It didn't just come, it hemorrhaged, as Marcus began, "His name was Doctor Rockwell, and those were troubled times.

It wasn't just war abroad. In Vietnam's mud we had come unglued. Our convictions and commonality, all in question - questions screamed in shrill square mouthed battle cries. Violence was vogue.

Just causes were, just ... causes unfettered of measure. We had principles. We would fight. But who were we, violent for violence sake, violent for peace? Aggravated adults and seething pseudoadults united only by form, linked in national tantrum, mindlessly lashing out in an age of id, masturbating with rage, and raging against self gratification until blind.

War. Nam. From out of nowhere, a place that had never gone anywhere. Flames of unreason were burning everything and they weren't fueled by ideology, but rather, an absence of it. Fear lacked cause.

Identity flipped on slick phraseology. He asked us - to ask not. All face but no brains, this handsome jut jaw crooked finger wagging womanizing cult figure of the young, asked us - to ask not. Ask not what the country could do for us. Ask not! Government for the people had become passe'. We the people were to be people for the government - and asked to ask not.

Unquestioning. Suspend reason. For what reason? But youth was fickle and caterwauled, Hell no, we won't go! Inconsistencies. Everywhere, permeating inconsistencies!

Heated politics of race sizzled the streets, spinning vortices of reaction, rising from hot tar. Reason, and unreason, were the same. Jail the Chicago seven or free them. Both, factious voices in amorphous howl. Movement was by insistence. Policy by coercion.

Good was not found in philosophy, dialectic, or a profession of self evident truths. Good was merely a place, a tight squeeze, between equally emasculating extremes. It was a transparently thin and transient haven squashed between opposite forces. Good was only to be found in a nil, a net zero. Or, perhaps, in the eye of a storm whose direction was fickle.

Good was respite and respite was only to be found in negation. It was the balance of insanities, neutralization. It was being able to live in liberty, pursuing happiness which required havens, havens away from the unlistening and unequal out of control forces, havens outside the fire.

But counterpoise had been swept into chaos, onto the highways of self serving rhetoric on which marched self assigned truth sayers and on which rolled the self appointed enforcers. Apocalyptic Nazi helmeted horsemen, with chains on their belts, and metal studs on gloved knuckles, came on motorcycles in hundreds to hammer hippies into dust. It was sport, not cause.

Children of the flowers, from the roofs, hurling rocks rather than roses, stone age missiles, shattering windshields of passing squad cars. Blood blinded cops sank to instinct - venting gas, batons, and bullets. Gas, batons, and bullets, the new trinity.

Rock concerts! Idiots promoted rock and roll concerts to quiet swelling mobs. The music was crazed and pumped on drugs . Descending on this were the rabble descended in reason. Bodies piled ever higher here as war piled them ever higher there. Each stack had its own distinct philosophy, yet, a similar smell.

Mindless assault claimed humanity while shouting justice. Ideology and schizophrenic babble were indistinguishable. The only tactile reality - tanks in the streets. There was bloodshed. There were lines being drawn and lines being crossed. Lines lacked simplicity and did not hint at clear choices.

The surgeons, and we who were to become surgeons, were no strangers to difficult hours. But at the bottom of this massive funnel of destruction we were tired. Shifts of thirty six hours relieved by twelve hour comas, if you were lucky. Reason was irrecoverable. We staggered to lists of duty with no redeemer.

Except one.

His name was Doctor Rockwell, and those were troubled times.

His name was Rockwell, and it was Rocky who made us laugh.

Without provision for the sustained madness of such weight as was on us, we were up to our hair in blood and guts, unable to linger for sanity. Call, ceased. Surgical theaters - all of them - were furious in seamless action, a continuum of emergency , day after night after day. Anyone able to remain standing was working and numb.

You couldn't run. You couldn't even lean. There was no space. Rooms for two stretchers had eight. We climbed over wounded to get to other wounded.

You could not see for the same reason you could not breathe. Crowd control. Mace attacked our eyes and lungs with the rapacity of locusts on wheat.

Time didn't just waver, it involuted, melted away in the LSD of reaction to priority. We forgot to eat. We showered only when urged by the nurses who were urged by others. Intravenous infusion after collapsing from dehydration was just a quick snack. That's how it was.

A utility closet, with ventilation slats, become our womb. Wedged into a V beneath the mop sink, a cot beckoned us. In that glorious dark, embryonic cramp, under the cold plumbing, we slept. Moments only. A precious few fetal minutes there, five, maybe ten, numb to the war, outside the grill. Abrupted unceremoniously, we were born again, pulled breach, back into the wretched reality outside.

Now, I tell you these things, as though there were clarity of backward gaze. But that's the lie. There is no clarity. I only remember remembering. I remember each last spoken recollection. An oral tradition of memories retold by generations of myself. I remember a retelling. But reality is that I am blinded with only vague consciousness of older remembrances. I can't see the details. I see nearly nothing and especially I can't see any of the faces.

