Coma
Literary Passport:
Announcement
Consciousness is stranded between two worlds. Doors open before him onto lives that might have been. But why does one of them feel too familiar?
Hashtags
#Coma #Choice #Memory #ReturningToYourself #MetaphysicalProse #Incubator
About the Literary Project
THE INCUBATOR™ is a cycle of philosophical novellas by Iskandar Kadyrov at the intersection of intellectual prose, psychological drama, social satire, and dystopian literature.
- Literary Project: INCUBATOR™
- Cycle: I. "The Threshold"
- Author: Iskandar Kadyrov
- Age Rating: 18+
- Novella: "Coma"
- Genre: Metaphysical prose · Existential novella · Psychological drama
- Slogan: No one dies at the moment they stop breathing. They die when they stop being themselves.
Announcement
Consciousness is stranded between two worlds. Doors open before him onto lives that might have been. But why does one of them feel too familiar?
Hashtags
#Coma #Choice #Memory #ReturningToYourself #MetaphysicalProse #Incubator
About the Literary Project
THE INCUBATOR™ is a cycle of philosophical novellas by Iskandar Kadyrov at the intersection of intellectual prose, psychological drama, social satire, and dystopian literature.
Coma
I must warn the reader at once, as one of my predecessors warned in similar cases: what follows should not be taken for a theological treatise. I am no theologian, and I make no claim to understand the workings of the threshold on which this man found himself — let us call him simply N., for the name is of no more consequence here than the name of anyone who has ever stood on such a threshold, quite possibly without knowing it. I am only setting down, as faithfully as I am able, what appears to have happened to him — leaving the reader to decide for himself whether it was revelation, the hallucination of a fading brain, or both at once, which, I might add, is not so uncommon a combination in matters of this kind.
I. The Threshold
He was not falling. I insist on this detail, because it contradicts, from the very outset, all the familiar images — tunnels, flight, a plunge into darkness — with which we habitually dress up the unknown to make it bearable. He had simply ceased to be where he was used to finding himself — with no transition, no dividing line — and found himself in a silence that pressed on nothing and frightened no one, but simply was, the way the air of an empty room simply is, once everyone has gone and forgotten to shut the window.
He tried to feel for his body. Nothing turned up — not pain, not numbness, but the complete absence of that ordinary proof by which we generally persuade ourselves that we exist.
Then he thought of light — and light was there: not a source, not a direction, but an even, diffused presence, as though space itself glowed faintly from within. He tried to look closely. There was, however, no gaze to speak of — only understanding, calm and level, like reading a page one already knows well.
"Where am I?" he asked, though the question formed itself inside him rather than being spoken by lips which, it turned out, were not available either.
The answer came — not as a voice from outside, but from that part of himself which, in life, one seldom manages to hear over the alarm clock, the traffic, and the day's small irritations. I shall call this part, for want of a better word, the Guide — not because I am certain of its independent existence, but because it makes the telling easier.
"By your earthly reckoning — a coma," said the Guide. "By every other reckoning — a threshold."
"A threshold of what?"
"Between. Neither there nor here. There is nothing to fear. It is simply the point at which nothing happens on the outside. Whatever is going to happen, will happen within."
He tried to grow angry — as many in his position try to rebel against the very first condition of the new reality — but anger, it turned out, requires a body: clenched jaws, breath coming sharper than usual. None of that was available to him. There was only attention — clean as the first snow, before anyone has yet disturbed it with footprints.
"Why am I here?"
"To decide."
"Decide what?"
"Whether you will remain where your earthly life is drawing to a close, or return."
He said nothing for a while. Silence here turned out to be a different thing — not the awkward silence one hurries to fill, but simply the space between two thoughts, in which, oddly enough, it was rather comfortable to be.
"How much time do I have?"
"Here, there is no time at all. There — anywhere from three days to several years. That is for you to decide."
"How?"
The Guide said nothing — not the silence of one refusing an answer, but the silence of one who knows that only the asker can supply it, and no one else.
Somewhere — though distances did not seem to hold here either — someone was holding his hand and weeping. He did not hear it. He knew it — by a thin, almost imperceptible thread, stretched from nowhere to nowhere, and yet holding firmer than any rope.
II. The House of Many Doors
He tried to remember what had come before this place, and discovered that "before" had no boundary — a discovery I find remarkably precise as it applies to the state in question: true eternity does not begin at the moment time ends, but at the moment the very idea of a beginning ceases to be necessary.
