“Yes,” the doctor said, frowning a little. “You could call it that.”
“And I’m ill.”
The doctor smiled. “I don’t think there can be any question but that you’re ill,” he said.
“You still don’t remember anything?” his lawyer asked.
“The doctor told me to rest,” the man said. “I’m not supposed to talk to anyone. I don’t even know how you got in here.”
The lawyer waved the statement away. “Tomorrow we take out all the stops,” he said. “Deploy everything we can.”
“Please leave me alone,” said the man. “Please go away.”
“Go ahead, keep it up,” said the lawyer. “See if it does you any good.”
His head was starting to ache. When he reached up to touch the bandages covering it, his fingers came away bloody. He should have paged the doctor, but he wanted to write more down first, even though his fingers were shaking and the blood was dripping onto the paper. He was afraid of dying, but he was more afraid of forgetting.
He had dreams just before the bleeding started. He was dreaming but he was still awake, hunched in the bed. He saw people rushing out of a building, people hurling chairs through windows and throwing themselves out, the sound of an alarm going off. It wasn’t right. It was as if he was watching a bad TV set. There were jerky black-and-white images of people running, and he was there among them. In the dream, he was panicked.
Why does his head hurt so badly? Who is doing this to him? Did someone take his place for a few days and then depart again, leaving him to take the blame? Is he mad? Is it the world itself that’s starting to come apart at the seams?
He was still sitting there holding his special borrowed pencil, clicking it to make a little more lead appear so he could write, and suddenly it was as if the whole world started to dissolve. There was a humming in his head, and the notebook seemed too far away to be in his lap, miles away now, and had begun to be eaten away by threads of darkness. And then suddenly it all disappeared, just blinked out.
He woke up having fallen partway out of the bed, the notebook lying on the floor. The guard was still in his chair just outside the door, still sleeping. He hadn’t woken up. How was it possible he hadn’t woken up? The man didn’t know how long he had been there on the floor like that. Enough time for the bandages on the left side of his head to become sodden with blood and for blood to form a small puddle on the hospital floor.
He managed to retrieve the notebook. The pencil too, though reaching for them made a lump of darkness clot his vision for a moment. A numbness oozed out into his arm. He managed to slide the notebook under the covers and pulled himself down lower in the bed until he was lying down mostly flat, his head bloodying the pillow. Then he reached out for the call button, but his fingers found the morphine release button first.
So he pressed it. He wasn’t thinking all that clearly. His head felt as if it was muffled in cotton. He knew he needed to press the call button, that he was still bleeding, but he could never quite find it. And then he thought, okay, he’d just close his eyes for a minute, he’d just catch his breath.
The last thing he wanted to do was lie in his bed and bleed to death. The last thing he wanted was for blood to slowly puddle around his brain until he died.
He felt as if he was drowning. Or maybe choking. He still had his eyes closed, but he was starting to wake up, groggy but still alive. He opened his eyes and found something covering them. Something was draped over his face. No, pressed hard against it, smothering him. He tried to shout but could only make a muffled noise, hardly even human. He couldn’t breathe. Blood pounded slower and slower in his ears. He was barely there, blood in his throat now too. For a while, it was all he could do to breathe. And then he couldn’t even do that.
Perhaps hours later, he awoke to see a doctor’s face.
“What happened?” the man asked.
“You tried to die,” the doctor said.
“Where are the police?” he asked. “Where’s the lawyer?”
The doctor looked at him strangely. “The police are where they’re supposed to be,” he said. “And what lawyer do you mean?”
But this can’t be true. He has a lawyer, his lawyer’s been coming to visit him.
“No,” the doctor explained, “nobody has come to see you since you were admitted.”
But, but, but, he said, maybe they came and nobody saw them. Yes, that must have been what happened, yes.
The doctor shook his head. “No,” he said. “We have a very serious protocol here. Nobody could get in or out without our knowing.”
Once again, he knew then he should have been quiet, that he’d said too much.
“Language,” scolded his lawyer, who was suddenly there beside—
Wait, maybe that was from the same conversation or maybe from a different one. Everything mixes with everything else, and he’s so groggy he has a hard time keeping things straight. How is he to know where one thing starts and another ends?
The doctor paid the lawyer no attention. Which means he probably wasn’t really there. But since I am telling the story, I am going to keep him there. He, I mean. Since he is telling the story, he is going to keep him there. If he’s the man’s lawyer, well, he should have been there.
The doctor paid the lawyer no attention. Instead, he stared at the man.
“Where are my parents?” the man asked.
The doctor looked at him quizzically, started to thumb through his file. “I thought your parents were dead,” he said.
“That’s exactly what I’ve been telling him,” the man said, nodding toward the lawyer.
“Don’t listen to him,” said his lawyer, but the man wasn’t sure if the lawyer was speaking to him or to the doctor.
The doctor, in any case, didn’t seem to hear him. “Telling who?” he asked.
“Your parents are exhausted,” the lawyer said. “I told them I’d stay with you as long as the hospital let me. They’ll come when they’re feeling better.”
“How can they feel better if they’re dead?”
