Blue Lilac

by Edward Lear, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

They glued twenty-one electrodes to Teun's head on the Monday morning, and the glue smelt of nail varnish and pear drops.

The technician did it with a wooden stick, a small brown bottle and a hairdryer on its cool setting, one electrode at a time. First she measured, with a soft tape, from the bridge of his nose over the top of his skull to the knob at the back, and from one ear to the other, and made marks on his scalp in red wax pencil where his hair was thinnest. Maarten Kooiman sat on the visitor's chair by the window and watched her measure. She was quick and she was right. He had expected her to be one or the other.

"Ten-twenty system," she said, when she saw him watching. "Ten per cent here, twenty per cent there. Every head is a different size, so we go by proportion."

"Like a recipe," said Teun, who could not see her.

"Like a recipe."

The wires came out of the electrodes in a bunch of colours, white and black and red and blue and green and a yellow that Maarten would have put at RAL 1018, zinc yellow, and she gathered them at the back of Teun's neck and wound them round with gauze until he wore a turban, rather tall and very white. From the top of the turban a single grey cable ran to a box on the wall. She plugged it in, stepped back and looked at him the way Maarten looked at a wall he had just finished.

"Good," she said. "Now. You can't get it wet, you can't take it off, and you can't leave the room unless somebody comes and unplugs you. Five days."

"Five days," said Teun, and touched the turban with two fingers, as a man touches a new hat in a shop mirror.

---

The room was on the first floor of a long low building among trees, at the epilepsy centre in Heemstede. It had one bed, one chair, one wardrobe, one table on wheels, a basin, a folding bed strapped shut against the wall, and two cameras. One camera was in the corner of the ceiling behind a dome of smoked plastic, like the eye of a fly. The other was on a bracket over the door. Between them they could see every part of the bed and most of the floor. A microphone in the ceiling could hear everything. At the end of the corridor, in an office with the blinds half down, a nurse could watch it all on a screen, with Teun's brain written out underneath in twenty-one wavering lines.

On the wall over the bed, clipped to the cable, there was a button.

It was grey plastic, the size of a matchbox, with a raised red disc in the middle. The nurse who came at eleven, whose name was Ilse and who had a cold, showed it to them both.

"If you feel anything coming," she said to Teun, "anything at all, even if you're not sure, you press it. It puts a mark on the recording, so we know where to look, and it rings in the office, so somebody comes. If you can't press it," and she turned to Maarten, "then you press it. You're the—?"

"His husband."

"Husband," said Ilse, and wrote on her clipboard, and Maarten watched the pen write partner, which was the word printed on the form. He let it go. It fitted the box.

"Don't wait until you're sure," she said. "Everyone waits until they're sure. Then he's halfway through, and we have it on film, but we haven't tested him at the beginning. The beginning is what we want."

"I know when it's the beginning," said Maarten.

She looked at him over the clipboard, kindly, the way nurses look at relatives, and blew her nose, and went to fetch the tablets.

There were fewer tablets than usual. That was the point of the week. For twenty-two years Teun had taken lamotrigine and levetiracetam, morning and evening, and for twenty-two years they had held him most of the time. Now the centre was going to take them away, a step a day, so that the seizures would come out where the cameras could see them. You cannot draw a bird that will not leave the hedge. Somebody has to take the hedge away.

---

Maarten had brought the book.

It was a black notebook with squared pages, the kind sold for keeping accounts, and on the cover, in white paint pen, he had written 9. The first eight were at home in a shoebox in the wardrobe, under his winter jumpers. The first entry in the first of them was dated 14 April 2001, which was a Saturday, and it said:

21.40. Kitchen, Kruisstraat. 1½ min?? (didn't time it). Stared. Chewing. Right hand picking at shirt. Left hand stiff, bent inwards. Lips went bluish. After: asked twice what day. Said beforehand he could smell ironing.

He had known Teun eleven days then. He had not been told. Teun told nobody until he had to, and on 14 April 2001, in the kitchen of the flat in the Kruisstraat, with a pan of rice going over on the stove, he had had to.

By the second book Maarten had learned to time them. By the third he had settled the columns, and they had not changed since. Date. Time. Place. Warning, and what kind. Duration in seconds, from the first stare to the first right answer. Right hand. Left hand. Mouth. Colour. After.

He no longer wrote bluish. For thirty years he had worked at a decorators' merchant on the Gedempte Oude Gracht in Haarlem, where people brought him a scrap of their grandmother's wallpaper, or a chip off their front door, or a cushion in a carrier bag, and he mixed them a tin of paint that was the same, and he could do it by eye better than the machine on the counter could do it by light. So he wrote colours in RAL numbers, because they were exact and because they were his. In a short one Teun's lips did not go past 3015, light pink, with a little grey come into it. In a long one they went all the way to 4005, blue lilac, which is the colour of a bruise on its third day, or of a pigeon's neck in shadow, and stayed there for a count of ten or twelve, and then came back.

