The Coma

by Alex Garland

  “It ...”

  “And how about this,” I said, showing her the second book in the pile. “Another great novel you can plow through in under three seconds. ‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.’ Want to know what happens next?”

  “I . . .”

  “Tough. That’s all there is. But no problem, we’ll move on to The Catcher in the Rye.” I cleared my throat. “‘Pretty phoney,’ said Holden Caulfield. The end.”

  “Sir . . .” said the girl.

  “Wait. I haven’t got to Austen yet. ‘It is a truth universally acknowledged that a man in want of a woman is a man in need of things that a woman with needs can want to universally acknowledge.’” I closed the book with a snap. “It goes on in a similar vein for another three-hundred-odd pages. It makes you wonder why they teach it at school, don’t you think?”

  “Sir,” said the girl, “I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”

  8.

  Outside the bookshop, I looked at the buildings opposite and I marveled at the absolute madness of my memory. On these buildings, I could see bricks. On the bricks, I could see variations in color from one brick to the next, and between the bricks I could see areas that needed repointing. I could see water stains beneath ledges and around gutters, and lead flashing beneath dormer windows. The windows were sash. In one pane, I could see that the glass was perfectly flat, whereas in the next pane I could see that the glass was subtly warping its reflection, and I knew that the flat glass was from a modern replacement following a break or crack, and the warped glass was original.

  The road surface. Changes in the road surface, different kinds of tarmac, different shades of gray. Shapes of different tarmac—interlocking and overlapping rectangles. Strips, where the road surface had been dug up for work to the water main, or electricity lines, or gas supply. Different levels to the tarmac. Places where a pothole had been repaired. Places where a pothole had not yet been repaired.

  The pavement, marked with grease and rain and chewing gum. Thousands of pieces of discarded chewing gum, pressed flat by pedestrians into a constellation. And if I reached down to touch the pavement, I could feel grit beneath my fingers. The grit stuck to the natural oils on my hand. If I lifted my hand and looked at the grit, I could see that like grubby snowflakes each grain was different from the others.

  Detail. Spectacular. Fractal. The threads that constructed my shirt, and the smaller threads that constructed the larger threads. The shapes of the clouds above, the shapes that led to further shapes, and the slow movement of the clouds across the sky. The cloud shadows that passed across the tarmac and softened the brightness of the closed windows. An open window, through which I could dimly make out the patterned wallpaper inside.

  Spectacular, fractal, awesome detail of the way the world looked. Presented by my memory effortlessly, with no act of concentration. No pause to assemble or consider the image as my gaze swept from left to right, or up or down, or anywhere.

  And yet. Call on my memory to remember a handful of words from a familiar song, and it tripped, and it fell.

  Now, surrounded by this impressive and useless detail, I considered for a moment that waking from the coma was going to be more difficult than I had first imagined. I suppose that my initial realization—that I was dreaming—had made the coma seem more domestic and less dramatic than it really was. After all, up to this point in my life, all I had ever done was wake from dreams. Waking was the most reliable part of a dream, as built into dreams as death is to life.

  You dream, you wake: you live, you die.

  Somehow, it occurred to me that if you die, you wake.

  From the top of one of the tall buildings I had been examining, I stood on the coping stones that bordered the flat roof. This was a red-brick mansion block with shops at street level that sold empty books and fractured records. There were eight stories between me and the chewing gum and the pavement.

  I held my arms slightly away from my body and stretched my fingers out like the feathers at the end of a hawk’s wing. Although I had no aerodynamic expectations of my fingers. The purpose here was not to fly.

  Looking down, courage deserted and found me by turns, and rocked me gently on the soles of my shoes. The courage always seemed at odds with the wind you find at high places. When the courage was with me, the wind pushed me away from the ledge, catching my shirt, ballooning the material around my back. When my courage was failing, the wind pushed me from behind, towards the drop, pressing my shirt flat.

  I shut my eyes. I listened to the sound of the wind. Through the sound of the wind, I heard a diesel engine.

  The next time the wind blew, I allowed myself to step in that direction.

  9.

  “You again.”

  I opened my eyes and found myself gazing into someone else’s. In a rearview mirror, the eyes of the cabbie who had driven me back from the hospital.

  “Yes,” I said. “Me again.”

  “What are the chances of that happening? Picking you up twice.”

  “Surprisingly high,” I said, relaxing into the back seat. “I must have stepped backwards.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I said, I must have stepped backwards. From the roof.”

  “What roof?”

  “I nearly just jumped off the top of a building.”

  “Life getting you down?”

  “No.”

  “What stopped you from jumping?”

  “I don’t know. The wind wasn’t with me.”

  The cabbie’s curiosity seemed to have passed. “So, where are we going?” he asked, businesslike.

  I thought for a moment. “I’ll get back to you on that,” I said.

  So passages from favorite pieces of music or literature were too incomplete to provide the waking trigger I was looking for. And if my encounters with Anthony or Mary or Catherine were anything to go by, then conversations with dream people were not going to do the trick either.

