by Nina George
Slowly I pulled out the permit that my mother had refused to sign and showed Scott a picture of the back of her Visa card, which I had secretly photographed with my smartphone that morning, just to be on the safe side. I hadn’t actually meant to use it. Until now. Until the film.
“Can you do this one?”
“Easy-peasy,” said Scott, taking my mobile and the piece of paper, and spiriting his fountain pen from its case.
* * *
—
So at midday today I rubbed sand in my eyes and pretended to my French teacher, Madame Lupion, that I’d suffered an allergic reaction. Then I set off for the Wellington with bright red eyes that were still itching and weeping.
No one paid any attention to me in the Underground. No one ever says anything on the tube, and no one looks at anyone either. People act as if they’re alone in the world, even when your face is being pressed into your neighbor’s armpit. The air is seventy-three times more polluted down there than it is aboveground.
Sheila Walker didn’t comment on my eyes either. They really do sting.
Dr. Saul is sticking a sheet of paper to the wall of the waiting room as I enter. It reads: “This is a specialist neurological clinic, not a clubroom, so no slurping your tea and no chatting.” I try to sneak past God without being seen.
“Hold it there, Samuel! What’s the matter with your eyes?” he snaps without turning around. He carefully sticks down the last corner of the poster. His lower arms are powerful, and his fingers never shake.
“I…I have an allergy, sir.”
“Oh yeah? Well, so do I, Samuel: I’m allergic to liars.”
“I might have gotten some sand in them,” I answer tentatively, adding a reverent “sir,” just in case.
God turns to face me. He has one blue eye and one green. His right eye, the blue one, is cold, whereas the green one is warm—two different men staring out at me from the Viking face framed by strawberry-blond sideburns.
“Some sand, eh? You look as if you slept facedown on the beach. Trying to blind yourself? No? Ever heard of neuronavigation?”
“N-no, sir,” I stammer.
“Then come with me,” he purrs, and leads me up to the next floor and into the magnetic resonance imaging demonstration room.
“Allow me to present…the monster,” Dr. Saul says. “This is a functional MRI scanner. It measures brain activity. Bloody thing cost two million pounds and is regarded as England’s first mind reader. It’s so smart that we hardly understand how it works.” He points to a chair and says, “Sit down, tilt your head back, and open your eyes wide!” He trickles a few drops onto my eyeballs. This immediately relieves the stinging.
All at once it strikes me that God is very often very alone. Dr. Saul switches off the lights and turns on the projectors. The whole wall is suddenly plastered with images of slices of brain. My eyes feel better in the dark.
He runs his fingers slowly, almost lovingly, over the projections on the wall. “Here’s a splendid aneurysm. We plug it by entering through the upper thigh and working our way along the veins. Ooh, how about this one! A wonderful example of a hemangioblastoma, as snug as a pea in a pod.” His voice changes from black to light green to pink as he traces the outlines of different brains. God loves brains.
“Have you ever peered into someone’s soul, Samuel?” he says, beaming a microscopic view of the brain onto the wall. “These are the two halves of the brain, as seen from the spinal cord at the bottom of the neck. It’s as if you were climbing up a tunnel from the neck, striding down a long corridor to the end of the brain stem, and then stepping from the cerebellum into the center of the brain. The secret chamber, the seat of our humanity.”
He enlarges the picture until it takes up the entire wall. It looks like a cathedral, with veins for buttresses and cells like high vaulted ceilings. It’s magnificent—magnificent and very weird.
“A church built of thoughts,” I whisper.
God pins me with his two-colored gaze, as if until this point I had been unreal to him, a simple offshoot of C7, and am now becoming real. His cool eye becomes warmer, then he gives a slow nod. “Exactly, Samuel,” he says softly. “The brain is a church built of thoughts.”
He abruptly flicks the lights back on and is once again a blond Viking with the forehead and shoulders of a bull. “Okay, you’re wondering if your father’s going to die, right?” Nothing holds any fear for God, not even the toughest questions.