But wait, how had he gotten confused? It had not been his lawyer after all, but a nurse, and she wasn’t talking about his parents but making him follow her moving finger with his eyes.
“Good,” she said. “Good. Good.”
The doctor had withdrawn to one side, scribbling on a pad—the doctor at least was still there. The man looked closely at the nurse to make sure she wasn’t his lawyer in disguise, but if it was a disguise, it was good enough that he couldn’t see through it.
A liquid touched his lips, and it felt as if his tongue was on fire. Then he was half asleep and half awake and watching a long procession of people who looked as if their bodies had been bled dry. He knew he was observing a battalion of the dead, a long line of ghosts. They nodded to him with their missing jaws. They beckoned and opened their arms wide.
The doctor was there beside him, in his shiny white coat. A nurse was with him too, either the same nurse or a different one.
“How are we feeling?” the doctor asked. “Let’s take a look at that head.”
Which head? the man couldn’t help but wonder, and he kept expecting the doctor to pull one out, but then the doctor reached out and touched him. A wave of pain ran through him, and he realized the head in question must be his own.
Finally the doctor stopped prodding it. “Could be worse,” he said.
He began to unwind the dressings from around it. They were sopping with blood. The nurse collected them as they came off, in an enameled bedpan. They made a wet sound as she slopped them in.
The doctor stared at the exposed wound for a while, his brow furrowed.
Then they wrapped the head back up again, and the doctor began to write on a clipboard.
“What happened?” the man finally managed to ask.
“Hmmm?” he said. “Problems with blood pooling. And your brain was swelling. We had to cut a hole and put a shunt in, to take the pressure off. You should be all right
in a few days.” He smiled. “Then we’ll install a plate.”
“A plate?”
He nodded. “Sure,” he said. “Nothing to worry about. We’ll graft skin over it. Nobody will even know it’s there.” He turned to the nurse. “Let’s let him rest for a while,” he said. Then he gave the man an injection of something.
But I’ll know it’s there, he thought as he drifted off. And the doctor will know, and the nurse too. And anybody who reads this notebook. How can that constitute nobody?
V.
Morning again, a pale light streaming in through the window, motes of dust whirling in the air. A nurse moving about the room, smiling. She changed the bedpan and then, with the help of an orderly, moved him from his bed to a new, clean one. It hurt a little, was a little jarring, but it didn’t kill him. He only began to relax as they set the brakes of the new bed and wheeled the old one out.
It was starting to get dark when the sound of voices in the hall woke him. Soft at first, then growing louder. Soon, his lawyer opened the curtain and came in.
The guard was back. Now that the curtain was open, the man could see he had retreated to the doorway and stood in the hall. He leaned awkwardly against the wall, stiff as a board.
“Hello,” the lawyer said. “Feeling better?”
“Not really.”
“We won’t have long,” the lawyer said. “Did you look at the file?”
“File?”
“Yes,” he said. He lost just a little of his composure. “I told you I was leaving it. I asked if you understood. You said you did.”
“I don’t remember any of that,” he said. “I never saw any file.”
The lawyer regarded him silently. “Well,” he finally said. “We don’t have anything to talk about, then. Not yet. It’s tucked under the mattress,” he said.
The man made a move to pull it out, but the lawyer shook his head no. Not until after he was gone.
When the guard still hadn’t moved, the man snaked his arm out from under the sheet and slipped it over the side. He pushed his fingers under the mattress, poking around for the so-called file.
But nothing was there.
All right, he thought at first. The lawyer had pushed the file in too far. No problem. He scooted over to the very edge of the bed and made sure his arm was sunk in to the elbow and wiggled his fingers around. But he still didn’t feel anything.
All right, he thought. Just because the lawyer was seated on that side in his last visit didn’t mean he wasn’t on the other side the visit before. So the man labored his way to the other edge of the bed and slipped the other hand in.
Still nothing.
He lay there for a while staring at the ceiling in the slanting light of evening.
Someone took it, he thought.
But who?
The police? A guard? His doctor? The orderly? The nurse?
Or maybe his lawyer didn’t leave it after all. Maybe he’d forgotten to. Maybe he just wanted the man to think he had.
All those thoughts spun about in his skull, slowly starting to consume him. Until he remembered that they had changed his bed. They had moved him from one bed to the other and wheeled the first bed out. The file must have been under the mattress of the other bed.
He pressed the call button. He would call the nurse and have her find the bed and get the file for him. He needed the file. He needed to see what he had done.
He pressed the button and waited, but nobody came. He pressed it again. Still nobody.
Was the guard there this time? Sure, why not? Let’s put him there. Let’s say that the man could see the edge of his shoulder just past the edge of the curtain.
“Hello?” the man called to the guard. “Can you help me?”
The guard didn’t move. He stayed exactly where he was.
“Hello?” the man called again.
When the guard still didn’t answer, the man very carefully moved his feet to the edge of the bed and then let them slip off. He pushed himself up with his arms until he was sitting. It was almost too much—his brain was sloshing like wet sand. He could feel the blood pounding in his skull and imagined the dressings wrapped around it beginning to saturate. He managed to get his legs onto the floor, and a wave of nausea went through him, only slowly ebbing back.
