Of Those Asleep
Peter arrived at work hungover, nursing the dull throbs of a headache. A little flash of conscience reared its hopeful head, suggesting that he should call in sick, as after all, a doctor would need his head clear and resolve steady to work effectively. This little voice soon wavered, a flickering, trailing light in the darkness, blocked by a selfishness that it could not penetrate. Peter had long resented his once youthful, optimistic promise to the hippocratic oath. Now middle aged, he saw himself as little more than an underworld ferryman, slowly delivering lost souls to their final resting places. The alcohol gurgled in his stomach. He felt hot. His forehead was tight with tension. He attempted to shrug it off. In his mind, in the end, it didn’t really matter what state he was in. As the most senior doctor of a coma ward, he felt his responsibilities were limited to the simple basic checkups for people who, as far as he could tell, could feel no pain or stimulus. So long as nobody made a miraculous, medically defying recovery over the duration of his shift, his years of experience would allow him to tune out, switch on the autopilot, and rely on his well-trained muscle memory to carry him through.
The air in the room felt stagnant, like a heavy summer's day before a storm. Visitors to the room would often shift reflexively, trying to adjust themselves to the temperature. Most wouldn’t last the hour, finding the heat and unending silence unbearable. Those that were more superstitious even subconsciously began to fear the place. To Peter, the ward represented a clinical, cold comfort. There was something he found oddly tender and bittersweet about being surrounded by the presence of near death. It reminded him that, despite his anxieties and worries, we were all corporeal, finite beings that ended our brief spans as equals.Some of the nurses under Peter’s charge did not find the room as comforting, and were similarly disturbed by Peter's seemingly inappropriate cheeriness. Those more sensitive on the ward had reacted indignantly when he described those in his care as “vegetables.” They argued that it was not the sort of language a caregiver should employ to their patients. He had suggested “drains” instead, reminding his colleagues of the families of the patients who rarely visited their unresponsive charges. His sombre observations had long made him unpopular.
“Good morning everyone,” he announced upon entering the ward. His voice lingered awkwardly through the air. There was no reply, no echo. The ward was devoid of any other conscious soul. Peter thought nothing of it. It was no secret that the department was understaffed, and due to his sharp tongue and blasé demeanour, his colleagues often kept a civil distance.
“Good morning, Doctor,” replied Peter to himself.
They say that talking to yourself was the first sign of madness. Peter often dryly countered that technically he wasn’t talking to himself; nobody specified that the people you were talking to had to be awake. The comatose were the perfect, idle audience for Peter’s everyday musings, off colour jokes and trivial observations.
Normally, Peter relished the silence and lack of pleasantries his personality had afforded him. Today, with his headache, the permeating silence seemed grating. The subsiding intoxication had made him hyper aware of the ringing in his own ears, the waxiness of his skin, the stale taste in his mouth. His body had long punished him for chasing his vices. Just last year, in a personal low point, Peter had woken up the next morning after a particularly indulgent night out, still clothed, still drunk, holding his car keys, having clearly driven himself home well over the limit. Whilst he never allowed himself to overstep quite as badly again, it still didn’t deter him from his drinking. Before, Peter had drank to try and loosen up, seeing it as a social lubricant essential for a good time with friends. Since that incident, the main driving force behind the continued drinking seemed to be shame. He liked to think of himself as a good person. Whatever negative thing he had imparted upon the world, his argument seemed to be that he had more than made up for it by being a doctor, and caring for the vulnerable. This non verbal, personal quarrel was getting very heated this morning, his conscious admonishing himself for arriving at work in such a state. Oddly, he found himself craving a drink, internally reasoning that perhaps a late morning hair of the dog would clear out his sinuses. Peter didn’t think he could count himself as an alcoholic. At least he hadn’t started bringing a hip flask to work, he thought. He would concede, however, that he had been turning up to work more and more hungover. In fact, he had been drinking more full stop, ever since…
No. He stopped himself. He would not allow the voice in his head to continue that conversation.