Reality around him did not so much part as reveal layers no one had previously noticed in its fabric. He stood in a room that was his — and not his: he was, at once, still leaving it long ago, already remembering how he had left it, and, it seemed, had never once entered it at all. The three states did not quarrel among themselves. This, I note, rarely happens in our own parts, where things generally prefer to choose one version of the truth and cling to it to the last.
"One cannot lie here," said the Guide.
He wished to object — but the objection would not gather itself into words, because words, it turned out, no longer formed the orderly queue he was accustomed to.
Instead of the expected film — childhood, school, a first kiss — something else unfolded before him: a long corridor, lined on both sides with countless doors, made not of wood or plastic but seemingly woven out of condensed silence, shaped like doorways. He understood without being told: each door was a version of himself he might once have chosen — and had not. Not sins. Not mistakes in the usual sense. Simply — unchosen paths.
Behind the first door — a boy with a piece of bread, watching the snow through a window, happy with that particular fullness available only to one who does not yet know that happiness can be lost. N. stood beside him and felt not nostalgia but something sharper: a tenderness directed at someone who no longer existed and never would again.
Behind the second door there was no school, no childhood grievances, only a system of quiet, almost polite consent — a collective mold that trains a person not to stand out. It had no face, but it functioned perfectly well. "Don't draw attention to yourself" sounded here not as a phrase but as the very architecture of the space, quietly governing a person until nothing remains of the original that could be plainly called a transgression.
He wished to be indignant at this system — but the indignation would not gather, because he suddenly saw clearly: he himself had chosen its terms, every time. Not out of fear. Simply because reducing the tension had always proved easier than remaining himself in its presence.
Then he opened another door — and went still. Here, precisely, nothing had happened, and it was in this absence of event that the whole horror lay: a boy of about fourteen stood in the hallway with a crumpled sheet of paper in his hand — a drawing, a report card, it did not matter — and looked at him, waiting. He, the grown man, walked past. Not sharply, not angrily. He only said, "Later" — and closed the bedroom door.
The boy did not call out to him again. Not because he was hurt, but because he had learned, once and for all, that "later" never comes.
N. stood now before the absence of that very door, long since shut, and understood: that had not been an oversight. It had been a decision — silent, but final — the very point after which he ceased to be the sort of man people come to with a drawing in their hands.
The doors went on opening by themselves.
A wife — not as a person, but as a gaze, one that had once chosen him and had, ever since, been slowly withdrawing, so as not to be destroyed by his absence. He saw not how she had changed, but how invisible he himself had become within that change.
A daughter — with a drawing she held out to him at seven years old, while he hurried past with a phone at his ear; and that drawing existed simultaneously as given, as lost, and as not yet found anyone to be given to — and all three of its states coexisted without the slightest contradiction, which, I confess, I find one of the most precise images of conscience in this whole account.
A son at the wall — always slightly apart, grown now into a man who had trained himself to take up less room than he was rightfully owed. The wall behind him served not as background but as witness — and because of it the whole balance of responsibility in the room shifted, and not in N.'s favor.
"Is this a trial?" he finally asked.
The Guide was silent long enough for him to understand, on his own, that the question was not quite the right one. Perhaps, I thought, reading his account later, because judge and defendant here were one and the same person, and no external court holds any authority over such a trial.
III. The Exact Weight of a Choice
Everything vanished at once — not the way a light fades gradually, but the way it is switched off by a single movement of the hand. Silence again — but a different kind: not empty, but charged, like the air before a storm, as though everything he had seen had not gone anywhere, but had only settled inside him, and now pressed down without a sound.
He thought of thirty pages in a long-deleted folder. Of his daughter's drawing — where it was now, whether anyone still kept it. Of his son, to whom he had never once said aloud, without occasion, that he was proud of him — not of his grades, but of the man he had become on his own, in spite of him rather than because of him.
"Have you decided?" the Guide asked again.
"How long have I been here?"
"The third day."
The third day. Somewhere, someone was holding his hand and weeping — he knew it by that same thread, which could be neither severed nor pulled toward himself by force.
"I... I don't know," he said.
The silence that followed did not press or hurry him. It simply waited — patiently, the way a good teacher waits, knowing that an answer arrived at too quickly is rarely a true one.
"No," he said at last. "I do know."
Something shifted inside him — not with a jolt, but the way a long-stuck thing shifts when one applies, not force, but a precise pressure in the right direction.
"I need to go back. Not because I'm afraid of what's here. And not because someone is waiting for me there. But because I cannot go on staying here in the darkness of what I never did. There, it can still be done. Not undone — that word, it seems, does not exist at all in what I have just seen. But — done. Finally done."
