Per Petterson - In The Wake

I GO THROUGH the doors and sit down in the arrival hall or vestibule or foyer or whatever it is called, where everyone passes on their way in or out and waits for the lift or buys the flowers they have forgotten, or sweets, or lousy novels in paperback editions because they do not remember the rules for hospital behaviour until they have them pointed out right here, or just sit waiting in dread on a chair with a coffee or a Coke on the table in front of them to stretch the time.

The coffee tastes horrible. And I cannot smoke. I look around me. There is a dividing line here, I know it, a before and an after, in this very vestibule or foyer, and I know exactly where. It is over there by the lift. I can stride over and with a piece of chalk show where the line will go on the floor, if anyone is interested, and I do not talk about much margin of error, a couple of centimetres at the most, and in a whole life that is not a lot. After all, I am forty-three. After all, I have seen plenty. In real life. On video. An elk falling dead and getting up again. A woolly penguin on a bunk. Water closing over and then falling silent. My father on the floor in a sea of beer, or was it blood, skin to skin with other bodies. Suddenly I do not remember clearly, but I know I have seen it.

I push away my coffee cup, stand up and go out the way I came in and stand to the right of the entrance smoking a cigarette just beside a huge concrete ashtray. I am not alone. A man in a wheelchair beside me nervously sucks his cigarette. He looks worn out. I don’t want to think about what is wrong with him. Behind him a nurse in green stands gazing into the air at nothing.

I look over at the helicopter still standing quietly on its pad with its rotor blades hanging, being nothing now but several tons of dead metal, and I look at the car park where my car stands among hundreds of others. It has got a small dent in the back bumper and a nasty scrape along the front left wing. Maybe I can get one second-hand. Maybe I should look for a job. I have hardly any money left. I don’t know. Above all, I must sleep, and then I must think of something.

I finish my cigarette, bend down and stub it out in the big ashtray which is full to the top and would make almost anyone stop smoking. I feel a slight pain in my side when I straighten up. Automatically, I lift my hand and press it against the bottom rib and what I fear is something new and unknown a little further in. The nurse turns and looks at me, and even though his face is quite expressionless I suspect a certain irony and think: he knows something I do not know, and I let my hand fall. I avoid his eyes and look past him at the emergency entrance a bit further on where an ambulance approaches, turns and stops with its back to the entrance. The driver gets out and walks round the vehicle to open the back doors, and two nurses come out of the hospital; a man and a woman. He is tall and strong, she has rather severe-looking glasses. They pull the stretcher from the ambulance and snap down the wheels, straighten some tubes hanging from a pole, I can see blood all the way from where I stand, and for just a second she looks over at me and stiffens. It is Mrs Grinde in a green nurse’s uniform. And then she looks at her watch. I don’t know why, but she glances down at her watch and looks over at me again, and then I do the same thing. I look at my watch. It is half past four. That tells me nothing except the time of day. When I look up again they are on their way in with the stretcher between them. I walk quickly over there, past the ambulance and over to the glass doors and stop outside, and stay there staring in. I am not allowed to go in there, but I see Mrs Grinde’s back by the stretcher moving at full speed and the tall man on the other side. Someone comes running and puts something into her hand. I can’t see what it is, but they do not stop, she just half turns and takes it as they hurry on. Her body is indecipherable in the shapeless green uniform and might look like anything at all, but it does not, she has a quite specific shape, a quite specific curving and extension and warmth, and if I have not thought about her once today that I can recall now, I can feel her all the same, as a half-blind animal does underground when it turns in deep darkness beside another, and nothing but that movement is important, and then the next, until skin and skin become one skin; no glasses, because no-one need see anything anyway, no green uniform or brothers with tubes down their throats or roaring helicopters or Zen Buddhist manoeuvres on cold nights.

But why did she look at her watch?

I go back to the main entrance and walk in, cross the wide hall past the Narvesen kiosk and cafeteria tables on the left where my coffee cup waits on one of them half full and abandoned, and right over to the lifts. I press the bell and wait. There is a ping and when the doors open I cross the line.

I leave the lift and walk down the corridor to the intensive care room and push the door open. A little too hard, maybe, I didn’t mean to. The man in the bed there is quite unknown to me. He is not my brother, anyway. He is wounded in the face and his head is bandaged, as are several places on his body, and there is plaster on both legs and a collar round his neck. His head is clamped in a kind of steel device screwed together on both sides, and only his eyes move. They grow big and frightened and stare at me as I burst in. I stop in the middle of the floor and the door shuts behind me with far too loud a sound, and I say:

“I’m sorry, I took the wrong door. I will go again. Oh, shit.” This last is to myself mostly, and I back towards the door. He moves his lips. He wants to say something. I stop and go back to the bed and bend over him. His breath is faint on my face.

“What?” I say.

“Please,” he whispers. His eyes fill with tears, they run over in a rush and roll down his face that gets soaking wet, wounds and all, I have never seen such a flood, and he whispers: “Please, please.”

“But for God’s sake, I am not going to hurt you,” I say, whispering too. I feel I’m getting really annoyed, this situation is meaningless. I straighten up and walk over to the door again.

“I will fetch someone,” I say over my shoulder on the way out.

I stand in the corridor with my back to the wall. It’s as if I had been running. I am breathless. And then I go to the nurses’ office. I knock on the door frame and put my head through the open door. It is the same nurse as last night.

“Hi,” I say.

She turns and recognises me. Reports or notes or whatever they are called are on the desk, and to the right is the jug of cocoa. That much cocoa can’t be good for you. She puts her pen down.

“Your brother has been moved to the next floor down,” she says. “He is conscious now. How are you doing? Did you get a good night’s sleep?”

“Couldn’t have been better. I slept like a baby. But the man in intensive care doesn’t feel so good.”

“We know. That is why he is there.”

“I think he wants to talk to someone.”

“He mustn’t talk. He must have complete rest. It is important.”

“OK,” I say, “that’s settled, then. You’re the boss. I had better slip down a floor then.”

“Yes, you do that.”

She turns to the desk and her journals again and picks up her pen. I should have said something about stability, I guess, but nothing comes to mind.

I do not use the lift, but take the stairs down the one floor and go from the landing in through the glass doors to the ward. His bed is in the corridor. It is too sudden, I have no time to prepare myself, there is nowhere to hide and I cannot turn because he is not lying down, he is sitting up in bed waving his arms and laughing. His wife Randi is sitting on a chair by the bed. She catches sight of me and waves. I have not seen him this lively for ages. I walk up to them slowly, breathing as deeply as I can and letting the air slowly out, and I fetch a chair and sit down beside Randi. She looks at me, shrugs slightly, and does not seem to be having any fun at all.