Notes from a Coma

by Mike McCormack

  “Any man doing all this must be in the full of his health.”

  “I feel fine, it’s good to be out of that place.”

  “I’ll bet. It’s an awful dose.”

  “You wouldn’t wish it on anyone.”

  “There’s some who would. You’ll do the outside as well, I suppose?”

  “Might as well now that I’ve started.”

  Frank nodded. “You might as well. Will he raise any hand to it himself?”

  I motioned Frank to a chair. “I would if I was let, Frank, but he has to do it all himself, there’s no talking to him.”

  “You’re right, JJ. Old fellas like that are more hindrance than help.”

  Frank always had this soft spot for JJ. It was never anything he did or said about him, it was all in the way he talked to him—like he was his equal or like they had something between them that only they knew. Whatever it was it always gladdened me to see them standing around together talking as if nothing had ever happened. That was Frank’s doing. After Owen’s death he did his grieving and got on with it and tried his damnedest not to let any bad feeling grow between our two houses. Without him things would have been a lot worse. Life is too short for bad feeling, he told me a few months after Owen was buried. You don’t get over these things but you learn to get around them. Move on, make the best of it. Anything else is a sin against life.

  That was the first time I’d ever heard that and it made me wonder how many of us are guilty of that kind of sin.

  “If there’s anything I hate it’s painting,” Frank said. “I leave it up to herself, it only leads to arguments.”

  “There’s no arguments here. JJ’s doing it himself, that’s all there is to it.”

  “There’s no rush, leave something for tomorrow. The man who made time made plenty of it.”

  You could see JJ was satisfied the evening he finished. He put the cans and rollers in the shed and stood out at the gate wiping his hands on a rag.

  “It’s a bit brighter anyway,” he said. “We should have done it a long time ago.”

  “It makes everything else look bad,” I said. “We should throw out some of that old stuff; it takes the look off your work.”

  He shook his head. “It’s fine,” he said. “It’s just the idea.”

  Of course when he’d finished painting he was left with nothing but time on his hands. What was he going to do with himself then? There was no talk of going back to work nor did I want to hear any of it but JJ was never a man to sit around doing nothing. The first thing he did was pull the table and chair from his bedroom out into the yard and set up a sort of desk there. That’s where he sat most of his days, eating and reading, smoking and drinking water out of a plastic bottle.

  He was lucky the weather was so fine, blue skies every day and the yard lit with the sun reflecting off the white walls. They were the type of days that open your eyes to just how beautiful it is around here—something that’s easy to lose sight of during the winter months when the sky is down on the ground and the wind cuts in from the sea. But when the sun is shining and those hills are out from under the clouds you wouldn’t wish to be anywhere else in the world. We’re lucky up here on this height. On a clear day you can see up to Lachta in one direction and out to Clare Island in the other—the only thing between ourselves and America. If you take a walk into the fields you have a clear view all the way up to Inishturk; with a blue sky over your head you wouldn’t believe the world could be so big. When we worked together in London, Frank told me this was one of the things he missed about this place—this openness, this sense of space. Of course at the time I didn’t know what he was talking about—I’ve never had a feel for these things. But some days now I walk out and I begin to understand a little clearer what he was on about.

  You wouldn’t think it but JJ made a good convalescent. He read outside and took his meals at the table and didn’t move to turn his hand to anything about the place. I was glad of that. By that time the silage was wrapped and the few loads of turf we needed for the winter were in the shed; all the heavy work was done. But, knowing JJ, if he had wanted something to do he would have found something. He didn’t. He just sat there and soaked up the sun and it was only when I saw him with a book in his hand that I remembered I hadn’t seen him reading in the longest time. Again, it was only a small thing, but it made me happy to see him doing something like that. I would have been happier still if he had given up the fags. That was something I worried about. I jarred him about it one evening at the table.

  “Mark my words those things are doing you no good.”

  He smiled and tossed the match into the ashtray. “This was the first thing I remembered after I woke up—the fact that I smoked. I never knew I was that fond of them.”

  “All I’m saying is that you have to look after yourself. The only other man to smoke in this house was my father, your grandfather, old Tom, as everyone called him. I knew he was dead the night he stopped smoking.”

  “I thought he died in his sleep.”

  “He died in his bed whatever about his sleep. He was never a good sleeper. He’d wake in the middle of the night and smoke one fag before turning over to get a few hours before morning. He’d have it rolled on the table beside him so he could reach out and find it in the dark. I used to go up to him every morning with a cup of tea. That morning I went up the first thing I saw was the fag; it hadn’t been smoked. I didn’t even look at him; I pulled the door behind me and drove into town. As luck would have it Mattie was crossing the square as I pulled up. I told him the craic and he said not to worry, he’d take care of it. I had three quiet pints in Conlon’s on my own and when I got back Mattie had him laid out, candles and flowers and everything.”

  “But he lived to a big age.”

