The Coma

by Alex Garland

  The older policeman nodded. “That’s no different from the statement of the witness.”

  “Was she hurt? The girl?”

  “No.”

  “I was afraid she might have been raped.”

  “She wasn’t hurt. They took her bag, but we recovered it when we arrested them.”

  “You caught them?”

  I must have sounded surprised, because the younger policeman seemed to take offense.

  “We do catch people sometimes,” he said, with a little heat in his voice.

  The older policeman continued. “When they jumped off at the next station, they’d been captured five different times on CCTV before they even reached street level. In fact, two of them we were able to track on camera right to the doors of their homes. They won’t be getting away with this; you can rest assured of that.”

  “What about my bag?” I asked. “I had a bag. Did you recover that too?”

  The older policeman frowned. “A bag?”

  “Yes. With a brass clasp. It had papers inside.”

  The younger policeman started checking through his notepad. “I don’t have any record of a bag with a brass clasp,” he said. “It wasn’t with you in the carriage.”

  “And I don’t remember seeing any of them carrying a second bag on the CCTV,” the older policeman added. “But we will look into it.”

  “It’s very important I find the bag,” I said. “I need it for my work.”

  “You shouldn’t be worrying about your work for the moment,” the older policeman said.

  “You will try to find it, though? It had my wallet inside and it was full of papers and . . .”

  “If I may,” said the older policeman. “I think you should put all thought of work and papers out of your head. Your most important job right now is to get yourself better.” He smiled at me. “Out of this hospital and back home.”

  3.

  I was discharged the next evening. The hospital provided a taxi for me, and something to wear. My clothes had been torn and badly bloodstained in the attack, so as I walked up the steps to my house, I was wearing green pajamas and slippers.

  I realized at once how long I must have lain unconscious in the hospital from the large pile of letters that the front door pushed aside. I carried the letters through to the living room and pressed “play” on my answering machine. I had thirty-four messages, but I didn’t feel ready to listen to them, and I didn’t feel ready to open my post either. I didn’t even feel ready to turn on the lights. Instead, I turned on the television.

  I watched the ten o’clock news. I had missed the headlines and the lead stories. I heard an account of a fire in a nightclub and saw an argument between two celebrities. The argument was outside a film premiere, and it had been caught by a member of the public on a videocamera. The newsreader speculated that although the celebrities had nearly come to blows, it was possible the argument had been staged as a promotional exercise. I thought, as I watched the newsreader, that he seemed quite uninterested in the truth behind the confrontation, because several times he seemed to lose the meaning of the words he was reading from the autocue—failing to anticipate the end of one sentence, or the beginning of another. I also suspected that he didn’t recognize the celebrities any more than I did.

  Like the newsreader, I lost concentration. When I regained it, the television program had changed to a black-and-white film. I turned the television off and went upstairs to bed.

  I was reminded again of how long I had lain unconscious in the hospital by the dust in my bedroom. The bed was unmade—just as I had left it when I had gone to work the morning of the attack. When I tugged at the duvet, the dust stung my eyes like pollen and made me blink convulsively. I could feel the irritation in my nose and at the back of my throat.

  But it was a warm night, so I pulled the duvet to the floor and opened the window to get a little fresh air circulating in the room. Then I stripped off the hospital pajamas, changed into some boxer shorts, and lay down.

  I hadn’t closed the curtains, so the room was bright from the street lamps outside. I wasn’t really trying to get to sleep. During the cab ride from the hospital, I had felt apprehensive about what psychological fallout I might expect from the attack. It seemed to me that it would be at home that the fallout would make itself felt, as I tried to reintroduce myself to normality after such an abnormal and shocking incident. The familiarity of home would force a juxtaposition that the unfamiliar hospital had not. Specifically, I think I was concerned about nightmares—reliving the attack in a dream world, where perhaps the dream would loop endlessly, where the attack might be even more brutal and unpleasant than its real counterpart.

  I had decided during the cab ride that the most sensible approach to the psychological fallout would be, in a sense, to keep my expectations low. I wouldn’t have any plans or give myself any targets, such as returning to work within a set time. Where sleep was concerned, I wouldn’t try for it, nor would I resist it if it came.

  The cab driver, whom I’d spoken to a little during the journey from the hospital, had agreed.

  “I was in a car crash once,” he explained. “What they say is, after a car crash, you’ve got to get driving again or you’ll lose your nerve. The same as if you fall off a horse. Or a bike. Or a ladder.”

  I nodded at the reflection of his eyes in his rearview mirror.

  “But I did it differently,” he continued. “After my car crash, when I got back in my cab for the first time, I didn’t even turn on the engine.”

  We had pulled up at a traffic light at this point, so he turned around in his seat to emphasize the point.

  “I didn’t even touch the wheel!” He shook his head as the lights changed and we moved on. “My wife thought I was mad. She was watching me from the pavement. But I wasn’t mad.” He shook his head again. “And I didn’t switch on the engine the second time either, but I did take off the hand brake. We live on a slight slope, so the cab moved forwards a couple of feet or so. Not more, because there was a parked car in front. ‘You’re mad!’ my wife said. But look at me now. I’m driving again.”

