Notes from a Coma (17 page)
Authors: Mike McCormack
“This dream,” he said one day, “I keep having this odd dream.”
“They’re all odd, that’s why they’re called dreams. No use asking me about them.”
“Do you have a recurring dream?”
“Yes, as it happens, I do. I had this dream once as a child, a flu fever thing. I’m very small and vulnerable in it. I’m standing alone and naked in the middle of this open
space. Out of the distance these balls come bouncing towards me, big balls about three times my size, brown and soft like inflated internal organs, horrible things. All I know is that I can’t let them touch me—for some reason I know that will prove fatal. So I spend the whole of that dream dodging and weaving, getting weaker and weaker … Not a nice dream. It comes back to me sometimes, not very often. I’m always seven years old in it. Don’t ask me what it’s about. Why?”
He rose above me on one elbow, his face in shadow.
“I can feel myself getting better, Sarah, becoming whole again. Day by day I’m recovering more and more of my memory. There’s this thing in neurology, Hebbian linkage it’s called. Basically, it states that neurons firing in the cortex set off chain reactions in neighbouring neurons which build up associative webs throughout the brain and integrate the whole of human experience. Basically, this is the mind-making process although how this neurochemical fizzing and popping results in consciousness is something I can’t understand. None of the mind/body arguments I’ve ever come across make any sense to me.
‡
But I see something
similar happening with my memory. One memory sets off another, linkages and connections are established, people and places and events are falling into place and I can recognise more and more of my past self. Except for one thing. This dream I’ve been having—I can’t place it, it just doesn’t fit … I’m lying on a bed in a dark room, dead tired and unable to move. It feels like I’m drowning in that dark room but there is no way I can move away. There’s this crippling pain in my left leg which won’t let me get off the bed. And I’m falling asleep, this dense sleep is moving in on me. I’m terrified, it’s not like any fear I’ve ever known. I don’t want to fall asleep but I can’t prevent it. I can’t stop it moving in on me. At the very last moment, just when I’m going to go under, I wake up sweating and frightened. The strangest thing is that I feel fine after it—no pain or fear. I put on the light and look at myself in the mirror. And this is strange too—this feeling of having to wait a few moments before I catch up with myself. Like the real part of myself is still back in that dream. Does that mean anything, Sarah?”
“Are you alone, in the dream I mean?”
“Yes, I’m all alone—that’s one of the terrible things about it. I have this feeling that if someone comes in and talks to me I will be OK.”
“How come you can’t get off the bed?”
“I’m tired, tired and nauseous. There’s also this pain in my knee.”
I could have walked away then, made some excuse and gone home and got my thoughts together. If I had wanted that badly enough I could have got up and walked away. But I knew these things and he didn’t.
“This is a need-to-know thing, Sarah. You’re the one with the memories, my memories … and I have to know.”
I knew that and he knew that I knew that. So I told him.
Afterwards he sat on the side of the bed, elbows on his knees.
“So you’re telling me I have a detailed memory of something that isn’t mine, something that never happened to me. Time and place and character where they should be but none of it mine.”
“I’m just telling you what it looks like.”
“How close were we?”
“Close as, closer than, brothers. But for appearances anyone might have thought you really were. You sat together in the same desk throughout your school years. Wherever one of you went the other was always a few paces behind. You even had this trick of sitting together reading out of the same book.”
“Nothing odd about that.”
“No, not reading, but turning the page without consulting each other, that was odd. Don’t worry though, you were often seen together in the same room, there really were two of you.”
“So I can hardly remember my own life but I have a detailed memory of my friend’s death. My best friend, this crisis apparition, come back to haunt me.”
“You had a hard time after he died—you gave yourself a hard time. If only I’d stayed with him that night, if only we had gone straight home, if only, if only, if only … Then you tumbled to the idea that you’d argued him to death—that didn’t help either.”
“What’s it trying to say to me?”
“It’s part of what brought on this breakdown, a type of delayed reaction the specialist said. It is not uncommon. Dwelling on it will only make things worse. It’s just a dream, it will go away.”
He lay in beside me and gathered me into his arms.
“No, it won’t, Sarah. Here it goes again. It won’t go away. None of it makes sense. Just when I thought everything was coming together.”