I can't recapture faces as I look back through my own tunnel of darkened memory. I hear echoes, but through twists and turns of time and fatigue of these eyes, I can't see faces.

I hear echoes. A chief of neurosurgery screaming at me, as though from an audio tape running at half speed, for my meandering clinical notes scribbled drunkenly sliding off the page. I fell asleep in his chair, soothed by the lulling monotony of his impenetrable rant. I slept through his face. Besides, it's too far back, spattered by his unsympathetic spittle. We were driven by such drivers, those who left us no self initiating aspects of our being.

The only escape was laughter. The laughter of doom and strain. It was Rocky, who made us laugh when laughter was all we could afford. The single emotion to survive when all the rest were consumed.

His name was Doctor Rockwell, and those were troubled times.

Our world twisted in violent rage, flamed to the torches of mobs pressing themselves upon the vicious liquid summer asphalt. Dark forces by day, radiant by night in the dazzle of Molotov cocktails. Following this parade of madness, we were the brooms.

The dazed, the bloodied, the beaten looked to us for sensitivity, but we could barely feel. We were so, so, tired. Tired and empty. Empty and hungry, hunger yet another continuum of dismal void among the many. It is possible to be too tired to even feel your own hunger, let alone sympathy. Mayhem and injury relentlessly left us numb.

You had to dismiss it all to survive.

Abstraction and denial propped us through the trudge of torn flesh spiced with broken glass, hearts gone bad, and battered bones. Reflection yielded to reflex.

Yet, somehow, in that soulless void of the involuntary - Rocky made us laugh. Depleted, miserable, and weakened - he alone - made us laugh. Negligent of dignity, of who we were supposed to be, he made us laugh. When we could not go on, he made us laugh about our not going on. And, then, on we went.

Anesthesia was his specialty and we had become his self appointed patients - his charges. He weighed who we were, as we strained under a load for which we were too young, unprepared, and failing. He came to us, to fortify. He encouraged us with smiles as we worked. He invigorated us with stories of inspiration as we fought our closing eyes. And jokes! Endless jokes. Where did he get all those jokes? We were too exhausted to laugh and yet, covered with blood, we laughed. Through the worst of tragedy, we giggled. Rocky was our hypnotic, our oasis. Rocky made us laugh.

His name was Doctor Rockwell, and those were troubled times.

Isn't memory strange? I tell you these things as if I can see them. You would think, in this recollection, that I am inspecting every one of those old images with fresh perspective. But we can only drift further from antiquity. Never closer. I try. I torture my mind in backward pursuit of where I've been, as though I might actually glimpse that place from which I've come.

Do I see it?

I do not. All I see is rubble. Memory is a backward glance to broken realities lost in ruins. You, I, all of us clinging to precious tokens, reminders, mementos, notes of what was on the far side of that debris. With these imperfections we conjure our past in incantation to the trickery of thrown voices of augurs and their illusory floating tables. Truth becomes whatever salves as retrospection gropes in the dark.

Through veils of pain, revelation, wisdom, and ignorance, we do not see yesterday free from untinted tomorrows. We merely feel the chill of distance. Old and older things struggle to reanimate in tired breaths of retelling.

God! There are so many things I can only remember remembering. And damn! I cannot see faces. There are none there. Gray silhouettes at best. I cannot draw expressions on such dimly lit casts of my past. So many countenances without illumination. They are lost to me. So many shadows.

So many.

One.... She was burned, nearly half of her, to coal. A woman charred so badly, one of her legs just broke off and fell bloodlessly. In horror, we sanctified her distress with electric saws cutting deep signs of the cross into her bituminous chest. Unthrottled lungs then heaved her only words, 'Let me die.' Barely heard, but heard - and heeded. She knew. Her only chance was death.

Thanatos, standing nearby, always quiet, an empty hooded figure, waiting patiently. We gave her over to Death as Death placed its empty sleeve gently upon her. I know this happened, but I can't see her face. I have no idea. Who else bore this pall? I can't see them either. I can't see any of their faces.

Fire also suffocates. But does it illuminate? A pretty girl, freshman, I think. I remember that I could have easily loved her. She was beautiful, aglow in the ruby radiance of carbon monoxide, and yet, so utterly dead. Imagine her prayers, choked in smoke within a closet, sucked of air, by fire spawned in a tree at Christmas. Intact in physical form, attended by a family, destroyed. Death gently cradled her within its empty sleeves of decorum. Yet I can't see her face. Was she fair? Was her hair long or short, brunet or auburn? I don't know. Her father. Totally broken. Was he ruddy or pale, full or gaunt?

 I can't see any of it from here. A young girl's beautiful face? Just memory that such a face existed - and a father grieving. Its all gone, gone to me. Somehow I know it, but, I can't see it.

A motorcycle gang. Their leader, a menacing giant, shot in the groin, had my name, my full name, exactly. Burly, I'm thinking, wore leather, most likely. What DID he look like? Must have had a beard. Or those chains that hang from their belts? Don't you think? The fact is, I don't remember. I do recall Rocky saying that it was a treat to meet my father. I remember laughing at that. The joke, that's it. That's what I remember. The rest is reconstruction.

