To Tell About It
John H. Matthews
In this world, I am a reporter writing a book about the near-death experiences of others. There is no religious agenda here, I just want the facts. I want to know how you almost died.
I am doing this book for selfish reasons. Mainly, I think it’s a grand idea for a book, but also because I once had a near-death experience of my own. Stupidly, I almost died when I was seventeen. I attempted to swim across the Illinois River, a body of water that claims at least ten lives every year.
On this foolish night, I miscalculated distance and overestimated my strength. Halfway across the black river I saw that the shore I believed to be on the other side was actually a bank of vertical concrete. I would not be able to rest on the other side for the return trip. Realizing this, I panicked and started back the way I’d come. Soon, I was exhausted. My arms felt weighted down by sand bags. I was taking water down my throat, gasping, barely keeping my head above the river.
I recalled doing a back float could help in a situation like this and, as I extended my arms and looked up at the sky, I prayed I would not die. I kicked and floated, kicked and floated, encouraged by my friends who were watching this spectacle in horror. I made progress slowly, the cold water licking at my ears, occasionally flashing over my eyes. Inch by agonizing inch, I closed the gap to safety.
When at last I was on shore, shivering, my lungs burning, I turned to see a heavy silent barge float right down the center of the river where I’d been not seconds before.
This was death I witnessed, ominous and lethal as a shark.
For my stupidity I was awarded an indelible lesson: in seconds your life, any life, can be snuffed out without ceremony, without negotiation. This was what I was going to write about.
I put out ads. I talked to people. I talked to people who knew people. I met for coffee, for dinner, over beers. I brought my voice recorder. I asked people how they almost died and they told me.
A woman told me how she’d almost died whitewater rafting on a class four river in Wisconsin. A guide who should have known better took this woman and her inexperienced friends down rapids meant for seasoned rafters. Everyone in the boat including the guide flew out as they went over a large fall. Everyone was flung into the churning, uncompromising water.
This woman found herself below the raft, drowning, her head touching the rubber bottom. Her hands sought the edge, but couldn’t find it. She needed air. She was pushed down and aside, pulled by current and slammed into rock. The raft moved on and she rode the rapids the rest of the way, swallowing water, bashing her limbs, cracking her helmet, until a tow line finally was thrown to her fifteen minutes later when she was into calmer water. This woman relives her near death as she tells it. She will not raft again. Sounds of rushing water terrify her to this day.
A man named Peter tells me of an odd incident where he was driving his car to his girlfriend’s place to pick her up for a Neil Young concert. This is years ago, around the time of the first Gulf War, Desert Storm. Peter sees strange flashes of light in the sky—blue-white and brilliant—just ahead. This is odd since there is no humidity, no storm predicted.
“I thought maybe we were under attack by Saddam,” he said.
He drives toward the light. The flashing continues. It gets brighter. Suddenly he is stopped. The traffic is halted. A car directly in front of him backs into his car, a small bumper collision. It’s then he sees the giant power cable laying on the street in front of a bus just ahead. The end of the cable is sputtering sparks, twisting like an angry snake. The ground throbs and hums. The bus is on fire. People are screaming, shouting for help. Some are running down the street.
“You could smell the current,” Peter says. “It was like this live, pissed off beast.”
A woman dies trying to escape the burning bus. The next morning the story is on the front page of the Tribune.
“That bus was just one car length ahead of me,” Peter says, shaking his head. “If I’d left just thirty seconds earlier, the power line would have been on top of my crappy little Toyota... It would have been me.”
