~ Alex ~
George
Coming out of the coma is a slow and baffling experience. It’s a long time before he really understands what is happening. The way towards his waking is paved by a lone voice that drifts in and out of awareness. He can hear it demanding answers, and recognises it as a voice he knows, but the words themselves just ripple through thick, murky waters, too muffled and distant to follow.
Each slide back into consciousness brings fresh voices, enigmatic sounds, sometimes no sounds at all. It’s those silent awakenings that unsettle him the most. Incapable of exploring his whereabouts, he’s forced to turn the questions onto himself. Who is he? What has happened to him? But answers remain elusive, coming only in pictures; a dockyard; a man in uniform; a room with no escape. Then he’s adrift again, losing the connection. He needs something to pin down a fixed point in space. And like some ancient mariner plotting uncharted waters he finds his answer in the stars. Just a pinprick to begin with, puncturing the black, far out in front; an axis that declares itself as ‘up’. A woman’s face hangs somewhere beneath, drawing close, their bodies connecting; rising towards the light, so slowly that the pinpoint wanders without noticeably growing. He kisses her eyes, her nose and lips. The light above gradually grows larger and more diffuse, its rays bleeding into the surrounding darkness; their breathing moving into phase, their bodies rising and falling in unison. Deep inside, a pressure is building, mobilising for action. And then, with a rush, it is over; the cry shattering this inner world and the insane, garbled contours of another crashing in to fill the vacuum. A world as witnessed by a blind man suddenly given eyes. Hard edges, sharp angles, impossible contrasts, dizzying movement, fierce perspective, nauseous colours, terrifying shadow – he wants to bellow for help, to cling to someone, to run for safety. But there is no way through to his body, no ties to anything solid beneath, around or even within him.
His brain becomes a battleground between sight and sound, one minute shooting white lights thrusting aside the jumbled noises, the next his head engulfed in a cacophony of grating, whirring and clunking too shattering to see anything beyond. Only when a truce is declared and his senses form an uneasy alliance can some degree of understanding return. Shapes can begin to settle and their edges be defined. Sounds can be attributed to images. Movement can be contained without giddiness. He can at last make some sense of his surroundings.
He lies in a white room, his eyes fixed upon the ceiling. Crisscrossed by harsh white lights, it’s a most unremarkable ceiling, yet one that sets off instinctive alarms. On his left side, a blank wall is cut only by a single window. On his right, the ceiling spills downwards to the edge of his vision, white and featureless but for the play of light from the window opposite. Beneath, just beyond view and sensed rather than seen, a confusion of angular shapes encircles him, like the hint of a city skyline. Figures move through the space, shaping the light. The din that woke him has softened into hushed tones. The walls seem to absorb rather than reflect the sound. He tries to raise himself for a better view and work out where the hell he is.
But something quite extraordinary holds him tight to the bed: a total inability to converse with his body. Somewhere around the base of his skull the nerves have become tied up by a continuous vibration, an ‘unobtainable’ signal, as if a cable in his spine has been cut. The sensation confounds him. A vestige of sleep? His body telling him he’s woken too soon?
Closing his eyes again feels unreal. Just a head with no body; a liberated consciousness, no way of telling where the physical self ends and the rest of the world begins. He takes what comfort he can from the afterimages that hang on in the dark. Before, in his blindness, it had made no difference, whether eyes open or shut. But here the orange-brown screen plays host to geometric patterns, to passing shadows, to flecks that dance and jump. He can squeeze his lids tighter to reduce the brightness and his eyes remain free to move beneath, to chase little shapes that rise to the surface, cross-fade with others and then expire. The negative imprint of the window becomes the parallel black lines of ceiling lights, becomes the silhouette of a figure. Some seconds into this private viewing he realises its importance. He has chosen to do these things with his eyes. At least one conscious link still holds brain and body together.
But the vibration persists.
He fights to suppress a rising fear. Sleep. Why can he not make himself sleep? Sleep should be easy for a mind that floats untethered in space like this with no gravity to hold it down. Sleep should simply carry him away – and safely return him as and when his body is ready to hand back the controls.
The muted voices move back and forth across the orange screen. They pose no sense of threat, yet something countermands his instinct to look – a hunch that it will end exchanges that are surely about him but probably not meant for his ears. He tries to tune in; the words themselves do make sense, but keeping them in order and drawing out their meaning proves impossible. They leave him only with crumbs, that fall through his fingers as fast as he can gather them, ‘…Regaining consciousness… partial paralysis… things slowly improving… need to determine… move him out of ICU…’
At least it tells him this is a hospital. So why has he nothing to account for being here? No flashback of slipping at the top of a flight of steps – or sitting at the wheel and catching a flash of headlights or a frantically sounded horn. Maybe arms and legs refuse to respond because arms and legs are no longer his to command. That terrible whirring and grinding – the sound of being hacked from wreckage, limb by limb…
Is he unable to sleep because this is already a dream?
Or because he is already dead?
Now he can hear the man asking to be fetched when the patient awakes, and saying something about an ‘oral feed’. As silence falls, he steals a first glance. A nurse, dressed in blue, busies herself with something down at his shoulder, a little too close for comfort. He drops his lids again quickly. At once the screen deepens to a richer brown, as her shadow crosses his face, laying a trail of perfume laced with sweat; not pleasant, but at least another connection to the outside world.
