Take No Prisoners (27 page)

Coma

She had dark eyes, did LoChi, but they'd been closed for six years. The consultants had dragged her eyelids open each day to make certain she was still alive; more than two thousand times they'd discovered her irises were dark. She'd known nothing of this: the pupils of her eyes had remained unfocused and somehow lonely as the consultants had peered at them with their little stabbing lights.

Every day a nurse had checked her ears for excess wax. That was something else she hadn't known about.

She'd been fifteen when the car had hit her; the driver had been eighteen and drunk and in due course imprisoned. Her father (her mother was long dead) had told her this, but of course she hadn't registered the words. She'd just lain on her narrow, thinly mattressed bed, a transparent plastic tube thrust up her right nostril, waiting, it seemed, for death to confirm that it had finally taken her.

Death took her father first. One of the nurses told her while operating the sphygmomanometer with a savage haste: there were other patients to be dealt with, after all. Eyes closed, she didn't hear the words. Her father, sans wife and sans daughter, had amused himself by buying a parachute jump and then refusing to open the parachute. The man-shaped dent in the ground had been measured at a depth of eight inches. He'd landed face-downward, so it was likely he'd seen the ground rushing towards him.

That had happened four years into her coma.

The nurse had told her, but she'd heard nothing.

No. That's wrong. She'd been hearing something else, all these years.

Everyone else had assumed her brain was dead or dying, but this wasn't the truth. Whatever the physiological condition of her brain, her mind had been alive. It had discovered things it'd never have discovered if it had spent those six years locked up within the perimeters of her consciousness. It had wandered through the backwaters of the universe, accidentally finding places where energy displayed itself in its full nakedness or touching the hearts of imploding stars, feeling the crushing hatred and the pain ...

The chord.

All of the universe was playing a chord. Each of the trillion galaxies was contributing a muted note. As her mind had spun through the great empty places she'd heard a chord made up of all those trillion softly hummed notes. The chord expressed to her a purity she'd never known before: it was the purity of the statement of existence.

Sheer existence.

Nothing more.

She felt the chord flowing through her body. The tingling of its passage started, oddly enough, in her knees. Then it spread upwards through her thighs and her torso, touching her shoulders like a lover's caress (although of course she didn't know this) while at the same time seeping more slowly toward her feet. It was as if the chord stirred the atoms that made up the molecules that made up the cells that made up her body, so that her flesh became warm and pink.

It had been six years.

She smiled just before her dark eyes opened.

~

When she'd been hit by the car she'd been a girl, and her father had been poor. Before his death, however, he'd made various investments using the money he wasn't spending on the upbringing of his daughter; one of the insurance companies had kicked up shit, claiming (quite rightly) that the policy was void because he'd committed suicide, but the others had accepted that the matter could never be proved one way or the other – perhaps it was just the parachute had failed – and so the shit-kicker had fallen into line.

She was six years older.

She was a woman.

She wasn't rich, but she had enough money to buy herself a flat in London, or perhaps a cottage in the country. She decided to opt for the latter.

Of course, none of this happened at first.

What happened at first was that she was whipped through to an operating theater where various anonymous people in white suits looked at her nakedness and probed her in all of the places she didn't want to be probed, and then she was taken back to bed to have blood samples taken every three hours.

She reintroduced herself to the world by reading a Perry Mason novel.

All the way through it, she heard the chord she'd discovered. She could hardly see the words because of the colors of the music. Yes, Mason had successfully defended his client, but didn't he always do that? This time it was a blonde with a dubious reputation. Six years ago it had been a brunette with a dubious reputation.

She hated the whiteness of the fluorescent light shining down on her.

She hated the forced intimacy of the sphygmomanometer.

She hated the blood tests.

She hated being here.

Here.

The chord.

~

All of the universe is a
place
, do you understand that? No, of course you don't.

She was in her cottage, where the walls shone whitely as if they loathed her. The sunshine coming in through the windows seemed to her like an intrusion as it washed across the cork tiles someone else had put down.

Six years had gone. Six years of her life. Her father had died. The world wasn't the same one she'd left: the first thing she'd noticed, when they'd taken her out of the hospital, was the way the cars had changed.

She still heard the chord, but now it was hurting her.

On the bed, staring at the ceiling with her hands behind her head, watching the shifting pattern of the sunlight filtered through the wind-wafted branches of the tree outside. Reaching one hand up into the air, clawing at the emptiness, feeling the subtle touch of the chord lapping at her fingertips.

They didn't want to know her any more, those far-too-kind people at the hospital. She was out. She was no longer their concern.

Her arm seemed to extend itself so that now she was touching the ceiling: it was cold and white and sent a shiver through her. Her frosty feet seemed to be a long way away, despite the warmth of her pajamas. She pulled the quilt over her shoulders and turned onto her left side, snuggling down under the coarse cotton, hoping for sleep and for a return to the world she'd left.

~

There was a single string, you see, and I touched it. As soon as I touched it the string started to vibrate, which wasn't what I'd intended it to do, because all I'd meant was to find out what it felt like. (If you really want to know, it felt like a length of badly knotted wire.) But the damned thing twitched under my finger-touch, and before even I could know it there was a chord sounding throughout all of the emptinesses I'd created. The string wasn't a part of me, not a part of Qinmeartha, not a part of Qinme the Maker: someone who came before me must have left it behind.

~

This time she woke naturally and giggled at the whiteness of her pillow. It was late in the day, and so she switched on her bedside lamp, even though she didn't need the extra light. She pulled on clothes she'd never worn before and stumbled to the bathroom for a pee and a cleaning-of-the-teeth. Her face in the mirror was a face in the mirror: she washed it thoroughly and went back to bed.

She couldn't sleep, now.

