by Nina George
“How’s Maddie?” Sam asks.
“She’s fighting, Samuel. She’s fighting.”
“She wants to live, but she’s scared,” he explains.
“You must know her well to make presumptions like that, eh?” Marion teases him.
“No, she told me,” he answers.
“Oh really?”
“Yes, in my dreams,” Sam says earnestly. He states it in the same tone of voice that authors adopt when they tell me about their new ideas—calmly and with conviction. I’ve never found any of them pompous. Not even when a writer revealed to me that dreaming was when your spirit visited its soul mate, even if that person was already dead. Dream machines, lucid dreams, dream time travel: none of them ever struck me as absurd or crazy. Poppy, Ralph, Andrea, and I have often debated the possibility of impossible things happening. I’m accustomed to the unbelievable. Literature exists to survey unfamiliar worlds. Who else but writers will gladly take on that task? Who else is duty-bound to consider, without inhibitions, “What would happen if…”?
And yet now I take a step back. This here is reality, not a book or some nerdy competition. That humming monster over there, Dr. Saul’s questions, and Henri’s ventilator, pumping air in and out of him eight times per minute: they’re reality. Henri hasn’t breathed independently for six weeks now. The time for miracles has come—a time when nothing’s more urgent and nothing’s rarer.
“When did you dream about her?” Nurse Marion asks slowly.
“The night after I found out she got blood poisoning.”
“Do you mind telling me your dream? You know, dreams are definitely a means of communication and—”
“I’m going to get a cup of tea,” I angrily interject.
I can’t stand the way Nurse Marion is raising Sam’s hopes, even at this juncture.
“Don’t you want to hear this, Mrs. Tomlin?”
No. It breaks the last tiny, intact corner of my heart to look at the boy in this light and see his resemblance to his father. I promise to protect you, Sam, even if I have no idea what you need protecting from. Maybe from too many illusions? Yes, that’s it—from the illusion that miracles occur when you most need them.
“Have you never dreamed of him, Mrs. Tomlin?” the night nurse asks in her smoker’s voice.
The buzz of the neon lights on the ceiling changes in tone. What was it Sam said? How can he sense that Henri is very close, watching us and wishing to tell us something? It’s…like a needle coming down on a record. I know that feeling all too well. It’s as if the world were secretly catching its breath. It’s the moment when the eyes of the entire orchestra are trained on the tip of the conductor’s baton. But I cannot disclose it—not the dream in which I was making love with Henri. That was simply lust, no more than that.
But what if it wasn’t only that?
“I dreamed about my father long ago,” I reluctantly confess. “But only after he died. Often at first, then less and less frequently.”
Nurse Marion nods.
Whenever I see my father, I immediately know I’m dreaming. That’s what happens when we lose someone who meant the world to us. It tears a hole in our lives, and that hole sucks out our laughter and insouciance. The person’s absence crushes us, and all at once the distinctions between truth and dream appear to us with great clarity. It’s as if only death allows us to enter the world between the worlds.
Only occasionally do I hear my father outside of those dreams. One example was when Sam was lying in my arms in the hospital chapel and I picked up my father’s voice, loud and clear, saying, “Seek out a place and sing it.”
Twice I had an impression that he was me: once when I was riding my motorbike and the second time in Cornwall. The air smelled fresh and was still warm in spite of a first hint of autumn. The sea was singing, and everything was well with the world. It felt as if he were walking in my body and enjoying this unexpected opportunity to smell and feel the warmth of his own life, the tensing of muscles and the pounding of a heart. It must have lasted for four or five minutes. Yet despite their intensity I still regard those experiences as a successful piece of self-delusion. That’s how people are: they imagine the most outlandish things as solace and deem them true.
“Mrs. Tomlin, have you ever heard of after-death experiences?”
“I’ve heard of near-death experiences.”
“No, after death. You dreamed of your father. Did you also have the impression that he was there? Could you smell or hear him? After-death experiences are instances of interaction, experienced by people when someone they were very close to has died.”
