by Nina George
Nurse Marion? I cannot see the woman with the vaguely familiar, croaky voice, which smells of cigarettes. It’s a welcoming aroma, like coming home. Soon my heart is beating more calmly, no longer flapping frenziedly like a bird in stormy waters, no longer begging so urgently to be heard.
“Hello, Henri Skinner,” the voice says softly.
“Hello,” I answer. Can she hear me?
“Mr. Skinner, every night I analyze your sleep architecture. I’m certain you’re awake, but you can’t express yourself.”
Yes, yes! A gentle coolness floods my veins, and my fierce, black pain subsides, burning me less, no more than a flickering candle flame now.
“It’s almost half past three,” Nurse Marion tells me, and the scent of smoke reminds me of childhood nights by the fireside. Central heating came late to our village by the sea, and every house was heated with firewood in winter, its fragrance only fading when warmth arrived with the summer breeze at the end of spring.
The voice says something else: “Madelyn, my dear.”
I think, Madelyn, are you there?
There is no sound. The end of my world in this hall of the “zombies.” That’s the ceiling; this is my phantom body. I drift away. I fly through a purple sky—below me the sea, above me the barrier. The glass zone. I fly for days and days. I can feel sparks breaking off me as I begin to dissolve and disperse across an endless space….
“Good morning, Mr. Skinner.”
I’m startled. The sky recedes with a whoosh. Good morning, Mr. Skinner? The words are buzzing in my head. Is there someone who can hear me on the other side of the glass?
“My name is Dr. John Saul and I’m your doctor, Mr. Skinner. I’m a neurosurgeon and I’ve operated on you several times. You had a cerebral contusion. You sustained a tear to your spleen and fractures in your right arm, knee, and five ribs.”
What?
“Your name is Henri Malo Skinner. You’ve spent the past forty-two days at the Wellington Hospital in London, Great Britain. Britain is still a part of Europe, although a majority of Britons have recently voted to change that. It’s late June 2016, shortly before seven o’clock in the morning. The city is full of tourists from places where we go on holiday. It’s ghastly.”
“What happened to me?” I ask, but he continues without answering my question.
“You’ve been living in a coma for twenty-eight days, Mr. Skinner, ever since you suffered a cardiac arrest that left you clinically dead for several minutes. You’ve already survived two bouts of pneumonia and the onset of thrombosis.”
I was dead? I suddenly understand. My father, the sea, the island, that door. I died and on the way to death I ended up—what did my father call it?—“in between.”
“If you can hear me now but cannot speak, I would ask you to give me a different signal. First, I will squeeze your hand and would be very obliged if you could give mine a short squeeze back.”
“I am here!”
He doesn’t answer.
Oh no, no, no! He can’t hear me either, and I can’t feel his hand. I cast around despairingly inside my numb body, but I feel nothing—no hand and no pressure. I try with all my might to imagine fingers clenching.
“Oh well, shaking hands obviously isn’t your thing but then it never really has been.”
What does that mean: never has been? How many times has he squeezed my hand before? He told you, Henri: twenty-nine mornings in a row. But what am I doing in London? It’s not possible. First I lived in Paris with my boy. I got married to Eddie, and we lived in…we lived…where did we live?
No, I didn’t marry. Or did I?
Coma, I’m in a coma. That’s what Dr. Saul said.
Fear overwhelms me. It’s like brackish water, gradually submerging a deep, stagnant underwater prison cell. I feel the pull of the silence beneath me and try to press myself against the glass, try not to fall asleep, not to let go. I don’t want to sink back down there; I can’t bear the thought. The glass darkens, as if someone’s lowering a blind over the glass barrier. But then I recognize a face and moving lips.
“Mr. Henri Skinner, I’ve said your name so often I’m starting to sound like one of those irritating call-center assistants, but in my case I was testing whether you can hear while unconscious.”
Yes, for hell’s sake, I’m here. Here! Please get me out. Wake me up, damn it, wake me up. Do something, please! I’m here!
