iBoy

10

The next thing I knew (or, at least, the next thing I consciously knew), I was opening my eyes and staring up at a dusty fluorescent light-fitting on an unfamiliar white ceiling. My head was throbbing like hell, my throat was bone dry, and I had that not-quite-there feeling you gel when you finally wake up from a really long sleep. I didn't feel tired, though. I wasn't sleepy. I wasn't dazed. In fact, apart from the not-quite-thereness, I felt incred­ibly wide awake.

I didn't move for a while, I didn't make a sound, I just lay there, perfectly still, staring up at the light-fitting on the ceiling, irrationally taking in all the details — it was cracked at one end, the plastic was old and faded, there were two dead flies lying on their backs in the dust... Then I closed my eyes and just listened.

I could hear faint beeps from nearby, something whir­ring, a soft tap-tapping. In the background, I could hear the mutter of quiet voices, a faint swish of cushioned doors, muted phones ringing, the dull clank of trolleys ...

I let the sounds flow over me and turned my attention to myself. My body. My position. My place.

I was lying on my back, lying in a bed. My head was resting on a pillow. I could feel things on my skin, in my skin, under my skin. Something up my nose. Something down my throat. There was a faint smell of disinfectant in the air.

I opened my eyes again and — without moving my head — I looked around.

I was in a small white room. There were machines beside the bed. Instruments, canisters, drips, dials, LED displays. Various parts of my body were connected to some of the machines by an ordered tangle of clear plas­tic tubes — my nose, my mouth, my stomach ... other places — and a number of thin black wires from another machine appeared to be fixed to my head.

Hospital room ...

I was in a hospital room.

It's no big deal, I told myself. No problem. You're in a hospital, that's all. There's nothing to worry about.

As I closed my eyes again, trying to relieve the throb­bing in my head, I heard a sharp intake of breath to my left — a distinctly human sound — and when I opened my eyes and turned my head, I was hugely relieved to see the familiarly dishevelled figure of my gran. She was sitting on a chair against the wall, her laptop on her knees, her fingers poised over the keyboard. She was staring at me, her eyes a mixture of shock, disbelief, and delight.

I smiled at her.

"Tommy," she whispered. "Oh, thank God ..."

And then something really strange happened.

How do you describe something indescribable? I mean, how do you describe something that's beyond the limits of human comprehension? How do you even begin to explain it? I suppose it's a bit like trying to describe how a bat senses things. A bat experiences the world through the sense of echolocation: it emits sounds, and it deter­mines the location, size, and manner of objects around it through the echoes they produce. And although as humans we can understand that, and we can try to imag­ine it, we have no way of actually experiencing it, which makes the actual sensual experience impossible for us to describe.

In my case — as I looked at my gran, and she whispered my name — the phenomenon I experienced inside my head was so alien to anything I'd ever experienced before, I simply couldn't digest it. It happened, it was happening, and it was undoubtedly happening to me, in me ... but it couldn't possibly have anything to do with me.

It couldn't be.

But it was.

The best way I think I can describe it is like this. Imagine a billion bees. Imagine the sound of a billion bees, the sight of a billion bees, the sense of a billion bees.

Imagine their movement, their interactions, their connec­tions, their being. And then try to imagine that these bees are not bees, and these sounds, these images, these feel­ings are not actually sounds, images, or feelings at all. They're something else. Information. Facts. Things. They're data. They're words and voices and pictures and numbers, streams and streams of zeroes and ones, but at the same time they're not any of these things ... they're somehow just the things that represent these things. They're representations of constituent parts, building blocks, frameworks, particles, waves ... they're symbols of the stuff that things are. And then, if you can, try to imagine that you can not only experience everything about these billion non-bees all at once — their collective non-sound, non-image, non-sense — but you can also experience everything about every individual one of them ... all at the same time. And both experiences are instan­taneous. Continuous. Inseparable.

Can you imagine it?

You're lying in a hospital bed, smiling at your gran, and just as she looks at you and whispers your name — "Tommy. Oh, thank God ..." — a billion non-bees explode into life inside your head.

