The Book of Dreams

by Nina George

  Her anger was only ever directed at herself. Apart from that one, fatal time when nothing could pierce her armor.

  “Please forgive me. I love you. I love you.” Her eyes seek mine, but the harder I try, the less success I have in drawing her gaze to mine. I say, “I love you, in this life and every other.”

  Nothing. I can feel the crinkle of her fear working its way along invisible threads to me. She doesn’t notice me. She looks at me, and I look at her, but there’s no meeting of eyes, no recognition. I’d love to wipe away the tear that’s creeping down her face. Oh God, I don’t even know if I have a hand.

  “Henri, just in case Dr. Saul hasn’t come by to read you the weather forecast and your biography, you should know that today is a fine day for open-air swimming. I’d love to go to the pool with you, but Liz is on holiday…”

  Who’s Liz?

  “…and so I’m going to take over her job. I hope you don’t mind my exercising your arms and legs?”

  Oh thank you, my darling. I wasn’t aware that I still had arms and legs.

  She’s here and she does things with me that I can’t feel, and yet it seems as if I’m lying in a warm bath of silk and scents, soft, sweet oil, and safety. She sings “Lullaby of Birdland,” interspersed with descriptions of what she’s doing. She washes my feet, she moves my ankles, works on my knees and legs, my hands and shoulders, and then she tells me that the hardest part is next. She rocks my head gently back and forth, using my nape as a fulcrum, singing as she does so. It is as if she were painting a wonderful garden with her voice. Dappled sunlight falls through the treetops; the weather is mild, and fragrances rise from the jasmine bushes and beds of wildflowers. She sings of all these things.

  I am completely in her hands: it’s the safest place in the whole world.

  “My darling,” I whisper again. Why are you here? I want to ask. Why haven’t you given up on me?

  Her face is very close to mine, and quietly she says, “I must kiss you every time and hope that you consent.”

  With a gargantuan effort I try to summon some sensation in my body and conjure up a twitch of my finger, toe, or eyelid. Something to tell her, I’m here and not only do I give my consent, but I need your kiss and you if I am to survive.

  “Are you there, Henri?” she asks.

  Yes! Her eyes seek mine, and I concentrate on boring through the glass to Eddie. Please, Eddie, can’t you see me?

  She breathes out with resignation. I can feel her heart sink, but then she pulls herself together. She won’t give up. She might not know it yet, but she never gives up. All the stories she has read have shown her the fantastic, unbelievable, and yet feasible twists and turns life can take. She can imagine anything, both beautiful and terrible, and she never averts her gaze.

  “Do you remember the drunk wine waiter at that Swiss hotel?” she inquires, and for an instant it seems as if she can see me.

  I’m electrified.

  “A few nights ago I dreamed of the sea. You and I were by the coast, in a place where there was a small chapel?”

  Saint Samson? Was it Saint Samson?

  “We…”—her breath is close now, her words shrouded in warmth—“made love on the rocks. But then…”

  I know, I want to say. But then the wave came. I know that life! Did you dream of it, Eddie?

  I don’t have time to consider this further, because just then I feel another presence. It is as if all my sensory antennae form a hot ball. I know it’s him. Samuel Noam. So this is my son! He has a fine soul, and he has a great deal of Malo in him. A very great deal.

  Far under his skin, I see a tall, intelligent man growing inside him, ready to emerge one day and replace the boy.

  “Hi, Ed,” Samuel says in a deep voice, and they bump fists. Then he’s in front of me, saying, “Hi, Dad!” and we see each other. No, his gaze is like Eddie’s: just past me.

  “Hello, Samuel,” I say anyway. I’m overjoyed to see him. My happiness and affection and pride and also despair overflow because this child is so dear to me. Every single moment of my life, my imperfect life, now makes sense because of Sam. Because I have unwittingly gotten something right. I look at him and love him with a desire to protect and touch him that leaves me in despair.

  My child. My longing to see my son grow up pulls me back toward life. I want to see what he’s like, what he wants from life, what he’ll do with his.

