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NB: with apologies.
...
All we know about the dead is the same as we know of the living: they lie.
Not because they are bad. Not even to keep themselves amused. But the dead are without consequences, or rather, they are all consequence, and as such they cannot attach much importance to truth.
I don’t have a bed near a window, but I can see out the window from where I am. The bed is low so all there is to look at is a plank of sky between blind and sill. Jugs of still water stand between the sick people. Some are half full, others are almost empty. I imagine it’s some obscure system of measurement, for recording how much life they’ve got left. The empty juggers are earmarked for eternity.
I have no jug. This doesn’t bother me over much.
Hospitals are okay. Hospitals are like churches, they’re halfway houses. The doctors and nurses get burn-out ‘cause of living at the business end of the miraculous, both kinds. Hospitals are like churches, only not. You can arrive at holy through the act of embellishment, or you can arrive at holy through a process of elimination. Now that I think about it, I’m not sure which does what.
I been hospital before, lots of times. It’s okay here. Long as you don’t have a problem with indeterminacy.
That doesn’t mean I can just lie there. What worries me are the marks on my body. What worries me is that when you are sick then you’re not in a position to deny anything. What I don’t want are well-meaning questions, from social services and child psychiatrists, from people who still think they can fix anything.
There’s no fixing. Not for me, not for anybody. There’s no fixing, no living, no dying. There’s just coping, which is something else, somewhere in between.
You can’t tell people this so you get out before they ask you. Besides, the real world, the police and their precious fucking riot, I don’t need the agro, I got enough repercussions to be getting on with.
Repercussions. Reaper-cussions. Ha-de-shagging-ha-ha.
I need to be gone. I want to be gone. I’ve got to be gone. But I’m fucked if I can move. Did I dream my words or just think them. What’s the difference?
What happens if I push this button?
…
Can you imagine being full of time? Like blood, or better yet, like piss, or something. You’re full of time and they’re drawing it off through your dick, viscous temporal fluid via a catheter threaded straight though your cock, sucking the stuff from your bladder, or something.
Yeah, or something.
But that’s what it is, that’s what they’re doing. They’re leeching my fucking infinity. You’ve got to be conscious. You’ve got to be now. You’ve got to do processes, go through the motions. You’ve got to here. You’ve got to wake up. These are the rule. Learn the fucking rules.
Infinity goes out. Some saline shit goes in. They pull back your eyelids and stare down in to you. But the cupboards are bare. There’s nothing to see.
They talk to you loud and slow, like you’re thick or deaf, but I’m used to that. I humour them. Or they humour me, because I talk like Nana after her stroke, drooling all down the left side of my face. This bloke goes how it’s the drugs that they give me. I got no way of dealing with the diminishing returns of making him understand that I understand, so I stay quiet. It’s tough to swallow. My Adam’s apple is heavy like it swelled up about the size of a Goddamn goat’s head. I’ve got this kind of queasy feeling and I think I might be sick.
There are too many pairs of hands. My nose is running. That see-through baggie of stuff they’ve got me hooked up to ought to have a goldfish in it. You know, like you win at the fair. I got pins and needles down both legs and in my crotch. There’s this gnawing thing between my shoulders. The cubicle curtain goes swick-swick.
That’s all anybody needs to know about that.
…
I’m on my own.
For the longest time there is nobody. Nobody I know. Nobody living. It’s hard to tell, though. The dead move about with such impunity here. I can’t always determine the status of who I am talking to. The bloke in the bed by the window, for example, the one with the holes in his arm and the gauze all over his face. Is he dead or alive?
Or both.
Betweenness never occurred to me before, but maybe some people really are, in equal parts, both dead and alive. How would you tell? What would they look like? Bad things would probably happen to them. They would probably be alone.
I had to wait a while before anyone came to see me. Mammy come with Padraic, eventually. You stupid little bollocks, he goes, in English. His big rough hands make a solid wall around my wrist. What you want to go getting involved in all that for? You’ve got enough to contend with, Shanahan, we all have… we all have.
He looked to be very old to me, just then. He was shivering, ever so slightly, like is was cold or he needed a drink. His eyes were a kind of yellowish-red. No more of this, he goes, no more of this. He shakes his head. I am squeamish with shame and I look away from him. I go how I’m sorry, Pa. I want to cry, just to keep him company, but they haven’t left me with enough fluids for that. I want to say I’m sorry but he doesn’t know what it’s like, living here, and you’re tasked with being young and doing living and nobody shows you what to do so you have to look at the bigger boys and guess, so you have to make it up as you go along.
Nobody ever tells you that there’s anything else. To live is to struggle. To suffer is fine. To be dead is ideal. You grow towards death, scared you’ll grow passed it, frightened that you’ll miss the opportunity to make something of yourself. You can make dead or you can be dead. Those are your choices, but preferably both. That’s what it is, Padraic, that’s all any of it ever is. The living don’t learn how to do the only thing that differentiates them from the dead.
So what else am I supposed to do, Grandfather? What the hell else am I supposed to do?
