Dirk Gently had always known that he did not pay attention to things the same way that most people did.

He discovered this for the first time at the age of five, when he focused so intensely on a window crack, he somehow missed the moment both his parents (as well as all the other passengers, one by one) had left, leaving him and the driver the only people inside. He continued to be reminded of it again and again in the subsequent years.

At eight, he was successfully missing every single fact listed in every single one of his English history classes, yet memorizing by heart every song that played on the radio. At fourteen, Riggins would drive him insane with idiotic tasks he could not even properly understand, but could hear and distinguish the voices of other children, in other rooms, sobbing ever so quietly and asking for their mothers.

It was happening now as well. The hospital around was him chuck full of noise and people and details, all competing for his attention, yet that didn’t prevent Dirk from spending approximately eight minutes watching a can of coca-cola stuck inside of a vending machine do precisely nothing.

“It’s really very sad,” thought Dirk, examining the can from every side. Judging by the label, it had been stuck in the vending machine since 1995, and no one cared enough about it to reach into the twisted coil and get the can out. “All these years,” Dirk mused in his head, “and it stayed there, alone, watching all the other cans get picked one by one. Every other can, but not this one.”

He drove himself to quite deep levels of sadness through an extraordinary feat of imagination, attributing all kinds of feelings and experiences to the poor lonely and very expired can of soda. He would have never remembered that he came here to get a drink if it wasn’t for professor Daly.

“You alright there, son?” professor asked, and it took Dirk a few seconds to register the words, decipher them, and react to them.

“Hm?” was the reaction, accompanied by a slow turn of Dirk’s head. “Oh. Professor.”

“You’re not a fan of hospitals either then,” Roger smiled warmly, and Dirk gave him a single nod, deciding that it was an easier reason than a sudden bout of deep empathy for an inanimate object. “Me too. This one in particular. Yes. Quite.” He paused, and rubbed his wrinkled forehead. “Both of my parents died here,” he explained, “but that was long ago. More then twenty years. Almost thirty.”

“I’m sorry,” Dirk muttered.

“’S alright,” Roger assured him. “Oh, right, I was supposed to say that the doctor finally showed up. She’s talking to Todd and Farah now.”

“I should listen to that. Probably,” Dirk said, and followed Roger back to the ICU.

In the room where Kevin stayed, motionless and stiff, various tubes coming in and out of his body, the curtains were drawn and the floors smelled of flowers and strong alcohol, like a fanciful party cocktail. Farah and Todd stood by Kevin’s bed, and opposite them stood a young woman with an iPad in her hands. Dirk sneaked into the room almost on tiptoes and joined Todd and Farah, while Roger took a seat near the window to the side, not particularly invested in whatever was going on here.

“Like I was saying,” the woman continued after the interruption, “his condition is severe but stable. I’ve discussed his EEG results with Dr. Sierra, the neurologist, and he thinks this level of brain activity leaves at least some chance of partial or, potentially, even full regaining of consciousness.”

“But why…” Todd frowned, waving a hand above Kevin as if he was a hideously decorated cake at a baking competition, “why is he like this? I mean, ‘he’s in a coma’ is a consequence, not a cause, right?”

The doctor frowned right back at him, tapping the iPad screen nervously. “We aren’t completely sure,” she elaborated. “We have detected a fault in his pacemaker, so our best guess is that a mechanical fault occurred, and caused temporary heart failure, which cut out oxygen to his brain.”

“And you can recover from that?” Dirk asked incredulously.

“That rather depends on how prolonged was the oxygen deprivation,” the woman replied. “Without knowing how much time passed between the heart failure and you finding him, it’s…”

“Oh god,” Farah mumbled, then, quite suddenly for both herself and everyone else, covered half her face with her hand and rushed out of the room.

“I better go check up on her,” Todd muttered, running after Farah.

“Yes. Right.” The doctor shook her head, an expression of sympathy on her face.

“What I’m saying is, it’s impossible to say right now. Whether he will wake up or not. I’m sorry,” she added.

“Sorry?” Dirk repeated.

“You all look like you were quite close, and…”

“Oh, pff, no,” Dirk dismissed, “I’ve only met this bloke like yesterday! I was just thinking, “ he carried on, “a fault in his pacemaker… how does? No, wait, never mind. You have better things to do while my brain is configuring. Lives to save and so forth. Please go be awesome and I’ll get back to you.” Dirk beamed.

And taking the opportunity, the woman walked out of the room at once, feeling like she was unexpectedly forced into an advanced version of a “talking to family members” exam, which she failed.

