Ruda has just turned 39. She was sure he was in the best moment of his life. Attractive, with a good job, a life insurance agent, with two children, three years after her divorce and after almost a year of fighting HCV. She hoped it would only get better now. “The worst is over,” she said to herself, getting into the car. She was f *** ed on life and everyone around her. For many years she had thought that nothing worse than what had happened to her in recent years or in a childhood devoid of parental love would never happen again. She was wrong. The worst was to come.
Monika woke up in a car. She was still lying like a log, limp, equipped only with a working brain and hearing. What kind of car is this? Who is taking her and where? She panicked, looked in all directions, but felt that she was slowly losing that ability as well. Suddenly she heard two men telling each other jokes, laughing every now and then so loud her brain almost exploded.
– Where are we going? She asked.
She heard the driver turn on the turn signal. She had never heard the direction make such a loud noise before. Nobody answered her question. She felt a jerk as if the clutch was released too quickly. The driver hit the gas.
“Can any of you fucking explain to me what’s going on here ?!” She repeated the question.
She thought she shouted her plea, but again silence answered her. She still didn’t realize that no one was hearing her because she had stopped talking, and all her lips had come out of is a cluster of groans and gurgling and gibberish. Someone on the side might think he is dealing with a drunk, mentally retarded woman. Suddenly she felt them stop. She heard the men getting out. The silence felt ominous to her. All she could see was the ceiling, but she was horrified to see that she seemed to be losing not only sensation but also vision, for she could not recognize shapes or colors. Suddenly she heard a familiar noise. Someone unscrewed the fuel cap and put the dispenser pistol into the fuel tank. She heard the steady hum of the pouring liquid. S *** shipping! They’re gonna kill me! – She was scared as hell. Have they kidnapped me? What happened to my children? Where are they now? She couldn’t remember how she got into that car, what time is it and why can’t she move? She was convinced that she was in mortal danger, and the lack of sensation was caused by the very tight pressure of the rope, which tied her firmly, which must have cut off the blood supply to the muscles. That’s probably why she doesn’t feel anything, can’t even twist her head, lift a finger or move her foot. Nothing in her body was working except her brain working at an unprecedented speed. If it had operated on the same principles as a car engine, it would have overheated by now. Thousands of thoughts and hundreds of orders sent to the muscles found no outlet. At the speed of light, they came out towards the spinal cord and bounced off the wall somewhere at the nape of their neck, came back and was instructed to “Do what,” then came back and encountered the same blockage. They picked up speed with each bounce. They were like balls from the computer game Arkanoid, with the difference that the ones in Red’s brain were trapped there forever, they did not disappear, did not fall out of the rectangle, but bounced off wall to wall like a squash ball.
Monika could not connect the threads from several dozen minutes ago, when she was given first aid in the emergency room, with what was happening at that moment. Suddenly she heard the laughter of men returning from the gas station. They kept telling jokes. They’re inside, the key is in the ignition, they fasten their seat belts – she analyzed every sound. They moved on. She heard the muffled sound of an ambulance signal. She passed out.
“A 39-year-old patient. Admitted to the ward after an episode of loss of consciousness with convulsions. According to an account of an ambulance service provider, the symptomatology of the seizure indicated a prolonged, generalized seizure with convulsions. The seizure took place in a natural medicine office, where the patient reported complaints of pain in the area of the back of the head and neck. In an interview for several weeks, she complained of a headache in the area of the back of the head, periodic nausea and vomiting, and imbalance. For this reason, the patient was diagnosed a week before admission to the local SOR SPSK 1 department, where a CTG of the brain was performed. Normal neurological condition. The patient was referred for further diagnosis on an outpatient basis. At the time of admission to the local ward, the patient was deeply sleepy, without verbal contact, with a deep quadriparesis. In reaction to the pain, there were tension in the right limbs, a positive Babinski symptom on both sides. ”
The doctor on duty finished writing the diagnosis and took a sip of coffee. The ward was quiet in the evening. Without the hustle and bustle of visitors, questions to which doctors either didn’t know the answer or couldn’t answer.
– Lives! I’m alive! Monika shouted with joy as she woke up.
