ARE YOU OK

Drew blinked. He could feel his eyelashes sticking together at the corner of his left eye, but soon forgot, a
blinding pain in his head pushed them shut again, twisting and turning somewhere behind his eyes and causing
him agony. He lifted his right hand, heavier than usual, and felt the stiffness crinkle and flake from his bones as
they moved again. He did not know this, but they had been lying stationary for several years. Twisting his wrist,
eyes still shut against the darkness, against the pain, it clicked sharply, more than once. But there was no pain to
speak of, it seemed glad of the movement and, with one snap of protest from the elbow, he rubbed his eyes clear
of the sleep clogging their corners and blinked again. Every time his eyes opened even slightly, the pain shot
deeper into his skull, lodging itself somewhere deep within his cerebrum. It lost its form, became dull and suffuse,
a feeling of utter discomfort, utter despondence which rolled down his spine, awakening from its slumber, onto
and across his legs, thighs, shins. By the time it reached his toes it felt more like the warm rush of urine.
He tried to sit up. He wriggled around vainly with his shoulders several times, to no effect, before flexing
his back and sitting forward. He was lying on a bed, a narrow bed, with old but clean sheets. He sat there for a
moment, his legs arching out slightly on either side and his lower back curved in a lazy slouch. The pain in his
head was weaker still, but he felt sluggish. Morose. His lower jaw hung slightly away from its counterpart, and his
eyelids drooped like those of an inebriate. He did not know it, how could he have!, but a line of dried saliva clung
to the left hand side of his mouth. Slowly he became aware of the total darkness in which he was sat. Directly in
front of him, at a distance of a few metres, Drew could make out what looked like a square, floating eerily in the
darkness, and after studying it for a few seconds he concluded that it was a window. The curtains blocked out
nearly all the light, but left a decorative smattering of a few centimetres. He was coming to peace with being
awake again, no memories had yet bubbled to the surface, no trace of shame or duty yet clouded his vision. The
dull ache, much more tolerable now that it had spread across his body and was not concentrated in his head, was
threatening to subside.
A loud humming noise erupted from the air around him. The sort of noise which ought to have been
accompanied by a great, rumbling vibration; a noise that made it seem like it was even if it wasn’t. He could feel it
deep in his chest, something moving, but had no time to question it before the lights flicked on. Big, blaring lights,
the sort of lights that ought to be accompanied by a high pitched shrieking noise as they burrowed into his eyes
and the humming was gone now, with the vibrations that weren’t there in the first place and the thing moving in
his chest seemed not to move or sway like it had done but was screaming hot fury, screaming, ripping through his
body with a resonating ululation which felt like it would shatter him to pieces. He probably had been screaming
when they held him down, when they ripped his arms away from his face and strapped them to the bed, when they
fastened the leather buckles and when he kicked one of them with his last free limb. He had been screaming for
four hours after that, not that he knew it.

Drew blinked. His eyes opened easily this time, no sleep, no blinding pain, no nothing really, not to speak
off. His eyes lolled backwards and forwards beyond his control, staring straight into the light if they pleased, he
wasn’t able to stop them anyway. Someone leaned over his face whispering instructions off towards the side of the
room, beyond his vision, a woman, short black hair in a bob. Red lips. Two hands reached towards his face and he
tried to stop them but found himself buckled down, unable to raise his arm more than an inch, scraping his
irritated skin against the leather of the strap restraining it. He didn’t know it, but fifty four other men had been
restrained using those same straps. A total of almost as many years. How could he have known that? A panic
would have welled up within him, but his brain seemed to still be asleep, and anyway, the hands had reached his
face several seconds ago, they did no harm, the taste of their rubber gloves felt clean as they poked around
examining his teeth. They prodded his ears and performed all manner of minute assessments, most beyond his
vision, but he felt no pain. He slowly slid back into a dreamless sleep. He sank into it like a duvet settling over a
corpse. He didn’t know it.
The next time, he woke properly. No confusion, no warm up, burning pain ripped him from his slumber in
an instant. All over his face was fire, blisters on fire dripping on his shoulders, little pustules erupting everywhere.
