Iain Banks - Transition

“Ah-hah.” The man smiled at her. (She saw, now. She’d thought he’d seemed familiar. The woman was inside the man. That was a bit tupsy-torvy!) “So,” the man-woman said. “Are you all right now?”

“We apologise for any convenience caused.”

“Listen, Seven, Bisquitine; I’m going to have to go soon. Is there anything I can do for you before that?”

“Yo, you cookin wit gas, now, hep cat. Cool. Hot properly.”

“Why don’t you come down this way? We’ll find a café, sit down, maybe have something to eat. What do you say?”

“Shiver me timbres, matey-boy. About flipping time, me old teapot!”

“I’m going to take your hand, is that all right?”

“Better men than you have tried, Thruckley. Leave me here. I’ll only slow you down. That’s an order, mister. Let’s get outa here. Pesky kids.”

“It’s okay. There. Come on. We’ll sit down. You’ll be okay. I’ll get somebody to come for you.”

“Lummy. There’ll be no going back, mind. Not on my escapement.”

“They’ll be my people, not the others. You’ll be okay. I swear.”

“This isn’t about you, it’s me.”

“Let’s get that gown closed, okay? There you go.”

“I take full responsibility.”

“That’s better.”

“Funny old life, sport.”

“Okay?”

“Random.”

This is how it ends: he comes into my room. He is dressed in black and is wearing gloves. It is dark in here, just a night light on, but he can identify me, lying on the hospital bed, propped up at a slight angle, one or two remaining tubes and wires attaching me to various pieces of medical equipment. He ignores these; the nurse who would hear any alarm is lying trussed and taped down the hall, the monitor in front of him switched off. The man shuts the door, darkening the room still further. He walks quietly to my bedside, though I am unlikely to wake as I am sedated, lightly drugged to aid a good night’s sleep. He looks at my bed. Even in the dim light he can see that it is tightly made; I am constricted within this envelope of sheets and blanket. Reassured by this confinement, he takes the spare pillow from the side of my head and places it – gently at first – over my face, then quickly bears down on me, forcing his hands down on either side of my head, pinning my arms under the covers with his elbows, placing most of his weight on his arms and his chest, his feet rising from the floor until only the tips of his shoes are still in contact with it.

I don’t even struggle at first. When I do he simply smiles. My feeble attempts to bring my hands up and to use my legs to kick myself free come to nothing. Wound amongst these sheets, even a fit man would have stood little chance of fighting his way from beneath such suffocating weight. Finally, in one last hopeless convulsion, I try to arch my back. He rides this throe easily and in a moment or two I fall back, and all movement ceases.

He is no fool; he has anticipated that I might merely be playing dead.

So he lies quite calmly on me for a while, as unmoving as me, checking his watch now and again as the minutes tick by, to make sure I am gone.

… But there has been no intensifying beeping noise from the machine that monitors my heart, its signal quickening as I expire. No alarm has sounded at all. He was expecting that one would, so this troubles him a little. I expect he glances at his wristwatch. From this he would see that he has been lying on me for over two minutes since my last movement. He frowns (I imagine). He presses down ever harder, feet rising entirely off the polished vinyl floor with a squeak. He has the same grasp of physiological limits as I do and so he knows that after four minutes brain death must be complete. He waits until that time is up.

He relaxes his grip, then tentatively releases me from the pillow’s embrace. He pulls the pillow entirely away and stands there, looking down at me, glancing with a curious, concerned, but not especially worried expression at the monitoring machines on the far side of the bed. He looks back at me, a tiny frown on his face.

Perhaps his eyes have adjusted a little better to the gloom now, or perhaps he is looking for something to explain the lack of an alarm. At last he notices the tiny, transparent, and – in this light – near-invisible tube that leads from the oxygen cylinder standing amongst the other equipment to my nose. (I see this; my eyes are even better adjusted to the darkness than his and are cracked open just enough to see his eyes suddenly widen.)

My right arm slides free of the bedclothes. I had felt for the paring knife hidden behind my bedside cabinet as soon as I’d heard the unusual noise in the corridor outside. I’d switched the heart monitor off too. I bring the hand with the knife sweeping out and round and up, catching the pillow as he tries to parry the blow. I feel the knife connect with something hard, jarring my hand. The pillow rips apart in a flurry of tiny pieces of white foam; they billow and scatter and start to fall as he stumbles to the door, holding one hand with the other. I am falling, already exhausted, to the floor, trailing bedclothes, legs still half trapped by the constricting sheets. My lunge has snapped or disconnected leads and cables and so finally produces some alarm noises from the nearby machines.

If he was thinking straight, and was not injured and shocked by what has just happened, my assailant might stay and finish the job, taking advantage of my weakness, but he stumbles crashing against the door, whirls it open and runs out, still holding his hand. Blood, dark as ink, spots on the floor as, finally, I slide out of the bed’s torque of sheets, released from its confinement as though being birthed. I lie gasping on the blood-slicked floor, surrounded by tiny soft particles of foam, still falling like snow.

Nobody comes, and eventually it is I who have to stagger along the corridor and cut the duty nurse free from his chair so he can call the police.

I sit back, exhausted, on the floor.

They find my attacker in his crashed car, dead, early the following morning. The car is wrapped around a tree on a quiet road a few kilometres away from the clinic. His hand wound was not life-threatening, but it bled copiously and he did not stop to staunch the bleeding properly. The police think that probably some animal – deer or fox, most likely – made him swerve, and his hand, blood-slicked, slipped on the wheel. It didn’t help that he hadn’t put his seat belt on.

I recover gradually over the next two months and leave without ceremony nearly a year and a half after first arriving at the clinic.

And? And I accept that all that happened happened, and I accept my part in it. I accept, too, that it is over, and that still the most rational explanation is that none of it happened, that I made it all up; I was never a man called Temudjin Oh.

Of course, that still leaves open the question of why somebody entered the hospital, tied up the nurse and tried to smother me in my bed, but no matter how I look at all this and try to explain it there is always at least one loose end, and looking at it this way, with that particular explanation resulting in that particular loose end, produces the most comprehensive of the former and the least troubling of the latter.

Whatever; I am resigned to living a quiet and normal life henceforth and will be content with that. I shall find a place to live and some honest, constructive work to do, if I can. I shall put my dreams of the Concern, Mrs Mulverhill and Madame d’Ortolan – and of having been Mr Oh – behind me.

We’ll see. I suppose I could be wrong about any of this, including the sensible stuff.