In Death's Throat

By ROBERT HUGHES

The night I nearly died closed off one of the best days fishing I'd ever had. It was late last May, and I was shooting a TV series about Australia for PBS, the BBC and Australia's ABC network. The crew and I had a day off in the old pearling port of Broome, on the Indian Ocean. I decided to visit one of my favorite spots on earth: Eco Beach, two hours' drive south. On that unblemished coast I fished with a friend, Danny O'Sullivan, who had taken up guiding after a long stint in the SAS, the Australian commandos. With eight-weight fly rods and streamer flies, we went after the small bluefin tuna that boil up in schools less than a mile offshore, around 15 to 30 lbs. apiece. That day they were abundant in the sapphire water; I hooked five, boated three and kept one. Gutted, tailed and beheaded, it went into a cooler in the back of my rented car. The crew and I would eat it that night as sashimi. Whistling gaily, I shut the gate to Eco Beach behind me and turned left on the deserted, twilit Great Northern Highway.

And that's all I remember.

The accident happened very quickly, some two miles from the turn. What caused it isn't clear, and there were no outside witnesses. The police, who reached the scene later, claim I had drifted into the wrong lane (Australia drives on the left; the U.S. and Europe on the right), but this isn't settled. In any case, though I believe my lights were on, I didn't see the oncoming car, a Ford with three men in it.

What do you feel when you get whacked? In my case, nothing, and I remember nothing, which seems weirder still but is actually normal. Doctors speak of "post-traumatic amnesia," PTA for short, to denote this peculiar whiting out of violent episodes. The other car hit me head on but slightly off center; its impact was concentrated on the driver's side. It then spun off the road, though its occupants too, astonishingly, survived. Under such an impact, bones may not just break; they can explode, like a cookie hit by a hammer, and that's what happened to several of mine.

My catalog of trauma turned out to be a long one. Below the right knee, the tibia and fibula shattered into half a dozen pieces. The right femur broken, the ball joint at the hip damaged. The elbow of the right arm crushed. Several ribs snapped, their sharp ends driven into the lungs. Collarbone and sternum busted. What saved me was the merest fluke: apart from punctured lungs, a few picturesque cuts and some bruising to my liver and heart, the damage was all skeletal, not soft tissue. My brain was intact; ditto my eyes, spine, guts and genitals. It could so easily have been otherwise, and in the weeks since I have sometimes thought how wildly, irrationally lucky I was to be spared. But not at the time. With the remains of my rented Japanese car folded around me like crude origami, I was trapped, intermittently conscious but aware of no pain, and losing blood.

My life was saved by an Aborigine. His name was Charlie Fishhook. He was driving back toward Broome with his wife and teenage daughter when he saw my wreck on the blacktop. He stopped and checked that I was breathing. He couldn't get much out of me but figured that I must have been fishing at Eco Beach with Danny. So he peeled off and headed for the resort. Meanwhile, some Aborigines of the Bidyadanga people, who lived not far from the crash site, began to converge on the car. They tried gently to free me but couldn't. Later I was told that some of them formed a semicircle by the car and began to chant, trying to sing me back to life. A Filipina nurse from the Bidyadanga settlement presently joined them and (I afterward learned) wept as she heard me mechanically counting aloud. I thought I was trying to stay conscious; she thought I was counting off my last moments. For all I know, we were both right.

JUST SHOOT ME

In the meantime, Danny was at home. He had a radio and a cell phone and, when roused, a foot on the accelerator of his jeep as heavy as a rhino's. He got straight through to the nearest medical unit, which was in Broome, 75 miles away. Then he tore up the road to the wreck, where he held my hand, swore that help was coming and listened to me begging him to shoot me if the gasoline, which was leaking copiously from the crumpled innards of the car, caught fire. Would he have actually done so? I don't know, but luckily for both of us there was no stray spark.

Instead I sat there, contemplating the tiny gap between life and death, not sure whether the growing darkness before my eyes was nightfall or my own consciousness shutting down, retracting into itself. Samuel Johnson once said the prospect of being hanged concentrates a man's mind wonderfully. I can testify that the prospect, extended over an hour or two, of dying in a gasoline fireball does much the same. It dissolves your more commonplace troubles--money, divorce--and shows you what you really want to live for.

