Pure Brilliant White

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The machine clicks and whirs and makes a wheezing sound like an old smoker at the top of the stairs. There are tubes that connect it to a plastic cannula that’s been taped to my arm. I smell disinfectant and a harsh ammonia that reminds me of vomit. The room is bathed in a pure brilliant white light from a source I can’t make out. There’s a small metal table in the corner of the room and no shadows anywhere.

I used to have an office job in the city. I remember the marble floors in the reception area and a woman who smiled at me every day when I pressed my key card against the turnstile. There was a man too. I can’t remember if they were there at the same time or whether they took it in turns.

I can picture my desk. Two large screens showing windows with coloured numbers. The desk could be raised and lowered and I could sit or stand. Hundreds of other desks laid out in rows. A hubbub.

My throat is sore and I’d like some water.

“Hey,” I whisper, much quieter than I’d planned.

My job is just out of reach. What I actually did. Or the names of the people I worked with. I can imagine them in the office, their silhouettes, clothes, but their faces are blank, the skin stretched tight in pink or brown.

It’s like waking from a dream, the memory fumbled like a tumbling stone slipped from wet fingers into a deep dark pool.

There’s a familiar metallic taste in my mouth or it might be garlic. I remember how my father could always detect it in food. I have a memory that it disgusted him although I can’t think why or even picture his face. I know what he represents, his relationship to me, but he’s an abstract, a concept, imprecise.

I’m on a bed, my head heavy on a pillow.

There is a sound from outside this room that could be an alarm although its volume doesn’t suggest urgency.

“Hello?”

My voice is weak and reedy. My throat dry.

The tube in my arm is red which suggests blood. I can’t see whether it’s pumping in or out. It connects to one of the machines that I can only make out in my peripheral vision. It pumps and sucks and there’s an electronic pulse every few seconds. Regular, like a heartbeat.

The room is unlike any hospital I have been to. Everything clean and brand new. The emptiness a presence, a physical thing. I had an accident years ago. My leg, I think, but the details elude me now, my injuries vague.

There are no windows but I have a sense it was light outside and now it’s dark. A man enters the room, checks the machine, looks at me, and leaves. I am unable to move or communicate with him. After he has gone I am unable to remember anything about him, his clothes, what he looked like.

I try not to think about him. It makes me panic when I do as nothing makes sense.

“Are you there?”

The words hang like bats in a tree. Not in the room which seems to swallow sound and light. But in my head. Stretched rubber. Or umbrellas. Black and torn.

I’m tired and I ache but I can’t sleep.

There are two more machines in the room. I don’t remember them being brought in. One is a screen with a plastic bag full of clear liquid. The other has cantilevered arms with different attachments on the ends. Like a giant knife. Those red ones hikers use, that open out to do various jobs.

There are two men in the room. They seem preoccupied with the machines.The men appear to change and then I wonder whether there are more, I’ve miscounted.

The room is bathed in light so harsh it is hard to be sure what I’m seeing.

The men are in silhouette or dark skinned, I can’t be sure.

I want to get up but my head is so heavy. I imagine there is liquid metal in the tubes and that perhaps it’s that that’s being pumped into my brain.

I am thirsty and then I’m not. My mouth moist although I haven’t drunk anything.

I am overwhelmed suddenly. A sense that my father will admonish me. That he will blame me for whatever has happened. And that my forgetfulness will be something too. Something to be ashamed of. An avoidable embarrassment.

I wonder whether the man shining a bright light in my eyes is my father. He has white stubble on his chin. Silver rimmed glasses. Coffee on his breath.

But there was an accident. Years ago, when I was at college. A drunk driver. My father on a pavement at night. My mother calling from overseas. ‘I have sad news Timothy.’

“Timothy?”

It has become a question and none of the men in the room answer.

“Timothy,” I whisper.

The machine with the arms is buzzing. A high-pitched whine.

“I have sad news Timothy.”

The figure operating the machine could be my mother. I haven’t seen her in years. She has an expressionless face. Benign. Her eyes softly closed against the light.

I remember her in the coffin. Her pale face framed in yellow silk.

“I have sad news Timothy.”

I want to see my body. To know if it is hurt, or broken. I’m not in pain but I can’t feel anything.

I’d like to lift my head from the pillow, to be reassured that everything is ok. That I’m going to be ok.

I try and communicate this to the person who spoke. The person who isn’t my mother. Who can’t be my mother.

“Timothy,” I whisper. But this is not what I want to say, not what I meant.

The machine is at work, its arms a blur.

