Chapter Two: The Planks
First thing Xavier noticed was noise.
He could not tell one sound from another and he could not tell where any of it was coming from, and it went on and on until he understood that some of it was him.
Light after that.
Too much of it and none of it in focus.
Shapes that swam apart when he tried to hold them.
His first coherent thought was a diagnosis, because that was the only kind of thought he had ever really had.
Survived.
Somebody pulled me out of the ditch.
Anoxic brain injury, probably significant, given the visual disturbance and the disorganised sensory input.
Which meant a long stay and a long fight and probably no more operating, and he found he did not care about any of that yet, because he was alive and the being alive was so loud that it drowned everything else.
He tried to lift his right hand to look at it.
Something moved at the bottom of his vision.
It was small and it was pink and it opened and closed and he could feel that it belonged to him.
He looked at it for a long time.
Oedema, he thought.
Fluid overload.
Except that oedema does not shorten a finger, and it does not fold the skin at the wrist into a bracelet, and it does not do that.
He tried to speak.
The sound that came out of him was an infant screaming, and it kept going after he had stopped choosing it, and hands came and lifted him and a voice said words above his head that were not English and were not any language he had ever heard.
The first thing they take is your hands.
He had not expected that to be the worst of it and it was the worst of it.
He had spent his adult life at the end of a pair of instruments so fine he had stopped noticing them.
He could tie a knot in a vessel he could barely see.
He had held a beating heart in one palm and been steady.
And now there were two things fixed to his arms that opened and closed on nothing and had no more to do with him than the ceiling did.
Then the head.
He could not hold it up.
It went where the room put it.
Then the crying, which he never got used to, because the crying was not his.
It started somewhere under him and came up through him and out, and he could hear himself doing it and could not stop it, and it went on until a body arrived and dealt with him.
He was being operated by something that was not him.
He lay there inside it and thought, calmly, this is what a stroke is.
This is exactly what I have been explaining to families for twelve years and I have been getting it wrong every single time.
And the sleep.
That was the one that took the most from him.
He would start a thought and go under halfway through it and come up hours later in a different light, and the thought would be gone, and he had no way to hold on to anything, and for the first several months of that second life he existed in pieces of about forty minutes.
He got through it by counting.
It was all he had left of a mind.
He counted feeds and he counted the beams in the ceiling and he counted the number of separate voices in the house, which was fourteen and then thirteen and then fourteen again.
It took him a long time to give up on the other explanations, because he was a stubborn man and because every one of them was better than the truth.
He tried head injury.
Head injury does not give you four kilos of body weight.
He tried coma dream.
He had read about people in intensive care who lived whole years in a week.
But dreams do not have boredom in them, and he was bored, so bored that he thought he would go mad, lying on his back in a dim room for hours with nothing to do but listen.
Dreams skip the boring parts.
This did not skip anything.
He tried drugs.
He tried psychosis.
He kept a mental record, dated by nothing, because there was nothing to date it by.
Findings: no fever.
No pain beyond hunger and cold.
Motor control absent, then poor, then improving on a normal infant curve.
Vision clearing on a normal infant curve.
Hearing intact and, as far as he could tell, sharper than an adult’s.
The body was working perfectly.
It was doing exactly what a new body does.
It was only that he was in it.
Then one morning a woman carried him through the house and stopped in a doorway to talk to somebody, and there was a bronze mirror on the wall beside her, and he saw the thing she was holding.
He had been telling himself for months that he had not seen his own face.
He had been careful about it without admitting he was being careful.
Now here it was, at the length of an arm, brown and soft and dented in the bronze, and it was a baby, and when he moved his mouth it moved its mouth.
Something in him came off its hinges.
He screamed for four hours.
Nothing would stop it and he was not trying to stop it, and after the first hour it was not even fear any more, it was just the only thing his body could do with what was in it.
The woman walked him the whole time.
She did not put him down and she did not hand him to anybody and she did not lose her temper.
She walked him up and down that corridor until it was dark, and she sang the same six lines over and over, and at some point he stopped and lay against her neck and let her.
He held on to her dress with a hand that could barely grip.
He hated that.
He had hated it, that the first comfort of his second life had come from a woman he could not name and had not chosen, and that he had taken it.
After that he was quiet for a long while, and he thought about the ship.
He had been standing in a corridor with a pen in his hand thinking about planks, and it had been a game then, a thing to turn over on the walk to the car.
Now every plank was new.
Every single one.
Not one cell of Xavier Reid had come through.
The hands were gone.
The hands he had built a life on were gone and he had a pair of things at the ends of his arms that could not close on a rattle.
So the question was not the same ship.
It was whether there was a ship at all, or only a way of getting somewhere.
He had said that.
He had said the planks never mattered, standing in a hospital corridor at eleven at night, and the universe had heard him and taken him up on it.
He lay in the dark and thought about Sofia Alvarez.
