by Nina George
The intensive care unit on the second floor is for patients wrapped in silence and loneliness. That’s why they’re sent here, to the Wellington Hospital’s neurology department. The London Brain Centre—the NASA of brain departments.
Sheila Walker hands me an A4 map of the hospital, the same one I received yesterday and the day before. With energetic swishes of her red felt-tip she circles where we are now—“We’re here”—and where I have to go—“You need to go there”—and marks the shortest route between the two points—“You’d be best taking that lift over there, Samuel.”
Mrs. Walker would be well suited to working at an information desk in the tube. “Turn right for Kensington, straight ahead for hernias, and the morgue’s on your left after the vending machine.”
“Have a nice day, Mr. Valentiner,” she says.
“You too, Mrs. Walker,” I reply, but she’s no longer paying attention.
* * *
—
My mother came with me to the hospital on the first day. As we waited for the lift, she said, “We don’t owe your father a thing, you know. Nothing. The only reason we’re here is because—”
“I get it,” I interrupted her. “You don’t want to see him. You promised yourself you wouldn’t.”
After a second she angrily retorted, “How come you always get everything, Sam? You’re not old enough!” She gave me a map of the hospital. “I’m sorry. It’s just that your father drives me up the wall. Oh, Sam.”
She wasn’t pleased that I had secretly asked my father to the Fathers’ and Sons’ Day at Colet Court. “He won’t come anyway,” she said at the time. Her voice suffused me like a fragrance, like the scent of rosemary in the rain, sad and muted. At that precise moment I could feel how much she loved me. All at once I could breathe properly, as if I were standing on the world’s highest peak. The ball of phlegm that usually clogged my chest was gone.
Sometimes my love for my mum is so overpowering that I wish I could die so she’d finally be happy again. Then she’d be left with her husband, Steve, and my little brother, Malcolm. A normal family—just father, mother, and child, rather than father, mother, child, and me, the kid who never looks anyone in the eye, reads too much science fiction, and is a permanent reminder of a man she can’t stand.
“Listen,” I suggested. “I’ll go in on my own, but only if I can stay for as long as I want and you wait for me in the cafeteria.”
She gave me a hug. I could sense how much she wanted to say yes, and how ashamed this made her feel.
My mother hasn’t always been like this. There was a time when she worked as a photographer and traveled to war zones. She was afraid of nothing—of nothing and nobody. But then something happened. That thing was me, an accident, and everything changed. Now she sneaks through her own life, as if she’s constantly trying to duck out of harm’s way.
“Please, Mum,” I said, “I’m almost fourteen. I’m no longer a kid.”
My mother ended up going to the cafeteria, and I went up alone to visit the second floor and the man who became my father because my mother slept with him once during what she refers to as an “embarrassing moment.” She’s never told me where and why it occurred.
Sheila Walker has already forgotten me as I make for the lift and take it to the second floor. The first thing I have to do there is put a smock over my school blazer, disinfect my hands and lower arms, and cover my mouth and nose with a white oval mask.
The brain center’s intensive care unit is like a large, brightly lit warehouse. There are beds along three long walls—A, B, and C. Rails run just below the ceiling, allowing blue curtains to be pulled around each bed to form a separate cubicle. On a raised platform in the center of the hall are several counters equipped with computer monitors and controls. Doctors sit there watching screens or making phone calls. Every patient has been assigned his or her personal nurse.
It resembles a refugee camp, because the coma patients aren’t called by their names, only by a combination of a letter and a number. “A3, glucose level falling.” “B9, restless.” None of them is real anymore. My father is C7. One of the “zombies.”
On my first visit, the right side of his head had been shaved and then daubed with orange iodine tincture. Lengths of white adhesive tape had been stuck on his face to hold the breathing tube in place, and his skin was blue, green, and purple—the colors of night, strength, and dreams. When I entered the ward, I felt as if liquid concrete were oozing into my stomach and hardening with every breath. That lump of concrete has been inside me ever since.
