The anaesthetist pulls away the blanket so that the corpse’s head beside me falls to one side, and we lie there face to face: the head is swollen, as if the flesh and muscle attachments have loosened from the skull. The face is peppered with starfish, and the eyes no more than two gaping holes with tiny creatures gorging themselves inside: void of thoughts or words or anything else that Anniken Moritzen and Arne Villmyr are so desperately pining for where they sit in Stavanger, still waiting.
‘There’s more,’ the crewman says.
The anaesthetist takes hold of Rasmus’s head, turning it away from me again, and looks up at the crewman. ‘More? What do you mean?’
‘Can’t you see it?’ the crewman says in a sharper tone of voice. ‘It’s attached to the body with cable ties.’
‘Bloody hell!’ The anaesthetist gasps in astonishment.
‘I didn’t see it at first either.’
‘What is it?’ The anaesthetist shakes his head in confusion and turns to face me again. ‘Hey, you!’ Angrily, he clicks his fingers in front of my eyes several times in succession. He moves over so that I can see the arm he is brandishing. I can see the radial bone and forearm bone where they protrude from the grey flesh with thick, rough fingers spread out, looking for all the world like an inflated glove. ‘Whose arm is this?’ he demands irascibly. ‘Do you hear? What kind of bullshit is this?’
I don’t have the strength to answer. Instead, the noise of the rotor blades spins a thread that binds me to the cold, the pain, and all the rest. Soon it is totally dark.
CHAPTER 43
Next time I wake, I am lying tied to a bed that is being dragged out of the helicopter and rolled across the tarmac from the helipad, into a doorway and on through a long, narrow corridor. The journey ends in a room with a sterile odour, crammed with apparatus, cables, gadgets and people who all seem to be waiting just for me.
The bed is placed in the middle, between the machines. A guy approaches and leans over me while two other personnel cut my clothes open – one from the neck down and the other starting on my legs.
‘Hello! Can you hear me?’
I only just manage to open my mouth, but can’t utter a sound.
‘Do you know where you are?’ The man uses two fingers to pull my eyelids open and shines a light on my pupils.
I shake my head.
‘My name is Dr Berg. I’m in charge of the trauma reception facility here at Tromsø University Hospital. If you can manage to say anything, shout out. Try to stay awake. OK?’
I attempt to nod but am struggling to keep my eyes open.
Dr Berg turns to a man nearby and exchanges a few words with him before turning his attention to me again. ‘Do you know why you’re here?’ He lays two fingers on my chest and taps with the other hand before repeating the procedure on the other side. Afterwards he turns to a third person standing in front of a whiteboard directly above the headboard. ‘Pulmonary oedema, doubtful.’ The man at the whiteboard scribbles something on the surface. ‘Pneumothorax, negative, but take an x-ray all the same.’ Dr Berg’s focus turns to me once more. ‘So,’ he says in a quiet, deep voice. ‘How are you feeling now?’
‘Rasmus,’ I whisper, just as a young man with short hair hauls my wet, sliced up clothing away from under me before starting to fix electrodes to my body. ‘Where is Rasmus?’
‘Martin!’ Dr Berg barks without looking up from my face. ‘Hypothermia?’
‘Mild to moderate.’
‘Temperature?’
‘32.3 degrees Celsius. Rising.’
Dr Berg grasps one of my hands and squeezes the fingertips, one by one. ‘Can you feel that?’
I nod and he takes hold of the other hand to repeat the process. ‘Does that hurt?’
I nod again.
Letting go my hand, he leans in closer. ‘Do you know your name?’
‘Thorkild,’ I gasp, struggling to rise to get a grip of where I am and what all these people around me are actually doing. ‘Thorkild Aske.’ The man at the whiteboard writes my name in block capitals at the top of the board.
‘Catheter?’ asks the nurse at my side, who is now finished with the electrodes and has followed the cables back to a machine that suddenly starts emitting noises.
Dr Berg nods his head before turning to a young blonde woman who has approached the bed. She stands beside the nurse with the electrodes. She has a long, thin rubber tube in her hand that she gives to the nurse before grabbing my penis and indicating that she wants the tube back.
