Mobius Dick

by Andrew Crumey

  What concerned him more was the nurse’s unpleasantly sweaty smell, which was beginning to make him feel nauseous. He was glad when she finished what she was doing and stood clear of the bed.

  She said, ‘I sometimes wonder why they didna put the hospital in Edinburgh instead. It would save a’ they helicopter trips. I reckon it’s likely something to do wi’ Red Zone, though I’m not supposed to talk about that. It’s below the basement, mind.’ She was tucking in his bed sheets while beads of perspiration began to glisten on her fleshy forehead. ‘We’re never allowed there, but you know what I’ve heard?’ She leaned towards him, wafting her farmyard scent over his nostrils again. ‘They’ve got some kinky social club doon there. There’s men come up the hill frae time to time – in big fancy cars!’ She leaned back, stood straight behind her proudly jutting bosom, and was evidently pleased to have dispensed the information.

  Ringer’s complete lack of interest was no deterrent to her, now she had begun to air her views on a subject she had said she was supposed not to discuss. ‘These men that come,’ she continued, leaning towards him again, ‘they’re no the type frae roond these pairts, I can tell you. Nice suits, some o’ them. We see them frae the canteen windae, comin’ alang the road in broad daylight, if you please. And there’s us slaving all day long, and all we get is a wee KitKat and a cup o’ tea while they’re doon in Red Zone watching a’ their naked table dancers in that strip club they’ve got. Well, that’s what we reckon. Wee Elsie – one o’ the cleaners – she swears blind they’ve got great big mirrors in there, so that when the lassies dance in front of them – stark naked, mind – the men in suits can get a good view. That’s what Elsie says. Though she did tell us once that her pet dog just had kittens, and that turned out to be no quite right.’

  For a brief moment, Ringer’s attention was snagged like a drifting net by the thought of those naked breasts and buttocks, ballooned and multiplied in a hall of mirrors. Perhaps there was only a single woman down in Red Zone whose many reflections populated the illusion of a cavorting crowd.

  ‘Hospital’s damn near empty, mind,’ said the fat nurse, continuing her monologue. ‘I tell you, it’s no way to run a business …’ She suddenly stopped herself as another person entered the room and came to Ringer’s bedside. ‘Eh, he’s woken up, Dr Blake.’

  ‘I can see that, Maggie.’ This second visitor was tall and slim, wore metal-framed spectacles and had flaxen-blonde hair that gave her a Nordic appearance. For an instant she looked familiar; Ringer had the same sensation he initially felt with the nurse, of having seen her already in a dream. But there was something different about this blonde woman that Ringer could not identify.

  ‘Hello, John,’ Dr Blake said to him. ‘Do you know what day it is?’

  ‘Monday.’

  ‘And can you remember what happened?’

  ‘There was snow.’

  Dr Blake was carrying a clipboard. She wrote something, then peered at him again through her spectacles. ‘Can you tell me the name of the First Minister?’

  Ringer attempted to push his lethargic mind into activity. ‘Goebbels?’

  Dr Blake turned to Maggie. ‘You can leave us now,’ she said curtly, and the nurse disappeared from Ringer’s field of view, taking her perspiration with her. Dr Blake lifted the uppermost page on her clipboard so as to inspect the next. She said to him, ‘I’d like to ask you a few questions. How many minutes are there in an hour?’

  ‘Which hour?’ he said.

  ‘Any. The one that’s just passed.’

  His mental inertia was unconquerable. ‘None,’ he said.

  ‘Which day comes after Friday?’

  ‘All of them.’

  ‘What colour is Wednesday?’

  ‘Red.’

  ‘Are you sure? Think carefully.’

  He tried again. ‘Green? White?’

  Dr Blake jotted a few notes. ‘What’s one and one?’

  ‘One.’

  ‘There are four socks in a drawer. How many pairs is that?’

  ‘Six,’ he said. Then, ‘Where’s Clara?’

  Dr Blake looked up from her clipboard. ‘Do you know her?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Clara. You asked where she is.’

  ‘Did I?’

  Dr Blake stared at him as if he were an unexpectedly subtle calculation. ‘We have another amnesic patient who was brought here yesterday,’ she explained. ‘We call her Clara. Did Maggie mention anything about her?’

