Robert Rankin - Necrophenia

And I lay there, saying nothing at all.

But thinking an awful lot.

And then, about an hour after the good major had departed, two fellows entered my room and stood at the foot of my bed, a-chatting.

‘Ten years?’ said one.

‘All but,’ said the other.

‘And who is paying for this?’

‘His brother made a donation, but that ran out some time ago and he is not on any Medicare programme.’

‘So why is he still alive?’

‘I don’t quite understand the question, sir. He lives because his body is healthy enough and one day he might awaken from his coma.’

‘But that is not altogether likely, is it? After three months in a coma, the chances fall and fall away. After two years the chances are almost zero.’

Nobody had told me that!

‘New advances are being made in the fields of neurosurgery all the time, sir. This man may be revived and go on to live a useful life.’

‘We do have a very thick CIA file on this individual. He did not have a useful life before his accident.’

‘No, sir, he didn’t.’

‘He’s too expensive. We need his room. We are going to extend the children’s ward. Children’s wards get funding. Vegetables taking up valuable bed space do not.’

‘I can’t just pull the plug on him, sir. That would be unethical.’

‘There will be a power cut at three p.m. Essential maintenance work outside. All staff have been notified of this, yes?’

‘Yes, sir, because the equipment that maintains the life-functions of patients such as this must be reset immediately after the power cut or they will not restart.’

‘And you are responsible for restarting this patient’s equipment?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Then I am ordering you to take the afternoon off. Go home, watch the Lakers game on TV. Here, take these.’

‘And these are, sir?’

‘Tickets to Carnegie Hall. The Fortieth Anniversary tour of The Sumerian Royalty. Have a good time. Take your wife.’

‘Well, thank you, sir. But the patient-’

‘I don’t think you need to worry yourself over this patient. I will take responsibility for him.’

And the fellow who said this smiled a cruel smile and drew a finger across his throat. And then the two of them left my room.

Giving me plenty more things to ponder upon.

Tick tock tick tock, time all passing by.

And me on my bed, all alone in my room, with plenty of things to ponder. And a certain rage growing within me that it would be very hard to describe to anyone who has never been in a similar situation.

They call it an impotent rage. And there is no rage worse than that.

And this rage roared through my body, boiling and foaming.

And the time on the clock ticked by.

So this was to be it, was it, then? Had some mighty cosmic force that wasn’t God (because God didn’t intervene) finally decided that enough was enough? That I had suffered enough? That now would be the time to put me out of my misery? That now I was just a waste of space?

I wasn’t having that.

I was not going to be switched off. Have my plug pulled good and proper. Be dispatched upon my way. No. And so I raged and boiled and foamed. And then I felt it twitch. It was a finger. The little finger on my left hand twitched and I could feel it doing so. And then I got the thumb going and another finger. And then I could feel my wrist. And my toes tingled and my nose ran. And I rose up from my bed.

Rose, as a titan from the depths.

As one born again. Although not that one, obviously.

Rose and tore out the tubes and the wires and set my feet on the floor.

And collapsed in a most untidy heap. A groaning, moaning heap.

Because feeling had now returned to my body and I hurt everywhere. My eyeballs hurt, and how can your eyeballs hurt? Even my hair hurt. And my toenails. But I climbed up to my feet, swayed gently, clutched the bed for support. And I savoured that pain, every red-hot-firey needle of it. Because I could feel again and even pain felt good. And I breathed great drafts of air unaided and I opened my eyes and I stared at the world. And the world didn’t look too good.

My room was shabby. In fact it was more than just shabby, it was filthy. It hadn’t looked like that through my astral eyes. It had just looked like a room. But with my normal eyesight, shabby grim. And with my nasal passages working once more, it smelled dreadful. As if some blighter had pooed in the corner and no one had cleared it up.

I steadied myself against the bed, sat myself down on it and pulled out the last of the bits and bobs that connected me to this and that.

‘Well, you can have your room back,’ I said. ‘I hope the dear children like the smell.’

My clothes hung in a cupboard in the corner of the room. I patted at the trench coat. They had taken my trusty Smith & Wesson, but the rest of my stuff was there, though smelly. All musty and fusty and greatly in need of dry-cleaning.

I tore off the horrid surgical gown that unflatteringly adorned me and it came away in pieces, it was so rotten. ‘No expense spent,’ I concluded as I togged up in my Lazlo Woodbine gear. And I took up that map that the major had left and stuffed it into a pocket.

The Woodbine gear didn’t fit me too well. It was, I confess, a bit big. I had clearly lost weight. The belt did up by another three holes. I was virtually skeletal.

There was a mirror over the sink by the window and I limped over to it and peered therein. And I didn’t like what I saw.

I looked awful. Sunken, drawn, my skin like yellow parchment, stretched across my cheekbones. Killer cheekbones, though. Like Elvis used to have, when he was young and really the king of rock ’n’ roll.

But I was a mess. My eyes were bloodshot and sunk deep in dark sockets. I opened my mouth. Had nobody cleaned my teeth? They were as yellow as my skin, with nasty black lines between.

‘Look at me,’ I howled. And I did. ‘I’m a wreck. I look like a plague victim. How did they let me get in this condition?’

And I felt that rage all boiling once again.

And very energising that rage was. And I splashed some water on my face, used my finger as a toothbrush, was disgusted by the blackness of my tongue. Pulled my fedora way down low and stormed from my hospital room.

And nobody stopped me. Nobody spoke to me. Nobody even seemed to notice me. The medics just went about their business. Gurneys were pushed, some folk shouted, other folk wept. Nurses came and went.

And presently I was outside in the street.

And I took great breaths of New York air and those great breaths were not rewarding or beneficial to the good health of my person. New York stank. It reeked. It was horrible.

It was a nice day, though. Bright sunlight.

Although-

There was bright sunlight, but there was a certain dark quality to this bright sunlight. It was difficult to quantify, really, but things weren’t right. Things were, shall we say, out of kilter.

Somehow.

And then I saw the policeman. He was just a policeman. He stood on the corner, twirling his nightstick as old-fashioned policemen used to do. And the sun, the dark sun, shone down upon this policeman and cast his shadows before him.

And yes, I did say shadows. He cast two shadows, that New York cop. And I could see them clearly.

Two shadows! And I thought about that woman in Croydon who had had the crash on the roundabout and woken up in the Ministry of Serendipity. She’d seen the double shadows. And was it her who had ran me down and died in the crash?

Probably yes, I supposed.

And I glanced here and I glanced there. And saw them here and there. Them. The dead, the animated dead. The ones that cast two shadows.