When Gillian came around, her father was standing by her bedside, in quiet conversation with the doctor. Gillian didn’t listen. She closed her eyes and saw the hole in her face through which she had seen inside her head. She tried to raise her hands to hide, to protect herself. The covers were pressing down on her, she could hardly move her fingers. Suddenly breathing was a struggle too. She opened her eyes. The two men were still there. They weren’t talking now, and were looking down at her, into her. It was more than Gillian could do to stop their looking or deflect or respond to it. She closed her eyes and ran away as far as she could. A silly game, a dance, a children’s skipping rhyme with endless verses. Then she heard her name, the doctor had said it. When she looked up at him, her eyes met her father’s. Her father turned away.
How are you feeling?
She didn’t say anything. She mustn’t give herself away. She was hiding, and if she didn’t move, they would never find her. She was capable of staying hidden for hours on end, in a wardrobe or behind the sofa, in the attic, before she realized that no one was looking for her. Then she would slowly start to creep back, show herself more and more blatantly, but it was as though her long period in hiding had rendered her invisible. Her parents seemed to see right through her. What a relief when she’d been standing for a quarter hour in the kitchen doorway, and her mother finally told her to set the table, as though nothing had happened. She heard the door and saw her father leave the room. The doctor followed him out.
Something was broken. Gillian remembered the feeling of despair when she held the pieces in her hand as though they could knit together and be whole again. She couldn’t remember how the crash had come about. Only the feeling of weightlessness. Suddenly she understood that time had a direction, that it was irreversible. Her first memory was that sense of not being able to do anything anymore, of having no force and no mass. It was as though consciousness had already deserted her body, which accelerated through space, collided with something, was thrown back, hit something else in a ridiculous to-and-fro.
Gillian had always known she was in danger, that she would sometime have to pay for everything. Now she had paid. When the doctor asked her what she could remember, she had slowly moved her head from side to side. She wasn’t shaking her head, she was looking for her memories on the white walls. But the things she saw there had nothing to do with her. Her job, her parents, Matthias — they were all from another life.
Everything is still there, she said, only I am gone.
The careful movements of the nurses, their deliberate smiles.
Tell me if this hurts.
Pain was small events that took place just in front of her face, a fireworks of stabbings that Gillian couldn’t connect with herself. It was her body that reacted to it, flinching or convulsing. The nurse apologized, her voice sounded impatient. Gillian didn’t want to apologize for her body, which was nothing but an heirloom. She was someone else, she had only just moved in here. When people came along, she opened the door to admit them. She watched her visitors, tried to read in their expressions what they thought of the address. If they seemed impressed, she was happy. It is nice here, isn’t it. Bit of a work in progress, of course. She laughed. The nurse explained what she was doing, but Gillian wasn’t listening. She tried to bring the pain into harmony with her face, to make one single image, but she couldn’t do it. The picture was incomplete, the proportions didn’t work.
Almost done now, said the nurse. There, that wasn’t too bad, was it?
She left the room. The mirror lay on the bedside table. Gillian was thinking about the mirror, not her face. The mirror was the face she could hold up in front of herself. She put out her hand, hesitated, waited a moment longer, then took it. She played with it, turned it around and looked at its shiny back, a dim reflection of her face, a sense of intactness. If someone had looked at her now, it would be his face in place of hers. Then she turned the mirror around again and looked at herself for a long time. Earlier, she had sometimes stood in front of the mirror at home and gazed deep into her eyes. But her eyes were glass, the pupils black holes, and at the bottom of their impenetrable darkness was her body.
She tried with all her might to recognize herself in that flesh. She saw eyes, eyebrows, mouth, but they formed no whole. When the doctor or a nurse entered the room, she quickly put the mirror down on the table and imagined her image was trapped in it, so that she could hide from the looks of the others. She tried to make out disgust or horror in the expression of the nurse. But all she saw was a friendly indifference.
She looked at the faces of the nurses, tried to make herself a nest in them. In her mind she copied their expressions, pursed her lips, blinked her eyes, furrowed her brow. She involved them in conversation just to be able to watch their faces, and to be able to rest in them.
Her father moved a chair up to the bed. When Gillian turned her head, she could see him sitting there staring at an exhibition poster on the wall, three red dots placed diagonally on a green background.
Do you like that picture?
Three dots. She had picked her head up off the pillow. He looked at her quickly and then looked away.
John Armleder, she said. The artist’s name suddenly sounded rather threatening.
They would pull off some skin, she didn’t quite understand it, but the doctor wanted to take some skin from her forehead, and without cutting the blood supply, fold it down, and use it on the new nose.
Matthias is dead, said her father.
Yes, said Gillian, of course.
She had known it, she had seen him. The tears were running down her temples before she realized she was crying. Her father took a Kleenex from a box on her bedside table and wiped them away, in an unusually gentle gesture.
I’m sorry.
I could have been dead. Gillian had said the sentence over and over to herself, but it didn’t have any meaning. The tears stopped as suddenly as they had begun. Her father dropped the Kleenex in the bin by the door and returned to the bed, settled down on the chair. He waited for a moment, then said he had a couple of practical things he needed to do.
Your mother was in your apartment and tidied up a bit.
Ever since she’d been in the hospital, Gillian had thought a lot about her childhood and the time after she’d left her parents’ house, of drama school, the years on small provincial stages. She had a vague memory of how the story continued, her getting married to Matthias, her job in TV. She had come up with an ending, too, a scene in a garden, a sunny afternoon in summer, she was older now, but still attractive, there was a man, they were drinking white wine together and talking about old times.
Matthias is dead, said Gillian.
He had a blood alcohol level of 1.4, said her father. It sounded like a statistic, as though he had given Matthias’s height or weight.
I’m tired, she said.
At least you’re alive, said her father.