Corpsing

by Toby Litt

  The bullet, during the long moment of entry, is not only spinning but also yawing slightly – like a fish, swimming seen from above.

  Despite refinements in weapon design over the past twenty-five years (particularly in higher quality barrelling and improved systems of rifling) some instability is always likely to occur in the flight paths of physical objects. However, this yawing only begins to play a major role in trajectorization once this first bullet has passed out of the air and into the denser material of the human body.

  Lily’s body.

  After the skin and a thin layer of fat (forgive me, Lily), some thoracic vessels, nerves and membranes, the bullet next enters the red cross-hatching of Lily’s ribcage muscles: external oblique, external intercostal, internal intercostal, innermost intercostal.

  As the bullet passes through the cohesive but elastic tissue of the muscles, a cavity of greater diameter than the bullet’s own is temporarily created – around and behind it. For all of five to ten milliseconds after the bullet passes, this ripping-rippling emptiness pulsates – in and out, in and out – spreading damage laterally, through to tissues the bullet itself hasn’t even touched. This phenomenon is technically known as cavitation.

  Next, the bullet breaks both Lily’s fifth and sixth ribs. The thudding force of this impact sends off a number of bone-splinters to do further peripheral damage.

  These secondary missiles are a well-known feature of gunshot wounds, and often – as in Lily’s case – do as much damage as the primary missile.

  One particularly sharp rib-fragment slides up in a smooth parabola of harm towards the apex of Lily’s heart. Another, broader and less bladelike, plunges down in the direction of her liver. A third – almost circular in shape – stops millimetres short of puncturing her spleen.

  It is bone-spray and not bullet-bluntness that slits the gauzy sheet of Lily’s pleura.

  By now the bullet has lost some but not much of its forward impetus, its kinetic energy. The fifth and sixth ribs – as it smashes through them – have rocked it a little, exaggerating its fishlike yawing, its ongoing wobble.

  One of the ballistic laws governing the motion of a projectile through a body states: the greatest damage will occur neither at the point of initial entry, nor at some arbitrary mid-point, but at exactly the point where there is the greatest loss of kinetic energy. In other words, the more the moving bullet starts to yaw, to wobble, to tumble, the more harm its passage will cause.

  Next, the bullet carves into the inferior lobe of her left lung, a greater and more passable space – less dense, less damageable.

  The bullet passes out of Lily’s left lung between the sixth and seventh ribs, severing the intercostal nerve, vein and artery. The sixth rib itself is only cracked, but the seventh shatters – spewing dusty bone-fragments off in the direction of the bullet.

  When the bullet has passed a sufficient distance onwards, these bone-fragments will start to be sucked back inwards again by the contraction and resettlement of the muscle tissues.

  At the moment the bullet meets the muscles of Lily’s back, it is travelling sideways. Harsh contact with her posterior ribcage has finally converted its wobble into a fully developed tumble. The bone-resistance has also slightly deformed the front end of the bullet. Tissue damage to the internal oblique, erector spinae and latissimus dorsi muscles is therefore exaggerated.

  Next, through fat, dermis, epidermis, dead skin, hairs.

  Because Lily – at the moment the shooting takes place – is leaning against a metal chair-back, the exit wound of the first bullet is not quite as simple as it might otherwise have been.

  Exit wounds commonly look like stars, slits, circles or crescents.

  In Lily’s case, the wound – because of the presence of the chair-back – becomes what is known as shored.

  As the sideways bullet pops from her back, the skin is stretching outwards – and pressing, hard, against the firm stopping surface of the chair.

  This pressure, which is exerted also through the fabric of Lily’s camisole and Lily’s frock, turns her exit wound from a clean, simple shape into a smeared, succulent, minutely latticed, clitoris-like thing.

  7

  ‘Bastard,’ she is saying.

  The hitman – at this point – is a brightly coloured blur across the extreme right of my peripheral vision.

  But after the first bullet has gone through Lily, shattering the mirror behind her, I glance round to look at him.

  Lily is being executed by a bike courier. He is dressed in a Day-Glo-orange cycle top. He is wearing skin-tight bicycling shorts and has a dispatch rider’s bag by his side. He is wearing a safety helmet. His eyes are hidden behind splat-shaped mirror-lensed glasses. His mouth and nose are covered by a pollution-exclusion mask. His calves are sinewy-powerful. He has a two-way radio on his left shoulder. In his right hand is a black and metallic-silver gun.

  He looks like a vision of the future – a future where everyone is concerned solely with keeping their bodies fit and dodging between fast new technologies of danger, a future of which I want no part.

  Somehow, I can’t believe that someone prepared to wear a Day-Glo-orange cycle top would also be prepared to kill. (Or vice versa.)

