Notes from a Coma by Mike McCormack Page B

filed into the funeral home and stood over the coffin with our hands joined and tried to say a prayer. Owen was wearing a dark suit I’d never seen before, his hands clasped on his chest. I stood over him and never said a word, not to myself or to God or anyone else. I had no thoughts. Owen’s parents and aunts and uncles sat by the wall and we went and shook hands with them and told them we were sorry for their loss and then stepped outside and stood around crying and hugging our friends.
    The lads in the football team carried the coffin to the church—it must have been half nine when it crossed the square. Dad was on traffic duty that evening, holding up those tourists passing through who must have thought it odd that a whole town could come to a standstill on such a fine summer’s evening. I walked with JJ and sat beside him in the middle of the church. He hadn’t spoken since he’d seen Owen in the coffin. I think it was only then that he fullybelieved that Owen was dead, seeing him there all pale and his freckles grey under his skin.
    There was a bigger crowd at the funeral the following day. ‡ Owen’s mother stood at the graveside clutching a wreath of flowers and Frank stood with his arm round her; it was hard to know whether he was comforting her or leaning on her for support. All that grief in his face, those bloodshot eyes—he must have aged twenty years in those couple of days. JJ stood back from them with two wreaths in his hands, one from himself and one from his classmates. The coffin was lowered into the ground and a decade of the rosary was said. Then the gravediggers moved in to cover the coffin. They don’t fill in the graves here in this parish until everyone has left. The thinking is that it’s too hard for the family hearing the stones clattering down on top of the timber; the gravediggers just lay timbers across the grave, pull a green tarpaulin over it and decorate it with wreaths and flowers. The mourners pay their respects and move off, leaving the immediate family to themselves.
    JJ and I went to Thornton’s afterwards and sat at a table. There were six or seven of us there, all friends. Everyone was nervous around JJ. He was off in some miserable world of his own. Those who spoke to him said it was like talkingto someone standing twenty feet away from you. With no sleep in two days his eyes were sunk in the back of his head. He drank two pints and got up to leave.
    “I’m going home, Sarah, I need to lie down.”
    “I’ll walk out with you.” I was wary of leaving him on his own, I didn’t know why exactly but I was afraid for him.
    “No, I want to walk home alone. It’s been a long day.”
    “Call tomorrow.”
    “I’ll call sometime in the evening. I’m going to the grave tomorrow.”
    He didn’t call the next day or the day after that. It was four days before I saw him again.
    Three months later, at the inquest, the coroner returned a verdict of death by misadventure. Analysis of Owen’s vitreous humour—the fluid in his eyeball—showed a blood alcohol concentrate of .45—ten points over the levels of surgical anaesthesia we were told. Sometime during the night, the alcohol in his system depressed his involuntary reflexes and respiratory failure resulted. Four pints of cider and a bottle of 50 percent proof liquor on an empty stomach will do that.
    And of course we got to thinking had one of us stayed with him that night he might have been saved … Then again he might not.
    * One of those places where we’ve got ahead of ourselves, taken leave of our senses. Our essential selves now move a couple of paces ahead of us, opening doors and switching on lights, tripping intruder alarms, motion sensors and biometric systems … our souls clearing a path through the technosphere for the trailing golem of ourselves. This is how we’ve become attenuated, how the borders of our identities are drawn out, vitiating our core selves; this is how we’ve found ourselves beside