The Coma Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  part one

  Chapter 1.

  Chapter 2.

  Chapter 3.

  Chapter 4.

  Chapter 5.

  Chapter 6.

  Chapter 7.

  Chapter 8.

  Chapter 9.

  Chapter 10.

  Chapter 11.

  Chapter 12.

  part two

  Chapter 1.

  Chapter 2.

  Chapter 3.

  Chapter 4.

  Chapter 5.

  Chapter 6.

  Chapter 7.

  Chapter 8.

  Chapter 9.

  Chapter 10.

  Chapter 11.

  Chapter 12.

  Chapter 13.

  part three

  Chapter 1.

  Chapter 2.

  Chapter 3.

  Chapter 4.

  Chapter 5.

  Chapter 6.

  Chapter 7.

  Chapter 8.

  Chapter 9.

  Chapter 10.

  Chapter 11.

  Chapter 12.

  Chapter 13.

  Chapter 14.

  Chapter 15.

  Chapter 16.

  epilogue

  Praise for The Coma

  “[A] dreamy Kafkaesque head trip.”—Entertainment Weekly

  “Quicksilver prose . . . spooky and compelling. Garland . . . cool[s] his prose down to its most liquid essence. Very quickly, it feels like we too are locked in the coma with Carl. And finishing the book is the only way out.”—St. Petersburg Times

  “Urgent and unsettling . . . compelling and chilling.”

  —The Observer

  “[Carl’s] voice as a narrator is unstudied, graceful, and honest. When he wakes to a familiar and uncannily altered world, we don’t pity him so much as identify with his displacement—it is at first something akin to a feeling we’ve all had on days when a hangover or recent trauma or just simple lack of sleep has made the world into a stranger. The natural grace of Carl’s voice is a big draw, and the scenes evoke the lunatic logic of dreams. The Coma resembles a novella in one other way: It’s a quick read. With short chapters and plenty of illustrations, the book is well-paced for summer reading, perhaps best saved for one of those humid nights when the city has gone to sleep and darker things are stirring.”—Salon.com

  “A bold premise . . . intensely readable. The eerie melodrama of the subconscious is brilliantly explored.”—New Statesman

  “Incredibly simple and wonderfully complex, suspenseful and elliptical, all at once.” —Cargo

  “[An] ingenious jeu d’esprit, whose oddity and dark charm are enhanced by forty woodcuts by the author’s father, Nicholas Garland.”—Time Out

  “Entertaining . . . this Möbius strip of a novel should fuel the cult following that Garland cultivated among twentysomethings with The Beach and the screenplay for 28 Days Later, which imagined an England overrun by zombies. Like that film, this book follows a man who awakens from a coma inside a London hospital. But in this case, the dawning horrors he faces might all be inside his head.The spare, sly story takes several Kafkaesque turns, its foreboding mood heightened by the woodblock illustrations of Garland’s father. We watch, admiring, as Carl dopes out his states of consciousness and logically navigates a course back toward normal. But just when the facts start coming into focus, the view blurs up again, and we cannot help but smile.”—Booklist

  “Fans won’t be disappointed. The Coma has many of the hall-marks of Garland’s output to date: a narrative spinning out from an act of extreme violence; popular music playing a crucial neurological role in modern life; a few ethereal Eastern grace notes; and an enigmatic protagonist . . . moving through a sequence of bizarre events. Yet behind the fractured distance, a certain human warmth. A solid backbeat below the trip-hop. A perfectly polished cameo, a little world as strange as you would find in Gogol or a Stevenson tale, complete in every necessary detail. At its center, a Kafkaesque philosophical/psychological conundrum. Garland has both inverted and subverted the process he began in 28 Days Later. The boundary between wakefulness and dream is blurred. This abstraction is underscored by the illustrations. The Coma is crisp, intelligent, and engrossing; and, with the woodcuts, grimly beautiful.”

  —The Glasgow Herald

  Praise for The Tesseract A New York Times Notable Book

  “All but flawless, a tour de force of brilliant narration and psychological acuity. The Tesseract has the traits of a thriller, but it’s also a love story, a character study, a portrait of life among Manila’s street kids, even an experiment in narration . . . A feverish, affecting, altogether captivating story . . . Garland also lavishes his characters with quirks that ring true, outbursts of human oddity that transform a moment that most authors would rush past into something memorable.”—The Washington Post

  “Mr. Garland is a natural at orchestrating violent set pieces with deadpan panache, but he also proves in this novel that he can create odd, oddly sympathetic people with unexpected inner lives. [The Tesseract] reconfirms his prodigious and diverse talents.”—The New York Times

  “Extraordinary ... Remarkable ... Garland is a master at capturing that elastic moment before tragedy rips through the surface of ordinary life. Even in moments of explosion, he catches every contradictory thought of terror and compassion.”