Can you imagine that?

There was no time to it at all. In one sense, it lasted less than a moment, less than an instant... an unknowable and instantaneous explosion of crazy stuff in my head. But in another sense, a more accurate sense, it didn't even last less than a moment. It didn't last at all. It happened without time, beyond time ... as if always-there and never-there were one and the same thing.

It didn't hurt, this unknowable experience, but the shock of it made me squeeze my eyes shut and screw up my face as if I was in some kind of terrible pain, and I heard my gran curse under her breath and scramble up out of her chair, knocking her laptop to the floor, and then she was flinging open the door and calling out at the top of her voice ...

"Nurse! NURSE!"

"It's all right, Gram," I told her, opening my eyes again. "I'm OK ... it was just —"

"Lie still, Tommy," she said, scuttling over to me. "The nurse is coming ... just take it easy."

She sat on the edge of the bed and took hold of my hand.

I smiled at her again. "I'm all right —"

"Shhh..."

And then a nurse came in, followed shortly by a doctor in white coat, and everyone started fussing around me, checking the machines, looking into my eyes, listening to my heart ...

I was OK.

I wasn't OK, but I was OK.

I'd been in a coma for seventeen days. The iPhone had split my head open, fracturing my skull, and — according to Mr Kirby, the neurosurgeon who'd operated on me — a number of significant complications had arisen.

"You have what we call a comminuted skull fracture," he explained to me the day after I woke up. "Basically, this means that the bone just here ..." He indicated the area around the stitched-up wound on the side of my head. "This area is known as the pterion, by the way. Unfortunately, this is the weakest part of the skull, and for some reason yours seems to be particularly weak."

As he said the word pterion, something flashed through my head — a series of symbols, letters and numbers (non-symbols, non-letters, non-numbers), and although I didn't recognize or understand them, they somehow made sense.

Pterion, I found myself thinking, pronounced teery-on, the suture where the frontal, squamosal, and parietal bones meet the wing of the sphenoid.

Very strange.

"Are you all right?" Mr Kirby asked me.

"Yeah ... yeah, I'm fine," I assured him.

"Well, as I was saying," he continued, "the iPhone was apparently thrown from the top floor of the tower block, and when it hit your head, this area here — around the pterion — was shattered, and your brain was lacerated and bruised by a number of broken skull fragments and smashed pieces of the phone. There was damage to some of your blood vessels too. We managed to remove all of the bone fragments and most of the phone debris, and the bleeding from your ruptured blood vessels doesn't seem to have done any permanent harm. However ..."

I'd kind of guessed there was a however coming.

"I'm afraid we've been unable to remove several pieces of the shattered phone that were driven into your brain at the time of your accident. These fragments, most of which are incredibly small, have lodged themselves into areas of your brain that are simply too delicate to with­stand surgery. We have, of course, been closely monitoring these fragments, and, as far as we can tell, they're currently not moving and they don't seem to be having any injurious effect on your brain."

I looked at him. "As far as you can tell?"

He smiled. "Well, the brain's a highly complex organ. To be honest, we're only just beginning to understand how it works. Here, let me show you ..."

He spent the next twenty minutes or so showing me X-rays, CT and MRI scans, showing me where the tiny fragments of iPhone were lodged in my brain, explaining the surgery I'd undergone, and why the fragments couldn't be removed, telling me what to expect over the next few months — headaches, dizziness, tiredness ...

"Of course," he added, "the truth of the matter is we have no way of knowing how anyone is going to re­cuperate after this type of injury, especially someone who's spent a considerable amount of time in a coma ... and I must stress how important it is for you to let us know immediately if you start feeling anything ... ah ... unusual."

"What kind of unusual?"

