Beyond the High Blue Air Read Online Free

though we have entered an underwater world: tinted green glass divides cubicles and nurses’ stations, and everywhere is silent save for the rhythmic tidal swish of respirators and the soft sonic keening of machines, like whale calls in the deep. Nurses and doctors glide through the rooms, serious, intent on the silent bodies each beached on their high beds.
    As we reach Miles’s cubicle the dread of seeing him engulfs me. Will has his arm firmly around me as we enter what is – I sense it at once – a hallowed place, a shrine; there is an overwhelming impression of a warrior, wounded, suffering. Afterwards we discover that we all felt this same thing, felt the sense of spiritual power heavy in the room and that we were on the periphery of something beyond our mortal comprehension, as though Miles were absorbed in a conversation with Life and Death and we should not presume to interrupt.
    He lies on his back on a high bed in the centre of the room, perfectly still. The stillness is terrible. His strong face, the one we are so familiar with, that we know to be so expressive, humorous, animated, is closed from us in a way it would not be if he were asleep. After a week in the mountain sun his face and neck alone are tanned, a clear demarcation line where the top of his tee shirt would have been. He always tanned easily and it suited his dark looks; now that demarcation line breaks my heart. A sheet has been placed like a loincloth over his middle, but otherwise he is naked, his muscular young man’s chest and arms and beautiful virile legs defying his injury. A multitude of wires and tubes connect his brain and body to the bank of machines and electronic charts behind him which are recording every tremor of his existence, tubes coming out of his nose, his mouth, the top of his head, his chest, his wrist; but his face, bruised down the right side only, is calm, his eyes closed, the violent new scar running serenely from his hairline up and over his partially shaven head and down to the base of his right ear.
    He looks so strong , so healthy, in such fine physical condition. How can it be that only his brain is damaged, and quite so damaged? It is later we are told that he comes to be known by the doctors and nurses on the ward as The Athlete; the nurses flirt coyly with the word. But it is not just his body that is powerful; something is radiating directly from him, the air is thick with his presence.
    Will and I stand silently, on one side of the bed. On the other a male nurse is filling in a chart. He finishes and turns to us, apologises for intruding at this moment but explains that because Miles is on a ventilator there must be a qualified person in the room at all times. His English is impeccable. A ventilator: I wonder what the word for it is in German. In whatever language it is a thing only ever glossed over, half imagined, in a fleeting glimpse of horror. An iron lung it was called when I was a girl and polio was the scourge of the age. I remember my childish incomprehension seeing pictures of people encased in them, as though they were in an iron suitcase like a magician’s accomplice, and the shock when told they could not breathe without it.
    There is too much to take in. I bend down and kiss Miles’s cheek, then the other cheek, his forehead, his nose, his neck, his chest, but it’s no good, there are too many tubes in the way. I begin to speak, hesitantly, it seems difficult. We love you so very much, Miles. You know that. We adore you, we absolutely adore you. You know, don’t you, that we are all here for you. We can feel your strong fighting spirit, you are with us as you always are. You will be all right, you’re going to be all right, you are going to come back to us. I love you so very, very much, my extraordinary, precious, beloved son.
    Who cares if I am gushing. Will bends to kiss Miles too. You’re going to make it, dude, he