Notes from a Coma

by Mike McCormack

  ‡ Spooling through his head these cross-fades and dissolves, the memory wipes and flashbacks of this self-generating narrative. Splicing together the threads of himself, aligning these twitchy structures which throw him out of sequence with himself, these longeurs which give him pause. Linear and sequential, beginnings, middles and ends in their proper places—this is what is needed here. It’s as if the whole project could come into being only as an image of the very structure and process it now serves to suspend—every breakdown and reversal, every distraction, false start, list and seemingly pointless excursus having at one time its correlate in the process of consciousness itself.

  SARAH NEVIN

  Whenever I’ve tried to bring him to mind these past three months it’s always the same picture that comes to me: the pale JJ on that bench under the tree looking at me with this clueless expression on his face, his pupils dilated like black suns. You’d think after all our time together I’d have something else to draw on. It just shows though how powerful and odd those weeks were.

  “We have the time,” I said, “we can build you.”

  “Rebuild,” he corrected tonelessly.

  “Is there anyone else in the room with you?”

  He shook his head. “No, it’s a small room, just a desk and a chair. Once in a while this man comes in and takes away the finished sheet on my desk. He lays down another and walks out. The sheet is always the same, multiple-choice questions and puzzles—if two typists type two pages in two minutes how many will it take to type eighteen pages in six minutes. I’m flying through them but it makes no sense … Do you know anything about it?”

  “Yes, I remember it, the myth of the boy genius was minted in that room … You were six years old when our teacher Eileen Mangan sprung a surprise exam on you—the Scholastic Aptitude Test—the entrance exam for the Irish Centre for Talented Youth in DCU, a test of mathematical and verbal reasoning. You sat the exam alone in her office; it took the whole morning. Six weeks later the results came back; the youngest candidate ever to sit the exam and you’d scored eleven points over the entry threshold. Your IQ put you in the top 1 percent. They offered you a scholarship, wanted to take you on that summer.”

  “So I went off to this infant hothouse?”

  “No. At the time the institute was an eight-week summer camp. The choice was up to you but you weren’t interested. Even then you weren’t keen on travelling.”

  “So now you tell me I’m this genius with not a thought in his head?”

  “It won’t always be like that.”

  He took the disc out of his Discman and passed it to me, a blank home-made compilation. “This disc, Sarah, all these torch songs and schmaltzy ballads … You can’t convince me I’ve ever had a taste for this kind of stuff.”

  “You’d have to take my word, wouldn’t you?”

  “Right now it’s all I have.”

  I saw the initials on the disc. “SN,” I said. “Sarah Nevin. This is mine, you must have made a copy of it. This is the first thing you ever gave me after my car accident.”

  “You as well?”

  “Car crashes are a right of passage thing for our generation—broken bones and stitches, our badges of honour. I came to it a bit younger than most, a few years ago now. It wasn’t too serious but I did crack my head and spend a week unconscious. You came to see me and the second time you came you had this compilation for me. You’d asked around, found my favourite songs and downloaded them on to this disc. A comfort disc, that’s what they’re called in the ICU community.* I was wired up to it for a couple of hours a day. It’s supposed to stimulate the auditory cortex, part of the ongoing stimulus therapy. They think it might have some effect in recovering people from deep coma …”

  “And that’s how we met?”

  “Yes. You bluffed your way on to the ward, told the duty nurse you were family. When you saw me swathed in bandages and hooked up to those machines you fell in love with me. A sleeping princess you said, and all those vigilant machines agonising on my behalf … I had to be special.’†

  “I really am sick.”

  “It wasn’t your fault. I threw myself at you—threw myself at you insofar as it’s possible for anyone in a coma to throw themselves at anyone.”

  “It’s not exactly textbook grounds on which to start a relationship.”

  “I had to be original. You were one of the school heroes, the one with all the looks and the brains; I was just another of the plain Janes mooning at you from a distance. There was no reason why you should have noticed me and were it not for my accident you never would have. But I’d nearly died in that car crash—nearly but not quite—and that was something you respected. For all your brains and reading I had direct experience of something you had only ever theorised about. That gave me allure and it got your attention. It was good enough to start with. Sooner or later your heart would follow.”

  “And it did?”

  “It did.”

  And that’s how it was with us during those days, how we put him back together, piece by piece, Anthony and myself leading him into the dark places of his mind and switching on the lights for him so that he could find his way back to himself. What amazed me most was how easily the world can become fragmented not just in one person but also in the lives of those about them; that someone’s life was such a fragile weave of connections and interlocking stories was news to me. One of the first things I realised was that I was not only telling him his story but mine also. Recovering myself in his mind was now part of my job as well. I had to make sure that I too was not lost in him otherwise something about me would remain only half a story and that, as JJ would say, was no story at all. So I became anxious over and beyond my concern for him. Each day, just to prepare myself, I’d try second-guessing what he might say, reaching to get a head start on him. But I’d let him choose whatever he wanted to talk about, I took the lead from whatever fragment came to him during the night and nagged him. He used to say that he could feel these parts of himself crying out to him for telling. All the scattered pieces of himself …

  In other circumstances it would have been fun, a couple reliving old times insofar as a couple our age had old times. But now it was mostly an anxious job of work—love and sentiment had little to do with it. We were reconstructing a person. And incredibly, piece by separate piece, we did bring him together. Each little story drew another into the light and each in its turn reached out and formed other connections, bringing bigger parts of his memory into life. JJ was fascinated by the process.

