The Universe versus Alex Woods

by Extence, Gavin

  I stopped and turned to face her. I had no choice.

  ‘The last time I checked, the toilet was back that way.’

  ‘Occupied,’ I said cheerfully. ‘We thought we’d just use the one on 6A.’

  Nurse Fletcher tapped her pen against the desk. ‘The toilet on 6A is for the patients on 6A. I’m sure that Mr Peterson can wait five minutes if he has to.’

  I glanced down for help. Mr Peterson was already scribbling. He passed me his hastily torn-out note, which I handed on to Nurse Fletcher.

  Mr Peterson can’t wait.

  I tried to make my tone conciliatory. ‘As you can see, the situation’s a little urgent.’

  Nurse Fletcher curled her lip. ‘I’m afraid it’s out of the question. Mr Peterson is not meant to be out of bed without proper medical supervision. I certainly can’t have the two of you gallivanting all over the hospital looking for an unoccupied lavatory, not when the facilities on the ward are more than adequate. If you go back now, you’ll probably find that the toilet has already been vacated.’

  Mr Peterson had started scribbling furiously.

  This is ridiculous! We’re going. I will not be treated like a child or an invalid!

  I passed the note on. Nurse Fletcher read it, quite calmly, and then, without a moment’s hesitation, raised the drawbridge to her desk and stepped out to join us in the corridor, positioning herself pointedly between ourselves and the exit. She looked quite prepared to wheel Mr Peterson back to his bed herself if needs be.

  I stood like a statue. I could see the plan crashing and burning before my eyes.

  Nurse Fletcher folded her arms. ‘Mr Peterson,’ she began, ‘I can appreciate that you’re distressed, but I’m afraid this is not open to discussion. The doctors have assessed your situation and advised us accordingly. They’ve been extremely clear in their instructions. You can’t leave the ward unsupervised. I’m sorry, but we’re acting with your best interests in mind.’

  Alex, give this to Nurse Fletcher, Mr Peterson scrawled. Since time is limited and she clearly has no interest in listening to me, I’m giving you permission to speak on my behalf. Please explain to her that we’re leaving. Right now.

  I handed the note across. Nurse Fletcher looked at it and shrugged. ‘I’m sorry, I can’t understand this. It’s not legible.’

  ‘It says that I’m to speak on Mr Peterson’s behalf,’ I said. ‘He’s had enough of trying to talk to someone who has no interest in what he has to say.’

  Nurse Fletcher raised her eyebrows in a way that told me I’d just crossed a line. But I pressed recklessly on.

  ‘We’re leaving,’ I said. ‘Mr Peterson doesn’t care to stay here any longer. We’re discharging him.’

  Nurse Fletcher’s voice was very calm and cold. ‘No. That’s simply not possible. He’s in no state to be going anywhere.’

  ‘I’m afraid that’s not your decision to make,’ I said. ‘It’s no one’s decision but his. Please go and fetch the necessary paperwork.’

  ‘Young man, I don’t know what game you think you’re playing here, but this is an extremely serious situation. Mr Peterson is going nowhere. You cannot discharge him without proper authorization.’

  I held her gaze for a few icy moments. Mr Peterson passed me another note.

  Tell her to call a doctor.

  ‘What?’ This was going way off script.

  Mr Peterson was writing like a man possessed.

  Insist! We need her behind that desk. As soon as she’s on the phone, get me out of here.

  I folded the note in my pocket.

  ‘He’d like you to call a doctor, please.’

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘He wants you to call a doctor. Immediately.’

  ‘Mr Woods, I’ve had quite enough of this now. This is not an emergency, and I’m not going to call—’

  ‘It is an emergency. You’ve made Mr Peterson extremely distressed. You’ve said that he can’t leave without a doctor’s permission, so now we’re asking you to call a doctor.’

  Nurse Fletcher closed her eyes and exhaled through her tightly pursed lips. ‘If you’d kindly take Mr Peterson back to his bed, then I assure you I’ll get a doctor over to see him at the next reasonable opportunity.’

  I looked at Nurse Fletcher for about five seconds, then I backed up a couple of paces and parallel-parked Mr Peterson’s wheelchair against the reception desk. I made a big show of applying the footbrake.

