The Comatose Scenario

I’d lived nearly ten years in a coma when my wife left me and moved back to Cyprus. And it wasn’t a bad life, all things considered, up until that point. I could hear everyone and everything, though I couldn’t respond in any way. No blinking yes/no or anything. No meaningful finger twitches. The weird thing was that people couldn’t tell whether or not I was sleeping, so sometimes when they’d say, “Can you hear me?” or “Dear God, I hope he can hear me, please let him hear me,” I could; and sometimes I was in dreamland and couldn’t. But to them it was all the same.

For the first while I spent a lot of time worrying about this, and then resenting it, as if I were a child being spoken about in the third person by towering adults. Sometimes people did speak directly to me, though, especially this one nurse, Bailey, who cracked me up inside when she’d tell me jokes and who’d ramble on and on as if I’d suggested the most interesting topic with some subtle look.

So I got past the resentment, mostly because I couldn’t hang onto it, and turned my thoughts away from the pointless efforts to signal someone or to raise my head or to communicate that I’d very much like the plug pulled. I mean, I’d still get down on myself, would cry some, always inwardly, but more and more I began to adjust, maybe to accept, and to enjoy myself, if you can imagine. Found that I grinned a lot to myself, and did a lot of thinking. Pretty much caught up on all my thinking.

Also, once a week I’d get a full body massage from one nurse or another, not to mention the more or less regular, though unscheduled, rubbings of various body parts—hand, forearm, calf, thigh—that my wife would give me, at first with affection, later with resignation, finally with resentment. I looked forward to the sponge baths, which were like calculated dog licks, and to the regular shavings, and to being rolled to one and then the other side for the bed changing, and I swear there was a beef bullion cube crushed and added on Sundays to the I.V. drip. Sometime in November, turkey bullion.

People mourned for me. They came and they mourned, except for my little brother, Mickey, who told me stories about home life and the strain my situation put on the family, like how Mom criticized Dad for using a metal spatula on the frying pan and how Dad answered by playing the spatula like a flute and chasing her around the house.

Sometimes during nice weather Mickey would pretend to sneak a cigarette into the hospital room for me. He’d crack a window, light the cigarette, drag a couple of times to get it really smoking, and then put it to my lips, saying, “Suck, buddy, suck.” I could smell the flavor of it, just as part of the mechanism of breathing, pretended I could see how the smoke roiled up, and felt the butt against my lips, which sometimes quivered with the basic joy and relief of the staged moment, the fraternal complicity.

Mickey was very proud of this signal, but who could he tell? It’d be worse that I was smoking, or had smoked prior to the accident, than that my lips quivered. My parents are very concerned about the body and treating it right. They are convinced that if they could only get some supplements or vitamins in me, I’d recover more quickly, and pushed the nurse at least once to replace or supplement the Sunday bullion with a pulverized multi-vitamin. For a while—years, really—Mom gave me surreptitious magnet tests and treatment when she knew the nurses would be absent for a good length of time. “South magnets are for regeneration,” she said and she used masking tape to attach the cold, round apparatuses to my skin over the liver, the spleen and, for good measure, and because you never know, the thyroid, that mystical miniature subterranean pomegranate.

It must be hard on them, to see me trapped inside this body. I wish I could tell them—Mom and Dad and Mickey and Adrian and little Angie, who I’ve never technically met—that it’s not what they think. That it’s not so bad. Contrary to expectations, in fact, I feel freer from my body than I ever did when I had control of it. My body now is a mere incubator for the mind, a shrine built to house the Prophet of higher motivations, dripping in robes of gray matter, enervated with the moving rivers of electrical impulse, a perpetual thunder storm within and around perpetual cloudy skies.

It’s that once you get over the complete loss of control or, rather, the belief that control will return, however gradually, you give up any expectations of your body, which then more or less ceases to exist, especially as the number of physical stimuli becomes minimal and the type becomes mundane. Then, and from then on, you’re all brain, a jiggly king on a throne of bone and blood vessels, the promenade of the body stretched out to greet visitors.

Until one fine day you wake up. Both from sleep and from the coma, simultaneously. It’s weird, because like in the movies, the timing makes it seem as if you’ve only had a long, dreary dream, and that feels cliché. But if it’s true that you really spent nearly ten years in a coma—and you know there are people like this in real life—you don’t want your first thought upon awakening to feel cliché. It ought to be dramatic. I mean, there ought to be drama.

So you look around, squinty-eyed against the mild light of pre-dawn. But there’s no one there. No one to see you wake up, to witness the landmark. You feel like you’ve awakened off cue, just before the alarm clock. Now there’s both the cliché to manage and the sense that you were cheated of sleep. You’re left only with more time to think, and that seems natural enough. Familiar. Much more familiar than looking around the room, which is still too dim anyway. Or than working the eyelids up and down, for fun or practice. Or than testing just how far the consciousness might extend, to the finger? The toe? Is it propitious, this absence of audience? This stage and its props and the closed eyes of the stage lights for one first and one last dress rehearsal?

(Maybe you are still asleep? Have you never dreamt of awakening from the coma in ten years of perpetual dreaming? Has your mind never cheated you, with some farcical, pointless dimness and the absurd absence of the loving, grieving, fitfully sleeping wife—the sweat on her forehead and the clenched teeth as evidence of that fitfulness—of the dramatic awakening you’ve earned after ten wasted years in bed and the wasted body as evidence?)

