by Matt Wilven
I can see blood on her face, on her hands. Pages of my novel scatter in the wind. Familiar words blow past my eyes. My brain feels high up. My body is toppling. As I get close to her I stumble, somehow spinning one hundred and eighty degrees, but I just manage to save myself from falling. I spin one hundred and eighty degrees back towards her but my legs are giving in, I’m sinking, scratching at the blackness, trying to get back to my mind so I can help, but the inward pull is too great. I’m gone before I hit the ground.
I wake up in an ambulance.
“Where is she?” I ask, trying to sit up with a paramedic’s hand restraining me.
“She’s here,” he says. “Look. Right there.”
I look across to the other side of the ambulance. Lyd is on the main medical bed. I’m on a foldout thing that has been pulled down from the wall.
“Lyd? Lyd? What’s going on? Why can’t she hear me?”
“She’s unconscious,” says the paramedic.
“The baby?”
“We’re not sure,” he says.
“What do you mean you’re not sure?”
“There seems to be some kind of anomaly,” he says.
My stomach turns.
“Is there a heartbeat? Is it alive?”
I try to sit up and he attempts to restrain me again but I catch a glimpse of blood between Lyd’s legs and rip him away from me. A confused medic is moving his stethoscope around on her pregnant stomach which now looks like a rocky mountainscape. Mucus-thick red blood covers her crotch area and is drooling down from the bed onto the floor of the ambulance.
“What the hell is going on?” I wail. “What are you doing? Why aren’t you saving her?”
“We don’t know what we’re dealing with,” says the paramedic.
“You’re dealing with a pregnant woman who got hit by a van!”
“No,” he says, very certain and very sternly, “we’re not.”
When we get to the hospital everything becomes a blur. No matter how much I struggle, they won’t let me go with Lyd. They take me to a waiting room where I rock back and forth on an uncomfortable chair. They make me sign things that seem completely irrelevant.
Finally, they tell me she’s prepped for an emergency operation that might or might not be a caesarean section and that if I really want to, and they advise against it, there’s an observation window I can watch from.
I go with them.
A surgeon makes a long, deep incision in Lyd’s bumpy abdomen. His hands are quick. I close my eyes for a moment. The surgeon makes lots of precise adjustments to the incision and cuts away some fatty tissue whilst a male nurse dabs at the blood. When the surgeon makes a vertical cut into Lyd’s womb, a litre of thick red albumen pours out of her. The surgeon recoils and looks at his colleagues, confused, asking for advice. The viscous red gloop pours over her hips and between her legs, off the sides of the operating table and onto the floor. One of the nurses runs out of the theatre and comes back with a bucket and mop.
After a little debate the surgeon goes in with some forceps and pulls out a shard of something bluish white. He does this again and again, pulling more and more strange white shards out of her, dropping them into a metal tray. His brow is knitting tighter and tighter. Though the pressure has eased, the red albumen keeps oozing. The nurse mopping the floor just seems to be spreading the thick red slime around.
After five or ten minutes pulling out increasingly smaller white shards from Lyd’s womb, the surgeon seems satisfied and goes in deeper with the forceps. All the people around the operating table lean in to see.
The thing he pulls out has big, fuzzy purple bulbs on top of its head and a yellowish fleshy flap instead of a face. Its arms are hooked over, webbed, speckled with what look like wet black feathers. One male nurse runs to a bin to vomit, another nurse holds her hand to the patch over her mouth. Two doctors take the creature to a separate table whilst the surgeon begins to take more white shards out of Lyd.
I don’t know where to look. There is too much thick red albumen. It’s everywhere. It covers every apron, it’s on every bare arm, it almost covers the floor. Over by the creature two doctors are scratching their heads, looking really closely at the centre of it. They seem to have come to some sort of agreement. They bend over it with medical tools I can’t decipher the functions of. I can’t see what they’re doing.
On the main table a nurse is vacuuming Lyd’s insides and the surgeon is shining a light into her womb. The two nurses holding the wound open are looking away, squeezing their eyes closed. The gurgling sound the suction device makes inside her is making me queasy, even though the sound is muffled by the glass.
Back on the small table the two doctors put something that looks like a large orange turkey wing with tufts of black feathers into a metal tray. They look at each other and nod, leaning back in. Thirty seconds later another raw, limp turkey wing is put in the metal tray. Now, they both move in very close and work very carefully.
The gurgling stops.
Over on the operating table they expertly sew Lyd’s womb, tissue and skin back together.
One of the two doctors over with the creature puts a long yellow flap and a cap of skin with two furry purple bulbs into the metal tray. Both doctors look at each other with amazement, carefully pull some loose strips of skin away and put them in the metal tray, and then pass something small and purple to one of the nurses. She goes to wash it in a sink.
Lyd’s wound has been dressed. I can see the machines she’s attached to and nothing is flashing or making irregular noises.
A nurse comes towards the door to the viewing room with something wrapped in a small green sheet. As she approaches everybody in the room gathers around her. In the doorway she doesn’t say a word. None of them do. When she passes it to me I don’t expect to see what I do. It’s a baby. I look up at them all. They are all peering down.