  ‘I think she’s my wife.’

  Dr Blake’s smooth brow became creased with doubt. ‘Your wife’s coming up from England to be with you as soon as she can make child-care arrangements.’ She continued to watch his face, intrigued by the apathy she saw on it. ‘Would you like me to tell you anything else about your family?’

  He felt no urge to reply; instead, dimly recapturing part of his dream, he said, ‘She got lost on the mountain.’

  Dr Blake tapped her pen thoughtfully against her lip.

  ‘What’s in Red Zone?’ Ringer asked.

  Dr Blake was still more intrigued. ‘We’re getting some new brain-scanning equipment installed down there,’ she said cautiously. ‘Physicists from the Craigcarron plant are setting it up for us. Who did you speak to when you were there yesterday?’

  ‘The Invisible Girl,’ Ringer murmured.

  ‘What?’ Dr Blake was trying to unscramble a problem her scientific training had left her unequipped to deal with. ‘Is this some kind of code?’

  Ringer gazed blankly at her.

  ‘There’s something I want to show you,’ she said. ‘I’ll be back in a moment.’

  She went out, leaving Ringer to stare at the ceiling, whose emptiness was more reassuring than anything else he had seen since waking. What was he doing here? The question hovered briefly in his mind but was soon submerged by renewed waves of listless torpor.

  His mind was swirling. Dr Blake’s absence may have lasted a considerable time; but there was no question of boredom, since Ringer had no interest in what would happen when she returned. Instead, for what may have been seconds or hours, he watched the flat expanse above his head; the ceiling that after a while began breaking and crumbling into tiny fragments unable to remain aloft. They were dropping down on him: countless flakes of snow. His bed, he noticed, was gone. Instead he was lying on solid, frozen earth, beneath an infinite sky. A man was looking down at him, shaven-headed and malnourished, bearing a shovel in his dirty hands. Ringer was about to speak to him; but the man, seeing the movement of Ringer’s lips, appeared shocked. He’s still alive, he called. Some way off, a uniformed guard stood with a rifle slung casually over his shoulder and an expiring cigarette dangling from his lip. Dig! the guard barked. But I tell you, he’s alive, it’s the truth.

  Then it was over. Dr Blake was with him again, holding what Ringer saw to be a book. She opened it at a place marked with a slip of paper, then presented the page to him. The words were mostly too blurred for him to read, but he saw a phrase that had been underlined. The Invisible Girl.

  Why was she showing him this? All he could recall was the snow, which perhaps had come from some other story he once read. The book was in his hand as he prepared to cross a road. In his other hand, a phone. He had to call someone.

  Dr Blake pointed to a footnote at the bottom of the page; circled in pencil. Ringer was unable to focus on the small print at the end of Dr Blake’s polished fingernail, so she read for him.

  ‘The Invisible Girl is possibly based on a real-life woman exhibited as a fortune-teller in fairgrounds throughout Germany, who would fall into a trance in front of a mirror and speak in many languages. Schumann’s piano piece “Chiarina” may be a portrait of this enigmatic figure, rather than of Clara Wieck as is commonly supposed.’

  Dr Blake closed the book. ‘Does that mean anything to you?’

  The ceiling above him was solid now. What had felt like hours must have been no more than a minute or two.

  She sai
d, ‘This book – The Life and Opinions of Tomcat Murr – was in the bag of the woman found wandering near here yesterday. We call her Clara because of the name in the footnote. She’d marked the page, as if it were important. I think you know who she really is, and what she was doing.’

  Dr Blake then moved closer and lowered her voice. ‘I hear the rumours, like everyone else. Perhaps Craigcarron is the cause of all the health problems round here, which is why they’re so keen to help treat them. Maybe it’s really a new reactor they’re putting in Red Zone, and this entire hospital is simply a way of keeping it hidden from nosey journalists or terrorists. Oh yes, I hear the gossip, and then I wonder if all the private research funding I’ve been getting is no more than a way of making me play along with the facade. So I need to know: what was Clara doing? What happened at Craigcarron? You can trust me.’

  He made no reply, and she stood back, convinced of the genuineness of his ignorance. She said, ‘I once read somewhere that ninety-nine per cent of the people involved in the Manhattan Project had no idea what they were really doing. Who knows, perhaps Red Zone is the same. For me it’s a brain scanner, for the Craigcarron people it’s something else. You might be the only person who knows the truth. Yet you’ve forgotten.’