‘Just relax,’ the nurse with the electrodes says. ‘It’ll soon be over and done with.’
‘What? My life?’ I try to say, but the words are drowned in saliva and slime. Around me the trauma team is in full swing, checking the oxygen saturation level in my blood, my pulse, blood pressure and temperature, all the time reporting back to the man who is filling in the details on the whiteboard. The woman with the rubber hose has now pushed it so far up my urethra that only a small tail is protruding from the opening. She pumps air or fluid in before moving off to her next task.
‘How did you end up in the sea?’ Dr Berg is poised above me again just as a heavy x-ray machine is hoisted over my chest. ‘Did you fall in?’
I shake my head. ‘The rivers.’
‘The river? Did you fall into a river?’
Shaking my head, I try to turn away, but Dr Berg wrenches me back. ‘Listen to me. How long have you been in the water?’
Once again I shake my head.
‘Do you feel any pain anywhere?’
‘My stomach,’ I answer. Dr Berg plants himself in front of me and places a hand on my abdomen.
‘Here?’ He looks up at my face.
I bow my head when he touches the block of stone. ‘It’s stuck,’ I whisper.
‘I see.’ Dr Berg addresses the man at the whiteboard. ‘Constipated.’
I try to close my eyes to shut out the noise, but every time I do so, Dr Berg is there with his fingers, forcing them open again with a fresh round of questions. I observe sensation in my body slowly but surely reviving and the pain receptors being reset.
A lab technician enters with a sheet of paper for Dr Berg once the x-ray machine has been pushed away. They stand there talking in whispers for a few seconds before the technician departs again. Dr Berg moves over to my clothes and goes through the pockets. After a short time he returns to me, laying his hand on my forehead and pulling my eyelids wide open.
‘Have you taken any of these?’ He holds up a fistful of empty blister packs, containers and dispensers for tablets and capsules. ‘Have you?’
I attempt to close my eyes, but Dr Berg pulls them open again as he reads out the names on the boxes and jars to the man with the pen. ‘Which ones? Sobril? OxyContin? OxyNorm? How many?’
I succeed in forcing my eyelids closed for a moment before Dr Berg’s fingers are there once more. ‘How many?’
‘All of them,’ I answer with a sigh.
He lets go, taking a step back, and beckons to the lab technician at the door.
‘OK, guys,’ I can hear him say. ‘I think we have all the damage vectors on the board now.’ I’ve already closed my eyes and squeeze them so tightly shut that Dr Berg will have to use both hands to force them open. ‘This is a suicide attempt. So,’ he claps his hands before he goes on, ‘let’s double-check the x-rays for haemorrhages and possible cardiac tamponade and finish off here. After that you can transfer him to the intensive care unit.’
I feel the people around me pull back, one by one, with the sound of rattling equipment and slicing rubber echoing off the floor. Suddenly Dr Berg’s voice booms out again: ‘Everyone ready? Martin, reference temperature? Teemu, Janne, you take care of the reports and wheel the patient up. The rest of you, get ready for the next stint. The night has only just begun, people.’
CHAPTER 44
I usually dwell on these thoughts. In them, I am with a woman – I don’t know who she is, because I can’t see her face. We are in an
apartment, and I am me, now, only without the damaged face. We are sitting – no, circling each other in a bright room with high windows. She is wearing one of my shirts and skipping barefoot across the warm pine floor, as though we are in some corny yoghurt commercial. It is so real, this dream sequence, so intense, that when I wake, or drop back into reality, it is as though I have just walked through the wrong door and my body is filled with panic. I turn round and grab the door handle, but there is no longer any door there. Just me, on my own, in some anonymous, sterile waiting room.
Ulf calls it an alter ego. He says it is a fantasy I return to when I want to die, my paradise, and my seventy-two virgins – the alibi I give myself when life gets too complicated. Ulf is right about many things, and almost certainly this too. The problem is merely that he doesn’t understand. How difficult it is. He doesn’t appreciate that the abyss is not something that you flee to, but something you run away from. Emptiness is not a cold body in a coffin beneath the ground. Emptiness is me, Thorkild Aske, in this apartment with the high windows. Alone.
