Night Must Wait

by Robin Winter

  "You went to the same college?"

  "Yes, four of us, Wilton, Lindsey, Sandy and I came out of Wellesley, same dorm. We all went to Nigeria once we had our professional credentials."

  She could tell from Lowenstein's posture that he listened. She looked down at the red fragments of candlelight refracted through her glass.

  "I wanted to be swept away. A romance bigger than any man could offer. I knew Nigeria's attractions might be dangerous, but that was the relish. How could Wilton predict the future that slammed us? You've seen my notes on her. You know whatever she did, she paid for it."

  "What was it like?" Lowenstein said. "I have no idea. I only remember the ads begging for aid after the war began. Starving babies, legs like kindling."

  "Oh God, it was a place where you could walk through a marketplace and hear Beethoven played against Perry Como and honkey tonk. At full volume. People grabbing at you calling 'Onocha!' like you were a long-lost best friend."

  "What does ono-whatever mean?"

  "White man," Gilman felt the smile on her face. "Those Biafrans, the Igbo, were merchants born. Every day filled with passionate rejoicing and passionate terror, a land where grown men wailed like babies and soaked their shirts with tears when Mother died. But you gotta remember, Lowenstein, that I'm talking about the Eastern region of Nigeria and the Igbo and Ibibio. My people. The part that became Biafra. The other three Regions were as different as Atlanta is from New York or Tucson."

  She took a sip of wine.

  "How can I make it into a sensible story?" She looked up to see if he sat back or let his attention wander. No, she hadn't lost him. "In Nigeria there were four major regions, the enormous Muslim North with lots of nomadic tribes, the other three regions stacked under it. The West, traditional and full of Yoruba who are formal in their manners, and the cockeyed optimistic Igbo in the Mid-West and the East, where I lived. Those Igbo were my kind of people. But you asked how I got there. I went on a visit to see Wilton. For fun.

  "On the third day of my visit Wilton oh-so-casually arranged for me to see a hospital. I had a premonition, hesitated, felt Wilton's eyes on me. If she'd been sure of herself, I wouldn't have gone in. Now I wonder if that was acting too. She threw down a gauntlet, and I picked it up. Perhaps for the hell of it, perhaps because I couldn't separate my self-respect from her opinion of me. I went in.

  "God, what I saw in that hospital. At the time the ignorance, the suffering shocked me. Of course what came later, during the war, trivializes that."

  She fought for the right way to say this, a phrasing that wouldn't trigger too much of the shrink in Lowenstein.

  "I knew I could do miracles. I bit down orders, bursting to roll up my sleeves. I was perishing of frustration when a young Nigerian doctor came up to say welcome and asked if I'd examine a patient and consult. Postsurgical complications in a tubercular patient."

  She managed to smile at Lowenstein as if to say, wasn't I a funny young thing? But pain splintered her heart at the remembered glory of the moment.

  "I'm sure now Wilton arranged this to set her hook. Africa's hook. It was too much-—the admiration of the doctor, the gratitude of the patient. The pride in Wilton's face, all for treating a cryptic infection. I even enjoyed Wilton's half-hidden smile of triumph. And I forgot that being a god is heartbreaking twenty-four-hour-a-day slavery, even without war to make it a losing battle with hell."

  Was that doubt in Lowenstein's face? She could show she was grown up now. She'd examined her own flaws and come to terms. No leftover issues. No delusions of grandeur.

  "My motives weren't altruistic," Gilman said. "I've thought it all over, faced what was true and what wasn't. Vanity got me in, and vanity kept me there."

  "Vanity," Lowenstein said. "And a need for Wilton's approval. What about your parents? Did they agree?"

  "They thought I was nuts, but remember my father was a famed plastic surgeon who called me a fool for heading toward internist. No money in that, he used to say. Waste of his investment."

  "Should we eat, or would you rather drink yourself into a stupor?"

  He startled her and when she stared across the table at him, he laughed.

  "I may be old and settled, but Doctor Gilman, I'm not a complete stick in the mud. I know you're afraid I'm going to analyze you in some way you find threatening, but though I'm curious and would like to hear what you'd say drunk, I'm also hungry."

