MICHAEL WILDING
After the accident he lay for weeks in the still white ward. They fed him intravenously but scarcely expected him to live. Yet he did live, and when at last they removed the bandages from his eyes, it was found he could see. They controlled what he could see carefully, keeping the room dimmed, the blinds down, at first; but gradually increased his exposure to light, to the world around. Slowly his speech came back. He blocked for some time on words he could not remember, could no longer enunciate; but gradually his vocabulary returned. But he had lost sensation, it seemed. He could not smell the flowers Maria brought in to the small private ward. And when she gave him the velvety globed petals to touch, he could not feel them. All foods were the same to him. The grapes she mechanically bought, he could only see. They had neither touch nor taste for him. If he shut his eyes and returned to darkness again, he did not know what he was eating. Yet he was not totally without sensation—it was not as if he were weightless or bodiless. He was conscious of lying in bed day after day, his body lying along the bed. Perhaps because the constant pressure reached through to his numbed nerves. But the touch of Maria’s fingers on his cheeks, the kiss of her lips against his, he could not feel; nor mouth the taste of her.
And yet as he lay alone in that small white room, odd sensations came to him, brushed him with their dying wings. As if, lying there with only his thoughts and imaginings, he could conjure back the taste of grapes, the soft touch of Maria’s hand, the searching pressure of her kiss. They surprised him, these sensations; often they would make him wake from a slight sleep as if a delightful dream had achieved an actuality: but when he awoke he was always totally alone, and remembered nothing of any dream. It was often, as he lay there, as if someone had actually touched him, or forced grapes against his palate, and he would want to cry out at the unexpectedness of it. If imagination, it could only have been triggered by the workings of bis subconscious. He mentioned it to the nurses, and they said that it could be that he was getting his sensations back. He did not argue with them, pointing out that there were no correlatives to the sensations, no objects provoking them. It was like a man feeling pain in a foot already amputated: a foot he would not be getting back. The sensations were the ghosts of feelings he had once had, nerve memories of a lost past.
When released from hospital, Maria took him back to the house in the country. They made love that first night, but he could not feel her full breasts, her smooth skin, and making love to her was totally without sensation for him. Its only pleasures were voyeuristic and nostalgic: his eyes and ears allowed him to remember past times—like seeing a sexual encounter at the cinema. The thought came to him that the best way to get anything from sex now was to cover the walls and ceilings with mirrors, so that at least he could have a full visual satisfaction to replace his missing senses. But he said nothing to Maria. He said nothing, but he knew she realised that for him it was now quite hopeless.
He was woken in the night by a dream of intercourse, the excitement of fondling a body, the huge relief of orgasm. He lay awake, the vividness of it reminding him bitterly of what was now lost to him.
The early days back in the house he found disorienting. Within the white walls confining the ward, experience was limited for him. He saw little, encountered little; the disturbing nerve memories were few. But released, they swelled to a riot, as if exposure to the open world had revived dormant, dying memories for their final throes. Released, his body was a continual flux of various sensations, of smell, of taste, of touch; yet still with no sensations from his experiences. He walked beside the dung heap at the field’s corner, used to manure the land, and though he inhaled deeply hoping its pungency would break through his numbness, he could experience nothing. When Maria was not looking, he reached his hand into the dung: he felt nothing. A visual repugnance, but no physical sensation, no recoil of nausea.
Yet at tea suddenly the full pungency of the foul dung swept across to him; his hand, unfeeling, holding a meringue was swamped in the heavy, foul stickiness of the dung. He left the table, walked across to the window that looked out on to the wide lawns. There was nothing outside to provoke his sensations; and if there had been, how could his touch have been affected from outside? His touch and smell had not, as he’d momentarily hoped, returned. Maria asked what was the matter, but he said nothing. He went to the bathroom, but oddly did not feel nausea. He expected to, biting that momentarily dung-drenched meringue. But his stomach recorded no sensations. His intellect’s interpretation had misled him; his mind was interpreting a nausea he would have felt, in his past life, an existence no longer his.
Yet in bed—he went to bed early for he was still convalescing—as he reached out to fondle, hopelessly, Maria, who made love with him now more eagerly, more readily, more desperately, uselessly, pointlessly than ever before, his stomach was gripped by a sudden retching nausea, and he had to rush to the bathroom to vomit.
“My poor dear,” said Maria. “Oh, my poor dear.”
* * * *
He wondered whether he should rest again, to recover the placidity he had known in the hospital. But to rest in bed, although he could read or hear music, meant his life was so reduced, three of his five senses dead. To walk round the fields or into the village gave him stimulation for his two senses that remained.
But activity seemed disturbing. And provoked a riot of these sense memories, these million twitching amputated feet.
Then, one day, he realised bis senses were not dead.
It was a compound realisation, not a sudden epiphany. In the morning he had driven the car, and going too fast over the humpbacked bridge that crossed the canal, had provoked a scream from Maria. He had asked in alarm what was the matter.
“Nothing,” she said. “It’s just that it took the bottom out of my stomach, going over the bridge like that.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t realise I was going that fast and I didn’t feel it.”
And he had forgotten, till she reminded him, that the sensation existed.
They made love at noon, not because he could experience anything, but because in his dreams and in his waking nerve memories, he so often re-experienced the ecstasy in actuality denied him. He perhaps half hoped to recapture the experience. But never did.
Maria got up to cook lunch, absurdly spending great labour on foods he could not taste, perhaps hoping to lure his taste from its grave. She rushed from the kitchen to his bed when he gave a sudden cry. But he was laughing when she reached the bedroom.
“Sorry,” he said. “But your saying your stomach dropped out going over the bridge must have reminded me of the feeling. It just happened this minute, lying here.”
