The Book of Dreams

by Nina George

  Marie-France never sends me another photo. Every month I mail a check that she never cashes. Initially I ask once a month, then twice a year, if I may come to Paris. She won’t let me. It seems Marie-France still resents the fact that I didn’t ask her at the airport if I should stay with her.

  The story of Ibrahim’s sister is the first portrait of my career as a non-war-correspondent. From then on, I only write about people, what they go on to do and who they are.

  The man who reads stories without pause to keep humanity alive.

  The actress who decides to spend the rest of her life in a tree.

  The eighteen-year-old boy who’d rather meet his maker than have a heart implant.

  I travel around the world to listen to people, and gradually my obsession with never allowing a single war to go unwitnessed wanes.

  At my request, Greg manages to bring Ibrahim to London. Greg and his wife, Monica, take the boy in and a few years later they ask him if he’d let them adopt him.

  One day I hear from a female colleague that Marie-France had an affair for a few years with Claude, the editor in chief of her newspaper, but he wouldn’t divorce his wife for her.

  Sam is four when his mother moves to London. She still denies me any contact with the boy. Greg and Monica say I could sue her for access, but is that really the proper way to deal with such problems? By suing one another? I slept with the woman when she was lost and petrified. There’s no way I’m going to take her to court. Then again, perhaps I’m giving up too easily. Maybe I should keep on asking Marie-France, over and over again. Knowing my son is in the same city, my ignorance of his appearance fills me with a numbing pain. I see my son in a thousand boys’ faces in the street.

  When I do manage to sleep, I dream of seas without coastlines, of long, dark Underground train carriages hurtling over me. Again and again, I dream about war.

  Out of sheer force of habit, I continue to see the company doctor, Dr. Christesen. Alongside Greg, Monica, and Ibrahim, he’s the only constant in my life. He prescribes pills, but he’d rather prescribe me a different life. “Your sleeplessness, Mr. Skinner, is a sign of profound trauma. Your brain is full. You get lost because there’s no room left in your head for yourself.”

  Ibrahim is now sixteen, going on seventeen. With his green eyes and reddish-brown hair he looks more like an Irishman than a former Afghan refugee. He explains to me that a father is the most important thing in a man’s life. I’m like a “little father” to him, and Greg is his “second father.”

  “Little father, you too need someone who’s important to you.”

  “That’s you, Ibrahim. I have you.”

  “I’m not your flesh and blood.”

  He still has the purple cap he wore in Kabul, back when he was a chai boy. Monica has put it away in a cupboard somewhere. It dates back to another time and a different life. If only life were as easy to discard as a cap.

  It took Ibrahim three years to inquire about my father. He asked as we were setting off for his end-of-year speech. Every year the best pupil in the class had the honor of making the concluding speech in the school chapel. I told him how incredibly proud I was of him, and as the taxi drove through London, past houses glowing in the early spring sunshine, he asked me whether my father had ever told me he was proud of me.

  “Yes, Ibrahim, when I was very small.”

  “How about later on?”

  “Later, it was my grandfather Malo who said it.”

  Ibrahim senses that he really shouldn’t push the matter any further, but he’s excited and so he presses ahead.

  “But why didn’t your father—”

  “Because he was no longer alive when I was your age, Ibrahim.”

  The young Afghan says nothing for a minute. He bends his head and says, “Please forgive me!”

  I’m in no position to grant forgiveness, I want to say, but I remain silent. I’ve only ever told one person that I was to blame for my father’s death. Only Malo knows what happened off the coast of Brittany when I was thirteen years old and why I came home alone without my father, Grandpa Malo’s only son. The look Malo gave me—a mixture of loathing and compassion, grief and horror. I don’t know how Grandpa got over that and consoled me. Me, of all people. That’s why I detest the sea, Brittany, and myself.

  Eddie

  The fourteenth day since I was asked to sign to say, “Yes, I will.”