  —The Christian Science Monitor

  “As in his brilliant debut novel, The Beach, there is a powerful narrative drive, exotic locations that unfold like a corrupt and mysterious flower, and a moody intelligence that holds everything together. Is Alex Garland the new Graham Greene? After The Tesseract, the question needs to be asked.”—J. G. Ballard

  “Extraordinary and riveting . . .”

  —San Francisco Chronicle Book Review

  Praise for The Beach

  “A furiously intelligent first novel . . . a book that moves with the kind of speed and grace many older writers can only dream about. Just as impressively, Garland has written what may be the first novel about the search for genuine experience among members of the so-called X Generation . . . that’s not snide or reflexively cynical. . . . The Beach combines an unlikely group of influences—Heart of Darkness, Vietnam war movies, Lord of the Flies, the Super Mario Brothers video games—into . . . ambitious, propulsive fiction.”—The Washington Post

  “Absorbing . . . suspenseful . . . The Beach is impressive in its group portrait of a new generation of young vagabonds. Raised in an era of diminished confidence, they have set out in search of something that feels genuine and fulfilling. What they find turns out to be not utopia but hell. A genuine page-turner, full of color and menace.”—The New York Times Book Review

  “Remarkable . . . That real rarity: a subtle and complex novel that reads like a comet. Echoing Dog Soldiers as much as Lord of the Flies, Garland discovers the hell lurking in heaven’s tide pools while delivering as much karmic payback as anything since Treasure Island. Take it for what it is: a luminous voyage into the dark side of humanity’s increasingly tenuous dreams of paradise.”—Salon.com

  “One great book . . . The Beach will astonish readers.”

  —USA Today

  “Generation X has its first great novel . . . A wonderful adventure and allegory. Lord of the Flies . . . On the Road . . . Animal Farm . . . The Beach can hang with those classics on a purely literary level and as a postmodern update of them.”—The Sunday Oregonian

  also by alex garland

  The Beach

  The Tesseract

  28 Days Later

  (screenplay)

  THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Pengui
n Group (USA) Inc.

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  South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2004 by Alex Garland

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form

  without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in

  violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  RIVERHEAD is a registered trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  The RIVERHEAD logo is a trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  eISBN : 978-1-594-48085-0

  1. Coma—Patients—Fiction. I. Title.

  PR6057.A639C

  823’.914—dc22

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  part one

  Until the telephone rang, the only sound in my office was the scratching of my pen as I made margin notes, corrections, and amendments.

  I pressed the speaker button.

  “Carl speaking.”

  “Carl.”

  “Catherine! I meant to send you home hours ago—”

  She interrupted me. “I am at home. I’ve been home, been out to see a film, eaten a pizza, paid the baby-sitter, and watched the end of Newsnight.”

  The clock on my desk read 11:42. I turned in my chair. The window of my office was floor to ceiling. Through the window, I could see the city glitter and the night sky. No stars—a low cloud layer made the sky glow almost red.

  Catherine continued. “I’m calling because the last tube leaves in twenty-five minutes.”

  At the underground station, I kept reading through papers. I made more notes in the margins, and the pen slipped as the papers buckled under the pressure of the nib. From somewhere, an echo of laughter bounced down the tiled walls and corridors. I looked up as the sound faded, but I was the only person on the platform. Even so, the noise unnerved me a little. It was humor-less and predatory.

  I folded my papers away—the loose pages in my hand made me feel vulnerable. As I closed my bag, closed the worn brass clasp, I felt a suck of air as my train approached.

  The only other passenger on my carriage was a girl in her early twenties, sitting at the far end of the car, reading a book.

  Just before the doors closed, I heard the laughter again. The noise was closer and clearer than the first time, but the platform was still empty—from what I could see of it, looking each way over my shoulder, tilting my head backwards towards the glass in order to increase my angle of sight. Then the doors closed and the train gave a slight lurch. I looked back at the girl. She was still immersed in her novel.

  I stared ahead at my reflection in the opposite window and watched my head rock with the movement of the carriage.

  When the train had reached its fastest speed, something appeared in my peripheral vision. A shadow in an area of lightness. I glanced in its direction, and saw that the faces of four young men had appeared through the dirt and thick glass of the doors between the carriages. Their heads were crowded into the frame of the window.

