Notes from a Coma Read online

  “It’s passed so quickly.”

  “I have this picture of him,” he said, “this image. It’s the same image that comes to me whenever I think of him but for the life of me I don’t know where I got it from. It’s a sunny morning, always Monday even though I don’t know how I know that either. Owen is outside Kelly’s shop with a bottle of Lucozade and a pint of milk in his hand. He’s wearing jeans and T-shirt, his working clothes, and he stops to take a swig out of the bottle. He puts the carton of milk on the window sill behind him and stands there swigging away, wincing and thumping his chest as he swallows. Then he screws the cap back on the bottle and walks up the street to where the David Brown is parked outside the Bunowen. He swings her out on to the street and takes off out the Westport road. I don’t know where I got that from, Sarah. Owen must have done that a thousand times in his life but I can never remember seeing him do it. But it’s still the clearest memory I have of him, something I’ve never actually seen him do. How can that be?”

  We had the house to ourselves that evening so we pulled the table into the middle of the back garden and made something to eat. JJ had come round to himself a bit by then. He was looking healthier and hungrier.

  “Twelve bicycles, Jimmy said, that’s how many he got through on his journey to the moon.”

  “I spoke to him outside the graveyard the day Owen was buried. He was so lonely I couldn’t believe it, an old man sobbing into a big white hanky like that. You’d think with all his years something like Owen’s death would be easier to take.”

  JJ shook his head. “I think it only gets worse. When someone like Owen dies in a small place like this it’s not just death you’re talking about. This village didn’t just lose one of its sons, it lost a part of its future. Owen was the type of fella this village has hopes for, it saw its future in him. He was an only son, he was going to stay at home and run the farm, probably build a new house … Another couple of years and his kids would be going to national school and Owen would be going to parent-teacher meetings. These are the things that ended in Owen’s death and that’s why an old man like Jimmy was crying. Owen’s death yes, but the future also. People round here had their fingers crossed for the likes of Owen, they had hopes and dreams for him even if they didn’t know they were hoping and dreaming. Someone like Owen is public property in a small place like this. You must feel that too, the way people look at us when we’re out together.”

  “I know the way people look at us but I just thought it was young love and all that kind of thing.”

  “It’s more than that, Sarah, people have their fingers crossed for us too. They remember what it was like here in the eighties and early nineties, how sons and daughters got scattered to the four winds and never came back. That still frightens them even if they don’t know it.”

  “Have you ever thought of going back, JJ?”

  I knew the moment I opened my mouth that I’d made a mistake. The look on his face, he honestly didn’t know what I was talking about.

  “Back where?”

  I paused and drew a long breath; I wanted to know. “You know, back to where you came from, back to see, to find out.”

  This look of disbelief crossed his face. “Where has this come from all of a sudden?”

  “I’m sorry I brought it up, I was just thinking out loud. But, you have to admit, it’s the most obvious thing in the world. All your questions and searching, all your anger, I thought a time came for adopted kids when they needed to find out about their roots and their blood relatives. I’m sorry; I shouldn’t have brought it up.”

  We had never broached this topic before and now that I had I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear him talk about it. He laid down his fork and shook his head.

  “It’s a fair question, I’ve asked it myself more than once. But think about it, Sarah, what would I do if I went back? Look up registers and documentation? Find some poor woman in a tower block or rearing pigs on a small farm, a woman who has moved on with her life and who has probably forgotten all about me? Worse maybe, find out that she has died and that’s all there is to it. No, I’ve never wanted that. I’ve never felt my roots lie anywhere other than here. This is my home, Sarah, these are my roots, this is where I belong. I might have come into the world a thousand miles away but that was before I was born. I was born here, Sarah, and I belong here, I’ve never felt any other way.”

  “But all those stories, all that talk about those other kids and the guilt, that’s all part of you.”

  “It’s too late to go back, Sarah, that’s all in the past. Anything I found there would be out of place and out of time for me. All that anger and guilt, as you put it, has to find its answer here. This is my home, Sarah, don’t go making me homesick on top of everything else.”

  “I just don’t understand. You’re now saying that all that happened before you were born and it has nothing to do with you. All you’re saying is that you were born to be angry and guilty and bitching and moaning at the world.”

  “Maybe that’s exactly what I’m saying. Things happen in your life and they make you what you are, but coming into the world is not one of them. Neither is dying. They’re only bookends, they have nothing to do with your life. Think about Owen. Think about him. His death had nothing to do with his life.”

  “Nothing except end it,” I said shortly. There was something here I couldn’t understand and it was making me angry.

  “Apart from ending it, it had nothing to do with his life whatsoever. It had a far greater impact on mine and yours.”

  “Jesus.”

  “I don’t mean it like that.”

  “The worst sort of hair-splitting … I don’t understand.”

  “What makes you think I do?” He picked up his fork. “Let’s drop it, Sarah. This food is going cold.”

  * How did we get this tired? When did this fatigue become so total? If the truth be told there is no drama here. Five men on the flat of their backs, sunk below the gag reflex and pupillary response, struggling to raise a delta wave … there is nothing to tell here.