He picks up a marker and draws a big black dot on a whiteboard. “This is ‘waking,’ okay?” He writes Awake next to the black dot and draws five concentric circles radiating out from it. At the edges, above, below, and on both sides of the largest circle, he writes the word Death. Inside the circles, from central to outermost, from the black dot, he writes Numb, Asleep/Dreaming, Unconscious, Coma, and Brain-Dead. The marker squeaks on the board.
“There are a variety of forms of life on the margins of death,” God explains. Tapping the area marked “Coma,” he takes a different pen, a red one this time, and draws three lines. “Deep, medium, and light coma. But it is in these areas, Sam, closer to the core,” says Saul, shading in the rings marked “Asleep/Dreaming” and “Unconscious,” “much closer to being awake, that your father is presently living. Do you see? Closer to life than to death. Do you understand?”
I nod. Has God noticed that he describes unconscious and coma as places rather than states?
Dr. Saul tosses the markers casually onto the table.
“A word of advice,” he barks as he leaves the room. “Use toothpaste instead of sand next time.”
* * *
—
On my way to take the lift back down to the second floor, I run through all the things I want to tell my father today. Maybe I’ll mention Saul’s model. The disc world.
I wonder if you dream beyond the sleep zone, and if a medically induced coma is similar to a true coma or not. And if you know that you’re in a coma. I don’t know I’m dreaming when I dream. Is being in a coma like being alive, except that you don’t know you’re alive? Like in The Matrix?
In recent days I’ve had an occasional impression that I can feel my father. There was something restless about him, as if—and these are thoughts I will never reveal to Scott—he was searching for the path leading back to reality through a maze of darkness and fear. I now know that might be the case. If waking and sleeping and coma aren’t states but places, then my father is currently on a journey between those places. Or worlds. Or zones that get darker and darker, the closer they are to death.
Waiting for the lift, I imagine these worlds as one gigantic subterranean space. They rest on top of one another like discs and become more unfathomable the further you advance from the waking point. Nobody knows what it’s like at its outermost edge. Maybe a lot different. Maybe coma isn’t a dark zone. Maybe it’s identical to life in the waking zone, where I’m now sitting and hoping that my father will respond to my pressure and squeeze my hand. Hoping that just once he will approach the waking zone, through all the different levels and zones and degrees of darkness, via the staircases and corridors that appear abruptly through the fog of medication and dreams, allowing him for a few short moments to navigate a path through all the intermediate zones between waking and death, and surface.
If he squeezes my hand, he’s still here. “I’m here, Sam, I’m here. Even if I’m elsewhere. I’m coming back.”
But so far he hasn’t squeezed back. Not after the first operation, nor after the second, when they mended his ruptured spleen and pinned his broken arm, nor after a further ten days.
Maybe today?
Eddie
“You look a bit cross today, Mrs. Tomlin.”
“I’m not cross, Dr. Foss.”
“Of course not. My apologies.”
“I’m furious. There’s a difference, wouldn’t you
say?”
“Certainly, Mrs. Tomlin.” Dr. Foss remains as friendly as a butler pouring tea, but I can hear my voice getting louder. My fear is howling inside me like a wounded animal.
“Are you actually doing anything, or are you simply allowing him to wither away in order to save money?” I snarl.
Dr. Foss is standing behind me, but I can see his face in the mirror in the brightly lit, tiled room in which, every day for the last fourteen days, I’ve put on a smock and taken it off again, disinfected my hands and lower arms, and pulled a white oval mask over my mouth and nose. Dr. Foss purses his lips almost imperceptibly and stares at the floor. I’ve hurt his feelings. Hallelujah. In a sense, I am grateful that there are still people with feelings to hurt in English hospitals. You need to have some feelings in the first place for them to be hurt, and if you have feelings, you can empathize.
“I’m sorry, I’m not usually like this. Or I hope not, anyway.”