That’s nonsense! I want to shout. That’s what I imagine Henri calling to me: Help me, Eddie! Sancerre-sozzled nonsense!
So I say, “No. The brain is an excellent self-deluder. We console ourselves by fancying that we can hear and feel and smell our loved ones. Self-healing is the best medicine. In truth, though, Henri hasn’t given even the slightest response when I’ve been here. Nothing, do you hear? After death? Dreams? Spare me!” My voice thunders in my ears. Even Dr. Saul looks over from his Plexiglas cubicle.
After-death experiences. Dreams. Too esoteric, too few guarantees, too much wondrous wound-healing.
I stand up, walk out of the MRI room, and wander along the corridor toward the drinks machine. I feel like beating the walls with my fists or ramming my forehead into them. I want Henri back. I want my dad back. I want my life back.
“Dear little Eddie,” I hear my father say softly, but only inside my head.
By the time I reach the drinks machine, I don’t feel like a coffee. Instead I tiptoe back and lean against the wall beside the open glass door where neither Marion nor Sam can see me.
“…and Maddie didn’t want to go out onstage. She was longing to, but she was scared. Of life. I told her I was there, but I don’t know if that’s enough. Maybe I offer too little for a whole life.”
Nurse Marion says in a kindly voice, “Sam, you’re the best reason she has for recovering.”
Sam’s voice cracks as he asks, “Can my father dream?”
Marion sighs. “I’ve worked for many years here at the brain center, you know. I’ve often heard neurologists say that there’s no chance of coma patients having dreams because they take place at a level of consciousness that isn’t accessible from a coma. You see? The dream machine is almost at a standstill, but…”
I prick up my ears.
“…but when coma patients return—and more of them do than you’d think—then they relate their experiences. Some of those experiences are hallucinations, as we know. The noise of the machines, the lights, the injections, and the doctors’ conversations are all recast in the limbic system—the emotional part of the brain—and translated into new images. A ventilator becomes a submarine engine. The beeping of the EEG turns into a truck or a slot machine.”
Silence, apart from the humming of the monster.
Dr. Saul announces through the loudspeaker, “We’ll conduct one last series of tests with glucose.”
Nurse Marion resumes her explanation at a slightly lower volume. “And then there are some patients who display no REM phases in their sleep cycle, meaning that at no stage do their eyes move under their lids.”
“The dream phase,” notes Sam.
“No, that’s old hat,” Marion contradicts him. “We now know that dreams occur during any phase of sleep. But…”
“But?” I ask, reentering the room.
“But the question is: if someone is in as deep a coma as your Henri, for example, far beyond sleeping and dreaming, then as far as modern medicine is concerned, he’s unable to dream because the brain won’t allow him to do so in his condition. But what does that say about returnees’ accounts? Do you see? If people in comas are unable to dream or receive any stimuli from their surroundings, then where were they?
What are returnees talking about if it is neither reality nor dream?”
Before I can really process what it might mean if comatose patients’ experiences weren’t dreams but…well, what?…the loudspeakers crackle again. Dr. Saul has obviously forgotten to switch off the microphone because, without warning, he says, “Well, Fozzie, I’d be amazed if we receive any sign of life from Skinner before we retire.”
Nurse Marion waves a warning and strides rapidly toward the doctor, but he doesn’t notice her and continues, unaware that we are unintentionally listening in. “Whatever the boy’s beliefs, this man is not going to recover. If the twenty-four-hour electroencephalogram doesn’t register anything, we should consider persuading Mrs. Tomlin to interrupt the treatment and remove the ventilator and the feeding catheter.”
Dr. Foss replies, “Yes. Simply extending life isn’t valuable on its own. You have to be able to live properly.”
The boyish confidence drains from Sam’s face. He heaves himself out of his chair like an old man.
“They’re wrong,” he whispers. With clenched fists and wild eyes, he turns to face me. “They’re wrong, Eddie! You mustn’t do it. My father’s alive. He’s here.”
