Page 57 of Never Tear Us Apart

Chapter Fifty-Five

‘He has been cared for in a private facility, which is paid for by his wife and, latterly, his son, for the last thirty-three years,’ Selena explains.

‘I spoke to his doctor. His health is stable if not good. He still breathes and performs other basic essential-to-life functions without medical intervention, but essentially, he is not there in any meaningful way.’

‘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 the Times 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 went away 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 a man being in a coma for thirty years and everything that you are experiencing. ’

‘And what am I experiencing?’ I ask her.

‘Some kind of miracle,’ she says.