Steve Toltz - Quicksand

5. Birth is irreversible because death is not its true opposite.

The last epiphany I swear was not said by me. As I drifted off to sleep I heard a voice, or the echo of a voice, say my name. The voice came over the radio but there was no radio. And wasn’t it funny how my keys were in my hand but the last thing I remember is the sound of the car engine thrumming and a voice on the radio saying my name?

This, random citizens who have nothing to do on a Tuesday morning, is where my story gets sad.

XXV

A viscous liquid percolated in my throat. Groggily I opened my eyes. Wilting lilacs in a plastic vase came into view.

— Look who’s awake.

A backlit middle-aged nurse with a man-nose bent over me. I felt scaly and turgid, coated in a tepid gruel. There was a seething pain, but far away, as if in a second body. Tubes protruded from both arms. I was sheathed in hospital blankets as flimsy as rice paper.

— My name’s Chelsea. Do you know where you are?

— On the set of a hospital drama?

She blinked softly.

— No darling, this is a real hospital.

I believe, Your Honour, I may have already mentioned how I’d always been terrified of losing my footing and falling from the regular society into either the prison society or the hospital society, and I can’t emphasise enough how my super-awareness of these two overpopulated and under-resourced hells have shaped my nightmares since boyhood. And now I had finally fallen.

— You were in a car accident.

That made no sense. The last thing I remember I was parked on a side street, being gawked at by teary, terrified preschoolers, the hand brake on, ignition off, keys bunched in my hand, sirens heralding the arrival of ambulances, and although I was drifting into unconsciousness at the time, even the horrendously uncoordinated and terminally unlucky can’t crash a parked car. What the hell happened?

From the corridor I could hear a male nurse tell another how he loves his dog but the bitch sheds hair like she’s had chemo.

Life, then.

I tried to raise myself from the bed.

— Hold on there. You’ve been unconscious for two months.

She let the import of that passage of time sink in. A man lay in the bed beside me, his bruised eyes half closed, a tube in his throat, his mouth wide open but rendered so useless it couldn’t even yawn. Welcome to the realm of the disgusting, he seemed to say. I thought: If by chance I get out of here in one piece, what shape will that piece be? The nurse laid out her equipment on the bed with calloused hands; she wrapped my arm with a rubber tube before unveiling the gigantic syringe from my nightmares.

— May I be blindfolded, please? I croaked.

— Sorry darling, we don’t do that.

I turned back to the body in the adjacent bed, hoping my grunts of pain comforted him. Certainly his coughing comforted me, even though phlegm was the least exotic fluid in the place.

The next time I opened my eyes I saw a head of crazy hair.

— How do you feel? asked Mimi.

— Like I’ve been molested by a stage hypnotist.

On the other side of the bed, Stella picked up my hand and pressed it to her tear-glistened cheek. Both women?! A grim omen. I fell asleep again and when I awoke, Liam was sitting in Stella’s place. His sad face conceded that my downward spiral had crushed his downward spiral. Ah, the pyrrhic victories of old friendships. Again I closed my eyes and when I opened them Morrell had replaced him in the chair.

— Poor deathless, imperishable creature. Maybe your will to live is inexhaustible after all.

He brushed hair away from my forehead. It seemed as if anybody who wanted to could caress me willy-nilly. Two doctors swept into the room like Mongol armies. I knew instantly which was the most experienced and professional of the two; he was the one who didn’t ask how I was feeling.

— Lift your head, he said. His voice was low and melodious, like he was about to break into a Gregorian chant. He gently pressed his fingers into the back of my skull.

— You know, you’re lucky to have escaped any serious brain injury.

— It hurts to breathe, I said.

— You were on a ventilator.

— You were in a critical condition for a while there, the other doctor added, and then proceeded to describe in detail the operation I underwent, which I chose not to understand. Instead I imaged myself tied to a spinning wheel in a circus tent as clowns in surgical masks flung razor-sharp knives.

— After the injury, your brain swelled up. Your head could hardly contain it. That’s why we had to keep you in a coma.

I could see Morrell wincing, picturing my engorged brain.

— Anything else bothering you?

— My shoulder hurts.

— Well, other than the pain, it’s of no clinical significance.

I couldn’t think of a response to that, but it seemed to me like the kind of phrase that could define a civilisation.

— You lost a few teeth, you’ll have to have some pretty serious dental work, the first doctor said.

— Other than that, the other chimed in, you fractured your left sinus cavity bone, you have several broken ribs, a fractured pelvis, and you broke the ulna and radius bones in your left arm. We put in six steel pins that will be removed when you heal and a metal T-plate that should be there permanently.

There was a heavy silence. They were dancing around a taboo, staggering their revelations; I knew the last one was about to come. I sensed it — a fate vastly worse than death — and instinctively tried to shift up the bed, as if to higher ground. The doctor took out a pin and pricked my body from the tip of each toe up to my neck, asking me to describe the feeling, whether it was sharp or dull, or nothing at all. My toes were unresponsive, my legs unresponsive, my thighs unresponsive, my knees unresponsive. They asked me to flex my foot, my ankle, to raise my leg. I could not. They used a hammer to test my reflexes. No knee jerk, no ankle jerk, no plantar reflex …

I felt at the end of my life cycle and already my thoughts dove straight back to suicide, to self-removal. I had instantaneously composed a suicide note— Dear World, I’ll show myself out. Thanks —by the time the first doctor half squatted on the edge of my bed and spoke the words.

— You are paralysed, he said.

— It’s unlikely you’ll ever walk again, said the second.

The light grew bright and my brain felt speared with the cold shock of a permanent loneliness, as if loneliness were a very, very, very long javelin that just keeps on going through you, and I couldn’t breathe or make out the faces peering at me and caught only phrases from the doctors such as ‘incomplete paraplegia’ and ‘crushed T-5 and 6’ and ‘the absence of motor and sensory function’ and ‘the zone of partial preservation’ while my own thoughts were actual, distinct ear-splitting voices of varying ages and sexes and races speaking all at once: The blind get great hearing, the deaf a super sense of smell. What do the paralysed get again? And: Does paraplegia ever just, you know, blow over? And: Who would have suspected that at such an advanced age of adulthood you can become someone so entirely worse? Tough break, pal.

Mimi, I noticed, was kissing my hand.

— I think he’s in shock, she said.

People wait their whole lives to tell you you’re in shock — any layman can apparently diagnose this.

— One more thing, the doctor with the priestly demeanour said. The police would like to talk to you.

— Why?

I think it’s best they tell you about that.

Then they turned away and walked out without saying goodbye, as if to say goodbye would have degraded everyone involved.