Nurse Marion flings open the door of the cubicle with the monitors. Dr. Saul glances up in surprise and realizes that we must have overheard him. I see a flash of shame in his blue eyes. He glances at Sam and hangs his head. “I’m sorry, Samuel.”
Sam rushes into the MRI room as his father is removed from the tube.
“Don’t worry, Dad,” he blurts out. “I know you’re here. Did you hear them say they were going to switch you off? Well, I won’t let them. Don’t be scared—I’m here and I know you are too.”
But Henri just lies there the same as ever, a face with no twinkle in its eye, a beating heart, and an uninhabited body. Nobody knows where he is—including himself, probably. Nurse Marion seems neither a fanatic nor religious, and I see Sam, whose synesthetic sensory powers can penetrate skin and the boundaries of the visible world. What if the two of them are right, and I’m deliberately blocking out their knowledge?
I think of my father, and to be on the safe side, I say his full name out loud. “Edward Tomlin.” They say that the dead can touch you when you speak their names.
And immediately I feel him—for one, two, three, four, five seconds. I sense his presence diagonally to my left, on the same side as my heart. I couldn’t care less if I’m imagining it or if the impossible has happened.
“Sam,” I say calmly, “do you have your smartphone here?”
The boy gets up from his position leaning over his father. His face has twisted into a grimace. He nods.
“Please give me your phone. I want to check if there’s a Saint Samson chapel on the coast of Brittany.”
Eddie
I feel like a bride. I’m trembling with panic and anticipation. I scan my mind and my body for the least doubt that might stop me from saying yes. I have many, the same ones as before, but none of them are loud enough to urge me to say no.
I’m lying between the crisp white hospital sheets of my bed in the sparsely decorated family suite, ready to dream. But I can’t dream, now of all times. I’ve been running around for the past seven weeks in a state of constant exhaustion, but now, when my only goal is to sleep, I can’t.
That dream of being with Henri at the church. It was more than a dream; it was…I don’t know what you’d call that kind of experience. It was inexplicable.
The chapel dedicated to Saint Samson really does exist. It’s a small stone church by the sea, with a red door and two small stained-glass windows, on the D127 to Trémazan, near the Saint Laurent peninsula, a promontory dotted with giant rocks and wild horses at the entrance to the Chenal du Four, the most dangerous stretch of sea in the entire world. The chapel lies in the parish of Landunvez on the shores of the Iroise Sea, between Porspoder and Portsall in an area known as Pays de Léon, the Land of the Lion. Henri’s homeland.
I used first Sam’s smartphone and then my laptop to travel through the area where Henri grew up. The images, maps, and blogs reveal a wild land, and I would love to visit it one day and explore it with him.
The cliffs are fringed with yellow gorse bushes, and to the south the Saint Mathieu lighthouse guards the entrance to the roadstead of Brest. Bright waves thunder against the cliffs, as translucent as fine bottle glass and a magnificent shade of emerald green. They are magical, hypnotic, and so alluring that people vanish into them.
That is how I would like to vanish into the night. I long to throw myself into a deep sea of dreams, where I will meet Henri again. It’s of no importance what it’s called, or how unlikely or inexplicable it is. But my heart is racing, and I feel no trace of tiredness. I don’t wish to drink to hasten the onset of sleep. I don’t want any whiskey-steeped fantasies.
I toss and turn on the mattress, get up, draw the curtains closer together, and place a rolled-up towel along the bottom of the door to banish the ray of light seeping through the crack there. I try counting backward from a hundred.
An hour passes, then another. I feel as if I’ve never been so awake in my entire life. As thoughts flash through my mind, I remember the many things I’ve forgotten to do over the past forty-five days. I’ve neglected to pay bills, haven’t answered emails, and have overlooked invitations. I haven’t cleaned my flat, gone to the hairdresser’s, or enjoyed sleeping in once, and yet still I’m wide awake.
I get up and wander along the permanently lit corridor in my pajamas. I pad down the stairs in my socks to the intensive care unit. I put on the rustling smock and pick up a mask.