  Moments later, the doors opened. As the men moved from their carriage to mine, everything was startling and loud. The pounding sound of the wheels on the tracks, the gasping sound of the subway walls as they rushed past.

  The young men crowded the girl in the same way they had crowded the window. They leaned over her, hanging on the straps, blocking her from my view.

  One of them reached down to grab the bag between her legs. There was a scuffle of some sort, which temporarily the girl seemed to win. She took her bag by the handle and stood, pushing the men aside. Most of this I saw from the corner of my eye.

  The girl walked the full length of the carriage towards me and sat down, precisely blocking my reflection in the opposite window. She struck me as brave. I think it was that she was still holding her book in one hand, and one finger was still keeping the page she had been reading.

  “Excuse me,” she said. “Do you mind if I sit here?”

  I shook my head and held her gaze and hoped my expression seemed reassuring. I didn’t need to look sideways to know the young men would follow her down the carriage. I wondered what would happen next.

  The young men appeared; one of them pulled at the girl’s bag again; her wrist was grabbed; her arm was twisted in order to make her release her grip on the handle; she shouted.

  I didn’t feel sure of what was happening. I didn’t know what to do.

  I stood. I raised a hand. I said, “Hey.”

  As a small boy, I once fell backwards from a high swing and hit the back of my head hard on the ground. As this accident was happening, I watched it remotely, from the perspective of the branches of the tree to which the swing was tied.

  Now, through the side windows of the train, as if I were hovering between the external glass and the subway walls, I saw myself walking backwards through the carriage, holding up my arms around my face and upper body. The young men were attacking me. Many of their blows looked as if they glanced harmlessly off my head and shoulders, and some missed me altogether. But some blows connected hard.

  My movements seemed slow and confused. My hands swung out a couple of times to ward the men off, but the gesture looked no more fierce than if I was swatting away a fly. Soon my legs buckled, and I fell backwards against the seats, then rolled down to the floor. From my position outside the carriage, I watched as the young men kicked me into unconsciousness.

  1.

  Still as a remote viewer, I remained near my unconscious body. Not in continuous observation—I saw myself in a series of slow snapshots that must have been separated by several hours if not days.

  In the first image, and the briefest, I saw myself in the back of an ambulance. My shirt was open and covered in blood, and an oxygen mask was being held to my face.

  In the next image, I was lying on a hospital bed, in what I imagine was an intensive care unit. I was still wearing an oxygen mask; my head and chest were bandaged; I was connected to machines. Catherine, my secretary, was sitting beside the bed, and she was crying. A male doctor stood behind her. He was reaching towards her, as if about to make a gesture of comfort, but he never seemed to cover the remaining few inches to complete the gesture, and his fingers remained floating above her shoulder like a faith healer’s.

  In another image, I had been moved from the open ward to a private room, and the girl from the train carriage was in the room with me. She was holding a bunch of chrysanthemums and a card, and she looked uncomfortable. She spent more time looking at the flowers she held than at my face, which was now out of bandages, and showing its bruises, but sleeping peacefully. The girl stayed with me a short while. Her lips moved occasionally, but I missed the words. Eventually she put the flowers in a vase and the card on my bedside table an
d left.

  In the final image, a man—a nurse, I think—sat on my bed and talked to me, and as he talked he looked with great concentration at my face. Again, I couldn’t hear the words, but from his posture and expressions I knew he was speaking in a very direct manner. I assume he was trying to wake me up.

  The male nurse was still with me when I finally did wake up. Back in my body now, I opened my eyes with some effort, arching my eyebrows to pull the lids apart and break the sleep crust. A damp cloth or a sponge was wiped against my face. I asked for water, and the nurse put the lip of a glass to my mouth. When I swallowed, I felt as if I could trace precisely the path of the water down my throat. I thought I could feel it pooling in my stomach, and the surface rippling as I shifted my position.

  “I am alive, then,” I said eventually.

  “Yes,” said the male nurse.

  “Am I badly injured?”

  “You’re recovering.”

  “Good,” I said. “That’s good to hear.”

  2.

  Sometime later, I sat in a wheelchair and talked to two policemen. The older of the two did most of the speaking. He wanted to know if prior to the attack I had laid a hand on the young men, or assaulted them in any way.

  “Absolutely not,” I replied. “I mean, I was trying to stop them from robbing the girl. But all I did was stand up. The next thing I knew, they were punching me. I wouldn’t have had time to assault them, even if I had wanted to.”