Notes from a Coma Read online

  But if you ask me, JJ’s problem was that he saw signs everywhere, he made too many connections, this was his difficulty. Everything that happened in his life—his time in the orphanage, his adoption, the burning in the church—he wove all these things together into a kind of world view. I suppose you could call it a philosophy … His abandonment by his mother and the circumstances of his adoption were only the start of it. He saw himself free in the universe, not in the positive sense of being able to make and forge his own destiny but in the negative one of being cast out without love or grace. Of course if you pointed out to him that he’d been rescued from something a lot worse he would have said that was just chance, he was lucky not worthy, and to JJ there was a world of difference. There was this want in him, this hunger—you could feel it in every discussion and debate we ever had. Argument for the sake of argument or point scoring didn’t interest him; he had more need than that. He believed in everything he ever argued no matter how unlikely the idea. And that’s why I don’t think he was confused either. That’s the kind of fool’s pardon I find objectionable. I’ve never come across anyone with such a coherent sense of himself in the universe—it’s something I can’t explain, it just goes beyond me. But if that’s confusion then it’s the most reasoned and clear-sighted confusion I’ve ever come across.

  * Inhabiting the realm of the undead has not put the subjects beyond politics. How the project handed the public a silent media babe who has found broad approval across all demographics is one of its more interesting sidebars. Respondents to various newspaper and online polls have chosen JJ as the nation’s favourite son, the man most likely to take any marginal seat in any forthcoming election—by-, general, presidential, or European. He now occupies a place in the nation’s consciousness exceeding that of the project’s original mandate. He is now public property and any attempt to appropriate him as the exclusive property of any single party is likely to be rejected by the electoral-response reflex in cross-voting, abstention and outright hostility. The absence of any manifesto or electoral programme is seen as the perfect catch-all, a final and total collapsing of left and right paradigms, a deft clearing of the middle ground where the blunted spike and wave tracings of his EEGs assure us that, contrary to appearance, our man is bearing certain things in mind. Faced with a candidacy undreamt-of in focus groups or grass-roots soundings the government parties have found themselves hopelessly off-message. Baffling pollsters and running ahead of spin doctors, the political establishment now finds that mindlessness and the rhetoric of silence is likely to have a defining influence in the make-up of the next government.

  By way of limbering him up certain nameless backers have already pitched him head to head in a five-way contest with the other subjects. A simple enough beauty contest it has, however, brought to light several unforeseen variables. Heavy online polling suggests that French national chauvinism is weighing in behind their man. Against that, how does one quantify the sectional loyalties of the worldwide death-metal community? Will Jorda’s pan-sexual appeal offset Spanish voter apathy? What of Callanan’s canny pitch as a compromise candidate? Is JJ’s homeboy status enough to see him breast the tape? All this above the protests of gay and feminist lobbies, disappointed ethnic minorities, all harping on themes of alienation and democratic deficit. The result is far from clear and as it stands it represents a considerable gamble on the part of JJ’s backers. An ur-politics to be sure but still part of the nation’s candlelit vigil.

  SARAH NEVIN

  You can see us together here in this photo. This was taken on the steps of the hospital the day I was discharged, three weeks after the accident. JJ with his arm around me and a big smile on his face, me with my bald head and crutches. It was the beginning of August, a beautiful summer’s day, the sun splitting the stones. But see how pale I am, like a ghost; that was my first day in the sun that whole summer.

  I like this photo, it’s full of sunshine and it caught me at a moment when I was happy. More importantly, it caught me at a moment when I knew I was happy. I’m sixteen and a half in this photo, just back from the dead with a shiny new Kevlar plate in my head, a pair of crutches and two months’ supply of opiate painkillers in my pocket. On that day, the eighth of August, I was the happiest girl in the world. My bones were mending, I had a recovery to look forward to and, best of all, I was in love.

  What shocked me most was the amount of anger in him. I couldn’t understand it. Everyone knows how Anthony took JJ out of that orphanage but not everyone knows that money changed hands. It made no difference to me when JJ told me. All I could see was that he was lucky to have been saved.

  “Saved,” he hissed. “For the umpteenth time, Sarah, I was bought, I wasn’t saved. A herd of cattle went to the sword—well, the humane killer—for me. In the beginning was bovine spongiform encephalopathy.”