  But if my memory could be relied upon to produce buildings with accuracy, then perhaps I still had an ace up my sleeve. Some buildings, or locations, were as evocative as music or conversations. And buildings could be explored. Rooms could lead to corridors that led to further rooms.

  It was a question of finding the right building.

  “Do you know where I went to school?” I said.

  “I couldn’t guess,” the cabbie replied. “Give me a clue.”

  I shook my head. “It’s not a guessing game. I’m asking you if you happen to know where I went to school.”

  “Would I know a thing like that?”

  “I just thought perhaps you might.”

  He craned around in his seat to shoot me an incredulous look. “I’d have thought you might.”

  “Yes,” I agreed. “But I don’t.”

  “So, is it your old school you’re after?”

  “Not necessarily. It was just the first place that came to mind. What I’m after is . . .” I paused. “A trip down memory lane.”

  “Memory Lane . . . is that south of the river?”

  “I was using a figure of speech.”

  “And I was making a joke.”

  When it became apparent that I wasn’t about to laugh, the cabbie cleared his throat. “If I was after a trip down memory lane, I’d want to go back to the house where I grew up.”

  “Ah. That would be ideal.”

  “So why don’t we head there?”

  “I’d love to.”

  I didn’t add anything more, such as the street address the cabbie was doubtless expecting.

  Eventually, he said, “You don’t know where that is either.”

  “No,” I said.

  “So how do you expect us to find it?”

  “I suppose . . .”

  I suppose I was hoping that by mentioning the house I grew up in, or my old school, we would simply find ourselves there. It had happened that way with the hospital, and the record shop, and standing on the roof. Up to
now, the relocations had been quite easy. Even helpful. But perhaps not anymore.

  “. . . I was hoping for the best,” I finished.

  “I think you have to do more than hope,” said the cabbie, and I wondered if he was chiding me.

  “What do you suggest?”

  “Well, I’m a cab driver. I drive around everywhere. Chances are, I’ve driven past the house where you grew up on more than one occasion. I’ve probably dropped off on that street. I probably know it well.”

  “Okay . . .”

  “If you could manage to describe something about the house or the area, there’s a good chance you might be able to tell me more than you think.”

  “Describe the house . . .”

  Yes—a sensible enough suggestion. But hopelessly let down by my amnesia, which at the moment was permitting me only the snapshot I had seen in the record shop—of a child’s perspective of a shadow father figure standing by a turntable that was out of sight.

  The cabbie was waiting. I felt too embarrassed to say I couldn’t tell him anything useful, so I winged it.

  “The house had a roof,” I said, then added, “obviously,” to show I was only getting started.

  “Roof,” the cabbie noted seriously.

  “And a front door. Walls and what have you.”

  “Roof, front door, walls. With you so far.”

  I tried to think of other features my house was likely to have had. I didn’t want to mislead him with false information, but I wasn’t sure what else I could confidently suggest.

  “Windows?” the cabbie prompted.

  “Yes,” I said quickly. “Several.”

  “A front garden?”

  A front garden.

  I had a sudden flash, a sense of place. A sense of movement, backwards and forwards. Then falling.

  “. . . A swing. Of course.”

  “What?”

  “A small front garden, with a tree and a swing.”

  “Ah. So now we’re getting somewhere. Do you know how many houses have a front garden and a tree?”

  “I don’t.”

  “Fewer than most. So I think your house will be found in one of the more comfortable parts of town.”

  I nodded. “I don’t recall discomfort.”

  “There,” said the cabbie. “And I’ll tell you another thing. I would hazard a guess that the house was built after cars became commonplace. Because in the older houses, where the streets were widened, the front gardens disappeared. No—you grew up in a suburb.”

  “You’re very good,” I said.

  The cabbie’s eyes sparkled again. “I can picture the place already.”

  “Yes,” I said. “So can I.”

  10.

  It was clear that nobody had lived in the house for quite some time, because the grass in the front garden was meadowlike, and the windows were black and framed with peeling paint, and the net curtains inside were gray and torn. So my parents, or my dream parents, whose faces I couldn’t picture and whose names I couldn’t place, were either dead or had moved on long ago.

  It was also clear that this was a dream house. The dilapidation was not a memory but a representation of a poorly remembered past. It was a metaphor I could walk around in and clear metaphorical cobwebs from.

  And it was also, for these reasons, a disappointment: that this rather obvious representation of a poorly remembered past was the best I could do. Long grass and black windows. A bit of rope hanging from a tree that once held the swing, whose wooden board had rotted away. A front path, where moss grew over broken concrete and dandelions pushed through the cracks.

  But never mind. This was the house I’d grown up in, so at least I was in the right place. And little details about the house were coming back to me fast. I knew that when I pushed open the front door, it would give a low bass creak, from the wood rather than the hinges, and I knew that as I stepped through, loose hall tiles would click as I walked across them.