“What is it?” I ask.
All of them are silent. I have to open the blanket and find out for myself.
It’s a girl.
I wrap her back up and bob her up and down. Relief gushes through me, tears and joy and confusion. She’s so light and precious.
“I don’t understand,” I say.
Nobody responds.
“I don’t understand.”
One of the two doctors who put the hooked wings and yellow flap into the metal tray steps towards me.
“Neither do we,” he says. “They should both be dead. But it looks like they’re both going to make it.”
I look down at our little girl’s face. She is still immersed in non-being but signals are beginning to prod at her: light on her translucent eyelids, new temperatures, the emptiness of air compared to liquid, the coarseness of cotton over flesh, weight and gravity, disconnection. It’s too early for her to grasp any of this but her brow wrinkles. An ancient black secret escapes her. She pulls back towards nothingness but life has her. She is slowly coming into being, stuck here. She cries. She wants to go back, where all the secrets and miracles hide.
SIX
I am the forgotten connections, the untold stories, the lost sensations, the useless facts. If somebody needs to hear a song, I sing it. If somebody needs to see a sign, I show it. I had never saved a soul. I had never touched the truth. I was no more than a thing that said I…
“Vince.”
I’m sitting on the couch holding my fountain pen with a plain black notebook resting on my thigh. It’s open on the first page, blank. Lyd is nursing Merula beside me.
“Huh?”
“You were miles away.”
“I was thinking about when we were first getting together.”
I chuckle.
“What’s so funny?”
“You were always talking about string theory. Constantly.”
“So what?” she says, smiling.
“At first, everything that came out your mouth was completely baffling but then, after about the third time we met, you started dumbing it down for me.
”
“Ohhh, that must have been when I realised you were an idiot.”
“Around then, yes. I remember you said that everything in the universe might be made of these tiny strings, and if it was, all space, all matter, light, gravity, everything, when you looked really close, would look similar to sound waves. And what made one thing a rock and another thing a sunbeam was just the way it vibrated. Everything was made of the same thing. It was all just vibrations travelling through vibrations, like a giant symphony.”
“It seems so long since I’ve had the time to think like that. I’ve been so entrenched in the details.”
“That’s when I knew how successful you were going to be. I knew if you could get me to understand it you could get anyone to.”
“I think those chats were the preamble to writing my book,” she says.
“I’m glad I could help.”
“I’ve actually been thinking about writing another.”
“That’s great. What about?”
“Probably supersymmetry. It seems like the right time.”
“Definitely.”
Merula stops nursing and milk drools down her chin. Lyd wipes it away gently with her thumb and tucks her breast away. I lean over and give Merula a kiss on the cheek.
“I think it might be a while before I can write anything again,” I say.
“You deserve a break. You wrote a novel in nine months. That’s quicker than usual isn’t it?”
“I guess.”
“You can’t just bounce from one thing to the next.”
I look at her, supporting Merula’s little head, close the notebook and move closer to them.
“I just don’t like being at a loose end,” I say. “I need a project to be getting on with.”
“I’ve got an eighteen-year project for you right here.”
I take Merula whilst she buttons up her shirt.
“I know,” I say. “But it’s not the same.”
“It’ll come. Don’t worry. Did Angela get back to you yet?”
“Not yet. She said she’d put it to the top of the slush pile. If I don’t hear anything within a couple of weeks I’ll start putting in the administrative grind, try and get it into the right hands.”
“And in the meanwhile?”
“Just keep following my nose.”
“You’ll think of something.”
“The words always find me in the end.”
“Exactly.”
Jamal opens his door and stands aside for me to enter his front room. The floor is covered with pieces of scrap metal and motor parts on newspapers. It’s just as crowded and inhospitable as it used to be.
“I see you’ve taken up your old habits again.”
“Not all of them,” he says, shutting the front door.
“Just the worst ones?”
“A man who starts again usually chooses the same path.”
“Are you going all Zen master on me already? How many joints did you smoke this morning?”
“Shut up. Let me show you something.”
“Here,” I say, handing him a print-out of my book. “Take this first.”
“Great, thanks, man. I’ll get started on it later.”
He puts it down on top of a car battery on the coffee table and heads up the stairs (each of which has a carburettor pushed to the right-hand side on top of a newspaper).
At the doorway of his workshop, after looking into the room for a couple of seconds, he turns and looks my way.
“Isn’t it beautiful?”
I approach him and look through the doorway. He’s built an entire Rolls Royce in his workshop. But it is no longer a workshop. All the shelves have been taken down and all the tools are gone from the back wall. The walls have been painted white and the room is lit like a car showroom. His black Silver Shadow is gleaming. It looks like it just rolled off the assembly line.
I start laughing.
“You’re crazy,” I say.
He walks around the side, opens one of the bedroom windows (which were previously covered by the hardboard wall of tools), feeds out a hose pipe connected to the car’s exhaust pipe and closes his new thick black curtains. He then reaches up and clicks the side of a big box that is hanging from the ceiling, a projector.