  Just as I think these thoughts, there’s a spark of interest in my son’s eyes and he focuses his attention afresh. Apparently he can really see me. Yes, he can!

  “Hi, Dad,” he repeats, but this time in a far softer voice. “So you’re here.” His face glows with unbridled joy as he raises his eyes to Eddie on the other side of the bed, and then the words spill from his lips. “He’s here, Eddie. My father’s here.”

  Sam

  I cannot bear to watch their attempts to wake him or, rather, to get him to a state they think resembles “waking.” He’s come a long way, from the outer edge of life to here, a hair’s breadth from waking. He gives the impression of being trapped in amber, voiceless and motionless, but I know he’s there. He radiates warmth, but that warmth is only perceptible on the underside of one’s skin.

  I wish I’d kept quiet. They’re pestering him now. They want him to breathe independently and so they are frequently turning off his air supply for a few seconds. They wave objects before his eyes. They knead his calves so hard that their red fingerprints mark the skin where they’ve rolled and pinched a bunch of muscles.

  Standing at the head of the bed, Dr. Foss is trying to startle him. Out of the blue he claps his hands, making everyone jump apart from my father and Maddie. They push things into his hands—soft massage balls and toothbrushes—but he doesn’t grasp them. They ask him to blink, look to the left, say his name, or calculate the sum of one and zero.

  “I wouldn’t answer that kind of question even if Claudia Cardinale were putting it to me,” I hear Scott whisper inside my head.

  My father doesn’t move. No fluttering of the eyelids, no quickening of the pulse, no twitches anywhere.

  “I’m sorry, Dad,” I murmur.

  Dr. Foss changes position and takes a mechanical pencil from his top pocket. I know what he’s going to do because I’ve watched him carry out similar tests on other patients in the intensive care unit. He’s going to insert the lead under the nail of my father’s big toe and then under his thumbnail.

  I sense my father’s presence and the black pain that’s threatening to engulf him because he cannot do what they’re demanding of him, and because there’s another greater pain. And thirst. And anger. Bright-red, foaming anger at what they’re putting him through.

  Now they’re pulling his tongue. It hurts me, and I hear a sharp intake of breath from Eddie.

  Dad’s despair is a strange blue inky color that seems to smudge, as if he were weeping tears that mingle with the ink. But I realize that the cause is not the tests but rather that Eddie cannot feel him.

  She’s standing by the wall with one hand cupped over her mouth and the other resting on her stomach. Her eyes are glued to my father.

  I’ve moved over to kneel down beside Maddie’s bed and stroke her hand. Both of us are wearing antiseptic gloves. She’s receiving artificial respiration, and her left kidney failed this morning.

  “He was here, Maddie,” I whisper, “and he looked at me as…” As nobody has ever looked at me before, as if I were the most important person in the world, as if he were expending all his capacity and strength and experience to tell me that he was proud of me.

  But of course I cannot say any of those things aloud. I can’t even really put them into words. Wimpy tears crowd into my throat, salty and bitter. Bitter because this is so good and so new, and yet it’s almost over before it’s even begun, and because I had no idea how amazing it feels to mean
the world to someone. I mean the whole world to my father!

  There’s not enough room inside me to cope with this sensation, and so I weep furious tears and clasp Maddie’s hand. I imagine that she’s holding my hand instead and drying my tears. This would have embarrassed me in the past—seven weeks ago, when I was still a child.

  “Stop it!” I hear Eddie implore loudly but calmly.

  The nurses have just stretched out my father’s arms and legs to allow Dr. Foss to carry out his pain test.

  “But, Mrs. Tomlin, I need to stimulate the reflexes and muscle tone to check his motor functions.”

  “Don’t, Dr. Foss. Stop bombarding us with medical jargon to justify hurting him. Stop it.” Eddie’s intimidating manner as she strides toward Dr. Foss forces him to retreat. “Leave him alone. Now! That’s enough!”

