In the Belly of the Beast

Where were we? Right, waking up in a dark hospital room. As I said I knew where I was but not why. I didn't know that I had been there for more than a month. According to the records I was there for sixty-eight days and let's go with that. The previous exactly thirty days had been spent - equally incognizant - in another hospital. Why they jettisoned me to this hellhole I don't know but plauible deniability was probably a major reason.

This isn't the beginning - just the beginning of the part I remember. See, on 15 December 2020 I had done what I had done on every other day for years. Rolled out of bed (literally as I had a custom-built bed that allowed me to sleep just about a foot off the floor so I just rolled over and hit the floor face down) and did a hundred pushups. Stick a pin there - you'll see why it's important later. I had been doing it for a year or more. I had worked up to it over a period of months and figured a hundred was about all I needed and sometimes it time permitted I would do it again later in the day.

I was probably - technically - thirty pounds overweight but I have a stocky build so even at that it barely showed and was probably more like twenty on an average person. I knew it was there and tried to keep it under control, breakfast of whole oats with no additives (sugar, butter, whatever) and the closest thing to fresh orange juice you can buy in a store. Black coffee and off to work. My office was upstairs and there was a stairs like a fire escape but enclosed at the back of the building. It was in two sections at ninety degrees and I would often leave the building that way. I would stand on the landing of the top section and put my hands onthe rails and jump and land at the bottom a little over six feet down, then repeat the process on the second section.

Not bad for a guy a month away from his sixty-fifth birthday. Weather permitting I walked about two to three miles in the afternoon and figured that a little overweight or not I wasn't doing that bad for being in an office nine to ten hours a day and working at a desk at home for another couple of hours.



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