Notes from a Coma Read online

  That, loosely, was the procedure and evaluation process. You can read a more detailed account of the whole thing on the official website. This is a public experiment and most of the material can be accessed by the public. The only information kept private is the family details and the individual medical histories of the candidates. And of course it’s JJ’s medical history which has you here today. Let me say that the disclosure of this information is a severe embarrassment to this department. A full public apology has been issued to JJ and his loved ones and how it became public was the focus of a departmental inquiry. Unfortunately, the inquiry never reached any conclusions. Lines of inquiry just disappeared into the sand. When his medical history was lodged in the official website guest book we were appalled. That attachment was traced to a public library in Dublin where the email account was set up. The account had never been used before nor has it been used since. That is as far as any back-trace can go. That is the difficulty of the Web, its openness and anonymity.†

  Of course that disclosure cast a shadow over JJ’s involvement. Yes, we knew of his medical history and it was discussed by the panel. But it was not considered an obstacle. JJ was not ill, mentally or physically, when he was chosen. When he presented for the project he was ten months out of St Theresa’s with a clean bill of health. The confusion about JJ’s state of mind arises as a result of all those articles which persist in confusing unhappiness with mental illness. They are not the same thing, as any psychologist will tell you. Put simply, a person who is unhappy or sad or guilty or grieving is not necessarily a sick person. Sadness is not an illness, neither is guilt or grief; it does not have a pathology despite what all the New Age spoofers would have you believe. Whatever about being desirable it is a normal part of the human condition. And to say, as some have, that JJ was not in his right mind is pure arrogance. JJ’s right mind is a sad mind—that is his normal condition. That is not the same as saying that his condition was desirable but it is the fact of his whole existence. He is not a happy young man. We knew all this and it was explained to us by the supervising psychologist. We discussed it but did not see a problem.

  And that’s it; those are the reasons and that was the process. I can assure you it’s all above board—certainly no other project in the history of this government or any other has gone through such an exacting series of checks and examinations. Medics, lawyers, accountants, environmentalists—all areas of expertise were considered. The Attorney General was consulted to make sure nothing in the project would offend the constitution—the Council of State was convened twice. The world is looking on at this, everything has to be out in the open. This project will not be filed under conspiracy in some sort of paranoid X-Files dossier. It’s about figures, nothing more or less: the punitive cost of the present-day prison service. And yes, I have an investment in all this. This is my constituency; JJ is one of my constituents. I have to go before the people in two years’ time for re-election; the last thing I want is to be writing letters of condolences to loved ones and answering questions before a government subcommittee. Something going wrong is not an option.

  * Legally, there were no insuperable obstacles to the project. Harmonisation of judicial and sentencing procedures across the EU meant that the smooth running of the project was down to making sure it didn’t snag on translations of conveyancing warrants and so on. Documents had to be flawless. Months were spent haggling over them by translators and paralegal teams, calibrating every nuance and word before they were brought to effect. It’s a tribute to the work of these people that each of these warrants passed without hitch through the relevant courts and legislative bodies.

  There was no shortage of volunteers. Several countries—Germany and France in particular—were inundated with applications. Most of them came from prisoners serving long-term convictions with an eye to passing three months of their sentences as quickly as possible. Most were deemed unsuitable from the off. A screening process affixed to the European Penal Commission’s initial proposal and further amended in consultation with various legal advisers significantly reduced the eligible number of volunteers. Serious offences, second offenders and likely recidivism excluded hundreds of applicants. These amendments were the first obstacles within the internal constitution of the project. The EPC worried that the amended screening process would prove overly restrictive and narrow down the pool of volunteers below a viable threshold. They were out of sympathy with the concerns of the legal bodies. However, the legal advisers would not countenance any circumvention of justice and, as one of them said in an internal memorandum, “If the twin concerns of justice and research could not be conjoined then the project had no future.” This focused minds and a joint session of both bodies published an agreed document which contained all the proposed amendments of the legal advisers within the EPC’s initial conditions. Legally and medically, each volunteer would have to meet each condition separately and independent of each other; there could be no question of an aggregate success.

  It was essential from the point of view of public confidence that the project be seen to come under the authority of the EU penal system. This was to offset worries that research institutes might gain a foothold within the EU penal system which would allow them to come in and recruit volunteers for further projects. To guard against this, a redundancy clause written into the project’s constitution would come into effect at its close.

  In line with this, the governor of the Somnos would have ultimate say on when and if the project should be aborted. A full-time medical observer liaised with the attending neurosurgeon and anaesthetist on a daily basis and so long as his report squared with the daily report of the project coordinator the project could continue. Any discrepancy between these reports or deterioration in any of the subjects’ conditions below certain paremeters would be taken as legitimate grounds to abort. Ultimately, next of kin retained an absolute right to withdraw the volunteers at any time.

  † Is this how we faded from ourselves, the protein and electrical weave of the self giving up the ghost and watching as it drifted away, with good reason, through these walls? And did we part on good terms, shake hands and go our separate ways but still, in our heart of hearts, hanging on in the expectation of a plaintive call or a postcard from the other side telling us we were missed, wish you were here …? Or was it bitter and acrimonious, both of us glad to be shut of each other, both of us vowing never again, not in this life?

