness or this reality.