Winman, Sarah - When God Was a Rabbit

‘Arthur! Get back!’ I shouted, as he fell close to the side.

Again thunder and lightning triumphed, the splintering sound of fractured wood tore through the valley; the loud thump of rain as it hit the river surface before being enveloped by the rising mass. Nelson shook behind Arthur’s legs, and again Arthur shouted out into the storm and railed at the loss of his boy, his hallowed gentle boy he’d feel and know no more.

I didn’t hear my phone ring, not the first time – the thunderous noise maybe, or the inconsistent signal that faltered during storms. But as the storm moved over and left us with the feeble spray of sunlit rain, that’s when I heard it, the ring suddenly echoing amidst the quiet exhaustion of the scarred river valley.

‘Elly,’ the voice said.

‘Charlie?’

‘Elly, they’ve found him.’

The moment I’d waited for. I held my stomach. My legs suddenly shaking. I reached for Arthur’s hand. What had they found? What thing had they found that had declared him, him? And as if he could read my silence he quickly said, ‘No, Elly. They’ve found him. He’s alive.’

. . . to a passer-by he might have looked like a man sitting on a bench overlooking Lower Manhattan, enjoying a quiet moment of aloneness away from the wife, from the kids maybe, from the pressures of work. He might have looked like an insomniac, just like the joggers who ran the promenade in those early hours. He might have looked like either of those things, because he was shaded by the trees and nobody would have been close enough to see that his eyes were shut; not close enough to see the trickle of blood from his ear or the dark wet patch that matted his curls on his swollen head; because they weren’t close enough to see, he could have been a drunk, sitting on a bench in the early hours of the morning. And nobody was interested in a drunk.

He was found unconscious at three o’clock in the morning on 11 September 2001, on a stretch of the promenade at Brooklyn Heights, a place he always went to, to think about life.

It was quite a walk from his house, Jenny, but he did it at night, often instead of a run. He loved the bridge, loved to walk the bridge and never felt afraid of the city’s vacant aggression that hugged darkness, because it thrilled him and emboldened him. Could quite simply arouse him. And he was found by a young man who approached him for a light, a man who saw up close the bruising around his mouth, the swollen features of a bursting head. This young man phoned the police and saved his life.

They found nothing on him. No wallet, no phone, no keys, no money, no watch. Nothing to say who he was or where he was from. He wore only a faded red T-shirt and old chinos and brown Havaianas on his feet. He never felt the cold. Not like me. Remember how I’d shiver.

They rushed him to the ER, where they drained the fluid and worked on his head until the swelling retreated. They took him up to the ICU where they put him with four other patients and there he stayed, waiting for his mind to return to gently inform the rest of his body to awaken and live. And there he stayed, quite peaceful, apparently, and immune, until the morning he awoke and tried to pull the tube from his mouth. He didn’t know his name or where he lived or what had happened. Or what would happen next. He still doesn’t.

All this is fact. What we’ve just learnt. Will let you know more, Jenny, as it comes.

Ell xx

Her name was Grace. Grace Mary Goodfield, to be exact, and she was a registered nurse, and had been for twentysix years with no thoughts yet of retiring. Her folks were from Louisiana and she still holidayed there.

‘Have you ever been?’

‘No, not yet,’ said Charlie, the first day they met.

She lived alone in Williamsburg, had the ground floor apartment in an old brownstone, a happy place, good tenants above and below. ‘Space enough for me,’ she’d said. ‘Kids long since flown; man long since gone.’

Like so many others she wasn’t supposed to be at work on 11 September. She was doing mainly night shifts that week, and her morning was to be spent changing over the curtains to heavier ones in preparation for the coming fall. But even before the Towers fell she rushed to the hospital to take up her position like all those others, waiting for the mêlée of survivors and their tales of luck from those upper floors. But, as we know, that didn’t happen.

She wasn’t needed in ER, and so she went to her office on the ICU floor, and went around the rooms to boost morale, to hand out cookies, and always with a smile, because she was the best shift leader and she knew her staff and she knew her patients. Just not the new one, though, not the unconscious one. No one knew him.

She called him ‘Bill’, after an old boyfriend who liked to sleep. She would sit with him when the others had visitors, and she would hold his hand and tell him about her life or tell him about what she’d cooked the previous night. She’d tried to look for him on the Missing Persons websites, but it was useless because thousands were missing. The police wanted to help but there was nothing they could do whilst he was under, their minds and resources directed elsewhere; directed to the horror unfolding beyond those safe walls.

She looked at his clothes, those meagre belongings bagged in his locker, and she could piece nothing together of his life. This useless anonymity scared her. She worried he might die lost, with no one knowing; parents and friends not knowing. I’ll be there for you, she said one night, as she left after a particularly hard shift.

She brought in different smells and oils and placed them under his nose, anything to flick the switch of memory. She introduced lavender and rose and frankincense to his mind, coffee too, and her latest perfume – Chanel No 5 – which Lisa from emergency had brought back from Paris. She encouraged the other four patients to talk to him if they felt well enough, and soon stories of wars and sex and baseball rebounded across the floor, and only quietened if a nurse was present, something more reminiscent of an old bar than the care unit it was. Sometimes she would bring in music and hold a headphone gently to his ear. She thought he was in his thirties and calculated what songs may have travelled with him throughout his life. She played Bowie and Blondie and Stevie Wonder – all borrowed from her neighbour’s collection, the neighbour who lived upstairs.

Almost three weeks later she got the call. Janice ran in and said Bill had woken up. Grace called for a doctor. When she entered he was grabbing for his breathing tube, panicking, his left arm sluggish. ‘It’s OK,’ she said. ‘It’s OK,’ and she stroked his head. He tried to sit up on his own and he asked for water. They told him to sip it slowly, they told him not to speak. His eyes darted around the room. Gerry in the bed by the door said, ‘Welcome back, son.’

When he was strong enough, the police returned.

‘What’s your name?’ they asked.

‘I don’t know.’

‘Where are you from?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Where do you live?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Is there someone we can contact?’

He rolled over.

‘Don’t know.’

He did well over the next few days. Ate well, slowly started to walk, but still remembered nothing. He recognised the Twin Towers as structures of architecture, not as places he’d visited for meetings, places that housed people he’d lost. They moved him out of ICU to a single room. They heard nothing from the police. Grace kept an eye on him, tried to see him most days, took him flowers and kept calling him Bill; he didn’t mind. And they would talk about magazine articles and watch films. He watched a film with the actress Nancy Portman and he decided he liked her and thought she was funny, and he would have been thrilled at that moment, had he known she was his aunt, but he didn’t, of course. He remained locked into a world solely of the present.