  But it is not so much that there is nothing happening here as that it has all happened before and elsewhere. Here in the realm of the undead things have been speeded up, fast-forwarded to the end. This is where denouements are spliced into the opening reel, plot twists straightened from the off, loose ends cut away in the prologue … This is where bad guys throw up their hands after the opening credits and take what’s coming to them, where adventuresses come with transparent motives and where skeletons are routed from closets in the opening act … This is where love affairs, pallid for the want of sundering and tearful reconciliation, have cut straight to the inevitable disappointments and recriminations, where sex is wound on to postcoital depression, where killers never get into their serial stride because the first corpse, no matter how battered and seemingly senseless, always manages to hold on to incriminating forensic matter, where appellants skip over mandatory setbacks in lower courts to ringing exculpatory verdicts in courts of appeal, where civic-minded explosions ring in prior warnings and coordinates to the authorities and emergency services, where car chases are paraphrased into the moment of collision with paramedics and metal workers already on standby and where, in spite of the digital meter counting down the days in the top right-hand corner of our screens, our dramatis personae, our action heroes, stay terminally locked in first positions.

  KEVIN BARRET TD

  Why JJ you ask? Let me say from the beginning that I am glad once and for all to go on record and clear up some of the misunderstandings which have arisen in the public mind over this project. A lot of confused nonsense has been written about it and I am glad of this chance to clarify things.*

  Firstly, there was never any ulterior motive or agenda in choosing JJ. This idea that JJ’s background, his adopted status, presented some sort of an easy option is wholly untrue. His background was not an issue. His application came through the same channels as the others and it was subject to the same
evaluative process. This project was open to everyone. It was written up in the national press, you could go into any government office or library in the country and pick up an application form and the literature. Failing that you could download everything from the Net. It was all out in the open and that was the way JJ’s application came to this department. It arrived at department offices two days inside the deadline; you can see it here and you can see also the date of receipt stamped on it.

  Secondly, JJ O’Malley is not a criminal. He has never served a prison sentence, never stood before the courts, nor are there any outstanding warrants against him. JJ O’Malley is an innocent man. That is important to stress because it is rumoured in some quarters that JJ is under suspicion for some crime or other. None of this is true so it is worth repeating: JJ O’Malley is an innocent man. No doubt confusion has arisen in some parts of the public mind because of the nature of the project. Yes, it is a penal experiment, it comes under the jurisdiction of the European Penal Commission and it is charged with research into the possibility of using deep coma as a future option in the EU prison system. And yes, it is true that four of the five participants on this experiment are serving sentences. JJ O’Malley, however, is not one of them. The reason for that is simple; it lies in the nature of the experiment itself. In any laboratory experiment of this kind conducted with multiple subjects over such a timescale there has to be a control, a standard of comparison against which the re-actions of the others can be measured and compared. That is JJ’s function on this project. As an innocent man with no prison record he is the control, the baseline reference, the norm. This is standard experimental procedure and it was the responsibility of this department to find such a control. Hence JJ.

  Once we drew up a shortlist of those candidates who had passed through the physical and psychological tests, the choice came down to an interview and the two-hundred-word essay each volunteer submitted with his application. Speaking for myself this was the most tedious part of the whole process. Almost without exception each essay exceeded the word limit. This in itself was sufficient grounds for binning them; however, we persevered. In general most of the essays were nothing more than a hotchpotch of clichés and second-hand platitudes—furthering the glory of science, to do something for my fellow man and so on and so forth. After reading a handful of them I felt as if I was judging a beauty contest. I half expected one of them to say they wanted to travel the world and work with handicapped kids. But JJ’s effort stood out. Two hundred words was the limit; he submitted twelve. I want to take my mind off my mind for a while. That’s all he wrote, I want to take my mind off my mind … You can imagine after so many screeds of cliché and platitude how sudden and direct this was. It spoke to the heart of the issue and unlike the other scripts it spoke clearly and directly. It cut through all the dross and verbiage and spoke more in twelve words than the rest did in two hundred words or two hundred pages. The immediate impression it gave was of a clear mind which was direct, highly intelligent and with a merciful ability to spare words—a mind which did not beat around the bush. This was what it said to the panel, the five lay readers. Of course this gut reaction was not enough; we could not proceed on the basis of our layman’s analysis. To support the panel each application was handed over for evaluation to the forensic psychologist at Castlerea Prison, Jane Evers. Each script was handed over as a numbered file, with only relevant biographical details like age attached, but no names or any other details. The only stricture placed on Evers was that her report be written with as little technical jargon as possible—it had to be accessible to a general audience. This is her report:

  Totalling a mere twelve words, the brevity of the text prevents us from subjecting it to any of those intra-document analytics which enable us to compute those fault and readability indices which accommodate conclusions about the writer’s educational level; the lack of complex words using suffixes and prefixes is a further prevention. Likewise the absence of recurring phrasal patterns, adjectives, adverbs and intensifiers preclude conclusions as to the writer’s state of mind vis-à-vis such moods as stress, anger, anxiety, etc. Given the context and its intended audience one might surmise that the note was written in this abrupt manner with just such a purpose in mind.

