Notes from a Coma (21 page)
Authors: Mike McCormack
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Whether or not the
Somnos
project had its precedent in those reality-TV incarcerations which bulked so large in the programming schedules of a couple of years ago is still a matter of debate. Theorists point out that the comatose condition of the subjects is the ultimate refinement of the witless compliance of all those contestants who never once sought to subvert the terms of their confinement from within. TV critics noted that those baseline dramas—tantrums, sulks, hissy fits and petty mind games—which intrigued so many viewers in the original versions had now been flatlined to a series of minimal cues and responses, decipherable only to a specialist audience. However, the fact that we do not know what we are watching nor how to interpret what it is we are watching is now apparently no obstacle to our watching.
In parallel with this analysis ran an especially paranoid theory—that the whole project was a trial run towards a partnership between media corporations and state penal systems. The privatisation of state prisons along American lines had been ongoing in Austria, France and Britain since the mid-nineties and was now increasingly viewed as an opportunity to offload an exchequer expense on to the private sector … However fanciful this theory may be, it would gain renewed currency in the months after the
Somnos
project when the Italian media corporation Fininvest successfully tabled a bid for a prison franchise in its home city of Milan.
Cool is the new grace JJ used to say, the new electedness. You either have it or you don’t, you can’t buy it and there’s no way of earning it. I thought of that this morning when my radio alarm went off and the first thing I heard was “Sound Sleep” …
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So what to wear today? Style mags don’t cover these occasions. Like everyone else I have one of those T-shirts with his EEG graphic on the front. I bought it in the first weeks of the project before all those images were hemmed in by copyright law. Even now though you can’t walk down any street without seeing it spread across someone’s chest. Only yesterday I saw someone wearing
I Want To Take My Mind Off My Mind
on a cheap knock-off. It was only a matter of time I suppose before wilful mindlessness became the season’s Zeitgeist.
Sitting on the side of the bed this morning it came to me
that I’ve spent these last three months looking back at our time together. That surprised me. How is it possible to carry on day after day in a relationship and still have no clue just how much your life and soul is tied up in that someone else? There on the side of the bed was the first time I had any real idea of just how much I love him. And that surprised me too. In spite of all we’ve been through together, all the tragedies and injuries and arguments, all our days together seem to me to have been days of light and fun. There was never any talk of love or commitment between us, never any big avowals. We were together and that’s all there was to it. Never once can I remember JJ telling me he loved me and for my part, if anyone had asked me did I love him, I would, more likely than not, have been stuck for an answer. We took each other so much for granted and that seems to me now no bad thing.
It’s one thing me taking him for granted but the rest of the world doing the same … that’s something that spooks me. That’s my right, it’s how we were, but it doesn’t give the rest of the world the same right. These past few months, seeing him referenced all over the place like some hero or prophet has made me realise just how easy it is to reduce someone to a T-shirt slogan or a media profile. In spite of his presence all over the place people have forgotten JJ—the flesh-and-blood person has disappeared from view. In spite of all the words and images—or maybe because of them—JJ has faded away. But he’s not some T-shirt slogan or discussion topic. He’s more than that. He is someone beautiful and awkward, a son and lover, someone who is too smart for his own good but not smart
enough to see that. People need reminding and that’s why I’m telling you all this. Other people’s motives I can’t speak of but I know what I want; I want him to come back to himself, I want him to be here to meet himself when he walks off that boat and if talking him into the hearts and minds of people is what it takes then that’s what I have to do. He told me once that death is no barrier to injury—another of those fancy paradoxes he was so fond of. He pointed out that when a person dies their identity lives on after them in all the things they leave behind, all the good and bad they’ve done, all the influences they’ve had. He didn’t know how right he was but he didn’t know either how someone can be traduced and misrepresented or, worse, turned into their own ghost, this alien presence. Of course were he to hear me now he’d throw his eyes up to heaven and feign a weakness. He once said that just because you can go on at length it doesn’t mean you have something to say, it doesn’t mean you have a story to tell; just because you’ve been unlucky or short-changed or fucked over or fallen heavily on the thorns of life—that’s no justification. I beg to differ; sometimes we need others to speak on our behalf. JJ is smart, smarter than I’ll ever be. I don’t have his brains but I don’t have his paranoia either. I can’t see signs or make the connections he can—my world isn’t shaped like that and I wouldn’t want it shaped like that. It doesn’t revolve around me and that’s OK; I wouldn’t want his sort of faith. So I’m not a character witness or a cheerleader—I’m just someone who cares. I don’t want miracles, I’m not even interested in change. The old JJ is fine by me, I can cope with that. All
I want is that he should wake up to himself and pick up where he left off, pick up what it was he left off.