“Your name is Henri Malo Skinner, Malo being the name of your Breton grandfather. You were born at the northwestern tip of Brittany, and you grew up on the coast of the Iroise Sea.”
I know where I was born, for God’s sake. But he doesn’t care. He can’t hear me. He keeps saying that I’m living in a coma, and I want to tell him that everything is very different. I’m here. I’m really here!
He talks about a form that appoints Edwina Tomlin to decide on my fate. But where’s Eddie?
I’m supposed to squeeze hands, lift my arm, move my nostrils, blink, and swallow, but I can’t do any of those things. He says that he’s given me a gentle pinch, but I don’t feel anything. Next he claims that he doesn’t like doing this, but it’s necessary. I have no idea what he’s talking about. He apologizes again, saying, “I’m sorry, you’re bleeding a little. Some tests are brutal.”
Maybe I’m paralyzed!
Then it’s over. Dr. Saul mumbles, “I visit you ten times a day and every four hours at night. You’ve been through a scanner three times, revealing no significant streams of consciousness.”
Well, buy a machine that works then, idiot!
“Mr. Skinner, you’re nearer to us than to our strange friend Death. Come toward us. We’re here, and you’re safe with us.”
Death isn’t my friend, I feel like saying. Also, didn’t you know that Death is a woman? Death is a woman!
I can sense that Dr. Saul is contemplating me, as if a message just got through to him. My anger, perhaps. I have to make myself angrier. I perceive his presence like a huge, cragged rock amid the foaming waves, weary from many millennia of erosion by salt and wind, but solid nonetheless. And very, very lonely.
Lonely old Dr. Saul reassures me again: “You’re safe here, Mr. Skinner.”
I don’t feel safe. I feel as if I were buried up to my mouth in asphalt at the end of an empty street.
Dr. Saul walks away.
I try to listen out for any sounds in the world beyond the glass barrier and penetrate it with my sensory antennae. There’s someone else there. I can feel a presence, calm and majestic and attentive, but it’s out of reach. Is it Dr. Saul? Or Nurse Marion with her cool, soothing fingers?
What is watching me?
I continue to search for the girl and find her very close, directly by my side. She’s in a frightful state, but she no longer wants to die. She’s fighting. She seems to be desperately dragging herself toward life, yet something is holding her back with an iron grip.
The darkness approaches tantalizingly from all sides with a peaceful, soft blanket, trying to carry me away, and I anticipate the sweet slumbers that it brings. I put up a fight. No! I want to open my eyes wide, squeeze and crush Dr. Saul’s hand. I want to tell him not to leave me and that I’ve been here, close to the glass, many times before, always too briefly, and now I want to wake up. I want to tell him to help the child, because the little girl is never going to make it alone. But it’s as if someone has turned off the light and…
Henri
The next time I drift up to the glass barrier, the air is different, cooler, as cold as groundwater, and a lush, black veil is lying on it. I can feel the depths of night have settled over the room; it has a different weight from the day.
At my side is the rock called Dr. Saul. He whispers, “It’s two o’clock.” He’s searching for me, but he can’t find me. He explains that they tested me in my “absence”
for Guillain-Barré syndrome, a form of rapid-onset paralysis, and for polyneuropathy, a different disorder of the nervous system that makes it impossible for the sufferer to move. However, it isn’t my body that’s resisting—it’s my brain.
“Your son once said that the brain was a church built of thoughts. I like Samuel. He has an inner dignity most people will never attain, even if they live to be a hundred.”
My son! He’s here? What does he look like? What’s he doing? How is he?
Dr. Saul doesn’t tell me. I suspect that this doctor never leaves the hospital and has set up his camp bed in a room on a forgotten corridor somewhere.
Light stabs at my pupils. I can smell Dr. Saul’s breath. It smells fresh and warm, and his body radiates the same warmth. I envy him for being able simply to get up and walk away. I can see him, as if through a reverse telescope, a hundred yards above me, his face the size of a pin.