  He was quiet for a few moments, then added, “It’s okay to take things slowly.”

  4.

  Although the room was reasonably bright from the street lamps, I didn’t become aware that blood was seeping through my bandages until I rolled onto my side and felt the under sheet sticking to my back. I had felt the wetness already, but assumed it was sweat from the warm night. I sat up in bed and saw a large dark stain on the linen, and when I put my hand to the bandages, they were sodden. Alarmed, I went straight to my bathroom and switched on the light.

  In the mirror, I was swaddled in red. I must have opened several cuts without realizing—cuts I hadn’t even known I’d had. I had no real idea of the injuries to my chest; the bandages around my torso had not been changed since I had woken up. Until seeing the blood, I’d assumed the bandages were to cover the bruises that spread up around the top of the wrapping, over my collarbone and up to my face.

  But now, inspecting myself more carefully in the mirror, I could see that the bruises I had seen in the hospital had faded to the point where I wasn’t sure if I was seeing discoloration on the skin surface or simply shadows thrown by the overhead halogen bulbs. Certainly, as I moved my head and re-angled my body, the marks that looked like bruises seemed to change, and if I angled my body backwards, to lean up towards the light, my skin seemed entirely clear.

  Meanwhile, the blood was seeping down from the bandages into the elasticized waistband at the top of my boxer shorts. I decided I should remove the wrapping as quickly as possible and assess the seriousness of the wounds. If they looked bad, the only sensible thing would be to return to the hospital.

  They did look bad. That is to say—they appeared bad. I was as good as painted red, a great block of color from the top of my chest to my navel. But as I peeled off the last strip of soaked material and let it drop to my feet, I could see that the
appearance was thankfully deceiving. I couldn’t actually see a wound—from a stab or a slice or a graze—anywhere. In a way, this didn’t surprise me. I had often heard that the blood from wounds could be misleading as to their seriousness. And I felt fine; not dizzy, or in pain, or even in discomfort.

  I stood over the sink and wiped away the blood with a towel. My only remaining concern was to find the source of the bleeding and to dress it properly—and I guessed that a well-applied Band-Aid would do the job. It had probably been the looseness of the bandages that had encouraged the bleeding.

  An idea struck me. Like falling from the swing, it was another memory from childhood—this time, of repairing punctures on my bike. A cut in the rubber was also impossible to spot with the eye. The only options were to turn the inner tube slowly against your ear and listen for the sound of hissing, or to place the entire inner tube in water, where you would see the escaping air as a stream of bubbles.

  I didn’t think I would be hissing, and even a black belt in yoga wouldn’t be able to get an ear to his own chest, so I ran a bath.

  From a point on my solar plexus, a miniature tendril of blood seeped into the water, like a faint coral or a sea anemone. The wound must have been no larger than a pinprick.

  As my gaze flicked between the coral, and the congealing puddle of bandages on the bathroom floor, and the red smears around the basin and the chrome taps, I began to think for the first time that my psychological fallout might be more severe than I had anticipated.

  5.

  I leaned on Anthony’s doorbell. It was well past midnight and all the lights in his house were off, as were the lights in the houses of his neighbors, and as far down the street as I could see. When he came to the door he was wearing a dressing gown and all the hair on the left-hand side of his head was sticking directly up into the air.

  “Carl,” he said. Then again. “Carl! God. What time is it? Are you okay?”

  “I think so,” I replied. “More or less. But I need to come in.”

  “Of course, of course,” he said, collecting himself, smoothing down his hair and rubbing the sleep and surprise out of his eyes.

  I followed him inside to the kitchen.

  “I’m sorry for waking you,” I said, as Anthony filled the kettle with water from the tap. “Did I wake Mary as well? And Joshua?”

  Anthony shrugged. “Mary will be back to sleep already. Joshua—I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. Anyway, I’m the one who’s sorry. I meant to collect you from the hospital today. I knew you were being discharged, but . . .” He turned to me. “Well—but nothing. I should have been there.”

  “I don’t think I wanted to be collected. I wanted to go home alone, to keep everything low key. Now I’m not so sure. Maybe it wasn’t such a good idea.”

  Anthony leaned back against the counter and waited for me to continue. But I didn’t continue. I wasn’t quite sure what I ought to say. So we both waited, while steam from the kettle began to rise and collect under the kitchen units.

  Eventually I said, “If we wait long enough, something strange will happen.”

  Anthony frowned. “What do you mean?”

  “Just . . . that. If we wait long enough, something strange will happen. I suspect I’ll be the only one who notices it. So perhaps it will only be strange to me . . .”

  “Strange?”

  “Strange.”

  “Tell me what you mean.”

  “Well, for example, I don’t know how I got here tonight.”

  “... To my house?”

  “To your house—yes. I have no idea. I don’t even remember making a decision to come here. One moment I was lying in the bath, the next I was ringing your doorbell. With nothing in between, except . . .” I shook my head in a gesture of helplessness. “A transition of some sort.”

  “A blackout?”

