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A Novel
by Gianrico Carofiglio
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After a while, the doors and windows shook—because of the wind, I thought. The noise was so loud that I suspected an earthquake. I got up cautiously and was hit by a deluge of sounds: the TV in the next room, a moped in the street, my racing heart, my labored breathing that sounded like something out of an underwater documentary or a suspense movie, even my few unsteady steps on the floor.
I had a light blue bedspread, almost sky blue. All at once, that pale, relaxing color grew threatening, it came to life, leaped toward me like some psychedelic entity, and went right through me with an unreal violence. Immediately after, a beam of light emanated from that same bedspread, a kind of rainbow, first light blue, then dark blue, yellow, and other colors, until it became a blinding white that turned into a series of luminous streaks. These intersected, joined, divided and multiplied, gradually filling my field of vision.
The din became deafening. I covered my ears with my hands and tried to cry for help. I don't know if I succeeded, because it's the last thing I remember.
Some years later, Mom would tell me she had found me on the floor, unconscious but shaking convulsively, my eyes rolled back.
In my personal film of the episode, that fade-out is followed by a subjective shot from a hospital bed: a room with furniture the color of condensed milk.
There were people around me, but at that moment nobody was looking at me. My mother and father were there, along with some men in white coats. They were talking among themselves in low voices. Then someone noticed that I had woken up.
My parents came over to me.
"Antonio, how are you feeling?" my mother said, taking my hand and stroking my forehead. An uncommon gesture from her, and one that made me feel like crying.
"What happened?" I asked after a moment or two.
"You ... you had a turn, a very strong dizzy spell ..." There was something strange in her tone. Mom usually spoke in a precise, confident way, in complete sentences, as if reading from a well-written script. Not this time.
"You had a turn," my father echoed. "But don't worry, we're in the hospital now. The doctors have to run a few tests, and then you'll be home in no time at all."
Even in my Valium-induced state, the discrepancy between my father's reassuring words and his expression was very clear to me. He seemed like a little boy suddenly informed of the true nature of the world and its mortal dangers.
He was joined by one of the men in white coats. He had a dark complexion, five o'clock shadow up his cheeks, and a low hairline. He asked me how I was feeling now, what I'd felt before I lost consciousness, and other things that weren't completely clear to me.
I felt drowsy; it was as if I had woken up for a few moments to look around me but wanted to go back to sleep right away.
My memory of what happened in the next few days is also confused.
Things certainly didn't go the way my father had promised. They didn't take me home immediately. I stayed in the hospital for quite a long time, more than a week.
During those days, I lost all sense of time. Morning, evening, and night merged into one, what with my constant drowsiness and my restless sleep, while men and women in white came and examined me, took blood, gave me injections and administered all kinds of pills and drops.
Sometimes I was taken to a room full of antiquated, fearsome-looking equipment. There, I would have electrodes attached to my head and be made to do balance exercises while the printouts emerging from the machine were examined with a bored air.
I was taken back to my room. I threw myself on the bed and stayed there, vegetating, never getting up. I didn't want to do anything, not even read the books and comics brought by my parents or the relatives who came to see me, looking sheepish and feigning flippancy. I shared a room with another boy who was in worse shape than me. He, too, was always in bed, with a drip in his arm, completely absent. The only person who came to see him was his mother, a prematurely aged, gray-looking woman in whose eyes I occasionally caught flashes of sullen resentment.
Excerpted from Three O'Clock in the Morning by Gianrico Carofiglio. Copyright © 2021 by Gianrico Carofiglio. Excerpted by permission of Harper Via. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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