Fluid seeps into me through my nose and out again via a catheter. I feel more like a plant than an animal, a mammal, an ape, a human. Part of the machine. All the processes have slowed. I have to find a way back; blow the tanks, pull the cord; floor the throttle?
Some of these people look familiar.
Dr Joyce is here. He wears a white coat and he makes notes on a clipboard. I'm sure I saw Abberlaine Arrol, just fleetingly, a while ago ... but she was dressed in the uniform of a nurse.
This place is long and echoing. Sometimes I smell iron and rust, and paint and medicines. They took away the card I was given, and the scarf... I mean the handkerchief.
Ah, coming round, are we? Dr Joyce smiles at me. I look up at him, try to speak: Who am I? Where am I? What is happening to me?
We have a new treatment, the doctor says to me, as though to a particularly dim child. Would you like us to try it? Would you? It might make you better. Sign this.
Gimme gimme. In blood if you like. Give you my soul if I thought I had one but never mind. How about a tranche on a few billion neurons? Nicely run-in brain here doc; one careful owner (ahem); didn't even take it to church on Sundays... Bastards; it's a machine.
I have to tell everything I can remember to a machine which looks like a metal suitcase on a spindly trolley.
It takes a while.
Just me and the machine now. There was a sallow-faced lad in here for a while, and the nurse, and even the dear good old doctor, but they've gone now. Only me and the machine left. It starts to speak. 'Well,' it says -
Look, anybody can make a mistake. Isn't this meant to be the season of - naa, forget it. OK already; I was wrong; mea fuckin' culpa; Joe Contrite here. You want blood?
'Well,' it says, 'your dreams were right in the end. Those last ones, after you left here. That really is you.'
'I don't believe you,' I tell it.
'You will.'
'Why?'
'Because I'm a machine, and you trust machines, you understand them and they don't frighten you; they impress you. You feel differently about people.'
I think about this, then try another question: Where am I? The machine says, 'Your real self, your physical body is now in the Neurosurgical Unit at the Southern General Hospital, Glasgow. You were moved from the Royal Infirmary in Edinburgh ... some time ago.' The machine seems uncertain.
'You don't know?' I ask it.
'You don't know,' it tells me. 'They moved you; that's all we both know. Might have been three months ago, might have been five or even six. Whenever; in your dream it was about two-thirds of the way through. The treatments and drugs they've been trying out on you have scrambled your sense of time.'
'Do you - do I - have any idea what date it is? How long have I been under?'
'That's a little easier; seven months. The last time Andrea Cramond visited you she mentioned something about it being her birthday in a week and if you were to wake up it would be the best-'
'OK,' I tell the machine. 'That makes it early July; her birthday's on the 10th.'
'Well then.'
'Hmm. And I suppose you don't know my name, do you?'
'Correct.'
I say nothing for a while.
'So,' the machine says, 'you going to wake up then?'
'I don't know. I'm not sure what the alternatives are; what's the choice?'
'Stay under or surface,' the machine says. 'Simple as that.'
'But how do I surface?' I was trying to do that on the way here, before I reached the desert. I tried to wake up into -'
'I know. I'm afraid I can't help you with that one. I don't know how you do it, I just know you can if you want to.'
'Hell, I don't know; do I want to?'
'Your idea,' the machine points out, 'is as good as mine.'
I don't know what they're pumping into me, but everything's hazy at the moment. The machine seems real, when it's here, but the people don't. It's as though there's a fog inside my eyes, as though the fluid in them has darkened, as though they have finally silted up. My other senses are similarly affected; everything I hear sounds mushy, distorted. Nothing smells or tastes of anything very much. I think even my thoughts are slowing down.
I lie, a shallow man breathing shallowly and trying to think deeply.
After a while, nothing. No people, no machine, no sight or sound or taste or smell or touch, no awareness of my own body. Greyness everywhere. Only memories. I fall asleep.
I wake up in a small room with one door; there is a screen set in one wall. The room is cubical, finished in grey, windowless. I am sitting in a large leather armchair. The chair looks familiar; there is one like it in the house in Leith, in the study. There should be a tiny burn on the right arm where a bit of dope fell out of ... no; not there. Must be a new chair. I look at my hands. A little scar tissue on the right one. I'm wearing Mephisto shoes, Lee jeans, a checked shirt. I have no beard. I feel thinner than I remember.
I get up and look round the room. Blank screen; no controls. Concealed lighting round the top of the walls. Everything in grey concrete; feels warm. No seams in the concrete; not a bad pouring job at all; I wonder vaguely who the contractors were. The door is ordinary, made of wood. I open it.
There is a similar room on the other side of the door. It has no screen and no armchair; just a bed. It is a hospital bed, empty; crisp white sheets and a single grey blanket pulled back at one corner, as though in invitation.
A noise comes from the room I've just left.
If I go through there, I think, and find an old guy who looks like me, I'm going to get out of there somehow and find that machine and complain.
I go through to the room with the armchair. I do not find Keir Dullea in make-up. The room is empty but the screen has come to life. I sit down in the armchair and watch.
It's the man in the bed again. Only this time everything's in colour; I can see him better. He is lying on his front, for a change, in a different bed in a different room. A small ward, in fact, with three other beds, two of them occupied by older men with bandaged heads. There are screens round my man's bed but I am above him, looking down. His bald spot is quite visible. I reach up to my own head; a bald patch. Sure enough, the hairs on my arms are not black but muddy brown. Shit.
It all looks more cosy that I remember. There are yellow flowers in a vase on the small bedside cabinet. There's no chart hanging on the bottom of the bed; maybe they don't do that these days. There's a plastic bracelet on the man's wrist. I can't read what it says.
Noises in the distance; people talking, a little female laughter, bottles or maybe something metallic clinking, and what might be a set of wheels squeaking on a floor. Two nurses appear; they go inside the screens and turn the man over. They plump up his pillows and sit him up a little, chatting to each other most of the time. Infuriatingly, I can't hear what they're saying.
The nurses leave. People start to drift into the picture, approaching the other two occupied beds; ordinary people; a young couple for one elderly man, an old woman talking quietly to the other old chap. Nobody for my man yet. Doesn't look as though he cares.
Then Andrea Cramond appears. She looks odd from this raised vantage point, but it's her all right. She wears a white trouser suit of raw silk, red high heels, red silk blouse. She puts the jacket - didn't I buy that for her in Jenner's last year? - down at the foot of the bed, then she goes to the man, and bends to kiss him, on the forehead, then lightly on the lips; her hand stays a little while, stroking hair back from his brow. She sits in a chair on one side of the bed, legs crossed at the knee, elbow on thigh, chin in hand. She stares at the man. I stare at her.