Peter felt a dull vibration hum in his pocket. He pulled out his mobile phone and was surprised to see it was ringing, calling from an unknown number. He answered it, only to hear five or so seconds of a little boy breathing. Peter hung up, assuming perhaps that a child had accidentally fumbled with their parent’s smartphone, whilst playing some game designed to keep them occupied. It was unusual to find his phone even on, as he usually switched it off during work hours. Unperturbed, he turned it off and placed it back into his pocket. He began to start his routine, checking up on the eight patients in the ward. Despite the crueller observations he had made to his peers about those in his care, he had come to grow fond of his patients, enjoying his one sided conversations with them, and imagining what their lives would have been like before they had ended up in their current states. He only knew their names, medical histories and the reason they had been placed or fallen into a coma in the first place. There was no real indication of their personalities or temperaments, but still Peter liked to guess or exaggerate the kind of people he was looking after. Most in the ward were elderly, and he imagined wartime espionage and illegitimate children, and one was younger, in his early forties, having fallen into a coma following a riding accident. Peter imagined the extravagant wealth of the younger man, of cocktail parties and yachts in Monaco. The fantasy was a startling contrast to the bed bound man in front of him. He wondered if he dreamt how odd it must seem to have ended up here.
After his observations were complete, the smell of bleach seemed to irritate Peter’s heightened senses, and he found himself getting lightheaded. Despite overdoing it the night before, Peter was resolute he would not allow his excesses to negatively impact upon his work. He paced quickly across the ward, hoping to go to the bathroom, and splash some cold water upon his face, or better yet, find some aspirin. He felt disgraced he had let his own sickness interfere and impair his own senses again. He placed his hand on the cold door handle, and pushed in gently, but found that he was unable to exit. He tried again, but to no avail. Peter sighed, patting his pockets, hoping that he had remembered to bring a master key into work, but found to his frustration that it belonged to the many trinkets he had forgotten at home in his hungover rush to the hospital. He did a small circuit of the ward, finding that each of the other exits were similarly locked. It seemed peculiar that despite his noisy tampering with the door, he could not alert any of the other nurses or orderlies who may have had their own keys.
“Hello?” he called out. Nothing. No response. He repeated his call several more times, daring to increase his volume, as if worried he might wake his permanently sleeping patients. It wasn’t that the ward was understaffed today as he had previously thought; it was completely empty.
Wrapping and rattling the door handle with a tight grip, Peter attempted to dislodge the heavy door from its frame. He was getting increasingly angry. This kind of prank was the sort of thing that he would expect from young first year medical students, not the now seasoned professionals who worked tirelessly under him.
“It’s a very good practical joke, well done,” he bellowed to nobody in particular.
“But I must remind everyone about our open door policy in regard to fire safety!”
No answer. Peter took out his phone, and began to scroll through the relevant numbers. He rang every nurse and doctor he had the number of, every orderly, every person with access to keys and swipe cards. Each phone call ended abruptly in the same way, as his phone was unable to receive any signal. He pointed his phone to the ceiling, fruitlessly attempting to avoid any further interference. The phone pinged, coming back to life, and rang again. Relieved, Peter celebrated this small mercy. It must have been one of the orderlies, out to an early lunch or something, suddenly remembering he had locked a senior doctor in the coma ward. Vindicated, and revelling in this hopeful morsel, Peter began to rehearse the severe amount of reprimanding he would soon relay to his subordinate.
He held the phone to his ear, and found, to his confusion, that it was not one of the orderlies on the other end. What Peter heard was the same caller that had previously rang, a little boy breathing down the phone. Whilst the last time, Peter had dismissed it, this time he really listened. The boy sounded quiet, weak. It chilled him to his core. You didn’t have to be a doctor to know the sounds of someone severely hurt or unwell. It could have been a child with asthma, perhaps, or some kind of seasonal cold. But Peter well knew, after being privy to the last hours of many of his patients, when someone was taking their final breaths. Upset, still hoping it was someone playing an elaborate practical joke, he held the speaker close to his mouth and unleashed his frustrations down the line.
