The Fall of Man

Part II chapter 3

Chapter 3

Noah wakes to the sound of the door clicking shut. There is no sign of anyone in the room. It must be daytime; a steady flow of light is streaming through the window to his right. He gingerly pulls himself up onto his elbows for a better look. His arms quiver slightly under the weight of his body.

At least seven more times the window has cycled through day and night since he first woke up. Each time the small room seems to shrink a little smaller. There has now been a steady trickle of visitors to his bedside, most of whom have been accompanied by the ubiquitous Doctor Marsh. Typically, they talk over the top of him – like he is an exotic fish, landed and flipping hopelessly at their feet while their words wash over his head. Certainly, little of it makes any sense to him. However, between the medical references and unpronounceable terminologies, he has gleaned the facts that he is healing quicker than anticipated, and that his brain appears to be functioning well. All good news by the sound of it, but he feels terrible. And with each contraction, the confines of the fridge around him shrink from close towards unbearable.

The room is definitely empty. Noah slides a limp leg out from under the covers. The floor is a long way down from atop the height-adjustable bed. The sole of his foot feels spongy where it makes contact with cold vinyl, like his pencil-thin bones might cut through the soft flesh encasing them. His second leg slides out into the open, and he rolls onto one hip before planting two feet on the floor. The bundle of cables attached to his wrist restricts movement of his right arm beyond the elbow, but with his left he is able to push himself upright into a sitting position.

Hands on knees, he steadies himself against a wave of nausea with a deep breath, and then studies the room from his new vantage point. The door to the corridor is four or five long strides away from him on the other side of the bed. Its vision panel glows with the usual uniform golden haze of the corridor lights. Every few breaths a shadow flits across it as another person passes by, oblivious to the activity inside. Two further doors stand discretely on the far side of the room, given away by faint outlines traced on the smooth pastel wall. From his prone position, he has previously observed that one leads to a wardrobe (empty apart from bed linen) and the other to a small bathroom. The window at his side is almost within reach, but he can see nothing through its translucent film.

The bedside monitor that restrains his right arm is on castors. He drags this arm feebly across his body. The skin of his wrist is pulled taut by the weight of the apparatus, but he feels no pain and the trolley grinds slowly out on its small wheels away from the wall. Finally, he has some slack with which to move.

With a lurch, he leans forwards off the bed and attempts to stand. There is a tug at his hip and his legs give way almost immediately. With his left hand he flails desperately for the window cill. His fingertips make contact with the frame of the translucent screen, which holds briefly under his weight. Then his knees buckle and the screen pops free from its restraints. Immediately he topples sideways and crashes onto the floor. The screen drops alongside him with a clatter. At his bed head, the machine now emits a low continuous beep, and he sees that one of the cables shackling them together has pulled loose. A clear tube extending from a bandage on his hip is strained taut across the mattress above.

He looks back up to the window. Behind the toppled screen, where there should have been a view of the world outside, there is only a shallow recess formed in rough, unfinished concrete. The alcove is inhabited by a matrix of softly glowing fluorescent tubes and a ventilation grille thick with dust that flutters as air is pumped through it. A small camera lens is nestled discretely into the top left corner of the recess. There is no outside. He is nowhere, utterly lost and totally alone. The nausea returns and darkness descends.

When Noah regains consciousness, he is lying back in his bed. Once again, he is stretched out straight - like a stone crusader atop an ancient sarcophagus, and the sheets are neatly tucked about his body. Through bleary sleep-encrusted eyes, he can see that the false window screen has been replaced.

Without turning his head, he knows that Doctor Marsh is stood at his side. Her hair is scraped behind her ears again and from where he lies her pointed face is all chin and nose, but she still manages to look and smell good – exciting, even. A simple necklace of wooden beads hangs around her neck. It emerges from beneath her crisp white shirt to stand proudly on the slight swell of her chest. Dazzling points of light sparkle and dance in the gaps between bead and fabric. He has the urge to reach up and touch it. She smiles and glances down at him. Every time she looks at him, he gets a warm feeling inside.

“Hi there, Noah. How are you feeling today?”

He groans a gurgling sound in response and closes his eyes. His tongue is swollen - much too big for his mouth. It presses against his teeth, and saliva gathers in all the little recesses. His right hand moves to wipe the dampness from the corner of his mouth, and the monitor cables tug a friendly reminder at his flesh. He winces at the sharp stabbing pain.

“Don’t worry – it’s just the Morphine wearing off. We’ll get you started on speech and physio- soon. You’re obviously feeling ready to leave, but we have to wait just a little while longer until you’re a bit more recovered. I’m afraid that in the meantime, we have a few tests to run too…” 

For the next few days, Noah drifts in and out of consciousness. The visits continue, and the tests begin. A small army of white-coated men and women cluster around him intermittently to interrogate the handset that hangs at the foot of his bed and prod the monitor panting patiently by his bedside. They speak to one another in the hushed foreign tones of mutineers on a troubled ship, destined for a distant land. Occasionally, one of them looms in his field of vision and asks him to perform a basic physical movement, to lift an arm or look out of the ‘window’. Once a day, his long limp body is rolled clattering down a series of mostly-empty corridors to a small glass cubicle. There, he is transferred from the bed onto a supermarket checkout conveyor belt which passes him slowly through a large circular scanner. For the thirty minutes each day that the specimen is encased in the machine’s throbbing coil, while a deep, resonant hum blocks out the consultants’ chatter, he lies at peace and invulnerable to their otherwise incessant prods and pokes.

Soon, the questions begin and his limited repertoire of frustrated gestures and unintelligible gurgles ceases to be sufficient. After perhaps a week of coaching, however, his tongue begins to form sounds again. The spitting, dribbling and endless repetitions are embarrassing at first, but he practices diligently during the short periods when he lies alone. Slowly, the wet noises become clumsy, misshapen words formed with a deep, baritone tongue that is familiar, but not his own. In his father’s voice, he relays to his ever-patient bedside companion all the clearer memories that he still possesses. Then, in anatomical detail, he runs through the itinerary that the two of them had planned together…

With his speech unmuddied, the consultants’ questions become more probing. Of all the medical staff that flock fleetingly around his bedside, only Doctor Marsh takes an active interest in how he is feeling. Sometimes she comes alone. Those times, she sits on the foot of the bed and they discuss his case history. While he studies her face with its broad beak of a nose and thin lips, her long back and straight posture, and breathes in the floral smell that hangs about her in a cloud, she tells him where he has been for the last four decades.

She explains that she has supervised his case for the past six months, since he came to the university hospital. Before that, he ‘resided’ in a number of care institutions, paid for by their satchel of currency and the insurances of his well-prepared father. There, he was an easy patient to keep. To maintain him in a stable state, his brain activity was constantly monitored and his body condition preserved through hydrotherapy. But when the money ran out, he was transferred to a teaching institution, and the bed came at a price. The procedure practiced on Noah was cutting edge – repairing significant damage to his brain stem - and was not without risks. But he was a near-ideal candidate and appears to be healing well. With the operation out of the way, he now has twelve months to recuperate while further tests are carried out and his recovery is documented by the staff. One full year before he must return to the real world… whatever that means now.