  Without mood signifiers and devoid of any circumstantial evidence concerning the writer’s life and loved ones the text might therefore be better understood as an elliptic philosophical argument. Expressed as a desire, the writer wishes to have his mind escape his mind. Implicit here is a distinction between his mind and the intentionality of his mind—his thoughts. His wish to relieve his mind from the stuff of his thinking, be they experience, memories or ideas, points to a kind of dualism which can be interpreted as a wish to achieve a peace of mind independent of thinking. While recognising that his thinking is a defining part of his identity as a conscious being, the writer now believes it to be a process which is damaging and which, for a while, he seeks to be relieved of. His thinking is now other, an unintegrated and mendacious part of himself. One might say that the writer is at odds with his own thoughts and seeks for the time being to be rid of them.

  In this context the writer’s temporal orientation is of interest. Entered as a qualifier which accepts the limited duration of the experiment the phrase “for a while” implies acknowledgement of a future wherein the writer sees himself ready to resume his cognitive selfhood once more.

  It should be noted that nothing in the text indicates a suicidal or parasuicidal ideation. The text evinces none of the hostile or exculpatory themes common in suicide notes; if anything its brevity and refusal to enter any justifying arguments points to a mood of fatigue. Neither does the writer levy any of the usual value judgements on himself or on loved ones. The self-reflexiveness of the text prevents the writer from seeing himself as a social or cultural being; nowhere is the self considered as perceived of or thought of by others. The subtlety and directness with which it addresses the question is also at variance with the emotive and repetitive rhetoric of suicidal discourse. Nowhere is the word “love” or its many synonyms used. Constrained within their narrow theme and stressful context, suicides show little ability to think about thinking and seldom if ever achieve the subtlety of this note’s embedded argument. Suicides and parasuicides do not make good philosophers.

  Written within the context of the experiment the script’s severe brevity presupposes a large degree of background and contextual information on the part of the reader. This is a deliberate application—we can assume it is carefully pitched to arouse curiosity and an aura of mystery. Nevertheless, the writer’s clarity of mind and disinterest in the project as a whole are attributes which should strongly recommend him to the panel.

  As you can see, Evers’ report expands somewhat on our layman’s analysis, more or less confirming in academic language what our hunch told us. That was heartening but we needed more. The next stage was the interview. JJ was one of five who’d made it through to this stage but it was still anybody’s guess as to who would be successful. Walking into the room he made an immediate impression. We were familiar with his background from his file but his height and his cheekbones took some of us aback; he was more Slavic-looking than Latin. And there was this confidence about him as well. Straight off it was obvious there would be no attempt to glad-hand us or second-guess what we wanted to hear. Yes, he had read the terms and constitution of the project, but no, he had no interest in it. Whether it was successful or not as a penal experiment did not bother him. Yes, it was a historic opportunity, but no, he assured us, he had no wish to make a name for himself. Yes, he had discussed it with his loved ones and, no, it hadn’t been easy. However, his father was used to this degree of recklessness in his personality and if he did not exactly have his enthusiastic blessing he was here with his best wishes. Of course he anticipated a degree of media curiosity about whoever was chosen and yes he was prepared to do a number of interviews. However, beyond the fact that he was a fit young man with the necess
ary degree of courage, he didn’t see that his personal biography was all that relevant. This was an important point and it was well answered. The other candidates had come across far too eager to fill out the blank spaces of what we knew would be one of the stories of the year. JJ’s wariness struck a different note. It spoke the proper sense of his role in the whole thing and when, as we anticipated, the whole project became a media circus this was the type of diffidence we needed in our candidate. Finally, what was in it for him? A rest, he said simply. To go to sleep for a few months, nothing on his mind: just a rest. The impression he gave during all of this was that he was doing us a favour. His demeanour was that of a man with other options on his plate and the loss would be ours if we did not choose him. It was arrogance all right but it was the kind of arrogance you could warm to; it inspired confidence. He spoke clearly, without rambling. No, he had no questions of his own, everything was clear to him and it was the shortest of the five interviews. Watching him walk out of that room my feeling was that we’d found our candidate.

  I wasn’t the only one with this feeling. A straw poll around the table after the interviews showed him to be the favourite. He was elected by a unanimous vote at the next meeting and he was informed a few days later and told to report for a medical briefing in Beaumont Hospital. Of course the interview and the psychologist’s report were not the only deciding factors. JJ is a single man—that was important; no spouse or dependants were part of the criteria. Also his physical condition—two years working as a labourer had left JJ fitter than most men his age. His cardiovascular fitness and fat to muscle ratio were the best of all the applicants. Odd as it may seem coma patients need their bodies to sustain them. Muscular atrophy is an inevitable effect of long-term coma no matter how much physiotherapy they receive. But according to medical projections JJ had muscle to spare—two years shovelling and pushing wheelbarrows had seen to that.