Alongside the bed there is the customary small table, with a drawer, and a space beneath for personal possessions. He has nothing but a hospital bag containing those of his clothes that were salvageable after the accident, and a paperback novel gifted by Jack from the next bed, discharged after two weeks.
‘It’s a good book, man. You’ll like it.’
Reaching out his good arm to take the book, he smiled his thanks. But he knew his command of the language wasn’t enough.
On the surface of the table beside him stands a tumbler, the only thing he can reach. It becomes the focus of his attention. He studies its glass sides, welcoming the sunlight that reaches it from the windows for a few hours a day on cloudless days like this. The beams are diffracted through it, magnified and concentrated in this little patch of light on the table top. He watches it move as the afternoon passes. It seems to grow to fill his vision, or perhaps the world contracts to this little patch. It is an image of openness and light from a world beyond the windows. Out there sunlight describes endless space, but glances into this room as into a fishbowl. This little bright patch is a token from that world, tantalizing, and soon snatched away. His thoughts circle endlessly in this transparent prison.
Idly he tries to cover the pattern of light below a palm, trying to capture its fragility, knowing it will elude him. The glow falls instead across the back of his hand. He turns it so that his cupped palm is illuminated. A stray message from a world he cannot touch. Where is the warmth that sunlight should give? He feels nothing.
Of what happened that day at the junction he remembers little, only a moment of heightened awareness in which life seemed to run out of room. There was no space for escape, only time for regret for all the possibilities of life about to be snatched from him. He would not see his beloved Laura again, nor would he retrace his familiar way along the Avenida Colón to his college in the Old Town. Never again would he watch the evening sun filter gold through the branches outside his college window. His days must end here, in this strange land … And then.
An utter blank until waking, half waking, still groggy from anaesthetic, in the ward.
He found himself in traction, unable to move except one arm, and turn his head, and even that occasioned pain radiating down his spine. His right arm was rigid in plaster, as were both legs, the right being attached to ropes and suspended, because the hip had been so crushed. He was attached, too, to monitors, glowing, ticking boxes by his bed. It was explained to him that his internal organs were damaged in the accident, and he had initially lost a lot of blood. Days passed with a dullness in his body that he assumed the result of strong doses of analgesics. These must at first have been administered intravenously, because it was only after several days he was given tablets he was told were painkillers.
Since the accident he’s been able to do little without help. In the first weeks he realized he was making a recovery, painfully slow, but he felt determined, the boredom of immobile days only gave him greater resolve. The ward was geared towards overcoming the physical infirmities of broken bodies, and amongst those on the ward he found a general will to supercede, the common expression of unbroken minds. He was confined to his bed by the pulleys and weights unlike the other patients, each more mobile than he was.
Some would stop by his bed to chat. They offered him fruit, sharing what their visitors brought. Jack in the next bed went so far as to share his visitors, introducing his wife and young daughter.
‘’Cos you don’t have nobody coming to see you, man.’
He explained. ‘All family I have only in my country.’
Despite his limited language, he shared in the camaraderie of the shifting population in the ward. All of them believed they would recover their lives, even if it meant, as for him, having to learn to walk again, or to use prostheses. They were orthopaedic patients, men with shattered bones. There was a brightness evident there, a positive atmosphere pervaded the place, everything seemed to lead in the direction of recovery.
The day he was released from his cords and helped off his bed into a wheelchair, after weeks, ranked as a small victory. Nurses applauded, joined by some of the patients.
And then he was transferred from the first, surgical ward to this one. Life seems less certain on this long term ward. Things move more slowly. The constant movement of the first ward is replaced by a measured rhythm. Meals arrive at regular hours; twice a day a nurse checks on him, exchanges some pleasantries, and makes entries on the notes at the end of his bed, and once a day he is lifted and turned, and given a bed bath. When he needs it, he can call assistance to convey him slowly to the bathroom.
He tries to assess his situation. Two beds occupied by men who never leave them, and rarely speak. Four or five patients whose bodies appear whole, but who shuffle like grey shadows. Some of the men on this ward appear inescapably terminal, while some are on long convalescence; he wonders which he is, and if the transfer was evidence that the doctors have given up on him. Why else has he been moved here? He has become wary of talking to his fellow patients, as though even to invoke the comradeship of suffering would damn him as a member of the doomed and failing.
This is not his real life, in this land. The accident removed him from the grey city streets and from the dingy apartment where he has his bed but which he cannot think of as home. He feels no attachment to it, and the distance from his own world is magnified. This place he is in, this place of damage and disease, is temporary, an antiseptic, whitewashed passage between two lives, the old one he has been expelled from and the new one he has yet to join. The old life has been stolen, all he has is locked away in static memory, while the changing reality of that country, the people, remains inaccessible.
A nurse helps him into a wheelchair, and wheels him to a dayroom. As they pass along the corridor they move in and out of shafts of sunlight from high windows, tantalizing refractions from a world he can’t touch. Once there he is parked near the fishtank, and watches for a while, the painted backdrop, the strands of plastic weed, and a few desultory fish aimlessly circling. His gaze shifts to the room. A number of patients, each separate, some circling without purpose, others just sitting, vacant as fish.
