John Banville - Mefisto

How to describe it? Not to. I was Marsyas, lashed to my tree, the god busy about me with his knife, whistling through his teeth as he worked. I was alone, no one could help me. The difference, the strangeness. This was a place where I had never been before, which I had not known existed. It was inside me. I came back each time a little more enlightened. Now for the first time I saw the world around me radiant with pain, the glass in the window suffering the sun’s harsh blade, the bed like a stricken ox kneeling on its stumps, that bag of lymph above me, dripping, dripping. The very air seemed to ache. And then the wasps dying, the moths fumbling at the window, the dog that howled for a whole night. I had never known, never dreamed. Never.

The loneliness. The being-beyond. Indescribable. Where I went, no one could follow. Yet someone managed to hold my hand. I clung to her, dangling above the abyss, burning.

Never known, never dreamed.

Never.

Scorched hands, scorched back, shins charred to the bone. Bald, of course. And my face. My face. A wad of livid dough, blotched and bubbled, with clown’s nose, no chin, two watery little eyes peering out in disbelief. Yes, they let me see myself. That was later. They gave me a hand mirror, I wonder where it came from? It was round, with a pink plastic handle and a back in the fan shape of a sea shell. I don’t think, no, I don’t think it belonged to her, though it was she who put it into my swollen paw. When I had finished marvelling at my face I angled the glass downwards, and was dazzled by the glare of metal.

— Tinfoil, Dr Cranitch said. To prevent heat loss. A new technique.

But that was later again.

I liked the nights. The silence was different than by day, when it was not really silence, but suspension, as if things around me were holding their breath, appalled, speechless with wonder. At night a great nothingness blossomed like a flower. The room was faintly illumined. When I turned my head, when I was able to turn my head, I could see the open doorway, and then another room, or a corridor, in darkness, at the far end of which there was a desk, and someone sitting at it, dressed in white, who never moved, but kept her vigil all the long night long. A green-shaded lamp stood on the desk, throwing its rays downwards, only her shoulders and the sleeves of her white coat could be seen, and something around her neck that shone. A path of light lay along the polished floor, like a shimmer of moonlight on black water.

By day my door was kept shut. I strained to catch the vague hubbub from beyond it, voices and footsteps, the hum of machinery. There was a stairs nearby, and overhead people walked up and down. How busy they seemed! Once someone cried out, a long, desolate wail that rose up and up, like a red rocket, then wavered, and sank back slowly to a gurgle. That was the apogee of those days, the day of the scream. I was not alone.

I howled too, making someone else’s day, no doubt, bringing him a little solace, a sense of companionship. It was clear then I would survive: if I could scream, I would live. She came running at once, on her rubber soles, and emptied an ampoule of double-strength Lamia into my dripfeed. It was night when I woke again. She was at her desk, as always, headless in the lamplight. I imagined it was always she. All hands were her hand, all voices her voice. It was a long time before I began to distinguish the others, to distinguish them from her, I mean. I took scant notice of them in themselves. It was she who had kept me alive. She held on to me, and would not let go her grasp, until at last I scrambled up, out of the pit.

Weeks, weeks. I could feel the summer passing by outside, the slow days falling, one by one. At evening the visitors came. I heard them traipsing along the corridors, their heavy, swinging tread. I thought of a religious procession. Sometimes I even caught a whiff of the flowers they brought. They did not stay long, and passed by again, with a lighter step. A few stuck it out until the bell went. Then the tea was brought around, the skivvies singing. A mutter from the chapel as the rosary was recited. I listened, hardly breathing. I thought of the others, for I knew there must be others, straining like me after these last sounds, these last few drops, dripping into the sand.

Now I could not sleep, I who had slept for so long. I built up walls of number, brick on brick, to keep the pain out. They all fell down. Equations broke in half, zeros gaped like holes. Always I was left amid rubble, facing into the dark.

Father Plomer visited me. I opened my eyes and there he was, sitting beside my bed, with his legs crossed under the shiny black skirts of his cassock and his large, pale, hairless hands clasped on his knee. He smiled at me, nodding encouragingly, as if he were a hypnotist, and I his subject, coming out of a trance. I could not see his eyes behind the flashing lenses of his spectacles. He leaned forward, with a confidential air, and spoke softly.

— And how are you, young man?

— I want to die, I said.

— What’s that?

I tried again, getting my blubber lips around it.

— Die, I said, I want to die.

— Oh now. They tell me you’re doing fine.

In sleep the sirens had sung to me, I could still hear their sweet song.

— Don’t die, the priest said, and smiled blandly, gently wagging his head at me. Not a good idea.

The nurses were cheerful, cheerful and brisk, or else preoccupied. Not she. She moved with slow deliberation, saying little. Her hands were broad. She was young, quite young, or not old, at least. It was hard to tell. They laughed at her behind her back, called her a cow. She spoke to them quietly, in a stiff, formal tone, never looking at them directly. Yes, matron, they would say primly, their lips tightening. And she would turn away. Her face was covered with freckles, big coffee-coloured splashes, the backs of her hands too. She wore a cross on a fine gold chain around her neck. It dangled above me the day she cut me out of my metal wrappings. It took a long time. She plied the scissors and then the swab, turn and turn about. Her face was impassive, fixed in concentration. I could hear no sound anywhere around us, as if the whole hospital had been emptied for the occasion. Full summer sunlight streamed in the window. A nickel dish glinted. The tinfoil crackled, a cocoon breaking open. I wept, I moaned, I pictured a ribbon of raw, red stuff winding endlessly out of my mouth. Dr Cranitch appeared above me, his hands in the pockets of his white coat.

— Well, he said. You’ve pulled through.

A RIVEN THING, incomplete. Something had sheared away, when I pulled through. I was neither this nor that, half here, half somewhere else. Miscarried. Each day when I woke I had to remake myself, build myself out of bits and scraps, of memories, sensations, guesses. I knew how Lazarus must have felt, standing in the blinding light of noontide in his foul cerecloths, with a headache, confused, suspicious, still vividly remembering the other place, unsure that it was not better there than here.

— You were lucky, Dr Cranitch said in his jaded way. Full-thickness burns like that, they destroy the nerves.

— But I can feel, I said.

— What? Where, show me.

He hitched up his glasses and peered where I pointed.

— No, no, he said. Impossible. That’s phantom pain.

He sat beside my bed on a swivel stool. He was on his rounds, he wore a tweed suit, a tie with a narrow knot. Tall, thin, pale as a sea-washed bone. An air of remote amusement. That wan smile, as if he were remembering an old and feeble joke. He laid his cool hands on me, turning me this way and that, a sculptor with a dollop of clay. The blind was down, the air was close.

— We’re very hopeful, he said. Aren’t we, matron? Yes, very hopeful.