He smiled again. "Any kind." His smile faded. "It's very unlikely that the remaining fragments will move any further, but we can't rule it out." He looked at me. "We've been monitoring your brain activity continuously since you were admitted, and most of the time everything's been fine. But there was a period of a couple of days — this was just over a week ago — when we noticed a series of somewhat unexpected brain patterns, and it's just possible that these may have been caused by an adverse reaction to the fragments. Now, while these slight abnor­malities didn't last very long, and there's been no noticeable repetition since, the readings that concerned us were rather ..." He paused, trying to think of the right word.

"Unusual?" I suggested.

He nodded. "Yes ... unusual." Another brief smile. "I'm fairly sure that this isn't anything you need to worry about too much ... but it's always best to be on the safe side. So, as I said, if you do start experiencing any problems, anything at all, you must tell someone immediately. We'll be keeping you in here for another week or so, just to make sure everything's all right, so all you have to do if you do feel anything unusual is let someone know — me, one of the nurses ... anyone really. And when you go home, if anything happens, you can either tell your grand­mother or call the hospital yourself." He paused, looking at me. "It's just you and your grandmother at home, I believe?"

I nodded. "My mum died when I was a baby. She was run over by a car."

"Yes ... your grandmother told me." He looked at me. "She said that the driver didn't stop ..."

"That's right."

"And the police never found out who it was?"

"No."

He shook his head sadly. "And your father ...?"

I shrugged. "I never knew him. He was just some guy my mum slept with one night."

"So your gran's been looking after you since you were a baby?"

"Yeah, my mum had to go back to work straight after she had me, so Gram was looking after me most of the time anyway. After Mum died, Gram just carried on bringing me up."

Mr Kirby smiled. "You call her Gram?"

"Yeah," I said, slightly embarrassed. "I don't know why ... it's just what I call her. Always have."

He nodded again. "She's a very determined and resolute woman."

"I know."

"She hasn't left your side for the last seventeen days. She's been here day and night, talking to you, watching you... encouraging you to wake up."

I just nodded my head. I was afraid that if I said anything, I might start crying.

Mr Kirby smiled. "She must mean a lot to you."

"She means everything to me."

He smiled again, stood up, and put his hand on my shoulder. "Right then, Tom ... well, I've given your gran a direct phone number in case you need to contact us urgently when you're at home. So, as I said, any prob­lems, just tell your gran or call us yourself. Have you got a mobile phone?"

I tapped the side of my head.

He grinned.

"Yeah," I told him. "I've got a mobile phone."

Later on, in the hospital toilets, I took a good long look at myself in the mirror for the first time. I didn't look very much like myself any more. For a start, I'd lost a fair bit of weight, and although I'd always been pretty skinny, my face now had a strangely haunted, almost skeletal look to it. My eyes had sunk into their sockets, and my skin was dull and kind of plasticky-looking, tinged with a yellowish-grey shadow. My once-longish dirty blond hair had gone, shaved off for the operation, and in its place I had an embarrassingly soft and babyish No. i crop. I looked like Skeletor with a piece of blond felt on his head.

For some reason, the skin surrounding the wound on my head was still completely bald, which made me look even weirder. The wound itself — a raggedy black track of twenty-five stitches — ran diagonally from just above my right ear towards the right-hand side of my forehead, about ten centimetrs above my right eye.

I leaned closer to the mirror, gently touching the wound with my fingertip ... and immediately drew it back, cursing, as a slight electric shock zipped through my finger. It wasn't much — a bit like one of those static- electric shocks you get sometimes when you touch the door of a car — but it really took me by surprise. It was just so unexpected, I suppose.

Unusual.

I looked at my fingertip, then gazed at my head wound in the mirror. Just for a moment, I thought I saw some­thing ... a faint shimmering in the skin around the wound, like ... I don't know. Like nothing I'd ever seen before. A shimmer of something unknowable.

I leaned in closer to the mirror and looked again.

There wasn't anything there any more.

No shimmer.

I was tired, that's all it was.

Yeah? I asked myself. And what about the billion non- bees, and that definition of pterion that inexplicably popped into your head earlier on? Was that just tiredness too?

I didn't answer myself.

I was too tired.

I left the toilets, went back to my room, and got into bed.