Notes from a Coma
Authors: Mike McCormack
Praise for
Notes from a Coma
“Mike McCormack’s
Notes from a Coma
is a bold formal experiment, buttressing a surface text of domestic realism with a footnote-bound underworld of sci-fi dystopia—and between these two worlds hangs McCormack’s voluntarily-comatose JJ O’Malley, whose life story shuttles us back and forth across the novel’s many thrilling junctions of the global and the rural, the scientific and the spiritual, the intellectual and the heartfelt. Ambitious and accomplished,
Notes from a Coma
is the finest book yet from one of Ireland’s most singular contemporary writers, a daring reinvention of the gothic for the age of machines.”
—Matt Bell, author of
Cataclysm Baby
“A cross between
1984
and
The X-Files.… Notes from a Coma
establishes McCormack as one of the most original and important voices in contemporary Irish fiction.”
—
Irish Times
(original review)
“At times wickedly funny, at others almost unbearably sad.”
—
Sunday Tribune
“McCormack’s language is lovely, lyrical … his humor is dark, macabre; the words glimmer like a spell.”
—
Time Out
“The greatest Irish novel of the decade just ended.”
—
Irish Times
, Jan 15th 2010
Praise for Mike McCormack
“When venturing into the realm of the macabre, a writer gains a distinct advantage if he has a sense of discipline and a sense of humor … Mike McCormack has both to spare.… Like parables in their easy transcendence of setting and time, the most audacious stories are classics.”
—
The New York Times Book Review
“McCormack displays the satiric sense, religious knowledge, dark humor, cutting insights and incredible imagination that made Swift famous. Then McCormack adds an overcast of modern doom and gloom with the skill of Edgar Allan Poe. The result is stunning and irresistible.”
—
USA Today
“I am a huge admirer of Mike McCormack’s work. From sentence to story the writing is by times intriguing, funny, surprising, disturbing and profound.”
—Lynn Freed
“Gives Ian McEwan and Edgar Allan Poe a run for their money.… Decay and ruin seep through this book, driven by some of the finest prose to have emerged in over a decade.”
—
London Independent
“McCormack’s debut crackles with wit, is laced with black insight and places him right up there with McCabe as a master of the new Irish Gothic.”
—
Sunday Tribune
Copyright © 2005 by Mike McCormack
Originally published in 2005 by Jonathan Cape
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, businesses, companies, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved.
Published in 2013 by Soho Press, Inc.
853 Broadway
New York, NY 10003
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
McCormack, Mike, 1965-
Notes from a coma / Mike McCormack.
eISBN: 978-1-61695-233-4
1. Coma—Patients—Fiction. 2. Prison hulks—Fiction. 3. Identity
(Psychology)—Fiction. 4. Psychologicla fiction.
5. Ireland—Fiction.
6. Psychological fiction. I. Title.
PR6063.C363N68 2013
823′.914—dc232012029318
v3.1
When my perceptions are removed for any time, as by sound sleep, so long am I insensible of myself, and may truly be said not to exist
.
—David Hume
My guiding principle is this: Guilt is never to be doubted
.
—Franz Kafka, “In the Penal Colony”
*
Event Horizon
*
… because he is now both stimulus and qualia. His name, blurting through the nation’s print and electronic media, is also one of those synapses at which the nation’s consciousness forms itself. Firing in debate and opinion polls, across editorial maunderings and the antiphonal call-and-response formats of radio phone-ins, his suspended mind is one of those loci at which the nation’s consciousness knows itself and knows itself knowing itself …
His existence—it is not too strong a word—is now a continuous incident report. Each day, the newspaper of record carries an abstract of his EEG tracings across a six-column spread inside the front page. All over the country children above and below the age of reason chart the peaks and troughs of his delta waves across the walls of their classrooms. Cast out over the earth’s cortex also a continuous stream of his MRI and EEG tracings. They have the appearance of meteorological reports from another star—troughs and banks of high pressure, depressions and tidal movements. Electronically flayed, these images are drawn down to our bedrooms and workstations, pegged out to dry across screens and monitors. Bootlegged already by the fashion and design industry they are now protected by retroactive copyright and patent legislation; the author has asserted his moral right …
He evokes a response and this is to our credit. Contrary to ongoing analysis the nation’s compassion reflex has not been habituated. There is real concern, a genuine anxiety beyond the compassion flash fires of the latest crisis de jour. He touches our soul and, in a happy congruence of myth and politics, the public interest is now of interest to the public. We are not entirely mindful of him but we do bear him in mind …
My heart went out to Anthony that day, that’s no lie. Nearly twenty years ago now but I remember it like it was last week.
