The Quick

‘It doesn’t work.’

He had been sitting quietly at the side of the room. I could just see him, his chair tipped back against the wall, lovingly fingering his rolled-up cigarette. Now he stuck it back behind his ear and brought his chair down with a clack. I had to remember that the machine had not been designed with me in mind, he said. It was supposed to be used by someone who was desperate to communicate, and for whom it provided the only means of doing so.

‘You mean I’m not trying hard enough?’

He shrugged. That was part of it, he said, and then there were the lions. ‘They don’t do it for me.’

I asked him how he had made it work, but he didn’t want to say. I cajoled him a bit and he hung his head coyly. I pleaded with him until at last, with some excited shifting in his seat, he came out with it. ‘I’m riding an old Enfield through a deserted city. I come to a red light where another bike is waiting. The rider revs his engine, he glances across at me. I recognise the head porter. Well, between you and me, I hate the head porter. I turn back to the lights, I watch them like a hawk. Red changes to red and amber, I tighten my grip. Green! I release the clutch, leap the junction and land on two wheels, leaving him trailing in the dust…’

He had been talking eagerly from the edge of his seat. But now he slid back into the shadows and I turned once again to face the computer monitor. It seemed to me that he had hit on a good device. There was a certain elastic tension in that sequence: red, red and amber, green. I frowned hard at the undulating line. But however hard I concentrated, I couldn’t interrupt it. Finally, I let out the breath I had been holding.

‘It’s no good,’ I said, ‘it won’t budge.’

For a moment there was silence, and then out of the darkness behind me came a voice.

‘It’s got to mean something to you,’ it said softly. ‘You’ve really got to want it.’

I sat staring disconsolately at the screen, raising a finger at one point to scratch an itch at my temple, just under the rim of the cap. But I had no ideas. And then I did have an idea. It came to me out of the blue. Thankfully it was dark in the room and my face was turned away from Nestor, so he couldn’t see how I blushed. Once again I pictured the ringmaster, dashing in jodhpurs and a red tunic pulled in at the waist by a thick leather belt. This time, however, he wore an ivory cravat and a shock of white hair rose from his high forehead. Taking a step towards the lions he planted the soles of his riding boots wide apart in the sawdust, cracked his whip and fixed them with his burning, soulful gaze. I stared at the undulating line and to my amazement it lurched drunkenly towards the pear, missing it by a hair’s breadth.

Suddenly the room was a blaze of electric light, and I spun round in time to see Nestor bring his hand down from the wall switch. His body was rigid in the chair against the wall. He was staring sulkily at his cigarette and a muscle was flickering in his cheek. What’s the matter with him? I thought. Is he annoyed that someone else besides him has made his precious machine work? I peeled off the pink swimming cap, draped it over a corner of the chair and stood up. Nestor remained sitting, his head bowed. Just as I reached the door, a thought struck me.

‘Have you seen the patient?’ I asked. He raised his head slowly and I noticed that the eye around which there were traces of bruising was also bloodshot.

‘Should I have?’

There was menace in his voice, and I was taken aback. I told him it was an innocent question. He slammed the two front legs of his chair against the floor, standing up as he did so and clenching his fists. He had no reason to go snooping around up on the fifth floor, he said, and he’d like to know who’d seen him there. Furiously he kicked at a screwed-up ball of paper, sending it flying into the corner. Then he seemed to calm down again, and scuffed the toe of his boot sheepishly against the floor. I asked him why the other technicians had refused to work with the professor. He shrugged. I pressed him and he told me that Mezzanotte was in the habit of ringing up at midnight to discuss a problem. Sometimes he wanted the technician to meet him straight away, at the lab, and the poor fellow might not get away before dawn. It was hard on a man. But it was no skin off his nose.

I raised an eyebrow. ‘You don’t need to sleep?’

He frowned, irritated. He needed to sleep as much as the next man, but he had to take pills to bring it on, and these days the pills didn’t seem to work as well as they used to. So he was often awake in the early hours. He didn’t approve of the professor’s working habits, but as it happened they suited him. He was the man for the job, and Mezzanotte would have saved a lot of time if he had come straight to him, rather than letting his mind be poisoned by ‘filthy lies’.