The people in the room have formed a semi-circle at the bottom of my bed and I can only see the silhouettes of their heads. I appreciate how quiet it was. The sucking and beeping. Now the room is filled with a high-pitched rasping sound. I’m reminded of the dentist. Metal on enamel.

I can turn my head and there is another bed on white rubber wheels. A patient, perhaps, shrouded in white gauze and another robot machine alongside. It’s being pushed by one of the men, and guided by another. Their expressions suggest a delicacy. That whatever is on the trolley is precious.

I taste the garlic again and my head fills with the metal liquid. I feel like it might pull me through the bed to the centre of the earth.

If I close my eyes I can turn my head to face the ceiling again. The pressure on my neck eases a little.

I fight to stay conscious, my focus struggling with the blank white sheet of the ceiling.

The rasping sound has become a vibration that I feel in my teeth.

I’m aware of a second machine that’s performing a choreographed dance.

There was a man who I loved. His body with mine. That sense of not knowing where one of us ended, the other began.

An apartment in the city. Or I may be misremembering. Perhaps it’s just a photo I can see. Something in a magazine.

I was a child and I had parents and a sister.

My sister. A twin.

We were together, in nature. Beside a lake. A beach of tiny rounded stones. Snow-capped mountains reflected in the still water. Our mother and father preparing food. Cold meat on a wooden board. Chicken thighs wrapped in foil. A breast sliced into a dozen pieces.

And before that, in a liquid heartbeat. Together inside our mother who is not here, who is not in this room.

My sister, who wanted to be a boy. Who wanted to be me.

Timothy. Timothy, her brother.

The boy who wanted to be a girl.

I try so hard to hold onto this thought that I think I might expire. That all of the energy in the universe is not enough to hold onto this memory, so clear yet fleeting. A feather on the wind.

My sister. And a boy who wanted to be a girl.

I feel the gravity in the room ease. The great weight of me relax.

Happiness washes my body. An external force that I can feel.

I lift my head a little.

There are organs in metal dishes. A complex web of tubes connected to the machines and each other.

It strikes me suddenly that I may be dead. The wave of euphoria retreats as fast as it was upon me. Perhaps these are the last flickers from my synapses. Electrical impulses from something that is no more.

I let my head fall heavy again.

The man in an apartment. His lips on mine. He tastes of white wine. Olive brine.

My sister in tears. Holding hands across the coffin. Our mother at peace.

“Timothy.”

Her voice feint. A memory of a memory. But clear and irrefutable.

For a moment I think she is in the room. One of the silhouettes perhaps.

A sound like metal on stone. The hiss of a spray.

I am walking from the street into the building where my office is. Perhaps the first time in my sister’s clothes. The temptation to lick the lipstick from my lips. Sweat in my armpits, down my back. The thrill and the fear, of being seen. Two conflicting emotions. The woman on the front desk smiling with all her face. Her eyes whispering to me across the marble foyer. ‘I see you.’

“Timothy.”

Another whisper, here in this room of pure brilliant white. Something of who I was in this ocean of confusion.

My name is lost to the buzzing and sucking of the machines. Clicking and whirring and a sense at my periphery that the two machines are in a dance.

I try to think back to the last thing before this room. I conjure an accident. A car knocking me from my bike. A masked man with a knife. A steep flight of stairs, my hand clutched to my heart. I hold each image and examine it like a snow globe. A tiny faked scene. A detective searching for clues, time dismantling any evidence. But the only real thing I can imagine is the woman at the front desk at my work. ‘I see you.’

I stand tall in the foyer of my office building, my chin held high.

‘I see you.’

My sister is with me, trying on a suit. It will be mine. We are the same height and build. She looks fantastic and is framed by the skyline of the city. Perhaps we are in my apartment. My boyfriend and me, and my sister.

“You can look me and up and down. All of me.”

“I see you,” I say. “I see you Bryony.”

“Bryony,” I mouth, the word barely audible in the room. My throat dry again.

“Timothy.”
An echo of sorts. Imprecise. A fairground mirror.

Our mother’s womb. Before the names we were given. Just one heartbeat, all around. Nothing yet decided upon.

“Tim.”

My sister’s voice. It’s as if she’s in the room. Above the sucking and whirring and buzzing, she is somehow here.

“Tim.”

Faint, but I’m sure it is her. My sister. My twin.

Across from me, a bed. A machine and its robotic dance. Meat heaped into stainless steel dishes. I can make out bone and flesh, another body.

I bump against the edge of a memory. It is dark and without form.

My sister, who wants to be a boy.

And me, her brother, a twin. Who wants to be a girl.

It is pitch black and unreachable. A vague presence at the back of a cave. An ideaunable to fully form.

And all around me pure brilliant white.