the fall
(1,951 words)

The room smelled of nothing. Or perhaps, it was that I had no senses left. I seemed to have been there always, so that the shiny skin of the walls had closed in on me and had become my skin. The subtle perfumes of a modern hospital ward had slipped away into some past time, and in this single room, any sounds which might have issued from other sections of the building had become subsumed into the rhythms which emanated from the bed. All of it had merged into an intense, white pain and a feeling, in the pit of my belly, of the immanence of darkness. As his condition had deteriorated over the two weeks, I had eaten hardly anything, so that now I felt as though my head was filled with air. As always, I sat, hunched forwards, in a grey plastic bucket-seat; many times, over the fortnight, it had occurred to me that I was merely one of thousands. Yet my teetering neutrality was fake. I was no longer visiting. Like my father, I was here, forever.

The striped, orange curtain which was draped across the window flapped a little in the night breeze. Beyond the glass, I could see the lights flicker. It was like being in a plane, 30,000 feet above sea-level, hurtling through the darkness. I could still make out individual lights, yet I had no way of knowing their functions, nor what the dark, hulking shapes behind them might mean. I remembered the lights. My father used to have a Philips reel-to-reel tape recorder. The spools were two hours long and were filled with songs from the old country, from Bombay. Sad songs, happy songs. Rafi, Talat, Shamshad, Lata … the Kings and Queens of the Indian Gramophone Company. Morae Bhool Gae Savariya. My lover has forsaken me. The lights which felt warm to the touch and which sputtered, green, with my voice as I screamed into the brass and iron. Magic.

I wondered what had become of the tape recorder. Probably up in some attic, the glass of its valves, cold from disuse.

I drew away from the night and its silences. I was too high up to be able to make out the noise of car horns. Only the regular pulsing of the machines: a pressurised intravenous infusion which pushed a line of clear fluid from bag to tubing, and from tubing to … an illuminated dialysis box which reminded me of one of those plastic Dalek robots I'd been given, as a kid. I remembered tearing off the paper, opening the box, drawing out the gift. The backdrop of angels and lights, and the howling darkness outside. The bow of my father's smile. The itch of wool beneath my armpits, as I held aloft the toy. Stick arms. Hard, black bakelite. Yet I knew that within the robot skin was a mess of useless flesh. Batteries leaking acid. In this room, everything was whirring, filtering, changing. I became hypnotised by the twitching red wires, the catheter-bags with their multiple tiers hanging like gardens, the flashing, beeping monitor, tracings of a life …

It was sci-fi without the softening effect of a fiction, of a father's palm, smoothed across my brow. Enough.

I was here, and I was alone.

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Several days earlier, I had brought along a book and had sat by the long bed, thinking that maybe words would take my mind off things. It was an old, leather-bound volume of short stories which I'd picked up earlier that year, in a second-hand bookshop. I bought those things as much because of the thought of whose hands they'd passed through, as for the stories. As they sat on my shelves, the books themselves became tales which did not age and which stretched back to the time before. But this week, I had been restless, as though I had peered at a television screen for too long. The images in my mind were loud, vibrant, and I was unable to concentrate on the construction of other worlds. There was no quietude. I remembered only trivial occurrences. Whispers in the day. No-things. And seamed through it all, like the God that never was, I had the feeling of having no control, of absolute powerlessness. The book had remained, by my side. Unread.

Soft, tap, tap. The sound of my man-made soles on the poly-something floor. Hot plastic. I felt sick, exhausted. Wanted to lie down on the floor, beneath the bed like I used to when I was a child. I stopped pacing, and bent down and peered beneath the cloth and metal. The orange mattress was two-and-a-half inches thick, the same as the thickness of the floor which wrestlers had fought on, long ago, in those old, dramatic matches on T.V. Goodies and baddies. I used to watch those with my father, and we used to believe that they were real. We would root for one or other of the fighters, and would feel ragingly disappointed when 'our' man lost. Seconds away, Round 3 … half-Nelsons, full-Nelsons, back-hand chops, underhand volleys, a-one-a, a-two-a…
The sweat on their skins, the heave of their chests, the thump of bone on canvas. His breath on my neck. The taste of crisps. Vinegar.

It was only much later, I learned that the matches had been fixed beforehand. That the whole thing had been just an elaborate hoodwink, that we had been fooled, my father and I.

I straightened up. I would never have been able to have dodged between the plastic and got beneath the bed, and anyway, there were the nurses, what would they have thought?

I glanced back. The door had come ajar. The plain, red curtains were closed around the bed. I was outside. I could see, nothing.