  Hungry. Like a trigger, the word made her feel the gnaw of her empty stomach.

  "Yes," she said, "I'm always hungry. I can't seem to get enough."

  "Not surprising," Lowenstein said, "after the years you spent starving in Biafra."

  "You know, Wilton told me to get out. She cared for my safety."

  "Now you return her care."

  "Yes. How could that be wrong?"

  Lowenstein studied the menu. A ploy, she felt certain. He had the air of a man who'd been to this place so many times he could order from memory.

  "Will you take this on?"

  His blue eyes had a worried cast, but maybe that came with the job.

  "Yes, I will. First we find her. Did you say you had a position in New York?"

  "Mostly ER shifts. Bellevue. I get consulted on parasites on lucky days."

  He didn't need to know that she'd stooped to calling one of her father's old friends to get herself a paying position. No need to bother with information that would give him another Freudian tag for her.

  Steak. She didn't care how tough it might be, but she wanted a steak, and potatoes on the side. Nigeria hadn't been a place for potato farming, even before the war, and suddenly all she could see before her imagination was a plate of crusted home fries with well-sautéed onions, a few grains of salt on the browned surfaces. Her stomach growled and she caught Lowenstein's amused glance.

  Chapter 91: Wilton

  October 1970

  Norwich, MA. USA

  Purgatory was cold. Strangers everywhere, moaning, rambling and wanting, and bright lights hurt her eyes. She slept or woke, and time did not pass because nothing changed. No one here made peace with God. His absence was all she knew.

  She came awake because of the sun. She'd been standing at a window, leaning against the mesh of metal that pressed against her shoulder and arm, when it came to her that her hand and arm had changed color to a brightness. Colors. Yellow and white against the gray and pink. She did not want to move lest this change fade, but it did anyway, slipping away like feathers of color on the wind.

  She began over the next few days to draw a sense of what she was and how. Where, took much longer. Who, was not possible. She dared not talk to anyone, even if they might have answered her.

  Not a prison. This was something else. A punishment but not a prison.

  It seemed she would never be done with waking. She came to herself again and again, with blanks between that didn't even hold dreams. Sometimes her hands would hurt and she would look down at them and try to peel off the red paint that spread from the fingers onto the palms and backs, but if she did not keep it secret, people would come and bind her hands, sometimes both arms, so that she had to stumble about in a cocoon of grayish white that held her upper body stiff. They would put her in her bed and strap her there when it pleased them. She hated their unclean hands upon her and showed her teeth and they hit her.

  Words came back in clumps. She found them first clotting then running like water in her mouth and she had to bite her tongue to keep them in. "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth…fourscore and seven…it was a dark and stormy night. Something out there go and get it." Ah, she knew that one was true. Because if you don't go, it will come for you.

  Don't tell, or something will happen. Don't tell or they will find you. Don't tell.

  She woke from a vision of Sandy's copper shining hair and tears ran on her face and into her mouth, salty and cool. She could feel the memory of the snake's smooth coils in her arms. There was no ram in the bushes. Lindsey still
lived. Gilman still lived. Sandy was insufficient sacrifice. If she could go out from this place and find her friends, she could complete her work. All these little frantic birds trembling in her hands.

  Here she could abide. Hide. Let nothing change. God could not hate her for not completing her sacrifice if she were trapped here.

  Chapter 92: Lindsey

  November 1970

  Lagos, Western Region, Nigeria

  Lindsey sat at her desk reading an oil production report from the Rivers area. She looked up, startled, at a rap on the door. The sound came again. Lindsey glanced at the clock, forcing herself from her preoccupation. Three in the morning already. What were her bodyguards doing? The thought chilled her. She took her revolver from the desk drawer into her lap and slipped the safety, waited a moment then called, "Come in."

  The door opened. Lindsey raised the weapon behind the desk.

  "Madam, there is..." the voice was one she recognized as Regulus's. "Madam, there is a man to see you."

  Lindsey relaxed, but she still held her revolver.