It was around that time the
Somnos
project came to light. Like everyone else I saw the press conference that evening on the news. Kevin Barret with that deadpan look on his face telling the nation about this project that sounded like something out of a fifties sci-fi novel: five comatose prisoners on the flat of their backs in Killary harbour exploring something which may or may not prove to be the future of penal incarceration across the EU—incredible. Listening to him that evening was one of those moments that has you turning to the person beside you and asking, Did he just say what I think he said—a penal experiment with coma patients? And Kevin delivered it all in that toneless drone of his like it was the most obvious thing in the world. It was a riveting performance. I’ve never had an interest in politics but even I could see that Kevin was impressive that evening. I’ve never seen a public official coming before the people so clued into his work; Kevin had all the angles covered. He started with a brief outline of the project’s origins and then a close detailing of the binding legal and scientific protocols. Then he segued into the medical
precedents, lobbing out those technical terms as if they were part of some new manifesto. He rounded off the whole thing with a brief itemising of the costings bill which was being drawn up by the Department of Finance. Forty-two minutes of droning monotone without once having to refer to notes or repeat an essential point. Someone has pointed out that in all the interviews he’s given since he’s not once contradicted a word of that original press conference. But of course the essential subtext of the whole performance was that this was not up for discussion; this was a
fait accompli
—there were no legal or constitutional barriers, everything was in order Kevin assured us. The only outstanding thing was an Irish volunteer.
As a piece of salesmanship it was masterful.
§
The following day’s editorials missed the point completely, spilled ink agonising over ethics and safety and failed to see the real motives behind the whole thing. Or so JJ informed me.
“They’ve missed the point,” he said, smiling and tapping the paper. “Kevin has blinded them. PR firms will study this in years to come, a textbook example of misdirection—how to tell the truth and sidetrack people at the same time.”
“It sounds crazy, the whole thing.”
“Even the timing was brilliant,” JJ marvelled. “Nine o’clock at night, early enough to gather a few thoughts together but no time to sift through the info and reset today’s editions with real analysis. That’s why we have all this useless agonising about safety and ethics. Kevin handed that to them on a plate, that’s why he spelled it out in such detail.”
“But that is the real issue, talk about walking blind—who knows what might happen to those volunteers.”
“It’s a smokescreen, Sarah, all that information … It’s a done deal also. By the time people grasp what’s really at issue here those volunteers will be on the broad of their backs sucking three square meals a day through their IVs.”
“So what is the issue?”
“This is a quid pro quo. Think about it. Stumbling over the Nice Treaty, shuffling our feet over tax harmonisation, environmental legislation on the long finger, neutrality, an economic policy looking towards Boston rather than Berlin … What’s at stake here is not just the future of penal incarceration but our bona fides as good EU citizens.”
“And we need their approval that badly?”
“Kevin is looking at the bigger picture. This project will be carried out before the eyes of the world, a gallery of expectant nations looking on, fingers crossed that the whole thing comes up trumps and that souls can be racked and stacked in prison ICUs, atoning at half the price of five-star hotel accommodation.”
“There’ll be outcry.”
“Only to begin with, some liberal hand-wringing and agonising but Kevin’s betting on the people’s short attention span and desire for a quiet life.”
“I can’t see it making economic sense—all the technology, the manpower, its ridiculous.”
‖
JJ laughed and waved the paper. “I don’t know about that; nothing is as ridiculous as the present system. The only prison system in Europe with more warders than prisoners, two-thirds of its entire budget spent on salaries and overtime, no rehab programmes … anything has to be an improvement on that. But it’s not just about budgets, Sarah. It’s about knowledge also—the meeting of minds, the exchange of ideas—the big flaw within the concept of punitive incarceration. Prisons are criminogenic and our prisons are institutes of higher learning. You go in knowing how to steal a Volkswagen Golf and come out knowing how to rip off a BMW. But you’re not going to be able to
learn much when you’re out cold trying to raise a delta wave.”
“That’s as brutish a rationale as I’ve ever come across.”
“That’s why Kevin’s appealed to our vanity: an opportunity to show that we have the courage and expertise to guide this cutting-edge experiment. What Kevin wants to show is that we’ve moved on from the days of the Celtic Tiger. We’re not just a nation of mobile-phone salesmen or telesales spooks or production-line ops. We’ve left that potty training behind us—we’re out there now with a shiny piece of R&D all our own. We have the brains, we have the funding, all we need is a lab rat.”
“These are real people, JJ. Who knows what might happen to them.”
“I don’t know. Is a person in a coma a person? Is it meaningful to talk in any way about a subject with no consciousness?” He laid the paper on the table.
“Don’t start that guff, JJ, splitting hairs.”
“You’re right; what’s needed here are men of action not philosophers.”
“Tough, that rules you out so. Anyway, you’re not a criminal.”
“That’s just it. The Irish volunteer has to be an innocent, no criminal record needed—in fact, a criminal record will put you clean out of the running. They need a control,
an innocent in good health who establishes a baseline condition. An exemplar so to speak. Fair play to Kevin—even within a coma he’s managed to stake out the high moral ground for the Paddy.”