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I clutched the book so that its hard spine dug into the flesh of my palm. Old leather, against my skin. Words on trees. Fictions. For a moment, I imagined the bed to be empty. Perhaps the entire three weeks; the failing heart, the desperate breathlessness, the ridiculous humour, the cold sweat of desperation, the rush of ideas, the schemes of salvation, the mysterious and ludicrous beatification of mundanity … the whole of it; had been nothing more than a dream. Maybe life was structured, and somehow ran on, like parallel lines, beyond the furthest point which we could see. I was moving outwards, away from the rise and fall of the breathing, the aeroplane lights, the burning floor. From somewhere behind me, I made out the scrabble of a television set. For the third time that week, the nurses at the station were watching the National Lottery. The special ball, right at the end of the line.

I felt my shoulders press against the door. I felt its handle turn in the small of my back. It clicked shut. I let my head fall back, let it rest on the wood. I closed my eyes. Breathed, slowly, in and out. My muscles, seamed through with too much black coffee, relaxed at last. Shoulders, elbows, wrists … things were beginning to spin. I felt I might sink down, faint. I opened my eyes and, still holding the book, I forced myself to lift my feet and walk over to the window. I almost walked into the glass. I pushed it open, as far as it would go, and leaned out. The night air was cold and the rain fell steadily onto my face, my lips. Across the darkness, I made out the massive stone structure of the Kelvin Hall, where they used to hold the Carnival. Yellow plastic ducks, funny mirrors, skeletons in the darkness. Roundabouts. My father had bought piping-hot baked potatoes and we'd eaten them so fast, we'd burned our mouths. On the roof of the building were two identical towers, and at the top of each tower was a wrought bronze globe, replicas of those Enlightenment worlds in which the internal workings of the sphere were visible. The planet, spinning like a ball on a seal's nose. Edwardian fancy. But everyone was dead, I thought. The builders, the metal-workers, the old fair-folk. In the night, the red stone of the Hall had darkened. Black sand, seeping, grain by grain, into our lives. We live, only to bury one another. Something I'd read, somewhere. Recently, I had become obsessed with the friction of surfaces, with the dust on the pane, the fluff on the blanket. And with my body, and its layers of dead skin. At times, I had paced about the room, seemingly without purpose. I had needed to disturb the oppressive style which the room had become. And yet, somehow, it was a comforting oppression. At times, I would have been glad to have fallen to my knees and worshipped the bed curtain if it would've made any difference. When it comes down to it, our bones are medieval.

A sound came from above and behind me.
I twisted around. The red curtains were still drawn. A low-grade panic oiled through my body. I wondered whether one of the machines had begun to malfunction. Or to alarm. Something which only the nurses would know. In a micro-second, I swung between an inchoate fear of the noise and a penitent's adulation of the nurses and doctors, and porters, and cleaners. Even the night-clerk who once had smiled at me as I had asked for directions, the half-coins beneath his eyes folding and then unfolding like black gold leaf …

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But the sound was not coming from the room, the hospital. It was coming from the sky. From the darkness, and soon, it was accompanied by an intense white light. I shaded my eyes. I was unused to such nakedness. Everything had been subdued for so long, as the days and nights had stretched into centuries. The noise grew steadily louder, until it had filled the darkness with its metallic whirring. And now I saw that the light was like a sinew of fire that reached out and clawed at bits of the city, at Kelvin's worlds, at the silent, black river, at the trees which seemed never to slumber. The searchlight wheeled and circled impossibly, turning the stone from black to red, to black.
And then the light was in my face.

I stepped back from the window, felt my scalp bristle with static.
Hands gripped my shoulders. A body at my back.

I spun round, ready to fight, to punch my way out of this place.
It was one of the male nurses, dressed in theatre blue. He held his palms up.

They must be used to it, I thought. Dealing with angry, upset relatives. His face was a mask.

You're father … he began.

His voice was not quite cracked. Soap operatic.

My chest pounded into my throat, my ears. The light burned the back of my neck. The sound of the police helicopter merged with the noise of the machines. It was deafening. The nurse went on. He was having to shout, yet his voice sounded tiny and distant.
There's been another deterioration in his condition. He's taken a turn for the worse.

I nodded, slowly. It was difficult to stop my head from nodding. I was no longer breathing.

I glanced to my left. The curtains were open. The white searchlight flooded into the room. They must be searching the black stone for someone, I thought. A murderer, perhaps. Or a victim.

I pressed my palms against my ears, but the noise, the light, was inside. Everything was liquid.

I felt the book drop from my fingers.
It made no sound as it hit the floor.

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