by Nina George
“One day, mon ami,” says Scott, “we’ll look back and wonder what happened to those boys. Let’s make an oath: if ever one of us becomes an asshole, trapped in his own little caged life like a hamster, the other one swears to rescue him. Okay? Rescue me if I ever become like my father. Rescue me if I marry the wrong woman, or if I ever stop being Brainman.”
I nod; he says, “No hugs, please”; I punch him on the shoulder; and we hug all the same.
Scott then presses a parcel of new excuse letters with my mother’s faked signature into my hand. I run to the main building, slip one of them into the secretary’s pigeonhole, and then I’m out of there.
* * *
—
Forty-five minutes later I’m taking the lift to the fifth floor of the Wellington. Passing the nurses’ common room, I hear a woman I’ve never seen before pronounce Madelyn’s name. I stop and pretend to tie my shoelace.
“All psychogenic noncompliance of the kind Madelyn is exhibiting is a form of protest. It’s all about finding the sensory channel they are trying to transmit on and the one on which they wish to receive. It’s easier if someone loves them. Along with fear and hatred, loving and being loved are the strongest stimuli.” God stares at the woman and then turns round, as if he has sensed my presence. I think God’s synesthetic too.
“Samuel,” he says. “Allow me to introduce Angela. She’s an…empathy therapist.” She actually seems very nice, although I guess God would still dearly love to kick her out.
Every week brings a new group of pilgrims to Madelyn’s bedside. Doctors from all over the country and even from as far afield as America and France. She’s been described as a “fascinating case,” because her brain damage isn’t necessarily the reason for her vegetative state or, as some people call it, “minimal consciousness.” God used his disc diagram once more to explain this to me. Around “Awake” there are places just below the surface of life, as if a disc or an impenetrable film lies between the person and the outside world. They can hear everything and occasionally feel things, but they don’t understand the information and cannot express themselves.
He then cut out the circles and laid them on top of one another. Maddie is simultaneously numb and in a coma, although that isn’t actually possible. She rises and falls between the discs without touching “Asleep” or “Unconscious.” Her open eyes prove that part of her is “here,” but a more significant part is elsewhere, and between us lies not a pane of glass or a film, but a layer of ice and solitude.
Nurse Marion said she’d definitely prefer to see me than the “luminosities”—she means the luminaries—who take turns to inspect this “extraordinary case” and release her from her “condition.”
Marion is convinced that the experts who call Maddie a “condition” are of no use anyway. “Sam, darling, whenever doctors think nobody’s listening, they talk about people as if they’re cars. But what Maddie needs aren’t some hotshot luminosities publishing self-important articles with her photo in the Journal of High-Brain Medicine.” She shows me the scrapbook she’s keeping. “What Maddie needs are things that make her happy. It’s always the little things, those precious little things that keep people in a coma closer to ‘Awake.’ ”
Unfortunately, there’s no one left to tell us what Maddie likes. Does she like Gilmore Girls? Diary of a Wimpy Kid, perhaps? Does she like Taylor Swift or Bartók? Does she prefer literature or painting, the sea or the mountains? Cats or dogs? Spaghetti or sushi? If someone talks a lot or a little?
Nurse Marion calls the coma treatment unit the “bottom rung of heaven.” And that’s where God and the empathy therapist are sitting now. She’s telling him something about the “organ clock” and “daily cycles” when God briefly interrupts her to tell me, “You can’t visit Maddie now. Angela wants to see her first.”
“May I have her book then?” I ask.
Dr. Saul digs it out for me.
Marion keeps a record of all those “sitting on the bottom rung.” She has shown me these logbooks, which she produces with the help of their relatives, carers, and doctors. They document the patients’ favorite meals, hobbies, everyday rituals, and favorite words. The nurses start to keep the records in the intensive care unit, then they follow patients throughout their stay.
There is not much in Maddie’s book. Her former dance teacher, Mrs. Parker, knew little about her, due not to any disinterest but to a focus on dancing, her main preoccupation, combined with age-related forgetfulness.
Maddie doesn’t like:
Mozart
Maddie does like:
Russian composers
Anything blue with polka dots
The odor of an empty stage before the lights go up: this she told Mrs. Parker one day
Also:
Jane Austen (very probably)
* * *
—
They found Pride and Prejudice in Maddie’s rucksack after the accident. I dip into it while I’m waiting for the empathologist to leave, and I don’t really understand what’s going on. I think they all get married at the end, though.
The card in the pocket attached to the inside front cover shows that she borrowed the novel from her local library in Oxford. It’s overdue.
I feel an intense flush come over me. Perhaps I can take it back, and maybe the librarian can tell me something about her? But I have no idea how to get to Oxford. By train? Yes, by train. But then how am I supposed to disappear for a whole day without my mother’s finding out? I hate being only thirteen. You’re nobody at my age.