There were something over eleven hundred entries in the nine books. In 2009 Teun had asked him to stop writing them, and he had stopped, for six weeks. Then Teun had asked him to start again.

Ilse took book nine away at two o'clock to copy it for the doctors, and brought it back at four.

"Who taught you to do this?" she said.

"Nobody," said Maarten.

---

Nothing happened on Monday. Nothing happened on Tuesday.

Teun read. He watched the cycling on his telephone with the sound off. He walked to the window and back, which was as far as the cable would go, and stood at the window looking out at the beeches, which were turning from the green of a wine bottle to the brown of a ginger biscuit dipped in tea. He was forty-seven, and solid, with a fisherman's shoulders that he had done nothing to earn, and in the white turban he looked like an Ottoman merchant in an old engraving who has just been told the price of something.

Maarten went to work in the mornings and came in the afternoons and stayed until nine. He brought food, because the centre's food was the food of every hospital, beige and lukewarm and kept under a plastic lid that steamed it into surrender, and Teun would not eat it. On Monday he brought pea soup in a flask, thick enough to stand a spoon in, with smoked sausage sliced into it and the celeriac cut very small, the way Teun's mother had cut it. On Tuesday he brought rice with satay sauce, and a cucumber salad with vinegar and sugar, and four mandarins. Teun ate everything. Then he slept with his mouth a little open, and at the end of the corridor the twenty-one lines showed the long slow waves of a man who has eaten satay.

On Tuesday evening, without opening his eyes, Teun said, "I told my father I was in here."

Maarten was sharpening a pencil. He stopped.

"When?"

"Sunday. I rang him."

"What did he say?"

"He said, Ja. Then he asked what the weather was doing in Haarlem. Then he said he had to go, because it was nearly time for church." Teun opened his eyes and looked up at the dome of smoked plastic. "That was at half past four. Evening service is half past six."

Maarten finished the pencil and blew the shavings off its point into the bin.

Albert Brouwer was seventy-nine. He lived on Urk, two streets back from the old harbour, in the house where Teun had been born, and for forty-four years he had fished out of that harbour on a beam trawler registered UK 112. He had not come to the wedding in 2003. He had never come to the house in Haarlem. Teun's mother had come, three times, alone, by bus, and each time she had brought a smoked eel wrapped in newspaper and sat at the kitchen table and eaten very little, and said Maarten's name carefully, as if it were a word in a language she was learning from a book. She had died in 2019. Since then Teun had rung his father on the first Sunday of every month. The calls lasted about four minutes. Maarten knew this because he had timed them, though not on purpose, and he had never written it down.

---

Wednesday night was the night without sleep.

It is an old method and it still works. A tired brain gets careless and lets out what it has been keeping in. Teun was not to sleep from Wednesday morning until Thursday noon. Partners might stay overnight, and Maarten stayed, and did not unstrap the folding bed.

They played rummy with a pack from the ward's games cupboard. It had no four of clubs, so they agreed that one of the jokers would be the four of clubs, and at about two in the morning they forgot which joker it was, and after that both jokers were simply jokers again, and nobody minded.

At three Teun told him about the first one. Maarten had heard it before, in pieces. He had not heard it at three in the morning from a man who had been awake for twenty hours, in the voice that comes out then, which is the voice a person had when they were nine.

It was August 1985. Teun was six. On a Saturday when the boat was in, his father had taken him down to the harbour to help with the nets, which meant sitting on an upturned fish box on the deck and handing over the netting needle when it was asked for. He remembered the needle: blue plastic, as long as his hand. He remembered the smell of ironing, there on a boat where nobody had ever ironed anything. Then he remembered the deck boards against his cheek, and his father's jacket folded under his head, and his father's face over him, white as a gutted plaice, and his father's hand flat on his chest. His father was singing. Not loudly. The Hundred and Twenty-First Psalm, the old version, the one they sang in church: 'k Sla d'ogen naar 't gebergte heen. I lift my eyes to the hills.

"He stopped in the middle of a line when I looked at him," said Teun. "And he picked me up and carried me home through the town. I was too big to be carried. Everybody saw." He put down a seven of hearts and did not notice that it was no use to him. "After that it was my mother. The doctors, the tablets, the school. My mother did all of it. He went back to sea."

Maarten picked up the seven of hearts, which was some use to him, and said nothing.

At five the window went from black to the dark blue of the inside of a mussel shell. At a quarter to seven the beeches came out of it, one by one, as if somebody were developing them. Nothing happened all night. That is generally how it goes.