*

Farah stood outside the hospital, somewhere among the cars on a half-empty parking lot, clutching a road sign and breathing at rates she didn’t know human lungs were capable of. She didn’t hear Todd approach, but she still knew he was approaching. When he stopped behind her and put a hand on her shoulder, she turned around and pulled him into a hug.

“I am so damn stupid,” she mumbled into his shoulder, still feeling like her lungs were filling up with liquid fire. “All day he was panicking, all day, and I thought he was annoying and paranoid and specifically trying to make me mad and now I feel like I’m about to have heart failure too…”

“Hey,” Todd said, “it’s fine, it’s an anxiety attack. You’ll be fine. Do this, okay, take a deep breath, then hold it for four seconds.” She did. “Now breathe out, but slowly, on count of five. Yes. Right, and do that again, a few times over. Always helps me after an attack.”

This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.

Farah had a lot of questions to her own nervous system, particularly about reasons and timing, but decided to shelf them for a bit and focus on her breathing. They stood together for a while until she could breathe normally and speak normally again, after which she let go of her dead strong grip on Todd’s shoulder, to the relief of that definitely bruised shoulder.

“It’s all my fault,” Farah continued, a bit calmer but still high on emotion, “I am stupid! I am so stupid and useless and I let people down. Always! Always, Todd,” she couldn’t even look at him, “I did this with Patric and with Lydia and so many of the people on our cases. I can’t protect anyone. What’s the point of me even?!” She produced a single forced laugh and shook her head. “I’m not a person, I’m not a professional, I’m just some thing, some thing without any decent skills who can’t get anything right. No wonder no one wants me!”

“Farah, listen,” Todd interrupted, “you’re being way, way too hard on yourself. You didn’t fail cause he wasn’t killed. He’s not dead, remember? He just had a heart attack, which, come on, he had a heart condition already! He panicked himself half to death.”

“Oh really,” Farah scoffed, “you really think something as normal as a heart attack is going to happen in a case. And this is a case, and Dirk is feeling it, I’ve seen it on him. I always know. He can tell when it is a case and I can tell when he knows. And anyway,” she dismissed her own logic, “even if it was a normal heart attack, I still let him down.

Cause I should have realized goddamn it!” She laughed nervously again. “He’s been so anxious and he actually said he felt like he was having a heart attack at some point and I dismissed it! I thought that he was exaggerating and…”

“Wait,” Todd said, feeling a thought creep up on him and attack him out of the dark like a carnivorous hamster. “I remember when he said that. He said that when this guy… oh fuck!” Todd exclaimed, suddenly rotating two times on the spot. “That’s the… oh shit!”

“What?” Farah’s eyes were wide, trying hard to understand what the hell was going on in Todd’s head.

“The other guy in the ICU!” Todd yelled. “When they just let us in to see Kevin, I saw that other guy and I told you, I told you he looked familiar and oh this is definitely a case!”

And he ran back towards the hospital before Farah could ask any further questions.

*

While all of this was happening, Dirk sat by Kevin’s bed, looking thoughtfully through the words printed in his chart and trying to pretend like he understood highly specific medical terms such as “EEG waveform amplitude” and “platelet aggregation activity”. Roger respected his thought process, quietly going through the crossword in today’s paper, and the other patients in the room did not add anything to the discussion either, mostly due to being in a coma. Then the ICU sliding door opened and yet another person came in.

It wasn’t Todd, or Farah, or one of the physicians. It was a thirty-something woman, wearing a long white dress and with hair so long it almost reached her waist. And upon entering, she went right for Kevin’s bed.

“Hello,” Dirk greeted, quickly putting the chart back in its place.

“Oh, uhm, hi,” the woman said, not even looking at Dirk. “Damn you, Kev…” she mumbled, grabbing a chair that Dirk occupied just a few seconds ago and taking a seat near the bed. “The hell happened…”

“He’s in a coma,” Dirk explained. “They aren’t giving much more details. I’ve been trying to deduce some but I’m afraid I’m not ready to share that information just yet - with myself or anyone else.”

“Uhm,” the woman replied.

“And you are?”

“Alexandra. Alexandra Martinez,” she introduced. “I, well… I’m his ex-girlfriend.”

“Huh,” Dirk said, frowning slightly. “A bit unusual then.”

“Oh it’s not like that,” she explained quickly.

“You were planning on getting together again?”

“Well, no, not really, I mean, I was the one who broke up with him, but…” she paused, taking Kevin’s hand and brushing her fingers over it tenderly, “that doesn’t mean I don’t care about him?”

“Perfectly reasonable, dear,” Roger assured her.

She didn’t know who he was, but thanked him silently with a nod.