I woke up all nerves this morning, all twitchy and eager. I spent a few hours mooning around the house, listening to the radio in the kitchen. Of course the whole
Somnos
thing dominated the talk shows and phone-ins. Someone used the phrase “cognitive deficit” so I switched it off and went back upstairs to dress … So what does a girl wear to the resurrection? Do I go with the casual look or make a more formal effort? I want to strike the right note, classy not assy. After a few twirls in front of the mirror I decided on these trousers and this shirt—something between cool chick and cailín gleoite. Looking at my face I decided to tie my hair back; you wouldn’t believe how much agonising went into so little.
And that’s it. I’ve said all I’ve wanted to say, I’m ready now. So if you’ll excuse me, it is getting near the time and I have to go …
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An ambient chill-out groove, all synth washes and secular chants laid down over a systolic baseline; “Sound Sleep” became that summer’s soundtrack. JJ’s spoken-word lyric, sampled and edited from his one and only press conference, provided that summer’s tautologous catch cry—
sleep never sleeps
. DJ Sandman’s four-minute track went platinum across Europe and the bass hook—a looped précis of JJ’s ditonal heartbeat—became the most downloaded ring tone for mobile-phone users …
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… because on this day, the ninth of October, feast of St Denis, the patron saint of headaches, JJ O’Malley and his four companions emerge into the light, into the converged lenses of the world’s press. Among those waiting for him are his father and lover, his teacher and neighbour and, standing at a politic remove but still in shot, his public representative.
They come up the slipway together, side by side, no precedence discernible between them now. Their stiff gait, the result of muscular atrophy and residual acid in their joints, lends the short walk a processional, almost liturgical air. For future reference we note that this season’s well-dressed revenant is wearing a silver thermal cloak thrown casually over boots and T-shirt, accessorised with woollen cap pulled low over the forehead and wraparound shades shielding those sensitive retinas. But in the grey light it is difficult to distinguish one from the other. Their pallor and raiment, their sunken cheeks … something in their ordeal has reduced them to a sameness. And this is no time
for confusion. This is where our onlookers need their wits about them. These subjects can be recovered, each to their separate selves, but they need these witnesses to differentiate … Flick back through the declensions of their IDs, through the oral testimony and documentation, the forensics and circumstantial evidence, the tracings and printouts, the photographs in the ID laminates; flick back and gain piece by piece on that dawning instant when each one stands clear and apart … But our witnesses are not as sure of themselves as we’d like and the flaw of reverse engineering defeats them at the conclusion. Incredibly though and stiff and all as he is, JJ is one step ahead of them. Seeing her face in the crowd triggers the causal stream of skin-to-synapse linkage throughout his central nervous system, blooming less than a heartbeat later in his hippocampus—the breathless recovery of her in him. In spite of appearances he has remained mindful of her, he has borne her in mind. His facial muscles broaden out beyond the blank stare of his media portraits. Then his voice sounds, dusty and faint from underuse but still up to the task of speaking for itself:
“Yes,” he says, “I thought it was you.”
All this in the nth year of what is still termed without irony the Age of Restored Salvation …
Mike McCormack comes from the west of Ireland and currently lives in Galway. He is the author of two previous books,
Getting it in the Head
, which won various awards, including the Rooney Prize, and
Crowe’s Requiem
.