I call out, “Where’s Eddie? What’s wrong with Madelyn?”
“We must work in a guilt-free space, Mr. Skinner. We doctors, I mean. We shouldn’t beat ourselves up about our mistakes. Fuck that. The older I get, the more of my mistakes I’m able to visit, either here in the unit or out in the graveyard. No brain surgeon is free of guilt. Are you there, Mr. Skinner? Can you hear me?”
Yes I can, but why can’t this idiot hear me? Dr. Saul’s faraway face vanishes. The world beyond the barrier starts to shift and begins to swirl and eddy, like drifting smoke. Through the smoke I can make out my father’s outline, sitting on a bed in the background. I recognize his striped sweater, his jeans, and his bare feet.
Am I dying? He shakes his head and says, “I’m just waiting.” Those who love us wait for us. “Henri, did you know that I let go of you, not the other way around?”
I don’t believe him.
Being in a coma is like being buried alive, and nobody knows that I’m here. Here! What happens if they never hear me? If they think I’ve died? If they bury me alive? I can’t go on, I don’t want to go on.
Henri
A hand brushes against mine, then something seems to try to escape from the room. It is quick and as light as spray, and for a while it flits about between the beds and past the machines. It keeps banging against the windows, growing more and more impatient, like a moth desperate to escape.
Soon afterward there’s a rumpus. Doctors and nurses gather around a bed, which is now empty of the essential. You’re too late, I could tell them. The husk lies there, but the core has gone.
I smell smoke, and Nurse Marion says to the others, “He just passed me in the corridor,” but although this is true, no one listens to her. She goes quietly and alone out into the corridor because she’s not needed at the deceased’s bedside, and a few seconds later I get a whiff of fresh air. Marion has opened a window, and whatever it was that was desperately seeking to exit the ward and touched me on its way past is relieved to be able to escape. I savor the unexpected aromas. It’s as if the air has wandered the streets of London throughout the night and is now bringing the whole city to me: the smell of beer and the echo of loud music, the odors of people on the Underground, cinnamon, and the dirty brown water of the Thames.
The dead body still gives off the occasional spark as it is wheeled out of the ward. I can see this and more, but I’ll never be able to tell anyone.
I’ve had time to think, to think properly about the situation. I’ve never had as much as now because I am made up entirely of thoughts. And thirst.
I’ll probably never make it back to the other side of the glass barrier. Not today, not tomorrow, not easily. I’m buried alive inside myself, condemned to remain “in between” forever. Before the disc zone, as I call it—the narrow band on the edge of reality and the plain where something is always driving me toward the shores and decisive forks in my life where I was in the wrong or my spirit was weak. That something allows me to experience what might have been if I’d acted or decided differently between leaving and staying, kissing and running away; if I had said yes instead of no.
I have searched and searched for the right life—and never found it. None of the lives was perfect, no matter what I did or didn’t do. And out there, where I can see and hear real people more clearly with every passing hour—although they cannot see or hear me—I realize there’s a second world, which seems to shimmer like a mirage or sparkle through water vapor. Nobody’s aware of it, maybe not even Nurse Marion, although the night nurse does appear to be more sensitive than the others. I’ve always found her thoughts to be the clearest.
She calls the dead “the others,” and it’s an accurate description. I sometimes call them “the watchers.” Like my father, who’s waiting out there somewhere for me, and whom I am only able to see because I myself am half dead. He’s watching me, as he has probably been doing for decades, although I’ve been almost unaware of it.
“Almost,” because I could sense him at certain precious moments, although I denied it and wouldn’t allow him to offer me any encouragement, wouldn’t believe that he would occasionally borrow my body to walk or smell, briefly and breathlessly, or to feel the touch of a soft hand on his cheek.