At one point I saw Death. He made no gesture, but he opened his mouth and I looked right down his throat, which distended to become a tunnel. He expected me to yield, to go in. This filled me with abhorrence, a hatred of nonbeing. In that moment I realized that there is nothing, nothing whatsoever, outside of the life we have; that the "meaning of life" is nothing other than life itself, obstinately asserting itself against emptiness. Life was so powerful, so demanding, and in my concussion and delirium, even as my systems were shutting down, I wanted it so much.

When the police and medics got to the scene, I was only dimly aware of them. I have a confused memory of being cut from the twisted metal with a huge pair of yellow hydraulic shears, the so-called Jaws of Life, and laid on a stretcher. As they were loading me into the ambulance, Danny O'Sullivan's face swam into focus, looking down at me. "You'd have to be the toughest old bastard I know," he said encouragingly. Give me a break, I said. You used to be in the SAS; you know plenty tougher than me. "Well, toughest old art critic, anyway," he said. That'll do for me, I thought, and promptly fainted.

SUNK IN A COMA

The ambulance rocketed me to Broome Hospital. The only medical team on the west coast that could deal with my injuries was more than 1,000 miles south, in Royal Perth Hospital, so the medics decided to fly me there. When I arrived, the doctors had me on the operating table for 13 hours straight. Several times they nearly lost me. I ended up in semistable condition, with tubes running in and out of me, and breathing through a ventilator. In effect, this machine was breathing for me, because my whole body, shattered as it was, couldn't make good on my will to survive. I was sunk in a coma, unaware of the huge efforts the doctors and nurses were making on my behalf. I was oblivious to the presence of relatives and friends. I didn't realize that the woman I love had flown all the way from New York City to be with me--only to find a speechless wreck. There was no getting through to me.

But to be in a coma is not to be without some kind of consciousness. Mine was intensely vivid and took the form of a series of hallucinations, from whose grip I could not awake. They were protracted and obsessive dreams that went on for several weeks. To take only one of them: for years I had been struggling with an unfinished book about Goya. Now I found myself in a late 18th century madhouse, clearly designed by Goya himself--I knew that from its gloomy architecture--outside Seville. I had tubes running into my lungs and stomach, which I would have torn out if the attendants had not bundled me into a straitjacket. (That part was real; under intensive care, I was still intubated, and the tubes were driving me cuckoo.)

JESUS DIDN'T SHOW

Goya and his friends, who didn't like me much--in the long dream they were young, streetwise hustlers--had clamped an immobilizing device on my leg, which I couldn't shake off and which, to their vast amusement, prevented me from climbing over the madhouse wall to freedom. This too was real. The Perth surgeons had put my right leg, with its multiple fractures, in a fiendish-looking contraption called an Ilizarov frame: three concentric rings enclosed the leg, and from each of them sprouted an array of metal spikes that went through the flesh and screwed into the pieces of my tibia and fibula, holding them rigidly in position so they could reknit. I would be cursing this gadget for two months.

Such narratives, in all their bizarre confusion, seem a long way from the nice, uplifting sort of near-death experience that religious writers like to effuse about. But perhaps the simple truth is that near death, you have visions of what most preoccupies you in life. I am a skeptic to whom the idea that a benign God created us and watches over us is somewhere between a fairy story and a poor joke. People of a religious bent are apt, under such conditions, to see the familiar images of near-death experience--the tunnel of white light with Jesus beckoning at the end, as featured in the memoirs of a score of American K Mart mystics. Jesus must have been busy when my turn came: he didn't show. There was, as far as I could tell, absolutely nothing divine on the other side.

When I came out of the coma, a month after the accident, I looked at myself with amazement. I had lost 30 lbs. My smoking habit, a pack a day, had been broken. My skin bore graffiti--fine white scars from surgery--and the X rays showed an astonishing clutter of pins, screws, nails, spikes, plates and wires, as though the right side of my body were a reject costume design for RoboCop. My muscles had wasted away from inaction, and I could scarcely move without severe pain. I stank of sweat and urine. And I felt almost crazily happy--partly because of the outpouring of support and affection from friends and family, and partly because I knew I had been to the limit and made it back. Though diminished, I was alive. I had always taken that condition for granted before. I never will again. Blind luck had dealt me a whole new hand. From now on, I wouldn't waste a single card in it. Though, if possible, I wouldn't drive in Australia again either.