"The decision is made. It is yours alone," said the Guide.
"Wait," he said. "Why now, specifically? Why a coma, and not simply one more reminder?"
"You were reminded. Many times."
He said nothing, because he knew it was true, and arguing with the truth in a place like this turned out to be a surprisingly pointless occupation.
"From here, you will either bear what you have seen," said the Guide, "or return to your former simplicity, changing nothing in it. That choice, too, is yours."
IV. Return
Then, nothing happened — but that "nothing" lasted longer than everything that had come before it.
Then — not a sound, but the pressure of a sound, as though someone were gently squeezing his skull from within and letting go, and squeezing it again. Only on the third time did he understand: this was not pain. This was a monitor.
Weight returned first — the weight of his own body, of eyelids that needed lifting and that seemed, for some reason, to weigh more than they ever had before. He lifted them. Light struck him — white, hospital-white, without shading. Above him, a ceiling of square panels, one of them slightly out of line; he had time to be surprised by the thought — so ordinary, so alive — that someone ought to be told to fix it.
Then he saw them.
His wife stood closest. She was no longer crying — not because she had stopped feeling it, but because she was looking at him with that same gaze, early and open, which, he now knew, she had decided anew while she waited.
His daughter — grown, he kept forgetting that — pressed a hand to her mouth, laughing or crying, or, more accurately, doing both at once.
His son stood by the wall, slightly apart, as he always had — and there was no reproach in his eyes, and no hasty forgiveness either, only a patient waiting, as though he had always known: one day his father would look at him properly.
He opened his mouth. His throat wouldn't obey — three days without words, without water. What came out was not even a sound, only its likeness. But they understood. His wife took his hand — the very one he had felt, all this time, as a thin thread stretched across a vacuum — and pressed it, gently, simply held it.
He lay there, looking at the misaligned ceiling panel, and thought of the doctors who would soon come in, of the questions and the tests, of the long rehabilitation ahead, of the home where this new look in his wife's eyes would be waiting, the son by the wall, the daughter laughing and crying at once.
There was something to be done about all of it. Not undone — that word was no longer in his vocabulary. Simply — done. At last.
He turned his eyes to his own hand. On its back, where the IV needle had been, a small round mark remained — bluish, slightly swollen, like the map of an unknown island. He looked at that mark for a long time, unable to look away. An island. A map. It seemed, still, that one could swim to it.
Somewhere inside him, that vacuum remained, that silence, that corridor of doors. It had not disappeared. It could still be felt — the way an old scar can be felt: without pain, but with the persistent knowledge that it is there.
Later — much later, when everything around him had settled and had nearly returned to its former shape — he would take a blank sheet of paper from a desk drawer. He would simply set it in front of himself. He would look at it for a long time.
And then, perhaps, would begin what deserves to be called real.
The coma had ended.
The threshold had not.
I must warn the reader at once, as one of my predecessors warned in similar cases: what follows should not be taken for a theological treatise. I am no theologian, and I make no claim to understand the workings of the threshold on which this man found himself — let us call him simply N., for the name is of no more consequence here than the name of anyone who has ever stood on such a threshold, quite possibly without knowing it. I am only setting down, as faithfully as I am able, what appears to have happened to him — leaving the reader to decide for himself whether it was revelation, the hallucination of a fading brain, or both at once, which, I might add, is not so uncommon a combination in matters of this kind.
I. The Threshold
He was not falling. I insist on this detail, because it contradicts, from the very outset, all the familiar images — tunnels, flight, a plunge into darkness — with which we habitually dress up the unknown to make it bearable. He had simply ceased to be where he was used to finding himself — with no transition, no dividing line — and found himself in a silence that pressed on nothing and frightened no one, but simply was, the way the air of an empty room simply is, once everyone has gone and forgotten to shut the window.
He tried to feel for his body. Nothing turned up — not pain, not numbness, but the complete absence of that ordinary proof by which we generally persuade ourselves that we exist.
Then he thought of light — and light was there: not a source, not a direction, but an even, diffused presence, as though space itself glowed faintly from within. He tried to look closely. There was, however, no gaze to speak of — only understanding, calm and level, like reading a page one already knows well.
"Where am I?" he asked, though the question formed itself inside him rather than being spoken by lips which, it turned out, were not available either.
The answer came — not as a voice from outside, but from that part of himself which, in life, one seldom manages to hear over the alarm clock, the traffic, and the day's small irritations. I shall call this part, for want of a better word, the Guide — not because I am certain of its independent existence, but because it makes the telling easier.