You would think our ambulance driver's face would be etched in this brain. God, what a night of horror! His last call was to attend an unresponsive woman sprawled in a bath tub. And that is when and where he lost it. Her lifelessness, left alone in a tub, with an ongoing orgy in the adjacent room where unconcerned and unclothed bodies writhed on one another.

Into that uncaring fasciculation was his pistol emptied. Five naked men dead, three women one of whom was his wife of six months. I cannot recall his face which so calmly pulled the naked damned from an ambulance agape, his dead bride last. I remember this. Even so, I can't see her nor can I snatch a glimpse of him in the act. Both - are now just words of things out of reach.

Words capture feelings. But feelings cloud. Images distort with distance. I retell old remembered words, but the forms are vapor - lost, exhalations, all of them.

All of them.

All of them,  but   one.

An explosion of despair filled the void of all creation,

'THIS ONE IS MINE!'

I recoiled from a laceration toward the doorway. A silhouette, an eclipse, of striking darkness within a blinding corona . That searing frame of light caught my unready eyes in weakness. Hooded Death, slumped in restful inattention on the floor in the corner, sprang to his feet unbalanced at the resonant wail.

'THIS ONE IS MINE!'

The empty hood strained, as did I, to comprehend, to see that impossible figure made black by a halo of unsympathetic light. And as Death withdrew in horror, I grabbed my face with bloodied gloves - my eyes having mercilessly adjusted to this damned spectacle.

'THIS ONE IS MINE!' It echoes even louder now, with all this distance. It was Rocky, shirtless, in denim farmer's coveralls, his right shoulder strap slipped down off his shoulder, his arms holding forward a pale child, a girl. His.

'THIS ONE IS MINE!'

I had never seen her, but she had his eyes - when last he smiled - his last smile ever.

'THIS ONE IS MINE!' echoes amplifying with each recollection. His purple face was swollen, bloated with anguish, as flexing temples bearing sinuous arteries leaped out through a marine-like cut of blond short cropped hair. Sweat rushed down his brow, into his eyes along the lower shaking lids becoming a stream on his right cheek which cascaded down onto her face, the faultless face of this, his, dead child. A last bond between father and daughter, a river of tears - to her eyes from his. He was crying FOR her, as she could not. Dirt on his face framed that tributary. His neck throbbed in mixed hope and despair, choking on what he knew but was wanting away.

We knew death. Death was our partner, always ready, but now unsure. Rocky and this child? The Pieta'. His right hand grappled, like talons, into her shoulder, his left hand clutching her cold right thigh, trying to pull her back from a metamorphosis too far gone. Clinging desperately, trying to hold life within her and unable to do so, he appealed to us, 'THIS ONE IS MINE!'

His nostrils flared. His right lower lip twitched out of step with chattering teeth in a breakdown of bodily control. Wild eyes implored a savior to step forth and shepherd this lamb back into his fold.

In the center - of the startled and empty hood of Death - caught unawares, hung a tear - suspended in space on that invisible cheek. Death cried for him, as we took her. A mere whisper, 'Please. Save her,' came from this broken man. Another whisper, unearthly, came into our minds from Death, 'Please save him.'

We did it for him. We did it for Rocky. We slaved to save her. She was gone, but he needed time to let her go. Her head was askew on her body, a trophy to the woman whose drunken hands followed drunken eyes to a child picking flowers in the grass, and whose car followed shameful hands. We did it for him. It was, perhaps, just another notch to drugs and alcohol, but this scar of his, is somehow - mine.

Death turned away, unable to look at what it carried off. But I saw the violet perfusion of his ears, the welts that blistered up beneath his unshaven face, the stream of mud dripping from his chin down his neck to his bare chest, the broken left thumbnail, her missing sandals tucked, in keeping for her, in his left pocket.

I can see his face.

God! It haunts me. It haunts me. It haunts me. I look back and that face is the rubble that obstructs my vision, and colors all that I see, and masks all that is lost.'

'THIS ONE IS MINE!'"

Marcus lifted this cry in an explosive roaring wail that brought an entire cafeteria to its feet, as he slumped back into a tired silence, a silence respected.

On the far side of the cafeteria some were asking, what one of what was his? Lunch long over, the table gathering solemnly filed out. Frank Sumner stood up, blinked slow and long, sat back down engaging the vacant eyes of his old friend, stood again remaining just long enough to put his hand on Mac's shoulder, then left crying - loudly and openly. Frank had never cried before. Not in public. Larry Osten just melted backward with his arms hanging as if lifeless, unweighted, as a wailing Sumner eclipsed.

Shannon doubled back briefly to remind Mac of the meeting at the Law School. She would get the papers together and meet him at the car in one hour. "Page me when you're ready," she said softly.

"I'm ready. I'm ready now."