Marcel Theroux - Strange Bodies

*

To begin with, my room was kept dark all the time. My neck seemed to lack even the necessary strength to hold my head steady: the sight of the world pitching and yawing whenever I opened my eyes made me seasick. I was fed with some kind of thick orange-flavoured fluid through a tube in my nose; it was changed twice a day by a masked orderly. The bed was made of metal tubing and it creaked when I shifted position. Bowel movements were so traumatically painful that I felt tearful at their onset.

No one ever spoke in my presence. My impression is that in this period I was attended by one individual of indeterminate gender, but since he or she always wore a gauze mask, I can’t be sure.

With hindsight, I can calculate that these events took place around the end of August 2009, but during that period day and night themselves were indistinguishable; other temporal distinctions simply collapsed. I existed in a hopeless present, a stranger in my new body.

I recall, at some point, an attendant dilating my pupils with a pocket torch. This was certainly a man, because he came so close to my face that I could see black eyebrows, brown eyes, greying hair beneath his paper cap. He had olive skin and large pores on the bridge of his nose.

Later, I was given solid food. Someone fed me with a spoon: my arms were useless. I was able to move my jaw, though the food seemed tough and intransigent. My mouth filled with something warm and salty: I had chewed through part of my own insensible tongue.

My incapacity and the lack of stimuli produced a complementary overexcitement in my mental state. My mind roamed through acres of memories. There was a terrible disconnection between my physical surroundings and the world that sprang to life every time I closed my eyes. Inside my head was a richly textured world filled with unaccountable hopefulness, longing and betrayal, and the deep greens of an English spring; outside were the scratched yellow walls of my room, tattered nylon curtains flapping at the windows, and that dusty, bright light.

*

Some time after the change in my diet, the massages began. The attendant who performed them smelled of garlic and body odour. He would raise me upright, gripping me around the chest with his huge upper arms, and then flip me over onto my stomach. He worked the soles of my feet, pummelled my legs and back; stretched out my arms and cracked the joints of my fingers. When he rotated my feet at the ankles he would wait afterwards for an answering movement from me. On a couple of occasions, my efforts earned a grunt of approbation. Finally, he would turn me back over, laying me out almost tenderly, crossing my arms over my torso before he left, as though I were a corpse he was preparing for burial.

His work produced a perceptible improvement in my vision and co-ordination. Some stage of progress was marked on the day when he hoisted me from the bed and into a vinyl wheelchair with footrests. I was naked beneath my green gown. The corridor was as featureless as my room, unrelieved by any decoration; the only sound the footsteps behind me, their rubber soles squeaking on the linoleum.

The attendant, still masked, removed my shift and lowered me into a murky-looking swimming pool. At first, he merely encouraged me to make my way, crabwise, around the perimeter. On subsequent visits, he used various apparatus — a kind of hoist; parallel bars fixed across the pool — to help me move in ways that were more conventionally human.

As my physical condition improved, I graduated to a series of encounters that seemed intended to test my cognitive abilities.

One of my instructors was the man who had examined me with the torch. The same brown eyes addressed me over the gauze mask. He sat behind a low table; I was in my wheelchair. On the table lay an array of coloured plastic shapes which he mixed and shuffled about with the air of a card sharp. He took out a red square and placed it in a bare space in front of him. Then he examined me intently for a response.

You need to understand who I am, who I have been. An impulse to excel academically has been with me from an early age. Part of me wanted nothing more than to graduate from that purgatory with honours.

Lifting my arm with great care, I extended it across the table. My instructor watched me with a notable expectation. I dropped my arm onto the table and swept the pieces to the floor.

I surprised myself with my spirit of defiance. I’ve even wondered if it’s really mine, and not some trace, some palimpsest of the previous tenant.

My insubordination provoked a fresh battery of diagnostic tests. I was placed in a metal tube for hours with electrodes attached to my head; I was shown montages of nature documentaries while odours — I recall, specifically, cheese, manure and rose petals — were pumped into the room around me. I was made to step over low hurdles, walk along a balance beam, catch tennis balls. The exercises were timetabled with scrupulous exactitude: forty minutes of work; a rest period of ten.

I underwent a form of speech therapy. It was conducted by a masked female instructor in the regulation blue uniform. She used a rather ghastly rubber head, which resembled one of those dolls on which I was taught CPR as a designated first-aider at the university. The tongue, teeth and mouthparts of the doll were pliable and anatomically exact. The instructor manipulated them into a specific shape and then played the relevant sounds on a chunky tape recorder, whose anachronism, even at the time, struck me as absurd. Much of the time my efforts to speak resulted in silence; when noises did emerge from my mouth they were discouragingly bestial. Still, she persevered with no trace of impatience.

*

One lunchtime, I was taken into a long bright room which, in a more benign context, might have been used for school assembly.

A dark-haired balding man with a fleshy mouth sat on a folding chair behind a table set up in the room’s centre.

I was escorted to a chair opposite him. Two masked attendants stood just behind me. One of them inserted a leather strap into my mouth; it lay slightly under my tongue, like a horse’s bit.

The novelty of the man’s unmasked face preoccupied me. I watched as he shuffled some papers on his desk. I couldn’t say with any precision where he was from. He was of vaguely Mediterranean appearance, but when he spoke, he had the indeterminate American accent of a call-centre operator.

‘My name is John Smith,’ he said, in the tone that Fenella Webster would probably describe as affectless . ‘It’s my job to ensure that you are happy and comfortable here. Please indicate that you have understood.’ He made no effort to meet my eye; he was fussing with something in front of him. I remained silent. Now he looked up at me. ‘Please indicate that you have understood.’ His face was as unreadable as the plastic head on which I was learning to pronounce my vowels.

The attendants stepped slightly away from me and a wave of pain seemed to root me to the floor. When it passed, he was still looking at me. ‘Please indicate that you have understood.’ This time, I nodded.

‘Good job,’ he said. ‘In front of you, you will see a series of pictures. Please pick the one that most closely describes the idea fast . Can you indicate if you’ve understood the question?’

I nodded. The array in front of me depicted a tortoise, a tree and a bird in flight. I tapped the picture of the bird.

‘Good job.’ He selected a new array from the box in his lap.

The pictures he laid out in front of me looked like photos from a family album. There was a little girl of about seven, an adult woman in a headscarf smiling and holding a paint roller, and a boy of ten posing in a football strip that I didn’t recognise.