  “Don’t be such a drama queen. How can you be so angry, it could have been a lot worse.”

  “How could it have been worse? You mean I could have changed hands for a consignment of fags or a colour TV. A fair exchange is no robbery.”

  “That’s how it was, you said so yourself. It was chaos in that city. Riots, tanks in the streets, miners beating shit out of students. Revolutions are messy things.”

  “Revolution my tit. Revolution would be a fine thing. What kind of revolution starts by selling off its own kids? To this day no one knows whether it was a revolution or an internal coup. Imagine, you could go into any of those orphanages with a wad of used notes in your hip pocket and browse away to your heart’s content till you found some child you fancied.”

  “Those orphanages were hell, JJ. Those kids have better lives now than anything they could ever have hoped for.”

  “How do you know? Have you ever wondered where some of those kids ended up? We were easy meat, Sarah, it was a free-for-all in those orphanages, like the new year sales. The US State Department estimates that ten thousand kids left that country in the immediate aftermath of the quote-unquote revolution. And they don’t have a clue where they ended up. How many of them ended up in pornography or among paedophiles? No one knows, there were no checks or screening. As long as you had the spondulicks you were sorted. And of course if you came home and found that your little pink Caucasian baby was suffering from some illness you hadn’t bargained for or that his chromosomes weren’t stacked up the way God intended then you could turn him over to a state orphanage here, no questions asked. Twenty-three of us are now in orphanages here. AIDS, HIV, hepatitis, all the different shades of autism—bond with that! Some of us were so sick you couldn’t quarantine us, never mind love us. It wasn’t right, Sarah.”

  “You could be dead by now, JJ. Worse, you might still be in one of those orphanages, another state statistic. You should be glad you’re alive and angry.”

  “Les irrécupérables,” he said softly.

  “What?”

  “Les irrécupérables, that’s what we were called. The irrecoverables. All of us lost to the world. Out of sight, out of mind.”

  “It wasn’t your fault. You’re not guilty of anything.”

  He turned away and I was left looking at his back.

  “My point exactly, Sarah. I’m not guilty of anything, I’m just guilty.”

  This was the worst of him, all that anger and bitterness, it just kept chewing away at him. This going hand in hand with his mindrot meditations could make him hard work sometimes. The mindrot meditations; that’s what he called those flights of fancy he would go off on sometimes. They could take hold of him any time, a chance phrase, a snatch of a song, a picture—it didn’t matter, off he’d go spinning out a ream of rubbish for whatever length of time it took for it to fade out under its own weakness. But, because they never resolved themselves in any lesson or insight, they frustrated him. That’s why he called them his mindrot meditations. He had this idea that his own mind was eating itself up. He got the idea from reading an article on bodybuilding. Seemingly, in the bodybuilding community it’s
common practice to starve yourself in the days before competition. The idea is that with no foodstuffs to process the digestive enzymes turn on the body itself and start consuming the fatty tissue and after a couple of days you get optimum definition. But sometimes the process goes too far and the body starts feeding on its own muscle and starts to rot from the inside out. JJ thought he saw this happening to his own mind. His mind or his soul was chewing itself up, eating itself back to its own substructure. Those flights of fancy, the remedial metaphysics as he called them, were only the first stage of its self-consumption. What would happen when his mind had burned off all that fat, what would happen when his mind had nothing to feed off but itself? What would happen then?*

  One day we were at the sea, walking behind the pier. It was quiet, just the two of us with the whole beach to ourselves. We were talking about the Killeen further up the shore. The Killeen in this parish, where all the stillborn and unbaptised babies were buried, was dug in a field behind a cliff face which looked out to sea. But over the years coastal erosion had eaten back the cliff face and disturbed some of the graves. Sometimes after storms and high seas people found little skulls and bones strewn along the sand. I said something about how terrible this was, how painful it must be for people with loved ones buried there. Of course JJ saw it differently.

  “Maybe those kids want to go back to the sea. That’s where we come from in the first place, isn’t it? Maybe they want to start all over again. Washed out to sea and broken down by the sand and water, then rising up into the clouds and falling as rain all over this green and pleasant land. Rising up again as grass and trees and nettles and briars, maybe that’s what they want.”

  “That’s a JJ idea. I don’t see it myself. If you’re dead you’re dead and that’s all there is to it. No longing or feelings.”

