White light dazzles through black lace-work patterns and flows over his head. There is a noise like bubbling mud inside an oil drum and a huge moon rises across the lace-work. But this moon has a face—it speaks and more mud burbles.
Metal noise explodes and then there is white metal, all around him, under him, over him, nothing but white metal. His soul rips and sorrow floods in: blind pain, blind panic. He struggles—but can't move his body, for tight bands of paralysis across his legs and chest hold him still.
Two planet faces rise over him, vast, impassive and cold. A bombardment of noise tears through the whiteness: first an echo throbbing in metal, then a wail like the ending of worlds—a mermaid's death-cry. An animal howl from his own throat joins with the siren in an ululating duet and the ambulance jolts forward.
Later there is bright dead light, smelling of chemicals. He is flying down an infinite echoing corridor of disinfected white. Pale blue nurses coalesce out the whiteness then vanish. Hurrying doctors in white coats and rattling metal trolleys hurtle past.
Harsh whiteness—even the smells cut like scalpels. His eyes roll, seeing nothing but the sliding ceiling and the impassive blue cliff-face of his warder's back. A nurse runs beside him, carrying the clear bag of fluid that now feeds into his arm, pumping poison into his veins. His body is not his own, held down by bands of steel and the honey buzzing that clogs his mind.
The trolley turns, banking at Grand Prix velocity, then hammers into metal doors. Suddenly there is silence, deathly and white.
The silent light—brilliant and sterile—fills his eyes, his head, his everything. The smell is now pure: the essence of cleanness, empty of all life.
A nurse looms over, vast and blue, with only her eyes visible between mask and hair cover. He struggles to speak as she slides him forward into the whiteness, but his mouth moulds nothing but a series of grunts.
He is wheeled to the altar where gleaming steel and green cloth is dazzled by a vaulting arch of blue-white light. Banks of machines mummer quietly to themselves in hushed beeps and scanners pulse green luminous traces across empty screens. A hydra of tubes and drip bags writhe and twist obscenely, ravenous to feast on his paralysed flesh.
At the centre is the sacrificial slab, hallowed and sacred, draped in the purest white. On the priest's table beside it are the consecrated instruments of glittering metal: pain loving scalpels to divide the giving skin, flesh biting raptor forceps, crushing clamps for life-pulsing blood vessels, and bird-claw retractors to wrench apart the twitching muscle-meat.
Blue nurses buzz quietly around him like burka-clad devotees, showing nothing but their empty, insect eyes. Straps loosen and he is lifted by unfeeling hands. Powerless, he can look and he can hear, but his body cannot move and his mind cannot think.
He is laid gently on the altar. Masked faces surround him, a circle of insect indifference, and overhead the dazzling light of a second sun cuts into him, stripping the soft flesh from his pale bones. Drug-dull panic pumps in his veins. He struggles—his hands twitch feebly—and screams—his throat makes gurgles like a happy baby. A mask of his own—hard black rubber, the size of a toilet bowl—is pressed over his face. Chemical fumes fill his nose and the air becomes solid light, swimming like cigarette smoke.
Somewhere—in a different country perhaps—fingers brush over his belly, pulling at his tee-shirt and unbuckling his jeans. Then spirit coldness floods his groin, chilling and numbing the skin. Exposed and vulnerable, a plucked chicken—even through the drug-haze he squirms inside like a worm impaled.
'Bon. The patient est prêt,' says a female voice, coming closer, and a new figure looms over the vast black rim of his mask. She is blue and masked like the nurses, but this time he knows the eyes; not long ago filled with sultry invitation, now they glitter with the cold sterility of the room. She stands over the altar slab, the celebrant, her arms raised in priestly supplication as a nurse pulls a fingered condom over each of her scarlet taloned hands. The tight cotton of the tailored surgical gown hugs her slim figure, moulding to the upward thrust of her bust.
'I didn't mean to be rude back there,' he says, 'Perhaps we could try again?'
But nothing comes out of his mouth but babyish burblings. The priestess turns to her instrument tray, head bowed in silent prayer.
'And then afterwards I could tell you all about the heart of—.'
His burblings cease abruptly as she turns back to the altar, holding aloft in her condomed hand a huge scalpel, a surgical Excalibur. She pauses, poised to begin, the blade catching glittering light-beams on its razored edge.
'I think there's been a bit of a mistake—,' he tries to say, as the blade descends, falling out of view behind the arched horizon of his mask.
All is now quiet, just the steady machine pulse from the bank of dials and the mechanical flow of gas in time with his breathing. Just above the mask he can see her elegant neck, bent piously over his abdomen. Her perfume, languid and musky, slides like silk across the prevailing blanket of disinfectant.