And then suddenly he was standing, walking, feeling as if his feet were impossibly far below him. It was all he could do to stay upright.
He made his way around the curtain and there, just on the other side, he found not a guard at all. What he had thought was a guard was only a crude figure made out of cardboard. The word Guard had been written in the middle of the blob that was its head, the letters like the features of a deformed face.
Panicked, he stumbled out of the room and found only a dimly lit hall, dusty and impossibly silent. Only a few of the ceiling lights still functioned well. Others glowed a dull red and still others had gone completely out. Stacked against one wall were more cardboard figures. Some seemed well used, others almost untouched. Nurse said one. Chief of Police said another. Lawyer said a third. Orderly. First Reporter, and on its reverse side, Second Reporter. Almost everyone he had met and a few he hadn’t, not yet.
Near the back of the stack, one said Mother and another Father. But both of these figures had had their heads torn mostly free.
Behind these were four more figures, each of them with a quarter-sized hole burned in their cardboard heads.
He looked for a door out, but there was nothing but hall, seemingly going on forever. He started down it and before he knew it was back at the stack of cardboard figures without any sense of how he had gotten there. Lawyer was on the top now, though he hadn’t moved it. This, he thought, must mean something. And where was Doctor? he wondered.
Overwhelmed, he tried to return to his room but found only a piece of cardboard pasted to the hall wall where his room had been. He pushed at it, but it was just a piece of cardboard with a word on it, the word Door. Other than that, it was nothing at all.
“Hello?” he heard a voice say, and when he turned he saw the doctor—flesh and blood it seemed, not cardboard. How had the doctor gotten here, and why hadn’t he seen him before? The man felt the doctor touch him on the arm, but the touch felt wrong somehow.
“What are you doing out of your room?” the doctor asked. “How did you get out?”
He tried to respond, but when he did nothing came out. He tried to gesture with his hands to show the doctor that something was wrong, but they were flat and stiff and wouldn’t move.
“Come on, then,” said the doctor. “Come with me.”
When he hesitated, the doctor reached out and effortlessly gathered him under one arm. He carried him toward the word Door and somehow—the man couldn’t see how—opened it up and brought him back into his hospital room.
The doctor set him upright. For a moment the man saw his reflection in a brown square labeled Mirror and realized that he too was a crude figure in cardboard, a name scrawled on his insubstantial chest, the word scratched out and half effaced, illegible.
“There now,” the doctor said. “Isn’t that better?”
But he couldn’t say if it was or wasn’t, because he didn’t understand what was happening. He couldn’t move.
He listened to the doctor chatter on a bit, and then the doctor checked his watch and said, “Let’s let you get some rest.”
He allowed himself to be placed flat on the piece of cardboard labeled Bed because he could think of no way to prevent it. The doctor went out, and when he did the world around the man became even more impoverished.
He lay there, hoping the world still had some tricks left up its sleeve, and that some, at least, would fall his way.
After a time, an hour, a day, a month, perhaps longer, he could move again. He was holding a notebook in his hands. Someone was holding out a pen to him, telling him to write.
This is the extent of his report. He has done as you asked and kept a record of everything he can rememb
er. He has kept it to himself and shown it to nobody but you.
Now, we need you to tell us what we should make of it.
The Blood Drip
1.
They had stumbled upon a town and tried to approach it, but had been driven off with stones. Or Karsten had. Nils had stayed there, at the base of the wall, pleading, and had been struck, and then struck again. When Karsten had shouted to him to come away, Nils had turned and been struck yet again, in the head this time, and had fallen.
There was blood leaking out of his head when he fell, and in the brief flash he caught of Nils on the way down, Karsten thought he had seen bone. But as he hurried away he began to doubt. Were blood and bone really what he’d seen? Or had he convinced himself that he had seen them because he wanted to believe Nils was dead and thus no longer his responsibility? Shaking his head in frustration, Karsten turned around and went back.
He stopped shy of throwing range. Nils lay near the wall, in a heap. Perhaps he was dead, perhaps he was merely unconscious.
He cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted his friend’s name. When they heard him, the men on the walls threw a few stones. None came close to hitting him. At the base of the wall, Nils didn’t move.
“Nils!” he called out again.
Maybe Nils was unconscious, or maybe he was simply dead. Or maybe he was injured in a way that kept him from moving—a broken neck, say, an injured spine.
But in any case, Karsten could not retrieve him.
“Nils!” he cried. “Can you hear me?”
There was no answer. What was Karsten to do? He would have to leave Nils. There was no choice but to leave.
He started away, but he could not bring himself to go very far. Nils had stood by him, a part of him argued within his skull, and he should stand by Nils.
There were other parts of him that argued differently. But, after a while, that first part won.
He pretended to leave. If Nils was injured but conscious, Karsten hoped he would not see this and think he was actually leaving. But if Nils did think this, there was nothing to be done about it.
He entered the woods and threaded his way through the trees, coming out farther along, near one corner of the wall.
A Collapse of Horses Page 20