  Her words were as insubstantial as the snow that had fallen on him from nowhere and had just as quickly evaporated. Time itself was equally volatile, so that after she left him, the succeeding minutes or days passed quickly. The colour of a wall, the texture of a bed sheet, were of far greater concern to him than the faces he sometimes saw, or the question of who he was, or why he should be here.

  At one point he noticed a woman beside his bed on whom his eyes were able to focus with unexpected clarity.

  ‘Hello there!’ she said brightly. She had closely cropped hair and a ring protruding from her nostril. ‘Priss Morgan. Writing therapist.’

  His senses were sharper now; it was as though he had woken from a drugged sleep. He could concentrate well enough to wonder what was happening. ‘How long was I unconscious?’ he asked.

  She looked puzzled. ‘I don’t know. You must have been awake to talk to the visitor I saw coming out of your room when I arrived here a moment ago.’

  ‘You mean Dr Blake?’

  ‘No. Might have been your wife.’

  ‘What day is it? How long have I been here?’

  ‘It’s Wednesday. I think you’ve been in since last week. Now, Dr Blake reckons it’d be a good idea for you to put your thoughts on paper. Maybe you could keep a diary. Or we might try poetry.’ She took some blank writing paper from her leather briefcase, then laid the pages on a table that she wheeled over Ringer’s bed, placing a pen there too. ‘Jot down anything that comes to you,’ she suggested.

  He didn’t want to write; he wanted to get out of bed and discover what was going on. He was like a drunkard suddenly grown sober. Yet as soon as he tried to raise himself, his head began to pound with a force greater than any hangover. He fell back, stunned, and was once more in the windswept landscape, where the shaven-headed prisoner was wielding his shovel with a look of terror while the guard called to him, Dig!

  What restored him to consciousness was a noise outside his room; a banging and rattling as the door was pushed open and a trolley entered, pushed by a fat nurse who seemed familiar. It was Maggie. Ringer’s mind was clear again, his head free of pain. Priss Morgan was gone, and the blank paper she left him had moved. The pages were on top of his bedside locker, all filled.

  ‘Feeding time,’ said Maggie, taking from the trolley a brown plastic tray bearing an unappetizing meal that she deposited, along with a side-helping of bodily odour, on Ringer’s table. He stared at the food-shaped mess on his plate. ‘Have I been eating this every day?’ he asked incredulously.

  Maggie looked surprised. ‘Feeling like a chat, are we? That makes a change. Usually all I get frae you is a lot of mumbling while you scribble your story.’ She nodded towards the pages Ringer didn’t recall writing.

  Still contemplating the meal he had been offered, he said, ‘Is there anywhere I could buy a sandwich?’

  There was the hospital shop; but Ringer couldn’t go there, she said, because whenever he tried to get out of bed he swiftly fainted.

  ‘I’m sure I can manage.’

  ‘On you go, then, if you’re so smart. Let’s see ye gettin’ oot o’ that bed.’

  Ringer promptly swung his legs to the floor and stood up in his pyjamas.

  ‘Wonders will never cease,’ Maggie said sarcastically. ‘And I suppose you want me to take you to the shop now. Just as well for you I’m goin’ past there on my way tae Clara’s.’

  She produced a robe and slippers that were apparently his own, then presented him with his wallet which she retrieved from the bedside locker. He was perfectly steady on his feet, and keen to find out what sort of place he was being kept in.

  ‘Off we go,’ she instructed, leading the way as she pushed the rattling trolley through the open door.

  The corridor outside was empty and spotlessly clean. Everything Ringer saw looked new and hardly used. Walking slowly and to one side of Maggie’s unpleasant slipstream as she marched in front, Ringer saw open doors leading onto single-bedded rooms, none of which had any occupant. There was a complete absence of the constant hum and chatter, the endless sound of wheels and footsteps, the blur of passing faces, that would characterize any genuine hospital. This one was a clever fake, though not so clever that its creators had thought to include the most vital and convincing ingredient of all – the human souls, wrapped in private concerns over their own infirmity, whose presence would have been enough to make Ringer doubt what Dr Blake already suspected.

