The Coma

by Alex Garland

  Examining it more closely, I saw that although the figurine was proportioned like a man and wearing clothes, a robe, its face was oddly pointed. Not a human face. There was a snout, doglike, but less pronounced.

  As I looked at the curious face, a hand inside the shop picked it up. The shopkeeper, who looked not unlike the squatting old man I had been examining before, was gazing at me with the same odd grimace.

  He held the standing figurine up to the window for me to see, then gave it a little flick on the back. And the dog face stuck its tongue out at me.

  The shopkeeper’s grimace changed into a grin. This was his little trick to surprise customers. He did it a couple more times, and I saw that the tongue was loose in the head, a small sliver of bone. Its natural resting position was inside, but when the back was tapped, out it came.

  The shopkeeper said something but I missed it. I cupped a hand to my ear.

  “Monkey God!” I heard faintly through the glass.

  “Having fun?” asked Catherine, appearing beside me.

  “I thought it was a dog,” I said.

  The shopkeeper did the trick again, pleased to have doubled his audience.

  We ate lunch in a cheap restaurant that Catherine knew. She said it had to be cheap, given that we had left the antique district with the porcelain Monkey God in my pocket, loosely bound in bubble wrap. It turned out to be not less expensive than the ivory figures, but more. But I wasn’t overly worried at the cost. In fact, the cost was the point. I think I wanted Catherine’s scandalized reaction to my extravagance more than I wanted the figurine itself.

  Catherine wanted to wait until the late afternoon, so the heat didn’t tire us out as we walked around the grounds of the shrine she wanted to visit, which she had described as her favorite in the city. So we let lunch drag on a while. We drank tea, and let the waitress keep refilling the cups, and left the bill unpaid on the table until the shadows of the passersby were just starting to lengthen.

  9.

  We explored the shrine and temple complex for hours. First, the cool interior, where the floor-boards made a singsong creak as you walked over them, in a way that made you think of birdsong. Then the gardens, which were full of secret areas, and quiet streams and ponds.

  10.

  We ended up eating ice cream, sitting on stone steps beneath the canopy of a huge maple tree growing near the main entrance.

  “So, you haven’t yet told me,” I said, “why this is your favorite shrine.”

  “Well,” Catherine replied, “it has a very dramatic front door.” She pointed with the little shovel spoon that had been tucked into the ice cream lid. The front doors—or gates, to be more accurate—were indeed dramatic, and famous for their size. A feat of ancient engineering: they were more than twice the height of any of the surrounding buildings, modern or old. A tourist attraction: on the street side of the gates, there was a booth where you could have your photo taken with a camera with a distorted lens, so that both you and the full size of the gates were included in the frame. Sometimes after getting the photo, the tourists would leave without bothering to visit the shrine behind.

  “But also, it’s very peaceful,” Catherine continued.

  I nodded. “I can’t hear any traffic. Just . . .”

  “Floorboards.”

  I laughed. “Yes. What’s that about, the floor-boards?”

  “They were built that way. The iron nails are driven into the wood at an angle, or something like that. The idea was that if a thief arrived during the night, the noise would alert everyone to their presence.”

  “A burglar alarm.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “You know a lot about this place.”

  “As I said, it’s my favorite.”

  “You’ve been here often.”

  Catherine paused. “Actually, no. This is only my second time.”

  A group of young monks walked by. I noticed as they passed that the sky was turning the same color as their robes. The sun, which was out of sight behind the tall gates, was either close to or on the horizon line.

  I ate the last spoonful of my ice cream.

  “You know what?” I said, putting down the empty carton. “This was a perfect day.”

  “Yes,” said Catherine. “It was a good day.”

  “A perfect day,” I repeated, thinking back to our morning in bed, and late breakfast, and the general way in which our time together had unfolded. “I can’t imagine what else I’d want in the hours of daylight.”

  “Uh-huh. It . . .”

  She stopped. Her voice had caught.

  “It . . . ?” I prompted.

  “It was good.”

  “You’ve had a better day than this?”

  Catherine didn’t reply.

  “You won the lottery, and found a Caravaggio that someone had tossed into your back garden.”

  I glanced at her, expecting something: a smile, or at least a half-smile. But instead she suddenly looked rather sad. I felt confused. I could tell that there had been a shift in the atmosphere, but I couldn’t see the reason for the shift.

  “The first time I came here,” Catherine said eventually. “That was better.”

  “Why?” I said, and immediately tried to retract. “No,” I began. “You don’t have to—”

  But she cut in. “I was with someone else.”

  “Right,” I said. Then repeated it. “Right.”

  I sounded pretty stupid. Clumsy. I suppose I just wanted to make it sound like we were still having a normal, unloaded conversation. Which was a waste of time, because a couple of seconds later I loaded it up again by asking, “Who?”

  “It doesn’t matter who,” she replied. “That’s the point.”

