The Sudden Appearance of Hope

Chapter 94

On the second day, in the dead of night, I put my left foot on the ground.

In the depths of space, nebulas coalesced to stars, hydrogen fusion commencing at the core, light and heat bursting across the universe.

Put my right foot on the ground.

In the darkest places of the oceans, thermal vents cracked, spilling fire into the dark, and species of bacteria, amoeba, protozoa and tiny, wriggling organisms that could barely be called living, save that they respired and moved and reproduced and decayed, flocked to this eruption of heat, and fed on its energy, and evolved into something new.

I stood up.

Almost immediately, I fell, catching myself on the side of the bed, the pain in my side numbed by stitches and drugs, head spinning, knees strong but head weak, stars in my eyes, oceans in my brain.

Sat back down.

Counted to sixty.

Put my left foot on the ground.

Counted to thirty.

Put my right foot on the ground.

Counted for thirty more.

Held onto the metal stand on which had been suspended various sacks of antibiotics and saline drips, blood and all the goodies chemistry could supply. Used it as a crutch.

Took a step.

Counted to twenty.

Took another.

Lessons from being a runner, lessons from life. Divide the problem into parts. Not: today I shall run a marathon. Today I shall run to the end of the park and back. Tomorrow I shall run to the shops. Now I shall say something kind to a person I hate. Tomorrow I will study compassion and learn French.

Today I shall walk to the bathroom, replete with hooks, handles, straps, fold-away chairs and lift-up seats for every conceivable scenario.

Today I shall lock the door.

Take a piss.

Drink water from the tap; blessed water, drink water until I hurt, I AM THE QUEEN OF THE UNIVERSE!

Shuffle through the gloom of the night-shift hospital.

The nurse, catching up on paperwork at the desk, is confused by me, but I’m not her problem, and I seem to be walking slow but well, goes back to her paperwork.

Sleeping wards, half-sleeping patients.

Beep beep beep, a monitor has detected something wrong, waking the entire room, who squeeze their eyes tight shut and lie very still, in the hope that by ignoring the sound of the machine beep beep beep it will go away, just go away!

A spill of light from a bed where a woman has given up on sleep, put her headphones on, pulled the TV screen on its artificial arm close and now watches last year’s movies, a surgical drain filling slowly with fluid down one side of the bed, a five-litre bag gently swelling with urine on the other, the tube strapped to the inside of her thigh.

I am my feet

stepping

stepping

stepping.

A moment to recover breath. I sit in the big brown chair next to a woman on an oxygen feed, her eyes shut, her curly hair pushed up high across the pillow behind her head, her hands folded one over the other and back straight, like a pious funerary statue in an ancient church. She slept, and when I could breathe a little better I opened up the small cupboard by her bed, pulled out the green bag of patient belongings, and stole her jeans and a shirt and a fifty euro note. Left her the credit cards and the rest of the cash, apologised silently and bundled these goods into my robe.

Hobbling back to my bed.

Gender-segregated wards, no point going into the men’s unit, a nurse by the door saw me and smiled, might make a fuss, will forget. A junior doctor, badge round her neck, asked me if I was all right. I said yes; had just needed to pee. Did I need a hand getting back to bed? No. I’d be fine, really.

The woman with the headache was asleep at last in the bed opposite mine when I returned. I stole her smartphone — just for a little while — and was surprised to see how many calls she had received, from people with familiar nicknames, text messages laden with love and care, to which she hadn’t bothered to reply. With the volume turned all the way down, I sat in the chair beside my bed and ate plums and licked my lips and looked up Hotel Madellena.

It was easy to find. Not a news outlet in the world hadn’t picked up on the story and run with it. Explanations abounded — environmental catastrophe being the most favoured — but mass hysteria, terrorism, a virus, and at last, and most pooh-poohed, brainwashing, were all suggested to explain the images that were being pumped out to the world, streamed across YouTube and Twitter, Instagram and Facebook.

Images not merely of the dead; images of the killing too.

Here: the CEO of a TV manufacturing company smashing his wife’s head into the wall, and she wasn’t resisting, resigned almost it seemed to her fate, dropping silently to the floor when his work was done. There: a weather woman calmly drinking the blood of the man whose throat she has just slashed with her nail file. She sits on her haunches, then looks up suddenly, startled, like a fox caught prowling by a wolf, sees the camera, doesn’t perceive it as a threat, and slowly goes back to feasting.

Here: a TV pundit, famed for his comical yet racist views on immigrants, women and homosexuality, a man who specialised in dismissing people and ideas with the immortal argument “Well, they would say that, wouldn’t they?”, winner of last year’s “sexiest man on entertainment TV” award, quite happily beating a waitress to death with a chair. The padded seat fell out after the first few strikes, but he carries on with the frame regardless, long after she stopped moving.

Facts and figures.

Of the three hundred and twenty-nine people caught up in the events at the Hotel Madellena, only ninety-eight were confirmed dead, with a further forty-two in critical condition. A surprisingly low number, really; but that that is the difficulty of trying to physically kill someone with your bare hands.

Of the remaining victims/suspects (the line was blurred), fifteen were in custody, one hundred and eleven were receiving treatment for various non-critical injuries and the remaining sixty-three had escaped unharmed and were being interviewed by the police, when not being interviewed by the media.

Quoth the head of reception: They just went mad. They went mad. All of them: they just went mad.

I looked for Rafe Pereyra-Conroy, and there was a picture of a body being taken to the morgue.

I looked for Filipa Pereyra-Conroy, and there was no information. Nothing. Not merely a media blackout, but a silence on the internet, a dead space where her name should have been, only Google cache recalling the faintest trace of articles that had been, stories which might once have carried her name.

That was interesting. That implied she was still alive.

A statement from Prometheus:

deep regrets

losses

profound condolences

full investigation

criminal acts

etc., etc., etc.

Words that had no meaning.

I looked away from the phone, and the woman who I’d stolen it from was awake, watching in silence.

I stood up.

Hobbled across to her bed.

Put it back where it had come from.

Went back to my own berth.

Climbed beneath the sheets.

Rolled over.

Closed my eyes.

She said nothing, and no one came.