  “They don’t belong there, Sarah, it’s not sacred ground, it’s not even consecrated. And I’ll bet they know it. I’ll bet they’re happy when they’re washed up out of those graves. Imagine how they must feel when they get out of that cliff, when they feel the starlight and fresh air on their little skulls. I’d say they get a whole new lease of life. I’ll bet if you came down here some moonlight night you’d see them, all these little skeletons, jumping around and dancing and singing their little heads off. And then, just before sunrise, they run down to the waves and swim out to sea until their arms tire and they sink gladly down to the seabed. I’ll bet if you came down here some moonlit night that’s what you’d see.”

  I shuddered. “I wouldn’t want to see it. It wouldn’t make me one bit happy. Besides, those little kids won’t have much more time for singing and dancing. The whole thing is going to be exhumed and relocated to the new graveyard.”

  “That’s a mistake, I’ll bet that no one has considered what those little kids want.”

  I threw up my arms in exasperation. “That’s rubbish, JJ.”

  “Is it? Suppose one night one of those little skeletons paid you a visit. Suppose you woke up and found one of them sitting on the end of your bed. He has a job for you he says, he wants you to speak on their behalf. He’s heard about relocating the Killeen but himself and his buddies want no part of it. They’re happy where they are, or happy in so far as dead kids can be. They’re prepared to take their chances with the sea, they see it as a second chance and they are willing to take it. He wants you to be a spokesman for the dead, to make a moving plea on their behalf. After listening to him for a while you agree to make representation on their behalf, you make no promises but you tell him you’ll give it a try. Of course the little fella is delighted. He shakes your hand and turns to go but you have other ideas. You don’t want him to leave. It’s not often you’re on speaking terms with the dead; you have a lot of questions. You don’t want to pass up this chance.

  “ ‘So what’s limbo like?’ you blurt out before you can stop yourself.

  “The little fellow turns round and shakes his head. He hadn’t expected any questions but now that his work is done he’s in no hurry.

  “ ‘A terrible place,’ he says. ‘Badly thought out, a real rush job. There’s no facilities or toys or anything. It’s like an open-cast copper mine. We just sit around talking all day and night but since all of us are kids we have nothing to talk about.’

  “ ‘So who looks after you, who feeds you, do you ever see the angels?’

  “The little skeleton fellow is standing inside the door. He has loads of time.

  “ ‘You’d see angels once in a while; you’d see them passing through. Some of them are OK, the lesser ones, the thrones and dominions and virtues, they’re OK, they don’t have too many airs about them. They might stand and pass a few words with you but mostly they just pass through. But then there are the others, Gabriel for instance, deafening everyone with his bugle. And then there’s Cupid—’

  “ ‘You’ve met Cupid!’

  “ ‘Yes, but you wouldn’t know him now, he’s put on a lot of weight.’

  “ ‘Has he? I could well imagine. I mean, any picture I’ve ever seen of him, the thick arms and legs of him, you could tell he was going to have a problem with it later on.’

  “ ‘He has a problem now all right. And he’s angry and bitter with it. You couldn’t listen to him. Moaning and griping and bitching about the glory days when he was a marksman and could hit a target at a thousand paces. He couldn’t hit the ground now if he fell. And of course it’s everyone’s fault but his own.’

  “ ‘Jesus!’

  “A funny look crosses his bony face.

  “ ‘No.’ The little fella shakes his head. ‘I’ve never met him, or met anyone who has either. You hear a lot of talk, stories and so on, but I have yet to meet anyone who has met him.’

  “ ‘And what about the other fella, the red gent with the horns and the pitchfork—’ ”

  “JJ!”

  “What?”

  “Shut up.”

  “I was just coming to the good bit.”

  “No! I don’t want to hear any more.”

  And that’s what a mindrot meditation was.

  * “Coma is a sleep-like state from which an individual has not yet been aroused.”

  Refined from the Hippocratic idea of coma as “a sleep-like state from which an individual cannot be aroused,” LeWinn’s definition facilitates the growing corpus of documented and anecdotal evidence which testifies to individuals making various degrees of recovery from deep coma. Furthermore, it accommodates the use of medically induced coma in certain surgical procedures.

