The smell is terrible. As my eyes adjust to the light I can see that I'm in a bathroom, and one that has not been cleaned in quite some time. It has a squat toilet, stained almost black, with a shower directly above it. The door is closed, but I can hear voices on the other side. It occurs to me that I should probably feel confused by my new surroundings, but somehow I feel nothing but calm. Wherever I am, it doesn't look very much like Australia. My hand is tingling as if I have pins and needles, and my back is also very sore. I pull up my shirt and run my hand across the skin. It's coarse, and it stings as it makes contact with my fingertips. I force myself to feel again, and to my surprise I can run my index finger down the long ridge of a scar on my lower back, several inches long, and raised from the skin in a jagged mountain range of puckered flesh. That's certainly new, but then again, so are my surroundings. I push the door open, noticing an increase in the tingling sensation in my hand. The door yields easily. A little too easily. It almost feels like it would come off the hinges if I gave it a more forceful nudge. Behind the door is an equally dingy hotel room. The curtains are drawn shut and the room is lit by a very dim bulb, hanging by a chain from the roof. There is a lumpy bed in the centre of the room, upon which sits a young man with dark hair. His pants are around his ankles, and he looks very uncomfortable. Nearby an equally young woman is going through a suitcase. Neither one of them looks at me when I enter the room and I feel somewhat disconnected from the whole scene, as though watching it through a screen.
'Let's just get on with it, Ada,' says the man irritably.
The woman, Ada, does not pause in what she is doing.
'There should be some alcohol wipes in here somewhere.'
I walk over and stand between them, hoping to make my presence known quickly, but neither one of them pays me the slightest bit of attention. I wave a hand in front of the man, but his eyes look straight through me.
'Alcohol wipes? I'm about to stick a catheter bag containing a deadly anthrax variant into the eye of my penis. I'm not too concerned about alcohol wipes right now.'
Ada turns, holding up a small white sachet triumphantly. In her other hand she holds the aforementioned catheter bag, which contains a pale yellow liquid.
'It's all sealed, Evan. But who knows where they got their medical equipment? It's best that we sterilise it.'
Evan, the man's name is Evan.
'Hello, Evan,' I say experimentally.
To my unending lack of surprise, he doesn't look at me. Ada comes over to the bed, tearing open the alcohol wipe with her teeth and swabbing the end of the catheter with it. She sidesteps me to get to Evan, but that is her only concession to acknowledging my existence.
It's hard to know what to think in situations like this because I've never been in a situation like this. My first thought is the most obvious. I'm dreaming. What else can this be, except a dream? I open the door to the hotel room and step out into the hallway, just as Ada kneels down to begin her unpleasant task.
'Shit, shut that door,' cries Evan, and I turn back just in time to see Ada kicking the door closed in my face.
'Oh Christ that's cold!'
The hallway is as stained and disgusting as the room, with a series of nondescript doors lining it on either side. I walk to the far end of the hall, where some light is streaming in from between some shutters, and throw them open. The scene that greets me is at once unexpected and also quite familiar. In the street below, sounds of a foreign language waft up towards me. Cars and motorcycles are jammed into the narrow space, which is flanked by small hole-in-the-wall shops and makeshift food stands. A large throng of people push their way forward, moving slowly, like a river, washing around the vehicles which can move no faster than the flow of pedestrians allows. The odd cow, with crimson horns, meanders its way through the flow, and most of the people give them a wide berth. There is a man on a small wooden cart dragging himself through the crowd with hands wrapped in filthy rags. His legs are missing, and the stumps of his thighs end in small, undeveloped toes. I have been here before. I know exactly where I am. In fact, I have stayed in this very hotel before, in the very room in which Evan and Ada are now performing an unpleasant act. This is Par Ganj, the main bazaar, in New Delhi, India.
I was twenty two when I first came to India. I came with a girl I was dating at the time, a bird-like creature of nineteen who already had the sort of miserable attitude to life that it took me another thirty years to develop. From the moment we stepped off the plane to the moment that I left her in a ashram in Kerala she did very little but complain. I was the opposite. Everything I saw amazed me and I’d felt that this was the first moment of my life. Everything before had just been leading up to this experience. My education, and my string of menial jobs in bland office environments had all been leading to this. I would travel for the rest of my life, I believed, although this turned out to be far from correct. I was back in Australia within six months and had my teaching degree three years later. The only other time I left the country was on my honeymoon to Fiji on a package tour, where Mary and I stayed in a resort and tried to avoid being seated at the same table as the loud Americans. This hotel was the first place that I had ever felt any kind of freedom. It felt like the first choice that I had ever made entirely on my own, and I wasn't about to let the whinging of my then-girlfriend take that away from me.
'Ow!' screams Evan from down the hallway, his voice cutting through the sound of the street below, which is quite an achievement.