---

Teun slept from noon on Thursday. Maarten had taken the day off. He sat in the chair and read the newspaper without taking much of it in, and at ten past two somebody knocked at the door, which nobody on the ward ever did.

Albert Brouwer was not a tall man. Teun had his shoulders but not his height. He wore a dark blue jacket of the cut that the men of Urk wear to church, a white shirt buttoned to the neck without a tie, and a black cap, which he took off in the doorway. His hair beneath it was white and flat. His face was the red-brown of a flowerpot that has stood outside all its life, darker over the cheekbones, and his hands were enormous. In one of them he held a carrier bag from the fish shop on the harbour at Urk, folded over at the top. In the other he held the cap.

He had come by bus to Lelystad, and by train to Amsterdam, and by a second train to Heemstede-Aerdenhout, and from there he had walked, because a woman with a dog had told him it was not far. It had taken him three hours and forty minutes. He did not say any of this. Maarten worked it out later from the ticket, which fell out of his pocket.

"Meneer Brouwer," said Maarten, and stood up.

Albert looked past him at the bed: at his son asleep in the white turban, at the grey cable, at the button on the wall, at the dome in the corner of the ceiling, at the second camera above the door, which was above his own head, and which he turned to look at for some time.

"He's sleeping," Albert said.

"They let him sleep now. He was up all night. It's to bring one on."

Albert nodded, as though he had been told the price of diesel. Maarten gave him the chair, and took the windowsill himself. Albert sat with the carrier bag on his knees and the cap on top of the bag. After a while he opened the bag and took out a parcel in newspaper, and then another, and laid them side by side on the table on wheels. Maarten knew them by the smell before he saw them. Then Albert took out an exercise book, the old school kind with a pale blue cover, gone soft at the corners, and laid it next to the eels, and folded the carrier bag into a square and put it in his pocket.

He did not say what the book was. Maarten did not ask. It was not his.

At five past three Teun woke, and turned his head on the pillow, and saw his father.

"Pa."

"Jongen."

That was all, for a while. Then Albert pushed the table on wheels a little way towards the bed, so that the exercise book was nearest, and Teun took it and opened it.

Maarten could see the first page from the windowsill. It was ruled in pencil into columns. The writing was square and upright and pressed hard into the paper, the hand of a man who wrote little and meant all of it, and the first line said:

17-8-1985. Haven. 2 min. Rechterhand plukken. Linkerhand krom. Lippen blauw. Ps. 121.

Harbour. Two minutes. Right hand picking. Left hand bent. Lips blue.

Teun turned the page. And the next. The book was full. The entries ran through 1986, 1987, 1988, at school, at home, in church, on the dyke, once on the ferry to Enkhuizen, and they went on until a Tuesday in September 1997, the month Teun had left Urk for Haarlem. Every one of them had a time, a place, a length, the right hand, the left hand, and the lips. In the early ones the lips were blue. By 1990 there was a second word: blauw-paars. Blue-purple.

"I thought Mam did all this," said Teun.

"Mam did the doctors." Albert looked at the eels. "She said a doctor would want to see it. No doctor ever asked."

Teun went on turning the pages. He did not read them, exactly. He looked at each page as a man looks at a field from a train. Maarten looked at the columns, and at the black book on the windowsill beside him with 9 on its cover, which had the same columns, in the same order, and he said nothing about it at all.

Albert was looking at the black book too.

---

At twenty to four Teun said, "Ironing."

He said it quite calmly, in the voice of a man noticing that it has started to rain, and Maarten's thumb was on the red disc before the word was finished. It was only afterwards, when he thought about it, that he remembered another hand, very large, arriving at the wall a moment behind his own and stopping there, flat against the plaster, an inch from the button.

Then he looked at his watch.

Teun's eyes went to the far corner of the room and stayed there. His mouth began to work, chewing on nothing, small wet sounds. His right hand found the edge of the blanket and began to pick at it, gathering it into folds and smoothing them out and gathering them again. His left hand drew in against his chest and bent at the wrist and stiffened, the fingers curled, like the foot of a bird on a perch.

Ilse came in at a run with a second nurse behind her, and went straight to the bed.

"Teun. Teun, look at me. Can you hear me? I'm going to give you a word to remember. Bicycle. Remember bicycle. Lift your arms for me. Both arms. Teun. What's this?" She held up a pen.

Teun's eyes stayed in the corner. His right hand gathered the blanket.

"Forty," said Maarten, under his breath.

Albert was standing. His lips were moving. No sound came out of them, but Maarten could see the shape of the words, and knew which psalm it was, because he had heard it at three o'clock that morning.

