My room is peaceful. Lovely really, with its polished wood floors, marble tiles, and gold fixtures in the bathroom. Other than the ICU where I spent the first two weeks, I haven’t seen the rest of the accommodations. But knowing Daddy, this is the presidential suite.

Understand, I can’t actually see, not in any conventional way. Though my eyes are open, I am technically and by unanimous decision, knocked out. What I witness is more an “experiencing” of my surroundings. Images flash sequentially like a filmstrip running inside my head.

There are no flowers. Thousands of arrangements sent by well-wishers have been donated to other patients or carted away by hospital orderlies and cafeteria workers. On the floor in the corner, a Hefty bag of fan mail sits next to a short stack of week-old issues of Daily Variety and the Hollywood Reporter featuring headlines of my unfortunate accident: JACKIE’S JUMP BUMPS PIC SALES WORLDWIDE, JACKIE GOLD: FALLING STAR BRINGS RISING BOX OFFICE, and my personal favorite from the front page of the Enquirer, “GERONIMO!” JACKIE’S LAST STAND. My nurses sneak the copies out of my room, and then carefully put them back as I lie here, enshrined on my Posturepedic. My awareness, this ability to see, is not in their medical journals. It’s likely those of us who experience it don’t live to tell the tale.

The door of my room is thickly painted a soothing, creamy green, the reliable color of government buildings and public schools. Cut into the door’s upper half a porthole allows nurses and visitors to peek in as if framing the image before entering will somehow soften the blow. A chair sits by my door, the kind stashed in office closets; black plastic bucket seating, chrome sidearms, light enough for even frail, grieving hands to manipulate. A white wicker loveseat and matching chair with peach cushions from Pier One sit by the window, an ensemble meant to disguise my sterile chamber with an air of hominess. Like the smell of chocolate chip cookies wafting up from the chimney of a crematorium.

Camped in the parking lot below my window are dozens of fans and paparazzi. In the corridors and beyond, the media circus; ABC, CBS, FOX NEWS, CNN, MSNBC, even the BBC have gathered. Some guzzle coffee at nearby Starbucks or in the hospital cafeteria. The more creative hacks station themselves in waiting rooms; armed operatives with listening devices and hidden cameras pretending to be part of a worried or grieving family. Not that they’re all scumbags. As a movie star, I just happen to attract the bad guys. Until my accident, newsmen like Rather or Jennings had no cause to mention my name. So maybe not every reporter is in the rat race but believe me, they’ll all eat their young for a piece of the cheese.

DISSOLVE TO:

INT. HOSPITAL ROOM

AFTERNOON