  ‘We’re not going anywhere,’ I said. ‘Make the phone call and find out how long it’s going to take to get a doctor across. If the answer’s acceptable, then Mr Peterson will consider returning to his bed.’

  For a few awful moments it seemed that Nurse Fletcher was going to remain immovable. It had never been discussed at any stage of the planning, but I was fast coming to the conclusion that I might have to ram her.

  And then, quite suddenly, she unfolded her arms and spun on her heels. ‘Very well.’ The drawbridge was up. She was back behind her desk, reaching for the telephone. ‘I can tell you exactly what the doctor’s going to say. But if this is what it’s going to take, then so be it.’ She punched in the four-digit extension code. Out of her eye-line, I slipped the footbrake off. ‘Yes, hello. This is Nurse Fletcher on 6B. I need to get hold of doct—’

  I ran.

  The double doors held us up for less than three frantic heartbeats. I accelerated through a reckless ninety-degree turn, braced my legs and launched us towards the lifts. The momentum we’d accrued five seconds later was almost enough to pull my arms from their sockets. I overshot the near lift by a good two metres. Mr Peterson lurched dangerously in his chair. I fell forward and felt a handle burying itself in my ribcage, but there was no time to catch my breath. I backed up and jabbed the call button six or seven times. The torture of waiting for the lift to ascend five floors was instantly assuaged when the doors opened to reveal an empty interior. By the time we were in and I’d hit the G button, I could hear rapid footfalls echoing amidst the blood surging in my ears. I spun to witness Nurse Fletcher and a gangly porter hurtling into the narrowing frame of the closing doors. I couldn’t begin to imagine where the minion had materialized from, but his arrival was too late to make a difference. The floors counted down to zero, then I exploded from the lift like a rocket. It was completely unnecessary by this point. The foyer was still deserted, and had it not been, my actions would most likely have proven counterproductive. But I couldn’t help myself. There was so much adrenaline in my bloodstream, so much oxygen being pumped to my brain and arms and legs, that not running was unthinkable. No paramedic could ever have wheeled a patient into that hospital as fast as I wheeled Mr Peterson out. I took the hairpin bend of the exit ramp like a rally driver, shot past a bemused smoker and screeched to a halt twenty metres later, barely a foot from the passenger door of our waiting car.

  There was no discussion, no hesitation. Mr Peterson felt virtually weightless as I helped him in. Unthinkingly, I folded the wheelchair and crammed it into the back. Three minutes later, I’d circled the hospital roundabout and pulled off the dual carriageway into the Tesco garage, where we were safely shielded from view by a row of tall trees.

  I flicked on the interior light and waited for my hands to stop shaking.

  Mr Peterson passed me a note: You did great. I’m proud of you.

  I wiped my eyes and took about ten huge breaths.

  ‘I don’t know what came over me with the wheelchair,’ I confessed. ‘I meant to leave it in the car park. I guess I’ll just have to return it when this is all over. I don’t feel good about stealing from the NHS.’

  Mr Peterson started making a strangled choking noise. It took me several moments to realize that he was laughing, and even longer to realize that I was laughing too. Not the kind of laughs you make at a joke, but huge, hysterical, hyena laughs that wracked my whole body and sent tears streaming down my cheeks. It was several minutes before my head had cleared enough to allow me to read his next note.r />
  You’re OK?

  ‘I’m okay.’

  Great. So let’s get out of here.

  I flipped the ignition and pulled back onto the road. Ten minutes later, we were on the A303, racing east into the deepening night.

  ELEMENTARY PARTICLES

  When we disembarked in Calais, it was about 6 a.m., local time, and the eastern horizon was just starting to brighten. We left the port a few minutes later, passing the customs gate unhindered, and then drove a hundred miles before stopping for breakfast just outside Saint-Quentin.

