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The ambulance rocketed me to Broome Hospital. The only medical team on the west coast that could deal with my injuries was more than 1,000 miles south, in Royal Perth Hospital, so the medics decided to fly me there. When I arrived, the doctors had me on the operating table for 13 hours straight. Several times they nearly lost me. I ended up in semistable condition, with tubes running in and out of me, and breathing through a ventilator. In effect, this machine was breathing for me, because my whole body, shattered as it was, couldn't make good on my will to survive. I was sunk in a coma, unaware of the huge efforts the doctors and nurses were making on my behalf. I was oblivious to the presence of relatives and friends. I didn't realize that the woman I love had flown all the way from New York City to be with me--only to find a speechless wreck. There was no getting through to me.
But to be in a coma is not to be without some kind of consciousness. Mine was intensely vivid and took the form of a series of hallucinations, from whose grip I could not awake. They were protracted and obsessive dreams that went on for several weeks. To take only one of them: for years I had been struggling with an unfinished book about Goya. Now I found myself in a late 18th century madhouse, clearly designed by Goya himself--I knew that from its gloomy architecture--outside Seville. I had tubes running into my lungs and stomach, which I would have torn out if the attendants had not bundled me into a straitjacket. (That part was real; under intensive care, I was still intubated, and the tubes were driving me cuckoo.)
JESUS DIDN'T SHOW
Goya and his friends, who didn't like me much--in the long dream they were young, streetwise hustlers--had clamped an immobilizing device on my leg, which I couldn't shake off and which, to their vast amusement, prevented me from climbing over the madhouse wall to freedom. This too was real. The Perth surgeons had put my right leg, with its multiple fractures, in a fiendish-looking contraption called an Ilizarov frame: three concentric rings enclosed the leg, and from each of them sprouted an array of metal spikes that went through the flesh and screwed into the pieces of my tibia and fibula, holding them rigidly in position so they could reknit. I would be cursing this gadget for two months.
Such narratives, in all their bizarre confusion, seem a long way from the nice, uplifting sort of near-death experience that religious writers like to effuse about. But perhaps the simple truth is that near death, you have visions of what most preoccupies you in life. I am a skeptic to whom the idea that a benign God created us and watches over us is somewhere between a fairy story and a poor joke. People of a religious bent are apt, under such conditions, to see the familiar images of near-death experience--the tunnel of white light with Jesus beckoning at the end, as featured in the memoirs of a score of American K Mart mystics. Jesus must have been busy when my turn came: he didn't show. There was, as far as I could tell, absolutely nothing divine on the other side.