He was thrashing wildly within his restraints, screaming probably, jolting the little bed terribly but not disrupting
the supreme, indifferent surveillance of the same woman, leaning over him, calmly flicking her eyes back and
forth between a patch of skin on his bare chest and a stopwatch. Drew couldn’t see anything, but if he could’ve, he
would’ve seen nothing more than a dark red patch, a rash, about the size of a tennis ball on his chest. The agony
seemed to wash over him, bursting and spitting over his whole body, but moments later, with a final glance at the
stop watch, the lady with the red lips made it stop and he collapsed, immobile, onto the bed, his torso heaving
from the exertion. He tried to speak, but his voice, hoarse and painful, managed only a whisper: ‘what..?’ came
first, then ‘why...’ and a series of less distinct exhalations. She glanced at him sharply, reproaching him, and began
to rub a cream onto his chest, not wearing any gloves this time.
It was very curious, although Drew did not appreciate this at the time, that such an act concerned him. His
aching, befuddled brain, reeling from an ordeal which most could not survive, his bewildered psyche’s first
thought was whether or not she was at some risk of contagion, not using gloves. It stumbled and fell from
coherence before deducing, from her act itself, that she was not; but concern had been immediately and certainly
registered. He tried to ask her about it, to ellicit some words from his only fellow, but again he was silenced by the
remonstrance of a single, iron glance.
After these first few days, for days they were, Drew began to retain a much firmer grip on reality, on his
reality; on the bed, the pain. The cold. Sometimes hunger, sometimes not. He was visited regularly by only the
lady with the red lips, at first, but other staff soon appeared on the scene. They all showed precisely the same
clinical disinterest in him. He was struck by the difference between the diligent attention which their actions
displayed and the cold, recalcitrant condescencion with which his words were universally met. They would
whisper quietly to each other, normally in a corner of his room, always covering their mouths and never meeting
his eye while doing so. He had been right, about the window, but the drapes were never opened. They removed the
leather restraints after a week, below average, and the catheter the day afterwards. A drip ran into his left arm and
he dragged along with him a metal stand when he fumbled his way around the room, his only form of exercise.
The pain. They didn’t remove that after a week. Sometimes a leg, sometimes a lung. Somewhere,
somewhere it would surface just as sharp as ever, cutting outwards through him and spilling over his skin its foul
venom. Rashes, mostly crimson but sometimes black, would follow it around, lagging days usually, but sometimes
only hours. For hours he would lie in silence, gritting his teeth and gasping against it, fighting with his very being,
fighting against it. He would cough and wretch and twitch awfully but keep quiet as best he could, if she knew, if
she heard, it would only make it worse. They would stretch him out, like a prisoner on the rack, poke and prod
away, whisper beyond earshot and leave again, only to return moments later. He did not know it, but those
moments were hours. Long hours of torment which slipped away as quietly as those of peace. Of happiness. But,
as quickly as it had come, it would go. It would fade and seethe and say until then, then, and he would gasp and
collapse with relief, he’d want to, but he wouldn’t, he would rise and gaze about him, tired but determinedly alert.
These were his few hours, his alone, and not belonging to the pain. They were not theirs, either, he was alone. He
sat, looking around him, nursing a spot about where one of his kidneys lay from which the pain had receded. He
could feel the rash coming, prickling and jabbing at his hand as he rubbed it, dried skin flaking slightly. He was in
a small room, white, empty for the most part. The floor looked grubby, though it was hard to find any spot that
was not clean, excepting the black streaks where rubber had been dragged across it.
Drew shuffled his weight towards the edge of the bed, the first step in the laborious process of standing
up. Slowly but surely he lowered his legs down and was seated on the edge of a surprisingly frail bed. That is, the
frame of the bed was of iron, but rocked terribly, leaving doubts behind. His legs eased into the motion slowly,
each muscle twitching individually as it was stretched for the first time since the night before. He had lain in a
bout, last night. One of his worst; spasms and contortions and all manner of similar bodily convulsions had
accompanied the pain. His legs had been locked into the foetal position for eight hours; his left hip, on which he
had been lying, was bruised, probably, but he did not care. He must stand. A day in which he did not stand –
discounting the days of pain naturally as mere phantoms, hallucinations – was no day at all. He slid his weight
onto his feet and, left hand tightly gripping the metal apparatus from which hung his drip, collapsed. He hit the
floor hard. He often fell, but not like this. His nose smashed straight into the floor, arms limp and unable to defend
him. He did not know it then, but his nose never quite regained its former, rectilinear, configuration. When they
picked him up off the floor, the pool of blood had reached about the size of a fist, or the palm of a hand; two men
lifted his face out of it with a look of disgust and dropped him clumsily back onto the bed. The woman with the
red lips had been watching them. After they rolled him onto his side she held a small mirror in front of his face
and removed it again a moment later, fogged. Allowing the corner of her mouth a slight sneer of disgust, she
turned and stalked out of the room. Drew was unconscious for several hours. The blood slowly dried around his
nose, which no-one had bothered to splint. When he woke, he only had to endure the discomfort of it for a few
hours before the real pain returned.