  I’ve got into the habit of going to the small hospital chapel before my dates with Henri. Not because I have accidentally found religion. No, because the basement chapel, three corridors from the pathology department and the freezers, is one of the least visited places in the labyrinthine Wellington Hospital.

  I sit on the floor and don my courage like a mask. I dissect my competing, struggling, mutually obstructive instincts until only three essential ones remain. I focus entirely on keeping them in my mind and preventing any other emotions from approaching them. Self-pity? Doubt? Resignation? Away with you! Out! I think of Henri with all the tenderness I can muster and weed out my feelings of guilt toward Wilder, who isn’t aware of what I’m really doing when I claim to be meeting new authors.

  I breathe in and out and think: Affection.

  I take a deeper breath and pray: Courage.

  I breathe in and beg: Be like Sam.

  Sam responds intuitively to Henri. He talks to him—and he listens to him too. I, on the other hand, struggle to cast off the self-censorship imposed by my unwaveringly rational mind. Unlike Sam, I don’t see Henri. I can’t hear him. It’s like attempting to communicate with a deserted corpse, but I mustn’t show my desperation, ever, because there’s nothing more toxic than a relative’s resignation.

  I close my eyes and gather my thoughts. Courage. Affection. Be like Sam.

  Listen. See. Sense. No doubts, damn it!

  It’s hard not to doubt. Thirty-one days unconscious. Fifteen days under heavy anesthetic, then clinically dead. Eight minutes of eternity, then sixteen days in a coma.

  The passing time takes Henri further and further away from hope, and closer and closer to being one of the statistics I’ve come to hate. The longer a person lies in a coma, the lower their chances of ever again resembling the person they used to be.

  The doctors make a great effort to measure Henri’s consciousness, letting down soul echo-sounders inside him to listen out in the remote darkness for what might separate him from us. They use scanners and measuring devices. They tap on his knees and elbows, shine a flashlight in his eyes, carry out smell and hearing tests, and change the lighting, the temperature, and the angle of his torso. They don’t leave him in peace for even an hour. And still the waters do not stir.

  My father used to say that when you’re sitting in a lighthouse, the fear doesn’t hit you during the storm but the moment a strange silence settles over the sea.

  The next plateau of hope comes after three months. If by that time an estranged soul still hasn’t given any sign of life, Dr. Saul explained to me, the struggle is only just beginning. He spares me no bad news.

  “Your arguments with the health insurance company will intensify, Mrs. Tomlin, and you’ll get a bewildering glimpse of the empathy-free zone that exists in their administration. After two years, the insurer will refuse to pay and try to persuade you to pawn everything you own. After you’ve taken a battering, various reports by well-meaning experts will advise you in soothing tones to let your friend pass away peacefully—that is, allow him to starve or die of thirst or turn off his air supply. If you show the remotest interest in shortening his life, people will push an organ-donor contract under your nose, naturally only for the most heartbreaking cases who are dependent on Mr. Skinner dying as soon as possible. And you, of course, because you can’t sleep at night from all these worries, will look up all you can find about coma patients online.”

  I was
already doing that, every night and every day.

  He went on. “You’ll criticize us, stand accusingly in our way, and rightfully and angrily point to the disastrous care and staff shortages here. Yes, rightfully! Finally, you’ll cast about with grim determination for answers and outside help. Incidentally, I’ll respect your right to turn up here every week with a different specialist—one of the new brain whisperers. Just please don’t light an open fire beside his bed.”

  Here too, he’s right, and I hate him for it. I’m planning, for example, to meet a “body reader”—a neurologist who specializes in pain therapy and alternative medicine. For if coma is the symptom, what is the cause? I imagine that I might be able to save Henri if I can find out the cause of his reclusion. I’ve read somewhere that it’s normal to drift from hope to hope, from remote treatment to empathy therapy, constantly searching for a way out and suppressing the thought that it might not exist. I still know far too little.

  Every day I get used to having a date with a man in a coma. I so want to touch him, and I’m so scared of doing something wrong.

  “You don’t need to have studied to be important to him. You have two legs, two hands, and a brave heart. You’ve got everything it takes,” Dr. Foss told me.

