Maureen Johnson - The Madness Underneath

A man at a desk told us someone would come and speak to us and that we had to wait, so we stood in the waiting area, confused, staring between the desk, the television bolted to the wall, and the vending machine full of chocolate bars and bags of crisps.

“Thorpe,” Boo finally said. “We should phone him. I’ll do it. Give me your phone.”

So she did that, and Callum and I continued to stand around, pacing the tiled floor. About a half an hour later, a young, red haired doctor with a carefully trimmed beard came out into the waiting area and asked who was here with Stephen Dene. We got up and hurried over.

“You’re his friends?” he asked. “You found him un- responsive?”

We said that was us.

“We’re going to need to speak to his relatives. Do you have contact information for his parents, or…”

“His parents are dead,” Callum said quickly.

This surprised Boo and I, but we didn’t contradict him.

“I see,” the doctor said. “Is there someone else?”

“His…uncle,” Boo said. “He’s coming. But…what’s going on? Please. We’re the people he’s closest to. Please.”

After a moment of hesitation, the doctor nodded and took us to a small consulting room. “You stated he had been in a motor vehicle accident?” he asked, closing the door.

“Just a knock,” Callum said. “He seemed fine.”

The doctor nodded and leaned back against the door, looking down, as if thinking.

“In this kind of injury, that often happens. It’s called a lucid interval. The injured person seems to have no symptoms. It’s not the severity of the blow as much as how it occurs, which part of the head is hit. Maybe he complained of a headache, nausea?”

“A headache,” Boo said. “But it didn’t seem bad.”

The doctor scratched at his eyebrow. Then he looked at us with the kind of directness that never means something good has happened.

“Stephen has suffered something called an epidural hematoma,” he said. “The blow to the head caused a rupture, and he’s bleeding between the skull and the dura matter. When this happens, pressure is put on the brain. We’ve attempted to relieve this pressure…the thing about an epidural hematoma is that it has to be treated immediately. This injury occurred somewhere around eleven or twelve hours ago. We’ve drained the blood, but his brain has suffered damage. He is comatose, and we’ve put him on life support.”

“Life support?” Boo said. “But he’ll be fine, right? You fixed it, yeah?”

There was a pause and in the pause, there was everything. All the air went out of the room, and nothing was real. I couldn’t feel my hands and my head was tingling.

“We’ll keep him comfortable,” the doctor went on. “He’ll be in no pain. But decisions need to be made by the family. Do you understand what I am saying?”

No, actually, what he was saying made no sense at all. But it didn’t stop him from saying it. And then, we were moving again, into an elevator, down a hall.

Stephen had been moved to a room on the third floor. He was in a room by himself, much of which was taken up by a large piece of equipment. The window blinds were half-open, and slants of morning light cut across his bed. He was under a hospital blanket, which was tucked midway up his chest. He wore a blue hospital gown. Something about him being stripped out of his uniform, out of his serious sweaters or scarves, stripped bare of the things he wore in the normal world that gave him that appearance of authority, of seriousness…something about that papery gown stamped with the hospital name made it all true.

Boo made a sobbing gasp.

“Not this,” Callum said. “Of all the things it could have been, you know? All of us…all the things that could have happened, and just some little knock in the car…”

“Callum.” Boo was crying freely now, her voice thick. “Callum, don’t.”

“But of all the things that could happen to us…the Ripper. The things we see. The things we do. And some car accident …not even a bad one. It’s just stupid …”

He started to laugh, and the laugh got stranger and louder. He sat down on the floor by the bed and put his head down and laughed. Boo sat with him, and he put his arm over her shoulder. I thought dimly how this was one of those moments Boo had been waiting for for so long, when she would just hug Callum and hold on. She could probably do anything she wanted. But that didn’t matter anymore.

Stephen’s glasses were off. His face was the most relaxed I’d ever seen it, the worried crease between his eyes finally relaxed. I could look at him now in a way I never could before—I could stare as long as I wanted. I had never noticed how high his forehead was, high and elegant, sloping down toward his nose, which was also long and fine. His eyes were darkly lashed, and his eyebrows thicker than I thought they were. The glasses had obscured much of his real aspect. There were the lips I had pressed against mine last night—a slender mouth, long, with a strong tendency to pull down at the corners. He was almost smiling now.

I remembered how, at first, I had felt the tension in his lips, as if he was trying to make a barrier between us—then they had relaxed, parted slightly. And that’s when I had known he wanted to kiss me, wanted to give in. That little parting of the lips, the little sigh that came out…

I would hear that sigh forever. That little, little sound when the whole world seemed to open up.

“He told me if anything happened to him, he didn’t want his family contacted,” Callum said.

I had almost forgotten the two of them were there on the floor on the other side of the bed. They’d gone silent, and I had gone so deep in my thoughts that I was lost. Callum’s hysterical outburst had calmed, and he was leaning forward over his knees, as if ready to spring straight up from the floor.

“We have to call them now, don’t we?” Boo’s voice was hoarse. “Don’t we?”

“No. I think he meant it. It’s about what he wants, not what they want.”

“What does he want?” Boo asked.

“We should wait for Thorpe,” I said. I didn’t even mean to say it. The words came out, dry and automatic. Maybe I was channeling Stephen.

“Thorpe can’t decide,” Callum said. “Thorpe doesn’t know him. We have to decide. We have to do it. Stephen needs us to take care of this for him, not some bureaucrat.”

In the end, we took a vote.

I say that like it was possible. Like we could vote if Stephen lived or died. Like we were even thinking about this like it was really happening. It was more academic, like a question on an exam. If Stephen can’t live without the machine, would he want to live? Would he want to go on, his body forced to breathe, his mind not present or active? It was obvious to all of us that no, he would not want that, but we couldn’t quite say the words that followed. That the machine should go off. That he should be allowed to die. My head was feeling funny and light and my knees were shaking, and I got hiccups at one point and kept playing with the window blinds.

Then we talked to him. We told him stories. I told him about my grandmother’s discount boob job. I told him stories I would never have wanted him to hear, in the hopes that he would suddenly wake up just because I was saying something horrible and embarrassing. Getting my first period. That kind of thing. I didn’t care that Callum and Boo were there. They did the same thing. We told him jokes. Callum offered to show him paperwork to make him wake up.

Thorpe arrived, and brought the doctor back in with him. Every time I’d seen Thorpe before this he was just some guy from the government. The only thing I’d ever noticed about him was that his face looked too young for his white hair. This time, he didn’t wear a suit or a dress shirt or a tie, but a polo neck and some fancy jeans and when he saw Stephen, he fell silent and put his hand over his mouth.