Rupert Thomson: The Insult

‘You’ve been shot.’

I heard someone say it. I wouldn’t have known otherwise; I wouldn’t have realised. All I could remember was four tomatoes — three of them motionless, one still rolling. And a black shape, too. A shape that had a curve to it.

I’ve been shot.

Sirens circled me like ghosts.

I slipped away, the feeling of having fallen from a plane, of falling through dark air, and the plane flying on without me …

Each time I woke up, it was night.

Then voices spoke to me, out of nothing. Voices told me the rest. You’d been shopping, they said. You were in a supermarket car-park when it happened. It was a Thursday evening. You were walking towards your vehicle when you were fired upon, a single shot. The bullet took a horizontal path through the occipital cortex. One millimetre lower and you would’ve died instantaneously. You suffered no damage to adjacent structures; however, you have lost your vision and that loss is permanent. There were no witnesses to the shooting.

I lay in bed, my neck supported by a padded brace. My head had a strange deadness to it, as if it was an arm and I’d slept on it.

My mouth tasted of flowers.

The voices told me I was in a clinic in the northern suburbs. They told me how much time had passed, and how it had been spent: brain-scans, neuro-surgery, post-traumatic amnesia. They told me that my parents had visited. My fiancée, too. None of what they said surprised me. I could smell bandages and, behind the smell of bandages, methylated spirits, linoleum, dried blood. I imagined, for some reason, that the lino was pale-green with streaks of white in it, like certain kinds of soap or marble. It seemed to me that several people were positioned around my bed, though only one of them was speaking. I turned my face in his direction.

‘Something I didn’t understand. Occipital something.’

The same voice answered. ‘Occipital cortex. It’s located at the back of the head, the very base of the brain. It’s responsible for visual interpretation. In your case, the damage is bilateral: both lobes are affected.’

‘You said the loss of vision is permanent …’

‘That’s correct.’

‘So there’s no chance of recovery?’

‘None.’ The voice paused. ‘I’m sorry.’

Somebody placed a hand on my shoulder. I wasn’t sure which one of them it was — the man who’d been talking to me or one of the others. I couldn’t have said what it communicated. Pity, maybe. Consolation. It reminded me of the feelings I’d had about churches when I was young. How I’d imagined an angel’s touch might be.

I found that my eyes had filled with water.

Bits fly off me as I run.

The place is always the same. It’s a city street, though not one I recognise. Sunlight everywhere. The buildings blaze with it.

I can see myself running. The bits flying off me. Two ribs, an ear. One of my arms. Some teeth. They come loose, drop silently away. It’s like the way things happen in space. I watch a finger leave my hand, spin backwards through the bright gold air behind me. Soon there’s just the running left.

You might think it would stop then, but it doesn’t. I keep running, even though I don’t have any legs. Even though the body’s gone, the elbows too, the lungs.

It’s hard to describe. It’s like one kind of air passing through another. It’s not a bad feeling. The flesh has gone. There’s only the spirit left.

I wake up sweating …

The man who had talked to me before was sitting by my bed. This time he was alone.

‘My name’s Visser. Bruno Visser.’

‘What do you look like?’ I said.

‘An understandable question.’ He mentioned light-brown hair, pale-blue eyes. He was fairly tall, he said. Then he told me he was my neuro-surgeon, as if he thought that detail might complete the picture.

‘And what about me?’ I said. ‘What do I look like?’

He paused, his silence awkward — or perhaps just curious, intrigued.

‘I mean, am I disfigured?’ I asked him. ‘Would I recognise myself?’

‘There’s only one disfigurement, as you put it, and it’s not really apparent.’ He explained that I’d lost a small section of bone on the left side of my cranium, shattered by the stranger’s bullet as it exited. The normal procedure was to wait until the tissues healed, and then to fit a titanium plate. It was a fairly simple operation, he assured me. There would be a scar, of course, but the hair would grow back over it. Nobody would know.

He continued, more earnest now (he had moved his chair closer to the bed, his voice was lower). I shouldn’t underestimate the task that lay ahead, he said. When someone loses their vision suddenly, at least three stages can usually be distinguished. First there’s shock, a numbness that may last for weeks — the body’s own protective anaesthesia. Then depression sets in. This stage could last longer. Months. Years even. Hopelessness, self-pity, suicidal thoughts — I had to be ready, he said, for any or all of these. Finally, when I’d finished mourning my loss of vision, there was the gradual rehabilitation: the development of a new personality, with different capacities, different potential.

‘And now for the bad news,’ I said.

‘At this clinic, Martin,’ Visser said, ‘we don’t believe you should be under any illusions about your condition.’

‘I don’t think there’s much danger of that.’

There was a silence. ‘Perhaps you should get some rest.’ His chair creaked twice. He was gone.

I wake sweating, wait for my heart to settle. It always takes a while, after the dream, for my hands to join the smooth, glossy stumps of my wrists. For my body to piece itself together.

This is what must have happened after I was shot. I mean, that must have been the first time it happened. Only then it would have taken longer. Hours, probably. Maybe days. And there were parts of me that didn’t reappear, of course. One small section of my skull, measuring, according to Visser, 2.75 cm. by 1.93 cm. My eyesight, too. That never came back either.

I lie here with my neck supported by the brace. I move my fingers against the coarse wool of the blanket that covers me. I move my feet against the undersheet. There will come a time, I think to myself, when this won’t happen. When I don’t wake up in a hospital bed — or any other bed, for that matter. When disintegration’s pull can no longer be resisted. When the bits of my body continue to fly outwards, like the universe itself.

Visser returned. I knew him by his footsteps — or, to be more accurate, his shoes. They’d been repaired with metal, those steel crescents that prevent heels or toes from wearing out. I turned my head towards him. He wanted to explain something to me — I sensed his need — but he wasn’t sure how to begin.

At last he leaned forwards, his clothes releasing a faint odour of carbolic. ‘NPL,’ he said.

‘I’m sorry?’