The Reflection by Hugo Wilcken Read Free Book Online Page B

classmate, somewhere in Murray Hill. We’d been psychiatry interns together at Bellevue. He was in uniform, and I’d asked him what he was up to. He’d said that he’d been working at a military hospital. Setting up an experimental unit there. He’d been vague on the details, and whatever he’d told me about it, I’d long forgotten. In any case, that chance meeting came to mind now, when I thought about the Stevens Institute. Had I heard that name from him? Perhaps that was why it had seemed vaguely familiar to me.
    I could hear the hesitant snore. I wasn’t alone anymore; there was this person in my bedroom. With luck, I’d find out who he really was tomorrow. Or perhaps the mystery would only deepen. He didn’t seem real, in some indefinable way he didn’t even seem like the man I’d had committed. The variousthreads of thought running through my mind refused to cohere: it was the problem of having no perspective, nothing to measure myself against. In the solitude, in the darkness, it was too easy to lose one’s bearings.
    The night wore on interminably. I’d left my wristwatch in the bathroom and the clock was in the bedroom; I couldn’t tell if I’d been lying awake for an hour or for five. Tiredness weighed my body down until it felt like solid lead but consciousness wouldn’t let go of me. At some point I entered an exhausted, disembodied state, neither wakefulness nor sleep. Thoughts became disconnected, dissolved into nightmarish abstraction. It felt as if the deeper I reached into myself, the less I found.

6
    The light filtered through the grime of the windowpane and into my eyes. I sat bolt upright. Something was wrong: it was the silence—the absolute silence. I got up, went through to the bedroom. The man was laid out on the bed with his arms by his side, as if a mortician had positioned him like that. In shock, I grabbed his wrist. A weakish pulse—not dead, thank God. Body warm enough; the breathing soundless, irregular. I shook him gently, then more vigorously. He made a noise, a murmur, but didn’t wake up. He wasn’t just sleeping; he’d slipped into some sort of coma. The man was in my bedroom, on my bed, wearing my pajamas. I stood staring at him for a minute or two, at a loss as to what to do.
    I went back to the front room, and hunted around for cigarettes. At the back of a kitchen drawer I found an ancient packet, along with a book of matches on which the name “Le Zinc” was printed. The French café where Abby and I used to meet up. I was lighting my cigarette with matches from a place that no longer existed. The harsh, stale taste of the cigaretteand flow of nicotine jerked me temporarily out of the shock, back into the world. Of course, the fact that he’d gone into a coma wasn’t at all unlikely, I reasoned. The man had had so many barbiturates over the past couple of days. Totally abnormal amounts, compared with what they did in the psychiatric wards I knew. At those levels, dosage was hardly an exact science. I should never have left him alone in the room; I should have monitored him throughout the night. I should have had a shot of adrenaline at the ready. I should have called an ambulance, I should have done any number of things. Instead, I’d lain on the floor next door, lost in a haze of nonsleep.
    I could still do all those things. I could still go down to the pharmacy, write myself an adrenaline script. I could still call an ambulance. Perhaps I would. But for the moment, I felt incapable of movement, like in a dream. I wondered what would happen if I did nothing at all. The man had murmured when I’d shaken him, which meant it wasn’t a profound coma. It would probably bottom out. He would resurface, regain consciousness sometime in the next few hours. Then again, it could also go the other way. He could fall further in, ever deeper, until finally he stopped breathing. I thought back to other coma patients I’d dealt with, as a young intern. There’d been a