  “Replace the word visit with date,” was Nurse Marion’s contrasting advice. “Visiting is a duty; going on a date is pleasurable. Try to see him less as an invalid and more as a person with whom you have a date, even if it’s an unusual one.” She’s the one who teaches me to use my legs, my hands, and my heart, and also to divide up my despair into portions. “Don’t cry all your tears at once. You’ll often be so desperate that you’ll want to weep but your ducts will be empty. That emptiness is the worst, when you can no longer express your sorrow because you’ve used up all your despair.

  “My wanderers more frequently return at night than during the day,” the nurse says with conviction. Wandering—that’s what she calls being in a coma. Wandering souls.

  Marion teaches me how to treat Henri’s skin as it becomes ever more tender. Thin-skinned is not a metaphor here. She also shows me how to dab his mouth with water. Having spent thousands of nights with thousands of deep sleepers and patients with “passage syndrome,” a state of unresponsive waking midway between here and the other side, she knows that thirst is the most unbearable aspect of being in a coma. When patients are able to speak again, they all report that the worst aspect was the thirst—that and the noises. So she taught me to arrange ice cubes containing peppermint or frozen Orangina into “cocktails on sticks.”

  I learn to call Henri by his name, repeatedly, because a person’s name is the “longest fishing line,” as Nurse Marion puts it, to reel them back from whichever depths they’re swimming in. I imagine throwing him a rope ladder consisting of five letters.

  In the chapel I whisper, “Henri.” Courage. Affection. Be like Sam.

  I also apply a little Chanel No. 5 body lotion. I unscrew the top of the bottle and rub some cream into my neck and wrists, immediately filling the chapel with scents of jasmine, cinnamon, shortbread, flowers, and my own skin.

  An aroma is the most effective voice in the wilderness of wandering souls. Fragrances can apparently reach the level where the comatose reside. All sensory impressions pass through the thalamus—the gateway to the self—before they are processed. If the thalamus is damaged, then comatose patients can neither hear nor feel. Fragrances, on the other hand, take a secret and direct path into the limbic system—something they have in common with emotions. Fragrances trigger memories, and memories are identity.

  So I bring Henri aromas of things we used to eat and drink. Items from the past: newspaper, moist sand, rosemary, and fresh pancakes. Once I dig up a bit of rain-soaked soil, redolent with summer, from outside the Wellington. I bring him fresh sheets. I scour my memory for his everyday pleasures.

  Today I’m bringing him the scent I was wearing when we made love and my skin grew warm. The scent of a woman and love and us.

  * * *

  —

  I may be forewarned, but I am still shocked by how haggard Henri looks when I reach his bedside. The pneumonia he contracted ten days ago has really drained him. His fever has finally broken, but the night has hollowed him out. I notice that they’ve attached more electrolytes to the portacath under his collarbone.

  Dr. Foss is testing Henri’s reactions. He nods, and I can tell from his expression that he isn’t happy. Silence at sea. No news of ships. Fozzie Bear notes this in Henri’s file.

  Sam is standing over by the wall with a shy smile on his face. He packs up his things; the lesson he skipped has nearly finished. I take a novel from my bag. I bring along a new one for him every three or four days, and this time it’s The Bone Season.

  “I’ll leave it here, Dad,” he mutters in a completely natural tone of voice, as if Henri might feel like reading a few pages tonight. I envy Sam. He doesn’t look at me as he says quietly, “If I were to request that we take a trip to Oxford together, would you ask me why?”

  “Give it a try.”

  This time he doesn’t avert his gaze. “Can we take a trip to Oxford?”

  I nod. He’s visibly relieved that I don’t ask him why.

  I recognize more and more of Henri in him. His father was also very reluctant to explain his motives and always kept his life tightly sealed. I’d like to meet Sam’s mother, but I know it’s too early for that.

  “May I stay for a little longer?” Sam asks.

  I nod.

  Henri’s lying on his side today. His back is uncovered.

