(2 of 4)
My life was saved by an Aborigine. His name was Charlie Fishhook. He was driving back toward Broome with his wife and teenage daughter when he saw my wreck on the blacktop. He stopped and checked that I was breathing. He couldn't get much out of me but figured that I must have been fishing at Eco Beach with Danny. So he peeled off and headed for the resort. Meanwhile, some Aborigines of the Bidyadanga people, who lived not far from the crash site, began to converge on the car. They tried gently to free me but couldn't. Later I was told that some of them formed a semicircle by the car and began to chant, trying to sing me back to life. A Filipina nurse from the Bidyadanga settlement presently joined them and (I afterward learned) wept as she heard me mechanically counting aloud. I thought I was trying to stay conscious; she thought I was counting off my last moments. For all I know, we were both right.
JUST SHOOT ME
In the meantime, Danny was at home. He had a radio and a cell phone and, when roused, a foot on the accelerator of his jeep as heavy as a rhino's. He got straight through to the nearest medical unit, which was in Broome, 75 miles away. Then he tore up the road to the wreck, where he held my hand, swore that help was coming and listened to me begging him to shoot me if the gasoline, which was leaking copiously from the crumpled innards of the car, caught fire. Would he have actually done so? I don't know, but luckily for both of us there was no stray spark.
Instead I sat there, contemplating the tiny gap between life and death, not sure whether the growing darkness before my eyes was nightfall or my own consciousness shutting down, retracting into itself. Samuel Johnson once said the prospect of being hanged concentrates a man's mind wonderfully. I can testify that the prospect, extended over an hour or two, of dying in a gasoline fireball does much the same. It dissolves your more commonplace troubles--money, divorce--and shows you what you really want to live for.
At one point I saw Death. He made no gesture, but he opened his mouth and I looked right down his throat, which distended to become a tunnel. He expected me to yield, to go in. This filled me with abhorrence, a hatred of nonbeing. In that moment I realized that there is nothing, nothing whatsoever, outside of the life we have; that the "meaning of life" is nothing other than life itself, obstinately asserting itself against emptiness. Life was so powerful, so demanding, and in my concussion and delirium, even as my systems were shutting down, I wanted it so much.
When the police and medics got to the scene, I was only dimly aware of them. I have a confused memory of being cut from the twisted metal with a huge pair of yellow hydraulic shears, the so-called Jaws of Life, and laid on a stretcher. As they were loading me into the ambulance, Danny O'Sullivan's face swam into focus, looking down at me. "You'd have to be the toughest old bastard I know," he said encouragingly. Give me a break, I said. You used to be in the SAS; you know plenty tougher than me. "Well, toughest old art critic, anyway," he said. That'll do for me, I thought, and promptly fainted.
SUNK IN A COMA