At these times he must remind himself to fight for health, to return to the world he knew, to believe he will walk in sunshine again, or if not walk, that he might be wheeled into it and need not depend on a passing slant of light. He closes his eyes and tries to picture Laura’s face. Something about it is becoming blurred. Her laugh remains distinct, but he struggles to recall the shape of her jaw, the line of her eyebrows. These are times when he sinks. It’s easy to forget. Once he had purpose, he knew what was worth fighting for.
The nights are the worst. Always on the late evening ward round there are tablets to help him sleep, and he takes them faithfully, but they don’t stop him waking in the night, restless, always restless. Discontent builds in the hours of darkness, knowing no one will come. He lies there listening to the sounds of the ward for hours at a time, the snores and groans, the occasional hushed squeak of the night attendant’s soft shoes moving at a distance on polished floors. Little else reaches his senses except the cloying fake-pine-laden smell of antiseptic. Waiting, waiting for the things beyond his bed to slowly resolve into grey shapes in the traces of dawn; waiting for the sounds of the first birds, only heard. Waiting is all there is to do now.
Tonight again sleep is fitful. Perhaps the days contain too much that is like sleep, with nothing to fix attention on. He has lost the natural cycle of days, drained from his body by the complete inertia of these past weeks, replaced by a monotony in which time has little meaning. The world around him is asleep in the dark, and he is alone, remote.
In the depths of the night things skitter at the fringe of his vision. If he had to explain, he would say the feeling resembles that state we sometimes inhabit either side of sleep, drowsing, more or less conscious of what is passing before our thoughts, but slipping, only aware of it if some sound brings us suddenly to full consciousness. It resembles, too, that stage of a high fever when impressions begin to swamp you, the stage of obsessive irrationality before unconscious delirium sets in. It’s a precarious, fugitive state of mind, and it seems to represent his most real moments, the times when he is most conscious of his being, and of his isolation. Darkness folds around him, this new land fades away and he is back in his own, in a way that becomes hazy by day. He is sharply alive, travelling back in his thoughts, back to horror, back to the gloom of that awful place. Faintly, he hears cries, screams that might be his own, the rank smell of faeces and blood.
He strains to find the things in his life that mean enough to come back for, but they seem precious few. Everything he had is so far away, in his own country, all denied, back there, sealed off from him: his work at the college, Laura’s infectious laugh, family and friends. As hard as he tries to bring these things into close-up they pull away from him, dissolve into the beatings, the humiliation. It seems he can’t have one without the other.
He has heard it said often enough that in the final moments life flashes before your eyes, but he no longer believes it. What happens is as likely to be a thinning of life, as our hold becomes shallower, feelings and memories drop away, and any sense of purpose drains and evaporates like a dream on waking, but in an opposite direction. This is what scares him now, in the periods of lucidity that come and go, as he wavers, purpose flickers within him. This is how his days will end, he feels, draining away, becoming pointless.
The pain within is greater now. He tries to locate it, but at first it feels generalized, a hard, pushing feeling, pressing on his stomach and intestine, but just as evident in places he can’t distinguish. He trains himself to focus, and the pain manifests in his shoulder, which was not damaged, and down his leg. He must suppress it, not give way. There must be ways through this, he has had to do this before, he has learnt strategies. Sometimes it seems best to move into the pain, imagine it as fully as possible, and recognize its transience, that it is only an electrical signal to receptors in the brain. At other times he prefers to force himself to think of other things, resist, travel somewhere in his head. He recites children’s rhymes, plays songs silently in his mind, quavering, trying to concentrate.
A wave of pain hits him, breaking over his head, pushing him down with its force, taking his breath away. He gasps for breath, the wave too great to move with, the shock of it too massive. Focus, he tells himself, think of that song, that song, what is it …?
A nurse on her rounds sees his grimace and the involuntary curve of his body, arching with pain, and comes to his bedside.
‘What are you feeling? How is it?’
He writhes.
‘What is it? Can you tell me where the pain is?’
He understands, but merely waves her away. This is his to bear.
He is drifting, half asleep, a few hours later when the nurse returns with a doctor. Roused by their arrival, he clutches at the sheet with hands curved as tight as claws as another spasm of pain flashes through his nerves and explodes in his brain like lightning, blinding him. Like lightning, it is followed promptly by a different force, like a low, powerful, deafening rumble that runs on and on, as the first moments of sharp onslaught give way to a heavy power of pain that seems to consume him. He is engulfed by the storm of it. The pain now is like the impact of the accident, but it brings no relief of oblivion, not yet, he will be forced to suffer through it.
It feels infinitely heavy, like a ball of steel in his belly, hot and expanding, consuming his nerves until pain is all he can feel, all he is. He is trying to fight against it, but is forced back within himself, barely aware of the doctor’s presence. Or is it the doctor from that other place, yes, speaking his own language now, come to certify when he is fit enough to be returned for more torture. The doctor is saying something, shouting ‘Yes, urgent … immediately’, is that it? Or is it ‘Sí, se puede, hágale’1. Are they going to take him back to the chamber underground, the endless brutality, the filth, the crushing insistence of the torturers? No, no, resist, fight, don’t let them, don’t …