We Are Both Mammals (2 page)

I nodded again; tiny, careful nods,
directing my gaze elsewhere for a moment.

“
All of this is temporary
… erm, most of it is temporary,” the other nurse assured me, and
cleared his throat slightly.

I took a slow, steadying breath, as deep a
breath as I dared, feeling in the back of my mind that I would
probably be sick soon, and forced my gaze to return to the wreck
that was my body. I wondered in the back of my mind which bits of
it were ‘not temporary’, but I was too overwhelmed by the general
view to focus on the question. Beyond my bandaged torso, my legs,
though showing signs of fading bruising, appeared to be intact,
though my feet were still hidden under the bedclothes. I was nearly
naked: the bandages et cetera ran from my chest to my hips, and a
lightweight white cloth of some sort was tucked around my lower
hips and upper thighs, apparently to preserve some of my modesty
without placing any pressure near any of the bandages.

“
Are my feet … My feet?” I
mumbled incoherently.

After a second or two of puzzlement, the
nurses realised that I was trying to say that I wanted to see my
feet to be sure that they were all right. They rolled back the
covers still further, and I beheld that my feet and lower legs were
covered by lightweight white socks. I stared at the socks in
bafflement.

“
Oh, your feet are fine,”
said Surgeon Fong, as though I should take her word for it and need
no further assurance.

“
These are compression
socks,” one of the nurses was helpful enough to explain. She patted
the front of one of my ankles lightly. I saw her do it, but I could
not really feel it. “They’re there to keep your circulation
going.”

After I had satisfied myself with regard to
my feet, I prepared myself to return my gaze to my abdomen, as it
appeared to be the seat of the trauma. I gulped again as I took in
the gruesome sight. This time I registered that there was another,
larger, hose, sprouting from bandages on the right side of my waist
just under my ribs, about as thick as my thumb and carrying some
fluid that seemed brownish in colour, lying on the mattress to my
right. I followed it with my eyes, and it led across the mattress
to the thurga. The creature’s bedclothes had been rolled back, like
mine, to reveal the thurga’s body. Much of the creature’s dark
brown fur had been shaven, revealing startling pale-pink skin,
coated with the fuzziness of regrowing fur, from his chest to his
flanks. He, too, was heavily bandaged around his abdomen, and had a
few thin hoses attached to him, leading to various medical devices
as mine no doubt did. The larger hose seemed to disappear under the
bandages on his left side.

And still I did not realise.

There was a moment of silence in the room.
Feeling so, so ill, I tried to summon the strength to ask more
questions, and I registered vaguely that everyone was looking at
me. Including the thurga.

The feeling of sick dread hovered at the
edge of my brain. Something was wrong, something was awfully wrong,
but I did not know what.

My body was starting to hurt; a
more intense, precise pain than previously. I glanced again at the
thurga, who was gazing at me with the great dark soulful eyes
typical of his species. There was something
– 
pitying
in his gaze.

I was expecting to vomit at any second, but
it did not happen. I was breathing more heavily by the moment, and
feeling more and more light-headed.

“
I think we’ve got some
shock going on here,” one of the nurses said, not to me, and then
things went dark.

The next time I awoke, only one nurse was
present. I did not recognise him, but at this point I was barely
recognising anything. He was checking some kind of machinery that
stood nearby making a soft, intermittent hissing noise. It was
daylight; perhaps midday.

“
Oh, hello,” he greeted
me, when he noticed that my eyes were open. He turned toward me.
“How are you feeling?”

All the response I could manage was
something that sounded like “Mmph”.

“
Would you like a drink of
water?” he offered.

I nodded gingerly, and he raised the bed
slightly and helped me to drink a few sips.

Then I looked with anxiety at the sheet and
light blankets that covered me.

I didn’t want to see the mess that lay
beneath, but I wanted to know that everything was all right. I
wanted to see again that, although my body was riddled with tubes
and stitches and who knew what else, I was still intact, from head
to toes.