The weeks passed, months maybe, time wasn’t so important to Drew. He grew stronger each day, though
often it felt the opposite. He could walk fairly easily around his room, he had a fairly obvious limp, but it was
nothing serious. The doctors attended to him with the same, or similar, frequency. They gradually cured the
rashes, first reducing them to patches of flaky skin then eliminating them entirely. The limp, too, they examined,
but to no avail. He developed a cough, before long, which grew worse steadily despite examinations twice daily.
But they seemed entirely oblivious to the only ailment which caused him any real discomfort; they were rarely
present during the bouts of pain, and when they were they did nothing to assist him. He lay curled up in agony, or
writhing and twitching, gritting his teeth against the furious, burning force ripping its way through his viscera, and
they would watch him silently. They would eye him with the quizzical fascination of a young child watching a
game he did not understand. They would meet his eyes, frantic, wild eyes pleading for aid, with their own placid
and curious calmness. They still wouldn’t talk to him. Eventually they gave up whispering, and Drew realised that
they had not been whispering in English. It sounded Slavic to him, not that he knew, how could he have?, harsh at
first but delicate after a while. They would often look at him, repeating the same words as the day before, spitting
them at him.
The lady with the red lips brought him a chair. She just walked in, one day, carrying it. He turned from
where he had been standing, examining the rear wall, and smiled for the first time since he could remember. He
thanked her, though not warmly; his husky voice was largely incapable of warmth. She made that same look of
frantic reproach, confusion, distress, and hurried from the room. He called after her, to stay, to explain, anything.
But she was gone, shaking her head and refusing to look at him. It was wooden, the chair, without a cushion.
Angular. When he sat on it though, he was immediately grateful. Beds are not all that comfortable, after a while.
This was the first of the many hours he was to spend in that chair. He turned it so that it faced the wall
furthest from it, which housed the door, and waited for it to open again. It didn’t. He sat. The next few minutes
lasted hours, it seemed, but then the following hours only took a few minutes. He tried to remember how this had
all started, who he was, but every time he reached for something, it seemed not to be there, or to be just slightly
further away. He had come to accept that the pain had always been there. It was the only real, the only concrete
factor in his life, in his existence. He woke from it every morning and returned to it every evening, leading only a
blotchy, vague existence between its visits. He had no recollection of any time without it, any previous freedom,
or any recollection at all really. Where had he been before this place? He must have done something, no? A dull
ache began to throb behind his eyes.
Drew was about thirty, to look at, a mop of dark hair messy but not too long. His cheeks were covered in
a rough, patchy stubble, although were his nose straight he could still have been called attractive. His eyes were
sunken deep in reverie, most of the time; dark bags hung beneath them and they flicked around the place with a
slightly manic feel. Had he any companion, he would have seemed eternally distant, but on one’s own this is not
such a noticeable effect. He was tall enough, thin. He did not eat well. He deduced, eventually, that most of his
body’s sustenance was provided by the drip which still ran into his left arm. They would bring him food
sometimes, but it was prepared hastily, as though by someone who didn’t have to eat it themselves. And there
were no meal times. There were no times at all, really, sooner or later he would grow tired, switch off the light and
sleep.
Months passed, he didn’t know it, but they did. There were no seasons, no moon by which to score them.
His life throbbed slowly from wakefulness to darkness, from whitewashed walls to pillow and back again
endlessly, like some sickening carousel. They ran fewer tests, and the pain passed easier. Or at least he grew used
to it. He suffered in silence now, for the most part, wriggling up into his sheets or the corner of the room, shaking
slightly, knees clasped tightly to his chest. Why wouldn’t they help him? What was it they didn’t understand?