The “watchers” are everywhere, especially those who have unfinished business with the living. Sometimes they show themselves in a reflective surface—for example as sparkling light on the surface of the sea, in the gleaming chrome of a speeding car, or in a passing glint in an Underground tunnel. Most clearly, though, they reveal themselves to us just before we fall asleep, and we also notice them in opaque, confusing, and fleeting dreams. We think they’re apparitions, but in fact they’re the “others.”
I wonder if you need to be dead to infiltrate the dreams of the living, or almost dead.
I sense four others standing more and more frequently at Madelyn’s bedside, observing her. They pace around the ward, listening here and there for sparks, for breaths, and for news of the outside world. From time to time they vanish, as if they merely wanted to take a lungful of London air, and I imagine their taking the last empty seats on a bus or the tube, the ones passengers usually shun, although they don’t know why.
I must learn to understand this in-between state. Bar-khord. Between everything and nothing.
I once wrote a portrait of a hundred-year-old Persian tutor who, until the early 1970s, taught the children of the Iranian royal family the art of being a king and acting like one. I can still hear the old man’s wry voice and his cultivated Oxford English through the mists of my constantly shifting memories. With the same caution with which you might extend your hand toward a cobra, I had asked him for his opinion on the culture clash between the British and Iranian monarchies.
He pondered my question for a long time, his fine features half obscured in the dim courtyard of his house in Tehran’s old quarter, then replied, “The English language, like all Christian-dominated, Western languages, describes the meeting of two opposites in violent terms, as a ‘clash,’ a ‘crash,’ a ‘rupture,’ or even an ‘attack’—always as hostile and aggressive. It is undoubtedly an effective means of promoting prejudice and fear, for there is nothing better than seeing things as black and white, don’t you agree?”
He slowly raised his glass of mint tea into the sunlight of the hot, sandy afternoon and took a sip. The bright blue light filtered through the slatted roof that created a pleasant shade in the courtyard.
“In Persia we call the meeting of two opposites bar-khord. Bar-khord happens when two strong elements touch and something new forms at their point of intersection. It is not a clash of opposites—not like flesh on the metal of a car—more like an intermingling. Do you understand? This in-between state is in constant flux. It doesn’t set opposites against each other; it is the source of a third element, something completely new that draws on the opposites and bears no major similarities to either one or the other. It’s like a child that grows into something very different fr
om its mother or its father, you see?”
I nodded.
“Bar-khord is this tea—hot water and mint combining to create poetry and comfort. Bar-khord is when blood mingles with blood, when migrants find a home and love in a new country. It’s a new life. Not war, not peace, but a fresh start.” He sipped his tea. “And the highest form of bar-khord is dying. When death and life meet in dying, they create…” Here he paused. “What do you think, effendi? What is created between being and nonbeing?”
I answered, “Fear.”
Bar-khord. Between being and nonbeing. I’m at the spot where life and death create something. It sounds like a riddle to me, but if I solve it, will I be saved? What is born when dying begins?
* * *
—
Then the miracle happens. I sense her presence before she has crossed the ward, even as she’s still passing the “watchers.” Some of the others say, “Hey, here she is again.”
I’m filled with gratitude and anticipation. I can smell her—oh, her fragrance!—and it brings everything flooding back. She approaches and then…the long, gray day is finally over. “Eddie, my love,” I whisper.
She looks at me, and nothing in her beautiful, proud face suggests that she has heard me. Or did she hear me and is now tormenting me with silence? Is she even real? My sense of salvation is soon chased away by doubt and panic.
She sits down and it is as if the shape of the air has changed, becoming more supple and warm. A sense of enormous well-being flows through me. Yes, she is real. Eddie is reality.
“Hello, Henri,” she says, her voice dark and gentle.
“Hello, my darling,” I reply.
I want to lift both my hands to draw her face to my burning, frozen heart. I want to feel her and watch her bold lips as she speaks and laughs and demands to be kissed. I want her eyes to rest in mine, as they often did—so fiery and good, knowing and inviting, tender and grand. Nothing about her was ever hard, neither toward me nor toward anyone else, even when she flew into a rage.