“Listen, whoever this is,” he shouted. “This isn’t funny. You’ve got the wrong number!”
It had to be someone playing tricks on him. The alternative was too awful to consider. The truth was that knew the sound of that boy’s breathing; it was a sound that had long since resided within the dark corners of his own nightmares. One morning he had switched on the local news to learn that an eight year old boy had been struck dead by a dangerous driver the previous evening. Upon watching the bulletin, Peter had wept for hours. It was the morning after the night he had driven home drunk, with no memory of the previous evening. He didn’t think, or rather he hoped, that it was him that had struck and killed the boy. He was a doctor, for god’s sake. Even in that state, he saved lives, he didn’t take them. He can’t have been the only dangerous driver out on the roads that night, but with no memory of the evening, there was no way of knowing for certain. His long familiar feeling of shame kicked in. Could it have been him? Did someone know something he didn’t? Was there CCTV footage or an eyewitness, someone to testify the awful possibility that he had struck a child, and driven off without stopping? He tried to silence that internal voice again, but it was only growing louder.
It was raining that night, it said. The roads were slippery. You knew you’d had too many, and still you drove.
“What do you want? Money?” he yelled down the phone. “You can’t prove anything!”
The ringing in his ears had become unbearable, no longer resembling any headaches he could explain away by a night of heavy drinking. He felt off balance somehow, as though his own senses were betraying him. There was something else. The room just felt….off, like it had become asymmetrical, too far weighted on one of the sides. When you work in the same ward for as long as Peter had, you become acutely aware of the very layout of the room. Peter knew the spaces between the patients beds, how many exits they had, even tiny, seemingly unimportant minutia like how many plug sockets there were. Peter’s stomach sank when he noticed the difference, when he noticed what had been added to the ward without him realising. How could he have missed it? Had a nurse wheeled it in when he struggled with the door, then snuck out again? Impossible. As laboured and noisy as his attempt to escape was, he still trusted his periphery to have noticed someone in the background working. That kind of hollow silence always broke when there was another member of his staff in the room, and yet he had missed something, as it was not there mere minutes ago when Peter had done his initial circuit.
There was a bed that hadn’t been there before. He had counted. Four on one side of the room, four on the other. There should only be eight beds in the room, and yet there were nine. The rational, scientific part of Peter’s brain thought that an inspection was needed, that he must have simply miscounted. Something more primal, more instinctive, was instead keeping Peter rooted firmly to the spot. He noted his breaths were getting shallow. He could feel his knuckles and jaw tighten, and the air grew colder around him. The other patients on the ward were recognisable faces he saw everyday, all visible, hooked up to ventilators. They were older too, all adults, mostly elderly. This new addition had their face obscured by a hospital sheet, and was much smaller. It was the body of a child.
Peter turned again to the door, to try and find some purchase to the handle, but it wouldn’t give. He was trapped. He turned from the new bed for a second, trying to apply his full weight to shatter the door from its hinges. His phone rang again, only to hear the same child breathing down the loud speaker, the same final breaths he had heard before.
The figure was standing, the sheet covering his head and body, only the protruding grey arms and legs giving the impression of a human shape. Its wet feet slacked across the soft vinyl of the hospital floor, awkwardly lolling towards Peter.
Peter closed his eyes, but could still hear that awful sound. It was the breathing that filled his waking nightmares, and the form of a boy that haunted his conscience walking towards him.
The phone lay silent, the breathing stopped. The apparition stood in front of Peter, silent. Its cold, wet hand pressed against Peter’s flesh.
For the first time, Peter felt envious of those in his care, asleep and unconscious to the world around them.
For the first time, he hoped he would wake.