  Fozzie sighs and says, “All right, if that’s what you want.” He clicks the lead back in and stows the pencil in the breast pocket of his coat. “However, to ensure that we don’t overlook—”

  Eddie gives him such a withering glare that he’s unable to finish his sentence. “The patient may well be conscious but have no control of his motor system. Perhaps you’re simply causing him pain while he is incapable of defending himself. As his representative, I forbid you to torture him. Is there no other way?”

  Dr. Foss glances at Dr. Saul, who turns to me and says, “Our managers are well known for their penny-pinching, but as we have the monster, we may as well use it.”

  By the “monster” he means a special functional MRI scanner that measures activity in specific areas of the brain. It cost two million pounds and is referred to as England’s “mind reader.”

  Dr. Saul once explained to me that he’s one of only four neurosurgeons capable of carrying out reliable tests with it. “The monster peers into the brain for us. We can ask questions such as ‘Did you eat a clown for breakfast?’ and see if there’s a response in the middle prefrontal cortex. We can inject a fluorescent substance into the patient and measure his or her glucose consumption. If the brain continues to consume nutrients, then there’s a high probability that the patient is using them. We can even stimulate his or her motor imagination. ‘Play tennis! Hop on one leg! Imagine that you’re clenching your fist!’ We can do any of those things and the lights would start to blink, but unfortunately hardly anyone can interpret the signals. Nobody knows if it’s a reaction or simply a loose contact. The machine is smart, and we are stupid.”

  Nevertheless, God says to Dmitry, “Please prepare Mr. Skinner,” then motions to Eddie and me to follow him into his office. I take my time getting to my feet. Eddie brushes the remaining strands of hair next to the scar from my father’s operation out of his face. Her gesture is full of love, fear, and infinite sadness. Then she looks at me and says, “Come to us,” reaching across my father’s chest. I remove my disposable glove, take her hand, and then clasp his right fingers. She grasps his left hand and we stand there, united.

  Eddie checks that we’re alone and asks, “Tell me how you do it, Sam. Will this work?”

  I immediately understand what she means, but I don’t know how to explain it to her.

  I hear Scott’s grave future-psychologist voice echoing in my mind. “Mon ami, your only hope is occasionally to make contact with the outside world. Use pictures to explain. People like pictures.”

  So I try to put it into pictures. I can intensify my perception of everything I see by combining the senses, as if I were dialing up the volume or pushing a button up to maximum. Bright numbers, scented music, fragrances that paint pictures, colored pain, lies, anger, emotions, echoes from buildings.

  “Is he here now?” she asks.

  I stare into my father’s open, unresponsive eyes. I can feel he’s there below the surface, just as you can perceive someone’s presence behind a door. The atmosphere is different—denser, warmer.

  “Yes,” I reply.

  She gasps, her expression a mixture of disbelief and devotion. “Can he hear me?” she asks with longing and doubt in her voice.

  “What do you think?” I say. Maybe she too has an amplifier inside her. Maybe everyone does but simply doesn’t know it.

  Eddie gazes at my father, and the words wrench themselves from her lips. “Oh—H-Henri,” she stammers. “Oh, Henri, I love you.”

  She raises his hand to kiss it, and I peer at the EEG monitor. Three spikes in quick succession.

  She casts a desperate but hopeful glance in my direction. “I’m sorry, Sam. You must think I’m incredibly stupid, but I’m going to have to ask you to give me a simultaneous translation.”

  Her smile is gentle and lopsided, and I’d love to be able to comfort her by saying, Of course I will!

  “How can you sense he’s there?” she asks.

  “I don’t think about it.”

  “And what do you feel?”

  I study my father’s face and once again I can feel the echo of the sea’s swell. “Love, burning, and thirst,” I say softly.

  She lets go of my hand and reaches into the box behind her before carefully dabbing my father’s lips and palate with a damp swab. As she does it, I try to open myself up even further, turning up my inner amplifier far into the red. It’s almost unbearable because I pick up not only my father’s presence but every other sound, and that’s far more than a normal person can hear.

