braces. All the splints and pads and drips and dual monitors, LIH vascular packages, en-mode image intensifiers and portable nebulisers. Not to mention the hydro-colloid dressings, wound-closure strips, tubular bandages, Hemcom haemostatic bandages and chest-seal tapes.
Which I, in my present state, was quite unable to do.
And once they had transformed me into a passable facsimile of King Tut’s mummy, they loaded me onto a gurney, pushed this into the back of an ambulance, hooked me up to all manner of tubes, wires, chest-drains and whatnots, and then got the driver to drive away fast with flashings and hootings and wailings. And I watched all this happening. All of it. Even though my eyes were bandaged over. I watched it from outside my body, kind of hovering above it, free of gravity, as if in a dream and unable to feel the pain that the mash-up me below was clearly suffering.
And then we hit the ER. And my gurney was rushed along corridors and bumped through double doors and then surrounded by shouting surgeons, all of them shouting at once.
And they shouted all those things that they shout in movies.
‘Give me one hundred ccs of sodium bi-pli-nick-nack, hook up the defibrillator, bring a line in on the pulse oximetrical poliscope.’
‘Hand me a phase-nine sphygmomanometer and chips.’
‘We’re losing him. We’re losing him.’
‘Charge up the defibrillator. Full power. Stand back. Stand back.’
And then wallop went that electrical shock right on through my body.
And wallop I was no longer out of my body. I was back. But then I was out again.
‘No response. Stand back, I am going to shock him again.’
I was now hovering well above my body. I was drifting, in free fall, but falling nowhere. And I could see what was going on outside the Emergency Room. I could see folk in the corridor. I could see Fangio. He had come along. Which was decent of him. Although he did keep going on to passing medics that he had something really important that he needed me to sign before I snuffed it.
And there was someone else I knew. Although now this someone was truly a face from the past. It was Mr Ishmael. And he was remonstrating with medics, demanding that they save my life. That was nice of him.
Then wallop again.
And again I was back in my body.
‘We’re getting something,’ I heard someone say, not too far from my ear. ‘I’ve got a heartbeat, or something.’
And I was back in my body and I stayed.
And they said it was a miracle. But also that I’d never walk again. Nor speak, nor do anything much, really, other than impersonate a vegetable. And I lay there, saying nothing, doing nothing, but hearing everything.
And feeling it, too.
All those operations they did with the minimum or no anaesthetic, because, after all, I was in a coma, so what was I likely to feel?
Well, everything, really!
The cuttings, the probings, the sewings-up. The knittings together of bones. But I lay there saying nothing, doing nothing, unable to move, or to speak, just being.
As tick tock tick tock, my life went ticking by. And then all feeling left me.
One day the members of The Sumerian Kynges came to pay me a visit and sing me a song. The only member from the days when I’d had some involvement was Andy. And I could see him, even though my eyes were closed, as I seemed to be developing some very strange abilities within my vegetative state. Andy looked well; he looked older, of course, but he still had his hair and he still wore that hair in the ever-stylish mullet.
I tried like damn to communicate with Andy, to force my thoughts into his head, to persuade him to take me home with him, but it didn’t work. And presently he, and the three Chinese girls who now composed the other members of The Sumerian Royalty as they were now apparently renamed (a gender-neutral thing. Apparently), cleared off and left me all alone.
They came back once or twice, but as the media showed no particular interest after the second time, there were few other visits and I was left truly alone.
Apart from Fangio visiting me. He came every week. He brought me fresh flowers to put in my vase. And a box of chocolates, which he proceeded to eat, assuring me that ‘the nurses would only eat them otherwise’. And he never mentioned that piece of paper that he wanted signing. Which did make me wonder whether, perhaps, he had simply forged my signature onto it. But he did come. And it’s odd when you are really ill, isn’t it? Who does come and visit you and who does not. Who your real friends turn out to be. And all that kind of caper.
And what was really really strange was that I found, as time passed, as time all ticked and tocked away, that I was able to do all sorts of things that years and years ago I had read about in comic books.
In Doctor Strange comics.
I could see with my eyes closed.
Leave my body in my astral form and travel around and about.
Smell people coming from quite a considerable distance.
And, though it was faltering and not altogether reliable, read people’s minds. Hear their thoughts.
I was becoming a regular Master of the Mystic Arts. Which was all very well and quite wonderful really. But lying on my back in a coma was really doing my brain in.
The big change came one Tuesday morning, early in May in the year 2007. Because yes, I had lain in that bed being poked and bed-bathed and massaged and messed with for ten more years of my wasted, useless ticked-and- tocked-away life.
But a big change came one Tuesday morning, beginning with the arrival of a very old man. He looked to be a veritable ancient and he wore an old-fashioned uniform that perhaps once fitted him, but was now several sizes too big. And he took off the cap that was also too big and placed it upon my bedside table. And he took my left hand between his crinkly paws and stroked at my foolish tattoo.
‘Hello there, young Tyler,’ he said, in a wheezy, creaky old voice. ‘I’ll bet you won’t remember me. But I knew you when you were very young.’
And I looked hard at this venerable elder, hard through my closed eyelids.
And I said, ‘Captain Lynch,’ to myself. For none but me could hear it.
‘I’m Captain Lynch,’ said Captain Lynch. ‘Well, Major Lynch now, but long retired. Your mother told me you were here. It’s taken me a few years to save up the money to fly over from England, but I have and now I’m with you.’
And I looked on at Major Lynch, Captain Lynch as was.
‘I had to speak to you before it is too late for me to do so. I have to give you something. It’s an important something that we spoke of many years ago. More important than ever now, what with the way things are. I’ve talked with others and I know that you know all about them. And you know who it is – the Homunculus that I spoke to you of, all those years ago. It wasn’t Elvis, was it? Elvis is gone, but the Evil goes on and grows daily. You must stop it, Tyler. You will need this.’
And he produced from the pocket of his superannuated uniform a crumpled, dog-eared piece of paper.
‘I have carried this with me for sixty years,’ he continued. ‘It is the map. The location of Begrem, the Lost City of Gold. I never got to Africa. The Church Army said that I was not missionary material. There had been some trouble, you see. Certain Indiscretions. Certain scandals. But I kept your mother’s name out of it. But I never went. And I never married or had children. Well, only you. Well, oh never mind, forget I said that. But I was supposed to train you from when you were young, so that you would know what to do when the time came. So that you would have sufficient power to kill him.’
‘What?’ I went. But only to myself.
‘The map,’ said Major Lynch. ‘It’s there on the map. The location of the lost city. You must lead an expedition, Tyler. Find the city. There are secrets to be found in that lost city, secrets that could help you to destroy the Homunculus, before he destroys us all.’
And then the major patted my head, stroked my brow and, rising, kissed me on the forehead. Which was somewhat unlovely, as he lacked for several teeth and was a bit drippy in the mouth regions.
