Everything that's in my head

Chapter 3

Adam is falling in a deep, still fathomless ocean. He sinks like a stone, deeper and deeper into an all enveloping blanket of ink. As the weight of water increases so the pressure mounts until all movement becomes impossible.
He is beyond crying now and is content just to fall, with arms folded on his chest like a dead, marbled king. He is awake but asleep, he can hear but there is no sound, he can talk but there is no one to listen. The pain of being recedes but nothing fills the vacuum. Still he falls, plummeting into nothingness. Still he falls, down and down and down. He passes heaven but the angels have their feathered backs to him and share a joke as they toil in a field of endless, golden corn. Finally, his falling is over and he settles on the bottom with an inaudible bump. He lies inert. Ghostly crabs scuttle here and there, occasionally picking at is white, lifeless body. From time to time, grotesque fish, their features moulded by the fearsome pressure, idle by. But Adam is alone, alone in a wasteland that is his tomb and there he sleeps for eternity.

Presently, a distant voice rouses Adam from his slumber.

‘Wake’, it says coldly.

‘Now is the time to wake’.
The feasting crabs scuttle to safety and the fish scatter.

The syntax is awkward and clumsy, as if the speaker were translating verbatim from another language.

Again it comes, guttural and ugly. It won’t go away. Adam rolls over and tries to ignore it.

‘ Errr.....The time for waking is now?.

Adam ventures a feeble leave me alone but the words cannot escape his throat. Every time sleep wraps him in its warm embrace, the voice drags him back to a harsh, impossible wakefulness.

‘Fuck off, for I am dead’, Adam moans from the inky depths.

‘Wake’, comes the voice again, persistent and oblivious to Adam’s protestations.

‘Wake and open up your eyes’.

Over the Tanoy, he could hear an urgent debate going on amidst much hissing and whispering.
Adam, opens one eye enough to allow in a little light and instead of darkness there is a beautiful, translucent blue that warms his cold bones. This miasma circles above him, he is among it and like a fog on a wet moor, it swirls and eddies, never yielding or giving away the source of a hidden sun. Adam walks among it. He breathes it, he exhales it. He feels himself begin to rise from the ocean floor. Looking down, he can see the impression his long dead corpse has made on the grey, moon like dust below and he rises, inexorably upwards towards a distant light. He can see the surface now, some way off. The blackness gives way to light. Shafts of cathedral light penetrate down into the lagoon deep water and he breaks surface.


He is in room or what Adam’s feels is a room. Between blinking and squinting, Adam can make out a large Perspex window that covers an entire wall, behind which lie a group of bespectacled men with white hair and spotless, white coats.

‘Please sit up’, comes a different voice, this time English in accent and kind in tone.
Eventually, bowing to the inevitable, Adam sits up and lets out a petulant,

‘What?’

At the foot of the bed stands a young, Asian looking nurse, wearing a sweet smile and clad in an immaculate, starched uniform.
She bows a little bow and goes about gently cleaning his emaciated body with a piece of cloth that feels like silk.

‘How does that feel?’

An avuncular voice says smoothly over a Tanoy.


'Yes’. replies Adam, distantly, not really answering the question, resting on his elbows, eyeing the woman with a mixture of suspicion and pleasure.

He couldn’t see much further than the cloud of blue that hung about where he lay and for a while his curiosity lay dormant. He could still see the group behind the Perspex from the corner of his eye but at present they didn’t seem that important.

Eventually, her delicate hands reach his penis and he strikes out instinctively to protect his modesty. Adam lets out a yelp as he does so, for as his hand went to touch hers, it had passed straight through her wrist and out the other side. He lay back, quite in shock; he covers his eyes, unsure if what had happened was a result of him being mad or an unwitting part of some magician’s trick. The Asian nurse continues her labours and begins to rub the cloth over his sunken chest. He stares at her incredulously for some time before trying again. With shaking hands and racing heart, he aims his fingers at her belly and thrusts them forward only for them to pass straight through and out the other side. He pushes his entire his arm through until the whole thing appears out of her back. He moves it up and down and from side to side, even affecting a wave. He retracts his arm quickly and inspects it for any signs of gore but it is perfectly clean.

Adam rolls over and within an instant the woman is gone.

Adam by now wished he had a blanket under which he could hide but there wasn’t one, so he lay there eyes covered, for some considerable time, trying to get a grip.

‘Can you stand?’

Came a familiar voice. Kinder this time, softer and more gentle, with a timbre that oozed genuine concern. .

‘Here, let me help you’.

Adam managed to open one eye a little and in front of him this time was a middle aged man he recognised from the group that had been behind the Perspex screen. He reminded Adam of an English teacher he had once had; a face that exuded a comforting authority; a man that Adam instinctively trusted.
The man offers his hand.
Adam takes it readily, seeing it more as rock to grab hold of than a mere collection of knuckles and skin.
‘Careful’, said this saving angel,
‘‘Your legs haven’t taken any weight for quite some time’.
Adam gradually becomes perpendicular and he lifts himself from the bed.
It was only then that he could properly take in his surroundings. There was no beginning to his environment yet there was no end; only the thin blue mist that seemed limitless. His feet were definitely on Terra Firma but he could see no floor. Above him the same blue miasma continued until it gave way to an ever increasing darkness. The ‘English teacher’ looked into his eyes as if to say ‘trust me’ and they began to walk together amongst the blue mist.

It was then that Adam remembered the bathroom and its hideous memory and presumed that the man that was gently supporting him was in fact God or an older Jesus or even the devil.
‘I am not God’, said the man, reading Adam’s thoughts.
‘Oh’, said Adam a little deflated.
‘Nor the devil either’.
This, after all, was not journey’s end.
They walk away from the bed but as Adam turned slightly, he could see it seemed to be suspended in thin air.

‘Where am I?’
Asks Adam, and looks at the man he now saw as his only friend in a strange and wonderful landscape.
‘Never mind about that’, comes a confident reply.
‘All your questions will be answered in time’.
They continue walking very, very slowly, with Adam tottering and in great danger of falling flat on his face. They walk a few times around the bed before the English teacher picks him up with a single deft movement and lays him back down where he had first awoken.
The man stares intently at Adam for a while and then says
‘You have come a long, long way, longer than you or I can imagine and now you must rest’.
Weathered fingers settle on Adam’s eyes and he takes another long draught of sleep.