  Something in the here and now disappoints us, something in it has us turning away from it. We might say that the time and place is gone when we were identical with ourselves, when we were at one with our IDs and no margins or discrepancies threatened our ontic alignment. Now, by way of imaging technologies, information systems and bureaucracies, we find ourselves in this lateral drift from ourselves. Nothing else can account for this rush towards the abstract. We have come to live in this deferral of ourselves, drifting away on a digital tide, a hail of ones and zeroes which sift down through the ether and resolve to a lattice of pixels on screens and printouts—our very own hauntology. We have renounced the here and now, drifted to elsewhere and elsewhen, trailing in our wake a spoor of forensics and telemetry over a paraphrase of our timelines, a line of crumbs we hope one day to find our way back home over.

  SARAH NEVIN

  A couple of weeks after that incident in the church we had our first real argument, our first lovers’ tiff. The weather had taken up and I suggested we go away together for a few days, just a week or so on our own to get some sun on our pale faces: the kind of thing lovers do, I didn’t think it was too much to ask. Of course looking back now what I was really trying to do was move our relationship on to another level. We’d been a couple about three years by then but we’d never been away together, never spent any time alone together, so one week in August seemed to be just the thing. JJ had holidays coming and I had some money put by; I couldn’t see a problem.

  But JJ wouldn’t hear of it. He wasn’t being awkward or anything b
ut the idea just struck a fear into him I had never seen before. He put his foot down, a blank refusal; it was as if I’d asked him to up sticks and move away altogether. That shocked me because it was the first time he’d ever refused me anything. As a rule he was only too happy to do anything to please me, anything to put a smile on my face as he put it himself. It was just the way he was. All the care and attention he’d lavished on me at the beginning of our relationship hadn’t tapered off in the least. He’d kept it up effortlessly. Three years had shown me that it was more than the rush of attention you’d normally expect at the beginning of a relationship. All the presents and gestures, the courtesy and attention—he was a real romantic.

  But this idea of going away together was different. He wouldn’t even discuss it.

  “No, Sarah, let’s not get into this. I don’t want to go anywhere.”

  “It would only be for a few days, JJ, some sun and sand, waking up together. Just some time to ourselves.”

  “You’ve been planning this?”

  “Don’t be paranoid; it’s a suggestion not a plot. We could go anywhere.”

  “I’m not going anywhere. You go, get someone else to go with you.”

  “I don’t want to go with someone else. This is about you and me. Let’s get a map and stick a pin in it, do something reckless. We have the time and the money, a few days away—we could forget about things for a while.”

  “No.”

  “What are you afraid of? This is what lovers do. It would be such fun.”

  “I’m not afraid of anything, go yourself, I don’t want to hear anything more about it.”

  And that was the end of that discussion.

  So my idea came to nothing. I was so angry I threw a huff and went away with a friend—ten days driving around France. It was good fun but towards the end I was glad to be getting back. By then of course I’d cooled down and forgiven him. All I wanted was to see him and show off my new tan. But when I got back I found that everything had gone to hell.

  First thing in the door Mam tells me he’s in hospital.

  “I tried to contact you but your mobile was out.”

  “When did he go in?”

  “Five days ago, Thursday afternoon.”

  “An accident? What happened?”

  Mam blanched and looked down at the ground.

  “No, Sarah … he’s in St Theresa’s.”

  “He’s not a well man, Sarah,” Anthony said when I drove over to the house. “He’s not a well man at all.”

  Whatever about JJ, Anthony looked ghastly. If I hadn’t known I might have thought he was the one who was sick. He stood there in the middle of the kitchen, no shave and the hair standing out on the side of his head as if the fright of the last few days was still thrilling through his system. My own sudden appearance had upset him also. He kept tugging at the cuff of his shirt and looking around the kitchen as if he’d misplaced something. The curtains hadn’t been drawn; the kitchen was filled with this orange murky light. A mess of stale dinner things lay on the table and the chairs were covered with clothes and papers; in just five days the bachelor had broken out in Anthony.

  “The trouble with that fella, Sarah, is that he’s too smart for his own good. Too smart entirely.”

  “I’m going over now, Anthony. Can I bring him anything?”

  JJ’s bedroom was where he spent most of his time reading and listening to music. Unlike the kitchen it was perfectly tidy: his books and CDs on one wall and his bed against another, the wardrobe built into the wall opposite. Whenever I went into it I always had the feeling I was entering a monk’s cell. No posters or pictures or anything on the walls, just the bare necessities. This was the kind of impression JJ strove towards. He had this idea that if your bedroom was tidy then your life was tidy also. That was why he decluttered every couple of months or so, sorted out all his old clothes and letters and anything he didn’t need. He’d gather the whole lot up in a black bag and light a fire against the gable of the shed and stand over it till it burned away. It always made him feel better he said, gave him the impression of moving on, turning over a new leaf.