“All this enthusiasm, where has your guilt gone all of a sudden?—I’ve heard enough about it these past two years.”
“I’ve told you before I’m not guilty of anything; I’m just guilty, that’s all.”
“And now you can walk away from it just like that.”
“All I’m saying is … three months on the flat of your back, full bed and board …”
“Don’t even think about it, JJ.”
He looked into the distance. “My point exactly, Sarah, there is nothing to think about.”
And I knew then he was going to go for it and nothing I or anyone else could say would stand in his way.
*
Three weeks into the project, Nielsen/NetRatings confirmed that “coma” overtook “sex” as the entry of choice in the nation’s Web search engines. Only once before has this ever happened—during the second Iraqi conflict when “war” became the dominant search tag. What does this signify? What promises are being held out to us here? What exactly do we find so desirable? Why do we keep coming back here, day after day, night after night, to flick through the pages of this twenty-four-hour upskirt?
†
The weather in the hold is a simulation. Feeding off a continuous stream of data from the Carnsore weather station the full-spectrum light waxes and wanes through the moods of a day two degrees south of these latitudes. The delay in the transmission has the simulation lagging ten seconds behind the real thing. Save for Spenco boots and loincloths the subjects sleep naked. The lumens fall on their skin, duping their cellular chemistry into the ceaseless synthesising of vitamin D—like hothouse skinflowers. They breathe on under the unblinking gaze of registering monitors, within the vigilance of resuscitative machines.
‡
In the second year of his administration and seven months after the fall of the Conducator, the leader of the free world set his hand to designating the coming decade the “Decade of the Brain.” The resulting House Joint Resolution 174 ushered in a decade of funding and research comparable to that prompted by the 1958 National Aeronautics and Space Act.
Scrying with advanced neuro-imaging techniques and with various meat to mental dependence theories as working hypotheses, a generation of neuro specialists turned inward to map a universe of such depth and complexity that by comparison the probings of the various
Apollo
missions were but local tourism. Somewhere within the clints and grikes of this new world glittered the real prize: consciousness. One result of the congressional imprimatur was a shift in the balance of funding and prestige from cardiac and oncological research to neurology in clinical institutes. Neurologic facilities became the holy of holies within the clinical research community. Theoreticians of all persuasions crossed disciplines into a delicate nexus of technological probing and pure conjecture, a place of infinitesimal margins and staggering magnitudes, a knotty realm where connections dissolved before they were fully traced and gave way to ever more vertiginous speculation.
What at first glance appeared a heroic scientific enterprise had, in fact, its origins in an economic imperative. Fearing the rising cost of neurogenetic diseases, degenerative disorders, strokes, autism, depression and head traumae across an ageing population, heads of industry and insurance companies lobbied Congress for a federal and multi-disciplinary investigation of the brain and, as an afterthought, the very nature of consciousness itself. The whole project was predicated on suspicion of the individual as a potential economic liability. This rationale turns on its head the Conducator’s economic reasoning which earmarked a whole generation of neonates as fiscal assets whose life mission would be to drive up economic production and help redress the national debt.
§
Worries that the experiment would become a penal conduit which sped a criminal under-class straight from sentencing into a state sponsored oblivion were seized upon by many commentators. If coma were to become a sentencing option would there not be the likelihood that it would draw the bulk of its participants from the ranks of under-class offenders? Could any judiciary be trusted with such an option? Wasn’t this a blatant attempt by the state to cull, however temporarily, a whole class of offenders and wash its hands of all educational and rehabilitative responsibilities? Were we now looking towards the day when the ranks of hoodied recidivists would be thinned out so that a better class of white collar offender would have the run of our prison institutions …? Furthermore, it was argued, that with no binding terms within the experiments constitution, the degree to which faith in its democratic draw was vested in a governing moral calculus was worrying, to say the least. Could it be relied upon to keep the whole thing honest? Was it not worrying that this very calculus was grounded in the same bloodless over-realm in which the project itself had its origins?
‖
Somewhere there’s a formula justifying all this … Fixed as part of the greater national index in some ideational realm within the here and now, a place where abstracts like guilt and atonement are assigned certain values and reckoned as a percentage of all public spending … And this being an age of numeracy we’ve watched the coefficients become serial offenders, outstripping population growth and available resources, gaining on that siren-ringing cut-off point where cost analysis has drawn a line and said this far and no further. Fast-forward from a time when the
lingua franca
of national well-being gladdened us as a stream of stats issuing from government departments and research bodies, we now find all indicators flatlining, a general refusal to respond to the old stimuli. The conclusions are obvious: the old options are exhausted.