Now he can hear the gently metal click of her instruments. He feels delicate fingers brush over the top of his thighs and prod his chilled genitals. He squirms again, her every touch electric. Then he feels something sharper, an exquisite itch like a pencil drawn across his groin. He starts to wriggle—but suddenly the itch expands, blooming like a flower across his belly, becoming sharper still, no longer an itch but a breaking wave of molten steel, a blazing sheet of napalm fire, and—finally—the white-hot core of a cobalt bomb, detonating through his senses at the speed of light.
White light, white heat. Pain in its purest form, refined to perfection: crystalline, immaculate, absolute. It screams through his skull in a single resonating tone—then the bone shatters and his brain explodes, blasting jagged shards of skull and globs of bloody jelly into the black hole of oblivion.
Black empty space. Floating a sea of ink—warm, dark and, silent.
Lightning bolts of pain, white and jagged, tear through the darkness, some close, some far away. A low rumbling throbs with a steady, hot thud—lub-dup, lub-dup, lub-dup—pumping boiling liquid agony through the inflamed channels of his brain.
The bolts and the thunder stir him, prodding at his pain-numbed consciousness. Slowly, the ink of darkness begins to ebb.
Muffled noises from the edge of time come closer. Sounds crystallise out of the incoherence and from the sounds words begin to construct themselves.
'…fulminating osteomyelitis requiring la double amputation. The pancreas has been—how you say?—completement excisée…'
The voice is female, foreign. He tries to open his eyes, but cannot—the lids are riveted shut.
'…bilateral pleural strip…'
In the darkness of his skull he sees a beautiful woman in a fur coat.
'…drainage tubes installée…'
She smiles, reaches into her pocket and pulls out—
'…adrenal shutdown complet…'
—a glistening human testicle, freshly excised, dangling by its severed vas deferens from the jaws of a pair of pliers.
'…full-scale Addisonian crisis…'
The shock of the memory fires through his brain like a captive bolt. The beat machine jolts, misses, then accelerates to manic tempos, irregular, slewing wildly.
'…critical care essential…'
He screams, but no noise will come; he struggles to flee, but his body does not obey. His vision is filled with nothing but darkness and the she-demon rampaging through his skull, unchecked.
'…vingt-quatre seven barrier nursing…'
Light, he must have light!
'…dire situation…'
He focuses his energy, every last fibril of effort that can be mustered, on one tiny flap of muscled skin.
'…the life hanging par un thread…'
Pouring his entire being into it, he becomes it and it alone, willing movement.
'…in the knee of the Gods…'
At first nothing.
'…next of kinship to be informée…'
But then there is a tiny flicker—a crack of light appears at the base of his retina—and a twitch—the crack widens—and then, straining like an Olympic weight lifter, he raises his left eyelid. And, as at the raising of a theatre curtain, the room is revealed.
'…and now, allons nous. I do not like the leaving of our autre ami unattended.'
She is wearing a white coat, crisp and body hugging. Her hair is dark now, and in a tight bun. Black eyes, crimson lips, bone-white flesh: her face is a beautiful mask of death. As she goes out into the corridor, she is followed by a man carrying a clip board, a little man in a dark suit with a bowler hat pushed down onto his flabby head.
The slow throb through the dark liquid beats time with his life.
Lub-dup—lub-dup—lub-dup—lub-dup.
He swims upwards through warm ink, pushing gently with his hands. As he breaks surface, light floods into the swimming cavern of his skull.
Beep-beep—beep-beep—beep-beep—beep-beep.
The machine beside his head now chimes in with his heart, picking up the baton of time-keeping for his life. He has emerged into yet another lacuna of foggy consciousness, and is back in the white box where light and pain blur seamlessly into one another.
Light and pain. Pain and light. White pain flooding through the portholes in his skull, red light throbbing across his tortured body. Or is it the other way round? And in any case what body is that? Certainly not that part of him that, long ago, could jump and run, shout and sing, that made him one with the living vibrant world. No, that has gone and what he now has is a dead slab, paralysed and without function. And also largely without structure, for that matter: for he has no limbs, no genitals, and probably no lungs or intestines either, although he can't be a hundred percent sure about these. No, nothing remains but a turgid sack of pain, held together only by its Tutankhamen swathe of bandages.