  The Channel had been calm and the crossing unremarkable. By the time we’d boarded the ferry, Mr Peterson’s lack of sleep had finally caught up with him. I left him dozing in his wheelchair in a secluded corner of the lower passenger deck while I went upstairs to the open upper deck. It was the first time I’d been on a boat. It was the first time I’d been further from home than London. I spent most of the next ninety minutes towards the bow, watching the black water swelling beneath me and the stars ascending before me. I was quite alone; the few other passengers on board were all below deck. There were no distractions, just the sound of the sea and the unhurried rotation of the sky. With only minimal on-deck lighting, it was dark enough to make out the broad, silver arch of the Milky Way, which materialized over the stern in Cassiopeia, swept high overhead, and then cascaded south into Sagittarius and the sea. Saturn was sinking starboard in Virgo as Venus was rising in Pisces over the port bow. The flat horizon afforded a novel symmetry and harmony to the sky. It made me think, fleetingly, of my mother – I was sure that she’d have some unfathomable theory about what was going on up there. But this was just a stray thought that came and passed like a mist. For the most part, I didn’t think at all. I just watched, letting my mind drift from sensation to sensation, like a butterfly caught on a warm breeze.

  My head was in a curious place. I wasn’t thinking about what lay ahead; and everything that had gone before – at the shop and the hospital – had already taken on the character of a quickly fading dream. Only now seemed real. The adrenaline of escape had long since departed, but it seemed to have somehow flushed out my system, leaving me perfectly calm and alert. Or that was my working hypothesis. I’d also drunk eight cans of Diet Coke since Yeovil, and I wasn’t discounting the possibility that this might have played some role in keeping my mind clear and focussed. Whatever the case, I didn’t need to sleep, and, more than this, I didn’t expect to need any sleep until we got to Zurich. It’s hard to explain this expectation without sounding like my mother, but the simplest way I can put things is as follows: getting Mr Peterson to Switzerland was my job; it was the task I’d been appointed to; and once I’d accepted this, I knew that I’d be able to hold myself together for as long as it took. If I had to drive seven hundred miles to Zurich without sleep, then I would. If I’d had to drive to China or New Zealand, or the far side of the moon, I would have done that too. I knew our goal, and I was going to get us there. It was that simple.

  I wasn’t tired when we left the port, and I wasn’t tired when we pulled off the autoroute at Saint-Quentin. But I was ravenous. In the service-station restaurant, I ate about five pains au chocolat, washed down with more Diet Coke, while Mr Peterson managed to eat a croissant by dunking it first in his coffee; because of his difficulties with swallowing, it wasn’t easy for him to eat dry food. After that, he sat with the car door open and smoked some of his marijuana while I found a grassy hillock where I could meditate. The grass was a little wet, but I had a blanket wrapped round my shoulders to keep me warm. The constant rush of traffic became the rhythm of my breaths, rising, falling and eventually fading to nothingness.

  We continued in the same vein all the way to the Swiss border, driving in ninety-minute, hundred-mile bursts, stopping at various service stations and small towns along the way so that I could stretch my legs and Mr Peterson could have another smoke. He smoked much more than usual during that ten-hour drive across Europe. He said it was because my final harvest was an exceptionally smooth and mellow smoke – much too good to waste, but I thought that there was probably something more going on. I didn’t know for sure that Mr Peterson was experiencing more pain since leaving the hospital, but he was definitely in a certain amount of physical discomfort. The fall had shaken him, and the subsequent two and a half days he’d spent bedbound had taken an additional toll on his mobility. It seemed that even that short period of inactivity had led to some kind of deterioration in his muscles or neural pathways. He was suffering from stiffness and cramps that he struggled to alleviate. It was a visible effort for him even to manoeuvre his legs from the footwell to the ground outside the passenger seat so that he could face the open air as he smoked.

  For this reason, and despite my residual guilt, the stolen wheelchair was turning out to be a godsend, and Mr Peterson had been quick to accept the practical arguments for its continued usage. I wheeled him in and out of the services, and we progressed steadily southeast across the country.

  The farmland of northern France was more expansive but not otherwise very different from the farmland of southern England. Were it not for the signs and the tollbooths and driving on the right-hand side of the road, it would have been pretty much indistinguishable. But things started to change as we moved into the wine-growing regions further from the coast. By Lunéville, where we stopped for lunch, it didn’t seem so much like England any more; and by the time we stopped at Saint-Louis, just west of the Swiss border, I felt sufficiently in another country to think about calling my mother.