They moved her from bed to bed. She was in some hospital, but she had no idea where. She couldn’t look around because still none of her muscles was responding to commands from her brain. She couldn’t move her foot, hand, head – nothing. It was like a plant uprooted, lying in the sun and withering, but there is still life in it, and if someone put it into fertile soil and watered it, it would be reborn again. She felt thirsty. I don’t think she’s ever been so thirsty. She suffered from not being in control of the situation. She always had it. Two things that she has tried not to let go of in recent years are power and control. Suddenly she stopped having both. Something had made her incapacitated and chained her to bed, delivering the biggest blow that could be delivered to someone who was hedonist, perfectionist, and pedantic in attention to detail and cleanliness.
Suddenly a nurse walked by in front of her bed. But not an ordinary one, random. This one attracted her attention with her beauty and manner of behavior. Someone called her name, so she knew her name was Dorothy. She looked like a model, but at its best – not only beautiful, but also intelligent and sex-appealing at the same time, one that some men are afraid of. She had beautiful, long and extremely well-proportioned legs. Black, short-cut hair. A pendant with a large frog on the neck. If Ruda were a man, this is what she would like for her wife. Even though she hadn’t met her yet, hadn’t even spoken a word with her, she already knew that she was someone she could trust here. The only one I want to trust. She fell in love with her at first sight.
– Ms. Monika, can you hear me? Dorothy leaned over Redhead’s bed and repeated the question. – Ms. Monika, can you hear me?
Yeah, I can hear you! Red shouted. Yes! I hear you my beautiful, I can hear and see you. I love you!
Dorothy looked Monika almost straight in the eyes and repeated the question for the third time. After a while, she turned away from the bed and threw it towards her friend who was writing something down in the papers:
– He’s not in contact with her. Vegetable.
What vegetable ?! How is there no contact with me ?! The redhead protested even louder. I’m talking to you, Dorota!
The nurse was walking slowly towards the duty room. The redhead felt that there was nothing she could do. Even that “felt” was completely out of place. After all, she felt nothing. She wanted to jump out of bed, run to Dorothy and stop her, but she couldn’t. As if someone had cut off her head and put it to the rest of her body just to create the impression that Monika Michalak is still a normal person. In fact, everything, including the face, was already an independent entity, detached from the nerve tissue folded into the furrows between the bony lobes of the skull. She was like an illusionist model lying on a table, which suddenly slides into two unequal parts – on the one, the smaller one, only the head with moving eyes is left, and the rest is lying on the table like a piece of a pig that has just been killed. The inability to make any movement with any part of her body had become a fact for her. At this point, she realized that she was no longer a being in control of her body. Something disconnected her brain from the rest of her body. He has worked so far, but outside the system.
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She lost track of the passing of time. Did she no longer remember when she got to the emergency room and the hospital? Did it happen yesterday, a week ago, or maybe this morning? It’s been a month, two or three? It was the first time she had been in a position where she couldn’t date. When she woke up, she asked herself, is it today or is it tomorrow? How long have I been sleeping? Based on the intensity of the light, she tried to guess whether it was night or day. If during the day she had not heard the nurses talking to each other about what they would be doing when they came home from work, in the evening of the week or on the weekend, she had no idea what day it was. She was losing track of the hours. She had no idea that the dream she had just woken up from was just an hour’s nap, not the start of the next day. She didn’t know what time she fell asleep or woke up. Nobody gave her such information, there was no clock on the wall, and if it hung somewhere, it was in a place where her eyes could not reach. She lay staring at the ceiling.
F *** wa! How much time has passed? What’s the day? – she asked dozens of questions for which she had no answer.
She fell asleep. The examination woke her again. They tapped her again with some small hammer, hit her knee lightly, dragged her across the foot. She felt the touch. She heard and saw. So I’m not really dead, she thought. She tried to run her eyes over the cables that were pinned to her body. She heard many questions that were answered only in her mind, though she had the impression that she was shouting at the entire hospital. Tired from the excess of emotions, noise and interest in her person, she fell asleep again.
The fragment comes from the book “Damn me hit me” by Łukasz Grass.
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