“
Do you want to see?” the
nurse inquired.

I took a breath, steeled
myself, and nodded.


“Let me just call the other nurse in to help,” the nurse
said calmly, and he left through one of the doorways. I heard him
speak, and in a moment he returned with another nurse, a lady with
blonde hair in a tight ponytail. They made the bed raise my head
and shoulders a little more, so that I could look down and see my
abdomen, then carefully lifted and flipped back the covers so that
I could see.

I gulped again. It was as bad as I
remembered it. How could so many tubes, hoses, bandages and
dressings be necessary on one person? My flesh looked awful; I
barely recognised my own body …

But my legs were still there, albeit covered
by those odd, medical-looking white socks. I stared at my legs,
making doubly sure that they were mine and still attached to me. I
could not really feel them; there were moments when I could barely
feel my own fingertips without thinking hard about them. I tried
scrunching my toes, and to my delight I saw my toes move under the
synthetic material of the sock. I did it again, and then repeated
the exercise with the other foot.

“
Take care how you move,”
the male nurse cautioned me. “You’re very delicate at the moment.
We don’t want you overdoing anything.”

“
Don’t try to move your
legs,” the blonde nurse added. “Your body needs to remain as still
as possible.”

I nodded my acquiescence, keeping my
breathing slow and steady. I did not want to feel the nausea and
light-headedness that I had experienced previously.

“
We’ve been massaging you
to keep your circulation going, but I think you’ve been asleep for
most of it,” the male nurse supplied.

I looked around a little,
trying to orient myself. I glanced at the hose lying on the
mattress to my right, and it led my eye to the thurga. He was
awake, and watching me silently with those round, bright, dark
eyes. Feeling self-conscious, I glanced down again at the hose that
lay between us. I noticed this time that it had a sort of small but
strong-looking clamp of black plastic, with what looked like some
inner workings of steel, that seemed to encircle the hose, about a
hand’s breadth away from the bandages on my side. There was another
clamp near the thurga’s end of the hose; and I registered for the
first time that it
joined
us. The thurga and I were linked to each other by this
hose.

Something anxious arose in my brain. Why?
Why were we linked by a hose? I did not understand; and the
numbness and aching and soreness suddenly seemed more intense.

There was silence in the room, aside from
the soft hissing and some electronic humming that I had not
consciously noticed before. Everyone was watching me. Something was
wrong here; there was something that I was missing. My brain knew
it, my body seemed to know it, and I seemed to feel instinctively
that everyone else in this room knew it, but my weakened, foggy
mind lagged behind.

“
Can I have some more
water,” I mumbled.

The male nurse helped me to drink again, and
weariness came upon me. I lay back, and must have slept. I seem to
recall hearing faintly, as I drifted off, one of the nurses saying,
“Nope; he’s gone.”

In the darkness, perhaps as my
sleep lightened to a doze for a time, I heard voices. I thought I
heard one of them say,
He’s going to have to realise it at some
point
, but I
did not know about whom they were speaking. When I woke again, it
was once again daylight.

This time there were no nurses in the room.
I had woken gently, and I lay still, listening to my own soft
breathing. The dull aching in my body was still present, and though
I felt sleepy I also felt a little more coherent than previously.
There was light in the room, coming from the window on my left,
which had its curtains partially drawn: the light had a soft,
almost golden glow to it that I eventually registered meant that it
was late afternoon. The clock on the wall confirmed this.

I wanted to drink, and rather than pressing
the pad near my right hand to summon a nurse, I tried slowly
lifting my left hand, with the drip in it, to reach the cup for
myself. I succeeded, though my whole arm was shaky and weak, and I
emptied the cup, which had only a few mouthfuls in it. The cool
water was delicious. I would have liked more, but I could not reach
the jug that stood on the tall white bedside cabinet.

