Once, when Mats was little, his big brother frightened him with a mind game that Mats had never been able to get out of his head his whole life.
‘Try to imagine nothingness,’ Nils had said as they lay in the meadow along Teufelssee outside Berlin, the lake they used to visit every day on their summer breaks.
‘How do I do that?’
‘Start by imagining that this lake here, this meadow, and this little shore are not here.’
‘Okay.’
‘Then imagine that we’re not here either. We’re gone.’
Next, Mats was supposed to erase Berlin from the map in his imagination, then Germany, and Europe, and finally the whole earth. He was eventually supposed to erase the solar system, the planets, universe and finally all the galaxies from his imagination.
‘What do you see now?’ his brother had asked innocuously.
‘Just a deep, dark nothing.’
‘Good. Now imagine that’s gone too.’
‘How do I do that?’
‘Let the nothing shrink, down to a single, tiny dot. Then you make that go away.’
Mats was lying on the meadow and trying so hard to follow his big brother’s simple-sounding instructions, but it was futile.
‘I can’t do it,’ he said. Whenever the dot disappeared there still remained a black, endless void that was impossible for him to make go away.
He wasn’t able to replace nothingness with nothing.
‘You see,’ he’d heard his brother say in triumph. ‘We aren’t able to imagine nothing. Because nothingness is not some endless void but instead the absence of it. Nothingness,’ he concluded, ‘is a missing hole.’
Back then at Teufelssee, Mats hadn’t quite understood what his older and smarter brother was trying to explain to him. But now he was certain that he’d discovered that very place that his brother had told him was unimaginable.
He found himself in that exact focal point, in that missing hole. Surrounded by nothing apart from the absence of any life.
Mats couldn’t see. No matter how hard he tried opening his eyes he found all connection to his eyelids lost, just like he’d lost any contact to his muscles, limbs, to his whole body. Speaking, swallowing, gagging – nothing functioned any more.
His sense of touch seemed to be shut off too. Normally a person sensed having clothes on their skin if they thought about it and if they concentrated, they could actually feel them physically. Mats felt nothing at all. No itching, no scratching, no touch, nowhere. It was as if he were drifting naked in a vacuum, incapable of feeling himself anywhere. Along with the loss of his eyesight and sense of touch, he’d also become mute and deaf. All he heard was his thoughts; not even the sounds of his own body were there anymore, the blood circulating, the intestines working away, his breathing, nothing. Inside him all was painfully still.
Rob a healthy person of one of their senses, went the theory, then the other senses would overcompensate for the loss. The blind heard better, and deaf people could use their eyes to detect the tiniest shifts in feeling on the faces of their fellow humans.
To Mats, who had nothing left to him except his thoughts, the sense of fear appeared to have become the dominant and driving force of his consciousness. He didn’t hear how he breathed insatiably, didn’t sense the adrenalin surging in him, but he did feel the panic subverting his reasoning.
Where am I? What’s happened to me?
His thoughts screamed inside his head, inaudibly loud, deafeningly silent.
Suddenly that all changed.
Mats still saw only nothing, said nothing, felt nothing, but he heard something.
First a humming, similar to an ultrasonic toothbrush. An electric crackling became louder and now reminded him of an artificial cricket, and it was the loveliest sound he could imagine, because it was a sound.
Proof that he wasn’t falling down that missing hole anymore but was back in contact. In contact with a pleasant, earnest voice that materialised from the humming.
‘Herr Dr Krüger? Can you hear me?’ said the voice, and Mats attempted to reply. Tried to scream, to pop his eyes open, wave his arms, but he’d already forgotten how to do so.
‘I’m very sorry to tell you this, but you’ve suffered severe damage to your brain stem,’ the voice told Mats. The most terrifying of all truths.
Locked in. As a doctor he knew the diagnosis, of course, even if the voice did not come right out and say it. It was never easy for a doctor to let such cruel words cross their lips. Also, because the findings usually resulted from days if not weeks of tests. But Mats was a specialist. He was able to analyse himself, and he recognised that his brain had lost almost all connection to the rest of his being. The plug had been pulled. He was buried alive in his own useless body.
‘My name is Dr Martin Roth. I’m the head of the Park Clinic. We once met at a symposium, Dr Krüger. My team of neuroradiologists and surgeons and I are caring for you. You’re currently on an artificial respirator, and as a backup measure we’ve established a brain–computer interface using EEG electrodes.’