  They came to a small shop. It had bunches of flowers at its entrance, racks of newspapers, a counter covered in untouched confectionery, behind which stood a woman who must come up here every day, Ringer reckoned, to earn her living selling sweets and magazines to the few nurses and cleaners who might make her task worthwhile. They too – those idle staff members – would make the journey here, from all the villages round about, finding artificial employment in a place whose purpose they need never question; a job-creation scheme inhabited by sleepwalkers, happy to share the make-believe.

  ‘Enjoy your lunch,’ Maggie said to him, nodding towards the chilled shelf where a row of pre-made sandwiches stood neatly to attention in triangular packages. ‘I’ll take the rest of this food where it’s wanted.’ Then she went puffing on her way, pushing the heavy trolley that served to transport a single meal.

  Ringer watched her go towards what, according to a cheerfully cluttered direction board, was called F Wing. But as she disappeared round a bend, he decided that food was not uppermost among his present concerns. His body and mind were returning to strength; so too were his curiosity and scepticism. He wanted to meet Clara. And so he followed the nurse, seeing her some distance ahead as he turned the corner, and keeping well clear of her as she proceeded to Clara’s room.

  It was through a series of heavy double doors that Ringer was led. None was locked; each swung as freely for him as for Maggie, who simply rammed her trolley against them in order to gain access, as if she were barging through a gate in a field. But Ringer, wishing to remain unnoticed, had to move more slowly and carefully, sometimes waiting behind a set of doors until the nurse was well beyond him before continuing his pursuit. During all this journey, he encountered no one.

  Eventually Maggie arrived at her destination. She rapped the door, swivelled the trolley and pushed it into Clara’s room. Ringer, hiding at the end of the corridor, waited until he heard Maggie emerge and move on. He saw her proceed until she reached a bend far ahead where she turned and went out of sight. Now Ringer could pay a visit to the only other patient he knew of in the entire hospital. Once he was sure the nurse would not return, he walked gently to Clara’s door and knocked.

  There was no reply. He waited, and was about to knock again when he heard a noise inside.

&
nbsp; ‘Ooooo …’

  It was a woman’s low moaning; and as he stood there, the sound was repeated, growing in intensity each time, becoming more and more regular in its inscrutable rhythm; more and more urgent, determined and single-minded in its unfathomable purpose.

  ‘Ooooo-AHH!’

  Standing outside the door, Ringer heard a sound of ecstatic mystery; a deep, reverberating music, limitless in possible meaning.

  ‘Ooooo-AHH!’

  Recklessly, he opened the door and saw a white-walled room quite at odds with the rest of the hospital. There was a handsome wooden desk, a wardrobe. A woman sat facing him, cross-legged on the floor, and beside her, with his back to Ringer, a strangely clothed gentleman was adjusting his trousers, saying something in German.

  Ringer immediately closed the door. What had he just witnessed? How could Maggie have walked in so calmly, only moments before? His recovery, he realized, was still incomplete.

  Ringer knocked again. And again he opened the door, impelled by an urge he was powerless to resist. Now everything was changed; it was a room much like his own. The man was gone; the same woman still sat on the floor, though now he saw her to be wrapped in an unflattering hospital robe. Her meal had been left for her, and she was ignoring it. His previous hallucination hardly mattered to him, however, for all that concerned him was the startling familiarity of the woman, who with her eyes closed and her arms held bent across her chest repeated her rhythmic chanting.

  ‘Ooooo-AHH!’

  Ringer entered and closed the door behind him. He watched her sitting there, wholly oblivious to his presence, and he waited while her performance continued.

  ‘Ooooo-AHH!’

  At last he said to her, ‘Hello.’

  Her exhalations ceased, though her eyes remained closed when she spoke. ‘Guten Tag, Herr Schumann.’

  ‘I know you, don’t I?’

  Still her eyelids were lowered, her head was motionless. ‘Toujours.’

  With a clarity that felt startlingly new, he had the blissful experience of remembering, of truly recollecting, of being suddenly confronted with a beautiful past that was his own. It was in her face, her shape, her breath and in her very presence. He knew who she was, and had some dim sense of the way her life had intersected his. Seeing her there, cross-legged on the floor, a small but crucial part of his own true self was resurrected. He came and stood beside her.