I put the book in my bag, then start to flick through Maddie’s logbook. Nurse Marion, Liz, and the doctors all note something in it every day, either about the tests they do with her, the world in general, or the weather, as naturally no Brit would feel properly alive without a little meteorological discussion. There’s also the occasional human-interest story, such as “Kate Middleton is allergic to horses” or “Donald Trump wants to be president.” Entries about the noise in the unit, the angle of Maddie’s bed, the rhythm of the ventilator—anything that might someday explain what happened while she was away.
I take a pen from my school rucksack and write under today’s date: “Samuel Noam Valentiner (13) was here again.” I can’t think of anything else to say, and I imagine her reading it one day and asking me, “Why did you write that? ‘Was here again.’ You can find more original entries on a calendar!”
I give it another go. “It was normal in ancient Egypt for a cat owner to shave off his pet’s eyebrows when it died. Cats were buried with mummified mice. There is no record of the mice having their eyebrows shaved too.”
Good—or better at least. Now, something about her perhaps. “You keep your eyes open most of the time. Sometimes they’re closed, but no one knows if you’re asleep or not. You’re in a place where no one’s supposed to find you. I will shave off my eyebrows for the rest of my life if you never wake up again.”
I felt like writing “die” but chose not to, because you can’t be sure that the universe isn’t eavesdropping and might misunderstand. I have palpitations by the time I add a full stop. I can hear Scott saying, “Your whole life is a pretty long time, mon ami. Is this your new policy then? Promising to permanently disfigure yourself for girls you don’t even know?”
* * *
—
The woman who reads emotions just won’t leave. Quietly and dispiritedly, I slink away from the fifth and take the emergency staircase down to the second and my father.
Will Eddie be there? Eddie always brings along books to give me or leave for me. She sometimes comes in figure-hugging leathers, sometimes in a cocktail dress, and a few days ago I saw her online with the famous author Wilder Glass. They were walking arm in arm along a red carpet somewhere, he in a tuxedo and she in the dress she’d been wearing at the hosp
ital that afternoon when she washed my father’s feet.
Dad is alone now, though. The lung machine is doing his breathing for him, and his face is impassive. I nod to the nurse who checks up on him every fifteen minutes. His name’s Dmitry and he’s Russian. When he turns my father over, he seems to do so with great ease. Dmitry has explained all the different devices assembled beside my father’s bed. My father is surrounded by catheter stands, recording devices, and other machines that almost appear to be feeding off him.
Dmitry has also told me about the various doctors. There are some who only check the depth of my father’s induced coma: the anesthetists. He calls them the “gas men.” Typically, his nickname for others responsible for urine, blood, and the like is “plumbers.” Then there are people like God and Dr. Foss, who keep an eye on the brain, and doctors who monitor my dad’s circulation.
I don’t bother asking who’s taking care of his emotions because I know. Nobody. Nobody watches out for his worry or morale or loneliness.
I try not to think about any of the things I now know about comas. Some patients are lucky and can go into rehabilitation after two weeks without a stay in the veg compartment. Seven percent, or seven in a hundred.
Fifteen percent go straight into the freezer compartment, as the pathology department is known. And the rest live in a coma and stay there. Expressed as a number: forty thousand people in Britain every year.
The ones who wake up remember what people have said to them while they were in a coma.
“Salut, Papa,” I say. Ever since I found out he’s from Brittany and that both my parents are therefore from France, I try to skip French lessons less often. I rummage in my rucksack for the book I’ve planned to read to him, then wheel over the roller stool, bend down to his ear, and whisper so that my voice doesn’t crack, “Salut. It’s the thirteenth of June 2016. This is Sam, your son, speaking. I’m thirteen, going on fourteen. You are Henri M. Skinner. M for Malo, and Skinner as in…no idea. I don’t know very much about you. You used to be called Le Goff. You’re forty-five years old and a war correspondent. Were, before my birth. Almost four weeks ago you had an accident. You’ve been in a coma for the past twelve days and have had a cardiac arrest. You are at the Wellington Hospital, which is pretty expensive, and the director is called God. Outside it’s warm, and girls are wearing red feathers in their hair. Scott’s currently in his second rebel phase. He hasn’t stopped smoking, but he does still want to study psychology. And I was just with Eddie at her publishing house. Today, for starters, I’m going to read you a passage from A Song of Ice and Fire, volume one.”
My father’s very far away. I can make out the black aura of pain that’s always hanging around him like a fine mist. Nonetheless, I continue.
“It must be time for tea soon. You’ll be fed something tasty through the tube into your tummy, probably blended cucumber sandwiches and electrolytes with a drop of milk. I’m going to eat my school sandwich. Oh yeah, I bunked off school again. If you don’t agree with that, I suggest you wake up and tell me yourself.”
I peer at my father. Do I sense some tension in him? He’s exhausted and seems a little blurred, that’s it.
“Okay, if you think so. Mum would probably beg to differ. Her name’s Marie-France. She’s a photographer and you slept with each other once, but then something happened. You didn’t stay together. I don’t think you were even there for my birth. She told me shortly before I started school that Steve wasn’t my real father. He’s not too bad, though. He’s a floor layer and works in a DIY superstore. Anyway, I’m going to read to you now, if you agree.”
I open the book and begin to read aloud.