A door opens just behind me, and a concerned looking Israeli backpacker sticks his head out, glancing up the corridor towards the sound of agonised screaming. He looks at me quizzically. I shrug, and he goes back into his room, bolting the door behind him. The very slight tingling in my hand that I noticed in the bathroom seems to intensify and when I look down I am shocked to see a large scar on my palm, pink and rough. Turning my hand over, I can see that it is on the other side as well, about four centimetres long, as if something has pierced me. Like the scar on my lower back, this is not something that I have normally and I've never seen anything like it before. I can think of nothing I've done to sustain such injuries. I walk back down the corridor and push the door to the room open again. It's not locked, but once inside I shut it behind me and pulled the bolt across. There's something quite enjoyable about this whole situation. It must be a lucid dream, but it feels so real that it's almost like reliving that experience from so long ago; that time when I felt my life was just beginning. Evan is lying on the bed, his head resting on the mattress, as Ada straps the bag to the side of his stomach. He's dripping with sweat.
'There's a bit of blood, nothing to worry about,' Ada says, but Evan just rolls his eyes, looking ready to pass out from the pain.
As much as it feels like reliving the past, I don't actually recall sharing my room with a young couple who appear to be trying to smuggle an anthrax variant inside a catheter bag. I didn't keep a diary of my trip (I believe life is meant to be lived, not documented), but I'm fairly sure I would remember something like this.
'Now I need to piss,' Evan says miserably.
Ada shakes her head.
'You can't. The bag's not functional. It's just the pressure on your urethra that's causing that sensation, you don't really need to.'
'Oh well that's good to know. As long as I only desperately feel like I need to piss and don't actually have to then that's fine.'
Despite recognising Par Ganj instantly, a lot has changed. When I had first come to India there were far fewer tourists and things had a more dangerous feel to them. Now it looks more like a theme park, the beggars and cows being nothing more than novelties for backpackers to gawk at. But of course, this isn't real. It’s simply an amalgamation of memories from my past, all brought together because I passed out during my tutorial.
My tutorial! The memory of it comes flooding back to me now. Gabriel's whole body glowing like some terrible angel as she poured judgement down on me. Was that real, or was it just some sor
t of illusion brought on by lack of oxygen? I need to wake up. If I'm still lying on the floor having a heart attack, or whatever it is I'm having, then surely the longer I stay here the more damage I'll do. Evan sits up and slowly eases his pants up around his hips, being careful not to jiggle the bag too much, but he still winces as his belt catches on it. Ada pats his shoulder sympathetically, but she can't quite conceal a smile on her face, which Evan notices immediately.
'Go on, laugh if you want to. But the next time we do this we're smuggling plutonium out of China using breast implants.'
Ada does laugh, and gives Evan a hug, causing him to wince in pain once again.
'Oh, I'm sorry. I'm not laughing at you, Evan, I'm just laughing near you. About what's happening to you.'
Evan pushes her away, and she laughs again. I like her already. There's something about Evan that instantly annoys me, but I'm not sure what it is. I focus on his face for a while. It could be something to do with the fact that he clearly spends at least half an hour a day doing his hair, or the fact that he wears jeans with a huge silver belt buckle in the middle of the Indian summer. Then I decide that it has nothing to do with the way he looks but more to do with the way he acts. He has a cold arrogance about him. Even when he's lying on his back with his pants around his ankles he radiates a sense of undeserved confidence. Just like I used to at his age.
'Listen. I have to get back. There's a fairly good chance that my brain is being damaged as we speak and if I don't wake up soon then I don't know what will happen. Is there any chance at all that we could speed this up?'
I'm almost certain that Ada looks at me now, but then I see that behind me on a small wooden table there are two passports, and she again steps past me to pick them up.
'We'd better get going, the flight leaves in three hours.'
She hands Evan a blue Australian passport.
'So your name is Joe Finch. You're a European Literature lecturer and you need a catheter because you're waiting for a kidney transplant.'
'Wait, did you say Joe Finch?' I demand, snatching the passport from Evan's unresisting hand.
I look over the passport, and sure enough, there's my name printed right alongside Evan's smug face, which in turn sits right underneath his carefully styled I-just-got-out-of-bed hair. The date of birth is the 23rd of August, 1988, exactly thirty years after my own. That would make Evan twenty two years old.
'There's a section for special medical needs stapled inside listing your condition, so the customs officers shouldn't give us too much trouble.'
I flip through the passport trying to find it, but Evan takes it from my hand. He doesn't snatch it, but just takes it from me as if I'm not even there. As if I hadn't even taken it in the first place. He folds out the piece of paper that lists his false condition and looks it over.
'I have no idea what this is supposed to look like, but it all seems official enough.'
'The only thing that worries me is that we didn't leave the country on the same passport. These have false entry stamps and they assure me it won't be a problem but I'm not so sure.'
I don't have a catheter, and I don't need a kidney transplant, as far as I know. Not yet at least, but who knows what might develop? Could this be a lucid and prescient dream combined? Are those formats even compatible?
'Get going. You're not even real people and as soon as I wake up it won't matter if you get through customs or not. Just get out of here and let me wake up before I lose the ability to catch a ball with my right hand.'
'Let's go,' says Evan, sliding the passport into his pocket and zipping up the suitcase.
He throws the wrapper from the alcohol wipe into the bin underneath the table and with one last glance around the room to make sure they have everything they step into the hallway. I stand watching them leave, but nothing happens.
'Oh wait, better turn out the light,' I hear Ada say from down the hall and she skips back up and reaches her hand in, extinguishing the dim bulb hanging from the ceiling.
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