In Defence of the Coma

When I wake up I don’t ask “where am I?” because it’s obvious I’m in hospital, and also there’s a tube down my throat. After a bunch of spluttering and convulsing, and beeping, everything eventually falls into place.

One of the good things about a “medically-induced” coma is that no matter what anyone says, it’s fundamentally not your fault. Sure, whatever you did that meant the doctors had to put you into a medically-induced coma might be your fault, but the coma itself is not. It is, as they say, medically-induced.

I lie in the hospital and think about this. Then I think about how much my throat hurts, you know, from the tube. Then I think about how hospitals have to feed you, like, several times a day and I feel pretty happy.

Eventually after just the right amount of anticipation, a nurse brings me a tray full of coloured materials that don’t resemble any food I can remember, but after a year in a medically-induced coma, everything tastes absolutely amazing.

The nurse seems somewhat surprised when she returns four and a half minutes later and sees my tray is completely empty. I reach out to grab her arm and she flinches away.

“Please,” I say. “Why was my coma medically-induced?” She looks aside, seems embarrassed or ashamed or something. She opens her mouth, closes it again, opens it, seems to reconsider, opens it, and with the swiftness of years of practice, suddenly injects me with a powerful sedative.

When I wake up again, my agent Curt “Definitely a C” Blockade is sitting on my bed and looking at all the life support equipment in a way that suggests he’s trying to figure out how much he could get for it at Cash Converters. He notices me twitch.

“Maaaate!” he says, in the way he does. “What’s going on mate? Here you are all sitting up like jacky, and it’s only March mate. What’s the story?”

“Well first,” I rasp, “that expression is actually racist. And second, what are you talking about?”

Blockade looks confused, a subtly different expression from the look of bafflement that sits on his dough-like face at all other times. “Mate?” he asks. “I’m talking about the deal mate, the plan. The agreement. The ‘experiment’, you know?” He puts air quotes around “experiment” in a way that’s either ominously conspiratorial, or an indication that he doesn’t really know what the word means.

“I uh...” I say and Blockade grins with relief. “That’s right mate,” he says. “Eier Labs, the Big Egg, the Whole Omelette, the Fry-up from Hell, the -“ He trails off, seemingly transfixed by the CTG monitor next to my bedside. Then he blinks. “Anyway, good job, keep it up. Having a break mate, I get it, having a break is good. Here, the goodies so far,” he hands me an envelope. “Minus my cut, of course.” Then he climbs out the window, but that’s nothing especially unusual.

I look at the envelope. It has a vaguely egg-shaped logo in the corner, with EIER LABS written underneath. The envelope contains approximately four thousand dollars. As far as I can tell anyway, I’m not really used to counting that much money.

“What the f--“ I say, and then a clipped German voice from the other side of the bed says: “We trust the retainer is still to your satisfaction?”

“Blargh!” I say and flinch away while turning to see who it is, which gets my cords tangled up. Things are starting to fade to black until I realise a man in a dark suit is tut-tutting and untangling them. The cords I mean. The world comes back. “You really must take more care,” the man is saying. “You are a considerable investment. Well, not considerable, but an investment. Well, not an investment but we at Eier Labs cannot abide waste.” He has very short blonde hair, very bright blue eyes, and a very thin mouth.

“Okay,” I say, and then the nurse who’d injected me with the sedative bursts into the room with a panicky-looking doctor. “Oh NO!” cries the doctor, then covers his mouth, then looks at the nurse who is shaking her head. She pulls an ampoule out of her pocket, looks at it, then claps her hand to her forehead and shows the ampoule to the doctor. He glares at her and winds up like he’s going to punch her out, but then they both freeze, turn and look at the German guy, look at each other, and then run for it. As they go, another nurse comes in wheeling a gurney and whistling.

“Alright!” he says, smiling. “Just here to pick up the body, isn’t it?” He stops, sees me staring at him wild-eyed, and the German guy staring at him with a raised eyebrow. Then he smoothly wheels the gurney out again. I hear him go whistling up the corridor.

The German guy blinks. “Clearly, our protocols have developed an unfortunate permeability,” he says. He snatches the envelope from my hand, peels off what looks depressingly like $125, and drops it in my lap.

“Good luck with...” he waves one manicured hand. “Whatever.”

Then he leaves and I’m left wondering which one of these machines can put me back in that coma.