Star Sailors
Page 18
While brushing his teeth he decides to walk directly to the hospital. And quickly. There’s been no change in Sam’s condition for weeks but it feels to him that something has happened, or is about to happen. Bill’s increasingly convinced of it as he prepares to leave the hotel. Something big, like his awakening. Or another abduction. No, no, not that. It’s something positive, a positive development. A change for the better. He’s sure.
The soaked and empty streets offer their familiar soggy odour. Rain drums on the awning overhead. He pulls up his hood and lowers his head. His solo passage down the rainy street is remarkable in that he’s scarcely been alone for a waking minute in the three weeks since arriving in New Hokitika. Hiding to avoid being celebrated, he thinks. That’s a first. His sense of solitude, heightened by the cloaking anonymity of rain, is clean and good. No cross-channel interference, he thinks. Just me and the rain. It’s a kind of luxury. There’s a kind of fullness in this exchange, an abundance of something. What, exactly? Peace? Maybe a massage at the Pink Panther would feel the same? That would involve another person and some kind of static though, and a shift away from peaceful awareness towards sleep or sexual desire. He walks on. Hundreds of thousands of raindrops dimpling puddles. Such a light touch from three thousand metres. Never before has the distinction between solitude and loneliness been so clear to him. Yet I’d like Trix here, he thinks, walking silently beside me, soaking everything up with that way she has of enjoying everything. Peace, he thinks. This is what it will pretty much always feel like to be alone, now that I’ve been proved right. Hard-earned peace, that’s what it is. That’s why it feels so good.
Certain that Sam’s waking up, Bill begins to run. His hood falls off. Damn it, he thinks, pulling it back up. Bill Peters with his white hair can’t be seen running towards the hospital—it would inspire a media stampede. He slows his pace and the rain intensifies. A familiar off-road media truck with outsize tyres cuts a sibilant wake down the centre of the soaked street. He knows the driver, Paolo, and expects him to stop. He doesn’t. The hood works. A close call.
Bill’s soon clear of the central strip of bars and restaurants where the media congregate, increasingly to stave off boredom as the alien remains resolutely unconscious. The other hotspot is a little way out of town, on a knoll over the spot where the river currently meets the sea.
The new hospital is on higher ground, overlooking the valley. He finds the several flights of steps leading up to it are a little tougher on the lungs than they should be, even though he’s been pushing hard to get to Sam. It’s been only three weeks since he exercised. Could one scarcely inhaled cigarette make a difference? He has the inexplicable feeling that more cigarettes are inevitable. It’s fortunate he doesn’t have the Red Baron with him now—it would be a battle to say no. Why now, he wonders, when I’m finally happy? He looks up to where the hospital remains hidden in bush. And about to be even happier?
As his breath and heartbeat return to normal, Bill looks below for the old, infamous river bar, the bane of ships and boats for more than a hundred and fifty years. It was made toothless by the rising ocean. It’s all changed. It’ll keep changing. Hokitika has gone. Nothing of the old gold town remains but three wooden buildings which were taken apart and reconstructed, board by rotting board, here on the ridge. Down below, the Strip runs parallel to the river and a safe distance from it. It has the appearance of a main street in a Western: all façade. The ubiquitous Perspex awnings, along with the casino and indoor sports facilities and cinemas designed to occupy international rain tourists with a lot of money and a short amount of time to spend it, have all been built in the last ten years. It’s a foreign place filled with foreigners. Even the waves look different; dirty and foamy, breaking against trees on the drowned shoreline and retreating river mouth. And the mountains are rarely seen these days, lost in the perpetual rain clouds that Australians find so intoxicating.
‘Coming, Sam.’
He’s puffing again when the private hospital finally comes into view. It’s a gloomy, south-facing, vertical little thing, surrounded by dense, dripping rat-infested bush and a steel-barred fence, yet it inspires an odd sense of excitement. Sam is near. An old and nearly forgotten feeling of awe comes over him as he approaches. The same sense of anticipation, he realises, that animated him more than 60 years ago when parking his Morris at the sprawling Westland general hospital that once lay at the north end of Hokitika.
The middle-aged guard at the gate asks Bill what the good news is as he signs him in.
‘The onset of senility,’ Bill tells him. ‘A life-time of balls-ups forgotten.’
