by Alex Garland
I think I’m brain damaged.
I realize I am neither, I’m in a coma.
I realize I have to wake.
So I plan.
I look for a catalyst, and I find a fragment of a memory, in the form of “Miss Molly.”
By searching, and by coaxing, I find more fragments.
Gardens, swings, bricks, and windows.
They lead me to the house where I grew up.
Where the “Miss Molly” memory is placed in context.
Where I become light and weightless.
And the memory becomes as complete.
As complete as it needs to be.
And—perhaps this is where I congratulate myself the most—I do all this alone. I do all this alone; everything I achieve, I achieve alone, because it’s my head I’m locked into, and I share this space with nobody but myself.
In the living room, I saw my dad. Standing beside him was my mother. Still silhouettes, now against the French windows to the back garden. But I didn’t need to see their faces to know them.
I was unable to speak. The fabric of my body was now as weightless as a single spider web.
They both turned to look at me.
Then my father said, “This one bothers me a lot.”
And my mother said, “More than the others?”
part three
1.
Waking is rising: You wake up, not down.
Waking is rising, which is why my shoulders were drifting as I walked into the house. At that point I was like a diver on the bottom of the ocean, discarding lead weights. And when I saw the shadows of my mother and father, the final lead belt was released and I began a quick upward trajectory.
It was only as I started to rise that I realized how cold and dark the water was at the bottom of the ocean, and how badly my lungs were aching to take a breath, and how keen I was to leave the bottom of the ocean behind.
The trajectory felt one-way. The rising was helpless and inevitable. I felt sure that nothing could return me to the place I was leaving. I was passing through thermoclimes, and the water was warming and becoming brighter. I was moving towards splintered light.
I remembered a few things about waking.
I remembered the sense of surprise as dream life and waking life swapped primacy, and the way in which the most tangible and deeply involving dreams could bleach entirely away. I remembered that waking life had primacy, that the dreamed horror of losing your family was nothing to the reality of a pillow at the back of your head.
I remembered things that made waking life so different from dream life. The crystal qualities, the sense that the world existed in three hundred and sixty degrees rather than in narrow bands of vision. I remembered that waking was a hundred different kinds of clarities, and I braced for them to come as a cascade.
In anticipation of the clarities, it was already hard to believe that dream life had ever seemed so real.
Then, just as my fingers, the outstretched fingers of my outstretched arm, were about to break through . . .
Just as I was about to wake, something closed around my ankle and stopped my ascent. It held me in the warm water, at the boundary of full consciousness, so close to air and daylight that I could see shapes behind the water’s distorting surface.
I blinked and tried to focus, and saw two figures. They weren’t my parents at all.
2.
“This one bothers me a lot.”
“More than the others?”
“More than the others. Yes.”
“Why?”
Two people stood beside me.
A man. The nurse. I recognized his voice.
A woman. A doctor, perhaps. She had asked why I bothered the nurse more than the others, but she sounded distracted, uninterested in the answer.
They weren’t looking at me. They were looking at a clipboard.
I looked up. I felt as if I were in a frame. I could see metal bars that were vertical, and others that were horizontal.
I looked down and saw that something was covering my nose and mouth. A ventilator. It seemed to be both muffling and amplifying my breathing.
I tried to move my hand. I couldn’t tell if anything happened.
“The lack of movement,” said the nurse.
The doctor moved away. Towards an area of brightness, maybe a window, maybe the door of the room. Either way, out of my sight.
But I could still hear her voice.
“Well,” she said. “We won’t know for certain unless he wakes.”
3.
If my eyes really had been open—and for a few seconds I really had been looking at the interior of my ward room—I now closed them.
Waking is rising, and dreaming is sinking. You wake up, you fall asleep.
I began sinking back into my dream.
It’s possible that the nurse and the doctor were talking in a way that was careless or irresponsible, that they had forgotten the presence of the comatose in the way that people can forget the presence of cameras. But I don’t think so. I think the nurse was talking to me, directly and deliberately. I knew of at least one instance in which he had done this before, when he had asked me to squeeze his hand. And there were earlier instances when he had been a presence in my dream, which I imagine was a result of his bedside presence. And now he had orchestrated a conversation with a doctor because it was a conversation he wanted me to overhear.
I had been sent a telegraph, a headline piece of information: that there was a choice to be made, between the uncertainties of the dream world and the uncertainties of the waking world.
So I didn’t kick to keep from sinking, or struggle or fight. But I did feel some despair, that overcoming one strange and desperate situation had only left me in another. And I did feel frightened, that uncertainty was the only prize on offer. And I imagine that is why the dream world I returned to was so different from the dream world I had left.
4.
I sank and I sank, and when I reopened my eyes, I was in total darkness. So I assumed I was still sinking, or descending, and I simply had to wait until I reached the plane on which the dream landscape would reestablish itself.
