I considered this. ‘Perhaps,’ I answered, upping something from deep memory, ‘because I am myself a science fiction writer?’ Retrieving this was like pulling through my gullet and out of my throat a long piece of string I had, for some reason, swallowed. It was not, that is to say, pleasant.
‘Really? How very interesting.’
‘Do you read science fiction?’
‘Not at all. Not ever. Science fiction is for adolescent boys and people who make models of aircraft from plastic and glue. I am a mature woman, which is to say, the opposite of a science fiction fan.’ She considered for a bit. ‘You science fiction writers write about the future, don’t you?’
‘Sometimes.’
‘That may be a problem.’
‘In what way?’
‘What I mean is this: you may find it harder conceptualising the future in, ah, the future. Can you write about something else? The present, say? The past?’
‘I could try.’
‘That might be a good idea. One of the things Egas Monis discovered is that the frontal lobes of the brain are where we imagine the future. Where we plan and project ourselves imaginatively forward in time. Because the future makes some people anxious — what might happen, and so on — Monis discovered that destroying portions of this lobe reduced people’s levels of anxiety. Do you feel anxious?’
‘No.’ And I really didn’t.
‘That’s good.’
‘Are you saying that you have performed a pre-frontal lobotomy upon me, Doctor?’
‘I have not. Although such an operation, if it is going to take place, really should be performed by a medically trained professional.’
The curiosity I felt on this matter was of a generalised, rather pleasant sort. There was no urgency in it. ‘Has some other doctor lobotomisied me?’
‘As to the medical expertise of Leo Alexeivich Trofim, I cannot say.’
My memories of Trofim were bright and immediate. I knew who he was. ‘Trofim! — I never knew his first name before! He is a Leo, is he? Like Tolstoy! For some reason that pleases me.’
‘As your doctor I am pleased to see you pleased. You will recover more quickly if you have a positive mental attitude.’
‘Is Trofim here?’
‘He is not far from here. Although he is no longer in a state of coherent bodily assemblage.’
‘Where is here?’
‘Kiev.’
‘In the Ukraine?’
‘Is there another Kiev?’
‘I mean: the Ukraine on the planet Earth?’
There was a few seconds’ silence. ‘As your doctor,’ she repeated, shortly, ‘I am pleased that you have not lost your sense of humour. A sense of humour will be helpful to you as you convalesce.’
‘I meant the question,’ I said, feeling momentarily confused, ‘seriously.’
‘Seriously has a different interpretation in the realm of science fiction, perhaps.’
There was a sort of mental spasm, another memorial regurgitation inside my brain, like a mamma seagull splurting half-digested fish through her beak for her young. ‘I was in the Chernobyl nuclear facility,’ I said.
‘Reactor Four,’ she said.
‘The reactor exploded,’ I said.
‘Certainly not,’ she said. ‘Unless the reactor is your nickname for your young friend. He certainly was, according to the autopsy reports, a well-built individual.’
‘Chernobyl is still intact?’
‘It is generating the electricity that powers this hospital,’ she said. ‘So we must be grateful that your friend’s grenade did not inconvenience it.’
There was a cut, as if in a film. The doctor was no longer there, and instead a nurse — a very tall, thin young man with a bald head and the podgy, ingenuous face of a child — was taking my blood pressure. I had been asleep, or time had slipped, or something else had happened. ‘I was talking to the doctor.’
‘Were you?’
‘Doctor Bello.’
‘That’s her name.’
‘She was the middle of telling me something? I think I zoned out.’
At this point I think I zoned out. I was alone in the room. The window was very tall and thin, and admitted a perspective across a courtyard to a flank of rectangles, like the grid at the bottom of the spent fuel pool, only arrayed vertically rather than horizontally at the bottom of the pool. It took me a while to recognise these as blank windows. There was a tree somewhere in the space between my window and these windows, for a broomstick of branches poked out from the right side of the rectangle. These branches were usually motionless protrusions into the field of view, rather jagged and unpleasant, but every now and again a breeze would insinuate itself down into the courtyard and elate the twigs to a flurry of waving.
Now the window was dark, and the only illumination was a nightlight above the door. It shone with a gorgeous jade-green light; delicate and dim.
The nurse was coming in through the door. It occurred to me that he unlocked the door before stepping through it, and relocked it when he was through. For some reason this action snagged my attention. He was carrying a tray. On the tray was a bowl of broth and a small boulder of bread.
‘How long have I been here?’ I asked, between sips, as he spooned the soup into my mouth.
‘You know what I reckon about time?’ the nurse replied. ‘I figure that the passage of time is subjective. I don’t know much about frontal lobe injury, but I know it can do strange things to your sense of the passage of time. Does it feel like you’ve been here for a long time?’
‘Months.’
‘Ha!’ This pleased him. ‘Two days — three now. Or is it months? A philosopher might be able to tell us the difference. And why, anyway, should we submit to the tyranny of the calendar? The clock? Days? Months?’
He broke off some of the bread, dipped it in the broth, and poked one end in between my lips. I disliked the texture of it.
‘Which is it?’ I asked, annoyed, or tried to. I wanted solidity. But he wasn’t there anymore. I was alone in the room as the rectangular photographic print that was the window yielded the effects of the chemical wash in which it had been immersed and very slowly went from black to purple, to grey, to a yeasty paleness.
No.
Actually I wasn’t in the room, I was on a trolley, flowing along the longest corridor in the world. Actually it wasn’t a corridor, and those weren’t lights set at intervals into the ceiling; it was a liftshaft and those were floors. I was falling. Actually I wasn’t in a corridor, I was back in the womb, and the womb was a metal sac, like the interior of a toothpaste tube.
The doctor was helping me sit up in bed. I was in my room again. ‘Did I have a scan? Was that what that was? I assume that is what has just happened to me.’
‘As we discussed,’ she said. But I had no memory of such a discussion. ‘You used to be a smoker, I think’
‘A smoker?’
‘A smoker of cigarettes.’
And her words unlocked that whole storeroom of memory. I had been entirely oblivious to cigarettes until she uttered those words; and then, suddenly, I craved a smoke. I knew once again that stretched, physiological need for nicotine. ‘Do you have any cigarettes? ’ I asked. ‘I feel the need for one, right now, very acutely.’
‘Smoking is not permitted in here,’ she said.
That reminded me of something.
‘It is obvious,’ the doctor was saying, ‘from even the most cursory examination of your body, that you have smoked far too much for far too long. But I knew you were a smoker even before I examined you. Do you know how I knew? I shall tell you. You had a cigarette in your mouth. When they pulled you out of the pool, at the plant, they said your lips were set fast about the stub of a cigarette.’