"Paul Preuss - Rhea's Time" - читать интересную книгу автора (Preuss Paul)

eleven-plus months on disk. Never seen anything like it.

Patient remained in coma. After two months, transferred at husbandтАЩs request. . . .

Thus Rhea was installed in our wing, where she still remains and where I noticed her for the first time, a
rag doll of a young woman in a thin hospital gown, whose faintly yellow skin, even though inflated by
intravenous fluids, could not disguise her loss of muscle tone. She did not react to light, sound, or touch.
She lay in whatever position her nurses arranged herтАФif they opened her eyes, her eyes remained open
and unblinking; if they closed them, they remained closed. I had seen many like her, usually the victims of
trauma or drug overdose. I remember glancing at the record: blow to the head . . . cerebral hemorrhage .
. . coma. Simple. She was not my patient.

It was mid-March thenтАФspringtime, which means nothing, or rather the opposite of what one might
think, for like most large buildings on this coast of America, our hospital is a furnace during the cool half
of the year, a freezer during the warm half. (The microorganisms love us for it.) Rhea was generally
covered only with a sheet, with a light blanket kept folded at the bottom of the bed; on successive
mornings the nurse noticed the blanket pulled neatly up to RheaтАЩs chin. Nurse would fold it and return it
to the bottom of the bed. After a week of this she thought to ask the night nurse why it was necessary to
cover Rhea every night, and learned that the night nurse had not been doing so.

One has to skim the videotape they made that night; it moves like an Andy Warhol film of the Empire
State Building. The fluorescent light in RheaтАЩs windowless room is that of a morgue. Her left hand moves
at a speed of inches per hour toward the foot of the bed, until her body is bent almost at right angles. She
grasps the hem of the blanket and begins pulling it up at the same rate, straightening herself by millimeters,
and now using her creeping right hand to smooth the blanket across her chest. Her hands, moving at the
speed of glaciers, resume their former position at her sides. This takes eight hours. No one glancing
briefly at the monitor or into her room from the hall could have known that she was moving at all.

Against this date I can barely decipher the abbreviated jargon of our former neurological mikado
ordering up a new round of tests which, however, reveal no quantifiable change.

Thereafter Rhea is observed shifting the bed clothes constantly, around the clock. Pulls up her blanket,
pushes it down again, pushes away her sheet, pulls up her gown, exposing her naked self. At this hint of
sex, the local pack of witch doctors becomes highly aroused.

She reverses the process: down with the gown, up with the sheet, up with the blanket, down again. The
cycle takes days, and repeats. SheтАЩs always in motion, the same slow motion, almost too slow to catch.
A nurse tries to stop her from pulling up her gownтАФnurse records astonishment at the juggernaut strength
of the wasted woman. The nurses grow impatient with RheaтАЩs immodesty and untidiness and strap her
wrists to the bed rail, but so persistently does Rhea strain against the bonds that she is in danger of
dislocating a joint. Our maharaja orders her untiedтАФmanтАЩs been around, he can handle the sight of
rumpled bedclothes.

In May, Rhea begins to hum. Or growl, or groan. At any rate, she makes tuneless rumblings deep in her
throat, occasionally punctuated by quiet little yelps and gasps. Somebody notices that the EEG has
changed: right hemisphere still a chaotic jumble, but the left hemisphere has perked up considerably. It
occurs to meтАФit would not have occurred to themтАФthat the new pattern on this side could be almost
normal, for someone in deep hypnosis.

Boards and committees, meetings and consultations. The shamans are given their way with her.