The lights in the ward have been dimmed for the night, and on the central podium, half illuminated by the blue glare from the monitors in front of them, sit the watchmen over life and death.
The doctors nod and ask, “Have you disinfected your hands and arms?” I say yes. I probably do it a dozen times a day, but still they check.
I’m drawn to Maddie’s bed. They’ve closed the curtains around her cubicle. For the past four days her body has been powered entirely by machines. Should her liver also give out, she will die. Sitting beside her is Sam, kitted out in a nurse’s green uniform, complete with mask and gloves, hairnet, and disposable plastic overshoes. He’s reading to Maddie. He’s blocked everything else out, and his whole world consists of her face and this ten-foot-square cubicle bordered by green curtains.
“Look,” I whisper to Henri. “Your son’s a great lad and a good person. I love him dearly, Henri.” Henri’s eyes are shut.
I study the notes detailing his “sleep architecture,” but they still baffle me. The lines on the graph stream from right to left like the straight lines along the sides of a road. I dab his mouth with water, again and again, so that his thirst doesn’t burn him up.
Every fifteen minutes one of the duty doctors does his rounds, examines Maddie, and gives me a nod.
I imagine telling Henri in my dreams to come back so that we can start afresh, saying that everything will turn out fine and we’ll have each other forever. I imagine his overcoming every obstacle—cerebral contusions, clamping, bruising, fear, coma, rehabilitation—and learning to speak and walk and love.
At long last, for one wonderful moment, I’m able to draw a deep breath that isn’t obstructed by the worry constricting my throat.
I sit on the bed and, taking great care, lie down beside Henri on top of the sheet with my face against his shoulder. I take his hand and stare up at the ceiling above, wondering if he can also see it. Can he see the dimmed lights, the oblique lamps, the reflected red, blue, and green dots from the computer-gray monitoring devices stacked on top of one another on the wheeled trolleys alongside each bed?
Planting a gentle kiss on his shoulder, I whisper into his ear, “I’ve seen photos of Saint Samson, Henri. I’d love to go there and to Saint Laurent and to Melon
, where the winter storms batter the bay like nowhere else on earth.”
I think of the lighthouses. A quarter of France’s lighthouses stand on the cragged rocks and enormous stone islands of the raging Iroise Sea. There’s no sea as hungry, no sea in the world that demands such a heavy tribute in people and ships. “So that’s your home.”
Despite having been there, my father never told me anything about Brittany. Even many years later, lighthouse keepers refuse to speak about what they’ve seen at night, out at sea. They say nothing, and their silence is as deep as the sea around them.
“Shall we meet there, Henri? In Saint Samson or the place where you were born, Ty Kerk? You showed it to me once on the globe in Café Campania. I’ll be able to find it, the house between heaven and earth. I’ll take Sam.”
I notice I’m growing calmer in Henri’s presence, lulled to sleep by the rhythm of his ventilator, with which, as always, my breathing keeps time. I feel very drowsy. Still squeezing his hand, I lay mine on his heart and fall asleep by his side.
Henri
I can feel Sam’s incredible yearning and concern tugging at me like an invisible hand, reaching out with multiple feelers to check whether I’m here. However, most of his attention is focused on Madelyn.
I sense Eddie by my side. She’s taking care of my son. She’s stronger than she realizes. My child’s fear, my wife’s affection: one tears me apart, the other holds me together.
Eddie has just told me about Melon and Saint Laurent and the color of the waves that break against the shores of the land I call home. She’s asleep, but I’m not.
How I’d love to do something taboo and appropriate the body of a real person! There’s a doctor in the center of the room who’s about my height. He has strawberry-blond sideburns, and I spot the mark of an old injury—a scar at the top of his throat. Yet his body is so full of vivacity, blood, and nonchalance. Free of pain! If I could only borrow his body for a while, if I could only bend over Eddie’s sleeping face and cover her lips with mine, taste the soft expanse of her mouth. At first she would still be dazed by night, but then she’d respond.