  Anthony put a few things into a bag, underwear and T-shirts and so on. I pushed in his Walkman and a handful of CDs. Anthony handed me the bag.

  “When you see him, Sarah, don’t be too shocked. He’s not a well man.”

  He was in St Anthony’s ward, sharing a room with five other patients. An old man with a wide grin on his face sat propped up on a pillow by the window. Opposite him a young man was turned face to the wall clutching a small radio to his ear. JJ was sitting on the side of his bed in his own clothes—jeans and T-shirt and a pair of toeless sandals. They were his clothes all right but they didn’t seem to fit. Hanging limply, drooping and creased, they looked as if they’d died the moment he’d pulled them on. No light in his eyes or colour in his face and his hair swept over to one side of his head, like a little boy going up to his first Holy Communion. This more than anything upset me. He looked so lost in himself; there in body but his mind a million miles away.* I sat down beside him and took his hand.

  “How do you feel?” I seemed to be asking that a lot lately.

  “How do I look? Tell me how I look?”

  “You look lost, pale and lost.”

  “That bad?”

  “No, you’re awake, that’s a good thing.”

  He was looking at me intently, scanning my whole face. A gust of breath shuddered through him. He placed his hands on his knees to steady himself.

  “Sarah,” he blurted. “That’s it … Sarah.” Tears shone in his eyes. “Christ, it was touch and go there for a moment, I was really scrabbling. What’s happened, Sarah …? Tell me what’s happened.”

  “Can you not remember anything?”

  “This is my first day awake. Everything’s a blank. Doctors won’t tell me anything. Tell me.” He squeezed my hand. “Please.”

  “Maybe we should leave this to the doctors.”

  “No, Sarah … Please.”

  Of course he had to know. This was JJ, what else did I expect? After a moment thinking about it I felt it would be better coming from me than someone else.

  “You’d gone to work—or so Anthony thought. But when he got home that evening he saw your boots and jacket in the hall so he knew you were still in the house. When there was no sign of you for the dinner he went to your room and found you sitting on the side of the bed, naked and blue with the cold. Your whole face had collapsed in on itself he said, this grey colour, it looked like porridge. You didn’t speak or move or recognise him and you were as stiff as a board—like a man who’d spent the whole day doing press-ups he said. He pushed you back on the bed and threw a blanket over you and then called the doctor. The doctor spent five minutes with you and then told Anthony he was getting an ambulance to take you here. A nervous breakdown, he said. Anthony sat with you till the ambulance came but he couldn’t get a word out of you. When they brought you over here they sedated you and gave you a muscle relaxant. Anthony came to see you last night but you were asleep. He’s been here every day since you were brought in.”

  “Anthony who?”

  My heart lurched. I tried to wipe any expression from my face.

  “Anthony’s your dad; you’ll see him later this evening. What’s the last thing you remember?”

  A long moment passed.

  “The last thing before you came here?”

  He narrowed his eyes and shook his head gently as if clearing his thoughts.

  “I was at mass, I got sick. When did that happen?”

  “Over three weeks ago.”

  “What happened in between?”

  “You went to work as you always do. We were supposed to go on holidays but we had a fight and I went on my own. I was gone ten days.”

  “Do we fight often?”

  “No, not often. You’re awkward but not one for fighting as such.”

  “I have this feeling … so feeble, like I’m strung out all over
the place. Why do I feel that?”

  “You need rest, JJ, you need to build yourself up.”

  I’ve never seen anyone so lost to himself, so distanced from his own strengths and energies. It wasn’t so much that he was disoriented or lost to the world, it was more like he’d drained away into some hole within himself and had left only this shell behind him. There beside me within arm’s reach, but the best part of him a million miles away. Was he seeing me at the same distance? I wondered. Was I as far away from him as he was from me?

  “You’re going to get a lot of rest and sleep, JJ. You need it. You’ve been through a lot this last year.”

  He drew my hand to his cheek. I wondered who’d shaved him.

  “I need help, Sarah, I don’t know what’s happening to me. I sleep from one end of the day to the other, but waking or sleeping I can’t suffer myself. That’s all I know, I can’t suffer myself.”

  We talked some more and I left him after an hour, promising to return the following day. To tell the truth I was glad to get out of the ward—the smell, those squeaky floors. At the nurses’ station I caught up with the specialist in charge and after a few minutes trying to get through to him that yes, I was his girlfriend, he told me that JJ had suffered a mental breakdown, a stress-related check of his psyche. The serious aspect of it was that part of his memory was occluded—his declarative memory, the long-term memory which deals with learned facts and narrative.

  “It’s not unusual,” the specialist said breezily, “this retrograde amnesia. In this kind of breakdown there is generally some degree of memory loss and disorientation. But it’s not a calamity. It will return. The good news is that his procedural memory is intact—he showered and shaved himself this morning. That is a good sign. He will need rest and sleep for a few days and then we can go about rebuilding him. Don’t look so worried. Whatever’s wrong with him he’s in the best place for it.”