“Kev’s a complicated man,” she smiled, almost through tears. “A bit pig-headed. Can be quite annoying sometimes. His opinions… I mean, his thoughts on medieval realism are just,” she chuckled for a moment, “…yeah. As a boyfriend, we just, it just didn’t work like that. But he was my best friend and I thought, if I let myself be angry for all the stupid bullshit he has done, he’ll understand what I’m mad about, and learn from his mistakes, finally, and then we can be best friends again, but, oh god, if the last things I told him…” and she stopped again, about to break into a sob.

Dirk wanted to comfort her, and a thousand possible versions of how that could have been achieved were flashing through his mind at the same time. He was about to attempt a gentle pat on the back when through the ICU doors rushed in Todd - eyes wide, hair tousled - and lurched for the other bed, not even noticing Alexandra.

“Hell yeah it’s him!” Todd yelled with an almost maniacal expression of his face. “Dirk!” he exclaimed, pointing at the man in the bed, excited like a labrador retriever who was sent after a duck and returned with a whole deer. “It’s him!”

“Whom?” Dirk, who was about as puzzled as everyone else in the room, got up and approached Todd cautiously, as if afraid that Todd was about to bite him in his excitement.

“The guy!” Todd beamed. “This,” he glanced at the chart hanging off the bed, “Orson Delaware, whatever. When we came in I looked at this guy and thought hey, he looks familiar, where have I seen him, and I did! He came to our apartment like two days ago. I made him tea!”

“That’s… fascinating, Todd,” Dirk said, “but I’m not sure what that has to do with anything.”

“Don’t you see?” for Todd, this was painfully obvious, so he couldn’t even grasp how it wasn’t obvious to Dirk. “This guy came to the apartment two days before and he’s been in a coma here since then. And now Kevin is in a coma too. In the same ICU! He must have, I don’t know,” he mumbled, “ he must have infected him with coma!”

“Who the hell are you two?” Alexandra demanded, and for the first time Todd realized there was another person in the room.

“We shall discuss this outside,” Dirk smiled politely, dragging Todd out by the sleeve. “I have another issue. Like a toothpick in my brain.”

“That sounds serious,” Todd nodded.

“The pacemaker,” Dirk explained. “The doctor said they think it malfunctioned, but this guy’s a billionaire. As stupid as it is, shouldn’t he have the best of the best? The kind of pacemakers that never fail?”

“Do you think,” Todd continued in a conspiratorial voice, “that the other coma guy put like, a curse, on Kevin’s pacemaker?”

“And then it backfired on him,” Dirk picked up, “and he, well, he… we’re both idiots.” He proclaimed. “We have to ask the doctor who’s treating him.”

Luckily for them and unluckily for the poor overworked woman, they found Kevin’s doctor in the corridor next over, trying to stuff a whole snickers bar into herself in her one five minute break since two in the afternoon.

“Hello again doctor, uh, Schlechter,” Dirk read off her badge, “could I just bother you with one teeny-tiny question?”

The woman considered for a while, then decided it was far easier and quicker to just answer, and continued to listen while still trying to swallow a whole quarter of a chocolate bar in one go.

“You said Mr. McDougall’s pacemaker developed a fault,” Dirk said, “and thing is, we’re private detectives, and Mr. McDougall is our client, so it would really rather help if you could share exactly what that fault is?”

“We have reasons to believe he could have been harmed,” Todd added.

“Share it even if it seems strange to you,” Dirk advised. “We’re quite used to that. Being private detectives and all.”

“Fine,” the woman gave up. “The pacemaker didn’t develop a fault. The battery did.”

“And is that strange?” Todd asked.

“It is,” she nodded, still chewing, “considering that we didn’t find it. The battery I mean. Every detail is quite visible on X-ray, including parts that get displaced cause that can actually happen, but that’s the thing. The pacemaker doesn’t have a battery anymore and it’s not anywhere else in his body. It’s gone.”

“Right,” Dirk said, already walking away with Todd following, “thank you doctor, that was very useful!” he yelled over his shoulder.

“What is it then?” Todd asked, excited once again.

“Very simple,” Dirk smirked at him. “Simple, because we can immediately discard all the improbable and go straight to the impossible.”

“Meaning?”

“Unless we are willing to entertain the notion that Kevin has been walking around with a non-functional pacemaker for years,” he began as the annoying toothpick in his brain was removed at last, “and no one - not a single doctor - had noticed, we have to come to the impossible and yet the only remaining conclusion,” Dirk said, and took a pause for dramatic effect, unable to help himself, “which is that someone, quite probably the same someone who is after my very client professor Daly, someone has attacked Mr McDougall today… and stole the battery right out of his steadily beating heart.”