Notes from a Coma Read online

  Praise for Notes from a Coma

  “Mike McCormack’s Notes from a Coma is a bold formal experiment, buttressing a surface text of domestic realism with a footnote-bound underworld of sci-fi dystopia—and between these two worlds hangs McCormack’s voluntarily-comatose JJ O’Malley, whose life story shuttles us back and forth across the novel’s many thrilling junctions of the global and the rural, the scientific and the spiritual, the intellectual and the heartfelt. Ambitious and accomplished, Notes from a Coma is the finest book yet from one of Ireland’s most singular contemporary writers, a daring reinvention of the gothic for the age of machines.”

  —Matt Bell, author of Cataclysm Baby

  “A cross between 1984 and The X-Files.… Notes from a Coma establishes McCormack as one of the most original and important voices in contemporary Irish fiction.”

  —Irish Times (original review)

  “At times wickedly funny, at others almost unbearably sad.”

  —Sunday Tribune

  “McCormack’s language is lovely, lyrical … his humor is dark, macabre; the words glimmer like a spell.”

  —Time Out

  “The greatest Irish novel of the decade just ended.”

  —Irish Times, Jan 15th 2010

  Praise for Mike McCormack

  “When venturing into the realm of the macabre, a writer gains a distinct advantage if he has a sense of discipline and a sense of humor … Mike McCormack has both to spare.… Like parables in their easy transcendence of setting and time, the most audacious stories are classics.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “McCormack displays the satiric sense, religious knowledge, dark humor, cutting insights and incredible imagination that made Swift famous. Then McCormack adds an overcast of modern doom and gloom with the skill of Edgar Allan Poe. The result is stunning and irresistible.”

  —USA Today

  “I am a huge admirer of Mike McCormack’s work. From sentence to story the writing is by times intriguing, funny, surprising, disturbing and profound.”

  —Lynn Freed

  “Gives Ian McEwan and Edgar Allan Poe a run for their money.… Decay and ruin seep through this book, driven by some of the finest prose to have emerged in over a decade.”

  —London Independent

  “McCormack’s debut crackles with wit, is laced with black insight and places him right up there with McCabe as a master of the new Irish Gothic.”

  —Sunday Tribune

  Copyright © 2005 by Mike McCormack

  Originally published in 2005 by Jonathan Cape

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved.

  Published in 2013 by Soho Press, Inc.

  853 Broadway

  New York, NY 10003

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  McCormack, Mike, 1965-

  Notes from a coma / Mike McCormack.

  eISBN: 978-1-61695-233-4

  1. Coma—Patients—Fiction. 2. Prison hulks—Fiction. 3. Identity

  (Psychology)—Fiction. 4. Psychologicla fiction.

  5. Ireland—Fiction.

  6. Psychological fiction. I. Title.

  PR6063.C363N68 2013

  823′.914—dc232012029318

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Notes From a Coma

  Frank Lally

  Anthony O’Malley

  Frank Lally

  Gerard Fallon

  Sarah Nevin

  Kevin Barret TD

  Sarah Nevin

  Gerard Fallon

  Anthony O’Malley

  Sarah Nevin

  Kevin Barret TD

  Sarah Nevin

  Anthony O’Malley

  Sarah Nevin

  Anthony O’Malley

  Sarah Nevin

  Anthony O’Malley

  Kevin Barret TD

  Gerard Fallon

  Kevin Barret TD

  Sarah Nevin

  About the Author

  When my perceptions are removed for any time, as by sound sleep, so long am I insensible of myself, and may truly be said not to exist.

  —David Hume

  My guiding principle is this: Guilt is never to be doubted.

  —Franz Kafka, “In the Penal Colony”

  NOTES FROM A COMA*

  Event Horizon

  * … because he is now both stimulus and qualia. His name, blurting through the nation’s print and electronic media, is also one of those synapses at which the nation’s consciousness forms itself. Firing in debate and opinion polls, across editorial maunderings and the antiphonal call-and-response formats of radio phone-ins, his suspended mind is one of those loci at which the nation’s consciousness knows itself and knows itself knowing itself …

  His existence—it is not too strong a word—is now a continuous incident report. Each day, the newspaper of record carries an abstract of his EEG tracings across a six-column spread inside the front page. All over the country children above and below the age of reason chart the peaks and troughs of his delta waves across the walls of their classrooms. Cast out over the earth’s cortex also a continuous stream of his MRI and EEG tracings. They have the appearance of meteorological reports from another star—troughs and banks of high pressure, depressions and tidal movements. Electronically flayed, these images are drawn down to our bedrooms and workstations, pegged out to dry across screens and monitors. Bootlegged already by the fashion and design industry they are now protected by retroactive copyright and patent legislation; the author has asserted his moral right …

  He evokes a response and this is to our credit. Contrary to ongoing analysis the nation’s compassion reflex has not been habituated. There is real concern, a genuine anxiety beyond the compassion flash fires of the latest crisis de jour. He touches our soul and, in a happy congruence of myth and politics, the public interest is now of interest to the public. We are not entirely mindful of him but we do bear him in mind …

  FRANK LALLY

  My heart went out to Anthony that day, that’s no lie. Nearly twenty years ago now but I remember it like it was last week.