I’ve already told you that I’m a synes-creep. I experience the world differently from other people. I see sounds, voices, and music as colors. The London Underground sounds steel gray, like a bagful of knives. My mother’s voice is soft, like soft gauze on a frozen lake. And purple. My voice is currently colorless, but when I’m scared it turns bright yellow. When I speak it’s light blue, like a baby’s playsuit. It’s breaking at the moment, and ideally I would say nothing further until that’s over.
People who know who they are and what they’re capable of have green voices. Dark-green voices, serene and majestic like a wise old forest.
For me, numbers also have colors. The figure eight is green, four is yellow, and five is blue. Letters have personalities: R is aggressive, S is sly, and K is a covert racist. Z is cooperative and F is a diva. G is upright and strong.
When I enter a room I can tell which emotions have been felt in it most frequently. With someone like Mrs. Walker, I can sense how heavyhearted she is by the density of the shadows surrounding her.
I can’t look another person in the eye. There’s too much there, and much of it I don’t understand. Sometimes I’m afraid that their gaze will tell me they’re about to die, which turned out to be the case with our housemaster at Colet Court and our neighbor Mrs. Logan.
People with synesthesia used to be regarded as pathological. Pathologically shy, pathologically oversensitive, a real burden on their families. Children who have it are always screaming, quick to tears, and peculiar in other ways too. When they grow up they often turn out to be borderline, complete schizophrenics, or prone to depression. Many kill themselves because they can’t cope with the world and the way they see it. Hypersensitive crybabies. If there were any pills to treat this condition, I’d be gobbling them like Smarties.
* * *
—
The first time I walked through the ward of the “zombies,” it felt as if their souls were bleeding colors. I perceive that kind of thing, although I’d rather not. Then I caught sight of the man in C7. I felt nothing.
It was weird. I’ve never felt nothing. Only that once. The stranger was lying motionless on his back on an aluminum bed. The shadows around him were thick, the color of the moon. His eyes were closed, and he gave off nothing. That nothing worried me, but only in a strange, standoffish way.
I sat down carefully on the edge of his bed. Still nothing. I was relieved. If I didn’t feel anything, then I wouldn’t be obliged to miss my father all the time, keep thinking about him. I could stop searching everywhere for him. I didn’t need to come here again. My mother could make peace with herself at last.
Then I saw the scoobie. That scoobie changed everything. My father was wearing a plastic bracelet on his otherwise bare right wrist. It was dark blue, light blue, and orange. I’d woven it two years earlier and sent it to him by post. My mother had claimed that he wouldn’t wear it. He’d throw it in the bin.
I believed her, as always, even if I kept hoping that she was wrong. But she managed to convince me that my father was the man she had always described him to be: hard-hearted, self-centered, inconsiderate.
But he was wearing it. He was wearing my stupid, childish plastic bracelet in my three favorite colors—midnight blue, sea blue, and the orange of a summer sunrise.
I’ve no idea
how long I sat there, staring at the plaited plastic—a cheap charm that changed everything. All I know is that after a while the head of intensive care, Dr. Foss—“Call me Fozzie, lad!”—came over to me, laid his hand gently on my shoulder, and told me in a nasal voice that my father had been very lucky. His skull was fractured, but the swelling was no longer putting pressure on his brain and the cerebral cortex had barely been affected.
Luckily, God walked past and barked, “Samuel, don’t believe a word Fozzie says. We’ll have to operate on your father a few more times and only then will we be able to see where we went wrong.”
God’s real name is Dr. John Saul. With his blond hair, his broad shoulders like a rower’s, and his big sideburns, the director of the London Brain Centre resembles a Viking. Whenever he enters the intensive care ward where the “zombies” live, wearing that aura of silvery coolness about him like an invisible cloak, the nurses and doctors catch their breath. They all pray that he’ll be able to perform a miracle. Behind his back they call him God, because he knows everything—including the fact that they call him God. And Dr. Foss, in his green cord trousers, his curry-colored socks, his finely checked purple shirts, and his suspenders, is his Holy Ghost. He models his hairstyle on John Cleese and takes tea for half an hour every afternoon while playing Quiz Battle on his smartphone in its tartan case.
