A bicycle. A car not properly seen until the moment it has already cut him up on a zebra crossing. There are no zebras crossing.
Impact arrives all at once and then oddly slowly. The bike rears up like Champion the Wonder Horse. The Man rises briefly above the Biedronka car park before the back of his body meets the kerb.
The air leaves him. He can’t breathe.
For a few seconds he hovers above himself, looking down at a man writhing beside abandoned shopping trolleys.
“Is this where I die?” says the Body.
“Suicide takes many forms,” Lacan muses, unhelpfully, from off stage.
A small crowd forms instantly. Somebody crouches. A woman already looks faintly irritated, as if mortality has once again disrupted parking arrangements.
The Man pivots in a loop in the supermarket car park like a desperate Daddy Longlegs several of whose long daddy legs have been removed by a malevolent child.
Air returns in partial instalments. He stands badly, thanks everyone, waves them off and pushes the bike home in tiny collapsing circles.
The bicycle survives. A bent back wheel. Another damaged loop.
Two days of enormous pain follow.
It hurts to breathe, which is inconvenient. It hurts not to breathe. It hurts to sit, stand, cough, laugh, sleep.
“I’m not going to hospital again,” he says.
Then he does.
Eight hours in A&E. Laptop open on a plastic chair. “Is there internet here,” he asks a tattooed man whose left ear seems to have partially detached itself from the rest of his head.
“What did you say,” the man asks. “I can’t hear you.”
“Wifi. Vee – fee. Oh, forget it,” the Man says.
The X-ray rises onto a screen like evidence in a war crimes tribunal.
“Ah,” says the doctor. “Broken collarbone, three broken ribs and a collapsed left lung.”
That’s probably why it hurt.
Then the tube.
Nothing flattering survives contact with rubber being forced between broken ribs while a nurse pins your shoulders down like you’re an old pirate awaiting field amputation.
“This might hurt a little,” says the doctor.
Lacan bursts out laughing.
Outer body to inner body. The pleural cavity opened by force. For the second time in forty-eight hours the Man becomes convinced he is dying.
“I told you, didn’t I,” Lacan says. “There are other ways.”
Then the box arrives.
For six days a plastic container containing part of his own body follows him around.
The abject has been placed in what appears to be a Waitrose wine box.
The Man carries it everywhere.
A portable interior.
“So that’s us,” says the Boy.
“Part of us,” says the Man.
“A magnificent image,” says Lacan. “The sinthome begins to materialise.”
“Oh Christ,” says the Editor.
The Body begins speaking more frequently after this. It refuses sleep. Refuses movement. Refuses food. Then suddenly demands food at three in the morning with the urgency of a hostage negotiator.
The Man starts to realise something embarrassing: the Body has not previously been consulted on major decisions.
The diabetes arrives without introduction.
Bus to clinic. Clinic to lab. Lab to specialist. Specialist to corridor. Corridor to another specialist staring into a computer.
Machine not work.
“Nie działa,” says the nurse, shrugging.
Of course it doesn’t.
He is told to return.
He returns.
The machine still not work.
“Maybe next week.”
“What happens until then?” says the Man.
The nurse shrugs again with an ancient look that says: what exactly did you expect?
Then the gallbladder.
Three in the morning. Another waiting room where time itself appears to have been left untreated.
The pain removes dignity first.
The Man lies on the floor. No beds are available at Hotel SOR. Thankfully, he has paid his ZUS. The women at the hotel reception are keen to check this before he checks in.
In the SOR corridor, people step over the prostate writhing insect.
Something is removed.
Beds in rows. Curtains that never quite close. Tubes in. Tubes out. Another Waitrose wine box. A sweet German vintage this time.
“You notice,” says Lacan, “that the body does not ask for permission.”
“Shut up,” says the Boy.
“No, really,” says Lacan, delighted now. “This is the important bit. He thought he was a mind, but the body has entered the story.”
The Man still thinks the problem is elsewhere. The Body keeps trying to correct him.
The limp arrives next. He writes in his Hospital Diary: The Man Who Limps.
There is a version of yourself you never expect to meet, the Man writes. The one who limps. Literally: dragging one leg like a tired animal, shouting at cars while waiting at bus stops. The one who goes from doctor to doctor, each of them passing him on like a defective parcel. Another referral, another invoice. No one tells him what is wrong. The tests reveal nothing except the cost of being foreign. One hundred euros to be told you can’t be helped. In delightfully passive-aggressive English. The eyes say ‘what are you doing here’ as the voice stumbles over gall bladder. You thank them for the humiliation. Their children fly to soccer school in Florida, while you struggle to pay for ice cream at the Grycan ice cream parlour on Francuska.
A friend tells a friend, who tells another friend, who finally finds the “right” person – a surgeon who agrees your foot needs rebuilding but informs you, almost tenderly, that public hospitals will not operate before 2028.
The doctor looks at you as if you are a malfunctioning appliance bought during the 1990s and kept far beyond warranty.
He is no longer the Englishman-abroad, but a foreign body that hasn’t left yet. Exile without departure – an interminable leaving that never completes itself. A man trapped in Warsaw by his inability to move.
“Ah,” says Lacan softly now. “There it is.”
“What?”
“The sinthome. The thing that both injures and holds us together.”
The Boy looks unconvinced.
“It’s just a bad foot.”
Then The Alcove.
As he tells it, the Man physically shrinks.
“There were moments – small, humiliating flashes – when I would pause at the bottom of the stairs, hearing life above, and ask myself whether I should go up or stay put. I was not noble. I was wounded, humiliated, claustrophobic, scared,” he says.
Then, from the basement bed, a “temporary arrangement” that lasted a year, to an alcove on the first floor. A promotion.
He quotes a piece from the Alcove Months, another crucial section in the Prison Diaries:
“My feet stick out into the corridor. People, cats, insects walking past must navigate me as if I were a piece of badly placed architecture. I sleep and write half in the world, half in the walkway. From here, the house is loud. The noises that the basement softened now arrive without mercy. Oliver screams – always the first note of the domestic symphony. O screams back, high and insistent. Max and Henry fight in the room opposite.”
The Polish language echoes slide up the hallway and into the alcove. I understand most of it, but comprehension doesn’t grant belonging. If anything, it exposes the degree to which the sentences are not addressed to me. I am a man overhearing his own life in translation. Poland lives around me. I am here, but not quite of here.”
Upstairs, on the second floor, lies the bed he once shared with O. It is now unmistakably, definitively her territory. The children enter it; he does not. The stairs mark the border.
And yet he wrote. Because what else does one do when one becomes both resident and outsider in the same house? It forces him into a posture of listening. From here, he also sees everything. A spy in his own home. This was the real beginning of the book: not trauma, not travel, not Poland, not exile, but this narrow bed in an alcove, feet sticking out into the corridor, waiting to be moved again, already taking notes.
Somewhere beneath all the noise, beneath the hospitals and loops and humiliations, something inside him has begun, quietly, to say: stop.
But the loop, for now, has other ideas.
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