I looked at him. So he was an insomniac. That explained a few things, and yet it didn’t arouse any sympathy in me. ‘Good evening, Mr Nestor,’ I said, and stepped out into the corridor.

Back in my rooms everything was in order. My assistants had left for the night, and a note on my desk assured me that the afternoon had passed off well, and nothing out of the ordinary had happened. Two or three files had been placed over that of the Welsh lawyer’s: new cases awaiting my attention. I hesitated, wondering whether to sit down and make a start on them. Just then a wave of fatigue came over me and I raised my eyes to the window.

My own face was reflected against the night: a pale moon with two dark ovals for eyes, framed by short, thick, reddishgold hair. Beyond my reflection, or rather through it, were the lighted windows of the operating theatres. I knew that at this hour it could only be the cleaners at work up there, but the sight still had a soothing effect on me, for the reasons I’ve explained. Then suddenly it didn’t. The hospital seemed to crowd in on the axis of our two sets of windows, upsetting that precious symmetry. Three floors above me, Patient DL lay on her back as she had done for a decade, beyond the reach of medicine. Down in the basement, hundreds of obsolete hard disks harboured the records of patients who would never recover. In their midst, Nestor tinkered with his new toy, awaiting the hour when, if the rumour was true, he would set off on his nightly tour of the hospital. He would throw the switch on his way out, so that the only source of light in the room would be the greenish glow of the computer screen: that snakelike waveform I had managed at last to displace – though not, perhaps, in the way Mezzanotte had intended. Hurriedly I turned my back on my own reflection, crossed the room and locked the door behind me.

5

The next morning I returned to the hospital. As the lift rose past the second floor, then the third, I prepared myself mentally for the meeting to come. I had never yet dealt with a patient whose injuries were so severe, or whose diagnosis was as uncertain as that of Patient DL’s. I told myself that she was no different from the rest, only a little further along the spectrum, the scale of handicap, and that therefore I should treat her no differently. Even if she appeared not to respond to my attempts to communicate with her, I should continue to address her in the belief that she understood. I repeated the mantra over and over in my head: she’s no different, she’s no different. But I couldn’t quite drown out the small voice that said, there is something quite unusual about this patient and you know it. The upshot of this internal wrangling was that I was nervous, and several times as the lift rose, wiped the sweaty palms of my hands on the seat of my trousers.

When the doors opened at the fifth floor the first thing that struck me was the silence. It was thick, almost palpable, and when I glanced towards a window, and saw beyond it an overcast sky punctured by a few high-rise buildings, I realised with a shock that I had never set foot on this floor before. I had dealt with patients in hospitals on the other side of the world, but this was the first time I had ventured on to the fifth floor of my own. The fourth floor was where I had conducted most of my business, where the patients were, generally speaking, responsive. The silence was like a challenge to me: is there really anything you can do here? it seemed to say. Aren’t you out of your depth?

I presented myself at the charge nurse’s desk. She gave me a friendly smile and when she spoke her voice seemed to ring out too loudly, though in fact, I realised afterwards, she spoke at a normal volume. She checked her list and informed me that the patient had no visitors at the moment. It was still only eight thirty. Her first visitor of the day would arrive at nine. ‘And who will that be?’ I asked.

‘Her father,’ she replied. ‘He comes every morning and sits with her for an hour. A nice old gentleman. Quiet as a mouse.’

She pointed towards the mouth of a long corridor whose walls had been painted dark green up to waist height and cream above, with a long, narrow, black line separating the two. These were the colours that indicated the public areas of the hospital, though public and private lost their significance on this ward, where the patients were so ill they required round-the-clock care to keep them alive. In keeping with the hospital code, though, there was also blue linoleum underfoot, rather than carpet. The only thing that set this ostensibly public ward apart from the real public wards lower down was that each patient had his or her own room – on lower floors, and along with carpet, the exclusive privilege of private patients who paid for their care.