Henri
I fall until I hit the ground. It’s hard and cold. The candles have burned down and gone out.
Marie-France has pushed me off the camp bed we were sharing. I was cradling her naked body in my arms, and turning over in her sleep she pushed me out.
Images of the attack are still swirling around my head, and my heart is pumping. A war correspondent’s mind is a machine that’s always overheating and needing to be patched up.
I gaze at Marie-France. It wasn’t mutual seduction—we simply devoured each other in our hunger for life. I ought to go and see the company doctor Greg’s always talking about. So far I’ve refused to do so, but I barely ever sleep through the night now. During the daytime I’m assaulted by recollections so blurred and vague that I can identify them neither as elements from the past nor as illusions. It’s as if, when I doze off, I hover just below the threshold of waking, losing my way in a half-light of thoughts and images.
Marie-France doesn’t look me in the eye later as I hand her a metal cup of steaming coffee.
We fly to Wau and from there back to Paris via Cairo. Marie-France nods off against my shoulder as we cruise over the Mediterranean. She’s embarrassed when she wakes up and huddles against the misted-up window for the rest of the journey.
As we’re standing facing each other at Charles de Gaulle Airport I ask her, “Do you want to see me again?”
She shrugs her shoulders. They’re narrow and delicate, but they can bear a good deal—apart, perhaps, from the knowledge that I’ve seen into her soul.
“Not necessary,” Marie-France drawls.
When I say nothing she adds, with deliberate nonchalance, “Okay then,” and bends down to pick up her green camera bag.
Air-kiss left, air-kiss right. One last quick, searching look from her dark eyes. There’s a glimpse of wounded vanity there because I don’t insist on staying, but I can also catch a hint of surprise that she isn’t urging me to stay.
Go? Or stay?
As we touch cheeks for an extra kiss, I whisper, “Thank you,” and even as I pronounce those two words I’m flooded with relief. Relief that she genuinely doesn’t want me to stay and that I don’t have to lie and say I do.
“I think it’s better this way,” replies Marie-France, and shakes her head again, as if these words too have caught her off guard.
As I take a couple of steps away from the baggage conveyor belt where she stands, rubbing her stomach absentmindedly with one hand, she calls, “Henri!” and when I turn around, she asks, “Do you sometimes think, I’ve already had this experience or I’ve stood on this exact spot before?”
“Yes,” I say.
“Like now?” she asks.
“No,” I lie, although it’s true. I have an intense feeling of having already been here.
She shrugs again and walks away.
I fly back to London. My editor in chief Gregory wants me to be one of twelve reporters interviewed by Time magazine to represent war correspondents worldwide. I know the other eleven, and all of us are familiar with the rules of our profession as messengers of horror.
Do not take sides, simply observe.
You cannot save anyone.
Get out of this business before it’s too late.
The interviews take place one after the other at Claridge’s hotel in a suite hired specially for the occasion. I find this both fascinating and repulsive because all I can see are Akol’s frail hands clinging to the hot barrel of a gun.
Time asks each of us to say something about the others. Sia of the Washington Post calls me “Mr. Fearless.” If she only knew that the sole reason I jet from one war zone to the next is to escape. I’d rather not survive and that’s why I’m so cruel to myself. What would she call me if she knew? “Mr. Lifeless”?
One day later a bomb goes off in a street in Kabul. A seven-year-old girl is suspected of carrying it. Greg immediately sends me out to investigate. I try to establish the facts and in the process I make the acquaintance of a chai boy called Ibrahim, an orphan who was searching for his sister when the explosion happened. Ibrahim’s twelve, and his younger sister had been kidnapped.
The Taliban forbade her from
going to school, and instead the girl blew herself up with a bomb in a Hello Kitty rucksack, killing twenty-four other people.
Ibrahim doesn’t have his hair cropped short like pupils at a Koranic school. His reddish-brown locks are longer and peek out from under an embroidered purple cap. His eyes are two shiny green marbles in his emaciated yet beautiful face.
He wants to show me absolutely everything. He wants to betray the Taliban. He wants revenge because nothing was more precious to him than his little sister—neither religion nor fear nor money. The Taliban commanders are frequent guests at the house where he works as a servant. I break the first rule of every war correspondent: I take sides. I want to save Ibrahim, for if he acts alone he will die.
I stay in Kabul for a few weeks, and during that time Greg sends me the cover of Time with my photo on it, and Marie-France sends me a Polaroid of her positive pregnancy test at the pharmacy. “I want the baby, but I don’t want you,” she writes.
I beg her to let me meet our child, but she replies, “Please don’t go to war again after the child is born. I don’t want him to be scared for you.” She doesn’t respond to my request to see the baby, though. That’s the moment I decide to quit my job. I’m almost thirty-two.
I keep my promise and never report from war zones again. Yet Marie-France only lets me see our child once, shortly after his birth. She sends a photo of him—it’s a boy—sleeping with his little thumb tucked into his clenched hand. She calls him Samuel Noam, meaning “God has heard” and “joy, delight.” I write back to say that I can think of no better names for the boy.