That was the part that had come through.
That was the only cargo.
Everything else had been left in the ditch, the car, the hospital, Claire, the name, the face, thirty seven years of it, and what he had carried across was a girl on a table and a wrong word said in a confident voice.
Marcus Aurelius, in the dark, in a language nobody in this room would ever speak.
Do the work in front of you.
All right, he thought.
What is the work.
Learn to speak.
That was the work.
Everything else came after it.
It was not Latin.
He knew that much from the sound of it, though he could not have said how he knew.
He went at it the only way he had ever gone at anything, which was to write it down.
He could not write.
So he built the notes in his head and rehearsed them every night before he lost consciousness, and lost about a third of them anyway, and started again.
He began with shapes.
A run of sound that went up at the end came before somebody waited, so that was a question.
A short flat one from the big voice made everybody in the room move, so that was an order.
He had questions and orders eight months before he had a single word.
Words were worse.
Words came stuck to each other and nobody in this house said anything twice the same way.
He would build a meaning over a week and then hear the same noise used for something else entirely and lose the whole week.
He had a doctorate.
He had lectured.
He had stood in front of three hundred people and taken questions on liver resection, and he could not ask this woman for water.
He would open his mouth to say a whole sentence and it would come out as one flat vowel and she would laugh and kiss him, and he would lie in her arms and burn.
His first breakthrough came from the kitchen.
There was a girl who worked at the back of the house, and she came through with her hand up and blood running down her wrist, swearing at somebody behind her, and she said a word he knew.
Haima.
His whole mind went white.
He knew that word.
He had written that word four thousand times with different endings glued to it.
Haemorrhage.
Haematoma.
Haemostasis.
He had spent his entire professional life speaking a language he thought was English and it had been stuffed full of this one all along, every organ, every vessel, every disease, because two thousand years ago somebody standing about here had named them and nobody since had bothered to change it.
Kardia.
Hepar.
Arteria.
Nephros.
Derma.
Neuron.
Thorax.
Trachea.
Greek.
He was in Greece.
It was a Greece with no glass in the windows and no iron in the kitchen, and the word that girl had used for her own blood was the word he had been using for blood since he was twenty two.
He did not sleep that night.
He went back through his own vocabulary and pulled out every root he had ever learned, all the dead scaffolding under a modern medical education, all the words he had memorised at twenty and had never once thought of as belonging to anybody.
By morning he had six hundred of them, and no grammar, and no idea at all what year it was.
The year was the thing that frightened him.
Not the missing plumbing.
Not the being a baby.
He got over both of those.
It was that he did not know when he was, could not find out, and had no way to make anyone tell him.
He knew Corinth.
He knew the name once he had learned to hear it, Korinthos, and he knew there had been a Corinth in the ancient world and that it had mattered.
He knew Rome existed, because he had heard the word Rhome by then, and heard what happened to the room when somebody said it.
That was the whole of it.
That was everything Xavier Reid, MD, had retained about ancient Greece from a school he could not remember and books he had never opened.
He knew Rome ended up owning all of this.
He did not know when.
He did not know how.
He could not have named one Roman general, or one Greek city that fell, or one date that mattered.
He was a doctor.
He had spent his study time on things that saved people.
So there was something coming.
He was certain of that.
Something was coming, and it might be next year, and it might be two hundred years after his own second death, and there was no way on earth to find out, and every adult in this house was going about their business inside a countdown that only he could feel and that he could not read.
He had run a trauma department on information.
He had built a whole career on knowing the numbers before anybody else in the room.
Now he had nothing.
He was three feet tall and he could not hold a cup.
There was one shape they used at him more than any other.
Four beats.
It came when they wanted him and it came when they were pleased with him and it came, sharper, when he had put his hands in something.
Every voice in the house had a version of it.
The big voice made it short.
The woman who had walked him in the corridor stretched the middle of it out.
He worked out what it was long before he could make the sound himself.
Then he spent weeks refusing to make it, and he could not have told anybody why, and he knew exactly why.
He gave in on a hot afternoon with the flies coming in off the yard.
The woman was leaning over him saying it, over and over, patient about it, the way she had been patient about everything since the day he was born.
He was tired.
He was so tired of being nobody in a room.
He said it back.
She sat down on the floor.
She put both hands over her mouth and made a noise he had never heard out of her, and then she was shouting for the rest of the house, and people came, and he had to do it again for all of them, and somebody was sent to the harbour to fetch his father, and there was wine that evening, and a woman he did not know came and put oil on the doorpost.
Lysandros.
That was the name.
He had said it and he had answered to it, and there is no way back from that.
Xavier Reid died in a ditch in the rain on a Tuesday, and then he died again on a hot afternoon in a house in Corinth, on the floor, in front of his mother, and nobody in the building noticed, and they sang about it half the night because the boy had learned his own name.