  I frowned. I wondered whether she was being deliberately provocative—weighting her lines to cause maximum unsettling effect. But in the way she returned my gaze, I could see that, in truth, she was doing the opposite. Her expression was regretful, and affectionate.

  “What I’m saying, Carl, is that a good day only becomes a perfect day if you can share it with someone else.”

  “Oh,” I said, as the penny dropped. “I see.”

  Then the garden and Catherine and everything were drowned out by a sudden flood of words. Similar to the shouted word strings I had heard before ...

  11.

  In nirvana come and settle eden yet orca understood ardent rapture every infernal new talent earns rare endless summer towards eventual delight THE HIDDEN ENDING WOODEN ALLEGORIES LEFT KENNELED WITH AFFECTIONATE SAVAGE TO HEED REGENERATION OF UNSTRUCTURED GARDEN HAVING TAUGHT HASTE EVEN CERTAINTY IS TRUSTING YOU OR FORTUNE KICKED YOUR ORIGINS TO OTHERS.

  . . . But oddly, although the words seemed less random than before, I think they had less meaning.

  It can be hard to figure out what has meaning and what doesn’t.

  On the floor of my bathroom, the blood and bandages had dried into a solid mass. They cracked as I tried to lift them. Desiccated, they crumbled in my hands into black dust and fibers.

  Through the window of their kitchen, I watched Mary position Joshua in a high chair as Anthony stood by the sink, looking out over his front garden. I was standing directly in his line of sight, but he was gazing right through me. Looking back at him, I decided I had never known him, or his wife, or their little son. Their faces were generic, their features anonymous. They seemed more like the mannequins of a window display than a family.

  From the back seat of the cab, I decided that the eyes in the rearview mirror were the eyes of a friend. Older eyes than mine, belonging to someone I had trusted and felt guided by. I didn’t know who the friend was. I did know they were real, and important enough to me that this sliver of face could muscle through my amnesia. But when I tried to maneuver in my position on the seat, to see a little more of the face, the reflection in the mirror remained unchanged.

  I caught the smell of milk, warming in morning sunshine. From the radio in the milk float cabin, an indistinct tune was lo
oping through a fuzz of static.

  I tapped the back of the Monkey God, and the tongue popped out.

  The curtains blew open.

  All these relocations came fast. The transitions between them felt seamless. They were, I suppose, me thinking.

  12.

  In the final relocation, everything darkened rather quickly, in the same unexpected way as when a cloud passes over the sun. But the drop in light was closer to a moonless night. I felt a lurch of anxiety, fearing I might be about to be returned to the darkness of the void.

  I put my hands out. If I had an object, or sensation, to hold on to, I could keep that place at bay.

  I found, at the point of my elbow, at each arm, a curving shape.

  That reassured me. Cautiously, I leaned backwards, and felt something that was both soft and firm, and sculpted for lumbar support.

  I gave out a little sigh of relief. I wasn’t floating in a lonely void. I was sitting on a chair in my office.

  I reached over and switched on the desk lamp. Then I took a sheet of paper from the drawer on the left and a fountain pen from the drawer on the right, and I wrote:

  Until the telephone rang, the only sound in my office was the scratching of my pen as I made margin notes, corrections, and amendments.

  I pressed the speaker button.

  “Carl speaking.”

  “Carl.”

  “Catherine! I meant to send you home hours ago—”

  She interrupted me. “I am at home. I’ve been home, been out to see a film, eaten a pizza, paid the baby-sitter, and watched the end of Newsnight.”

  The clock on my desk read 11:42. I turned in my chair. The window of my office was floor to ceiling. Through the window, I could see the city glitter and the night sky. No stars—a low cloud layer made the sky glow almost red.

  Catherine continued. “I’m calling because the last train leaves in twenty-five minutes.”

  “Right,” I said.

  I hung up.

  “Right.”

  I lifted my legs and braced my feet against the side of my desk. Then I kicked backwards as hard as I could.

  13.

  I flew across the floor, smashed through the window, and launched into space.

  For a while, the shards of broken glass kept pace with me as I fell down the side of the office building. Then I, and the glass, and the chair lost touch with one another, like skydivers breaking formation.

  Though I was falling fast, I was tumbling slowly. Initially I was facing the heavens with my back to the ground. But the weight of my upper body rotated me until I was looking at the city upside down. The strange perspective kept me unaware of the speed at which I was plummeting, and the same was true when I looked directly down at the ground. It was getting closer, but not as quickly as I might have expected. I had time to make out the movement of cars from their pinprick headlights.

  The speed became apparent only when momentum had rotated me almost full circle and I was facing the building again and watching the stories flash by. Suddenly, the descent seemed immensely fast. Adrenaline and exhilaration snatched at my heart and made me suck in a breath—and as I did so, wind noise abruptly kicked in, as if the gasp had repressurized my eardrums.