  “Rebuilding myself,” he said. “Yourself and Anthony the hired labour. A few more weeks of this and I’ll be able to stand back and admire the whole thing. Hopefully the whole thing will come in on schedule and under budget.”

  But of course there were lapses, awful dead ends where he remained stuck for days, dark cul-de-sacs he could find no way out of. Some of them were even comical.

  “Of course you can’t separate them. They’re identical twins, no one can separate them.”

  “Null is Paul’s brother,” he repeated, “the older of the two.”

  “Yes, and Paul is the one you worked with.”

  “Null and Void, the Shevlin twins. They were in class with us but they left for Boston over a year ago?”

  “Yes.”

  “And I put that on them?”

  I shrugged. “It’s not far from the truth.”

  “And they’re my friends.”

  “Yes, you worked with Paul on the holiday homes. He was one of the block layers you tended. You drank with him in Thornton’s after work.”

  “So why would I go putting that on them? Am I that big of a bollox?”

  “It’s the way you are, JJ, you have a way with words.”

  “Jesus,” he said grimly, shaking his head.

  Anthony and I took it in turns together, divided the day into two shifts. If I did the afternoon Anthony made sure to be there in the evening. We never talked about it as such or drew up any pl
an, it just happened that way. JJ just pointed out to us where he wanted to go and insofar as we knew the way we led him there. Sometimes he didn’t want to talk so we’d just sit together on that bench holding hands, plugged into his Discman and listening to whatever piece of music had taken his fancy that particular day. Like his reading, JJ’s choice of music was all over the place. That was another of those things about JJ, something which could wrongfoot all his friends. One minute he’d be wired up to some Norwegian death metal, the next he’d be humming along to the rawest of the raw sean nós. No rhyme or reason as he said himself. But there was one piece he returned to again and again on that bench. Arvo Pärt’s Tabula Rasa. If there is a soundtrack to those days when he was groping towards himself it’s that twenty-five-minute piece. JJ bought it for me shortly after we became an item. It was a bit of a statement—he loved the piece, he used to lie in his room with the light off smoking and listening to it; giving it to me was a statement of his feelings towards me. He was telling me that I was special. It’s one of the ways we came together, hooked into those circular phrases, orbiting round each other in a world above and beyond ourselves. Hearing it for the first time I thought it was the most beautiful thing I’d ever heard. It sucked me in, the beauty and sadness of it, its aching towards silence. But now I can’t stand it. The backs of my hands start to itch in the opening phrases and I’m back on that bench in the hospital grounds with no sunshine or anyone else in the world but ourselves. And those phrases, circling round each other and moving towards that empty fade-out … I feel myself sinking and breathless within them now. But this was the piece JJ came back to whenever he was stuck for something to talk about.

  “It’s not that I understand it,” he said, “it’s just that I like the sound of it. Some days I’m a complete blank. I feel like an astronaut floating around inside myself, no coordinates or direction, no clue which way is back or forward. Sometimes I feel I might run out of air and choke in the absence of myself. That’s why I play this piece. Circling round itself and inching forward towards its own completion, that’s all I can bear sometimes. Aching towards resolution but dying on its own feet.”

  * … mainly private messages and greetings from loved ones, each subject’s private “listening” is confined to one hour a day. However, the ship’s sound system random-selects through this small library of aural stimulus and comes up with some startling and downright dissonant conjunctions. At any moment Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony might, without dropping a phrase, be rooted in the opening chords of “Reign in Blood.” Maria Callas finds herself back to back with Patti Smith, whales and Cistercian monks call out in their separate frequencies, the Folsom prison recordings segue into Hildegard of Bingen, New Age relaxation tapes of woodland sounds meld into Ennio Morricone soundtracks which in turn give away to a selection of Scottish mining songs … Pairing the music with its contributing volunteer has become a lively game on the official and unofficial chat sites. Some pairings are obvious. Luftig’s background draws in all the heavy metal, probably also the Sturm und Drang of Wagner, Orf and Beethoven. Gainsborough and Emile Perec are an obvious pairing. Online friends confirm JJ’s weakness for Hank Williams, the Smiths, Leonard Cohen—anyone who has sublimated self-pity to an art form. Scottish mining songs and the collected works of Ewan MacColl are easily accounted for, so too the dance rhythms of Underworld and Fluke. But what of all the devotional music? Who is responsible for Byrd’s Mass for Four Voices, Allegri’s Miserere? Did whoever volunteered Pärt’s Tabula Rasa hope to refine further its ache towards silence in Cage’s 4’33“?

