Page 78 of Never Tear Us Apart
‘Oh, God, his poor wife,’ I say. ‘Thirty-three years of having and not having him? His poor son. Poor Sal – he’ll be devastated. How can I tell him this?’
Climbing out of bed, I start getting dressed in my day clothes, not really clear what I’m doing, where I’m going or what I think I’m going to do. I only know that I need to get out of this room.
‘Shall I call Kathryn?’ Selena asks, signalling to someone in the room next door. ‘I will ask someone to go and call Kathryn.’
‘Thirty-three years in a coma?’ I ask, ignoring her. ‘Is that even possible?’
‘It’s unusual, to say the least. I can think of only one other patient who has lived in a coma for so long, somebody called Elaine Esposito who was in a coma for thirty-seven years before she died. Mr Borg is very ill, but it’s clear that his life is sacred to his family. They are determined to preserve and protect him for as long as he takes breath. They love him deeply. He is still the heart of their family.’
Selena hands me the folder, which I open to find a series of printed-out articles. One, from theTimes of Malta, shows an image of Sal taken in the last few days before his collapse. I recognise him – albeit a younger, slimmer version of him, with all his hair. He has his hand on his wife’s waist. They smile for the camera, their whole lives ahead of them. Then there is a photo of a man propped up on pillows in a bed. The room is clean; there are fresh flowers. He is surrounded by an older woman, whom I recognise as his wife from the first photo, a young man who is the image of him, and a gaggle of children of varying ages: his son and his grandchildren, I presume. All of them are smiling; half a dozen hands rest on him.
Sal, who I know and do not know, lies perfectly still in the middle of all this love, wired up to a monitor with a feeding tube inserted.
‘I also found this Salvatore Borg,’ Selena says.
This time it’s a black-and-white photograph that she shows me. A group of schoolchildren are standing outside a church, all in their Sunday best. I think – yes, I’m right – that is Vittoria, a few years before I knew her, tall and willowy, with eyes full of expectation. And standing with them, his hands crossed in front of him, is Sal, a Sal almost exactly the same as the one I know, and the exact image of the man in the coma.
‘That’s him,’ I say, tears springing into my eyes. ‘That’s Sal. He lives there, but he’s also here. I don’t understand how that works.’
‘I don’t understand how that works either,’ Selena says. ‘An astrophysicist friend of mine studies the universe, and once, just to pass the time, we compared the structures of the brain to the structures of the known universe and . . . well, they are remarkably similar, so much so that he wentaway to see if he could show that the universe itself might have consciousness. And if that’s the case, then maybe we humans are its creations, made expressly so that it might understand itself – which could mean that how we exist is far more complicated than we are able to fathom.’
‘What did your friend find out?’ I ask her. ‘Is the universe a thinking thing?’
‘Well, that was just over a decade ago,’ Selena says. ‘He’s barely started developing a thesis, really. These things take time. But ten years of human time is a blink of the eye in the span of the universe.’
It takes a moment for me to try to line up these big and complicated ideas in my head.
‘So, let’s say that the universe is just a great big conscious brain,’ I ask slowly, ‘does that make us figments of its imagination?’
‘No, more like manifestations, I think,’ Selena says. ‘Look, I can’t say that I understand what’s happening – no one truly understands the nature of our existence, why, where or how we exist. All we can do is to try and try again. In a way, that’s what we’ve been doing since the first human looked up at the night sky. It’s always a guess. So, let’s theorise, based on the very scant evidence we have, that we exist because the universe wants us to – maybe in more parallel realities than our poor human heads can get around. And if that is so, then having taken that huge, huge, frankly insane leap of reasoning, we could,perhaps, extrapolate to a place where the universe organises and reorganises molecules into vessels for our consciousness as often as it wants to. But sometimes, consciousness leaves, and the remnants are left behind. Mostly, this is what we think of as death, but sometimes, basic function remains; a sort of one-in-a-trillion glitch that might lead to aman being in a coma for thirty years and everything that you are experiencing.’
‘And whatamI experiencing?’ I ask her.
‘Some kind of miracle,’ she says.
Chapter Fifty-Six
‘It’s meant to be closed at the moment,’ Kathryn tells us as a security guard lets us into the building that stands above theHal Saflieni Hypogeum in Paola. ‘They’re conducting essential preservation checks, but I managed to get us in for a brief private tour.’
‘It feels alive, somehow,’ Selena says as Kathryn walks us into a purpose-built room full of incredible artefacts: a skull, an oil lamp, a small statue of a sleeping woman. It’s as if it’s charged and ready for . . .something. ‘I’d love to wire the whole place up to understand its electromagnetism and the background sound and radiation levels.’
‘I’m almost certain they won’t let you do that,’ Kathryn tells her. We’d told Kathryn everything we’d discovered on the way here. ‘This is a precious place – a world heritage site. It’s estimated that about seven thousand individuals were interred here over the period it was in use,’ she goes on, in the melodic tone of an expert reciting facts to a bunch of laypeople. Even in the dim museum lighting, I can see her eyes sparkling and the delight in her smile. ‘Now, there’s a series of metal walkways and steps that we must not deviate from, and please refrain from touching the temple.’ She turns to look at me as she says this, knowing that later I will need to understand exactly where to go as quickly as possible if I am to stand a chance of not getting caught. This is a reconnaissance mission.
She leads us through an air-tight door into the upper layer of the temple. It’s hard to reconcile what I’m seeing now with the place Sal and I visited in the dead of night. It’s been carefully lit and somehow seems tamed by its dedicated protectors into something less feral. Still, I can feel the charge in the air that Selena mentioned, and I hear a faint background hum waiting to rise.
‘It’s the way it’s built that still amazes and confounds archaeologists,’ Kathryn says. ‘And no, I don’t mean we think there’s a secret lost civilisation of giants or that aliens did it. I mean that our distant ancestors were incredibly clever, resourceful and remarkable people, able to design shafts and manipulate light from the surface, so that it travelled throughout the complex. We can’t know what was in the minds of the builders, but in some cultures, spirals – like the red ones painted on the walls here – are the symbols for eternal consciousness, representing our minds and souls unwinding forever into time and space, even after our physical bodies have turned to dust.’
Selena and I exchange a glance.
‘In Christianity, a spiral represents the Holy Trinity,’ Kathryn goes on. ‘God in all forms, like the spiral of a galaxy or the curve of a shell. It is the form of all creation. The same image is seen time and time again in ancient cultures, across religions, made by peoples who evolved completely separately. But in each instance, it seems to mark the first spark of life, and we can track its path evolving outwards from its conception into infinity.’
‘I’m not sure I like the idea of infinity.’ I’m whispering for some reason, as if we might be overheard. ‘The idea of being lost in nothing forever feels rather frightening.’
‘Ah, but there is no nothing,’ Selena tells me. ‘Even that which seems empty is still full of miracles: gravity, darkmatter, the unknowable fabric of our universe – there is no void, only mystery.’
Kathryn bows as she leads us into a long, rectangular chamber. ‘But it’s here, in the Holy of Holies, as some call this room, or the oracle chamber, that their ingenuity is truly breathtaking.’ Her enthusiasm makes me smile, and seeing the temple lit so carefully here gives me an entirely new view of the dark and mysterious place I visited once before.
We step into the largest chamber we have entered so far. There is a rectangle in the centre, surrounded by curved walls forming an elongated oval. Long, beautifully hewn steps lead down to a central floor. The same design is repeated on the ceiling. You could turn the room upside down like an hourglass, and everything would look exactly the same. Even the long tunnels leading off into the dark match one another with fearful symmetry.