"By your earthly reckoning — a coma," said the Guide. "By every other reckoning — a threshold."
"A threshold of what?"
"Between. Neither there nor here. There is nothing to fear. It is simply the point at which nothing happens on the outside. Whatever is going to happen, will happen within."
He tried to grow angry — as many in his position try to rebel against the very first condition of the new reality — but anger, it turned out, requires a body: clenched jaws, breath coming sharper than usual. None of that was available to him. There was only attention — clean as the first snow, before anyone has yet disturbed it with footprints.
"Why am I here?"
"To decide."
"Decide what?"
"Whether you will remain where your earthly life is drawing to a close, or return."
He said nothing for a while. Silence here turned out to be a different thing — not the awkward silence one hurries to fill, but simply the space between two thoughts, in which, oddly enough, it was rather comfortable to be.
"How much time do I have?"
"Here, there is no time at all. There — anywhere from three days to several years. That is for you to decide."
"How?"
The Guide said nothing — not the silence of one refusing an answer, but the silence of one who knows that only the asker can supply it, and no one else.
Somewhere — though distances did not seem to hold here either — someone was holding his hand and weeping. He did not hear it. He knew it — by a thin, almost imperceptible thread, stretched from nowhere to nowhere, and yet holding firmer than any rope.
II. The House of Many Doors
He tried to remember what had come before this place, and discovered that "before" had no boundary — a discovery I find remarkably precise as it applies to the state in question: true eternity does not begin at the moment time ends, but at the moment the very idea of a beginning ceases to be necessary.
Reality around him did not so much part as reveal layers no one had previously noticed in its fabric. He stood in a room that was his — and not his: he was, at once, still leaving it long ago, already remembering how he had left it, and, it seemed, had never once entered it at all. The three states did not quarrel among themselves. This, I note, rarely happens in our own parts, where things generally prefer to choose one version of the truth and cling to it to the last.
"One cannot lie here," said the Guide.
He wished to object — but the objection would not gather itself into words, because words, it turned out, no longer formed the orderly queue he was accustomed to.
Instead of the expected film — childhood, school, a first kiss — something else unfolded before him: a long corridor, lined on both sides with countless doors, made not of wood or plastic but seemingly woven out of condensed silence, shaped like doorways. He understood without being told: each door was a version of himself he might once have chosen — and had not. Not sins. Not mistakes in the usual sense. Simply — unchosen paths.
Behind the first door — a boy with a piece of bread, watching the snow through a window, happy with that particular fullness available only to one who does not yet know that happiness can be lost. N. stood beside him and felt not nostalgia but something sharper: a tenderness directed at someone who no longer existed and never would again.
Behind the second door there was no school, no childhood grievances, only a system of quiet, almost polite consent — a collective mold that trains a person not to stand out. It had no face, but it functioned perfectly well. "Don't draw attention to yourself" sounded here not as a phrase but as the very architecture of the space, quietly governing a person until nothing remains of the original that could be plainly called a transgression.
He wished to be indignant at this system — but the indignation would not gather, because he suddenly saw clearly: he himself had chosen its terms, every time. Not out of fear. Simply because reducing the tension had always proved easier than remaining himself in its presence.
Then he opened another door — and went still. Here, precisely, nothing had happened, and it was in this absence of event that the whole horror lay: a boy of about fourteen stood in the hallway with a crumpled sheet of paper in his hand — a drawing, a report card, it did not matter — and looked at him, waiting. He, the grown man, walked past. Not sharply, not angrily. He only said, "Later" — and closed the bedroom door.
The boy did not call out to him again. Not because he was hurt, but because he had learned, once and for all, that "later" never comes.
N. stood now before the absence of that very door, long since shut, and understood: that had not been an oversight. It had been a decision — silent, but final — the very point after which he ceased to be the sort of man people come to with a drawing in their hands.
The doors went on opening by themselves.
A wife — not as a person, but as a gaze, one that had once chosen him and had, ever since, been slowly withdrawing, so as not to be destroyed by his absence. He saw not how she had changed, but how invisible he himself had become within that change.
A daughter — with a drawing she held out to him at seven years old, while he hurried past with a phone at his ear; and that drawing existed simultaneously as given, as lost, and as not yet found anyone to be given to — and all three of its states coexisted without the slightest contradiction, which, I confess, I find one of the most precise images of conscience in this whole account.
A son at the wall — always slightly apart, grown now into a man who had trained himself to take up less room than he was rightfully owed. The wall behind him served not as background but as witness — and because of it the whole balance of responsibility in the room shifted, and not in N.'s favor.