  It was about two o’clock in the afternoon when the cars and the cattle truck came up the road. I followed them up and when I got to the yard the truck had reversed into the barn door and the vet and the bailiffs were already loading up the herd. Anthony was standing at the back of the house with the collar pulled up around his ears. I went over and stood beside him and said nothing. What could I say?*

  A dirty day it was too, pissing rain all morning and a wind blowing through the yard that would shave you. No one said anything but it didn’t take them more than twenty minutes to load up the whole herd—eight Friesian cows, a couple of yearlings and two calves. One by one they marched up that ramp without a bit of bother and I remember thinking we’d often had more trouble loading up two or three beasts of a Monday morning for the mart.

  They pinned up the tailgate and moved off and I saw the sergeant, Jimmy Nevin, coming over to Anthony. But whatever was on his mind he thought better of it and stood off holding the gate for the truck. Anthony turned into the house without a word. I watched the truck down the bottom of the hill and saw it turn out on to the main road. Jimmy Nevin closed the gate and walked over to me.

  “Before you go,” he said, “give him this.”

  He handed me a brown envelope.

  “It’s the quaran
tine order. Six months.”

  Anthony got barred from Thornton’s that night and it was years afterwards before he could have a drink in it.

  There was a time when Anthony had a reputation for being able to start a fight in an empty room: a short temper and tidy with his fists. I’d seen him in action a few times, London and elsewhere, and he wasn’t a man you wanted to do battle with. But that was all in the past—or so I thought. It all came back to him that night in Thornton’s.

  He’d been drinking since mid-afternoon and by eleven he was well on it. Ger, behind the bar—he was only young at the time—wouldn’t serve him any more. He came outside the bar and tried to lead Anthony to the door. Anthony of course was having none of it. He’d come in under his own steam, he’d go out the same way. And he did too a few minutes later when he saw he was getting no more drink. But that wasn’t the end of it. You’d want to get Eileen Flynn to tell you this story, she was there that night and she has a better telling of it than I have. She laughed about it afterwards but she was lucky she wasn’t killed the same night. Bang! The big window inside the door bursts in and this yellow gas bottle hops off her table and skids along the floor to the counter. Anthony is outside in the pissing rain, the sleeves of his shirt rolled up and the jacket down beside him in the channel. Any man, he was roaring, any fucking man!

  He spent that night in the barracks and he was lucky he didn’t spend a lot longer. Thornton’s didn’t press charges. They knew the craic and they settled for the price of a table and a new window but they told Anthony he’d have to do his drinking somewhere else. I got a call from Jimmy Nevin the next morning and went down to the barracks to bring him home. Of course by then the whole town was talking about him. Driving home with him that day I never thought that three months down the road he’d be giving them a whole lot more to talk about. That’s when he docked up with JJ.

  * In January of that year one of the first cases of BSE in the republic broke out on the farm of Anthony O’Malley in Louisburgh, west Mayo.

  After two days watching a Friesian cow with two permanent teeth stagger through the yard, unable to keep her balance and obviously disorientated, the beast was isolated and the vet summoned. Simon Conway’s provisional diagnosis was for an incurable neurological disorder. The animal was destroyed, blood and brain tissue samples were taken—sealed, dated, numbered and referred to the national laboratories in Dublin for analysis. Six days later a case of BSE was confirmed and in accordance with control measures brought in the previous year Anthony O’Malley’s entire herd was taken away to be destroyed.

  The destruction of entire herds containing infected animals would only become compulsory nine years later in the UK and other EU countries. Coming on the back of agreed measures drawn up in the Florence Agreement, it represented a further expansion of the offspring cull, a measure referred to unofficially as the Herod Option.

  ANTHONY O’MALLEY

  Not a day’s gone by, not an hour, when I don’t think of him lying out there on that ship in the Killary.* And the thing that comes back to me are all the arguments we used to have. How he’d sit there where you’re sitting now, in that very chair, covered in diesel and cement after his day’s work. More likely than not he’d have a few pints on him, probably drinking since after work. And it’d always begin the same way.

  “A consumer durable, Anthony, wasn’t that how it was?”

  “Go to bed, JJ. Have you eaten?”

  “Never mind eating, tell me the story. The bargaining process, tell me that again.”

  I’d make him something to eat then, a sandwich or a bowl of soup, because likely as not he’d have nothing solid in his stomach since dinner time. But he’d have no interest in food. All he wanted to hear was the story, his story.

  “Two thousand dollars, wasn’t that it?”

  “Eat up, JJ, it’s past midnight.”

  “That was the going rate at the time, wasn’t it? Over three thousand Deutschmarks or eleven hundred pounds if you could find someone to take sterling?”

  It could go on all night. He could sit there teasing out every detail of it, hearing it for the umpteenth time and still, after all these years, bewildered by it.