The guard laughs. ‘Nice for some.’
As Bill crosses the car park to the hospital entrance, the pungent wet earth of the bush and the peacefulness of the grounds and buildings confirm that he hasn’t been summoned to an emergency but to an awakening, a kind of birth; a miracle in this place where rain still falls daily.
One of the guards inside the door steps in front of him. ‘Afternoon, Mr Peters.’ There is a contrast between his friendly tone and body language. The man is in Bill’s face, actually barring him. ‘What can I do for you?’
‘Can I go up?’
‘It’s not vigil time, sir. That was at…’ The guard listens to his ear piece, ‘8.30 this morning and you cancelled. Unfortunately, vigil time cannot be rescheduled today.’
Vigils: the daily 15-minute recorded sessions, edited down to a few seconds for public consumption, in which Bill sits by the bed, emotes, speaks to Sam’s unconscious head and ruminates into a fixed camera. Bill loathes them. They became excruciating as soon as he ran out of honest emotions to share with the inert figure in its plastic cockpit. There can be no communication because Sam is beyond sleep or coma, a kind of artificially warmed mummy. There can be no real relationship, let alone a moving relationship, which is what Garrick, the vigil producer, wants. All the mummy can be is a prompt for monologues about Bill and Sam’s real relationship of the past. On top of that, Bill cannot articulate concrete bedside hopes for the future that might be perceived as having a political, religious or environmental agenda. Everything has to be vague and yet intense. It’s impossible. ‘A little more emotion, Bill,’ Garrick continuously tells him via earpiece during the vigils. But Bill is a journalist, not an actor like the new generation of news presenters are, and his emotions can’t be turned on like a tap, no matter how much Garrick exhorts him. The producer buzzes continuously in his ear. ‘Tip your head forward more, as if in prayer. Sigh now. Look up. No, not at the camera, up at the ceiling.’
After the last vigil, three days ago, a scientist told Bill—strictly off the record—her suspicion that Sam would never regain consciousness. But the official line remains that his level of brain activity is similar to that of a hibernating mammal in a continual sleeping state. Bill hadn’t known that the brain has active and sleep cycles during hibernation. That was news. The world was duly informed.
The blow Sam suffered to his head would result in a different kind of unconsciousness than that which they were seeing, the scientists have publicly insisted, a different kind of reduced brain activity. What are the cues for Sam’s hibernation to end and wakening to occur? Light, temperature, time, a change in gravity? Perhaps his species comes from a world with very severe winters, and their naturally evolved instinct to hibernate has to be accommodated during space travel. Or a natural tendency to hibernate is exaggerated for space travel? The news is all conjecture.
The hospital’s medical and science teams resent the vigils as well, and they’ve fallen into a mutually beneficial routine of last-minute rescheduling with Bill, which is impractical for either side to accommodate. The guard blocking Bill’s way knows this. They’re all on the same page. They all know the score. What’s his problem? Why all the blocking?
‘Actually,’ Bill tells the guard, ‘I was just hoping to have a quick visit rather than shoot a vigil.’
The guard frowns. ‘A quick visit?’
The guard lifts his wrist to his ear and mumbles something. Bill waits. ‘I’m afraid that’s not possible due to an ongoing medical procedure.’
‘I see.’
‘We have a vigil scheduled for 8 am tomorrow.’
‘Can I watch the medical procedure for a couple of minutes?’
A superior has tuned in to the conversation and his answer is immediately broadcast from the speaker on the guard’s chest armour: ‘I’m afraid not, Mr Peters. It’s a medical procedure and spectators are not permitted.’
Bill tells the tiny camera on the guard’s armoured chest, ‘I’m hardly a spectator.’
‘In this instance—a medical procedure—you would be.’
‘I have premium access.’
‘Not for surgery.’
‘Is it an emergency?’
‘No, no, no. Exploratory.’
Bill knows the doctors who will be at work. They won’t appreciate the distraction. ‘Can we move the vigil to 9 pm tonight?’
A brief pause. ‘Tomorrow we can do 5 am.’
‘8 am?’
‘No, it will have to be 5.’
‘Alright make it 5 am on Sunday morning. About 12 hours from now.’
‘I’ll inform your producer. Thank you for your understanding, sir.’
Set your alarm, Garrick. ‘Thank you.’