  “Remember what I told you,” the cabbie called through the driver’s window.

  “Remember what?” I called back.

  “About taking things slowly.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  Behind me, the cab’s diesel engine started up, then faded.

  11.

  The wood did creak, the tiles did click, and there was further familiarity in the hallway’s cool and settled air, and the sound of the front door closing behind me.

  There was something else too. It was subtle. It was a slight lift away from the floor I stood on, as if I had become lighter. It was the feeling after you’ve put down a heavy bag you’ve been carrying for a while, that your shoulders are drifting towards the ceiling.

  And—it was a shift within myself. In the fabric of myself, as if, relative to the house and the hallway, I was occupying less of the space than I should. I lifted my hand to inspect it, and expected to see through my fingers as though my flesh and bones were cloudy glass. Instead, I simply saw my hand. But the feeling remained. Whether I was or wasn’t, I felt translucent.

  I would say it took me several seconds to recognize these sensations for what they were—but dream life was not structured according to seconds or minutes. Instead I could say that several moments passed, or just that something passed, until I realized: this exercise, this return to the house in which I grew up, was going to work. In the house, I would wake.

  In fact, I was waking.

  The thought gave me pause. It made me catch my breath. Somehow I knew, or felt sure, the waking process would be fragile, as delicate a process as falling asleep. It was something I could get wrong. A sudden sound, anything that jarred or surprised, and the opportunity would be gone.

  So as the cabbie had instructed, I slowed myself down and looked around. From my position in the hallway, I had a choice. I could climb the stairs or continue across the clicking tiles towards the kitchen and the living room.

  In the living room, I’d find the stereo. I remembered how powerful the effect of listening to Little Richard had been in the record shop, before the song began to fracture and loop. It seemed to me that if I were to listen to “Miss Molly” here, the effect would be that much more powerful.

  But it also seemed to me that the stairs were exerting a kind of gravity, pulling me in their direction. I wondered if I was tracking a particular memory, and if there was a route I had to follow through the house. The memory might be dependent on sticking to the route, and waking might be dependent on completing the memory.

  I turned the choices over and decided I should go with gravity, which I assumed to be the working of my instincts. So I climbed the stairs and forced myself to be unhurried, and as I climbed I noticed that the lightness and the sense of translucence remained. Maybe even grew a little stronger as I ascended. This made me confident that if there was a route to follow, I was on it.

  At the top of the stairs I stopped again, now on the landing, looking for another gravity tug to lead me. Here, I could walk straight ahead to the family bathroom. Or, to the left, down the corridor, was my parents’ bedroom, which overlooked the street. And to the right was my bedroom.

  While I waited for an indication of which direction to take, I noticed that the dilapidation I had seen on the outside of the building did not extend to the inside. The house was quiet and somewhat lifeless, but in good shape. The brown carpet on the landing wasn’t frayed, the wallpaper wasn’t stained or hanging damply off the plaster.

  It was, however, dark compared to the bright day outside. Ambient light filtered under the closed doors off the landing and from the hallway below, but I couldn’t see as well as I would have liked. I still had the slight blindness that follows the sudden movement from light to dark, and my eyes seemed unwilling or unable to adjust.

  I continued waiting. It finally occurred to me that the reason I wasn’t being pulled in any particular direction was because I was in the right place for the memory to begin.

  12.

  “Hello, Carl.”


  The door to my parents’ bedroom had opened, and the landing was filled with light, and now my unadjusted eyes were blinded by the brightness rather than the gloom.

  “How are you doing today?”

  In the doorway was the tall silhouette I had recollected in the record shop. It was my dad, backlit, stooping down to look at me while I blinked and squinted against the glare.

  Then he was walking in my direction, right at me it seemed, a looming shadow—and I thought we were going to collide and he would send me falling backwards down the stairs. But simultaneously, something was happening to the perspective of the shadow—it was looming unnaturally large, unnaturally fast. And at the moment I expected and braced for the collision, and my dad’s shadow swamped even my peripheral vision in blackness—he simply passed right through me.

  I made sense of it moments later. He hadn’t walked through me, he had walked over me. That is how large he was, and how small I was.

  I turned quickly, just in time to see his figure reach the bottom of the stairs. Then he had doubled back around, and was walking down the hallway towards the living room. Frustratingly, if it hadn’t been for my angled viewpoint at the top of the stairs, I might have been able to see him clearly. But instead I saw him only as a moving shape, a zoetrope between the banisters.

  13.

  I followed him of course. I had confidence now. A good deal of confidence about the way this would play out, and why it would play out that way. Confidence in my whole approach to having discovered I was still in a coma. A degree of self-congratulation that I hadn’t panicked, too much. Self-congratulation that I had been calm and thoughtful, and had thought and planned my way out of what was, in truth and in all senses, a mess.

  It had all worked out like this:

  I’m attacked.

  I fall unconscious.

  I think I wake.

  The world is fractured and weird.

  I think I’m traumatized.