Soft-soled shoes

There’s a voice on the intercom informing whoever’s listening “response levels are low”- he sounds clinical, like he could be talking about a machine. I can’t see it, but there must be a speaker in this broom- cupboard- room they’ve put me in. “Negligible reactions to stimuli” is the next comment, but it is the first announcement, “response levels low” that sticks in my mind. It repeats over and over and I wonder how exactly you measure response levels and I get up and leave the room.

I scale the corridors trying to find a way out- there’s still time to make the party tonight. It’s walking distance from here and if I can’t sleep I might as well get fucked up. But it turns out it’s pretty hard to find a decent, real-life exit these days. There’s corridor after corridor and they all look exactly the same. At the end of every corridor is an illuminated, green emergency exit sign showing a man making a break for it. “Fuck him” I think to myself, he’s leading me all the wrong ways.

I give up on leaving the building and by two o’clock I’ve crept right back into the intensive care unit.

Outside visiting hours it feels like an aquarium. There are currents of electricity rippling through to these sedate- seeming, quasi- living things and a low constant drone, as if a sound engineer has broken in and plugged everything in to an old, battered amp. The lights are calming, placed onto a special night-time setting which does a pretty good job of convincing me that these dying people aren’t really dying at all. They’re just lying around watching brightly -coloured fish.

I would have got away with it, but I should probably tell you I’ve never actually been to a real life aquarium. I have seen lots of tropical fish tanks, though- in waiting rooms, shopping centres, fancy hotels and I even saw one in a bus station in Austria once. So I think that gives me the authority to make the comparison. That’s how I can tell you that outside visiting hours it feels like an aquarium. And you’ll just have to take my word for it. You’ll have to believe me. That’s what it’s like.

I take my shoes off because my footsteps are echoing like mad, and anyway high heels don’t seem appropriate. Even if she did buy them for me herself. I sidle over to her. The skin covering her temples looks like it’s about to bruise and I remember what the doctor was saying about bursting vessels and the damage done to the brain. Part of me is grateful for not understanding the science of it and part of me is ashamed that I haven’t tried to understand. I look at the life support machine with the thousand flashing lights and fancy mechanisms and it looks so much more intelligent than most of the doctors that I want to strike up a conversation with it and ask “come on, really, how long?” I touch her forearm making sure I don't mess up the tube of her drip and it’s clammy, pallid- almost translucent. I find it incomprehensible that this is the skin of someone who once stayed up all night and helped me to memorise the periodic table. I only thought it was cool because it had 'lithium' in it, somewhere near the start I think. She was the one who needed it. I just liked the song.

There’s a metal chair next to her bed, but I don’t sit down I just hover there and say “Hi” but the sound comes out weird, louder than I expected. I want to thank her and bless her and worship her, but I just can’t. She’s had enough, she’s given up. She’s been struggling to stay alive for the past twenty years, and now she’s beyond exhausted. She’s dog- tired, bordering on dead. I want to say I’m sorry and I love her, but I’m not sure how to do it. It should be the simplest thing in the world, but I can’t help thinking “Why didn't you say it before?” And anyway, I wouldn't want the machines to hear.

I lean a little closer, and I’m embarrassed to admit it, but I think I was about to pray but I don’t really know what to do and anyway I realise that I can smell her. Nothing clinical, or weird or anything, just her own natural smell. We never touched each other all that much, but I did spend nine months inside her, so I guess I should know better than anyone. I’m telling you, that was her distinctive smell. No one else’s.

From the other side of the room I can make out a nurse’s soft soled footsteps, and I gag. I know she’s about to find me and she’ll quietly reprimand me, and it suddenly strikes me that she should, she should beat me half to death. I’m not allowed to be here and I should have just stayed in the broom cupboard room or gone home or even gone to the stupid party, and left all these poor bastards alone because it’s the middle of the night and “response levels are low” and I’m not even wearing soft-soled shoes.