  "Send him in," she said. She knew that this late visitor must be important, since they dared not name him. But still, she raised an eyebrow when Sir Oro Voinadagbo strode through the doorway. He bent his white-clad height in a slight bow, his square face intent.

  "Please sit down." She replaced the revolver in the drawer.

  He did not show if he noticed her gesture, but sat down, settling his robes about him. She spared a spark of thankfulness that he did not douse himself with perfume as so many men did. It was one of the few things that still disturbed her about Nigeria, though she'd schooled herself never to betray it.

  "You're up late, Madam Lindsey."

  "So are you," she said, smiling at the implied rebuke. "You are equally guilty, Sir Voinadagbo."

  "Ah," he said, waving one long-fingered hand. "I must tell you again not to call me sir in private conference."

  His laugh took some of the sternness from him. Lindsey watched him, then looked down, moving her hand across the pile of papers on her desk. For a few moments they sat and did not speak. Lindsey could feel Voinadagbo's gaze and a certain unease crept over her.

  "Miss Lindsey," Voinadagbo said abruptly.

  He kneaded his hands together once upon his knee.

  "You are an anomaly here, a successful one, but you are not and never have been of this country. I do not intend this as an insult, but I have always considered people like you imperialist and aggressive."

  "Do you want that to change? For me to become something else?" she said, her inflection more sarcastic than she intended.

  "It has changed. I can no longer think of you as an outsider."

  "That's a miracle," she said, uneasy.

  "Yes, and I want another. Will you marry me?"

  Lindsey stared at him in disbelief. He endured it, waiting without explanation or apology. She tried twice to speak, her thoughts racing.

  "Marry?" she asked.

  "Yes, " Voinadagbo spoke very quietly. "It is not good to be lonely."

  "Have you been drinking?" Lindsey blurted with no thought of disrespect. She knew the answer before it came.

  "No."

  "I am sorry," she said.

  "I did not mean to startle you. Please, if you can, consider this."

  She nodded once. He rose and went to the door.

  "Goodnight, Miss Lindsey," he said and was gone in a sweep of his white robe.

  Lindsey leaned against the back of her chair, her gaze returning to the clock. A five-minute proposal. A laugh tightened in her throat without humor or pleasure and she swallowed hard. He had much to offer, recently widowed from his only wife, wealthy, no debts. Already had several grown children. She would not have a heavy load unless they decided…What could he see in her except power? She imagined how it would be to touch his skin, the slant of his cheek and his lips. She shrank from the idea of such overwhelming closeness. So dangerous. How could she keep herself whole if she let anyone in so close?

  "Sandy," she said, "would you have believed this? Laughed? Teased me?"

  Nothing. Sandy would have answered, not left her hanging. Lindsey hadn't felt so alone until this moment in her office without an answer.

  She'd been careless, she'd tighten up. Lindsey liked Voinadagbo too well and had let him translate her friendship. Now she boxed every feeling, bent down the flaps, sealed them.

  She could not afford to make mistakes. She glanced at the blinds drawn so securely over the window and drew one deep breath. Oroko would have a fit to think she'd been in this room with Voindagbo without a bodyguard. But no one with Voinadagbo's rank would kill her with his own hands. She wouldn't tell on David or Regulus for permitting Voindagbo a private audience.

  There had been a time, Lindsey remembered, when perhaps she could have married, with all the messy details it entailed. So entrapping. Binding, blinding. Now she felt old and tired beyond anything she'd imagined. Should go and see the doctor, maybe she had a touch of malaria. Too much effort. All she waited for now was Gilman. She had a plan for her old friend. A long slow plan.

  That extraordinary partnership with Sandy was the closest she had come to a mate. But Sandy had always left Lindsey to possess herself, never asking for anything but the right to hunt together. No physical greed, no appetite of low and selfish needs. No trade or commerce, no crippling parasitism. Perfect in all its parts. Kipling's thousandth man—that was what she had lost.

  That was what Gilman had broken.

  Chapter 93: Gilman

  January 1971

  New York, USA

  "Don't leave me," he slurred.

