See Through Me. Kevin Brooks
telling me what wasn’t wrong with me, which as far as I could tell was pretty much everything. I wasn’t suffering from a virus, or any kind of infection. My blood count was fine. Kidney function, liver function, heart . . . all okay. Toxicology test negative. X-rays and scans – CT and MRI – perfectly normal . . .
‘Some of your test results showed slightly abnormal readings,’ Dr Kamara said, taking over from Dr Reynolds, ‘but most of these can be put down to highly elevated levels of stress. In fact, given what you’ve been through, I’d be worried if you didn’t show signs of stress.’ She glanced at Dr Hahn, then turned back to me. ‘There are still a lot of tests that we haven’t done yet,’ she continued, ‘and we’re still waiting for the results of some we’ve already done, but so far it seems as if . . .’
She hesitated, her voice trailing off, and she looked over at Dr Reynolds.
‘How do you feel at the moment, Kenzie?’ he asked me, getting out of the chair and coming over to the bed.
‘Why can’t you just tell me –?’
‘I’m going to tell you everything,’ he said, moving aside to let Dr Hahn stand beside him. ‘But before I start, I need to know how you’re feeling.’
It’s hard to describe something that isn’t like anything else. If there’s nothing to compare it to, and there aren’t any words for it, it’s impossible to say what it’s really like. All you can do is get as close as you can. So that’s what I tried to do. But even after I’d done my best to describe the weird feeling in my skin – the uncold coldness, the clamminess, the tingling rawness of freshly scraped flesh – I knew I’d got nowhere near it.
‘Does it hurt?’ Dr Reynolds asked me.
‘No, not really . . . it just feels kind of . . . I don’t know . . .’
‘Unpleasant?’
‘A little bit, yeah.’
‘But it’s not painful.’
I shook my head. ‘It just feels wrong.’
He was looking closely at me now, his head angled to one side as he gazed intently at the side of my face, and as he leaned in a little closer – a sense of wonder showing in his eyes – I could feel the anger growing inside me. I’d had enough of this now – being gawped at, studied, examined, like I was some kind of experiment or something. I needed the truth . . . I needed to see myself . . . I needed to know . . .
I don’t know what I would have done if Dr Hahn hadn’t realised I was getting upset and given Dr Reynolds a discreet little nudge. Part of me was so desperate to see myself, to see the dreaded truth, that all I wanted to do was push Dr Reynolds away and rip off my gown and the long white gloves . . .
But another part of me was simply too terrified to do anything.
Dr Reynolds had responded to Dr Hahn’s nudge now, realising his mistake and straightening up so he wasn’t staring right into my face anymore.
‘Sorry, Kenzie,’ he said. ‘I didn’t mean –’
‘Help me,’ I muttered. ‘Please . . . just help me.’
‘I’m afraid there’s only one way to do this, Kenzie,’ Dr Reynolds said. ‘I could tell you what’s happened to you, and I could try to prepare you for what you’re about to see, but nothing will really mean anything to you until you actually see it. Does that make sense?’
I nodded.
‘And besides,’ he added, ‘you’ve already got at least some idea of what to expect, haven’t you?’
I remembered the flash of red . . . skinless, stripped . . . and the skull in the bathroom mirror . . . faceless bone, grinning teeth . . .
What did I expect?
I don’t know.
I think I was probably hoping rather than expecting . . . hoping that what I was expecting proved to be wrong.
‘Are you okay to go ahead with this, Kenzie?’ Dr Hahn said.
‘Yeah.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Yeah.’
‘If you want to stop at any point, for any reason, just tell us. All right?’
‘Yeah.’
She smiled at me, then turned to Dr Reynolds and nodded.
‘Could you adjust the lighting, please, Miriam?’ he said to Dr Kamara.
She went over to a control panel by the door and pressed one of the buttons. The LED light on the far wall dimmed, and the already gloomy room grew even darker.
‘Is that enough?’ she asked Dr Reynolds.
He looked at me, studying my face for a moment, then nodded to himself.
‘That’s fine,’ he said. ‘Just right.’
The light was so dim now that it was hard to see anything clearly, and as Dr Kamara came back over to the bed, and I gazed around at the monitor displays glowing palely in the dimness, I couldn’t make any sense of it.
‘Is that going to make any difference?’ I said to Dr Reynolds.
‘The light?’
‘Yeah. I mean, turning the light down isn’t going to change anything, is it?’
‘Well, actually . . .’ He paused, hesitating. ‘Look, I’m not trying to hide anything from you, Kenzie, it’s just that certain things are going to be a lot easier to explain, and easier to understand, when you know a bit more about your condition. I realise it’s all very confusing, but if I tried telling you now why we’ve dimmed the light, it would confuse things even more. You’ll find out soon enough though, and I give you my word on that. But for now I think it’s probably best if we concentrate on one thing at a time. Is that okay with you?’
I told him it was.
Then he asked me if I was ready.
And I told him I was, even though half of me wasn’t.
‘Miriam?’ he said.
As I turned to Dr Kamara, I saw that she was holding a clean white pillow in her hands.
‘I’m going to put this on your lap, Kenzie,’ she said. ‘Is that all right?’
I nodded.
‘You’ll have to move your hands, please.’
My white-gloved hands were loosely clasped together in front of me. I moved them out of the way, laying my arms at my sides, and Dr Kamara leaned across and carefully placed the pillow on my lap.
‘Is that okay?’ she asked. ‘Comfortable?’
‘Yeah . . .’
‘Good. Now all I want you to do is lay your left hand on top of the pillow. Like this . . .’
She showed me, leaning over and positioning her hand and lower arm along the length of the pillow, her palm face down.
‘All right?’ she said.
‘Yeah.’
She removed her hand and straightened up, and I copied what she’d done – left arm bent at the elbow, hand and lower arm resting on the pillow, palm face down. There was an ugliness to the way it looked – shrouded in the alien whiteness of the glove and the sleeve of the gown . . . it looked like something sick and dying.
‘I’m just going to roll up your sleeve now,’ Dr Kamara said, leaning over me again. ‘Could you lift your arm for me, please? Just a little bit . . . that’s it.’
She carefully rolled up the sleeve, stopping a few inches below my elbow – so my lower arm was still covered by the long white glove – then