My body became soft and light and the perimeter of it seemed to become elastic and merge with the objects in the room. I lost my name for myself, even the name for the idea of myself, my ‘I’. It sounds alarming, but I felt nothing more than a great sense of relief. My existence in the hospital bed became unimportant and I forgot about the whereabouts of my clothing, my urgency to leave the hospital, the problem of the names. I came to live in the fog brought by the medicine. My thoughts floated around in my head like leaves blown by the wind. I watched them from a distance, sweeping past me in long arcs, and never bothered to try to catch hold of any one.
Scenes of my life before—writing, and going to work every day, and my family and Anja—were like sequences in a novel read long ago. They were suspended at a pleasant distance, only minimally interesting and amusing, and not at all important or particularly connected to me.
Words lost their definition and drifted away from the objects to which they were usually attached. Language became a kind of alchemy, an impossible marveclass="underline" to make a sound, an arrangement with one’s lips and tongue and breath, which would conjure up the image of a thing, a hard object, in the mind of another. It was like a magician’s trick. I would hear the words of others coming at me through the air, and perhaps I sometimes sent out words of my own, sounds, also. Words became meaningless; I lived in the surer world—to me it seemed surer—of the senses, of hot and cold, of colours, and feelings pleasant or not.
Now and then Professor Pick would appear, although I did not recognise him at the time, and dictate notes to an assistant. At other times he would arrive with a group of young people, who I realise now must have been medical students, and who examined and measured me and asked me condescending questions. They crowded around to discuss the notes in Pick’s little book. I watched the whole proceeding as if from a vantage point outside myself, detached from the action.
I floated in this state for some time—weeks, months—and then one day something changed. There was a sensation of movement and changing lights and I became aware of being transported out of the room to a different place. Here I experienced an all-encompassing coldness, and then the air surrounding me seemed to thicken and bring warmth and lightness. My arms began to float upwards and I could feel a hard surface below me. It took me a long time to identify myself as being in a bath. The word ‘bathtub’ came to me, four-square, pleasantly solid, standing on little hooks of feet, exactly like the object. It floated before my eyes, a flag waving in the air, but after a moment it disintegrated and became only another shape to be made with the lips, a string of coloured beads to play with. I felt the sides of the bath with my hands and gripped the curled lip of the rim, trying and trying to remember. I looked blankly down at my unfamiliar body as it lay there, pink and naked, in the porcelain shell.
In the following days and weeks I was subjected to an endless number of baths of varying temperature, duration and method. I had water dribbled over me gently, like rain; I was wrapped in wet towels, like a package of meat to be transported; I was sprayed with a hose like a horse and rubbed dry by one of the battalion of silent nurses who populated the hospital corridors. The baths must have elicited from me some kind of physiological response, because it was they alone that stood out from the swirling mass of days in the hospital.
In the bath I could remember the things that had been nagging at me. I would rise up out of the water, like a drowning swimmer, shouting, waving my arms, gasping for breath. Words came to me and I called for help, the word ‘help’ like the alarm cry of a bird dashed against the hard white tiles. I would call other words, my own name, that important word, again and again as though another self would appear and spirit me away from that place.
Instead, the only people who came were the two orderlies, twinned in their muscular silence. They would hold on to my slippery arms, ignoring my wet skin and hair, which left damp patches on the fronts of their uniforms. Their dry, flat palms would push expertly onto my mouth, neatly holding my jaw together, covering my nose and making it difficult to breathe until the nurse arrived with her little cup. There seemed an endless supply of this medicine: no matter how many times I spat it out, sprayed it into the faces of the men, of the nurse, there came always another cup. Cup followed cup like an undefeatable army; it was useless to fight. I would allow the medicine into my mouth and from there it would slip inch by inch down my throat and everything would unravel again and I would slide down once more into that swirling, elastic world.
I began to learn that, when I surfaced, I must sit quietly in the bath and not draw attention to myself in any way. I learned to come up slowly, to creep into my own body and peer out through my eyes like a burglar creeping into a darkened house. I would look around the room moving my eyes only, and as I looked the words would begin to reattach themselves to the world. I wanted to shout with joy the moment when I had sat and looked, with my eyes turned down towards the bathwater, at the ten pink excrescences that were partly in, partly out of the water, and I discovered that I could move them at will, and their name came to me. Fingers. I would whisper the word to myself when I wanted to shout it: fingers. My fingers. I would move my lips a millimetre, feeling the way the muscles moved to shape the word and beaming with joy.
Then my eyes would move stealthily to the next object in the room and I would wait for the word to fly at me. I held all the words together in my head, shielding them, but as they gathered it became more and more difficult to keep them hidden silently within me. Eventually the name of some object in the room, or an emotion I was feeling, would come shouted out of my mouth.
I began to surface at other times too: in my bed, or walking across the lawns with the two silent orderlies. Slowly, I also became aware again of the hospital and my life before it. Anja, in particular, came back to me. I began to dream of her as I slept.
My awareness expanded to include the other people of the hospital; I began to recognise the nurses, the orderlies and Professor Pick. One day I woke to hear an echo of my breathing in the room and I realised that there was someone in one of the other beds. I hoisted myself up and saw that it was an old man with a large beard that covered the lower half of his face. The beard would have been white, but it lay on top of the bedclothes, whose bleached industrial whiteness turned the hair an unpleasant shade of yellow. We looked at each other silently for a long time.
Somehow, in that place, the usual daily social conventions lost their meaning, or, in any case, they seemed as unfamiliar and strange to me as the customs of a foreign culture. The words good morning materialised in my mind but seemed somehow wrong. I lay there and the stranger and I blinked at each other across the room. Eventually I realised that I could get out of bed and shake hands with him by way of greeting. As I got out of my bed, he did the same, and we met in the middle of the room, facing each other between the rows of empty beds.
I put out my hand, and so did the man. He was very tall and his body seemed to fit into his robe differently from mine: the fabric fell in sculptural folds from his wide shoulders like Roman drapery, and this, together with his beard, gave him the look of some prophet or ancient philosopher.
‘Promoli,’ he said to me, like a pronouncement. His voice was sonorous and the word had exactly the same intonation as the opening chords of the final movement from Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 16: the difficult decision. My head unexpectedly filled with this tune as our clasped hands pumped up and down through the air. Promoli. This was a word I had not heard before. Its syllables rolled through my head like a wave. I liked the word immediately; its shape and rocking-horse rhythm.