“Turn the lights off,” he says, grinning.
As I do this he sits in the driver’s seat. A bright blue rectangle is projected across two of the walls and then replaced by the image of his desktop (I didn’t know he even owned a computer). He rolls down the passenger window.
“Come on,” he says. “You’re riding shotgun.”
I shake my head with a smile and get into the car.
“Only you would build a beautiful car in your spare bedroom. What’s the point if you can’t drive it?”
“Who says I can’t drive it?” he says, starting the engine.
The machine hums and vibrates at a smooth, even level.
“We’re not going to die of carbon-monoxide poisoning, are we?”
“You just saw me put the pipe out the window.”
“Still…”
“I’m alive, aren’t I?”
“Sort of,” I say, with a smirk.
“Quiet a second,” he says, indicating with a hand to his ear that I should be listening to the engine. “Isn’t it beautiful? I could listen to that sound forever.”
“It definitely sounds like a car.”
“Come off it,” he says, squeezing the accelerator. “Tell me that’s not beautiful.”
“It sounds great,” I admit. “I don’t think you’ll get very far though.”
I gesture towards the walls in every direction.
“There’s all these videos you can download. They’re amazing. I’ve cruised down Route 66, put in sixty laps at Silverstone, I even did the Rally de Portugal. I felt a bit sick after that one.”
I’m laughing.
“There are these great railway ones too,” he continues. “I know it’s a bit weird, sitting in a car, but I did a four-and-a-half-hour trip from Glasgow to Mallaig last week. It goes over Fort William. Such a lovely journey.”
“You have taken recluse to a whole new level.”
“Who needs to leave the house when you have this? I never thought I’d get into the Internet, any of this technological stuff, but, you’ll see. I’m going to do the Trans-Siberian Railway at some point. I’ve got the full six days of footage. And there’s Big Sur, Nurburgring Nordschleife, Ruta 40, Conor Pass, Karakoram Highway, so many great drives. And people are just giving these videos away. I couldn’t afford to do all these trips in real life even if I wanted to.”
“I have to hand it to you,” I say, “you have assimilated into your suburban isolation with a great sense of adventure.”
“I got one especially for you.”
“Ominous.”
“Not at all,” he says, beginning to click though folders. “Here it is.”
“How have you got the screen so big?” I ask. “It’s in the side windows.”
“Just a bit of keystoning. It’s a decent projector. It’s got two heads.”
“Look at you, part of the twenty-first century.”
“Shush, just feel the engine vibrating through your feet and watch.”
“Aye, aye, Captain.”
The room goes black. It’s immediately apparent that he has the car wired up for sound, very good quality sound.
The room lights up.
We’re in the desert, with rocky mountains on the horizon and scaffolding in the foreground. A hissing noise slowly builds and builds until it explodes into a roar. The Rolls Royce shakes with the bass of it, the engine gently purring beneath. The scaffolding falls away. The camera spins slowly and we begin to rocket upwards. The huge mountain range quickly begins to look flat. Everything rumbles and vibrates. We pass a layer of small intermittent clouds. The desert below looks fuzzy from the heat. The roar goes on.
Long thin strips of white cloud slowly sink around us. The des
ert and the mountains shrink and shrivel. Over half of the view is blue sky. The sun makes me squint as it passes across the windscreen. For a couple of seconds everything beneath us is a mixture of vapours that the eye can’t see through but then a misty cloud falls away, revealing the surface below.
The roar thunders on. The flat horizon begins to curve. The desert is now just a small portion of the Earth which is mostly ocean. The sky’s upper horizon starts bending, shifting through all the deepest blues until there is an encroaching curve of blackness. This blackness pulls down, further and further, until the portion of blue that accounts for the sky is a thin, ethereal blue ribbon wrapped around a blue and white marble floating in nothingness.
A bright white light, a spotlight that used to be the yellow sun, with a centre that the camera cannot interpret as anything other than its brightest and whitest pixels, crosses the blackness as our rocket rotates, travelling diagonally, looking for nothing. The roaring of the scorched fuel settles into brassy reverberations. A booster pack is released and slowly floats backwards.
My stomach lifts.
The sound is dead.
We’re suspended in the vast blackness of space, spinning slowly, almost unnoticeably. The stars begin to multiply. The darkness between them deepens. It crosses my mind that, before the universe, there was an endless black hole, an infinite singularity, and that our universe is expanding into it. Our black holes are bubbles of that spaceless and timeless truth beyond us: death. And this death should not be feared as an evil, decimating force. It is formless and eternal, complete and inconceivable; part of a truth we cannot measure or judge.
Floating in an imaginary vacuum, suspended in disbelief, I get the sensation that the universe is expanding. This death beyond the stars is in retreat. I’ve almost forgotten that I’m sitting in a stationary Rolls Royce in a bedroom in Highgate. I don’t hear the rumble of the engine, the hum of the projector, the pause in my breath. The camera spins slowly. The world is edging back into view.
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