  There are so many intense emotions in every bed in the ward. One person has gotten lost in a very dangerous place, another is hounded by mortal dread, and yet another patient is running a fever. I sense fatigue and tension, as if there were taut strings and elastic bands crisscrossing the room. Concern, aches, and fear.

  “Sam?” Eddie asks, on her guard, with crackling, quivering anxiety. “It’s fine. Forget it. Stop now, you don’t have to do it.” She lays her hands on my shoulders.

  Dizzy from holding my breath for so long, I breathe in sharply. I need to tell her, though. “It’s as if there’s a different quality of light falling on him, darker, brighter, or colored, and it tells me how he’s feeling. If he could speak, I’d be able to tell by the tone of his voice if he were hiding something. I can see from his body if he’s there. It’s…”—I try to think of a simile—“…like a needle coming down on a record; you know something’s there even before the music has begun. Or when there’s someone in a pitch-black room: there’s a tension in the air.”

  I can tell from Eddie’s face that she isn’t sure whether to believe me. I can sense that she’s wondering if I haven’t just made all of this up to console myself and not lose hope.

  “He wants to live,” I say.

  “But is this enough to live?” she says bluntly, pointing wearily to his helpless, near-defunct body.

  My father is in turmoil, as if he were hurling himself, over and over, against the bars of his inner jail. But Eddie’s right: none of this is obvious from his face or his pulse.

  Maybe I’m kidding myself? No. No way. I can feel my father as clearly as if he were talking to me.

  “Come on,” she says. “Let’s go to see Dr. Saul. He’ll tell us what he can do.”

  Eddie

  “Fish don’t plait their hair,” says Dr. Saul. “Dragonflies write poetry.”

  Ten times he utters a completely nonsensical phrase in order to activate particular areas of Henri’s brain that only respond when the brain registers something absurd or must solve a puzzle. Henri’s brain appears to have no interest whatsoever in riddles, for Dr. Saul shakes his blond-haired head again and again.

  “Hello, Mr. Skinner? I’m your doctor. Your name is Henri Malo Skinner, and you’ve been at the Wellington Hospital in London for the past forty-four days. You’re living in a coma, Mr. Skinner. You’ve been transferred to a brain scanner that is measuring activity in your middle prefrontal cortex.”

  Sam is standing beside me. His attention is fo
cused on the huge, humming apparatus into which his father has just been pushed—the MRI tube, otherwise known as the “monster.” A ring fitted with special cameras is revolving inside it, dividing the brain into slices, alert for any light signals that might emerge from the darkness.

  “Imagine that you’re standing on a golf course, hitting a ball,” Dr. Saul says now.

  “That’s stupid,” Sam mutters, and I must agree. The fMRI is designed to highlight the same task-specific areas of the brain that are activated when the patient imagines particular movements—for example, while Henri is imagining swinging a golf club—as when a healthy individual dreams of standing on the fairway.

  “In your mind, please clench your fist,” the doctor orders. “Imagine that you’re wiggling your toes.” He also asks Henri to imagine that he’s playing tennis and soccer and then dancing.

  Electric sensors attached to Henri’s head and chest register every signal so that Dr. Saul can identify—if not on-screen, then on the MRI printer—any response.

  I want Saul and Foss and their bloody monster finally to confirm that Henri is truly there. Not because I don’t believe Sam, but because I don’t believe myself. I don’t trust myself, nor do I trust the doctors to listen to us.

  Nothing in Henri’s brain suggests that he’s imagining any of the desired movements. Nothing indicates that he isn’t lying still simply because he doesn’t know he’s in a coma.

  “Mr. Skinner? Mr. Henri Skinner?”

  The theta-wave test. I watch Dr. Saul, but he’s concentrating on the monitors.

  Nurse Marion joins us. “If nothing happens, it doesn’t mean that nothing’s happening,” she whispers. “We’ll connect Mr. Skinner to electrodes for another twenty-four hours after we’ve completed these tests. I actually trust them more than this ‘mind reader,’ which only observes Mr. Skinner for an hour. That’s nothing: he could be anywhere but here during that hour.”