The Coma

by Alex Garland

  On the table, the flowers that had been left for me were starting to wilt. One of the heads had fallen and looked as if it had hit my pillow before rolling down to the floor. A spray of orange pollen showed where it had landed.

  The next moment, I was lying on the bed. I was lying on the bed, and the nurse was walking across the room towards me.

  He sat on the edge of the mattress.

  “Carl,” he said. “Can you hear me?”

  “Yes,” I said, and my mouth didn’t move.

  “Carl, can you hear me?”

  His voice was loud and penetrating, but even in tone. The way you talk to the hard of hearing.

  “Yes.” My voice was equally loud and clear. “I can hear you.”

  Loud and clear, but completely internal.

  The nurse lifted my hand and put it in his. His fingers felt strong. His clasp felt warm and dry.

  “If you can hear me, Carl, I’d like you to squeeze. Can you do that for me? Squeeze as hard as you can.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Can you squeeze my hand for me, Carl?”

  “I am squeezing.”

  “Try as hard as you can.”

  “I am.”

  “Okay, Carl.”

  The nurse relaxed his grip, and my hand slipped out of his like a dead man’s.

  “Okay, Carl,” he said again, but quieter this time. More to himself. “We’ll try again tomorrow.”

  This is the way it is with dreams.

  Not for the first time in this dream, I woke up.

  3.

  I woke up with my mouth open as if I was screaming, sitting upright in bed, soaked in sweat the same way I’d been soaked in blood.

  Catherine, beside me, sat up too.

  “Jesus,” Catherine said. “Carl—what?” She had a tangle of hair hanging over her face, and she tripped over her words slightly. Sleep and adrenaline were clashing with each other. “What is it? What’s wrong?”

  “I’m dreaming.”

  “No, sweetheart, no. You were dreaming. You’re awake now. It’s okay. I’m right next to you.”

  “I’m awake?”

  “Yes, yes.”

  Catherine put her hand in mine and squeezed. I squeezed back.

  “I thought,” I said. “I thought I was . . .”

  I looked around me. I was in my bedroom. The window was open, and the curtains were pushed inwards by a breeze. A warm breeze, a warm night. On the bedside table, the clock read three in the morning, and the glow from the digital display lit the underside of a bunch of chrysanthemums, which stood in a vase.

  “Was it a bad dream?” Catherine asked. She was properly awake now. We both were. “Tell me.”

  “A bad dream. Jesus—a terrible dream. I feel as if I’ve been dreaming for days. Maybe months. I’ve never had a dream like it.”

  “Tell me,” she said again. “It will make it go away.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t know how I’d begin.”

  She leaned forwards and kissed me. “Try.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I—”

  I broke off.

  When Catherine had leaned forwards to kiss me, I had caught a slight scent of her perfume. And as I caught the scent, I also caught a half-memory, similar to the half-memories of falling from the garden swing or mending bicycle punctures. A window on a fragment of a moment, nothing revealed on either side of the window, no context. But inside the frame, something that felt strong and true.

  This was the half-memory: sometimes when Catherine came into my office, the scent of her perfume would remain after she had left. The scent would distract me pleasantly and pull me away from work for a short while, leading me into a daydream.

  I kissed Catherine back, and she responded, kissing me harder and lifting her hand to the side of my face. Then I pulled away.

  “The daydream,” I said, “was that the two of us were having an affair.”

  “. . . Your terrible dream?”

  “No. In my office, I would daydream that the two of us were having an affair.”

  “I don’t understand. Why would you daydream about that?”

  The curtains blew fully open for a brief moment, and the light from the street lamps outside illuminated half of Catherine’s face. She was smiling at me.

  “Exactly,” I said carefully. “Why would I daydream about that?”

  Catherine laughed. “You wanted the frisson. A simple relationship wasn’t enough.”

  “No. I daydreamed because we didn’t have a relationship.”

  The curtains had drifted shut again and her face was back in shadow, but I knew she was frowning. “I don’t understand, Carl. I really don’t understand what you’re talking about. Look—you’ve just woken from a nightmare. You’re confused, and you’re confusing me—”

  “Why are we in bed together?” I interrupted.

  “Why?”

  “Are we married?”

  “No—we’re not married. We’re . . . together.”

  “Together.”

  “Yes.”

  “We share each other’s lives.”

  She shrugged. “Yes.”

  “What’s my job?”

  She hesitated.

  “What work do I do in my office? It’s a simple question. Either as my secretary or my partner, you must know my job. What is it?”

  She didn’t answer.

  I reached over and switched on the reading light to see her face and expression more clearly. And her face was blank as I repeated the question, and she still didn’t answer.

  4.

  “It’s taken me some time,” I said. “I don’t know how much time. But I think I’ve just managed to understand what’s going on.”

  We were in the bathroom now. Catherine was wearing one of my T-shirts and sitting, knees together, arms folded as if she was cold, on the toilet seat. I was sitting on the edge of the bath. We faced each other over the pile of bandages I had left on the tiled floor.