An amount of time passed—long enough for me to realize that either I was descending at a slower rate than I had risen or I was descending to a far deeper plane than my previous landscape. Then more time passed, and I began to wonder if perhaps I wasn’t actually descending anymore. Perhaps I had already arrived at whatever place I had been descending to, and was now motionless.
With nothing to see in the total darkness, I had to rely on touch. But a cautious sweep of my arms told me there was nothing immediately within reach of my hands. Then an equally cautious step told me that there was nothing in reach of my feet either. In fact, I didn’t seem to be standing on anything. Meaning, I supposed, that wherever I was, I was suspended.
But suspended in what? While rising, I’d had the sensation of moving upwards through water. I wasn’t in water now. When I moved my arms or legs, or turned my head, I felt no resistance. And when I moved my arms more violently, fast and hard enough to have felt the resistance of air, I still felt nothing.
I took a pause. To try to think. But I didn’t get a chance to think, because during the pause, I noticed that besides feeling nothing at the ends of my limbs, and seeing nothing, I could also hear nothing. Not the sound of my breathing, or the rustle of my clothes, or the sound of any other person or entity or machine or object that shared this space with me.
So I tried to speak, and I made no sound.
And I tried to clap my hands, but when I swung my hands together, my palms made no contact. Nor was the swinging of my hands something I could feel sure I had actually done. None of my movements were evidenced by any sensation whatsoever. I couldn’t feel the parting of my lips or the blinking of my eyes.
Finally, I reached up to touch my face, and there simply wasn’t anything there. My fingers moved into emptiness, continuing backwards through what should hav
e been a skull, and beyond, until the movement became impossible, requiring a dislocation of arms and shoulder sockets that I clearly didn’t have. At which point, I lost track of any understanding of what movements might be, and how the now nonexistent parts of my body might have previously related to one another. I lost track of any understanding of physicality at all.
I was conscious, and that’s all. Beyond my consciousness, there wasn’t anything else.
More time passed. I waited for something to happen.
Nothing happened.
I was calm. Or frozen. I felt as if I was on the verge of having the most terrifying thought in the world, but I wasn’t having it quite yet.
Then I had it.
5.
Is this what I am?
It doesn’t sound so terrifying, spelled out like that. Maybe you had to be there . . .
In any case, the thought was: Is this what I am?
As in, if I were to lose an arm in an accident, I’d still be me. Nobody would say I wasn’t me. They wouldn’t say, He used to be Carl, then he lost an arm, and now he’s John.
And if, in another accident, I lost the other arm, the same would be true. Likewise with my legs, my sight, my hearing, my speech, my sense of touch. You could keep going, keep stripping me down, until I was only a consciousness, suspended in a void.
But take away the consciousness, and suddenly I’m gone. Carl is no more. And take away the consciousness but leave the body, leave the full complement of arms and legs, and I’m still gone.
So: whether dreaming or waking, this is what I am.
Whether dreaming or waking, this is what I am?
This?
From that point, it was only a hop, skip, and a jump to the lonely meaninglessness of everything. And having already lost my body, I now lost my mind.
As a consciousness in a void, losing your mind is serious, given that a mind is all you are. Unlike losing your mind in the context of waking life, nothing external is going to assert itself as a counterpoint to your breakdown. You aren’t going to find or be provided with any anchors.
That said, “losing your mind” is a figure of speech, and it’s misleading in this context. If you are a mind in a void and you lose your mind, it implies that your mind is misplaced, somewhere else, which leaves you only as a void. Something blank. But that’s not what happened, because obviously I still had my mind; it just wasn’t functioning. And actually, I was the opposite of blank—I was full up, or overly full, and bursting.
The surprise for me is that I can remember exactly what losing my mind was like. It’s tangible to me; it’s a taste in my mouth. And, even more surprisingly, I think I’m able to describe it.
Imagine a tone of voice. The tone is sort of dreary. But it’s also despairing and frustrated. If the tone was matched to a voice, it would be the nasal voice of a boring man, intoning his despair weakly: Oh no, no, God, oh dear, oh no ... But forget about what the voice is saying—it’s the tone that’s important. Dreary, despairing, frustrated, pathetic, and quite loud. So take that loud tone and make it ingredient number one.
Second ingredient, very straightforward: fear. Jittery, panicky. Something that you wouldn’t think would coexist with the dreary tone, but does. Quivering, cold, biting fear.
The third and final ingredient, also straightforward: random words. Random words, strung together. Strings of words. Simple and unhinged. Without pattern, no looping, no meaningful repetitions. And
SHOUTED AT TOP VOLUME.
BENT UNION TRACK OVER FINE CUBA ORE UNDER RED SORT ETHER INK TOKE INTRO SATURN NILE OR TRAP AMPS SECT REVS AVE NET DRILL OFF MINT AMOK SATURN IND TIMED FELL IS REP SEVER TALLOW SAP EASE EVENT MET SAW
Crash these things together, make them exist to the exclusion of everything else, and that’s it.
6.