I am told of a subway derailment and fire in the tunnel below the Chicago River. A man describes the course of events:
“First there’s a noise, a guttural bang and a weird groan, like wrench opening a rusty pipe. This is followed by eerie silence. The lights of the El car flicker and die. There’s no communication over the intercom from the train conductor. Nothing. At this point me and every one of the six hundred other passengers on this train are thinking the same thing—terrorist attack. This is only six months after 9/11. Terrorism is on everyone’s mind. I’m wondering if a bomb went off and we’re going to see the tunnel and car become flooded. What if the river breached the barrier? I’m thinking this when suddenly the train car fills up with smoke. It’s a vile white smoke, acrid stuff, just horrible... It’s got a metal smell to it. It burns your eyes. At that point everyone stands up at once and the emergency door release is pulled. We herd onto the catwalk, into the thicker smoke. People are screaming Hurry up! Hurry up! There’s fire back here! but you can’t go any faster because the walkway is only a foot wide and there’s people in front of you. We walk through the black tunnel using our shirt fronts as filters to breath through. Some people try to light the way with their cellphones. This whole time I’m thinking I might die. Only when I see the actual exit, a metal ladder headed up to the street—until I see the hatch opening up to the sky, a fireman coming down—do I realize I’m gonna live. When I got up to street level and saw my shirt, it looked like I’d smoked a pack of cigarettes through it.”
I do this for months, gathering stories for the collection. I hear stories of robbery at gun point, a man stabbed by a homeless drug addict outside a gas station, a deer that nearly decapitates a mother of two.
I hear from a man who was traveling in India for a software company whose morning habit for the week he was there was to get a coffee and bagel at a German bakery near his hotel in Dubai. One morning he skipped the bagel and coffee—the morning terrorists blew up the bakery.
I hear from a woman who was gardening in her backyard. She was called away by her phone ringing in the kitchen. A minute later a transformer blows right near where she was standing and starts her fence on fire.
There’s a vicious dog attack of a jogger in a Cook County forest preserve, a man who fell from a tree helping his friend prune some limbs, a lung cancer survivor, a brain trauma from a hockey puck, a triple car flip on the highway, pneumonia, heat stroke, hypothermia, the gamut.
My life is active with these near-deaths. For nearly a year I am constantly on the go, running from place to place, always anxious to hear the next story. At one point I have enough stories, but they keep coming in. I can’t say no. One more, I tell myself, just one more...
Story one hundred is a female comedian. I meet her at her favorite bar—a place where lots of actors come. This woman is short, with dark hair, very attractive. She has an unbelievable story about how one night three years ago she was with friends drinking and watching the fireworks from atop a condemned parking garage in the city.
When the show is over, instead of taking the stairs back down, she goes into an elevator shaft thinking there’s a car there, but there isn’t. She falls three stories. Her injuries are severe and life-threatening. She’s in the hospital for months recovering.
I have to stop her here, because I know this story.
“But wait,” I say, “didn’t you die?”
This makes her laugh. “Apparently not,” she says, rubbing her arms. She shows me the article in the paper, an article I wrote. It looks the same as I recall except for the ending. It doesn’t fit. I’m certain this woman died. But how to say that without being rude?
“You look like you don’t believe that I’m alive,” she says.
“I just don’t remember it this way,” I say. “Of course I’m glad you survived.”
“Well, isn’t living just being pre-dead anyway?” she says.
One of her stand-up jokes, I guess.
I wake up laughing with tubes in my arms, a monitor bleeping. I am surrounded by a doctor and nurse and later by older versions of my family and friends. The news comes to me gently that I’ve been in a coma for three years. I was shot in the back while responding to a noise complaint on the west side.
It comes back to me who I am. I’m not a reporter. I’m a police officer. I’m not writing a book.
I can’t speak yet, but I can communicate with a keypad device. I ask about the comedian. She was so real, so vivid. It seems like she’s still around me, hovering. I can smell her perfume.
No one knows anything about a comedian.
“You’re disoriented,” the doctor says. “That’s to be expected.”
The story won’t come out until the next day, July 5th, in the newspaper I desperately crave. A young talented female comedian was killed when she fell down an elevator shaft in a parking garage the night before—the night I awoke. There is a photo. This is the woman I met in the bar.
I look for the name of the reporter who took the story, the author of the article. His name is Phil Rodgers. I may know little of current events, but I know this man has a file cabinet full of notes, a voice recorder full of voices.
I tell the nurse I need to contact this man urgently.
I need to tell him how close to death I really came.
John H. Matthews’ writing has appeared in the anthologies What Happened to Us These Last Couple Years? An Anthology of the Bush Years, 2000-2008 and It'S All Good: How Do You Like It Here Now?