  “I never woke up.”

  I took a moment to further order my thoughts while Catherine waited patiently.

  “I was attacked on a tube train on the way home from work, and I was put into a coma. And I never woke up. I just dreamed that I had.”

  “This is your terrible dream.”

  “It’s all my terrible dream. Waking, being interviewed by the police, going back home, going to Anthony’s . . . and lying in bed next to you. Sitting in a bathroom opposite you. But in truth . . .” I tried to be more precise. “. . . Or in reality, none of these things have happened. In reality, I’m lying in a hospital bed, with flowers on the side table, and falling pollen, and this is the dream I’m having while I sleep.”

  Catherine nodded.

  “Right,” I said. “You’re nodding, because I’m not telling you anything you don’t understand as well as I do. You know why?” I didn’t wait for a reply. “Because you’re not Catherine. I’m not talking to Catherine. I’m dreaming of Catherine. In effect, I’m talking to myself.” I started to smile at this train of thought, more from the relief of jigsaw pieces finding places than from pleasure. “You don’t know what my job is because I don’t know what my job is.”

  Catherine cocked her head to the side. “Why don’t you know what your job is, Carl?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. From the blow to the head that put me in a coma, maybe. It’s given me amnesia, or . . .”

  Catherine’s cocked head, the thoughtful expression on her face as she listened, her slim legs curling out from under the T-shirt, distracted me. I was reminded of how pretty she was.

  “I wonder,” I said. “At this moment, the real Catherine may be talking to the person who has replaced me at the office. Briefing them on the job that neither of us can remember. And if that person is anything like me, he’s already starting to daydream about you. Started trying to place your scent.”

  Catherine dipped her eyebrows as if she found the idea distasteful. “I don’t know why you say that,” s
he said. “At this moment, the real Catherine might be sitting beside your bed in the hospital. She might care about you as much as you care for her. It may have been her that brought you the flowers.”

  “That’s a nice thought.” I looked at her a moment. “You’re the best thing that’s happened in this dream so far.”

  “Thank you,” she said simply.

  “Ah,” I said. “I just remembered something else. You’ve always been good at accepting a compliment.”

  We fell into silence for a few moments, and when the silence lifted, we were back in the bedroom. Catherine had pulled open the curtains, and it was morning again.

  “So what are you going to do, Carl?” she asked.

  I shrugged. “What everyone in a coma has to do,” I said. “I have to wake up.”

  5.

  I had an idea: a layman’s guide to waking from a coma. The idea took the form of an image—coma patients sprawled on hospital beds while people sat beside them, reading from books or playing passages of music on portable tape machines. Family members and friends, trying to infiltrate a catalyst into the coma patient’s mind. Triggers, cascades, to lift the sleeper out of unconsciousness.

  I mentioned this to Catherine just before the dream began to relocate me. As I was leaving her, and the bedroom, and the open curtains, I said: “I need a catalyst.”

  “What kind of catalyst?” Catherine asked.

  “I don’t know. I could listen to some records, maybe.”

  She said, “So go to a record shop,” which was clearly excellent advice.

  The understanding that I was sleeping made much greater sense of these relocations. Whereas previously I had mistaken them for blackouts, and felt unsure retrospectively how I might have moved from a bathtub to Anthony’s front door, I now recognized them as familiar aspects of a dream life: that one moment you are here, and another you are there.

  Very familiar. I could estimate I had spent perhaps a third of my life asleep, and a large proportion of that time must have been spent dreaming.

  So: I knew dream life. In fact, in a way, I was actually comfortable with it. Dream life, I realized, was only confusing when you were awake. It was from the perspective of waking life that dream life seemed fractured and lacking consequence, lacking any certainty that one thing led to another. But from within dream life, the world was generally coherent. Not exactly an unconfusing world—just no more confusing than any other.

  And now that I knew I was dreaming, had become self-aware, I had time to notice the details of how the relocations occurred. Catherine did not vanish like a ghost startled by daylight. Instead, the sense that I was sharing a space with her began to fade. And as that sense faded, so did the image.

  Likewise, the bedroom. The place I was seeing was a sense of place. While I could sense it, I could see it. And if, as I shifted from one location to another, I could sense two places . . .

  If I could sense a bedroom and open curtains, but also sense a record shop, with strip neon lighting and shelves of stacked LPs, alphabetized ...

  Then for a moment, curtains would blow open over the window of the record shop, and the vase of flowers would stand on the record shop counter.

  6.

  There were no other customers. The labels and price tags were all handwritten. The walls were lined with cork, and pinned to the cork were picture discs in plastic sleeves and dog-eared posters, faded where closest to the window.

  “Can I help you?” asked the man behind the counter.

  I checked to see if he had a face I knew. But as far as I could tell, he didn’t. I don’t think I’d ever known any men with a ponytail—not on principle, just that our paths had never crossed.

  “Just looking,” I said, and he nodded.

  “If you need any help, just ask.”

  “Sure.”

  He nodded again, and began flicking through a magazine.