  “He might have lived to a bigger age if he hadn’t smoked. All I’m saying, JJ, is that you have to look after yourself.” The sun had dipped behind Clare Island and there was a sharp chill in the evening. “Are you not cold sitting here? There’s a heavy dew falling, the grass is covered in the morning.”

  “I’m going downtown in a while. Sarah is working. I’m going to have a few pints in the hotel. Are you going down?”

  “I was thinking of it. You’ll be in the hotel so?”

  “Yah. I’ll be there till she gets off. Call in, a few of the lads will be there. There’s a game on the box.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Do. Sarah will be glad to see you.”

  So I did go down and I was glad after. I had two pints with JJ, two quiet contemplative pints as he put it himself, and Sarah stood me another at the end of the night when she came outside the bar.

  * The smooth commencement of the project met a hitch one month before the green light. From his prison cell in Stockholm Haakan Luftig requested clarification from the EPC as to the volunteers’ status while the project was operational. What seemed a simple enough request was complicated by Luftig referencing various articles of EU law which governed the rights of EU workers with regards to wages and conditions. His point was obvious. Since the volunteers were contracted to the EPC for the duration of the project they were de facto workers and therefore came under EU guidelines for remuneration and conditions; their worker status entitled them to a day’s wage for what Luftig was now insisting was a day’s work. While the request was immediately interpreted as an attempt on Luftig’s part to embarrass the Commission it did raise a valid point; if the Commission conceded the subjects’ worker status then the 168-hour working week contravened all existing labour laws. One member of the Commission was so irked as to ask whether any subject in deep coma could meaningfully be said to be engaged in anything which might accurately be described as work—wasn’t consciousness a defining precondition of human labour? There followed a debate within the Commission which, after two hours, had progressed little beyond a provisional definition of terms when Magnus Dubois, Professor of Medical Ethics at the École Normale Supérieure, drew a line under the disc
ussion. The issue, he said, was not one of conditions or remuneration but of Luftig’s intent to draw the Commission into an abstract and faintly ridiculous debate which would do nothing but damage public perception of the project and position Luftig himself as the volunteers’ spokesman. If the project was to have any future this must be avoided at all cost. As for the definition of work and the worker status of the volunteers while in coma—this was precisely the sort of philosophical havering Luftig was counting on to draw down ridicule on the project. Dubois concluded that rather than draw out any discussions and run the risk of having the debate go public, Luftig should be encouraged to put his demands on paper immediately. A meeting in Stockholm was arranged. Luftig’s initial demand was that each subject be paid the minimum wage for each and every hour of his coma. The Commission refused to be drawn into a tacit admission of a 168-hour working week and countered with an offer of a minimum wage over a thirty-eight-hour five-day week with double time at weekends for the duration of each volunteer’s coma. Luftig played hard to get a further five days then signed a contract to that effect, confirming the impression that his point was not one of principle or gain but a calculated attempt to mark out a pre-eminent position for himself among the volunteers. The other subjects were given similar contracts, bank accounts were opened and the incident served to make the Commission more vigilant.

  SARAH NEVIN

  So how then did it come to this? How did he go from convalescing in the sun to lying on the broad of his back out on that prison ship? If you’d seen him during those days you’d have seen a young man on the mend, someone who was sensibly looking after himself, gathering his strength up there on top of that hill. There was something about him during those days I’d never seen before, something I liked but which made me rethink a lot of what I thought I knew about him. This stillness came over him, he barely moved. From the bed to the kitchen to the backyard, by and large that was the extent of his world. It was like he was tethered there within some boundary visible only to himself and beyond which he was loath to stray. His strength was going to converge on that spot and he had to be there to gather it in when it returned. But he was a joy to be with during those days, more attentive towards me than he’d ever been. Learning to cook was one of the things he did with this time. Before that he’d never shown any interest in food but now, with time on his hands, he began doing things with woks and shellfish and artichokes. He was in two minds about this new skill and I teased him about it.

  “It will be happy for the woman who gets you,” I used to say whenever he made me sit down to eat some new meal he’d prepared.

  “It’s a sure sign of a man with too much time on his hands,” he’d reply. “A man with no proper work to go to.”

  After we’d eaten we’d go and lie down in his room for an hour or two, draw the curtains and make love in the green light which played across his bed …* All this made me hopeful. Lying in each other’s arms I thought we were home and dry, coming into the finishing straight of a bad time. The future didn’t exactly come into focus for me there in that green light but I could have sworn there were blue skies and sunshine hanging over it.† Of course I never guessed that all that stillness was part of the thing that was beginning to haunt him.

  “This dream,” he said one day, “I keep having this odd dream.”

  “They’re all odd, that’s why they’re called dreams. No use asking me about them.”

  “Do you have a recurring dream?”

  “Yes, as it happens, I do. I had this dream once as a child, a flu fever thing. I’m very small and vulnerable in it. I’m standing alone and naked in the middle of this open space. Out of the distance these balls come bouncing towards me, big balls about three times my size, brown and soft like inflated internal organs, horrible things. All I know is that I can’t let them touch me—for some reason I know that will prove fatal. So I spend the whole of that dream dodging and weaving, getting weaker and weaker … Not a nice dream. It comes back to me sometimes, not very often. I’m always seven years old in it. Don’t ask me what it’s about. Why?”