The night after that first hospital visit I talked to Scott via Skype while my mother had quiet sex with her husband, Steve. Scared of having another nightmare, my brother, Malcolm, was desperate to sleep in my room. As he fell asleep it was as if his spirit were walking down a long flight of stone steps into the dark. I could hear his footsteps, but unlike my father he was close, very close to the surface, and I could still sense his presence.
I told Scott that my father was “away.” Scott was sitting on the toilet. The McMillans have more toilets in their mansion than my mother Marie-France’s terraced house has rooms. We live in Putney, Scott in Westminster. If Putney’s Swatch, Westminster’s Rolex.
We searched for “traumatic brain injury,” “artificial coma,” and “cerebral cortex” on Google, or rather Scott did while I stared into the darkness, listening to the tapping of his fingers and to Malcolm’s deep breathing. I thought about the scoobie and how I couldn’t get through to my father under his thick fluffy duvet of anesthetics.
“Wow, Michael Schumacher was put into an artificial coma after a traumatic brain injury,” Scott lectured. “If the person doesn’t die straightaway, then—”
“Shut up.” If he didn’t say it aloud, then it couldn’t happen. It simply mustn’t happen. Not now. Not like this.
“Of course you don’t want to hear it, but you have to. Or do you want to let them lie to you? They always lie to us—at first because we’re children, then later because we’re no longer children.” Scott took a deep breath. “Now, listen to Brainman here. The cerebral cortex is the site of our personality. If it tears, you become either a vegetable or wildly aggressive. One day your dad might wake up and be so aggressive that he runs amok. Or kills himself. Or you. Or thinks he’s someone else. Some people come back and can do inexplicable things.”
“What kind of things?”
“You know, see auras, speak Tibetan, or hear thoughts.”
I didn’t tell him that I’m sometimes capable of two of those three things.
He resumed his typing and mumbled, “Aha, you have to hold his hand. If he squeezes your hand, he’s still there.”
Malcolm turned over in my bed with a sigh. I could feel his presence very clearly, even though he was sleeping and dreaming. My father, on the other hand…My father was somewhere beyond dreams.
“Where else might he be?” I asked Scott.
“This is crazy,” he whispers instead of answering me. “I’ve stumbled across a self-help forum for people who’ve met God or someone while they were in a coma.”
“What do you mean, ‘or someone’? Who? Elvis?”
We laughed and then the light came on in Scott’s toilet. He cried, “Oh shit, my dad!” and hung up. I was left sitting there in the dark at my desk.
If he squeezes your hand, he’s still there. I had to find out if my father was still there.
When my mother had finished making love with her husband, she went into Malcolm’s room, as always, to say good night. When she didn’t find him there, she knocked on my door, carried my sleepy brother to his own bed, and then came back to see me.
“I’m not going to sign that indefinite visitor’s permit for you, Sam. I don’t want you going to the hospital all the time. You need to focus on your exams, you know? That’s the most important thing right now. If you want to go and see him again in a few weeks’ time, fine—we can talk about it.”
My mother pays almost nineteen thousand pounds per year for me to attend Colet Court School, so it’s my fault that she doesn’t have enough money and is unhappy. But my mind was entirely on the scoobie, so I just said, “Okay.”
“Your father never took care of you, so there’s no reason you should look after him now. That may sound harsh, Sam, but it’s for your own good, do you hear? Otherwise, you’ll just end up being even more disappointed.”
Again I said, “Okay.” What else could I say? At last I knew where my father was. In C7. And I knew he was wearing my scoobie. She was wrong about him. Or was I? In any case I knew I would go back there to squeeze his hand. For as long as it took until, one day, he returned that squeeze.