  I knew exactly what I was looking for. A catalyst from one of my earliest memories, from way back in childhood. Something I would have heard around the time I was learning to talk. As far back as memories go. Little Richard.

  Now would that be under L or R, I wondered. Did “Little” count as a first name?

  I guessed not, checked under L anyway, and found what I was looking for immediately. Oddly, also shelved under L were Chubby Checker and Fats Domino. But no matter, I’d found Little Richard’s greatest hits.

  I took my find back to the man at the counter.

  “Actually,” I said, “I could use some help. Could you play this for me?”

  The man took a look at what I was holding.

  “Which tune?”

  I didn’t need to look at the listing to know the answer. “‘Good Golly Miss Molly.’”

  In one movement, he slid out the LP, gave the vinyl an expert spin to flip the disc over, and dropped the record down onto the turntable.

  “You got it.”

  He must have placed the needle just after the start of the track, because the music started so abruptly. And with it, Little Richard’s distinctive singing voice.

  “Good Golly Miss Molly. So like a mo. Good Golly Miss Molly. So like a mo. The way the rocking and a rolling. You can’t get your mama home.”

  I felt a sudden lifting of my spirits. In exactly the way I had hoped, I felt transported by the sound. A wash of half-memories hit me—sitting on the floor, looking up at my dad, a tall and shadowy presence by the stereo, a machine which was mysterious to me and positioned beyond my reach, outside my line of sight.

  The feeling of nostalgia was so strong I half expected to wake up there and then. And perhaps I might have, if something strange hadn’t happened to the tune.

  Although I couldn’t really understand how, the passage of music that had been played seemed to loop directly and seamlessly back to the point where it had begun. No sooner had Little Richard completed his short chorus than he was singing it again.

  “Good Golly Miss Molly. So like a mo. Good Golly Miss Molly. So like a mo. The way the rocking and a rolling. You can’t get your mama home.”

  And now that I heard the chorus again, the lyrics didn’t seem quite right. They sounded right, just didn’t seem right.

  When the chorus started to repeat for a third time, I gestured to the man to lift the needle.

  “Heard enough?” he asked when the music stopped.

  “Yes,” I said—then corrected myself. “No. Is there something wrong with this record?”

  The man frowned. “Wrong?”

  “Is it stuck or . . .”

  “Is it scratched?”

  “Yes.”

  He seemed to take mild offense. “It’s not scratched. I don’t sell scratched records.”

  “Yes, but . . .”

  “Can you hear the needle jumping?”

  “No, but . . . it’s repeating. I mean—the lyrics. There’s more to the lyrics than that, isn’t there?”

  “Listen,” said the man. “Don’t play this song for the lyrics. It’s Little Richard, not Leonard Cohen. If you don’t like the lyrics, choose another record.”

  “. . . Right,” I said.

  “And I happen to like the lyrics,” he added, as I turned back to the shelves.

  I started searching again. And now I realized, as I flicked through the albums, that although the records were stacked as if they had been alphabetized, they were certainly not. Under A, I found people whose names began with H. Under B, I found Schubert. Under C, nobody was there at all.

  “I don’t understand your system here,” I called to the man.

  “I do,” he replied. “What are you looking for?”

  I thought a moment. “The Beach Boys.”

  “Under P.”

  “P?”

  “Or S.”

  “. . . Why?”

  “Pet Sounds.”

  Pet Sounds—perfect. This, more than Little Richard, was a soundtrack of childhood. This was after I had learned to talk, when I could choose a record for mysel
f, and could stand on a chair to reach the stereo, and could place the needle without being supervised. And sing along.

  “We sailed on the sloop John B. My grand-daddy and me. Show me the captain ashore, I want to go home. I want to go home, I want to go home. I feel so broke up. Let me go home.”

  So far, so good, I said to myself. So far, so . . .

  “The first mate he got the shits. He ate up all of my grits. Call the captain ashore . . .”

  Got the shits?

  “Don’t you want this?” called the man as I headed for the door.

  “Time waster,” as the door closed behind me with the chime of a bell.

  I felt puzzled. I didn’t quite know why these familiar songs were so elusive. I remained puzzled until I visited the bookshop on the other side of the road.

  7.

  The experience in the bookshop was worse. I walked up to the shop assistant with a stack of literature I had pulled from the shelves, and lifted the first book on the pile. “This is one of the greatest novels ever written,” I said.

  The girl examined the book jacket over the top of her glasses, then nodded her approval. “It’s wonderful. A classic. I’ve read it three times.”

  “Three times? Really? How long did it take you?”

  “Oh . . .” She looked surprised. “I don’t know. I read it first on holiday, and . . . Maybe a week or so.”

  “A week? I just read the whole thing in less than a minute.”

  “. . . A minute?”

  “Do you want to know how?”

  “Uh,” she said, glancing around nervously, “. . . I suppose so.”

  “This is how.” I began flicking through the pages. “Because the only sentence in this entire book is ‘Call me Ishmael,’ written a few hundred thousand times. Tell me—do you think that constitutes great literature?”