A small red plastic tower, a kind of chess piece, stuck out of his forehead (or a bit higher; the lack of a hairline made it hard to tell): the drain that had been screwed into his skull to tap fluid from the swollen brain. It made me think of his wrecked brain, which wouldn’t even be able to take in the blandest joke, should he even come out of his coma.
A youth of sound body and mind. Before he went off to live on his own, Tonio was examined from head to toe: entirely healthy, not the least medical smudge. In the last twenty-four hours of his life, he couldn’t have been more handicapped, both physically and mentally. He could no longer even breathe on his own. Both sides of his brain were irreparably damaged. In God’s name, what had been the point and the purpose of Miriam and me having had such a beautiful boy in our midst for a good twenty-one years, a child whose lust for life kept us in good health and spirits, only to now have to say goodbye to the most critically handicapped creature imaginable, with a life expectancy of nil and whose mental capacity had been reduced to nil?
All those years of being proud of that handsome and clever individual we two had brought into the world … In the end, it was this terminal wreck I had sired and she had borne for us.
Time to go. It hit me hard, the thought of having to take this image of Tonio, the way he lay there, with me for the rest of my life. Does one’s final impression make an exclusive claim to legitimacy? I had to fight, on behalf of both Miriam and Tonio, to give the unspoiled version of my son its credibility back.
I looked around me. Aside from the three of us, there was no one in the yellow tent, but beyond the nylon I could feel the presence of the staff. ‘Minchen, we should go. They’re going to turn off the ventilator.’
I was shocked by the irreversibility in my words. Turn off meant: until death arrived. Put it off. Now. My brother Frans, Tonio’s only uncle, was still in Spain. He couldn’t get a flight back to Amsterdam any sooner than tomorrow morning. I remember having heard that, in exceptional cases, like when a close relative had to travel far in order to say farewell, they would extend the life-support for an additional twenty-four hours. Longer than that was irresponsible and inhumane. Frans did not require more than that amount of time for a night’s sleep (or sleeplessness), the flight to Schiphol, and a taxi to the AMC. Meanwhile, Tonio would have the chance to … to what? Snap out of his coma and return to the land of the living?
‘Our sweet Tonio,’ Miriam said, weeping gently. ‘He was always so nice to everyone.’
She planted another kiss on his ashen cheek, which only dented under her lips, its elasticity having ebbed away. With one last kiss, on his forehead, her chin grazed the drain.
It was as though I were now in a hurry. I took Miriam by the shoulders from behind and pushed her gently toward the opening in the curtain, back into the corridor.
3
Clutching onto Miriam and weak at the knees, I drifted through the corridors of the ICU. It felt as though I had just quarrelled with someone, had lashed out at him, and now, leaving the place of the argument, my knees wobbled as I walked off, in the creeping realisation that I was wrong and might just as well have gotten a clobbering myself.
We passed the niche with the Hindustani family surrounding the comatose patient, where it appeared that not an elbow had been moved, not a lock of hair shifted. Instead of going to the left we kept on walking, losing our way. It was as though I was pushing that last image of Tonio out in front with my forehead. At the next junction, where I thought we had to turn left, I froze. I dug my fingers into Miriam’s upper arm.
‘Minchen, when they turn off the life support … that’s really when we should be at his side. We can’t let him die alone … it feels like betrayal …’
I spoke agitatedly. We hurried back, past the Hindustani niche, all the way down the hall, and finally found the yellow curtain. Tonio was still connected to the ventilator. At the foot of the bed, monitoring the apparatus, was a nurse. She did not look up when we approached. She was focused on the blue digital lights on the instrument panel, which registered Tonio’s vital functions — as yet still in order. She may have been the one instructed to turn off the ventilator, and our return had taken her by surprise.
Miriam, not about to be put off by Tonio’s chemical smell, resumed her caressing and kissing his face, whispering things I could not make out. I directed my attention to Tonio’s right hand, which lay inert on the edge of the bed, the fingers curled indifferently between straightened and bent — just a thing that had been put there. The nails were nicked, and with a dark outline of dirt.
When I first knew Miriam, I used to tease her about her ‘filthy fingers’ — a matter of pigmentation, whereby her fingers got darker as they approached the tips. Only now did I see that Tonio had inherited his mother’s natural colouring, but on closer inspection it was simply that his fingertips were just plain dirty. I pointed it out to Miriam.
‘Look, the dirt under his nails. He obviously skidded across the asphalt.’
‘His nails were always dirty. How many times did I tell him …’
She said it almost straightforwardly, like a belated remark on child-rearing. The nurse was still standing at the foot of the bed, without looking up at us, as though she hadn’t even noticed our presence. She carried out vague procedures on or around the blinking apparatus, but out of the corner of my eye I couldn’t make out exactly what she was doing.
I took Tonio’s hand, which felt limp and heavy. The fingers were swollen, reminding me of his limbs when he was hurled, fresh from his mother’s womb, like a bundle of sausages onto my lap. He was still unwashed. There was not much life yet in the puffy, purply arms and legs. All the available nursing hands were needed to combat the perceived complications with the mother, which turned out to be less urgent than all that, but meanwhile there I sat with that sticky creature glued to my jeans. (I wore them for several weeks longer, without washing out the dried placard of blood and slime, like a proud Indian with bear blood on his vest.) Bawling, that it did, but without the body joining in. To check whether it was alive I poked my finger against the tiny hand. Immediately the minuscule fingers closed around it. Mission accomplished.
I laid Tonio’s hand down and put my thumb underneath it, lightly stroking the palm of his hand. There was no movement; the skin felt lukewarm. Normally you’d say: his hand felt pleasantly dry and cool. Now, I knew this was a temperature between life and death.
I continued rubbing my thumb against his palm in a regular rhythm — until the machine at the foot of the bed suddenly began beeping impatiently, and, startled, I jerked my hand back. The sound, in its electronic chilliness, had something agitated about it, like a mother bird’s alarm calls when her nest is under threat (in our backyard ivy). Miriam got a fright and started trembling. Nothing had visibly changed in Tonio’s inert state. I looked over at the nurse, who kept her eyes glued to the monitor, and did not seem fazed.
‘Does this mean it’s happened?’ I asked.
‘Oh, no,’ she said airily, without taking her eyes off the small monitor screen. ‘It even just seemed to pick up slightly.’
‘Pick up … meaning …?’
‘Well, just that … I’m seeing some improvement.’
I don’t believe her words actually elicited any real hope in me, but they did throw me for a loop. (Later it appeared that Miriam fortunately did not register what she had said.) The alarm beeps had stopped. Did this mean that what the nurse had taken to be an improvement had already fallen by the wayside?