Mats nodded, without nodding. In his mind he saw those little plates on the shaved areas of his skull, the cables leading from the head to the computers. In his practice he’d all too often seen patients with these severe types of injuries, after a brain stem infarct, for example. The bridge was damaged, the pons – that area between the midbrain and medulla that formed the brain stem of the central nervous system. In some patients, basic communication could only be maintained by monitoring brain waves. Atypical for him was that he could clearly hear everything around him. Most patients with locked-in syndrome could indeed see but not hear anything. With him it was apparently the other way around, and that was more bad news. It meant that, in addition to the brain stem, the occipital area also had to be damaged.
‘You’re wearing headphones, through which you’re hearing my voice. They filter out disruptive external sounds,’ he heard Dr Roth say. ‘You might not be aware of it, but you can still contract your eyelid muscles, in imitation of a blink. Please try and do so.’
Mats followed Dr Roth’s instructions and heard his delight. ‘Very good. Let’s try a simple discussion. I’ll only ask you yes or no questions. Please blink once for yes. Two for no. Do you understand?’
Mats blinked three times and heard Roth laugh.
‘You haven’t lost your sense of humour. That’s outstanding.’
Mats heard a male voice in the background that was vaguely familiar but he couldn’t place it.
‘We have a visitor I’d like to introduce in a minute,’ explained Dr Roth, who was presumably speaking to him over a microphone. ‘First, though, I’m sure you want to know what happened to you.’
Mats blinked.
‘You were shot. On the aeroplane. The bullet struck you directly in the head. It destroyed the connection between your brain stem and your spinal cord.’
Hearing such a diagnosis Mats would normally have shut his eyes, tried to hold back his tears, maybe scream, at least have trouble swallowing. But not even that was possible for him since he couldn’t feel his tongue anymore.
‘The police first considered you a homicidal threat, but that’s all been resolved.’ Dr Roth cleared his throat. ‘You’re a hero. You rushed the assassin and were able to prevent worst. The only reason the pilots were able to open the cockpit door and disarm the flight attendant was because she was stuck underneath you. The plane landed safely in Berlin. Everyone on board survived.’
The cricket kept chirping, probably just distortion in the transmission from microphone to headphones, and before it got any louder the head physician said, ‘All passengers except for the woman who was shot by the perpetrator.’
Amelie Klopstock, Mats thought. His recollection of what happened on that plane was so clear and immediate it was as if he’d just been on board a minute ago. Though the truth was he must have been lying in intensive care for hours if not days.
‘You woke up two hours ago,’ he heard the doctor say as if reading his thoughts. Maybe he even was. Modern medicine still knew far too little about the syndrome but it had made great strides. After all, it had now become possible to communicate even with locked-in patients who couldn’t so much as blink. This however took weeks and months of practice to correctly interpret the scans created as the severely injured person was subjected to extremely long interviews while lying inside an MRI tube.
‘Hours after you were admitted, we noticed that we could communicate with you by way of blinking. However, you didn’t remember anything. The injury had caused full amnesia. For that reason, we decided on an innovative new method of diagnosis that hasn’t been tried before. I requested help from a colleague, Professor Haberland. As you may know, he specialises in using hypnosis. Since your mind is fully functional, and you are awake in the clinical sense, Dr Krüger, we hypnotised you. You may not remember us initiating the procedure, but we’re hoping that it ended up working. So that you can relive the flight in your memory, we’ve had you experience various sensations via the brain interface. We played typical engine noises over your headphones, from take-off and during flight. Your bed is hydraulic and moves with gentle vibrations that simulate aircraft movement. In order to stimulate your sense of smell we placed, directly into your nose, a little stick soaked in room spray.’
Mats recalled the scent of the air conditioning, of the smell of blood – and the perfume.
Katharina’s perfume!
‘The all-decisive question now, Dr Krüger, is: did it work? Can you put yourself back in those last few hours on board the aeroplane with the help of hypnosis? Can you remember now?’
Mats blinked.
‘Good, very good. That’s fantastic. You’re probably asking why we’ve chosen such an elaborate procedure.’
The missing hole was illuminated by a flash, like someone taking a photo inside his brain – an electrochemical reaction resulting from the slight microphone feedback as Dr Roth said, ‘Professor Klopstock will explain everything to you.’