Coming Round
There’s a certain smell you get in hospitals, that an only really be described as “hospital smell”. Which kinda makes that a pointless sentence, but I need you to be picturing the disinfected plastic furniture plus mild scent of unwashed bodies that you get in hospital wards.
It was to this smell that our Asshole woke up, and to the fact that someone had requested the hospital radio be playing REM.
It was also to the face of a man he hadn’t seen in a few years, quite a few years. In fact, he hadn’t seen the man since he’d screwed the man’s wife, and the man out of quite a lot of money.
The police visited him a couple of days later; they had a stack of questions about the men who’d beaten him up. They asked him about possible motives, he said he couldn’t think of any. They asked him about the photo they’d found in his hand. He said he didn’t recognise the girl in it. They asked him about the evening he was beaten up.
He lied to them constantly, throughout the entire interview. In this sense, he didn’t deviate from his normal character. But the analysts who set up this chain of events intended this beating as a catalyst, not an epiphany.
Over the next few weeks, he continued to lie to the police, and be treated by a man who had every reason to hate him.