After this tremendous and triumphant
exertion, I lay still for a few minutes, resting drowsily, the
lightweight disposable plastic cup clutched loosely in my hand.
Replacing it on the bedside cabinet did not seem worth the effort
required.

At length, I decided that I wanted to see my
environment properly, and mustered my energy.

Blinking slowly, I looked around sluggishly,
from left to right, trying to take in my surroundings properly for
the first time. The room was spacious, with its light blue walls
that I had noticed earlier. The bed sheets were white, the blankets
cream coloured. In fact it was not one bed but two: two hospital
beds pushed flush together, I in one and the dark-furred body of
the thurga, mostly covered by the bedclothes, in the other. I
noticed that the bedclothes of each bed were not tucked under their
respective mattresses where the beds abutted: they lay loose,
overlapping slightly. The electrical cord that led to the pad by my
right hand snaked up from between the mattresses. Beyond the beds,
to the right, a large, lightweight, pale blue curtain screened off
the rest of the room.

I remembered the thurga’s dark eyes gazing
at me, and I decided to take a proper look at my bed companion. I
turned my head carefully to look at him.

I found that he was already gazing at me.
Big, round, dark, liquid eyes; elegant, dark whiskers on either
side of a small, round, dark nose; dark brown, soft-looking fur
that covered his body except for where he was shaven. The thurga’s
face was pointed and possum-like, and on top of his soft-furred
head his ears were like a cat’s: pointed and neat, with long, fine,
protective fur at their openings. A small but noticeable tuft of
soft black hair crested each ear. His hands – which is what
the thurga-a call the appendages at the ends of their forelimbs,
paw-like though they look to humans – rested on the covers,
and were covered in very fine short fur that was much paler than
the fur on the rest of the body; almost beige. Thurga hands have an
opposable thumb, but always remind me of a rat’s forepaws:
delicate, dextrous, with small thin claws, and soft pink fleshy
pads underneath, and though they are differently proportioned to
human hands, and used for locomotion as much as for gripping or
holding, there is a finesse about their design that really does
make them hand-like.

The rest of the thurga’s body was hidden
under the bedclothes. I could just see part of the shaven skin
peeking above the white sheet. Having briefly studied what I could
see of the thurga, I met his gaze properly.

“
Hello,” I croaked;
greeting him of my own volition at last, after spending who knew
how many days in bed alongside him.

“
Hello, Daniel,” the
creature replied.

Its voice was so soft and gentle; low in
pitch and quiet in tone, it reminded me of the purr of a cat. Its
small, sharp white teeth and pink tongue were visible in glimpses
as it formed the English words.

For a moment, all I could do was process in
silence my current situation: here I was, in bed, in a hospital,
after a near-fatal accident that I did not seem to remember, lying
next to an unfamiliar thurga who had apparently undergone the same
surgery that I had. Presumably, the surgeons had operated on us
both on the same day, or something, and had put us in beds side by
side to make nursing us easier.

I swallowed, trying to wet my throat again,
and tried weakly to clear it. “What was your accident?”

I didn’t think there had been any thurga-a
in the laboratory at the time of the accident; we didn’t have any
thurga technicians; so presumably this thurga’s accident had been
different from mine.

The thurga laughed slightly: a little
chuckling sound that sounded like it came from deep in its belly.
“I didn’t have one,” he said simply.

I swallowed again, frowning slightly. “Then
why … did you have surgery?” The nurses and surgeon had said that
this thurga had undergone the same surgery that I had; if he hadn’t
been in an accident, what had happened to him?

His big dark eyes held mine. “Because of
you.”

I blinked several times, nonplussed.

“
Daniel, your organs were
damaged almost beyond repair.” The thurga paused, as though giving
me time to assimilate this. “Your internal organs can no longer
function on their own.”

I frowned in puzzlement. As the thurga was
speaking, the feeling of sick dread had begun to rise again in me.
There was something here that I did not understand.