Then Home let us hasten, while yet we can see,
For no Watchman is waiting for you and for me.
WILLIAM ROSCOE, ‘The Butterfly’s Ball, and the Grasshopper’s Feast’
We liked to swerve through darkness but we had been carried by light and noise, and we had done it together. Now Cara had gone beyond me and while she recovered, I never caught up with her again. We spoke of it once, several months later.
‘Why did you do it?’
‘To see what it was like.’
After three days, Cara woke up and I was allowed to see her. The signs for Intensive Care led me along a corridor and along a corridor and along … It seemed that her room was not in the hospital at all but somewhere out in space.
She looked like herself and in my nervousness I behaved as if this room with a bed in it were just another bedroom, a place where we would giggle and conspire. I told her jokes, passed on gossip and recounted something funny from the problem page of a magazine. As she lay there trying to smile, I went on trying to be us.
She wasn’t us any more. Her eyes were open and she whispered the odd remark, but she was still off in the dark and somehow reluctant to come back. I stopped talking. How often did we sit in silence? Nurses came and went, and I sat there feeling like a child.
The machines lined up beside Cara’s bed understood her better than I did now. They knew what she wanted and how to behave. I let her go back to sleep, and sat and watched the rise and fall on a screen, hoping it to be the folding and opening of her guarded breath.
If only I could have turned a switch on one of the machines and had the white room fill with music. Only what music could relieve this? Cara had taken herself off into the deepest possible silence. We knew now that when you tried to move faster and feel more, it could happen just like that. No wonder we turned the music right up.