"Is this a trial?" he finally asked.
The Guide was silent long enough for him to understand, on his own, that the question was not quite the right one. Perhaps, I thought, reading his account later, because judge and defendant here were one and the same person, and no external court holds any authority over such a trial.
III. The Exact Weight of a Choice
Everything vanished at once — not the way a light fades gradually, but the way it is switched off by a single movement of the hand. Silence again — but a different kind: not empty, but charged, like the air before a storm, as though everything he had seen had not gone anywhere, but had only settled inside him, and now pressed down without a sound.
He thought of thirty pages in a long-deleted folder. Of his daughter's drawing — where it was now, whether anyone still kept it. Of his son, to whom he had never once said aloud, without occasion, that he was proud of him — not of his grades, but of the man he had become on his own, in spite of him rather than because of him.
"Have you decided?" the Guide asked again.
"How long have I been here?"
"The third day."
The third day. Somewhere, someone was holding his hand and weeping — he knew it by that same thread, which could be neither severed nor pulled toward himself by force.
"I... I don't know," he said.
The silence that followed did not press or hurry him. It simply waited — patiently, the way a good teacher waits, knowing that an answer arrived at too quickly is rarely a true one.
"No," he said at last. "I do know."
Something shifted inside him — not with a jolt, but the way a long-stuck thing shifts when one applies, not force, but a precise pressure in the right direction.
"I need to go back. Not because I'm afraid of what's here. And not because someone is waiting for me there. But because I cannot go on staying here in the darkness of what I never did. There, it can still be done. Not undone — that word, it seems, does not exist at all in what I have just seen. But — done. Finally done."
"The decision is made. It is yours alone," said the Guide.
"Wait," he said. "Why now, specifically? Why a coma, and not simply one more reminder?"
"You were reminded. Many times."
He said nothing, because he knew it was true, and arguing with the truth in a place like this turned out to be a surprisingly pointless occupation.
"From here, you will either bear what you have seen," said the Guide, "or return to your former simplicity, changing nothing in it. That choice, too, is yours."
IV. Return
Then, nothing happened — but that "nothing" lasted longer than everything that had come before it.
Then — not a sound, but the pressure of a sound, as though someone were gently squeezing his skull from within and letting go, and squeezing it again. Only on the third time did he understand: this was not pain. This was a monitor.
Weight returned first — the weight of his own body, of eyelids that needed lifting and that seemed, for some reason, to weigh more than they ever had before. He lifted them. Light struck him — white, hospital-white, without shading. Above him, a ceiling of square panels, one of them slightly out of line; he had time to be surprised by the thought — so ordinary, so alive — that someone ought to be told to fix it.
Then he saw them.
His wife stood closest. She was no longer crying — not because she had stopped feeling it, but because she was looking at him with that same gaze, early and open, which, he now knew, she had decided anew while she waited.
His daughter — grown, he kept forgetting that — pressed a hand to her mouth, laughing or crying, or, more accurately, doing both at once.
His son stood by the wall, slightly apart, as he always had — and there was no reproach in his eyes, and no hasty forgiveness either, only a patient waiting, as though he had always known: one day his father would look at him properly.
He opened his mouth. His throat wouldn't obey — three days without words, without water. What came out was not even a sound, only its likeness. But they understood. His wife took his hand — the very one he had felt, all this time, as a thin thread stretched across a vacuum — and pressed it, gently, simply held it.
He lay there, looking at the misaligned ceiling panel, and thought of the doctors who would soon come in, of the questions and the tests, of the long rehabilitation ahead, of the home where this new look in his wife's eyes would be waiting, the son by the wall, the daughter laughing and crying at once.
There was something to be done about all of it. Not undone — that word was no longer in his vocabulary. Simply — done. At last.
He turned his eyes to his own hand. On its back, where the IV needle had been, a small round mark remained — bluish, slightly swollen, like the map of an unknown island. He looked at that mark for a long time, unable to look away. An island. A map. It seemed, still, that one could swim to it.
Somewhere inside him, that vacuum remained, that silence, that corridor of doors. It had not disappeared. It could still be felt — the way an old scar can be felt: without pain, but with the persistent knowledge that it is there.
Later — much later, when everything around him had settled and had nearly returned to its former shape — he would take a blank sheet of paper from a desk drawer. He would simply set it in front of himself. He would look at it for a long time.
And then, perhaps, would begin what deserves to be called real.
The coma had ended.
The threshold had not.
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