  Gilman looked at his smudged face with its bristling four-day growth of beard, and for a moment she saw a different man, one dirty from combat instead of the streets of New York. There are so many flavors of delusional.

  "I won't." She took a folding chair from against the wall of the hospital room. She looked around at the four beds, only one other filled tonight with its curtains drawn. That man would never rise again, he simply waited for his heart to stop.

  "They threw me in the tank last time. This isn't the tank is it?" her patient said. The whites of his eyes showed. "There are things there. I can't tell you, it'd scare you, miss. It's snakes, stuff with more eyes than you want to think on and them things keep reaching."

  "I worked here at Bellevue years ago, Joe," she said in that low tone she'd mastered in a remote past, reading his name off the chart. "Old Gus taught me some things when I was a student here. Used to see a lot of you guys. Used to see snakes upon a time."

  Most of the interns thought it a waste of time or even quackery, but Gus, a Bellevue staffer from before World War II, taught Gilman decades ago how to talk some of the Bowery boys out of the DTs. This man wasn't bad off, and the Librium should be enough. What did Gilman have to go back home to anyhow? She put the chart back.

  "Do you know where I worked?" she said.

  She sat there and talked about Nigeria and step-by-step she softened her talk, making pictures of massive trees and wide rivers, shoals of butterflies and the endless waves of grass. The man settled, his eyes glazed with darkness, dozing, his face relaxing as she spoke. Her attention was a thread to which he clung.

  This wasn't like snapping a man out of a nightmare into cold reality, but changing the quality of his dreams without abruptly waking him. Like speaking to a dog growling and twitching in a bad dream until he sighs and quiets and thumps his tail in his sleep.

  "I talk to my delirious fever patients the same way now, since the time I spent half a night listening to bits of Tom's malaria dreams and thought of trying old Gus's technique. It works best on people one has a feeling for."

  He roused.

  "But you don't know me, miss."

  "You remind me of my Tom."

  She watched the man's eyelids tremble.

  "Joe, instinct knows when to trust. It's reason that confuses us, keeps us from knowing, makes us suspicious. Lind
sey would disagree with me, but she wasn't right about everything."

  She felt her words falter. She hadn't expected Lindsey's name to come out. Sometimes talking like this brought up things she didn't mean to say. But this man wouldn't remember. Her patients never did.

  "Impossible to guess your nightmare from the sleeping sounds you make, impossible to know with what dream I surround and replace it. We both keep our secrets. My nearest approach to shamanism."

  Shamanism made her think of Wilton, and how Lowenstein searched for Wilton. Wilton, the friend she missed on nights like this.

  "I'll have to explain Wilton," she told the man. Joe turned his head on the flat pillow, his eyes closed but still seeking her voice. "I know Lowenstein's going to ask me. It's hard. She had the power of tampering with dreams when we were awake—not sick or drugged or drunk or delirious, but awake—or at least believing we were. Wilton taught me that 'awake' is a relative state. She was a psychological third-story man. You know about that?"

  No, Joe probably didn't. She thought he must have drifted off by now, the IV draining its fluids slowly into his arm. Gilman stood and rechecked the meds and the labels on the bag. But she kept on talking, seeing her patient twitch as though at the shadow of a fearful dream.

  "Yes, Joe, while I was slamming and locking doors on the ground floor, she came in through the upstairs window. To keep her from getting smug, I opened doors with a fanfare while she was picking their locks, or looked the other way while she bagged some memory I knew was worthless, and waited to mock her when she tried to pawn it."

  Joe stirred again and his face changed with the soothing wash of the drugs and voice.

  "I was like you," she said. "Never tracking. I never knew whether I'd won or lost. Wilton stayed silent about her victories, and I never lost the feeling that I might be locking the door of a house whose walls and roof had long since fallen away. Folly to underestimate her. Lindsey's folly too. Wilton hunted down our ambitions, our dreams, our talents and weaknesses one by one. We were content to surrender them, if only she'd admire them. And so, finally, she was able to work us to her will and fill us with visions."