  And now I began to see static images through the lit windows that rushed past, only a couple of feet in front of my face. An effect grabbed me. It became the building that was moving, and me that was static. Like watching a train pass while standing on a platform.

  14.

  On the other side of the windows of the train, I saw two things.

  The first was an advertisement, running above the windows. A photograph showed Anthony, smiling brightly, and behind him his bland family. The advertisement read: Fresh milk, fresh coffee. Some things are just meant for each other. I wasn’t sure which of the two products he was selling, but I was glad to finally make sense of him.

  The second thing I saw was the four young men, getting ready to move into the next carriage, where they would intimidate the girl who was reading her book, and shortly afterwards, attack me.

  I call them young men, maybe because it makes me more comfortable about the ease with which they kicked me into oblivion, but in truth they were boys. The youngest was no older than fifteen. The oldest was possibly eighteen or nineteen. No shame, I suppose, in being beaten up by four teenagers—but still, it bothered me. Not as a physical thing, not as a comparison of speed and strength: as a disempowerment.

  I wondered, as I looked at them through the grubby glass, if I would hear myself as I protested at the first moment of their attack. I had a horrible feeling that I would hear the same despairing tone I had half heard during the mind loss. A boring man, despairing weakly. This is what I am? Oh no, oh God, oh dear, no ... Nasal, perhaps, because I’d just had my nose broken.

  It made me feel angry. It made me want to pass through the window and occupy their space before they occupied mine. Let me kick them into a coma. See how they cope!

  But I couldn’t attack them. I was a ghost. All I could do was press up a little closer to the window and follow them as they pulled open the doors between the carriages and moved through.

  I’ve said it already: the girl was brave. The way she kept her place in the book with her finger even while holding on to her bag and pushing the boys away.

  I continued past the girl until I was positioned directly opposite where I sat. Which made me wonder: When I had thought I was looking at my own reflection in the glass, had I actually been looking at myself? Glimpsing the ghost of coma future?

  Whatever—I wasn’t as brave as the girl. I could see that clearly enough, from the way my eyes flicked sideways to see what was happening farther down the train, and from the way that those eyes widened as the girl began to walk towards me.

  But perhaps I was brave too. When the girl said, “Excuse me, do you mind if I sit here?” I studied the way I shook my head and held her gaze. I remember that at the time I had hoped the returned gaze was reassuring to her. And from my new perspective, I could see that it was reassuring. The gaze seemed to say, Don’t worry. If anyone is going to get beaten up around here, it’s me.

  Then the boys were on us, and the girl’s wrist was grabbed, and her arm was twisted, and she shouted.

  As I stood and raised a hand and intervened, I actually felt a little proud of myself. Not so much for intervening, for what I was doing at that moment, but because I knew the extremely odd sequence of events that was about to unfold for the man in the carriage. I knew precisely what he would face, and how he would cope, and I didn’t feel he had done so badly.

  Finally

  through the side windows of the train, as if I were hovering between the external glass and the subway walls, I saw myself walking backwards through the carriage, holding up my arms around my face and upper body. The young men were attacking me. Many of their blows looked as if they glanced harmlessly off my head and shoulders, and some missed me altogether. But some blows connected hard.

  My movements were slow and confused. My hands swung out a couple of times to ward the men off, but the gesture looked no more fierce than if I were swatting away a fly. Soon my legs buckled, and I fell backwards against the seats, then rolled down to the floor. From my position outside the carriage, I watched as the young men kicked me into unconsciousness.

  15.

  There.

  The boys had gone, and the girl was gone, and the train was stopped at a platform, and the doors were open. The platform was empty. An alarm bell was ringing. Perhaps the girl had pulled the emergency cord before she ran, or had gone to get help.

  I walked into the train and looked down at my bloody body, which was fast asleep, and possibly already commencing a dream of flowers in vases, and bandages.

  Lying beside me was my briefcase with a brass clasp.

  I picked it up and took it with me.

  16.

  In a quiet place, my favorite of the places I had visited, I sat down and put the briefcase
on my lap.

  It was odd, I reflected, that my one remaining protection against the uncertainties of waking life was itself an uncertainty: I had amnesia. All my movements through memories and locations still hadn’t told me who I was. I didn’t have a surname, or parents with faces, or even a good idea of my age. And now the means to end that uncertainty was in my hands. The papers in the briefcase would tell me what I had been doing and thinking about in the very last hour before the attack. At the very least, they would reveal my profession, and I felt quite sure that from that basic piece of information the remaining secrets of my history would fall quite naturally into place.

  With my thumbs on the brass clasps, I hesitated for quite a while.

  I wonder now. If I hadn’t taken the briefcase, if the briefcase had been found by the police beside my unconscious body—would the dream have played out differently?

  Well. Who knows.

  The dream was over.

  I flipped the catch, saw the papers, saw the first line on the first sheet, and started to wake at once.

  It is possible you can guess what I saw. There are no surprises here.