  Routinely used in cases of seizure and intracranial hypertension, barbiturate comas induce deep central nervous system depression beneath level-three thresholds of surgical anaesthesia. A medium IV dosage of 10mg/kg/hour of Thipentol maintains the subjects in the deep end of the Glasgow Coma Scale. The delta wave signature of depressed synaptic activity at this level lies within a spectrum of 0.3—5HZ. The duration of the coma is reckoned within such recovery indices as the resumption of normal intracranial pressure and against such limiting factors as acute muscular atrophy, cardiovascular and renal damage. In the case of the Somnos project a further limiting consideration is that one-third of all inmates in Irish prisons serve an average of three months.

  Speculation has been voiced that the growing use of barbiturate comas in cases of radical surgery is now dictated by insurance rather than clinical concerns. The worrying incidence of litigation from patients who, following resuscitation after surgery, testify to consciousness of acute agony while undergoing surgery is now seen as a defining consideration as to the level and type of anaesthesia used in surgical theatres. The medical community deny that medical procedures are compromised by cost-benefit considerations.

  KEVIN BARRET TD*

  There was never a percentage in it, not in terms of public profile or column inches or first preferences or anything else either. That was obvious to me the minute my senior colleague landed that project on my desk—a blue folder with the word SOMNOS stencilled on
it. I didn’t know what the word meant then but I do now and when I read through it I thought of what that journalist said to me that day on the steps of the Dáil: a poisoned chalice right enough.

  No, I didn’t wonder at it or think twice about it and I’ll tell you why. On the evening I got my portfolio I was sitting in the Dáil bar talking to Emmett Cosgrave—he was junior environment minister at the time and he told me a story which has stood to me since. Emmett was back from an environmental conference in Düsseldorf, of all places. He’d put in a hard morning’s work in front of some watchdog committee explaining why this country wasn’t meeting EU legislation in agricultural pollution and groundwater contamination. Emmett had pointed to pending legislation and greater enforcement of existing laws and so on. All morning on the defensive and that wasn’t the half of it. In the afternoon, as part of a subcommittee, he’d met a delegation of Green Party activists from France and Germany concerned about the levels of mercury emissions from crematoriums throughout the EU. Seemingly, crematoriums are the single biggest violators of mercury emission codes across the whole EU, bigger even than heavy industry which, by and large, has cleaned up its act. But because of what they do crematoriums have managed to escape censure and this is what was worrying these people. Now I didn’t know there was mercury in the human body. There isn’t, Emmett said, or at least there shouldn’t be. But there is mercury in prosthetics: breast implants, pacemakers, false limbs, false teeth, teeth fillings, glass eyes, glasses, hearing aids and God knows what else we’ve been fitting ourselves out with. And with an ageing and more beauty-conscious population across the EU there are no shortage of these. The problem arises when crematoriums cannot burn off the latent mercury in these things. If a crematorium burns above a certain temperature, there’s no problem—the mercury vaporises and condenses within the incineration process, it can be gathered and disposed of safely in toxic dumps or, you’ll be pleased to know, because of its refinement, there is a ready market for it in the pharmaceutical industry. But if crematoriums do not reach this temperature, the mercury flies off in a raw state into the atmosphere and does all sorts of damage to the ozone layer and so on. Now since 80 percent of crematoriums across the EU were built in the sixties and seventies they are operating systems which cannot reach these temperatures and therein lies the problem. And make no mistake about it, there is a problem. Listening to these people, Emmett said, you’d think the planet was choking on the fumes of burning breast implants and glass eyes. Three and a half hours he sat listening to this. Facts and figures and demographic charts, medical submissions and forward projections … By his own account Emmett lost interest after the second hour and began worrying about catching his flight home. But, when it came to winding up the discussion, he thought he saw an opportunity to win back some of the ground he’d lost earlier in the day. He conceded that while he saw there was a problem and indeed a serious one, it was not an Irish problem. Ireland does not have a cremation culture; to the best of his knowledge there is only one crematorium and this one operates within existing codes. Obviously therefore the problem did not concern us. This was where they had Emmett snookered. As an addendum to their presentation they produced a proposal which outlined the need for biodegradable cardboard coffins and unbleached cotton shrouds for those countries with a burial culture. Would Emmett be tabling a motion in the future to bring these proposals to effect? This was too much for Emmett. He gathered up his papers and left the room.