I can make you hate Read Free Page A

other reality while medical professionals did something fancy with my neck. It was a minor procedure. Minor by modern standards, that is.
    The doctors casually performed the sort of everyday miracle that would’ve seen them worshipped as gods or drowned in the village pond if they’d done it in medieval times. But then, medieval peasants would run screaming from anything more complex than a turnip. Show them, say, a Nintendo Wii, and their minds would pop inside their skulls. Pop, pop, pop and down they fall, stupid green smocks and all.
    Anyway, the fact I’m sitting here typing this proves nothing went wrong. Nothing was going to go wrong anyway, but that didn’t stop me worrying. All I knew was this: they were going to stick a needle into my neck, right into the spine. Not too scary by surgical standards: it would only require a local anaesthetic. But it was precisely that fact which started my brain whirring.
    I figured it was essential to remain still during this kind of procedure if I didn’t want to wind up quadriplegic, which I didn’t. What if, just at the crucial moment they stuck the needle in, I was seized by some awful Tourettes-like urge to suddenly jerk around on the slab, cackling like a madman in a rainstorm, deliberately severing my spinal cord against the cold, hard spike?
    I’d have to be crazy to do that, obviously. But once the thought was in there, I couldn’t rub it out. Even if I didn’t actually snapand start twitching and flapping around, surely I’d be lying there fighting the urge, or at the very least fighting to suppress the urge from showing up in the first place? The more I thought about it, the more I became convinced I was going to do something appalling. It was like a mind virus.
    Then I had another, even more terrible thought: what if I was lying there, desperately battling this loopy self-destructive brainstorm , when something altogether simpler yet equally destructive happened? Specifically: what if I sneezed? What if I sneezed just as the needle pierced my spine, and the doctors screamed and the nurses wept and I spent the rest of my life paralysed in bed, like the guy in
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
, minus the consolation of having two pretty French women squabbling for my affections?
    I’d have to spend years staring at the ceiling. I don’t mind ceilings, but I’ve never glanced up at one and thought, ‘Oooh, I could stare at you for the rest of my life.’ Surely in this day and age, they could at least project films on the ceiling for me to watch? But that might be torture: what if they showed me nothing but Adam Sandler movies, and I couldn’t fast-forward or hit stop, just sit there, blinking angrily, only the nurse hasn’t noticed; no, she’s busy looking up and laughing, laughing at the bit where Adam Sandler trips over the bench, or Adam Sandler gets hit on the nose with the basketball, she’s laughing and I’m blinking and she hasn’t noticed, and the blinks grow wetter and I realise I’m weeping, and Adam Sandler tumbles face-first into some dogshit and she laughs again, and I grit my mind and stare past the ceiling, stare past the sky, into deep space, and I focus a mental tractor beam composed of pure magnetic rage on a chunk of rock silently gliding through the blackness, and I stop it in its tracks and draw it towards the Earth, a 100-mile-wide asteroid swooping down to meet us, dragged down by me, until it collides with London, obliterating everything, an extinction-level event, billions of lives worldwide wiped out in the blink ofan eye: my eye. My wrathful blinking eye. But don’t blame me. Blame Sandler.
    Anyway, in the event, I didn’t have to worry about sneezing, or quadriplegia, or my
Medusa Touch
doomsday scenario, because the injection itself turned out to be fun. Yes, fun. Not because I’m into needles, but because they sedated me – and whatever drug they used was brilliant. So brilliant I don’t want to know what it was,