  “And what was the asking price, Anthony, what was the reserve? Was it stamped across my forehead or was there a little tag dangling from my toe?”

  “It wasn’t like that.”

  “So what was your opening bid? I’d say you came in low—low and hard. You wouldn’t want to show your hand too early. Eight hundred pounds, was that it? Not much more surely?”

  “Go to bed, JJ, this isn’t the time.”

  “Did you spit on your hand to seal the deal, like a proper cattle jobber.”

  “It wasn’t like that and you know it.”

  “Of course it wasn’t like that but it’s the truth, isn’t it? And a seller’s market too, wasn’t it? They couldn’t keep up with demand. All of us there up on top of one another in our slatted house.”

  “It wasn’t a slatted house, JJ, it was an orphanage. Christ, you know all this, I’ve told you a hundred times. Why do you have to keep going over it?”

  “It’s a story, Anthony, a bedtime story. Tell me about the wicked witch. We wouldn’t want to forget her. Tell me again about the wicked witch.”

  I’d go along with him from here. He’d be so far into it the best thing was to get through it as quickly as possible and try to get to bed.

  “Her name was Dragana, wasn’t that it?”

  “Yes, JJ, her name was Dragana.”

  “And she had a pair of arms on her like a butcher and a hooked nose with a wart on it. Her broomstick stood in the corner.”

  “Whatever you say, JJ.”

  This was where he’d start laughing, leaning forward in his chair, his favourite part.

  “But you took no shite from her, isn’t that right?”

  “That’s right, JJ, I put manners on her.”

  “Witch or no witch you let her know who’s boss.”

  “Yes, JJ, I sorted her.”

  “You haggled with her, wasn’t that what you did?”

  “Yes, JJ, I haggled with her.”

  He’d be bent over laughing now, laughing or crying I could never tell from the tears rolling down his cheeks.

  “Haggled with her,” he’d gasp, nearly choking. “This is the bit that kills me. You actually haggled her down to two thousand dollars.” The mug of tea or soup would be slopping down the side of the chair. “The going rate for a healthy child was two and a half thousand dollars but you haggled her down to two thousand.”

  “Yes, JJ, I haggled her.”

  “And shook hands on two thousand.”

  “Yes.”

  Some nights it might end here, the worst of it over, but most nights he’d want to take it through to the bitter end.

  “It could have been a lot worse though, couldn’t it? You could have used the old barter system.”

  “Yes, JJ, something.”

  “No, not just something. Tell the story right, don’t be trying to get away from it. Cigarettes and televisions, those were the things, weren’t they? Explain the cigarettes to me again.”

  There was no way out now—I’d have to see it through to the end.

  “The place was in turmoil, JJ, the economy was a shambles and the currency was virtually worthless. The gold standard was a packet of cigarettes. A packet of Kent cigarettes traded at two dollars.”

  “So you could have had me for a thousand packs of cigarettes.”

  “If you want to put it that way.”

  “I don’t want to put it that way but that’s the way it was, wasn’t it?”

  This was where he’d sink back in his chair with that look on his face. This was where he’d start talking to himself.

  “And no one thought it was strange. No one said stall the ball, this isn’t right. You can’t put your hand down in your hip pocket and hand over a wad of notes for a child. That day is gone. No one saw anything wrong with
it?”

  “You don’t know what it was like. The chaos, the violence, the conditions in those orphanages. You were lucky, JJ.”

  I remember the first time I said that to him, the look on his face. Like I’d scalded him or struck him with the back of my hand. I thought he was going to hit me. But he just slumped back in his chair and looked into his mug.

  “I’m going to bed, JJ. You have to be up for work.”

  “I’ll have a last fag, I’ll go then. Goodnight.”

  “Don’t stay up all night.”

  But of course he would. I’d find him in the morning slumped back on that chair you’re in now with an ashtray of butts on the floor beside him. He’d have stayed up all night smoking and mulling things over. About him being lucky and the haggling and about what he called his life as a consumer durable.

  He looked anything but durable the first time I saw him. Lying in a crib he was with six others, them all up on top of one another like a litter of bonamhs only not half as clean. Like the rest of them he was scalded in his own water and looking out between the bars of the crib with the biggest pair of eyes you’ve ever seen on a child. They were that big I thought they’d jump out of his head and roll across the floor to my feet. And if there was any colour to them I couldn’t tell what it was from the bad light in the room. Black as coal they were and probably just as hard, I remember thinking. But that was just a trick of the light. I now know JJ’s eyes are a kind of deep ruby red, the colour of strong tea without milk. It’s not the type of colour that shows itself. You have to look hard to find it.

  Standing there looking at him I thought the room was full of wasps; there was this buzzing noise everywhere. But it couldn’t be wasps. This was the middle of March, there was eight inches of snow outside on the ground—not even that demented city could have wasps and snow at the same time. And then I knew. They were grinding their teeth. The kids, every one of them, grinding their teeth down to the gums and making this buzzing noise that was filling the room. Sitting on their behinds, sprawled across each other, lying on their backs, every one of them working their jaws from side to side, chewing nothing but cold fresh air.†