Before long someone brought him a bedside table, too, while he was asleep. Or at least that was his
conjecture, he woke to find it. But before long other things began to amass themselves; a cup, two pencils, a coin
of some foreign denomination. It was as if the doctors spent time collecting trinkets to entertain him, striking in
their ignorance upon only the most disinteresting objects. Until, that is, he was brought a book. A male doctor
walked in with it, looked round at Drew silently and dropped it onto the table with a snort. In his haste Drew
overlooked the offence he might have been caused, and picked it up. It was small, neatly bound, and on the front
cover was inscribed ‘Die Hunde’. He sighed heavily. Drew knew no German, and flicking through, couldn’t even
discern whether it was fiction or not. He chucked it down on the table again, resenting the fact that they had
bothered even to bring it to him, and marvelled at the fact that they might think him German.
He could feel the numbness of disappointment brewing inside him, wishing that no such hope had been
dangled before him, and was unconsoled by the thought that he surely couldn’t be any worse off for the book.
This, however, was not true; for inside him he could feel that something had awoken, something stirred restlessly
and he was gripped by the desire to read. He had no recollection of having ever read before, nor was he sure that
he would be able to (perhaps Die Hunde was really some English phrase?), but lurking within him was such a
desire to do so that all such concerns were immediately eclipsed. He could feel it welling up, a weight rolling
slowly forwards from the pit of his stomach and washing around him then it came, or it was that weight and the
weight was it as he sank down into his chair, wavering beneath it as his hands began to feverishly shake like he
had hypothermia, shivering and blue he felt like they were the hands of a corpse, his the mind of a corpse
possessed by this feeling, this awe and pain and desire that gripped him now as it came screaming from his gut,
burning him and yelling and shouting his ears were ringing he wanted to cry, he could feel his eyes stinging and
stinging and screwing themselves up into the bawling eyes of some piggy little baby as Drew, the stubbly
misshapen thirty year old Drew coughed a groan of pain, winced and dribbled slightly his abdomen clenching up
into a tiny little fist of pain through which was forcing itself the hate and the passion and he had to read, he
wanted to he wanted it so bad he would die and just turn into that corpse whose hands were his, the cold dead blue
little fleshy rotten lumps which shook and clasped him until it was over, until it was gone and he was left lying on
the floor shaking and sobbing and alone.
It didn’t take him long to read Die Hunde. He didn’t understand a word of it, but read it three times in the
first day and four the next. He sat, absorbed in the pages, completely oblivious to the rubber stained floor, the
grubby sheets and the curious glances of the doctors. The red lips didn’t distract him like they used to and he just
lay there staring at the words, his brain thinking each of them but not knowing how to think them, supplying
whatever it was that stalked his subconscious instead so he just kept reading and let it squabble over what each
word was as he slowly worked through it time and time again. Eventually he realised that what he thought each
time he read it might have been what the author had thought, and that it couldn’t be disproved, in any case, and
read it even more furiously. Soon enough they brought him more books, a whole box full of them, and not all were
in German. Some were, which he of course supposed the sequels, appendices and other addendas of Die Hunde,
much to his amusement, but others were in French and some were English. There was a collection of fifteen
French books, he knew a modest amount of French, titled ‘La vie en noire’, which took up over half of the box.
There were only two in English, one the second in a series of four books detailing the ‘Syntax and Accidence of
the old Norse tongue’, the other a small book of verses titled ‘Malaise – Introductory Remarks’. With but a single
book, he had filled his days endlessly. Now he rarely left his bed. He brought them, a pile at a time, to his bed and
would read each several times, drifting in and out of sleep, light to dark and the pain and out again and back to the
page, numbing the futility of his existence with the arbitrary but undeniable satisfaction of reading. They came,
tended to him, offered him food, but he ignored them now. His stubble became a beard as he shunned them,
resisting their probing examinations and letting the food they left go cold and rot. He became emaciated, his
muscles atrophying, sinking slowly further and further into his bed and into the pages before him. Drew would not
have been surprised if he had woken one day and just been dead, his brain having lost all function, slowly
dribbling from sentence to sentence as it turned into mush.
