Beyond the High Blue Air. Lu Spinney
Please let me know if there is anything we can do for Miles or yourselves at this time.
John Smith
Chief Executive, BBC Worldwide
I can’t control my tears. The letter gives Miles substance, a background, the importance of which we are only beginning to learn. In each new institution to which he will be admitted in the months to come he will simply be another TBI, another Traumatic Brain Injury. He’ll have no history, no personality; all that defines him will be his sex, his age, and his injury. The medical staff cannot know that he is thoughtful, funny, brave, kind, impatient, and irascible. They can have no idea about his lived life, its failures and achievements, the way his energy and presence seem to contain some electrical force. The only story they will have in the notes that accompany him is that he once snowboarded, not that he likes boxing and playing poker, writing poetry and playing the fool.
Turning into Miles’s room now, the shock of seeing him wired up and motionless on the bed makes a mockery of the letter in my hand. It was only ten days ago in the cosy sitting room at home with the fire lit and a glass of our favorite Rioja that we had a long discussion about his work and his plans for the future. After putting his fledgling company, K Tech, on ice two years ago he joined an international firm of management consultants and it was from there that he presented and won the account for them with the BBC. He had begun working at the BBC only a few months ago; he would be proud of this letter. Pulling up a chair next to his bed I read it aloud to him, and then I read it again, hopelessly searching his face for a reaction. Of course there is nothing, the softly flashing lights and the undulating lines on the screens above his bed the only proof that he is alive. He is there but not there, though a little part of me is certain he is listening and hearing me. I must hold on to this, my hope is tethered to it, a fragile skein of hope.
At the end of the morning visit we have our first appointment to meet Miles’s doctors. We are back in the waiting room, waiting in silence, for fear that if we speak our dread will spill out. The fish continue to swim in their tank, the overhead strip light glares relentlessly. This room feels like an antechamber to horror, the air heavy with the distilled fear of all the people who have waited here before us.
I need to clear my mind for this meeting, but it’s a scrambled mess of unfinished thoughts that keep sliding away, of questions I can’t frame. With grim relief I see through the glass wall two men in green surgical uniforms walking towards us. Neither is what I expected of a neurosurgeon, the older man with his ruddy jovial face and thick blond mustache, the younger man tall, tanned and athletic-looking, both more like men with outdoor pursuits than doctors. I suppose this is the Alps, I think, but Miles’s life is in their hands; I need to believe in them. When the older man introduces himself his voice is calm, authoritative, his expression no longer jovial as he looks around at each of us, one by one, taking us in. I am Dr. Stizer, he says. I operated on Miles on Sunday evening. He had suffered a severe brain injury and was unconscious on arrival here. We removed a large piece of bone from his skull to relieve the pressure on his brain. He is now in an induced coma and breathing by means of a ventilator. We do not know at this stage what the outcome will be. He lifts his eyes to the ceiling and raises his arms, hands upturned, a gesture of supplication. It is in God’s hands, that gesture seems to say, and I think I don’t want it to be in God’s hands, look what’s already happened in God’s hands. He looks searchingly around at us once more and his expression is so concerned, so kind, that I can see he cares about the young man who is his new patient and he cares, too, about us. I understand the shock you are feeling, he says quietly. We will do our best for Miles. But now, please ask me any questions you may have.
Dr. Stizer is a good man. But what questions? All that matters is, will Miles live? He cannot answer that.
Leaving the hospital together we walk in silence, each isolated in our need to comprehend what has happened. Below us the river Inn flows busily, people stroll past or sit at pavement cafés chatting in the sunshine, the mountains continue to sparkle under a cloudless Alpine sky. The serenity is monstrous. Claudia starts to walk fiercely ahead of us, then stops and turns to me, her face wet with tears: I’m going to take the cable car up the mountain, I need to be on my own. I’ll be back. She turns off to cross a bridge and disappears from sight. I look at Marina and her eyes are wide with pain as she says she will take a walk along the riverbank, giving me a quick kiss goodbye as she descends the steps leading down to the water’s edge.
We all need to be on our own. The information just delivered to us by the two surgeons has become a broken jigsaw of meaning, splintered pieces that need to be reassembled somewhere, alone, in peace. Three of us are left behind standing on the edge of a bridge that leads into the cobbled streets of Innsbruck Old Town and I can see sunshine warming the ancient stone buildings. It looks peaceful; I want to go there. I turn to Will and he understands. He and his father will go back to the hotel and get some lunch.
I have no plan. I probably should have lunch, but I’m not hungry. The world has been put on hold and I’m drifting out beyond the edges. The aimlessness is soothing, a kind of willed deferral of all the jagged thoughts; I will face them, but for now I want to keep drifting. Across the bridge the scene looks comfortingly unreal: delicately ornate façades of buildings in the traditional Tyrolean style suggest a make-believe world far from the morning’s reality. A sign hanging from one of the buildings draws my attention: “Goldener Adler” is inscribed in Gothic lettering and soon I find myself standing outside an old stone inn on the edge of a cobbled plaza. Entering the dim interior I see a chubby young woman at the reception desk who could be Heidi; her dirndl and shining golden plaits speak of mountain peaks and sunny pastures and innocence uncontaminated by pain. Can I help you? she says, and I hear myself replying that I need a room, some rooms. For which date, and for how many nights? she asks efficiently. I don’t know, I answer. Indefinitely. She looks at me with concern. My son is in the hospital. I didn’t want to say that, I haven’t had to say it until now; it feels too private. She takes a key from the board behind her and says with such kindness I must fight back my tears, I hope you will be happy here. I think I have a room you will like.
She does. A corner room that looks out over the plaza, large windows on each wall and a sitting area with sofa, armchair, and desk, it is spacious and light. We could retreat here. The station hotel Ben and Charlie booked us into is perfectly suitable, closer to the hospital and with more amenities, but it is deadening. A businessman’s hotel, its airless decor and efficiency leave nowhere in which to hide away and make private. I hadn’t thought it out until this moment, but some primitive maternal instinct warns me that we could not hold ourselves together for long in such a place, and here we might. How ancient is this instinct to provide a refuge, a burrow, a nest, anything hidden away and safe from the dangers that lurk prowling and snarling in the dark outside? Stepping out of the Goldener Adler into the chill afternoon air I have a sense of having restored a kind of order, exerted some small control over the calamitous events that have overtaken us. Goldener Adler, golden eagle: light, strength. Miles would like that.
Early that Tuesday evening Ron arrives from London. I have missed him; we’ve spoken on the phone but it is his presence I need. Now he is flying out to see Miles, and to see me. Watching him walk across the airport arrivals hall I think again how distinguished he looks, his integrity so obvious that it gives him his particular gravitas, but to know him is to know the ridiculous fun one can have in his company. When we meet I see the pain reflected in his eyes, complicated by his concern both for Miles and for me. How have you been? he says. How is the boy? He takes me in his arms and I feel stilted, different, I’m not the same as before; I am damaged. He was widowed two years before he met me when his wife died of cancer after many years of illness; theirs had been a long and stable marriage and for him and his two now adult daughters, Belinda and Amelia, it was a deeply painful time. I wish he did not have to suffer again on our behalf.
Ron had waited these two days before coming here out of respect for David, that at such a time it should be Miles’s father who sees Miles first with all of us together, the original family. Such consideration is typical of him, though I know Miles would want him here from the beginning. All four children love Ron as a father as well as a friend and confidant; he is an integral part of our family now. David