Teun's lips were going. The pink went out of them, and the grey came, and the grey went over into blue, and the blue deepened, and Maarten watched it go past 4002 and past 4007 and arrive where it always arrived. Blue lilac. It stayed there. He counted. At seventy the colour began to come back, from the corners of the mouth inwards. At eighty Teun's right hand let go of the blanket. At eighty-three his eyes left the corner of the room and came to Ilse's face.

"Teun. What's your name?"

"Teun," said Teun, a little thickly.

"Where are you?"

He looked round. He saw the turban in the dark window, and the cable, and his father on his feet with one hand still on the wall, and Maarten with his watch.

"Heemstede," he said.

"And what was the word I asked you to remember?"

Teun thought about it for a long time. "Ironing," he said. Then, "No." Then he closed his eyes and was asleep, the deep sleep that always came after, his breath going in and out like a tide over sand.

Ilse straightened up and let out a breath of her own, and smiled for the first time that week.

"Beautiful," she said. "We've got the beginning. That's exactly what we needed. Clean as anything." She looked at the button, and then at the two men, one on either side of the bed. "Who pressed?"

"He did," said Albert.

---

When the nurses had gone, Maarten sat down on the windowsill and opened book nine and wrote the entry. Date. 15.40. Heemstede, the bed. Warning: ironing, said aloud. Eighty-three seconds. Right hand, picking at blanket. Left hand, flexed at wrist, fingers curled. Mouth, chewing. Colour, 4005. After: name yes, place yes, word no.

Albert had sat down again. He watched Maarten's pen. When Maarten had finished he said, "What is that number?"

"It's a colour. Four thousand and five. They give every colour a number, so that you can order it anywhere and it comes out the same." Maarten put his hand into the inside pocket of his jacket, where he had kept one for thirty years without ever once needing it outside the shop, and took out a RAL fan: a long narrow deck of painted card strips, riveted at one end, that spreads open like a hand of cards. He found the violets, and opened the fan at them, and held it out.

Albert took it in his enormous fingers and looked at the strip. Blauwlila, it said, in small print at the edge. Blue lilac.

He held it up to the window, where the light was going, and looked at it for a long time. Then he looked across at his son's face on the pillow, where the colour had come all the way back. Then at the strip again.

"Ja," he said. "Dat is het." That's it.

He gave the fan back. Maarten put it away.

---

Dr van der Meulen came at five, still in her coat, with her bicycle helmet hanging from one wrist. She had looked at the recording. The beginning was on the right side, she said, in the temporal lobe, low down, near the front. It was very clear. It matched what they had seen on the scan in the spring. It matched the left hand. It was the kind of beginning that could sometimes be dealt with by surgery, and they would have to do more tests, a good many more, and she promised nothing; but it was the kind that sometimes could.

Then she asked whether she might borrow the books, both of them, overnight.

Teun, who was awake again and eating a mandarin, said yes, before either of the others could answer.

When she had gone, Albert looked at the clock above the door, which said twenty past five, and then at the eels, and said that his train was at ten past six, and that it was a long walk.

"I'll drive you to the station," said Maarten.

Albert considered this, and nodded.

Then he unfolded the newspaper from the first eel. It was a big one, as long as his forearm, bronze-black on the back going to the dull gold of an old wedding ring along the belly, with the shine of the smokehouse still on it. He took a pocket-knife from his jacket and cut through the skin behind the head, all the way round, and took hold of the skin with his thumb and his first finger and drew it down. It came off whole, inside out, like a stocking. He laid the eel on the newspaper, ran the knife along the back, and lifted one side of the flesh away from the bone in a single piece, and then the other. He gave the first piece to Teun on a paper napkin. He gave the second piece to Maarten.

It was still a little warm from the bag. It tasted of smoke and salt and of the oil that was running down Maarten's wrist into his cuff.

Albert unwrapped the second eel and pushed it across the table, with the knife, to Maarten.

Maarten looked at it. In twenty-five years he had eaten perhaps thirty of them, and had always given them to Teun to skin.

"Behind the head," said Albert. "All the way round. Not deep."

Maarten cut behind the head, all the way round, not deep.

"Now the skin, Maarten. Like this." Albert took Maarten's hand in his, and put the thumb and the first finger where they should go, and held them there a moment, and let go. "And pull. Slowly. Don't stop."

Maarten pulled slowly, and did not stop, and the skin came down over the eel in one piece, inside out, and lay on the newspaper like a glove somebody has taken off in a hurry.

Teun watched them from the bed, with the mandarin peel in his lap.

At the end of the corridor, in the office with the blinds half down, the nurse on the late shift watched three men eat an eel off a newspaper, with their fingers, on a screen. Underneath it the twenty-one lines ran on, steadily, all of them, and she found nothing in them that needed to be marked.

---

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, Kalendīs Novembribus (1 November 2026), ab Edwardō Lear per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Edward Lear, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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