  He rose above me on one elbow, his face in shadow.

  “I can feel myself getting better, Sarah, becoming whole again. Day by day I’m recovering more and more of my memory. There’s this thing in neurology, Hebbian linkage it’s called. Basically, it states that neurons firing in the cortex set off chain reactions in neighbouring neurons which build up associative webs throughout the brain and integrate the whole of human experience. Basically, this is the mind-making process although how this neurochemical fizzing and popping results in consciousness is something I can’t understand. None of the mind/body arguments I’ve ever come across make any sense to me.‡ But I see something similar happening with my memory. One memory sets off another, linkages and connections are established, people and places and events are falling into place and I can recognise more and more of my past self. Except for one thing. This dream I’ve been having—I can’t place it, it just doesn’t fit … I’m lying on a bed in a dark room, dead tired and unable to move. It feels like I’m drowning in that dark room but there is no way I can move away. There’s this crippling pain in my left leg which won’t let me get off the bed. And I’m falling asleep, this dense sleep is moving in on me. I’m terrified, it’s not like any fear I’ve ever known. I don’t want to fall asleep but I can’t prevent it. I can’t stop it moving in on me. At the very last moment, just when I’m going to go under, I wake up sweating and frightened. The strangest thing is that I feel fine after it—no pain or fear. I put on the light and look at myself in the mirror. And this is strange too—this feeling of having to wait a few moments before I catch up with myself. Like the real part of myself is still back in that dream. Does that mean anything, Sarah?”

  “Are you alone, in the dream I mean?”

  “Yes, I’m all alone—that’s one of the terrible things about it. I have this feeling that if someone comes in and talks to me I will be OK.”

  “How come you can’t get off the bed?”

  “I’m tired, tired and nauseous. There’s also this pain in my knee.”

  I could have walked away then, made some excuse and gone home and got my thoughts together. If I had wanted that badly enough I could have got up and walked away. But I knew these things and he didn’t.

  “This is a need-to-know thing, Sarah. You’re the one with the memories, my memories … and I have to know.”

  I knew that and he knew that I knew that. So I told him.

  Afterwards he sat on the side of the bed, elbows on his knees.

  “So you’re telling me I have a detailed memory of something that isn’t mine, something that never happened to me. Time and place and character where they should be but none of it mine.”

  “I’m just telling you what it looks like.”

  “How close were we?”

  “Close as, closer than, brothers. But for appearances anyone might have thought you really were. You sat together in the same desk throughout your school years. Wherever one of you went the other was always a few paces behind. You even had this trick of sitting together reading out of the same book.”

  “Nothing odd about that.”

  “No, not reading, but turning the page without consulting each other, that was odd. Don’t worry though, you were often seen together in the same room, there really were two of you.”

  “So I can hardly remember my own life but I have a detailed memory of my friend’s death. My best friend, this crisis apparition, come back to haunt me.”

  “You had a hard time after he died—you gave yourself a hard time. If only I’d stayed with him that night, if only we had gone straight home, if only, if only, if only … Then you tumbled to the idea that you’d argued him to death—that didn’t help either.”

  “What’s it trying to say to me?”

  “It’s part of what brought on this breakdown, a type of delayed reaction the specialist said. It is not uncommon. Dwelling on it will only make
things worse. It’s just a dream, it will go away.”

  He lay in beside me and gathered me into his arms.

  “No, it won’t, Sarah. Here it goes again. It won’t go away. None of it makes sense. Just when I thought everything was coming together.”

  It was around that time the Somnos project came to light. Like everyone else I saw the press conference that evening on the news. Kevin Barret with that deadpan look on his face telling the nation about this project that sounded like something out of a fifties sci-fi novel: five comatose prisoners on the flat of their backs in Killary harbour exploring something which may or may not prove to be the future of penal incarceration across the EU—incredible. Listening to him that evening was one of those moments that has you turning to the person beside you and asking, Did he just say what I think he said—a penal experiment with coma patients? And Kevin delivered it all in that toneless drone of his like it was the most obvious thing in the world. It was a riveting performance. I’ve never had an interest in politics but even I could see that Kevin was impressive that evening. I’ve never seen a public official coming before the people so clued into his work; Kevin had all the angles covered. He started with a brief outline of the project’s origins and then a close detailing of the binding legal and scientific protocols. Then he segued into the medical precedents, lobbing out those technical terms as if they were part of some new manifesto. He rounded off the whole thing with a brief itemising of the costings bill which was being drawn up by the Department of Finance. Forty-two minutes of droning monotone without once having to refer to notes or repeat an essential point. Someone has pointed out that in all the interviews he’s given since he’s not once contradicted a word of that original press conference. But of course the essential subtext of the whole performance was that this was not up for discussion; this was a fait accompli—there were no legal or constitutional barriers, everything was in order Kevin assured us. The only outstanding thing was an Irish volunteer.