The Sudden Appearance of Hope

Chapter 92

For a moment, I’d hoped I was wrong, and that Byron would not come to Venice.

Fat chance of that.

How do you stop a madman in the street?

How do you contain a lone wolf?

Byron speaks, and the world goes mad, and she presses her shawl into my wound and whispers, “I’ll find you,” and is gone.

Bleeding out.

(Dying.)

Facts and figures, to pass the time.

In the USA nearly one in five boys and one in eleven high-school girls were reported to have received an attention deficit disorder diagnosis: 6.5 million children

of those, 3.5 million on medication

(Someone screaming below, shush now)

Said the Scientologists of psychiatrists: “[they commit] extortion, mayhem and murder.”

Quoth the Anderson Report, conducted by the state of Victoria into the Church of Scientology: “Scientology is evil, its techniques evil, its practice a serious threat to the community, medically, morally and socially.”

(Blood heading towards the edge of the balcony — funny that, implies a slope, flowing not pooling; subsidence?)

Oxygen use in the body: liver 20.4 per cent, brain 18.4 per cent, heart 11.6 per cent.

Liver functions: breakdown of insulin, breakdown of toxins, conversion of ammonia to urea, production of coagulation factors, protein metabolism, lipid metabolism, amino acid synthesis, platelet regulation, production of growth factors, storage of vitamins, production of albumin, production of… production of…

(something smashing, the music has stopped and so has the conversation but funny, would have expected more really)

Diabetes: suspected long before its formal identification and discovery by the usual suspects of historical medicine, from Galen through to Avicenna. 1910 Sir Edward Albert Sharpey-Schafer isolates insulin

(crawling. Very slow, pushing a fingertip at a time towards the balcony ignore the pain ignore the knife, don’t touch the knife the knife is what’s keeping you alive, keeping the blood from spilling everywhere crawling)

Elliott Joslin publishes the first texts on treatment

however not before some interesting experiments on dogs

remove the pancreas observe the effects

which dogs live

which dogs die

how

why

(crawling, a smear of blood behind me, my clothes glued to my back, silent below now, too silent, even the sobbing has stopped)

Frederick Banting, Charles Best, J. J. R. Macleod, James Collip, purification of insulin for use in humans, only two of them got the Nobel Prize though must have caused a stir back at the office

(crawling, try to lift my left arm but no, blood-thrumming, eye-bursting, body-popping agony, to lift my left arm is to move muscles around the knife, to move muscles around the knife is to die, I know that now, I will die here in this place with a knife in my chest and here comes the pain, it comes it comes)

Three main causes of death from injury: shock, pain, blood loss

(Concentrate!)

Shock: low blood perfusion to tissues. Clammy skin, high heart rate, pale skin, confusion, loss of consciousness, for best diagnosis measure heart rate divided by systolic… systolic blood pressure for an answer of

treatments raise legs

(I can’t)

essential that what blood is flowing goes to the major organs, cardiac arrest, respiratory arrest

(my right hand can reach the curtain, twitch it aside)

Shock: cold shock response e.g. from falling through ice. Vasoconstriction owing to extreme cold. Heart has to work harder to pump blood — heart fails.

(I reach, but can’t seem to move it enough to see the world beyond. Pull harder scream no sound pull harder scream in my eyes my eyes are screaming I am my eyes screaming my hand screaming my voice screaming my)

the curtain falls.

Tangled for a moment in its embrace. The curtain falls and I look, turning my head slowly to the side, peeking down between the balustrades of the balcony.

I am pain, and that is fine.

Shock: acute stress reaction — numbing, amnesia, dissociative awareness, depersonalisation, muteness.

I am witness to these events.

I am my eyes, screaming.

I witness:

A woman, dressed in gold, crouched over the body of her dancing partner, twisting the shattered stem of her champagne glass deeper, deeper into his throat. He’s dead already, but she’s fascinated by the play of glass and blood, the brightness of the ruby drops on her skin. They complement her dress; perhaps someone can do a design based on this moment?

A man, his tuxedo turned red, a caviar knife embedded in his leg, but he doesn’t mind, dragging another man by the throat across the room. He gets to the door, and is confused by it, and lets go of the man in his grasp, but the body is dead and he’s still bewildered, so he goes back the way he’s come, stepping over the eyeless waitress who lies by the door, and sees if he can find enlightenment in another place.

Enlightenment: the final spiritual state; an absence of suffering or desire.

A woman, who sits on her haunches next to the man whose head now hangs by a string. There’s blood around her mouth, and blood on her teeth, but she’s satisfied for now, just rocking gently back and forth, I think I saw her in a movie once, I think she played an unhappy wife in a drama about American suburbia

(my blood drips off the edge of the balcony)

(it will not be noticed)

A man whose ear has been ripped from his face but that’s okay, that’s not the problem, bangs his head gently against the wall

rocks on his heels

backwards

forwards

bang

backwards

forwards

bang

A woman more beautiful than moonlight, confused, sees the dead and the dying, sees someone she thinks she knows, impaled on the melting ice sculpture in the centre of the room. He died there after he drowned a man in ice cubes, and look, his victim now lies beneath him, still face-down, gently preserved in champagne. The woman rises. Walks across the room. Pulls the white silk scarf from the throat of the man in the ice, then walks the other way, looking for a way to hang herself with the three or four others who also chose that route.

A girl strangled with pearls.

A man, his gold pen jammed into his spine.

There wasn’t much in the way of screaming. As the 206 began to slaughter each other to the sound of Byron’s voice, they were so busy killing that they didn’t really care about being killed. It was only the imperfect ones, the technicians and the waiters, the photographers and the press, who screamed as they died.

Rafe Pereyra-Conroy died screaming, I suspect, beaten to death with his own microphone just before he was going to speak. Who would have thought that such a little thing could be used to break so many bones?

His murderer sits behind him now, cross-legged on the floor, chewing her nails.

Filipa’s eyes roam the room, meet mine, but she doesn’t appear to see me. Doesn’t appear to see much at all, any more.

The cameras in the paparazzi’s box keep on rolling. YouTube awaits.

I am witness.

I close my eyes.