But I can’t say this. So I don’t. I bite my own lip until I draw blood. I make my fingers in to ineffectual fists.
Nana talked to the dead. Nana talked to the dead because she knew what living was. Nana wasn’t crazy, Nana was kind. Nana wanted something better for me, and dead was as good as it was ever going to get.
I can’t say this, either, and I don’t have to. Pa talks with words I don’t understand, but the meaning is clear enough to read. It’s alright, Shannon, he says, it’s alright, Shanahan, I’m sorry, and I know.
There’s tremendous solace in that, in I’m sorry and in I know. He sat close beside me, leaning in, awkward, to touch my face. I got his sleeve in my mouth, the hairs off it itching my nose. He was clumsy and he caught his knuckles more than once. His breath wore the bitter tang of neat spirits. But all that was okay. Mammy just stood by the bed and cried. She was too worn out to do anything else.
…
They must see it all the time, they must know. The doctors and nurses, they must know. They must know in how little regard the outside world holds the practice of healing.
They must have homes to go to. They must leave the hospital some time. They must get in their cars and drive off in to the heart of the neglect-happy town, see the ordinaryising of sickness and suffering.
The question is how do they resist? This grotesque ambivalence.
...
Getting well takes a while. Sunny come see me. He goes what did I see? He means God. He means did I see God. I tell him I did not see anything. I don’t remember being dead. Nobody took me in hand or told me what to expect.
He strokes my fingers with his. He has dark circles under his eyes. He says that my blood made a mess up the road. I think he is exaggerating. I’m your brother, by the way, he goes, you know, to get in? I nod my head. He talks about Ryan and Chelle and school and all that. He doesn’t say if there’s been bother. He talks about things that don’t matter. He is beautiful. It is that uncomplicated. It is that simple. A simplicity is as good as truth, sometimes. At least, a simplicity is as near as you’re going to get to a truth. Near enough to use as a landmark, near enough to use as a light.
I been worried about you, Shannon.
Um.
I wanted to come before, but there was nobody to ask.
It’s okay.
My eyes are heavy. In a minute I will be asleep.
Big Jim’s got his bollocks in a proper twist.
Um.
You’re not even awake, are you?
No.
He thinks about this. He asks should he go. He asks but he doesn’t get up. He wipes at my eyes ‘cause they’re crusted with sleep. He uses his finger. You’ll be home soon, he goes.
Yes.
Shannon-
I want to tell you something- it’s not- it’s everything- but it’s okay.
I don’t want him to be afraid. I want him to tell me I think too much. I want him to hold my hand forever. He says go back to sleep. He says it don’t matter. He says I’m fucked in the head from the drugs. When he leaves he kisses my hairline. I feel something I’m not familiar with.
…
Nana doesn’t like it.
It isn’t Sunny she resents, it’s my lack of commitment, to the dead, to unhappiness. She follows us back, streaming away behind the car like a train of tin cans on a wedding day. Red Bernard drives us, Mammy and me. He says he expects me to stay out of trouble, not give my poor mother anymore grief. Yes sir, I go.
Then and there I mean it too.
But Nana doesn’t like it. I’m lying on my bed, trying to read a book about the Spanish Civil War, and Nana is recycling herself with the air, rolling around in the dehumidifier. Don’t you remember what I told you? She asks me. Can’t you remember anything?
About expanding, Nana?
No! Don’t be a simpleton. Expanding? What expanding?
You said, Nana, about being absorbed.
Did I? Absorbed nothing, boy. I made that up.
Why, Nana?
Why? Goes Nana, totally flummoxed. The dead don’t have a word for why. You can never have a proper conversation with them. I can’t ask, for example, why they are here. I can’t ask what they want or why me or can’t they leave me alone. I can’t ask them what my dreams mean.
I sigh. I close my eyes. Go away, Nana, I tell her. The lot of you, all of you, just for the love of God fuck off. I am tired, I don’t want this anymore. Outside the window a girl with singed hair makes faces. She goes you don’t have a lot of choice, hen. Then spits on the glass.
But I do have a choice. I know that by an effort of will I make the fuckers go away. I did it before. I did it before when I ducked down in the river and held my breath until everything was silent. I made them go away and I can do it again. If I give myself something to concentrate on. I double up on the bed and work my fist against my belly wound.
…
The dead can never be gone, because the dead aren’t exactly here to begin with. None of us are, not really. We arbitrate between arrivals and departures. We draw lines under leaving as if here and there were natural phenomenon, not just something we invented to be less scared.
Nana wasn’t gone. The dead weren’t gone. And inside I knew that, but it made no difference. On Thursday I would go back to my life. I would go back to my friends. I would take a drink with Big Jim and Frankie, who would tell me I was a man now, as if all it took was an act of aggression.
I would draw my flimsy distinctions and put myself in to boxes. I would try to be good, to do what was right. It would not do me any favours.
I hadn’t learnt much at all.
------
The human race, the only race I know where everybody loses.
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Christie