Dr. Foss flashes his engaging smile and says, “Of course not,” and ties the turquoise smock behind my back. The way he stands and walks and goes about his work brings to mind either an expensively trained royal valet or a well-educated aristocratic spy. He’s one of those very rare gentlemen who would remain on the deck of a sinking ship until every woman and child had been winched to safety. He’s even kind enough to push the elastic band of my face mask a little higher on the back of my head. Gingerly, as if I might explode.
I use my elbow to pump some disinfectant gel from the dispenser mounted on the tiled wall and rub it into my hands, which are shaking. Suntanned hands with ink stains on them, quivering like little wings.
“Be patient with yourself,” he says gently.
Ha, me of all people! I’m never patient with myself. Most of the time I don’t even like myself. I push the button again so I don’t have to meet Foss’s gaze.
“Every patient needs someone to believe in them. Believe in Mr. Skinner, Mrs. Tomlin. If he has a good reason to wake up, then…”
I feel like asking Dr. Foss which book of motivational axioms he’s quoting. I want to yell at him that I’m not a good reason for Henri Skinner—not good enough, in any case. After a totally weird three-year, on-off relationship during which I sometimes didn’t see Henri for months on end, he made it abundantly clear to me two years ago that I wasn’t the woman with whom he wanted to spend the rest of his life.
It was the first time I had said to Henri, “I love you. I want you, forever and beyond, in this life and every other.”
He replied, “I don’t want you.” And the world went dark.
I’ve only just stopped feeling ashamed. I’ve only just stopped missing him. I’ve only just controlled the yearning for which there are no words and no logic. I’ve only just begun to contemplate the possibility of starting a new life, with another man. And now Henri has erupted into my days, my nights, and my desires again.
When I heard the police officer say his name—“Do you know Henri Malo Skinner?”—three memories came flooding back: the heavy, fluid heat of his body on mine; that night on the beach beneath the green shooting stars when we told each other about what we’d been like as children; and his expression as he walked out.
Henri had entered my name into his mobile and written, In case of emergency, on a slip of paper stuck into his passport, and had even put my name in his living will. Which all came as just as much of a shock to me as the phone call from the police fifteen days ago. The police officers—an awkward fat man and a fidgety red-haired woman—were quite annoyed when I told them that I wasn’t Henri’s partner or fiancée or cousin, and that I had last seen him about two years ago, at about quarter to nine on the morning of October 2, 2014.
I love you. I want you, forever and beyond, in this life and every other.
I don’t want you.
And then I slapped his face and threw him out.
“Get lost!” I shouted, while what I really wanted to say was, “Stay!”
“Get out!” I roared, while inwardly begging, “Love me!”
“Get lost, for hell’s sake!” really meant, “Go before I humiliate myself any further!”
He left.
I’ll never forget his face when he turned around one last time by the door. It was as if he couldn’t fathom this departure and was looking back at the flip side of our love and wondering how he’d happened to cross the boundary between the two. Such desperation in his eyes.
I almost cried, “Stay!” and “It doesn’t matter, you don’t have to love me.” I’d have meant it. My love was greater than my desire to be loved, and it was worse that he didn’t want my love than not being loved in return. I don’t have a clue if that’s normal.
For two years I missed Henri every day, then I met Wilder Glass, who desires me, who does want me. I’m no longer the same woman who loved Henri Skinner so much that she was ready to spend this life and every other with him. No, that old me is an empty shell, and the thought of it sends ripples of shame over my skin.
Yet here I am. The woman he didn’t want but whose name he nevertheless put in his living will. I’m the person for emergencies, for dying but not for life. What the fuck?
Wilder doesn’t know I’ve been coming to the Wellington every day for the past two weeks. Some of the time he thinks I’m at readings or with agents, at others I’m meeting promising authors, genre writers and utopians. I’ve a lot on my plate as a publisher, and so Wilder doesn’t inquire and he’s never jealous. Wilder David Stephen Ptolemy Glass has too much class, too expensive an education, too much sense, and far too enviable a reputation in literary circles ever to be jealous of anyone.
