This is an experiment. A piece of fiction. The beginnings of a novel...
Where do we come
from?”
“What are we?”
“Where are we going?”
John
Daniels sat at a forward angle on the scuffed brown plastic chair in the
Visitors Room of the Dementia Ward at St. David’s Hospital. The low chatter of day-time television, with
its seemingly ubiquitous stream of banalities, the same banalities that rolled
and reproduced themselves into the small talk of the nursing staff and the two
other visitors in that cramped, unpleasant room, hindered any possibility of
gathering together his thoughts. He had
been sat there for a full hour and twenty minutes, his throat and eyes dry from
the permanent stifling atmosphere of the place.
He dipped his hand into his rucksack and rummaged around for some
painkillers lodged somewhere between the clutter of exercise books he’d vainly
attempted to mark. There was an inch or so of lukewarm mineral water left in
the bottle, just enough to wash down the last couple of tablets. From as far back as he could remember the
effort of swallowing the second tablet always brought with it a retching
sensation, a reflex that persisted all the way to his forty-fifth year.
Tension headaches were to be
expected at this time of year as the steady stream of teaching and marking
swelled to a cataract. He held his palms
against his temples and massaged them gently and rhythmically. His eyes eventually scanned the sun bleached
sheets of paper hanging from the cork-board enough times for them to irritate
him with their child-like script, and seemingly unselfconscious display of
ignorance in the small matters of punctuation and spelling. But when your eye has been trained to assess
academic work, errors and mistakes can’t help but stare blankly back at you
every time you gaze at a text. Those outdated
messages and memos, whose fading legibility formed a written residue of what
was once important, insistent, relevant, needlessly hung there. Mistakes mingled in an intelligible code
expunged of any usefulness.
“He’s awake. You can see him now.”
At the soft tones of the staff nurse John stood,
discordantly scraping the metal legs of the chair on the worn, cracked, tiles
of the Visitors Room floor and followed her into the Day Room.
“How has he been?”
“Quite bright these last few
days. His sleep has been restful.”
He wondered whether the restfulness owed itself principally
to an upping of medication. No more
words were exchanged between them. The
soft padding of their feet was the only sound as they briskly moved down the
corridor.
Crossing the threshold of the
Day Room was like entering another world.
This was another world. Mentally
he always checked himself and, with conscious effort, adjusted his perspective,
as he shifted hemispheres from his native environment of a bustling High
School, a life of domestic comforts and
unease, of long worn and much loved social routines, to this asphyxiating
domain of human deterioration and unravelling.
The room itself was sparsely
furnished. The décor of pastel shades,
of hospital bedside chairs pressed into service as casual lounge furniture, of
an assembling of largely kitsch reprints of paintings by vaguely familiar
artists – the kind only ever found on institutional walls – gave the impression
of a contrived, makeshift, artificial homeliness.