‘Have a good night.’
‘Thanks. You too.’
Bill has dinner scheduled, a banquet in fact, with Venture Group’s board. It will be a long and liquid celebration of the news arm’s international triumph, and he expects his central role in that triumph will be recognised with a bonus and a significant tax-deductible gift. In this case the gift will be something he actually needs, because they know him and will do the research. Something wine-related, like label-making software and a special printer perhaps.
His urgent need to see Sam, he notes as he leaves the hospital, has evaporated. He feels like a drink. A feeling of wellbeing flourishes in its place and accompanies him down the flights of wet stairs. The rain has stopped and the fake movie-set town below is lighting up, stirring and coming to life. The foreigners have shaved, showered, applied their exotic colognes and perfumes; listened to their opera, whale song, zithers and pulse; and are emerging, lifting their eyes to the clearing sky, ready to come out and play hard. Everything’s alright. There’s enough time for someone to buy him a pre-dinner drink or two before the banquet. All that is required from him is to walk into a bar, any bar. I’ll definitely come back at five and see Sam, he promises himself as he reaches the bottom of the steps, if I feel the need.
It gets later and later in increasingly fast and furious bursts until it’s suddenly 4.15 am. The more ebullient and alcohol-resilient of Venture Group’s board and top tier management are still upstairs in the Grand’s VIP dining room. A suggestion is made to go dancing. Bill knows he must see Sam. But when he announces this at the window while smoking a cigarette, Ayla talks him out of it. At 4.21 am, just when he decides to go again, he finds himself on his back. Eager hands lift him from the floor. The words and identities of those surrounding him are blurred but the message is clear: they are pleading with him not to go to the hospital, but to come dancing instead. He lurches free of an embrace. They cling to him. ‘Fuck your next phase,’ he announces. ‘No, fuck it.’ His name is repeated over and over. He corrects them: ‘I’m the Red Baron.’ They love him. He has to go. He’s in the rain looking up at the lights of the Grand. (How did I get here?) He yells at the faces in the upstairs window. ‘Fuck your next phase!’ From the door at ground level, he hears Ayla: ‘Billy, come back and have another drink.’ Then Nefertiti is in the street, embracing him, saying into his ear, ‘Bill, Bill, go and see him.’ They stagger. ‘Or dance with me in the rain. No, no, go. Go. Do what you have to do. Go.’
Unable to maintain a straight line under the rain awning, Bill zigzags down the centre of the road. His head, defiantly bared, becomes soaked. ‘Fuck your fines,’ he says. Rain trickles down his back. He pulls his hood up. Tonight he learned that Sam was briefly clinically dead and resuscitated. It happened around lunchtime. ‘I was right,’ Bill tells the rain. Something had beenwrong. The medical procedure wasn’t exploratory at all. He had been lied to. But I knew, he thinks. I knew.
The board’s first proposal for the next phase of the story, which came out in the wee hours after dozens of bottles of champagne, is that Sam be declared legally dead in order to ‘facilitate a better science story’. Charges could be run through his dormant brain, the top of the skull removed and the brain more clearly mapped, large samples from the spine and gut be taken, and fuck knows what else. But Sam’s vital functions would be maintained ‘in the interests of sustaining bio-matter’ or some bullshit.
He stomps in a puddle. ‘Fuckers!’ It would be a dissection of a living man! A king among men! He extends his arms as if he were a red Fokker triplane and zigs off the road into a support pole. ‘Fuck. Too fucking drunk. Again!’ It’s what? It’s 4.56 am and there’s still a way to go till the hospital. ‘Fuckers.’ The other proposal is to keep Sam on life-support and try to establish communication via an alphabet selection device connected to his brain, similar to those used by people paralysed in accidents. Sam would have to provide lucid and newsworthy messages for the media in that case, and the world’s reaction—the market, in other words—would define the duration of the message cycle. This ‘soft option’ is considered unlikely. The ‘science option’, which Bill renamed the ‘dissection option’, appears inevitable, sooner or later, if Sam doesn’t regain consciousness. And they won’t just let Sam peacefully die because that’s not ‘optimum exploitation of the resource’.
