We squeezed our eyes shut and bit our lip until we could taste blood. It wasn’t dizziness; not quite. It was… more of a loosening of thoughts, a disintegration of the straight, neat lines of thoughts-with words, of structured reasonings and human sounds, splitting down, as our mind inflated like a hot-air balloon, into its component parts, like the dream-state just before sleeping or wakening when it seems perfectly logical for the goldfish not to like to peel its own potatoes on the bus. I thought of my thoughts, those conscious processes and pains, as thoughts- with-words, as understandings and rationales within the constraints of language; but in that state, our thoughts were nothing of the sort, they were…
We opened our eyes. We grabbed the nurse’s arm as she reached across with another dollop of gunge, and hissed, “When did you last make a phone call?”
“Mr Swift, is this entirely…”
“Your name was Jean but then your father died. He was a doctor. You cried down the phone and said help me, help me, please, but she was in Paris, she couldn’t come in time, there weren’t any tickets, it was Christmas she said baby, it’ll be OK, it’ll be OK, and you found the costume and you knew about magic you knew what made it tick, you told your friend on the phone that you were going to make it work and he said, what are you doing, what do you think you’re talking about and you said goodbye. Sorry I have to leave you goodbye. I’ll always think of you and then you hung up. You haven’t picked up a phone since. You fell silent, you don’t want to know, nothing that isn’t in front of you, no one that isn’t there, no voices, no distance, no responsibilities, just this, just goodbye Alex, I’ll sometimes think of you, but don’t think of me, goodbye.”
Jean pulled her wrist carefully free of our fingers and met our eyes without flinching. “Fascinating,” she murmured at last. “You know, you really should have informed me that you were sharing your consciousness with the stranded memory of the telephone wires, it qualifies as relevant medical history.” Her voice was level, her hand was shaking.
“We know you,” we whispered.
“Do you?”
“We know what you said.”
“How?”
“It’s…”
“We are the thoughts you left behind,” we murmured. “We-are… the feelings in your voice, even if he didn’t hear. We are…”
“Responding interestingly to what should really just be dizziness,” she said briskly. “Does your blood usually turn blue and wriggle like maggots in the presence of oxygen?”
We glanced at the trickling blue sparks crawling across our skin where the medicine had met our blood, and I felt suddenly sick, the world a spinning vague thing seen through a heat haze, tinnitus in my ears and my head aching, no longer a hot-air balloon but stuffed with lead, dragging me down with the sound of
“Help me!” I blurted through gritted teeth. “Please, help me!”
“Well now, that all depends on the problem,” said the nurse in a voice of infinite patience.
“I can’t remember! I can’t remember what… what I was before! I can’t remember being me!”
“You’d be wanting a shrink more than a nurse,” she explained, and she had got her composure back, in an instant switched back into professional, businesslike mode. “I can give you a referral.” Then, quieter, sharp little words to be spoken and forgotten again, “You still want the bleeding to stop?”
“Don’t know, don’t know…”
“I don’t want to cast a shadow on your evening, but it’s that or a slow and anaemic death, which, may I add, will do nothing for your complexion…” The smile gleamed, not exactly cruel, but neither bursting with compassion. She leant in close and murmured, “… unless that’s a tempting thing?”
I hesitated.
We said, “No.”
And we were surprised that we had spoken, surprised to hear ourself sound so confident, so sure of it, surprised that I hadn’t spoken sooner or more certainly.
“You sure? I mean, if you want the shrink…”
“No. We want… no. Please. Help us.”
“Help us, or help me?”
“We are the same.”
“You sure?” she asked nicely. “Only it seems to me that one of you has blue blood, and one of you has red, and one of you knows about the things that were in the phone line and one of you, probably the clinically dead one, has a better grounding in the personal ego – not that I want to speculate beyond my training, you understand. You may share the same skin and the same voice, but I’m really not entirely sure that you’re working on the same track.”
We thought…
But then
“I… am sorry,” I said.
“We’re sorry,” we added.
“I… please, forgive me, I… spoke…” I mumbled.
“We did not think that… we are…” we explained.
“Other arm,” she said, switching the iron grip from one wrist to the other. “This time, try not to drip electric blue sparks everywhere, please? It’s really not my place to judge my patients.”
“Why not?” we asked. “Would you treat a murderer?” I added.
“Yes,” she said flatly. “If he was ill.”
“Why?”
“Medical oath, vows of service, duty, legal reasons, NHS policy, all that.”
“But