  You can gauge a person’s self-confidence from their back posture. If it’s curved, it shows that they are unwilling to bear their own weight, bear themselves, knowing that they have flaws, sensing that other people are observing them. Anxiety and anger influence the poise and stiffness of the body between the nape and the lower back. That’s from my correspondence with the body reader. I don’t know how much to expect.

  “Hi, Henri,” I say, slowly moving closer to him and warming my hands by rubbing and blowing on them. I place my palms between his shoulder blades. Beneath my fingers I can feel his muscles and his pulse, which accelerates very slightly at my touch.

  “I’m here, Henri,” I whisper as I concentrate on attuning my breathing to his—or rather to the beat set by the oxygen machine. Eight inhalations and eight exhalations per minute. I close my eyes and breathe and hope that a little of my courage, affection, and warmth is being transmitted to Henri.

  Next, I take Henri’s hand and stroke it, along the sides of the fingers where the skin is particularly sensitive. “I’m here,” I whisper, thinking over and over again to myself: Courage, damn it! Please give me courage!

  I wait until Fozzie has left before leaning over Henri and conducting our usual introductory ritual. Our everyday ritual. I place my iPod and the boxy wireless speaker on the table and select a playlist of songs I know Henri likes, including the tango to which I taught him to walk and hold me: “Sólo por hoy” by Carlos Libedinsky. “Only for Today.”

  Back then I had short hair and never wore dresses. I danced the tango every night, with hundreds and hundreds of men. Every day, only for one day. But I stopped when Henri came along.

  The music streams out into the room, bathing us in an illusion. I put my lips very close to his ear and whisper, “Hello, Henri. I’m Edwina Tomlin. Eddie. We danced together once. We spent two and a half wonderful years together. I’m here at your request…and my own. I’m here with you. You are Henri Malo Skinner. You’re living in a coma, and I’m begging you to wake up.”

  I can smell the Chanel scent rising from between my breasts.

  “I’m here,” I repeat in a whisper.

  The tango washes over us. I feel like being silent, as we were the first time we faced each other and were silent all night and all the next morning. The way we gaz
ed at each other, caressing each other softly with our eyes and our gestures. That first night only our hands touched.

  The way he left. And then came back.

  Henri is the personification of tango: closeness, distance, passion, tenderness, trust, estrangement. He doesn’t stay, but he always comes back. I knew it at the time, and it offers encouragement now.

  He’s only in a coma for today. Only for today.

  He probably cannot hear or understand us. That’s what Dr. Saul and Dr. Foss and all those stupid brain scans suggest. I want to caress his face, his arms, and his stomach, to do all I can to tell him with my hands that he is not alone. That’s the clearest language I have, and using my fingers I try to hear if Henri is still inside this strange mannequin that bears his name.

  I touch him, but Henri’s face remains waxen, his lips silent, and his fingers do not close around mine. Not this time. Not yet. Perhaps. Never before have I derived such comfort from a lack of certainty. As long as nothing is sure, nothing is lost.

  Next song: “Assassin’s Tango” by John Powell. We used to dance to this. We made love to it too. Sometimes we danced and made love at the same time. Sometimes we merely lay on the roof to this song, my hand touching his, and said nothing. I’ve never talked to a man less than to Henri, and yet I’ve rarely felt so close to anybody.

  My fingers glide slowly down his back and along his legs to his feet. I can feel his pulse, his warmth, and the latent tension in his muscles. Is he running or flying, dancing or diving? Is he making love?

  “Dance with me,” I whisper. Where are you, Henri? Oh, where are you?

  Sam glances back and forth between our faces. It’s the first time he’s been here when I do what I do every day. I carefully wash the soles of Henri’s feet and massage them with warm oil. I’m like a maid, the devoted Magdalena. I wash him. I speak his name. I dance with him. I maneuver his legs, his arms, and his hands in the hope that, one day, he’ll be able to stand upright again—even if it’s only to walk away from me. I must reckon with that, for his nature is not to stay.