  This man isn’t shooting Lily properly. He should be coached in the etiquette of it, by respectful professionals of the old school. The business should be done by men dressed in black suits (impeccably tailored by their honest uncles) and white shirts (freshly laundered by their devoted mothers). As they go gliding past the waiters, these men should share a wisecrack about the lobsters outliving the clientele. ‘It’s a job of work,’ that should be the attitude – not ‘Come out and play’ or ‘Let’s stop off for a burger.’ This guy has stepped out of the traffic and he will step back into the traffic. It is like being killed by his bicycle, not by him. That someone wearing this techno-fibred get-up can shoot someone seems to undermine the seriousness of the act. Lily’s death – I am certain she is going to die – is being made into a joke. He should go away and change and then come back and apologize, and do it properly, with the full decorum it deserves.

  As I look back at Lily, the second bullet hits her.

  It is a headshot.

  A plume of bloody spray whips back into the broken mirror behind her.

  Her scalp is flipping up, still connected to the back of her head by a flap of skin.

  I start to giggle.

  As Lily leans slowly forwards, she catches my eye. I am sure she is looking out at me. From death.

  ‘Bastard,’ she is saying.

  Lily’s head tilts further. Her eyes go up into the back of her head. As if at orgasm. As if a dying saint.

  The third bullet hits her, biting through the edge of the table and lodging in her belly.

  She lolls.

  I am giggling and giggling and giggling and I don’t know why.

  (The very last thing Lily saw in this life was – most likely, most terribly – me, my face, my open mouth, my inexplicable giggling. I don’t think I could frame an expression for her to look at at such a time that would have been adequate – but I am not an actor. And, anyway, we’re all meant to be able to perform our own lives. Only, there was no rehearsal time scheduled for this – or maybe there was. Maybe that’s why I felt so bad. I’d practised a thousand times – at the movies, in front of a video. Bang.)

  Then the hitman turns and aims at me. He is about ten feet away.

  I lean back in my chair, without pushing it backwards. I want to get up. I want to hide.

  But I can’t. I am starting to lose my balance.

  The fourth bullet, my first, skids diagonally across my chest and mashes into my left arm.

  I am shouting the usual victim-things.

  My head falls backwards as I lose balance.

  I flinch away from the hitman.

  The fifth bullet misses me completely.

  The hitman moves a step closer.

  I am now stuck in a ridiculous posi
tion, my chair tipping far far back, my feet supported by the underside of the table, almost horizontal, almost flying.

  The sixth shot goes through my lower right side, my bowels.

  People are now moving around in the edges of what I can see.

  The hitman fires a shot into the ceiling.

  The people stop moving.

  My eyes close.

  No further shots come.

  I am opening my eyes.

  The hitman has gone.

  I am looking down.

  I see that I have a white-cotton napkin in my hands and that I have folded it up several times, in halves.

  As I bleed, I continue folding the napkin until it is as tight as it will go.

  I look up to the ceiling and see blood dripping down.

  I look down at the table.

  Blood. Lots of blood. Blood everywhere. Blood all over. Blood pooling in Lily’s lap. Blood in a fine misty spray on the mirror shattered behind her. Blood jumping from her chest-wound, like a heavy red frog. Blood seeping between my fingers. Blood staining the pale wood of the floor. Blood in the hair of the screaming woman at the table next to ours. Blood on her quiet husband’s white shirt. Blood on our food. Blood on blood. Her blood. My blood. My blood on hers. Her blood on mine. Our blood together. Blood-in-blood. Arterial blood. Venous blood. Dripping blood and blood smearing. Flowing blood and blood coagulating. Blood exiting from my body. Blood pulsing with my pulse. My blood. Life-blood. Bloody fucking. Fucking bloody.

  Blessedly, I lose consciousness.

  I don’t get it back for six weeks.

  Hospital Admission Report

  Name: (Alun Grey – deleted) Conrad Redman

  DOB: ?

  Address: ?

  Occupation: ?

  Smoker: ?

  Blood type: AB

  Estimated length of stay: 9 months

  Report:

  Severe internal haemorrhaging caused by gunshot wound – lower left abdomen, kidneys damaged. Massive trauma.

  Patient lost consciousness at site of shooting. Concussion – fell off chair on to floor.

  CPR. Blood transfusion. Lost four to five pints of blood. Adrenalin drip infused.

  Surgery, straight into. Requires immediate intervention.

  Summary:

  Critical but stable.

  Signed:

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  8

  There’s not much you can say about being in a coma.

  For six weeks I was less a human being, more a terribly unproductive drain upon the National Grid. I owe my life to the men and women of Southern Electric. Six weeks. Their power breathed for me, regulated my pulse, kept me warm, fed me, made quietly eloquent beeps on my behalf, and monitored almost every aspect of my physical and mental existence.