What they have taken away, though, they have replaced. For where he once had organs, he now has machines—their cascades of coloured wire, corrugated pipes and pulsing tubes are grafted into the bandage swathed cylinders that were once limbs, they grow into what remains of his abdomen and slide between paralysed lips to reach down his throat like the proboscises of some species of mechanical parasite. Exteriorised service systems: he is a human Pompidou Centre.
He rolls his eyes, scanning the towering banks of his new mechanical self. He is no longer living his life, it is being lived for him; his soul is in these flickering dials, these beeping displays, these computer modulated support systems. Indeed, the only function they do not perform for him is the feeling of pain—no, that is his pigeon entirely, his final all-encompassing role. He thinks to sigh, but his breathing apparatus does not respond.
A rectangle opens in the far side of the white cube and a blue-clad insect nurse enters, checking dials and adjusting programs. But the warm ink is once again lapping up the sides of his awareness and he begins sink back into the blackness.
Lub-dup—lub-dup—lub-dup—lub-dup.
The blackness of the warm ink.
Beep-beep—beep-beep—beep-beep.
The white cube of pain.
Black ink, white cube. White cube, black ink. He is in an infinite cycle, slipping in and out of consciousness. His machine organs maintain a perpetual vigil, living for him what little remains of his life, and the nurses come and go like blue worker termites tending a pupa.
He is oscillating between life and death, between oblivion and torture; now, however, he is no more than a bored spectator. Oh, he sees the light, he feels the pain as exquisitely as ever, but it all seems somehow so far away, so—irrelevant. He has had enough, he wants the show to end, he wants to go home. The black tide is lapping slowly higher, soon he will be once again beneath the warm, dark waves. Will this be his final immersion, will he at long last sink never to surface again?
Lub-dup—lub-dup—lub-dup—lub-dup—click.
But no, the opening of the door pulls him back into consciousness. He curses quietly—another tinkering nurse. He does not open his eyes, preferring to hide in darkness. She bustles into the room with a hollow thud and then mutters something—in a male voice. His eye shutters shoot up.
Two figures fill the doorway, manoeuvring something into the cube. Cadaverous, lean as skeletons, they are as black as the darkness of his oblivion: black suits and ties, black top-hats cascading black silk over bony shoulders, black wrap-around sunglasses hiding their eyes. Only their unsmiling, thin-lipped faces are white, as white as the room itself, as white as death.
He now sees what they are carrying: a tall box of polished oak, its brass handles gleaming like gold. They move slowly and solemnly, laying the box gently on the floor. He watches with dull indifference as they lift the lid to reveal a gleaming cocoon of white satin, comfortable, safe, and welcoming.
He follows them with his eyes as they cross to his bed. A black gloved hand grasps the bundle of pipe-work at his mouth, and tubes slither up his windpipe and gullet like regurgitated spaghetti. His life-preserving umbilicus is being severed—he knows it, but watches with mild indifference as, standing over him, they begin ripping out the wires and the tubes, cutting away the bandage swathes with silver scissors. Needles pop out of his arms, spraying arcs of blood and coloured liquid over his sheets. Pipes pulled from his abdomen bubble green intestinal fluid.
Soon they are done and what is left is a crippled stump, unsupported in a nest of cut bandages, a stranded fish on a dry beach. Something inside him smiles—at long last all will soon be over.
As they lift him up he sees there is another figure in the room: a woman in a flowing silk dress with a wide brimmed hat and a veil pulled down over her face. She carries a wreath in her gloved hands and she is sobbing, delicately and quietly. A mourner, although incongruously she is all in white: her dress, her gloves, her veil. The wreath is of lilies, the colour of a virgin's breast.
It is her whom he now watches as he floats through the air on black gloved palms to be lowered gently into the satin womb of the coffin. One of the undertakers takes his hands and folds them carefully over his chest. The woman—more bride than widow—kneels beside him, weeping gently, and lays the wreath over his crossed hands. She lifts her veil and as she bends to kiss his bluing lips, he sees her tear-streaked face for the first time.
No, not for the first time. A spark of life ignites in his breast.
'You,' he says quietly, the word actually forming on his lips.
The nymph smiles and the spark becomes a beam of sunshine. Then she leans forward, pressing her life-warm lips on his.
As the lid is lowered over him, a strange heat spreads from his newly kissed lips and blends with the sunlight in his chest, flowing through his now opening veins and out across his body and limbs, reclaiming territory he had thought lost forever. In the satin womb, he is safe and warm—the darkness here is soft and caring, like a baby's blanket. His bed rocks gently as he is picked up and carried away, and suddenly he is tired, very, very tired. Smiling to himself, he snuggles down and again drifts slowly into oblivion—the oblivion of sweet, sweet sleep.