The corridor stretched off into the further reaches of the wing. I followed it and turned right where it formed a ninetydegree angle, and left where it formed a second. As I moved further away from the nurse’s station and, as it seemed to me, the living heart of the ward, the silence grew thicker still. I’ve never been to a morgue, but I suspect that if I had it would sound something like that. The notices occasionally taped up by the doors might not be worded so differently either. One read: ‘Do not enter without gloves or apron’, another: ‘Latex allergy’. Slowly my ear grew attuned, and I began to detect the sounds of frail, struggling life: the hum and occasional click of life-support machinery. The rhythmic expansion and contraction of twenty diaphragms. The faint, almost inaudible breathing of creatures trapped between life and death.

I found myself making efforts to walk soundlessly, not to let my shoes squeak on the linoleum. Eventually I came to the last room on the corridor. It had no notice pinned up outside it, but the door was open and glancing inside I was struck by the sight of a shiny balloon floating in a yellow haze. A child’s birthday balloon, filled with helium. Semi-deflated now, with the words ‘Happy Birthday!’ looping across it, it bobbed at half mast and a low voice seemed to emanate from it. As I stepped over the threshold, I realised that the voice actually came from a TV suspended on the wall above and behind me. I naturally turned to look at the woman lying in the bed, whose line of vision I had broken, and that’s when I got the fright of my life. Her brown eyes were fixed on me, and in them was a steady gleam of contempt, as if the liquid of her iris had crystallised that way. I froze, and in the instant that our eyes met I half expected her to rear up and point an imperious finger out into the corridor. But her gaze merely slid away from me and became liquid again.

Feeling like a clumsy intruder, my heart hammering against my ribs, I lifted the clipboard out of its slot at the foot of the bed and pretended to peruse the drug chart. My hands were trembling, but I forced myself to focus on the words printed before my eyes. Name: Diane Levy. Date of birth: so-and-so. I peeped over the board. Her head lay in the same place on the pillow, but her gaze was vacant now, and dull. A thread of saliva ran from the corner of her mouth, down over her slack jaw. Breathing a sigh of relief, I glanced quickly around the room.

My first impression had been of entering a shrine or grotto, and now I saw that I wasn’t far wrong. A ledge running at waist height down the side of the room facing the bed was crowded with small objects, ornaments and such like, while the wall above it was densely covered with fragments of drawings, letters and photographs. There were several vases arranged about the room, containing flowers at various stages of freshness. At the windows hung not the usual, pale, waxy hospital curtains, but ones with a flower pattern, white on blue, good cotton and properly lined. They were cheery, the sort you might find in a nursery, and obviously home-made. At the side of the bed nearest the window a rocking chair was covered with a pink, mohair rug that carried the impression of a large person’s shoulders and haunches. On the other side, nearest the door, stood a plain, straight-backed wooden chair that had been pulled up close to the bed, and on this I now sat down.

From her date of birth I calculated that Diane had recently passed her thirty-first birthday. Close up, she looked younger than that. Almost childlike, as if the injury to her brain had also knocked her body’s internal clock, causing it to stop. There were no blemishes on her sallow skin, not a single worry line or crease of laughter. Nothing had troubled that flawless complexion for a decade, except perhaps very fleetingly, and then only a surge in electrical activity, a bubbling over of the animal parts of her nervous system. Her hair, which had been cropped high on her neck, was tousled and shiny as a conker against the snowy-white pillowcase.

I introduced myself and explained why I was there. ‘Soon some men will bring a machine,’ I said, taking care to enunciate clearly. ‘It will arrive in parts. I’ll put them together and then I’ll show you how to use it. Before you know it, you’ll be able to ask for anything you want.’

Somebody was walking in the corridor outside, I heard their footfall and turned quickly. But there was no one there, and when I turned back my heart skipped a beat. Slowly, almost as slowly as Mezzanotte’s brainwave had risen to graze the foot of the letter A, Diane was arching her eyebrows. They fell at the same controlled rate, and her lips stretched horizontally beneath the feeding tube inserted into her nostril. At that moment a light came into her eyes, as if someone had shone a torch through the back of her skull, and her face lit up with a joyous smile. Her lips parted and I saw her small, wet tongue lolling inside. I sucked in my breath. At that moment, as if she had achieved the desired effect, the light went out, and once again her dull gaze slid past me.