  This was the dream-illness: the one you’re not around for.

  The best analogy I’ve managed to come up with is this: Being in a coma is like being a perfectly functioning, top-of-the-range television transported to a completely uninhabited moon. With no TV signals to receive, my mind was the clearest cleanest static. In static, just as in flames, you soon start to imagine patterns – and to see pictures. These pictures are the much-debated topic of coma-dreams. My chief terror was the wolf, who appeared in my mind periodically – though I had no real sense of time. The wolf would eat my legs. Other people in my Internet coma-recovery group claimed also to have encountered the wolf – but only after I had mentioned him first.

  When I came round I was inexplicably bruised all over, particularly on my upper arms. My foreskin appeared to have been pierced by a sharp object, possibly a scalpel.

  My legs were slightly wasted away, making walking an issue of rehabilitation and encouragement.

  The only period in my entire adult life that I’ve had a full set of fingernails was the first few hours after I came out of my coma.

  My room in the ITU was dim. Anglepoise lamps rained their light down on to desks. LCDs glowed green and red.

  Mother was there at my bedside – as she had been for most of the previous month and a half. The first thing I saw when I opened my eyes was her smiling face.

  My first thought was I need to have a piss; my second, There is someone out there who it is now my obligation to kill.

  Yes, even the word obligation was there in my mind.

  They removed my respirator a few hours afterwards. I indulged myself with a marathon choking and gasping session.

  There was a great deal of mother-love.

  Still, I started biting my fingernails before I started talking. (As soon as I realized it really was my mother who was there.)

  ‘Granny sends her love,’ she said.

  This was a lie: Granny had Parkinson’s and couldn’t remember whether she took sugar in her tea, let alone the existence of some abstract grandson. (She took two.)

  Doctors and nurses came and went.

  I began to recover.

  Waking was often a trauma, and it was best I did it alone. I attacked people – that’s how it seemed to them. Really, I was trying to fight them off – them and their whole physicality.

  I was terrified of bunches of flowers. They made me cower. Yet I felt compelled to count all the grapes in any bunch I received, in order to control them.

  People were too much: giant beings with pancake-sized pores, football-bulging zits and spearlike nostril hairs. Doctors leaning in to my face with penlights always made me scream.

  ‘This won’t hurt.’

  It already does.

  If I could, I would have tried to encourage the nurses to wear even more make-up, to be as artificial as they could possibly be. My ultimate wish was for them to become medical geisha.

  It felt as if I had popped up into the world like an écorché – a flayed man, peeled of all protection, experiencing breeze as hurricane, cough as cataclysm, smell as orgasm (if nice) or disembowelment (if nasty), touch as torture. I didn’t want to be so beyond-human. I wanted the muffled dullness of my old-self. The hippies thought that the doors of perception could be cleansed with one sort of acid. But when it happened to me, it felt more like the other sort. Hydrochloric. An acid bath. Everything outsi
de dissolving until the inner is exposed to forces it was never meant to face.

  There is too much world.

  That was the only sentence I could come up with.

  There is too much world.

  (Remember the playground joke: What goes plink-plink fizz? Two babies dropped in an acid bath.)

  I refused to be prodigal of my perceptions. I closed my eyes and listened to the ticking of the floor, the walls.

  I got a reputation for being mildly eccentric.

  Why couldn’t they credit me with surviving? That’s all I wanted. My badge and go home.

  It was music that lassooed me and pulled me back in towards humanity. Hospital Radio – like a downer, slowing the world up and shooting it through a filter of hazy rippling golden nostalgia. I would sit there with the disability-grey headphones in my ears, blissing out. Hospital Radio is audio heroin. I heard rumours that some of the porters took bootleg tapes along with them when they went to visit their dealers – swapping a stack of C90s and some legal storeroom drugs (Valium, methadone, Mogadon) for a 10 per cent discount on their few twists of coke. Hospital Radio – it brought me close to a sad ecstasy. This was music for another generation, a generation of which I was temporarily a member. Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, Dean Martin, Doris Day – these people knew about pain and suffering, they understood the need for mollification and nullity. These were the Saints in the Church of Our Lady of Nice’n’Easy. Bless them, bless each and every one of them.

  My recovery was progressing well.

  Then, all at once, they started telling me the news – the good news and the bad news.

  9

  First there was my doctor.

  ‘Umm, listen…’

  He pulled up a chair and sat down at my bedside. (This meant news.) He spoke quietly and quickly. (This meant the news was not good.) And he used my first name. (This meant Lily was dead.) He spoke for a while in a comforting tone. (This meant Lily had died very slowly, in an agony so extreme that it took her beyond being Lily, being female, almost beyond being human.)