We joke around a lot. Everything makes us laugh, even the silliest thing.
Our situation is awful, but part of me is happier than I’ve ever been. Somewhere, in another reality, our bodies are dead or dying or trapped in ictal paralysis. But here, life is good.
Between games, Chiu reads medical journals with an intensity that doesn’t suit his age, like he’s searching for something. Whenever she gets a chance, Farah slips away and checks in on the baby on the neonatal ward.
One day, I decide it’s time to experiment with this place.
I’ve always liked rules. Rules mean predictability, order, safety. I can’t shake the idea that this place must have rules just like the ordinary world, just different ones. Science took us out of superstition and fear back there, I think, so maybe it can do the same here.
We’ve always been able to sense people in the ordinary world. For a while, I could still see them in Casualty. Now, it’s more of a feeling, a sense that somebody has just walked out of the room, or the impression that the space behind a closed door is not empty. I wonder if there’s a way to tease apart those feelings and see the people in the ordinary world again.
Communicate with them even.
I think of the videos I’ve watched on YouTube, about the way time flexes and bends when you’re not watching it. I wonder if that’s the secret to our fragile connection with home. I set myself up in the library like a hunter waiting for his prey. After a long time, my mind begins to relax. Time becomes liquid. I start to feel the people around me coming more clearly into focus. It’s not as simple as the idea that time moves more quickly here. Time here and time in the ordinary world are decoupled: free to move independently of each other except in the moments when they don’t. I don’t know how I know this. The knowledge comes to me as a kind of revelation. A certainty without origin.
If I wait long enough, I think, maybe I’ll slip into sync with the people in the library. Maybe we’ll connect, even though, in the same instant, I am lying unconscious in the street.
“What are you doing?” Chiu asks, looking up from his journal.
“Trying to see them,” I say.
Chiu shivers. “Are you sure you want to?”
After a while, I become aware of a man sitting at the end of the table. The first time I try to look at him, I twist my head too sharply and he’s gone. It takes a few more tries before I can hold my nerve long enough for the figure to fully take form: reading quietly, barely visible from the corner of my eye.
I force myself to stay calm as I turn to him. I can see him: studying, lost in intricate thoughts, his mind spread out and seeping like water into our world. I can feel the activity inside his head like spiders crawling around in the darkness. His eyes defocus and for a moment they lock on to mine. My heart stops. I wonder what it must feel like for him. A sense of unease? A shadow? I watch him fighting the feeling – the awareness of something – that his rational mind won’t accept. Then, with an urgent spasm, his rational mind loses and he gets up and leaves.
After he’s gone, I realize that he’s left his notebook. I know, somehow, that if I take my eyes off it, it will be gone too. He still holds it in his mind so it’s still tethered to the ordinary world and the idea of it is not fully in ours yet.
But maybe it could be?
I stare hard at the book. I feel the silent tug of war, the isness of the book loosening from the man’s thoughts as he goes about his day, my own mind closing around it. After a while, ten or twenty minutes of my time, the book begins to look more solid. I reach forward and pick it up.
“It’s stillness,” I call to Chiu excitedly. “That’s how it works. If something doesn’t move and people in the ordinary world stop thinking about it, the thing seeps into this world. Buildings, furniture, stale food, but not people.”
“Makes sense,” Chiu remarks, glancing up again, only briefly, from his journal.
The discovery makes me giddy with excitement. There are rules here. Different ones to the ones we’re used to, but rules all the same. Rules make the world more solid, less precarious, less terrifying. I am like one of Farah’s prisoners, chained up and scratching my theories of the shadows into the dirt, taking comfort in my own stories.
When Farah gets back, I tell her about it and we swig warm Cokes in celebration and christen our world “the Stillness”. Farah and Chiu congratulate me. I know they’re only humouring me, because they see how pleased I am with myself, but in this place we’ll take any excuse we can for a party. Farah sings pop songs – it turns out she has an incredible voice – and we all half dance, half bounce on our mattresses and spin on the spot until we’re dizzy and nauseous and it feels as if the whole planet is cartwheeling beneath us.
The next day, after Chiu and Farah have had their fill of losing at Uno, I find myself back in the casualty department.
It’s cold and empty, shadows line every corner even though there’s no direct light to cast them. There are none of the glimpses of the ordinary world I saw when I first arrived. Just a heavy, disused feeling. Unease crawls over me. I remember staggering in here, my brain on fire, my thoughts splintered into jagged fragments. I wonder what would have happened if I hadn’t met Farah, if her presence hadn’t grounded me, helped me hold on to myself. Would I have lost my mind? Would I have torn myself apart? I don’t think I’d have been as stoical as Chiu.
All you’ll want to do is close your eyes and wait it out.
I approach the big concertina doors that mark the entrance. After yesterday’s successes, I think I might be able to pull the same trick again and figure out why the outside affects us so badly. Another experiment, a gradual exposure and a careful observation of my experiences. I imagine myself carving away my fear by creating a clearer picture of this world, a theoretical framework. My own take on quantum mechanics?
But as soon as I come close I realize that I’ve made a mistake. My muscles tighten and my heart rises into my throat. I stare at the unchanging emptiness of the outside world, the unguarded canopy of the cloudless sky, and I feel as if I’m teetering on the edge of an impossible chasm.
It’s just the ambulance bay. A patch of grey tarmac with faded yellow cross-hatching. But there’s something out there. It crowds around the dome of the sky, watching us, judging us. It’s the same dread I felt before all this, the same dread that precedes my seizures, the same dread that kept me welded to my house.
But worse, much worse.
I think about the weeks that followed my GCSEs. Recovering, taking it easy at first; Mum glad to know I was home and safe while she was out at work. Then the point where it would be normal to declare myself well. A breath of fresh air. A walk in the park. Buy a cake and go sit by the canal. Simple things. But I stood at the door instead and I felt the sky over my head bearing down, desperate to crush me, and I knew right then that I was going nowhere.
That’s when I came up with my new plan. Online retakes. It was OK, I told myself. I was regrouping, getting ready to crush my GCSEs after all, preparing for my future in London. But I knew even then that it was a lie: you can study for GCSEs at home, but you can’t take the exams at home.
I step back from the doors and let the safety of the hospital walls fold themselves around me. A new, bitter knowledge follows me inside.
This is ending, I think.
The thought comes from nowhere and fills me with fear. The safety of our routines in the hospital is as much of an illusion as the world I created for myself at home. Something is coming that will force us from this place, I think. And it will be terrible.
FOURTEEN
I rush back to the library filled with unreasonable fear and when I get back I find Chiu pacing around the room, his small, wiry body thrumming with excitement. “Where were you?” he says.
“I went for a walk.”
“I found something. Something important.”
I look at Farah, but she’s quiet and thoughtful, in a way that makes me anxious. “Go on,” I say.
“I’ve been reading. I read all the new journals. Usually it’s nothing – minor discoveries, science stuff – but this month it was different.”
