It was just a room. Not like off a soap or one of those TV hospital dramas, in which anyone in intensive care is wired up to bleeping machines and doctors and nurses flit about, waiting for the patient to flatline at any moment. Here it was quiet and still. Low-tech. An art print on the wall, a pair of IKEA-style armchairs and, in one corner, a table with a radio/CD player and a portable telly. All it needed was carpet instead of easy-clean flooring, and room 6 could’ve passed for a hotel bedroom. If you ignored the reek of antiseptic. The curtains were partially drawn, and a bluey-green gloom was cast over everything. The color of the sea in a child’s painting.
In this half-light, he thought the bed was empty. But as his eyes adjusted, he made out a human form beneath the blanket. Like a dummy. Something you’d use to fool someone into thinking you were in bed when really you weren’t.
Then the head on the pillow.
Alex approached the bedside. Stood there, making himself look at the face. His face. Waxy, pallid. Even though he knew that the boy—Alex—was alive, it was like staring at the features of a corpse. Like seeing himself dead. The eyes were shut, at least. He was grateful for that. To see his own eyes staring back at him … that would’ve been too much.
A tube disappeared into the right nostril, for the fluids and liquidized food that kept him alive. That was the only piece of medical kit. If he placed his ear to that chest, he would hear the heart beating away as though everything was normal in there. Doing its job, regardless. The lungs, too. The breaths were shallow but he could see the rise and fall of the ribs. Hear the air being inhaled and exhaled through the parted lips. In his long hours at the PC, reading about the soul and the mind, Alex had come across the origins of “psyche”—the German translation of a Greek word for “life” or “spirit” or “consciousness,” rooted in a verb that meant “to blow.” To the ancient Greeks, the psyche was the vital breath that made human beings what they were.
The breath of life.
Well, Alex—the bodily Alex on that bed—might be missing his rightful psyche, and he might be unconscious, but he was breathing, breathing, breathing.
What was with the TV and the radio/CD, though? He would hardly be sitting up in bed watching The Simpsons or using the remote to switch CD tracks. They were for visitors, he supposed. Mum and Dad. Alex imagined his parents listening to music or watching television in there. It must be boring, waiting for someone to die. Or to wake up. Maybe they played Hot Fuss or Sam’s Town on a continuous loop, in the hope that it would penetrate their son’s shut-down brain and lure him out of PVS.
Could he hear anything? If Alex spoke to himself now, would the sounds—the words themselves—register somewhere deep in his unconscious?
But then it wouldn’t be Alex who heard them. It would be Flip. That might be Alex’s head, Alex’s brain, but it was Flip’s unconscious in there.
Alex looked at himself more closely. The face was thinner and more drawn than usual, and the hair had grown longer. Not a lot; someone—his mother?—must have been keeping it trim. He pictured her doing that. When he was little, she used to cut his hair rather than pay for it to be done at a barber’s. She still did cut Sam’s. The eyelids looked fragile, like scraps of tissue paper had been laid over the eyes. Perhaps it was his imagination but they appeared to be flickering.
They were. Was Flip dreaming? Did he have nightmares, just like Alex?
He wondered whether Flip had detected the presence of his own body, and of Alex’s soul. Proximity wasn’t a factor in psychic evacuation, but all the same he couldn’t help thinking that a psyche would show some kind of response to the nearness of its “twin.” But if Flip’s did, Alex picked up no hint of it.
He took hold of the right hand in his left. The skin was warm. He didn’t know why, but he hadn’t expected it to be. Long fingernails, he noticed. Unbitten. They looked false, he was so used to seeing them chewed right down. With his free hand, he smoothed the fringe back. The hair felt coarse, a little greasy. The forehead was cool, at least. Now he was touching that face: running his fingers across the eyebrows, the cheek, the jaw, the chin. That mouth. Tracing his thumb along the parted lips.
No. Too strange. Too freaky. He took his hand away.
If the physical contact affected the boy on the bed, he seemed oblivious. So calm. So peaceful. Alex could almost believe he was merely asleep and at any moment he’d wake up and everything would be fine.
Leaning over the bed, Alex became aware of the smell. Not unpleasant, as such, but there was a slightly sweet whiff of stale sweat and body odor and old pajamas. Of musty armpits and unwashed hair. His own smell, although it seemed unfamiliar; he hadn’t even realized he had a scent before.
There wasn’t time for this. He didn’t know how long Rob could delay the nurse, or when she or another of the staff might come in here to check on Alex. Or when his mum or dad might appear. Perhaps they’d gone to the café while the doctors did their ward round and were, at that very minute, heading back through the maze of corridors towards ICU to sit with their son once more.
If Alex was going to do this, he had to do it now.