There is maybe a way out here. They said he’d been unconscious. This paralysis might be nothing more than an after-effect, or some hallucinatory drug they’ve used to bring him round. Another bout of half-sensation tingles in – a halo of pins and needles as the nurse’s hands cradle his face, fishing for something around his top lip. So outlandish is the experience that follows that he can only imagine it as a ringworm being pulled from his guts and out through his left nostril. Faced with his look of utter astonishment, the nurse loses no time in calling back the doctor.
“Ah, Mr George, you’re awake. I’m Dr Prentice. Now there’s nothing for you to worry about. You’ve been very sick, but we’re taking good care of you. Can you remember anything at all about what happened?”
Inside, the answer rings out loud and clear. ‘No I bloody can’t. And why the fuck can’t I move?’ To the world outside it emerges only as the thinnest whine of dismay.
“That’s alright. That’s fine. You’ll be sensing a loss of movement and muscle control for a while. But all the signs are that these will come back over a period. We’re just going to do a few reflex tests, and I want you to indicate whether or not you feel anything.”
Not from their drugs then. God help him, this paralysis is for real. ‘All the signs are… come back over a period…’, the doctor’s words jump about in his head. ‘We’re going to do a few tests…’ Holy shit. No power to veto their torture – like a cadaver on a slab, his mind the only thing free to squirm and scream. He watches helplessly as wires are taped to his head and body and machinery is calibrated. Evil-shaped instruments arrive on trays as the doctor explains the rules of his ‘experiment’. Various locations are to be tapped, squeezed, prodded and pulled; he must grunt once for ‘sensation’ and twice for ‘no sensation’.
But only the latter is ever called for. The whole sorry episode is over in minutes. F
or all the physical discomfort the paralysis may spare him, each of his negatives jabs like a knife. Nothing from his legs, nothing either from his arms. No to his stomach and his back. Not a thing. Total abdication. No longer the proud owner of this body. Scrapheap job. A total write-off.
Well, at least they now know it. They know, and it hasn’t alarmed them. So they are on the case. They must be. And, thank Christ, from what they’re saying it seems he hasn’t been involved in some crippling road accident. They’ll mend him. He mustn’t panic. They are experts. He must have faith in these doctors. He focuses the resolve to be strong on a point on the ceiling and refuses to let it go.
The space around him is cleared again, the medical instruments wheeled away. But the peace is a short-lived one. As the doctor and nurse leave the ward they’re accosted by another white coat and held at the door in conversation. Papers are swapped. The second doctor nods and advances upon the room, his own young nurses tailing him. The entourage annexes the bed in a horseshoe, everyone behaving as if the patient on it were nothing more than a corpse. The doctor talks fast and bored from his notes.
“This is a Mr George: a thirty-three year old man found malnourished, dehydrated and unconscious two weeks ago, now revived from coma and due for release tomorrow from ICU. Evidence of extensive paralysis. Possibly impaired speech function. Tests suggest a heavy drinker, but otherwise physically fit. Recent injury to side of face causing minor cheekbone fracture. Additional older injuries including evidence of scalding. A small head wound, reportedly sustained at the time of discovery, but none of these injuries appearing to relate to either the coma or to the paralysis.
“So, any thoughts?”
“Sounds like someone beat him up,” chips in the group’s only male nurse. The doctor eyes him disparagingly.
“Perhaps you would like to join the police force, Nurse Peters, while the rest of us confine ourselves to medical diagnoses. Anyone else?”
Another voice pipes up enthusiastically, “A severe stroke, doctor?”
“Hmm. A reasonable suggestion, but no, nothing shows up on the MRI to that effect.”
“Brain-shake causing haemorrhaging or pressure on the brain?” the male nurse again.
“No, PC Plod. As I just said, nothing from the MRI.”
“Drugs overdose?” This more cautiously from a third nurse.
“Possibly, possibly. Say more.”
A fourth voice, quiet and authoritative, picks up the thread. “Certain psychotropic drugs, taken in excess or mixed with alcohol, can lead to coma and or temporary paralysis.”
“Indeed so. But a clear tox report.”
“Yes doctor, but many of today’s club drugs rapidly break down in the body to produce naturally occurring chemicals.”
“Okay, now we’re getting somewhere. You’ve clearly been doing your homework on Friday nights, Nurse Chatterjee.” Everyone but the nurse herself forces a laugh. “Well, Mr George here is certainly in safe hands. Dr Prentice tells me there are signs of improving mobility and reflex responses to stimuli, but we shall be continuing to monitor him closely. Now, in the next ward is a Mrs…”
More twists and turns to tighten the screws. Drink. Drugs. A catalogue of injuries. And in a coma – for two whole weeks? None of it had meant a thing; they might as well have been describing the patient next door. For fuck’s sake, what kind of a god-awful life has he been leading? Maybe he’s an addict; a homeless bum. Or more likely just some wild, spoiled twat. If this paralysis turned out to be his own stupid fault – some mad, drug-crazy antic to impress his mates, some out-of-his-skull act of showing off that went horribly wrong – how would he live with that?
Focusing again on the ceiling, he wills his mind to pick through the few morsels of evidence and scraps of memory he can muster. The doctor said he was thirty-three. His name was George. Both sounded plausible. And his first name? When he first awoke he’d recalled a dockyard – where was that? And a seaman in uniform – who was he? And a room that entrapped him – why? But there is something else too. Something he knows he’s missing that lies at the very core of his being; something that fundamentally defines him.
He goes on racking his brains until the effort fries his mind, until the lights begin to diffract from his despair, until a new sound melts softly into the room, the first recognisable utterance he’s heard himself make. Speech may be denied him, but not the faculty to sob. And the sobbing carries on until pitying sleep finally snatches him up and sweeps him away to a safer and kinder world.