The pattern of light on the ceiling was just another way the chord she'd heard for six years could be expressed. It was as if someone had taken a single breve and cut it up into an infinite number of parts, each of them shining in a different shade, then projected the result as a flowing movement of sparkling yellow colors.

For six years she'd heard the chord, but now she couldn't conjure up even its remotest trace in her mind. All she could do was see a pale representation of it on the ceiling.

The district nurse arrived, was admitted, and examined her. She was a little underweight, she was told, for her height, and the level of cholesterol in her blood was not as good as it could have been.

The district nurse left, and bed still seemed the best place to be. She rolled over onto her back and felt the comfort of the mattress pushing at her shoulderblades. With the departure of the nurse the ceiling had become a light gray. She wanted to go back to sleep again, but found she still couldn't. She tilted her legs over the edge of the bed and, blindly, found her slippers with her feet. A moment or so later she was upright, groping through the gloomy room.

All she had was a tenor recorder. It had been bought by her father for her to play at school, but somehow or other she'd never got round to it.

She felt the brown plastic and blew a shaky note. The sound was hideous – like a valkyrie's shriek.

Then she put her fingers over the holes and blew more gently, producing a low sound that pleased her as it resonated through the empty rooms of her cottage. She grinned to herself in the darkness and blew the same note again. There was a whale in the distance, trying to speak with her in its sad monotone. The echoes of its chant filled her ears until she could hear nothing else.

She threw the recorder away from her as hard as she could, so that it broke against the wall, the mouthpiece sintering away into the wine-like darkness of the shadows by the door.

The note would have been a pleasure, a delight, an object of desire before.

Now it was somehow ... inadequate. She'd heard the chord that represented the universe, and her body had acknowledged its purity. She could still feel the maze of the intertwined notes as a concrete structure that had built itself within her while she had been away ... wherever she'd been. That was it. It had been a feeling, almost like the sensation of pain, rather than something merely heard. The chord had become a part of her and she a part of it; for the rest of her life she would be a dual entity, made up of not only the her that had existed before the car had hit her but also the solid thing the universe had decided to construct within her.

In bed again, she found she was sucking her thumb. For a moment she tried to pull it out of her mouth, thinking bitter thoughts about her childishness. Then she left it where it was and crossed a warm and tranquil sea into sleep.

~

People call me a creator – or even The Creator – but that isn't really the truth of it. Somebody – something – created me long after she/he/it had created the universe. A universe of galaxies and stars and planets, all working together in an infinite and infinitely elaborate pirouette. But it was a dance without music. The one who/which came before me had been able to generate nothing but a great ocean of sterility.

She/he/it left a string behind for me to touch.

Then she/he/it created me so that I could touch that string.

I speak in metaphors, of course. The string is not just a vastly long piece of catgut or steel encircling the universe. In a way, it is the universe: it is the universe's soul. And it wasn't a finger I touched to the string-that-isn't-a-string: it was my self. Only once I had set the string-that-isn't-a-string into vibration did the universe become what it is now.

The galaxies and stars and planets that I inherited aren't important any longer. How can I explain this? Let's use another metaphor. Here's a question for you: which would you prefer to own, a cow or a byre? The answer's easy: both. But if you had to choose between one and the other, you'd go for the cow, because the byre's no use on its own whereas the cow could probably struggle along without the byre. When I was put into the universe it was nothing more than a byre, you see, but then I touched the string-that-isn't-a-string and it started to vibrate.

Then I was the proud owner of not just a byre but also a cow to put in it.

I had what you'd have wished for: both.

So in that sense I guess it's OK for you to describe me as The Creator.

But only in that sense.

The woman you see down there, half-tucked into her bed – she knows all of this, but she's keeping the knowledge well hidden away from herself: it's a piece of understanding which she doesn't want to belong to. She's heard the sound I created when I touched the string-that-isn't-a-string, and forever she'll know what that chord is without being able to pull it into the front of her mind.

Or, at least, I think so.

~

The dark eyes open and the ceiling is pinkish green in the reluctant light of the dawn. She stretches herself on the bed, so that it feels as if her body is a million miles long. She spreads her legs until they're a million miles apart, and then does the same with her arms, so that her hands and her feet are exposed to the chilliness of the morning while the she that is herself is still warmed by the cocoon of her quilt.

The cocoon of her guilt.

A silly word-play – yes, she realizes this, but at the same time she recognizes its accuracy. She does feel guilt – guilt that somehow she's managed to cheat everybody else by traveling six years into the future without having paid for her ticket. She's fifteen, except for the fact that she's twenty-one. She has a family – well, at least a father who loves her – except for the fact that she doesn't. Right now, if she hadn't been hit by that car, she would have a parent comforting her rather than just the district nurse being professionally sympathetic twice a day. She never wanted to incur this guilt, but it seems to her that somehow she's done so.

A moment later she's on her hands and knees, smelling the comforting staleness of the carpet. If the bloody district bloody nurse could see her now she'd be in a place of misery politely titled by polite people an Institution.

She touches her tongue against a tuft, feeling its unpleasantness.

Enough.

Coffee?

Tea?

She doesn't relish either, but she feels she ought to be doing something constructive, like making herself hot drinks she doesn't want and drinking them even though she doesn't wish to.

She lurches through to the kitchen, wondering if there's a music shop in the area that might be able to sell her a harpsichord.

~

She lets her fingers do the walking through the Yellow Pages and over the buttons of her telephone. (Buttons! Telephones usually had dials when she fell asleep.) At last she finds a place in Chagton that doesn't have a harpsichord but can at least offer her an autoharp, which is a lot cheaper and could be persuaded to produce the same sort of effect. She explains why she needs the instrument and the man on the telephone tells her it would be good if she could pay in cash, rather than by cheque.