I wake to find a young, fair-haired nurse standing over me and fiddling with my genitals. ‘Take it easy,’ he says softly as I startle and try to pull the quilt back over my crotch. ‘I’m going to empty the catheter and take it out. You’re being transferred to the renal unit. Then we’ll give you an enema and see if we can sort out that stomach problem of yours.’
It is morning, or at least light outside. The square room contains four beds, two on either side. My body feels numb and the absence of pain makes me fearful.
‘Give me a mirror,’ I say when the nurse has removed the tube from my urinary tract and dropped it into a metal bowl shaped like a sauceboat.
‘A mirror?’ the nurse peers suspiciously at me as he pulls off his gloves. ‘What do you need a mirror for?’
‘I need to look at my face.’
‘We can’t give you a mirror.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because,’ the nurse answers, before seeming to arrive at a compromise that will ensure our time together is as brief as possible. ‘I can push your bed closer to the basin on the way out and then we can raise you up in the bed, if you promise not to get up to any mischief.’
‘Mischief? Such as what?’
‘I think you know what I mean,’ he replies, grabbing the side rail control that elevates the top of the bed.
The scar that runs from my eye down my face is almost gone, masked by my grey complexion. Even my lips look anaemic and transparent, as on a dead fish. ‘The same,’ I whisper, turning away.
‘What do you mean?’ the nurse asks, adjusting the bed to negotiate the doorway.
‘My face,’ I say, with a sigh. ‘It’s the same.’
‘What had you expected to see?’
‘A new Thorkild,’ I murmur, moving on to my side, though the pains in my belly suddenly prevent me from completing the action. I remain on my back, staring at the lights on the ceiling, as the nurse wheels me along corridors and into the lift en route to my next stop.
‘You’ll be sharing a room,’ he tells me, drawing to a halt outside a door. ‘At least until this afternoon. Try to relax.’
A bald man in his seventies sits in a bed by the window. His complexion is pale, and his sinewy hands lie like broken twigs in his lap. He is gazing out at something on the other side of the glass.
‘How long do I have to wait here?’ I ask as the man by the window turns to face us. He lets his eyes slide slowly and apathetically over us, then turns his attention to the outside world again.
‘We’re keeping you here for observation until your kidney and liver function are back to normal.’ He gestures towards the bathroom door. ‘Well, if you just go in there and wait, I’ll come and help you,’ he tells me before crossing to the washbasin.
I sit on the toilet-seat lid and wait. After a while, I hear a tentative knock on the door, and then the nurse is standing in the doorway with a smile on his face, an enema in one hand and a tube that most resembles a fully-grown adder curled around the other.
‘Ready?’
‘Can hardly wait,’ I say, and shudder as he places the enema on the edge of the basin and dons a pair of gloves. He spreads a towel over the floor between the shower and toilet.
‘Just lie on your side on the towel with your back to me.’
I kneel on the towel and pull down my boxers before stretching out on the warm floor with my hands beneath my cheek for support.
‘By the way, my name is Jens,’ he says. I can hear his breathing grow more laboured. ‘It might feel a bit uncomfortable to begin with,’ he tells me, guiding the end of the tube in. ‘But I’ll be as gentle as I can.’
‘Mhmm,’ I gasp, squeezing my eyes more tightly shut and pressing my knees against my midriff. The sense of dying, socially, has never been stronger than at that very instant.
Jens speaks with a remarkable, ludicrous, naturalness. He holds the plastic bottle of enema in one hand and the tube in the other. Sometimes he squeezes the enema bottle slightly to produce more liquid, other times he rests his hand on his head as he talks, telling me about completely trivial things such as the water level in the city at present or the approach of winter, as I answer in words of one syllable. It is almost as if we are two old acquaintances, brought together in this comical teamwork without it changing anything between us.
‘There!’ Jens lowers the arm with the enema bottle and places the bottle on the floor behind my back. He puts one hand on my naked backside. ‘It’s important that you hold tight for as long as you can. Preferably for five or six minutes after I remove the tubing, so that the oils have time to work.’