It’s a reflex, I told myself, a simple reflex. But what if it wasn’t? On an impulse, I leaned forward and squeezed her bony fist where it lay, immobile on the sheet, to let her know I had seen. It was cool, a little rough to the touch. I saw myself do it; from a point on the ceiling I observed my own rather secretive gesture, and I immediately felt foolish. As I straightened up and let go of her hand, I caught a whiff of something. Not the usual smell of the chronically ill, but something sugary, cloyingly sweet. A wave of nausea rose to my stomach, so powerful it pushed me up to my feet and away from the bed. Mumbling something about another appointment, promising to return soon, I backed out of the room and sped away along the corridor.

6

What was that smell? At the first turn in the corridor I slowed to a walk and racked my brains to identify it. It was almost as if she were preserved in something, infused with a very weak syrup: a living cadaver. I shuddered and walked faster. Ahead of me I heard murmuring voices, two women, one of them I recognised as belonging to the charge nurse, the other deeper, more mellifluous. I emerged from the corridor, and the two women standing by the nurse’s desk turned to look at me: Sister and Fleur Bartholomew, a neurologist I had worked with in the past and knew well.

‘Well,’ Fleur said, ‘did she turn a nice somersault for you?’ The nurse laughed, a mocking laugh, and when I looked at her she lowered her eyes to her chart. Fleur was regarding me steadily, but in a good-humoured way. She wore an emeraldgreen tunic and a towering green turban. Heavy ropes of amber beads hung around her neck, and her teeth when she smiled were like a slash of white in her polished, black face.

‘She smiled at me,’ I said. ‘I mean, I know it wasn’t… but it really seemed as if she smiled.’

I felt the blood rush to my cheeks. Fleur laughed, a deep booming laugh like a train rumbling underground, and opened her eyes to show the yellowish whites. ‘Voodoo, is it?’

I glanced at the nurse, who was smirking under her blonde eyelashes, and I asked Fleur if I could talk to her privately.

We took the lift to the third floor. The hospital lifts were old and slow, we descended with rattles and jolts. I leaned in the corner and chewed my lip, watching Fleur as she adjusted her turban in front of the mirror that covered the back wall, but without, so to speak, really seeing her. My mind was still occupied with my recent encounter. I was surprised and annoyed at myself for having been put so easily off my stride. It was as if no time had passed since my immersion in the strange world of insomnia, as if I had learned nothing from that episode and all the patients who had passed through my consulting room since. This patient had plucked emotions from me as effortlessly as if she were picking daisies, and the nurse and Fleur had seen it written on my face.

The lift stopped at the fourth floor but the doors didn’t open. It remained stationary for a minute or two, as if confused. Fleur hummed a bit, and rustled inside her silk sheath as she swung her hips out to left and right. Then, as if she had been reading my mind, she threw me a sidelong glance and told me not to tie myself up in knots. As soon as she said it, I realised how tensely I had been holding myself. Her drawing attention to it seemed to release something inside me, and in the small, enclosed space of the lift, where nobody could hear us, I told her everything I had seen; my chaotic impressions of that first meeting. I explained that the two looks Diane had given me, the one of contempt and the other of joy, had seemed somehow directed at me. I had reminded myself that her facial expressions were nothing but muscular tics, I wasn’t as easily led as all that, nevertheless it was uncanny. Even though I had only been in the room a few minutes, I had felt very strongly the presence of another intelligence.

Fleur waited until I had finished, then smiled. It was natural to feel that way the first time one met Diane, she said, because as a human being one identified with the most meagre spark of humanity in another living creature. I mustn’t underestimate the power of wishful thinking, of willing her to understand. Even as a professional, it was hard not to be led astray, down the path of hope. As a professional, though, one also had to remember that there was a simpler explanation. There was almost always a simpler explanation. ‘I know, I know,’ I said, and slumped in the corner.

With a jolt the lift started to descend again. Fleur laughed and shook her head. Everyone went through the same storm of emotions the first time they met Diane, she said. After that, you had to come to terms with her in your own way. The way she had come to think of it was that looking at Diane was a bit like ‘looking at the sea’. Everybody had their own idea about what was lurking in the depths, but they all saw the same thing: clouds reflected in the surface. I thought about this. It was a nice idea, but it wasn’t enough. I wanted to say so, but Fleur had already turned back to the mirror, and raising a hand to the back of her magnificent turban, was twisting this way and that, smiling at her reflection. A moment later, the doors opened on the third floor.

