When Death comes very close to you

When I regained consciousness, I had visions. They were architectural. I saw majestic palaces and other grand edifices, all built from alphabets. The building blocks of these fantastic structures were letters, as if the world were made of words, created from the same basic material as language and poetry. There was no essential difference between the objects constructed from letters and stories: they were made of the same stuff. Their essences were identical. The visions coalesced in outer walls, grand halls, high domes that were both luxurious and austere – sometimes a Shish Mahal in Mughal style, plated with mirrors, sometimes a palace with stone walls and latticed windows. My troubled brain showed me something like the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, then the Alhambra and Versailles, Fatehpur Sikri and the Red Fort in Agra, the Lake Palace in Udaipur, but also a darker version of El Escorial in Spain, menacing, puritanical, more nightmare than dream. When I looked carefully, the alphabets were always there, alphabets with glittering mirrors and terrible letters of stone, alphabets of brick and treasure letters of diamond and gold. After a while I realized that my eyes were closed. At that moment I was still thinking of my eyes in the plural.

I opened my eyes – only the left eye, as far as I could vaguely see, the right eye was covered with a soft bandage – and the visions did not disappear, but became more ghostly, translucent, and I began to distinguish something from my real state. The first discovery, the most oppressive and inconvenient, was the fan. Later, after they disconnected it and I could speak again, I said it was like having a daddy’s tail stuffed down your throat. And when they took it out, it was as if it belonged to you plucked a tatoo tail from the neck. I had survived the coronavirus without needing a ventilator. But here I am tied to one. And although my head was very pounding, I remembered the first days of the pandemic, when few people were disconnected from the ventilator and escaped with their lives.

I couldn’t speak. But there were people in the room. Five, maybe six people. I still wasn’t good with numbers. Letters were floating in the air between me and them. Maybe they, the people, didn’t even exist. Maybe they were hallucinations too. I had been given strong painkillers. Fentanyl, morphine. They were probably the cause of the alphabet hallucinations. Maybe they were also the cause of these ghosts in the room.

They weren’t ghosts. They were Eliza, Melissa, Eumir, Chris, Adam and Jeff. They had all arrived – some by plane, some by road – before I woke up. I didn’t have my glasses—they had broken during the attack, or perhaps in the commotion that followed—so the people were blurry, which was probably a good thing, because I couldn’t see the grim expressions on their faces. They were looking at something I couldn’t see: at me. My neck and right cheek had been torn open by the knife and they could see the two sides of the wound held together with metal staples. On the side of my neck, under my chin, I had a deep horizontal gash, held together in stitches. They could see that the entire area of ​​my neck was grotesquely swollen and bruised. They could also see that the dried blood from the wound on the left hand looked almost like a stigma. There were bandages around the wound, and my hand was held tightly in a splint. And when the nurse came to take care of my destroyed eye, Eliza and the others saw something that looked like a special effect from a science fiction movie: the horribly bulging eye, out of its socket and hanging on my face like a large boiled egg. The swelling was so terrible that in those first days the doctors couldn’t even tell if I still had an eyelid. (I had.) Eliza and the others could see the ventilator tube stuck in my mouth and no one could tell them when or if it would be removed. The wounds on my chest were covered, but they knew that my liver had been damaged and that a portion of my small intestine had to be cut out. They had been told that my heart had been “affected”. They did not know if I would live and, if so, what my future state might be. All this could be read on their faces, but their faces were blurry. As I was, anesthetized and half-conscious, I was just glad they were there.

(For weeks, Eliza refused to let me look in the mirror so I wouldn’t realize how terrible I looked. The doctors and nurses would come to examine me and say, “You look so much better,” and I believed them. the lies, because I wanted to believe them. In the middle of the night, when in the trauma department of the UPMC Hamot hospital, the screams of the dying could be heard in the air – life or death? – and there was no clear answer.)

Eliza was by my side and didn’t show her pain or fear, knowing she had to stay strong and loving for my sake.

– Move your leg if you understand me, she told me.

When I didn’t move him, he was on the verge of despair. Maybe the knife that had stuck so deep into my eye, reaching up to the optic nerve, had also injured my brain.

A little later, when I was less dizzy and could understand more clearly what was being asked of me, I began to move my leg – once for yes, twice for no – and, even in that dazed state, I felt the waves of relief that flooded the room.

Now that they knew I understood them, they started talking to me. Eumir came, sat at my head and said he wanted to read something to me. It was President Biden’s statement in response to the attack. Eumir read it slowly and rarely in my ear:

Jill and I were shocked and saddened by the news of the terrible assault on Salman Rushdie that took place yesterday in New York State. Along with all Americans and people around the world, we pray for his recovery and recovery. I thank the emergency teams and the brave people who acted immediately to jump to Rushdie’s aid and to immobilize the attacker.

Through the depth of his analysis of human nature, through his unparalleled talent as a storyteller and through his refusal to be intimidated or silenced, Salman Rushdie embodies essential and universal ideals. The truth. The courage. The feeling The ability to share ideas without fear. These are the cornerstones of any free and open society. And today, in solidarity with Rushdie and all those who defend freedom of expression, we want to reaffirm our commitment to these profoundly American values.

When Death comes very close to you, the rest of the world recedes and you feel an immense loneliness. In such moments, any benevolent words encourage and soothe. I give you the feeling that you are not alone, that perhaps you have not lived and worked in vain. Over the next twenty-four hours I realized how much love was pouring my way—an outpouring of dismay, support, and admiration from around the world. In addition to President Biden’s message, I heard firm words from the French President, Emmanuel Macron: “For 33 years, Salman Rushdie has embodied the idea of ​​freedom and the fight against obscurantism. He has just become the victim of a vicious attack by the forces of hatred and barbarism. His struggle is our struggle, everyone’s, it is universal. Now, more than ever, we stand by his side”. There were other similar statements from other world leaders. Even Boris Johnson, the British Prime Minister at the time, who once wrote an article where he argued that I did not deserve the knighthood awarded in 2007 “for services to literature” on the grounds that I would not have been a good enough writer, now issued some reluctant platitudes. India, the country where I was born and my deepest source of inspiration, failed to find anything to say that day. And, inevitably, there were voices that expressed their joy for what happened. If you are turned into a target of hate, there will always be people who hate you. I had lived this truth for thirty-four years.

Main image taken from Pexels.