But I kept those thoughts to myself—the first time I’d ever hidden something really important from my mother. By no means the last, though.
* * *
—
On the second day Scott brought a great stack of printouts about brain injuries to school for me.
“Virtually everyone shows signs of delirium when they wake up from an induced coma,” he told me during the lunch break, which we spent on St. Paul’s School’s carefully tended hockey pitches behind the assembly hall instead of at the dining hall. Once we’d passed our exam with top grades, we too would become so-called Paulines. Everyone at St. Paul’s went on to have a brilliant career—at least that’s what the mothers of Paulines said—and they all knew by the age of sixteen what they were going to study and do with the rest of their lives.
Nothing could interest me less at the moment.
“Delirium—what a scary thought! Hallucinations and nightmares. You no longer know who you are or who anybody else is. Your dad might think you’re an orc or a synes-creep.”
“Oh, kiss my ass.”
“Here? Word would get around, mon ami.”
I didn’t react to this. For the very first time I couldn’t bring myself to laugh at one of Scott’s jokes. He watched me closely through the square inch-thick glasses he’d recently started to wear, of his own free will, in order to look like a geek. “Know why? Because of the girls.” There are no girls at Colet Court.
“When are you going to go and see him again, Valentiner?”
I shrugged. “My mum won’t let me.”
Scott tugged at the three hairs on his chin that he’s been trying, unsuccessfully, to sculpt into a beard. “She can’t stand the fact that you like him, mon copain. Jealousy. Like my dad. It rankles him that my mother loves me. The same problem all fathers have at the birth of their first son,” he stated pompously. He’s known that he wants to study psychology since he started seeing a psychotherapist at the age of nine near St. John’s, the church with the unicorn on its coat of arms. He intends to specialize in psychosis and somatic delusions.
Now, however, he was observing a group of older St. Paul’s pupils, who no longer had to wear a school uniform but were allowed to wear whatever they liked—as long as it included a jacket, an ironed shirt, and a tie, as well as full-length trousers. They were holding the doors open for one another.
“Where exactly did the a
ccident happen, Valentiner?”
“On Hammersmith Bridge,” I replied. “Yesterday morning.” As we stared into each other’s eyes, the penny finally dropped in our highly gifted but idiotic brains. It always takes geniuses longer to understand the easiest thing. We’re totally and embarrassingly unequipped for everyday life.
“Merde, Valentiner! That’s just around the bloody corner from here! Your dad was hit as he—” Scott stops abruptly.
Yes, it would seem that my father…was on his way to see me. He was going to come! My sense of joy blazed for one bright second, but then the full force of my guilt came crashing down on me. If only I hadn’t sent him the email, he’d never have been on that bridge. If I hadn’t invited him to come, he wouldn’t be lying in a hospital bed now, half-dead. If I hadn’t…
“Valentiner?” Scott asked.
I couldn’t answer.
“Valentiner! Whatever you may be thinking right now, check this out and then think again!”
He was holding up his smartphone. It’s approximately fifty-three times more expensive than my own, and on it I could see a shaky video Scott had found on YouTube. He wasn’t the only one—it had 2.5 million hits. The film’s title was “A Real Hero” and it showed a man swimming in the Thames. The camera zoomed in, and the blurred footage showed the man diving into the water and resurfacing a few seconds later with a wet bundle. It was only when he had made it to the bank that it became clear that the bundle was a girl. The man carried the child to Hammersmith Bridge. The picture shook as he strode toward the camera and said, “Were you only filming, or did you think of calling for help?” Four seconds later the car smashed into him. The film broke off. The man was my father.
“Your dad’s a cool dude,” Scott said dryly. “You should tell him that one day.”
The bright burst of joy and energy that had swept through my heart when I caught sight of my father in the film gave way to a dark shadow at Scott’s words. My yearning to tell that living father everything—everything I thought, everything about who I am—turned to despair as I was reminded of his now motionless figure. Motionless and cut off from the world.