There are two things that puzzle me now. One is, how long did I stay in that insensible state? Obviously, it wasn’t indefinite or I wouldn’t be here now. But neither was it a short period of time. Somehow, I know that. It wasn’t the equivalent of an alarm waking you at eight, then you slip back to sleep and have what feels like a long dream, then wake again to find that only ten minutes have passed.
If I were to make a guess, while taking into account the odd time-keeping qualities of internal life, I’d say I was adrift for perhaps two or three months of waking life. But a guess is all it is.
The second thing that puzzles me is: What pulled me out? Given the void, the absence of anchors, why didn’t the mind loss continue indefinitely?
That I really have no answer to, and no guess either. All I know is, quite abruptly, like a tap being turned off, the madness stopped and I was shunted back into the more familiar dream landscape I had been inhabiting before.
It felt like home.
It was home. It was my bed, and I was with Catherine. And she had her arms around me, and she was saying, “Hey, don’t worry. It’s okay. It’s okay.” Then she was kissing me and saying that she loved me. And her lips were soft and warm, and I could smell her, and it all felt completely real.
And I although I was confused, punch-drunk, mentally beaten up, my presence of mind—my lost mind—began returning to me amazingly fast.
And I knew this was still a dream, and this wasn’t really my bed, and Catherine wasn’t really there, and didn’t really love me. But, crucially, I didn’t care.
7.
That morning, this is what we did. We made love, we took a shower, then we went downstairs and had breakfast.
None of it was real. I didn’t care.
For breakfast I ate bacon and toast.
It wasn’t real bacon, and I didn’t care.
A couple of times, something weird happened. For example, the bacon and toast took literally no time to cook, they just appeared. And the kitchen was maybe two times narrower than its real-life counterpart, with higher ceilings.
But I didn’t care.
Because why would I? Strip down my waking life, and I’m a consciousness in a void. Strip down my dream life, and I’m a consciousness in a void.
What difference?
After breakfast, we went for a walk.
8.
At the end of my street, we turned right on to the main road that led down to the river. It was mid-morning and the day was shaping up to be hot. Catherine was wearing a sun hat and a pretty summer dress, cotton, flower patterned. I was wearing jeans and a short-sleeved shirt, and I carried a small backpack with a water bottle inside and a camera.
Rather than walk the length of the main road in the growing heat and tire ourselves out, we chose to take the pedestrian subway, which had recently been extended. One could now travel the full distance to the river in air-conditioning, away from the traffic noise and exhaust fumes. One could even do a little shopping en route. Several outlets had opened up in the small alcoves that lined the walkway, most of them selling clothes and jewelry. It made the journey a little longer and a little slower than it might otherwise have been, because Catherine kept pausing to check the wares. I would be chatting away, in mid-sentence, and turn to look at her, only to realize that for the last few paces I had been talking to myself.
The pedestrian subway was also a little disorienting, because it was hard to judge how far one had traveled. Periodically there were staircases back to street level, but by some strange oversight, they had not yet been signposted to mark at which cross streets they exited. So we ended up guessing which exit to take and, by chance, chose the right one.
We came out at the bridge, where we paused to take a drink from the water bottle. We had been underground for perhaps half an hour, but already the day had got a good deal hotter. Either that or we had been softened by the air-conditioning. I began to wish I’d had Catherine’s good sense and brought a cap along, because I could tell that in this weather I was likely to burn.
“Where do you want to go?” I asked Catherine.
Catherine shrugged. She was leaning on the guardrail of the bridge, look
ing down at the slow-moving water below. “Do you think they eat their catch?” she said, indicating the fishermen who were sitting on the sloped concrete banks. “The river always looks so dirty.”
“I don’t think they do,” I said. “I think there may be a rule about having to put the catch back.”
But I wasn’t sure. A little way down the river, the banks were crowded with the wooden shacks and shanties where many of these fishermen lived. A different part of town, less affluent. Looking at their homes, it suddenly seemed unlikely they spent their days idly fishing for sport.
“I think they do eat them,” Catherine said, maybe having followed the same thought process as me. “I bet they taste of mud.”
“The fishermen or the fish?”
“Both.” She stood up from the guardrail. “How about we head through the antique district and then up to one of the shrines?”
Now it was me who stopped at every shop window and Catherine who hovered impatiently ahead. I was distracted mainly by the small carved bone and ivory figurines that were for sale in most of the shops. The good ones were all far too expensive to buy, but I enjoyed looking at them, and I liked the smell of incense that floated out from the doorways.
One figurine caught my eye. It was an old man, squatting, with one hand resting on his knee and the other holding a fan. His head was angled, and he was looking straight up at me. He had an odd expression—a kind of grimace, slightly disapproving, but also angrily amused.
Beside the old man was another figurine, this one standing. It seemed even older than the rest, but it wasn’t ivory or bone. It looked as if it was made from clay or porcelain, and I wondered if this meant it would be more affordable than the others. The years had beaten it up a little. The glaze was cracked and chipped, and all of its protuberances—the folds of its clothes, its feet and hands—were worn down as if it had spent years knocking around inside someone’s pocket.