It was about two o’clock in the afternoon when the cars and the cattle truck came up the road. I followed them up and when I got to the yard the truck had reversed into the barn door and the vet and the bailiffs were already loading up the herd. Anthony was standing at the back of the house with the collar pulled up around his ears. I went over and stood beside him and said nothing. What could I say?
*
A dirty day it was too, pissing rain all morning and a wind blowing through the yard that would shave you. No one said anything but it didn’t take them more than twenty minutes to load up the whole herd—eight Friesian cows, a
couple of yearlings and two calves. One by one they marched up that ramp without a bit of bother and I remember thinking we’d often had more trouble loading up two or three beasts of a Monday morning for the mart.
They pinned up the tailgate and moved off and I saw the sergeant, Jimmy Nevin, coming over to Anthony. But whatever was on his mind he thought better of it and stood off holding the gate for the truck. Anthony turned into the house without a word. I watched the truck down the bottom of the hill and saw it turn out on to the main road. Jimmy Nevin closed the gate and walked over to me.
“Before you go,” he said, “give him this.”
He handed me a brown envelope.
“It’s the quarantine order. Six months.”
Anthony got barred from Thornton’s that night and it was years afterwards before he could have a drink in it.
There was a time when Anthony had a reputation for being able to start a fight in an empty room: a short temper and tidy with his fists. I’d seen him in action a few times, London and elsewhere, and he wasn’t a man you wanted to do battle with. But that was all in the past—or so I thought. It all came back to him that night in Thornton’s.
He’d been drinking since mid-afternoon and by eleven he was well on it. Ger, behind the bar—he was only young at the time—wouldn’t serve him any more. He came outside the bar and tried to lead Anthony to the door. Anthony of course was having none of it. He’d come in under his own steam, he’d go out the same way. And he did too a few minutes later when he saw he was getting no more drink. But that wasn’t the end of it. You’d want to get Eileen Flynn to tell you this story, she was there that night and she has a better telling of it than I have. She laughed about it afterwards but she was lucky she wasn’t killed the same night. Bang! The big window inside the door bursts in and this yellow gas bottle hops off her table and skids along the floor to the counter. Anthony is outside in the pissing rain, the sleeves of his shirt rolled up and the jacket down beside him in the channel. Any man, he was roaring, any fucking man!
He spent that night in the barracks and he was lucky he didn’t spend a lot longer. Thornton’s didn’t press charges. They knew the craic and they settled for the price of a table and a new window but they told Anthony he’d have to do his drinking somewhere else. I got a call from Jimmy Nevin the next morning and went down to the barracks to bring him home. Of course by then the whole town was talking about him. Driving home with him that day I never thought that three months down the road he’d be giving them a whole lot more to talk about. That’s when he docked up with JJ.
*
In January of that year one of the first cases of BSE in the republic broke out on the farm of Anthony O’Malley in Louisburgh, west Mayo.
After two days watching a Friesian cow with two permanent teeth stagger through the yard, unable to keep her balance and obviously disorientated, the beast was isolated and the vet summoned. Simon Conway’s provisional diagnosis was for an incurable neurological disorder. The animal was destroyed, blood and brain tissue samples were taken—sealed, dated, numbered and referred to the national laboratories in Dublin for analysis. Six days later a case of BSE was confirmed and in accordance with control measures brought in the previous year Anthony O’Malley’s entire herd was taken away to be destroyed.
The destruction of entire herds containing infected animals would only become compulsory nine years later in the UK and other EU countries. Coming on the back of agreed measures drawn up in the Florence Agreement, it represented a further expansion of the offspring cull, a measure referred to unofficially as the Herod Option.
Not a day’s gone by, not an hour, when I don’t think of him lying out there on that ship in the Killary.
*
And the thing that comes back to me are all the arguments we used to have. How he’d sit there where you’re sitting now, in that very chair, covered in diesel and cement after his day’s work. More likely than not he’d have a few pints on him, probably drinking since after work. And it’d always begin the same way.
“A consumer durable, Anthony, wasn’t that how it was?”
“Go to bed, JJ. Have you eaten?”
“Never mind eating, tell me the story. The bargaining process, tell me that again.”
I’d make him something to eat then, a sandwich or a bowl of soup, because likely as not he’d have nothing
solid in his stomach since dinner time. But he’d have no interest in food. All he wanted to hear was the story, his story.
“Two thousand dollars, wasn’t that it?”
“Eat up, JJ, it’s past midnight.”
“That was the going rate at the time, wasn’t it? Over three thousand Deutschmarks or eleven hundred pounds if you could find someone to take sterling?”