Jens pats me on the buttock before putting the plastic bottle, tube and gloves into a white plastic bag that he twists and ties. He lifts the toilet lid and says: ‘Just stay lying there and squeeze as long as you can. When you can’t hold out any longer, jump on to the toilet and let the forces of nature do their work. I’ll wait outside.’
‘Yes, OK,’ I comply, gasping and choking back tears, as I struggle to keep the other end closed.
As soon as Jens has shut the door behind him, I can hear the radio being switched on and the volume turned up. A man sings and the music builds up note by note to the impending storm.
At first next to nothing happens, apart from me feeling the oil press against the block of stone at one end and the opening at the other.
The pressure and the impulse to relax my diaphragm muscles intensify, matching the tension inside. I feel like a balloon gradually filling up with air, but have already decided to hold it in until the song is finished. If for no other reason than that I have lost all sense of time in here, lying with all my focus on this squeezing exercise.
At last something happens. A grumbling is starting to grow, first only as a tiny little prickling air bubble, but this is different, it doesn’t stop, doesn’t move quick as a flash like the others have done, staying there in limbo and causing pain. This one travels downwards and I can both hear and feel it.
Immediately afterwards it is as if something is released, a shifting, like when a glacier several million years old yields to pressure and slides several millimetres closer to the fjord and the meltwater at the base of the valley.
… Why don’t you love me any more? The vocalist on the radio demands bitterly and heartbreakingly while I slacken the muscles in my legs enough for them to slip down a little, stretching out a notch to feel the pain.... Tell me, why don’t you love me any more? … Tell me why don’t you love me any more?
Once again I feel the glacier move. This time I also have to release some of the squeezing pressure, just enough so that a thin trail of oil trickles out and runs down my skin towards the warm towel. I adjust the squeezing exercise as I stretch out my legs a little more, so that I can turn my head sufficiently to ascertain where the toilet seat is located.
When the refrain concludes, the synthesiser assumes control so that the melody almost twists in on itself. I can no
longer manage to hold it in. I quickly roll right over on my back and then on to my stomach before hauling myself up on to the seat and flopping down on the toilet just as the oil shoots out of me and washes down the inner walls of the porcelain bowl.
The next moment, I feel that the glacier has loosened. The ancient mammoth, led down by the forces of gravity, moves slowly but surely through slick, newly oiled paths towards the exit. A crescendo is reached, evacuation is in full swing, and the song on the radio ends with a scream. ‘At last,’ I whisper, and press my elbows harder against my haunches.
CHAPTER 45
‘Did it go OK?’ Jens puts his head round the bathroom door and eyes me with a sympathetic expression as he taps his fingers on the doorframe.
‘I’ve survived,’ I gasp from my stance in front of the mirror, rinsing my face with cold water.
‘What now?’ I ask when I re-enter the room where the radio is now switched off.
‘What about some rest? You must be exhausted after all you’ve been through in the last twenty-four hours.’
‘And afterwards?’
‘Afterwards a doctor will come to talk to you about next steps,’ Jens says, smiling, making a move to go.
‘My medicine,’ I exclaim, anxiety prickling as it dawns on me that he is about to leave without handing over my insect eggs.
‘Yes?’
‘I need something to help me sleep. I—’
‘Let me discuss that with the duty doctor,’ Jens says and departs.
I retreat to the bed and sit down with my hands on my forehead like blinkers. After a few minutes, Jens comes back with two 10 mg OxyNorm analgesics.
‘Here,’ he says. ‘Now you’ve got something to help you sleep.’
I lie motionless in bed once Jens has left. In my dozy, apathetic condition I am unexpectedly aware of a sound, two short peeps followed by a deeper, sharper metallic noise from the floor somewhere just beyond the mothership of my bed.
Immediately afterwards the sharp peep is there again.
I roll over on to my side and try to peer over the edge of the bed, where a tiny green light is blinking inside the plastic bag stuffed full of my sliced-up clothes.
I Will Miss You Tomorrow Page 19