A long corridor opened up before us, and I remembered that her office was at the end of it. That meant we had to walk past the operating suites on our right. One of the doors to these suites stood ajar, and when I looked through it I saw that the room was bare. All the equipment had been stripped out, including the operating table. There was just a solitary roll of bandage on the floor, partially unravelled. I stopped and stared at it. Fleur explained that the theatres were closed for repairs. All surgery had been moved to the paediatric wing on a temporary basis. Hadn’t I read the memo? No, I murmured in dismay. Somehow memos passed me by; I never found time to read them. We walked on and entered her office, which was similar to mine, except that where I had hung my framed certificates, she had photographs. In all of the pictures two children were laughing, a boy and a girl, and their smiles were identical to hers. I remarked how happy they looked and she smiled a proud, maternal smile.

We sat down in two stiff-backed armchairs covered in tartan plaid. Fleur crossed her legs and clasped her hands on her knee. Her red-lacquered nails stuck out in all directions, like the blades of a Swiss army knife. The conversation in the lift was forgotten. Now I could see from her erect posture, the way she held her head and the flash in her intelligent eyes, that she had assumed her professional hat. She explained in a matter-of-fact way that Diane’s smile was nothing more than a reflex triggered by stimulation of the retina: a shape flitting across the light-sensitive surface at the back of the eye. It might be that the shape had to be human, but no one could be sure about that. ‘A dog might get the same warm welcome,’ she said, and laughter welled up from deep in her thorax.

‘Yes, of course,’ I said, ashamed, and I asked her about the sickly smell. But that was easily explained too, she said. Diane’s mother assiduously massaged her with creams and lotions, to keep her skin from drying out and cracking. She was the bestoiled patient in the place; a glistening advertisement for royal jelly.

I laughed and settled back in my chair. I was feeling better now. I even said, ‘I don’t know what came over me,’ but Fleur waved her hand languidly in the air as if to say, ‘Don’t give it another thought.’ Then she continued to regard me with her smiling, questioning face, as if she were waiting to find out why I had come. Eventually I reminded her of what she must already know: that I was going to be working with the patient and Mezzanotte’s machine, so I needed to know everything there was to know about her; every detail of her medical history. At that, she arched a pencilled eyebrow. ‘He’s serious, then?’

I asked her why she should doubt it, and she looked at me thoughtfully. It was two months since the professor had paid her a visit, she said, and described how he proposed to help her patient. He had asked her opinion, and she had given it: the diagnosis was uncertain, the family was split. There were certainly more suitable candidates out there. But she agreed it was an interesting case, and that if she hadn’t been so busy herself, she would have liked to spend more time getting to the bottom of it. So she wouldn’t stand in his way.

Since then she had assumed that he had abandoned his plans, having come to the conclusion himself, perhaps, that they were too ambitious. The odds against it working, in the case of this particular patient, were high. I laughed. No, no, I assured her, the professor doesn’t give up so easily. The project was going full steam ahead, and I was to play a central role in it. I was to oversee the patient’s training.

She looked at me for a long time, with a strange expression, then raised her eyes to the ceiling. ‘Let me see…’ she mused, tugging meditatively at her long earlobe, from which a heavy gold ring dangled. ‘The case came to me six years ago, when Dr Seaforth, the previous consultant, retired.’

The history was as follows. Diane Levy collapsed the day after her twenty-first birthday, on the top floor of the maisonette that she shared with her husband, Adrian. She had married the young man a year earlier, having known him for only a few months. He worked for a newspaper; she kept house and dabbled in a little painting. Until her marriage Diane had always lived with her parents. She had suffered from diabetes since early childhood and her mother had, to some extent, wrapped her in cotton wool. True, she was prone to mild vascular problems, poor circulation, and once there was a scare over her eyesight, but it turned out to be a false alarm. In fact, the chances were that she had twenty-twenty vision. It was the brain behind the eyes whose state of health, or decay, was less certain.