(crawling, try to lift my left arm but no, blood-thrumming, eye-bursting, body-popping agony, to lift my left arm is to move muscles around the knife, to move muscles around the knife is to die, I know that now, I will die here in this place with a knife in my chest and here comes the pain, it comes it comes)
Three main causes of death from injury: shock, pain, blood loss
(Concentrate!)
Shock: low blood perfusion to tissues. Clammy skin, high heart rate, pale skin, confusion, loss of consciousness, for best diagnosis measure heart rate divided by systolic… systolic blood pressure for an answer of
treatments raise legs
(I can’t)
essential that what blood is flowing goes to the major organs, cardiac arrest, respiratory arrest
(my right hand can reach the curtain, twitch it aside)
Shock: cold shock response e.g. from falling through ice. Vasoconstriction owing to extreme cold. Heart has to work harder to pump blood — heart fails.
(I reach, but can’t seem to move it enough to see the world beyond. Pull harder scream no sound pull harder scream in my eyes my eyes are screaming I am my eyes screaming my hand screaming my voice screaming my)
the curtain falls.
Tangled for a moment in its embrace. The curtain falls and I look, turning my head slowly to the side, peeking down between the balustrades of the balcony.
I am pain, and that is fine.
Shock: acute stress reaction — numbing, amnesia, dissociative awareness, depersonalisation, muteness.
I am witness to these events.
I am my eyes, screaming.
I witness:
A woman, dressed in gold, crouched over the body of her dancing partner, twisting the shattered stem of her champagne glass deeper, deeper into his throat. He’s dead already, but she’s fascinated by the play of glass and blood, the brightness of the ruby drops on her skin. They complement her dress; perhaps someone can do a design based on this moment?
A man, his tuxedo turned red, a caviar knife embedded in his leg, but he doesn’t mind, dragging another man by the throat across the room. He gets to the door, and is confused by it, and lets go of the man in his grasp, but the body is dead and he’s still bewildered, so he goes back the way he’s come, stepping over the eyeless waitress who lies by the door, and sees if he can find enlightenment in another place.
Enlightenment: the final spiritual state; an absence of suffering or desire.
A woman, who sits on her haunches next to the man whose head now hangs by a string. There’s blood around her mouth, and blood on her teeth, but she’s satisfied for now, just rocking gently back and forth, I think I saw her in a movie once, I think she played an unhappy wife in a drama about American suburbia
(my blood drips off the edge of the balcony)
(it will not be noticed)
A man whose ear has been ripped from his face but that’s okay, that’s not the problem, bangs his head gently against the wall
rocks on his heels
backwards
forwards
bang
backwards
forwards
bang
A woman more beautiful than moonlight, confused, sees the dead and the dying, sees someone she thinks she knows, impaled on the melting ice sculpture in the centre of the room. He died there after he drowned a man in ice cubes, and look, his victim now lies beneath him, still face-down, gently preserved in champagne. The woman rises. Walks across the room. Pulls the white silk scarf from the throat of the man in the ice, then walks the other way, looking for a way to hang herself with the three or four others who also chose that route.
A girl strangled with pearls.
A man, his gold pen jammed into his spine.
There wasn’t much in the way of screaming. As the 206 began to slaughter each other to the sound of Byron’s voice, they were so busy killing that they didn’t really care about being killed. It was only the imperfect ones, the technicians and the waiters, the photographers and the press, who screamed as they died.
Rafe Pereyra-Conroy died screaming, I suspect, beaten to death with his own microphone just before he was going to speak. Who would have thought that such a little thing could be used to break so many bones?
His murderer sits behind him now, cross-legged on the floor, chewing her nails.
Filipa’s eyes roam the room, meet mine, but she doesn’t appear to see me. Doesn’t appear to see much at all, any more.
The cameras in the paparazzi’s box keep on rolling. YouTube awaits.
I am witness.
I close my eyes.
Chapter 93
I was cold for a while, now I’m warm.
I have a feeling that this is not a good sign, but fuck, who cares anymore?
Words from… somewhere.
Kafka, Franz, b. 1883, d. 1924, unknown in his lifetime, famous after death. “One of the first signs of understanding is the wish to die.”
Or other side-splitting japes: “My guiding principal is this: guilt is never to be doubted.”
But then again: “Youth is happy because it has the ability to see beauty. Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old.”
1924 was a leap year.
Lenin dies.
The Ottoman Empire gives way to the Turkish state.
The Immigration Act in the USA paves the way to racial discrimination against Asian communities, and will later be cited by the Japanese as proof of American colonial imperialism.
Nellie Taylor Rose is elected first female governor in the USA.
Edwin Hubble declares that Andromeda (previously believed to be a nebula) is a galaxy, and that the Milky Way is merely one of millions of billions of galaxies spinning through the universe.
Approximately eighty-six billion neurons in the human brain. Approximately three hundred billion stars in the Milky Way. Approximately two hundred billion galaxies in the universe, assuming infinity to be an unhelpful term. Approximately 7×1027 atoms in the human body.
I am…
here.
Chess: after three moves on a board, there are over nine million different possible positions that can be achieved in the following game. In a forty-move game, there are more possible positions than the number of electrons in the observable universe.
I am
awake.
My eyes.
Slowly.
No more screaming.
The screams went into my mind, but that’s okay, there’s plenty of room, and much weight of knowledge that I may cast down upon them, if they grow too loud. I am knowledge, you see. I find it is less harmful than many of the other things I could be.
My eyes are quiet, and so am I.
I open them, and I see.
Hospital.
Kinda unexpected, really.
All hospitals look the same.
Blue curtains separate the beds. A bedstand next to me, a jug of water and a plastic cup. A drip of something mixed with something running into a cannula in my left hand, the clear tubing threaded through my hospital gown. In the bed opposite mine, an old woman is awake and scowling, rolled onto one side, her feet bulging beneath the tight anti-thrombosis socks that contort her pale, spotted flesh. Hard to imagine her face, with its jowls and furrowed thick black brows, looking anything other than angry, but perhaps I do her a disservice. Perhaps everyone is angry in this place, with the grey winter light coming through the window at the end of the bed. Perhaps the doctors are rude.
A TV on in the booth besides me. Italian reality TV, something about seducing a rich man, a paradise island, a disastrous dinner — whatever. Waiting a while.
Traditionally this moment, this wakening, is when the doctors come and say, “How are you, are you in much pain, can you remember your name?” and I reply no, no I can’t, oh God what year is it who am I who am I who am I…?