The several flights of stairs up to the hospital are a concentrating experience. He reduces to essentials, makes use of the handrail. When he stops to puff on landings, the lights of New Hokitika revolve. At the sight of the hospital’s lights, also unstable, Bill stops, closes his eyes and gathers himself. Inner lights rotate. He has to open his eyes and put a foot out to avoid toppling. Light rain crinkles on his hood and craters the puddles reflecting security lights.
Cheerful and breezy, he thinks as he approaches the gate. ‘Morning.’
‘Early start, Bill.’
‘Vigil.’
Unexpectedly easy, he thinks as he pauses to get his breath back, apart from the risk of toppling into a puddle. Thought-gathering time, he tells himself, is over. Yes. ‘I will cry for you tomorrow, Sam,’ he announces. ‘But now I will fight for you.’ He focusses on the yellow lights above the hospital entrance and walks as quickly and directly as he can. I’ll sneak in, he thinks.
‘Mr Peters,’ says a smiling guard. Everyone is in their regular positions in bright light and wide awake. It’s a rude surprise. He blinks. Bill’s not sure if he knows the man smiling at him or not. It’s hard, when everyone knows his name, to remember if he knows theirs. ‘The vigil was due to start at 5 pm. You’re a little late.’
Bill looks around the reception area. Apart from staff behind the glass and the guards inside the entrance, it’s quiet. He’s about to demand that the time be moved because he’s only a few minutes late, when the guard says, ‘But that’s no problem. There’s still time in the 30-minute window for you.’
‘Oh.’ Having anticipated refusal and perhaps violence as a response on his own part, this easy acquiescence throws him somewhat. ‘Thank you.’
Following the guard to Sam’s room, walls loom up alarmingly. He takes evasive action only. Impacts are glancing. That last whisky with Ayla is kicking in. As he enters Sam’s room, with its banks of machinery and attendant doctors, nurses and guard, he thinks, I mustn’t fall on Sam.
Despite being so drunk, the familiar sinking feeling the room always inspires comes over him. It has become a site of defeat. The rubber and wax thing in his coffin-like container of clear plastic, turning by shades more yellow and gaunt
; the eyelids sticking together more tightly as if by slow-drying glue. This irretrievably dying traveller.
‘I want to hold his hand.’
‘Ah yeah, sure, Mr Peters.’
While a nurse prepares the ‘gateway’, Bill washes his hands. They appear old, like ancient mottled gloves concealing his real hands. Knowing he’s wasted, Bill washes them longer than is required to make up for his inevitable inaccuracy. A drunk, he thinks, but always a functional one. He elbows the tap off and announces as he turns, ‘I must be stinking the room up with these whisky fumes.’
‘Had a good night?’ a smiling young female nurse asks him.
‘A long night. I learned about Sam’s… medical crisis this afternoon.’
The nurse defers to a middle-aged doctor. ‘We had a blip during an exploratory procedure,’ she says, ‘but he’s stabilised now.’
‘A blip?’
‘We suspect Sam was shutting down further, to purely essential functions; going into a deeper cycle of hibernation. There was no “stoppage” as such, just diminished chemical and electrical activity. This is where he’s at now. A little cooler and slower.’
‘He’s okay?’
‘He’s very stable.’
What the fuck? The board had him dead. ‘He didn’t, like, clinically die?’
‘Well, that’s complicated. A human in this state would be declared dead by doctors in most hospitals. We have very sensitive readings available here.’
‘I see.’
‘The gateway is ready, Mr Peters.’
He lowers himself carefully on the vigil seat, bowing his head to conceal his haggard face the best he can from the wall cameras, which will have begun running. Sam has been rolled so Bill can hold his hand. The rolling is horrible and he always looks away. There’s no resistance in the body, no muscle memory, just weight transferred through joints not yet arrested by rigor mortis. The hospital gown can’t conceal what he’s become: a loose bag of skin and bone. The hand pulled through the gateway for him by a nurse is plain cold. It gives nothing. Holds nothing. Is beyond anything. Sam now looks and feels dead. Not recently dead, like people in state who have relaxed into a final expression of carefree dignity, but long dead and cold and gone. Dug up. A skin-bag filled with roiling earthworms. ‘You didn’t make it this time, brother.’ Bill starts to cry. This light, he thinks, shouldn’t have gone out. It’s wrong. Unfair. A terrible mistake. He drops the cold hand and bawls blindly until the medical staff draw him away 17 minutes later.