  “Probably. It’s the most likely explanation. But . . .” I paused a moment. “How did I get here tonight? Did I drive? Is my car parked outside?”

  Anthony glanced out the kitchen window. “No. It isn’t.”

  “So did I walk? It would have taken me forty minutes at least. The buses and the tubes aren’t running.” I felt in my pockets. “And I don’t have my wallet. I couldn’t have paid for a cab.”

  We fell into a short silence again, with Anthony watching me in a slightly puzzled or troubled way. Then the kettle clicked off.

  “We don’t have milk, so the coffee will have to be black,” Anthony said. “Sorry about that.”

  I shook my head to show my lack of concern. Or lack of interest.

  “No,” Anthony said, quite firmly, as if correcting my noncommittal response. “It’s a pity. Fresh milk, fresh coffee. Some things are just meant for each other.”

  “Okay.”

  He poured two mugs and put sugar on the table, then sat opposite me.

  “So. If we wait, how long do you think it will take before something strange happens?”

  “Your guess is certainly as good as mine,” I said.

  Anthony smiled. “Okay, then. We’ll just wait.”

  6.

  I didn’t want to drink the coffee. It looked dark and bitter, and there was a thin rainbow film on the surface. I think it was the residue of detergent. It made the liquid slightly iridescent, like the back of a beetle or an oil slick.

  And milk wouldn’t have helped. Milk or iridescence aside, I didn’t want to drink the coffee because I didn’t much care for the taste—and never had. In fact, I felt mildly irritated that Anthony had given me the mug in the first place, because, considering our friendship, I thought my dislike of coffee was the sort of thing he ought to know.

  The more I thought about it, the more peculiar the coffee became. Then, as I stared into the unwanted mug, it struck me abruptly that perhaps this—the unwanted mug—was the strange thing I had predicted would happen. The strange thing already had happened. It was happening even as I was making the prediction.

  The idea was interesting, and also frustrating—I had hoped that the strange thing would be more spectacular. As spectacular as blood-soaked bandages and bed sheets. In comparison, as an illustration of an unusual event, the making and offering of coffee seemed to err on the side of subtlety. Worse, in attempting to convey its strangeness to Anthony, I might come across as altogether too intense—too deep into the analysis of a hot drink. The only thing that would seem strange was me.

  On cue, Anthony said, “Don’t you want your coffee?”

  I looked up from the mug to face him.

  7.

  “Oh!” I said.

  Behind Anthony, the fronts of the houses opposite were dark, in shadow from a sun that was still too low to be seen above the rooftops. But the sky was a clear blue, and light was flooding into the kitchen. Birds were singing.

  “There.” I leaned forwards across the table. “There! That’s what I’m talking about!”

  Anthony stared back at me. “What are you talking about?”

  “What am I—?” I broke off, pushing back my chair, and went to the window. “It’s dawn! There’s light flooding into the room. There’s a milk float down the road.”

  “I know it’s dawn,” Anthony said.

  “So that’s it! That’s the strange thing! A moment ago it was dark, it was the middle of the night, and I was looking at the coffee, and now—”

  “Just a minute,” Anthony interrupted. “Did you say that the milk float is outside?”

  “Yes!”

  “Sorry, Carl,” said Anthony, rising hurriedly, and he almost ran out of the room. “I must catch the milkman before he goes,” he called from the hall.

  A few moments later, I watched through the window as Anthony jogged across his front lawn in his dressing gown, holding a twenty-pound note in the air like an Olympic torch.

  I felt a sudden and terrific feeling of despair.

  I knew that feeling. When I was a little boy, around five or six, I would have very powerful fever dreams. They always seemed to
involve scale—in a beige landscape, I would feel overwhelmed by a sense of the amazingly huge or the unbearably small. So, in the landscape, I would be small while the landscape was limitless and enormous. Or I would be huge while the landscape was claustrophobic and confining. Or both conditions would exist simultaneously, which was clearly impossible yet apparently the case.

  The beige landscape might be a flat plain. As a vast form, I might be a gigantic ball or sphere, far bigger than a planet or a sun. In my hands, or through my fingers, I would feel the hard corners and edges of cubes and pyramids, or the smooth curved surface of another gigantic sphere. Everything was represented in terms of geometry. Everything was flux. All of these states and sensations were extremely disturbing.

  Looking back on these dreams, I can rationalize that they were related to my parents’ bed, where I would be put to sleep if running a high temperature. I would be semi-asleep, perhaps semi-delirious, and the hugeness would be the distance from one side of the mattress to the other. The confinement would be the heavy duvet weighing down on my body. The hard corners and smooth surfaces would be the wooden bedframe or the sheets.

  It’s less easy to rationalize why I found the dreams so disturbing. I know I was running a high temperature, which is disturbing in itself, if only for being so physically uncomfortable. But there was something more than that—something that, to the mind of a five-or six-year-old, was particularly frightening. While I was locked into the dream, I had a very strong sense that the landscape was real. Moreover, that the landscape of geometry and flux and impossible scale was the only real landscape. That all other landscapes, including the one that held my parents and brother, were an illusion superimposed on the beige plains, and false.