  I don’t know what I can tell you about that phone call. It did not go well. Beyond that, there’s not much to report.

  It was around 3 p.m. local time, 2 p.m. British Summer Time, and I thought that the five hours I’d left for her to read and digest the contents of my letter might be enough to dampen down her initial reaction. But there was little evidence that this strategy had worked. She started crying the moment I started speaking, and she was still crying when I hung up. In between, she managed only a handful of stuttered sentences. She said, ‘Oh, Alex,’ a lot. She asked where I was and told me that I needed to come home, that nothing bad was going to happen as long as I came home right away. I didn’t know what she meant by this, and I’d already decided that I couldn’t tell her where I was. I could only tell her that I was safe and I’d be back by the end of the next week, but this reassurance did nothing to improve the situation. If anything, it made matters worse. Eventually, after I’d waited a couple of minutes to see if my mother was going to cry herself dry, I asked to speak to Ellie, but it wasn’t even evident that she had heard me.

  ‘I think perhaps I should speak to Ellie,’ I repeated. ‘Can you put her on?’

  My mother continued to cry.

  I hung up. There wasn’t much else I could do.

  We crossed the border mid-afternoon and entered Zurich an hour later. The traffic was slow-moving and the urban Swiss were calm and considerate drivers, which gave me plenty of time to find my landmarks, spot street signs and orientate myself within my mental map, which, I should tell you, was extremely comprehensive. I’d decided previously that it would be sensible for me to memorize the entire roadmap of the city. This had been an ongoing project for the past month. I’d spent several evenings and lunchtimes hunched over the Michelin map learning by heart various long and elaborate street names such as Pfingstweidstrasse and Seebahnstrasse and Alfred-Escher-Strasse and so on; and then I’d spent several more evenings and lunchtimes familiarizing myself with the different metropolitan districts and their subdivisions. The main districts were numbered one to twelve, and formed two nested arches around the northernmost tip of Lake Zurich, with District One – the Altstadt – acting as the keystone and the other districts counting clockwise in twin layers from base to base. I found this a reassuringly practical approach to town planning; from what I’d been able to ascertain online, the Swiss were a reassuringly practical people. They had a long, proud history of staying out of
wars, preferring to devote themselves to more constructive endeavours like science, secure banking and building extremely accurate clocks.

  Anyway, although memorizing the Michelin map allowed me to feel instantly settled on the city’s roads, in hindsight, my preparations may have been a little over the top. In case you didn’t know, Zurich is a very distinctive city. It sits in a natural bowl formed by the Limmat river basin and, as I’ve mentioned, is shaped like a tall bridge, or broad horseshoe, with the north tip of the lake forming the thin central hollow. The Limmat bisects the centre of the Altstadt along a straight north–south line, splitting the city into neat, almost symmetrical halves, and the Alps rise thirty kilometres due south from the river mouth. With all these natural signposts, Zurich is not a particularly difficult city to navigate. Or that was my experience.

  It probably helped, too, that the District Eight hotel Herr Schäfer had recommended to us was very easy to access by car. Most of the hotels in Zurich are clustered around the Limmat in the middle of town, but ours was located just off Utoquai, the main thoroughfare that runs down the northeastern shore of the lake. Herr Schäfer had a bank of about a dozen hotels that he could recommend according to the varying requirements and budgets of his clients. He had a lot of experience catering for foreigners who came to Switzerland to die.

  As for Mr Peterson’s requirements, these were relatively simple. I’d typed them into an email for him about a month earlier, just after confirmation of his appointment date came through. He needed a hotel that was in a reasonably tranquil location, with good road links, onsite parking and facilities suited to the mobility-impaired. His room would have to be spacious and similarly handicapped-friendly, with handrails in the bathroom and at least one sturdy, high-backed chair. In addition, he was keen to get a room with a balcony, and didn’t want to stay in ‘the kind of place you’d go while waiting to die’.

  If you can think of a more appropriate way to put that, he’d told me, please do.