You close your eyes again, the lids like an old door on its creaky hinges. You believe that you’ve been in a coma for nearly ten years because you must believe it, but also because there is just too much information in your memory of the days of visitors, of the pungent news people, of the lamentations that gave way to the shouts between doctors and family, then to the unwelcome first-name familiarity, the absent-minded nods-hello from the nurses; the deluge of flowers and cards and people who you knew well and less well, and then the dry heat of the sun and the remnant trickle of visits from those who felt mostly obligated, sometimes sentimental or nostalgic, less and less hopeful. And there were all the conversations about politics and sports and religion—a lot of religion—and things related to your condition and gossip about the conditions of neighboring patients and aren’t we blessed, in contrast, and some small talk and some angry fits, often directed at your limp and pitiful body, with harmless wads of paper thrown like a desperate lobbed tennis ball, and some really touching moments, usually at night, usually one-on-one, the lullaby in the stringy voice of a strange child, an active hand gripping your mannequin’s hand and a voice, as if from a movie, overhead, low, spoken more and more to oneself, the sentiment expressed with less and less frequency, “Mark, you don’t know how hard this is on me,” or “on Angie, the poor baby needs her father,” or “on your mother, you should see how she’s wrinkled,” or “on Mickey, he’s dropped out of college again,” or “on me, I don’t think I can do this anymore,” or “on Angie, she’s almost ten now, you know, she needs a father, I’m really doing this for her.” “This” was leaving me to go back to Cyprus, where her family lives, and taking Angie, my little American Angie, with her. To turn her into a tanned Greek-gabbing olive that I won’t recognize!

How do you respond to that? It’s true, you were speechless.

My head must have been connected to some head monitor, I imagine, with the dot-matrix printer and the sheaves of paper racing to keep up with the earthquake of peaks and canyons and the melting of the polar ice caps and the jumping of sinister icicles, all created by the inimitable, discrete act of opening and shutting the eyelids, because a doctor entered minutes later and reintroduced me to the cold glow of light from the hospital corridor, then from the overhead fluorescents, from the rude awakening and the cold pressure of his thumbs and fingers first on the right eye then on the left, then from the pen light.

“Good morning, Mr. Novak.”

He would say something like that, predictable and appropriate. Was there no hint of irony in any of this? Was I to be robbed entirely of my entrance? My eyes were still closed, the light really was garish, and so I couldn’t see whether the doctor wore an ironic grin or not. In the course of his career, he’d probably welcomed enough comatose people back to consciousness to dilute the significance of this one time. Besides being a professional. Besides having his own problems. Maybe a swollen prostate. Hangnails. Halitosis.

“You’re wondering where you are, I suppose, but first things first, Mr. Novak. Some tests, take you off that respirator for one, that tube must chafe a bit.” And there it was, a tube in my mouth, plumbing my throat, making me gag, the sudden recognition of it as of my hand when the doctor pierced the back of it for blood, mine for as long as I can remember.

And then Bailey was back, and the light was very strong in the room, but this time from the window, the shades now drawn, maybe for the first time with purpose, and consciousness was flooding into me and into the inert body with the force of wind and rivers and the stored memory of a thousand aches. The body awash with a fiery tingling and the sounds of fear and alarm heard anywhere the minds of individuals are threatened by their hearts.

There were two other nurses beside and behind Bailey, and they were whispering as if at mass or in the prelude to some famous, televised putt, here to see the waking man. I did not recognize their voices, but I knew Bailey’s, which now seemed displaced and echoy inside her full face and her big nose, as if it did not belong to her, this woman cast in the role of nurse Bailey for the adaptation of my life, first put down in a lifeless novel, to film.

“And how is the star of the day?” she said in an awkwardness befitting cue cards or an audition. I blinked to suggest recognition, the smile in my face still sunk in memory, and she nodded without keeping her eyes on me, feeling perhaps in the same moment the same disappointment in my animation that I’d felt in the embodiment of her voice.

She fiddled with a few knobs on the elaborate system of monitors and machines—my heart, my lungs, apparently—and then turned to go, motioning with two palms for the two groupies, with their agonizing looks of wonder that could just as easily have been let-down, to exit. As Bailey leaned back in for the door handle, with her head in the room and her body already out, she said, “Mr. Novak, your mother called this afternoon upon hearing the good news. She asked me to tell you, just because no doubt you’re wondering about all this and what’s transpired and all, that your wife and child made it safely to Cyprus.”

Not a dream, then.

“Oh,” said Bailey, just before she latched the door, so that only between my eyes and only her eyes and the cavern and darkness of her mouth was there this transmission. “You may also be happy to know that your wife was here when you woke up yesterday morning. She had been asleep in the guest room of the hospital. But she didn’t get a chance to say good bye before she left because you had fallen asleep again and, bless her heart, she didn’t want to wake you.”

Then the door latched and the silence of sleep returned to the hospital room, minus some chirping outside the window and the strange sound of your own breathing. And though you can’t think out loud yet, you find somewhere inside you the memory of a smile, make a wry one, the first of many future wry smiles. But for the life of you, you can’t get your eyelids to shut again.