At first the doctors were visibly irritated, the woman with red lips sat with him for hours at a time,
awaiting some response or recognition but still not prepared to say a word to him. He scorned them all, the pages
were succour enough. Although his French was rudimentary at best, he soon read all fifteen thick, gloopy volumes
of La vie en noire, deducing some words and inventing others, chuckling all the way, haunted by its chilling wit
and stung by its silences. It was the mark of a cheap imitation, thought Drew, to get anywhere. Instead all fifteen
volumes hung suspended in a void somewhere, somewhere far off beyond his reach, deep inside him they eerily
stared back at him. But he was more enchanted by the verses of ‘Malaise – Introductory Remarks’ for here he
knew every word (Die Hunde wasn’t, he concluded, an English phrase after all), but was none the wiser as to the
content of the little book. Each sentence was a mysterious combination of the sensible which resulted in the
sublime, the subliminal, or both.
His cough grew worse as the doctors grew to ignore him. He would sink into fits of asphyxiation,
wretching and gasping for air through the rough, jerking violence of his lungs spasming. The pain became more
like a somnolence, for a time, a foggy silence interwoven with hundreds of pages of words dancing before his
eyes, misty and bemusing in their own way. He slept, sometimes, he supposed, not that he knew. He did not
dream, unless his dreams were of him reading – that was something which he would not have been able to
disprove.`Occasionally, deep in the grips of the pain, whimpering softly or sobbing against the whitewashed wall,
he would recall some phrase or description which he had read, some word, which would float before him and
deride him, sometimes, or would offer him some brief reprieve from the suffering. He was never, incidentally,
able to locate the phrases in the books, and would soon enough forget them for more recent examples which he
would once again fail to locate.
He would lie for days in agony, tormented by the one thing which could help him on occasion, which
cruelly withheld its charms with neither justification nor relentment. He lay staring at them, the pile of books,
little grubby leather spines on some, flaking yellowy paper on others and felt sick, he felt it inside of him kicking
in disgust at such grim and physical harbingers of such delicate and charming aid. They stared back at him,
swelling up inside him, filling his mind with their presence and filling his stomach with a queasy weight which
melted away into the ball of yearning, the pit of angry desire, like a truculent child grabbing with a podgy fist at
some putty or dirt or squeezing and tearing at his arm as the disgust shivered across his goose pimpled skin, his
skin the thought of it sickened him as he tried to shrink away from it, receding into his bed into the corner trying
to slide out the back of it and onto the floor his eyes receding into the black, miserable pits from which they so
rarely glimmered the lights burning into them into him into his skull as he shivered with the vomit, the vomit
rising up hot and angry with that acid tang that burning taste on his tongue he shut his eyes and felt the dryness in
his mouth, the clumpy dry saliva gumming up his mind as the pain pushed up from his stomach and into his skull
he wanted it to stop to end he didn’t want any of it any more as he felt his balance tip side to side with the nausea
he opened his eyes and burped, he belched the filthy taste of vomit into his mouth, sure that his gut bubbling now
would soon expel its contents all over him all over the bed the books, they’d come and wash and clean him and
change his drip, his drip was there slinking away under his skin the little needle sat there on the inside of his vein
pointing out and ran away down the tube. He stared at it, silently, feeling the needle as if it was wobbling or
wiggling around in his vein feeling scared that he might fall at the thought that he had fallen that it might rip itself
out, might rip him open and end the swelling, brooding pain which tormented him, might rid him of the doctors
and the red lips, might end the pain and he could see it now as the dead fleshy little hand reached across and he
could feel it now pointing out from his veins and the red lips were there but they weren’t lips and they were
everywhere, dripping and running and him stabbbing now and it was gushing and the pain was screaming at him
and writhing and something inside of him wanted to do something to read to stop the red but it was everywhere,
thick and hot and dripping onto the sheets onto the floor but it was cold now he was cold and the thing was quiet
inside of him, was wriggling and writhing and was quiet now for the last time and so was Drew but not the red the
red was loud and angry and everywhere and always would be as far as he knew, not that he did, not that he could,
the red was quiet soon too, the silence settling over it and cooling it as the duvet settled slowly over his corpse, not
that he knew, how could he have?