This story was originally written on a TRS-80 Color Computer using an early word processor called Telewriter in 1986. It was moved to an MS/DOS PC about two years later. Over the years it has been moved from one computer to the next as I upgraded. In 2006 I started through old stories and started looking at ones to clean up and publish. I passed this for over a year, then sat down and in a couple nights got it ready to upload.

As far as I know the medical technique and medical condition discussed here does not exist. But it would be fantastic if the technique did because there are conditions that may be treatable using it. I have asked myself, given this situation, if I had been able to help my wife this way, would I have been willing to do it? I sincerely hope the answer would be yes but would I? I don’t know for sure.

May 1985

Dave Grey felt himself rising through the fog surrounding his head. He kept muttering, “I got stuck in Denver again. I don’t like Denver.” He didn’t know where he was but it felt like Denver. No matter what he did, he couldn’t seem to fill his lungs with enough air. Wherever he was, the air here seemed thin like it did in Denver. He remembered the feeling all too well that night. His layover was to be two hours but the weather closed in, his flight out was first delayed and then finally canceled just after midnight. He spent the night in the Marriott just off Stapleton field. After tramping from airline to airline to try to get out with no success he got a hotel room just before the last ones filled. He was dead tired when he flopped into bed.

He was awakened when the first planes began flying just before dawn. From his hotel room he looked out in the early light to see clouds everywhere. The sight of those clouds above, below, and all around him had been burned into his memory along with the thin air that made him feel like he had to work for each breath. He had a mild asthmatic condition that seemed to be major at this altitude. Why people lived here and in fact how they lived here escaped him. In his dazed state the memory haunted him. It was so much like Denver here, wherever he was, with the fuzzy clouds surrounding his head and his breaths coming in the short gasps he remembered as a vivid part of that night. In his semi-awake state, his mind kept telling him he was back in Denver but he couldn’t remember how he could have gotten there. He hadn’t planned to go to Denver in fact he hadn’t planned to go anywhere.