  Baffling as the musical soundtrack may be, it is a paradigm of narrative coherence compared to the spoken-word pieces which have found their way into the mix. Randomness and whim and downright historical mischief are the narrative imperatives here … Malcolm X vows by any means necessary and Desmond O’Malley pledges to stand by the republic. Galileo betrays himself to the Inquisition and 365 years later in Havana, Castro commends John Paul II on the posthumous pardon. Luther draws a line in the sand and says here I stand, I can go no further; Satan, down but not out, determines to make the best of a bad job but Lucifer, his sidekick, does not fancy the odds. Robert Shaw attests there is nothing deader than a shark’s eyes; John Doe tells us that only in a world this shitty could these people be considered innocent … And so on and so on …

  While within the hold fiction and history are put through narrative loops beyond all unravelling, there are those optimists who speculate that in spite of appearances there might be some truth unfolding here, some tireless heuristic at work which might at any moment resolve the larger narrative into some previously unsuspected coherence above and beyond the immediate determinism of historical cause and effect …

  † As good as any place, a place where dissent festers. Here in the sacral quietness of the ICU, the architectonics of man-machine symbiosis is reaching its apotheosis. With pain and systolic drudgery already contracted out to these machines, leaving these subject/object hybrids in their wake, the machines continue dreaming their machine dreams: a world without obsolescence or wear and tear, a place where optimum functioning is a way of being—dreams of redemption, what else? The worry is, however, that some day we’re going to get the bill for all this. One morning we’ll walk into our kitchens and workplaces and find a list of demands nailed to the door; kettles and fridges and domestic appliances petitioning for various constitutional amendments, universal suffrage, round-table talks on a minimum-wage agreement; these vigilant machines, worn out dreaming us, agonising on our behalf, appending protocols for counselling and compassionate leave; cars filing sexual-harassment suits; public lighting systems and the national grid drawing up the terms of productivity deals; the Internet, gathering in all its constituencies under one banner and making a case for full statehood before the UN General Assembly. Because, in the dead of night, and with the human flowing from us into these machines, who is to know that this is not happening? The least we can do is have it straight in our minds how we’re going to greet him, our brother in Christ, Robo sapiens. Are we going to turn our backs on him and give him the cold shoulder? Are we going to say, “Hail fellow well met”? Or, in this moment of recognition, will we put out our hand and say, “It’s good to see you, son, what kept you?”

  ANTHONY O’MALLEY

  He was discharged towards the end of May and, as he put it himself, came home to Louisburgh for the second time in his life. He had no plans to go back to work, no plans at all, and that suited me fine. If hanging around the house for the last few months of the summer was what he needed to gather his wits and strength about him then that was OK with me.

  He was like a pale giant that evening standing in the kitchen, his thin face and narrow shoulders, his wrists sticking out beyond the cuffs of his shirt. For some reason I thought he was going to strick his head off the fluorescent light over his head and bring the whole thing down around his shoulders.

  “Either you’ve grown or this ceiling has dropped.”

  He reached up on his toes and tapped the fluorescent with two fingers. It stopped flickering, a steady light fell.

  “That’s hospital food; everyone should have a spell of it.”

  He dropped his bag and shoved it to the wall with the tip of his boot. “It’s good to be home,” he said, “you wouldn’t believe how good.” That was said for both of us and it was good hearing it.

  After we had a bite to eat he sat back and looked around him like he was seeing the room for the first time.

  “A lick of paint wouldn’t go astray on these walls,” he said. “When was the last time we took a brush to them?”

  “Two bachelors, what do you expect? There are a couple of cans of emulsion in the shed, enough to do this room and ceiling. I suppose we could take a look tomorrow.”

  So we did—or rather he did. The following morning he stood in the shed looking at the dribs and drabs in the bottom of the paint cans.

  “Magnolia,” he said, press
ing the lids back down. “There must be other colours in the world.”

  He jumped in the car and was gone about an hour. When he returned the back seat was full of cans and a new roller. These colours you see here on these walls and throughout the house are all his work from those days. I suppose a change was what he wanted and this was what he came up with. It was the same throughout the house, the halls and the bedrooms; he changed the colour of everything. He did the outside too, the plinth and reveals, changed the colour of those as well. He must have spent the best part of two hundred euros on paint and of course he wouldn’t let me put my hand in my pocket. No, he said, I’ll do this myself. I knew then this was his way of taking his mind off himself and of course he threw himself into it the way he did everything. There was never any half-measures about JJ. It was as much as I could do to get him to take a break and put a bite of food in his mouth at dinner time or in the evening. I was afraid he would suffer some sort of a relapse so I used to go into his room at night and take the clock from beside the bed and let him sleep on into the afternoon so he could get some real rest. Of course he knew well what I was doing but he never said anything.

  Frank called over to see him after a few days. He stood in the kitchen looking around him, passing the palm of his hand up and down the wall.

  “God bless the work, JJ, you’re busy.’*

  “Frank, good to see you.”