I hate lying, and yet I do it as naturally as if the truth weren’t even an option. What is truth, anyway? A question of sufficient imagination. And how are you supposed to tell your partner why all of a sudden you’ve started to take care of an ex-boyfriend you’ve never mentioned? The mere fact of not having mentioned him would arouse any other man’s suspicions, but maybe not Wilder Glass’s.
I don’t know why I’m here, but I can’t help myself. It would cost me too much energy to deny myself, so I subject myself to this torture and get on with it.
There are signs and posters all over the place here. There are some bloody rules in the changing room, because presumably, without them, most visitors would beat and shout at their relatives to get some kind of reaction out of them.
Behave calmly, kindly, and respectfully in the patients’ presence.
Avoid hurried movements and walk quietly.
We do not talk about patients; we talk to them.
Approach patients slowly and always so that they can see you and will not be startled when you touch or speak to them.
* * *
—
Even married couples don’t treat each other like this. Henri hasn’t moved a muscle in these two weeks. He hasn’t blinked or moaned. Nothing. Frozen in an invisible block of anesthetics and painkillers, cooled by the machines that have adjusted his body temperature downward. The depth of his sedation is measured every eight hours. Minus five on the Richmond scale means unreachable; minus three and he’d have dragged himself back into the world; minus one and he’d be awake. I imagine him valiantly trudging toward minus one through a black void.
“Ready, Mrs. Tomlin?” Dr. Foss’s voice is quiet and respectful too. To him everybody is presumably a patient, suffering from some illness or other.
“Yes,” I answer, but I’m not. I’m afraid. Fear is a rampant creeper tightening its tendrils around my heart, my stomach, and my head, trying to force me to run to the end of the earth and hide there in the darkness.
Dr. Foss looks at me with soulful eyes. He’s a huge bear like Baloo. His boss, Dr. Saul, is a huge asshole. He isn’t thrilled that I want to be there during the attempt to wake Henri up.
“Yo
u’re afraid, Tomlin”—Dr. Saul calls me Tomlin, as if he were a drill instructor and I a soldier—“and your fear disturbs me during my work and infects Mr. Skinner.”
Dr. Foss interjects, “Dr. Saul doesn’t mean it like that, Mrs. Tomlin.”
Dr. Saul whirls around. “Don’t you ever again dare to suggest that I don’t mean what I say! Never again. It’s an insult to my intelligence, which, unlike you, I do not spoil with flattery. Their relatives’ worry is toxic to these patients.”
Whether it’s as a soldier or a trembling impediment to Henri’s recovery, I am here. I breathe, and with each exhalation, I seek to blow my anxiety somewhere far over the horizon. An author I publish taught me that trick. It had something to do with martial arts, a way of suppressing memory.
Blow it away. Maybe Dr. Saul is correct and my panic is poisonous. Then again, maybe not. I don’t want to run the risk, so I decide not to be scared and I blow my fear a long, long way away.
“Are you sure you’re ready, Mrs. Tomlin?” Dr. Foss asks.
I nod. Another lie. Breathe out, Eddie. I’ve had no idea what I’ve been doing here for the past fifteen days—I just do it.
We walk past A and B, past the cubicles, each with a bed in it, and in each bed an individual fate. Fingers quiver, eyelids twitch; the battle for life goes on in silence, far below the surface. I read somewhere that an induced coma is exactly halfway between life and death.
Is Henri already thinking in the language of the dead? He’s lying in cubicle C7. I go over to the bed and reach for his hand. Dr. Foss adjusts his tie and carefully loosens Henri’s cooling sleeves. “The brain doesn’t like being inactive for a long period of time. It’s like a car: if it simply stands around, its condition deteriorates. Machines like to be used, then they run smoothly.”