She touched his brow with her cool hand, whose coolness and presence he could not feel. He brushed her away, irritated by her solicitude. As he ate his lunch, he brooded over his cry of alarm. And later, buying cigarettes in the village shop, for the nervous habit that, he realised, had always caused him to smoke, not the taste, he came on the truth as his body was suffused with the sudden aliveness of intercourse, the convulsive ecstasy of orgasm.
“Are you all right, sir?” the shopkeeper asked.
“I’m fine, fine,” he said. “It’s, it’s ...”
“It’s nothing,” he was about to say mechanically, but it was ecstasy.
“It’s quite all right,” he said.
Walking back, he was elated at realising sensation was not denied him, but delayed. He looked at his watch and predicted he would taste his lunch at four o’clock. And sitting on the stile at the field corner, he did. In excitement he ran, his meal finished, to tell Maria, to tell her ecstatically that the accident had not robbed him of sensation, but dulled and slowed its passage along his nerves. When he tripped on a log and grazed his knee, ambivalently, he knew, that in three hours the pain would have travelled along his nerve to the brain: he waited in excitement for confirmation of his prediction, in anxiety about the pain it would bring.
* * * *
But his knowledge was a doubtful advantage. The confusions of senses before had been disturbing, but not worrying. It was the prediction now that tore him with anxiety. Cutting his finger while sharpening a pencil, he waited, tense, for the delayed pain; and even though cutting his ringer was the slightest of hurts, it caused three hours of anxiety. He worked out with Maria that the well-timed cooking of food could appetise his tasteless smell-less later meal; but few meals could produce rich smells three hours before serving. He could not do anything the slightest nauseating, like cleaning drains or gutting chickens, for fear of the context in which his senses would later register and produce in their further three hours the possibility of his vomiting. Defecation became nightmarish, could ruin any ill-timed meal, or intercourse. And ill-timed intercourse would ruin any casual urination. He toyed with the idea of keeping a log-book, so that by consulting what happened three hours back, he would know what he was about to feel. He experimented one morning, and in a sort of way it worked. For he spent so long noting down each detail in his book, he had little time to experience anything. He realised how full a life is of sensations, as hopelessly he tried to record them all.
He developed a device, instead, consisting primarily of a tape-recorder which he carried always with him. He spoke a constant commentary into it of his sensate actions and, through earphones, his commentary would be played back to him after a three-hour delay, to warn him of what he was about to feel. The initial three hours, as he paced the fields, were comparatively simple, though he worried at the limitations it would impose on his life and experience, having to comment on each trivial stumble, each slight contact. But after three hours had passed, and his bruised slow nerves were transmitting his sensations, the playback came in. And he found he could not both record his current activities in a constant flow, and hear a constant commentary on his three-hours-back activities, immediately prior to his sensations of those past ones. He braced himself for the predicted sensation that his recorded voice warned him of, and in doing so forgot to maintain his current commentary for his three-hours-hence instruction. And maintaining his commentary, he forgot to act on the playback and lost the value of its warnings. And returning again to it, intent on gaining from its predictions, he began to follow its record as instructions, and when he caught the word “stumble” from his disembodied voice, he stumbled in obedience, forgetting to hold himself still for the sensation of stumbling. And what, anyway, warned of a stumble, was he to do? Sit passively for the experience to flow through him and pass? He did not know how to benefit from his record. And what he had recorded as advice, seemed to become peremptory instruction, terse orders that his nerves responded to independent of his volition. The playback seemed to possess an awful authority, as if the voice were no longer his, and the announced experiences (which he had never felt) foreign to him; and at each random whim of the voice, distorted parodically from his own, his sensations would have inevitably to respond. And he the mere frame, the theatre for the puppet strings to be hung and tugged in. He could not, moreover, co-ordinate his commentary and playback: the one perpetually blocked the other, as he tried to hear one thing and say another. And he would confuse them and having spoken a sensation into the microphone before him would immediately prepare to experience it, confusing his commentary with the playback. And his sensations became as random to him as before in that maze of playback and commentary and memory. And when he did accidentally, reflexively, re-enact the activity his playback warned him to prepare for, then he had to record another Warning of that activity for his three-hours later sensation: and it was as if he were to be trapped in a perpetual round to the same single repeated stumble.
He abandoned notebooks and tape-recorders. He sat at the window awaiting his sensations. Sex became a nightmare for him, its insensate action and empty voyeurism bringing only the cerebral excitement of a girlie magazine, its consequence a wet dream, the tension of waiting for which (sometimes with an urgent hope, sometimes with resistant wished-against tension) would agonise him—keep him sleepless or, in the mornings, unable to read or move. And the continual anxiety affected his whole sexual activity, made him ejaculate too soon, or not at all; and he had to wait three hours for his failures to reach him and then, knowing his failure, was reminded of it cruelly three hours after his cerebral realisation.
He could not sleep. Any activity three hours before sleep, would awaken him—bumping into a door, drinking wine, switching off a record player. The sensations would arouse his tense consciousness. He tried to control this, spending the three hours before sleep in total stillness and peace, but the tension of this created its own anxiety and produced psychosomatic pains of which he would be unaware until they Woke him.
He thought back with a sort of longing to his hospital bed, when without stimulation he had experienced only the slightest of sensations. But within those bare walls of the bare room, he might almost have been in a tomb. If life were only bearable without sensation, what was the life worth that he could bear?
Maria came back from town one day to find him dead in the white, still bathroom. He had cut his arteries in a bath in the Roman way, in hot water, now rich vermilioned, to reduce the pain of dying. Though, she told herself, he would not have felt anything anyway; he had no sensation.
But three hours afterwards, what might he have felt?