Coma Boy


It was a black empty space and then it clouded with light.  I was on
something firm and flat and it smelled like clean things.  There was
something sitting and then it stood and she was above me smiling and
looking anxious.

“Hello,” she said.

My mouth was full of cotton and my head rolled to the side and I went
away again but not to the black place, only to sleep.  I awoke and she
was still there and now others too, not crowding but there
nonetheless.  I felt very rested and I took each of them in turn and
smiled at one, then the other, until I had everyone and the last was a
woman I didn't know and she was in a white coat.

“Hello, Thomas,” she said.  “I'm Doctor Postlethwaite.  You have been
in hospital some time.  You were in a coma after an accident.  Do you
remember being on your bike?”

I looked at her in a confused way.  The clean smell was the linen and
I breathed it in.  My mouth was still dry.  I shook my head but it
barely moved.

I cycle everywhere.  I didn't know the time she talked about.  I felt
a little cold suddenly and I got a pang of maybe I'd like to be back
in the black place.

“Well, a motorist knocked you from your cycle and you suffered a head
injury.  You are lucky to have come out of it this well, considering
you weren't wearing a helmet.” She was doing the little things doctors
do when they check your body is reacting to things.  “And you are
lucky too, to have so many here to support you.  I'll leave you with
them now and I'll see you again later,” and as she left she said to my
parents, “He will want to rest again soon.”

I never wear a helmet when I cycle.  One by one the people in the room
came over to me, not quite in the order I'd first registered them.  I
got kisses and pats on the shoulder and awkward hugs and slowly the
room emptied and it was my mother and my father and my girlfriend.

“You really don't remember anything about what happened?” asked one of
them.

“No.” The cotton feeling was gone and I could speak a little but like
the woman had said I was starting to get drowsy again.

“You went out for no reason just a ride and a man took you out with
his station wagon,” said another.

“Why won't you wear a helmet?  You had us so worried!” said the last
and I was drifting, drifting, gone.


I was only a few more days in the hospital but all up it had been
several weeks.  Still, as I was told repeatedly, who knows how long I
could have been in that coma?

My parents made me stay at theirs for a few days until they were
convinced I could look after myself.  I felt fine.  Better than fine.
I'd had to do routine physical therapy for being in bed a few weeks
straight but I think the doctors recognized I was feeling fitter than
ever and rather refreshed.  But I put up with the mild annoyance of my
parents' hovering.  Then my girlfriend took me back to my place,
promising them she'd look after me and stay the night the first night.

She made us a nice little salad which I had with a baked potato.  We
watched half a movie but I couldn't concentrate on it so we turned it
off.  Maybe she was a little surprised when I started coming onto her.

“Are you sure?” she asked.

I wasn't but I pushed on.  It worked out all right.  I lay there
afterward and she tidied a few things away and visited the bathroom.
I lay looking across the room at where the ceiling joins the wall
there.  She came back, turned the lights off and got in bed.  She put
her arm across my chest and murmered something about looking after me.
Soon I could feel her arm raising ever so slightly up and down slowly
on my chest like a half-hearted attempt at CPR.  She was asleep.

For some reason I couldn't join her in that.  I listened for the
sounds of my place at night.  There weren't any; it was very quiet.
It was eerily quiet.  I brought my free hand up to my ear and played
with it, cupping it, shutting the flap across it and opening it again,
opening it half-way.  I couldn't get that wooshing sound, that sound
like you're at the seashore.  Then underneath the silence came a
ringing from the back of my skull.  It got louder, pushing up through
my head, the frequency finding fundamentals, resonating with my bone,
my brain, and whatever else is in my head.

I shook, I jerked suddenly my arm that was under her head and she
groaned but with her mouth shut and she pushed up into my side some
more.  I reached over and opened my mouth to wake her.  As soon as my
lips parted that cotton rushed back into my mouth.  I couldn't move my
tongue and my lungs were flat.  The arm I'd reached over with lost
whatever was holding it up and it fell numb across her and I was
rolled over on my side unable to move, holding her the way I'd held
her a few nights before the coma, and finally I started to feel
drowsy.  The edges of my vision clouded dark, my eyelids, my eyelids
came closer and closer together.  The ringing swelled, dulled, rose
and fell, pounded in my ears, my brain.

At the last moment an alarm raised itself again in the center of the
wool filling up my mind.  It was a last effort, a final voice saying,
“If you let me be drowned out it's the end!  If you give up now you
give up everything!  I am the seed of strength at the core of your
being: nurture me and we can thrive together once more!  I am your
Tinkerbell!  Clap your hands!  Clap your hands!” And I was in the arms
of a girl and she was in the arms of me and the black place was not
far away and it came fast at the end and took us both up in it.