It was wrong. Dangerous, reckless, fraught with the risk of disaster. Crazy, really. But mostly just plain wrong. The greater wrong, though, was that the body on the bed—his body—was stripped of its true inner essence. What was wrong, as well, was that this body, the one Alex occupied, Flip’s body, with its own soul ripped out, was exiled to a place it didn’t belong.
That face. That head. He had to touch it again now.
The question was, would it work? And if it did, would the switch occur just before, or just after, the point of no return?
As he slipped a hand beneath the head, raising it gently from the pillow, as he felt the moist, warm skin at the back of the neck, the scalp, the sweat-matted hair, as he heard the small sigh with the shift in position, as the eyelids fluttered, as he used his free hand to ease the pillow out from under that head, then lowered that head again … as each of these things happened, Alex’s sureness about the rights and wrongs began to blur and slip and break apart.
He had to close his eyes. Had not to see his own face turned blankly towards him in that final moment before it was lost from view beneath the pillow.
Outside room 6, voices.
Alex froze. Listened. The voices echoed along the corridor—two women, talking (he couldn’t make out what about)—then footsteps, the squeak and rattle of a trolley being wheeled along. Drawing closer. Passing. Fading away. From the direction of the nurses’ station came the sound of a telephone ringing, unanswered.
He breathed slowly, deeply. Got a proper hold of the pillow and positioned it over the face without allowing himself to hesitate or even to think, placing his hands over the center of the pillow and pressing down. Firmly, then more firmly still.
The harder he pressed, the less that lump beneath the layers of cotton and foam felt like a human head, and the more it became just that: a lump. He had considered removing the feeding tube from the nostril but decided it would make no difference; in any case, he had no idea how to do that. As he continued to place his weight on the pillow, he stopped himself thinking about the tube. The nostril. The nose. The mouth. Those slightly parted lips. Blotted out the mental image of that face altogether. He was pressing a pillow down over an inanimate object; that was all.
There was no struggle. No sounds of frantic gagging for breath.
With no struggle, there was no gradual cessation of a struggle, no end-of-struggle stillness … nothing to indicate whether he’d kept the pillow in place for long enough, or for too long. So all Alex could do was hold the pillow and press down and down and down. Just go on pressing until something happened. Or until nothing did. Perhaps after all, the only thing to happen would be that he’d eventually lift the pillow to find that “Alex” was dead. Truly dead. And he’d put the pillow back beneath that head and leave the room, still inside Flip’s body.
He pressed down. He went on pressing down.
A statue’s skull, its sculpted features impressing themselves
on his flesh so that if he turned his hands palm-upwards, the marks would be etched there. The whorlsandcreases of a partially sketched face.
He pressedandpressed until his wrists began to
throb and hisStop
forearms, his shoulders. Aching with the effort. Every shred of strength, channeled into that point of contact.
Eyes closed. You weren’t to look. To think. To look at, to think of, what you were doing to that headfaceyou to him the boy the skull the stone bust
the mouth of that
decapitated suffocating sculpted head
under the weight of everything you bring to bear and still it won’tcan’tdoesn’t struggle or breathe or seem to breathe if it’s made of stone it can’t breathe
it’s your own head beneath the pillow and if only you could breathe ininin through your nose your mouth your mouth that cannot open because it’s made of flesh of blocked
stopped
flesh
the suffocated opening in flesh
and you arekilling, murderingyourselfhow can you
in the green gloomy gray light but your eyes are closed and even through the lids of your closed eyes the light is black
not black, green
not green, white like when you
STOP! But you dontyoudontyoucantyou
like when you push the heels of your hands hard into your eyes and the lids fizz with colored lights
and the headache, the splitting intolerable headache.
But the thing is to breathe if you stop breathing if you don’t breathe you
die
you blackgreenwhitered black out and you die
You are a fish. In the bluey green, a fish in a tank only the tank is drained and your gills his gills those gills flap open and closed open and for
want of water you are drowning in airStopStop!
with pain screaming inside your stone skull, the air screeching, shrieking inside your head. His head. Searing. Clawing, ripping the stitches of your brain the lungs your lungs your lungs will burst through your ribs
if
you
breatheyou will
STOPSTOPSTOPSTOP!
The jolt of a door being pushed open. A voice, yelling.
There was no falling, only floating. No standing up. Had he been standing up? No. Lying, that was all. Lying, afloat on flat nothingness.
The weight became light, the hard became soft, the dark became bright … and best of all, there was air. Sweet sips of cold air between his lips. There’d been no air before. But now there was. Lots of it. All the air he could wish for.
Glorious air that Alex breathed and breathed, deep into his lungs, and with each breath came the slightest but unmistakable trace of a wheeze.