Before Holmes Met Watson (FEATURED)

Day Eighteen: Holding Hands

John awoke breathing shallowly. The hostility of the desert was absent. He could sense it; he knew he'd somehow made it out. It had been pouring down rain. That he remembered: turning weakly to open his parched mouth and drink. The cool water soothed his blistered skin. The torment, the burning: it was all over. But there was now a void in him, an empty space where something belonged, something he'd forgotten, something he'd misplaced. There in the desert. He'd been waiting. Hoping. It had been important. Terribly important. It must have been. So why couldn't he remember?

Why can't I remember?

What can't I remember?

I've changed, John thought. I can feel it. A different person had emerged from the Devil's Anvil.

Was it possible to leave yourself behind in a dream?

It had all been a dream, hadn't it?

But it had seemed so real. And when the rain finally came, clouds gathering from nowhere, from nothing, it seemed some force greater than him had willed that he should live.

But that was a bit grandiose, wasn't it?

He'd awoken in isolation, sealed off from the rest of the ward by heavy plastic sheeting. They'd had nothing that could combat his infection, and they hadn't wanted it to spread. He'd had to be sent back into surgery for them to cut it out of him. They'd debated the procedure hotly. He'd been so weakened by fever that they'd feared he might die on the table. We have to try, they'd decided.

It seemed like it had all happened to someone else. John felt as if he were living inside someone else's body. He sometimes felt as if he were standing outside of himself watching that other person. He watched himself carry on conversations with the doctors and nurses caring for him, with his visitors. He watched himself smile and banter and reassure. He watched himself act like himself.

John mirrored everyone else's elation at his survival. Shouldn't he have been glad? That he had been chosen? That he had lived?

That awareness that you were a simulacrum? Was there a word for that? The Germans might have one, he thought. They have a word for everything. Words that should have been sentences. All those letters jammed together. Wasn't that cheating?

There was an exhaustion at John's centre that hadn't been there before. Rest, they'd told him. It will help you recover. Rest, he'd told himself, and when you come out on the other side you'll have your strength back. But John's lack of vitality had a different quality. It went beyond the depletion of physical vigour.

He'd already lost so much weight but had no appetite. He forced himself to eat and tasted nothing.

He wanted everyone to go away, to be left alone. Couldn't they see how tiring all their fussing and good cheer and smiling were?

He slept for the better part of the day sometimes, and the weariness never abated. It's all right, John, they told him. You'll be right as rain soon. You've been through so much. You're body just needs time to recover.

He was soon stable enough to be moved and was transferred to a hospital in Peshawar, Pakistan where there was no fighting. So many of them came to see him off. They were his friends. They would stay in touch, check up on him. He would check up on them.

They hadn't had the heart to give him the bad news. Some bloke in Peshawar he'd never even met told him: The nerve damage in your shoulder is permanent. You can't be a surgeon anymore. You can't be a soldier anymore. You're being honourably discharged. Thank you for your service. You're going home.