Wolf Flow

by K. W. Jeter

  It all looked like a picture, some period-piece engraving, an old photograph, silver etched on glass; a photograph come to life, or the shadow of it. In the moonlight, the figures in their old-fashioned clothes moved languidly, as though under a becalmed sea. Their voices and laughter drifted up to his ear as he watched their slow grace. One of the younger women moved her racquet in an underhand arc, and for a moment-and longer, forever-the shuttlecock hung motionless over the net.

  Then it lay on the grass. He hadn't seen it fall. Time had moved again, but differently now. The voices and the chiming laughter had stopped. The figures on the broad manicured lawns held still, only their heads turning.

  All toward him. Their faces lifted. The young women and the older ones; the men with their stiff collars and heavy mustaches; the ones in the wheelchairs, and the nurses standing behind them… They looked up to the window. At him. The pale light silvered their eyes, like coins or sparks of ice. They saw him-not smiling, not moving, their faces darkening as though a cloud had rolled across the moon. They watched him, their eyes locked on to his.

  One of the young women, the prettiest one, raised her badminton racquet up to her face as though it were a fan, her small hand touching its curved rim. She bent her head, her gaze shadowed by her lashes. Perhaps she smiled at him; he couldn't tell…

  He drew back from the open window. Before he could take a step away from it, he felt a hand touch his shoulder. His breath sucked in, a gasp, as his eyes darted around to the side.

  "Come along now."

  A nurse had laid hold of his shoulder, easily pulling him around, as though he had only a child's strength. She had on the old-style uniform, the same as the ones pushing the wheelchairs on the lawn, with the starched, winged hat, but without the short blue cape-that was for outdoors. A no-nonsense face, mouth set firm: she was older than the pretty ones outside.

  She took his arm. gently but firmly, and walked him down the corridor.

  "You're late." The words clipped out of her thin-lipped mouth. "The doctor's already waiting for you."

  He couldn't say anything-they were already at the end of the corridor, in front of one of the doors. This one wasn't numbered: in precise, gold-edged black letters, it read Examining Room.

  The nurse pushed open the door. "In you go." Her hand pressed at the small of his back, and he was inside the room.

  He heard the door close behind, but he couldn't tell if the nurse was still there with him. A light glared, blinding him; he raised his hand, shielding his eyes. The light burned between his fingers; tears welled under his squeezed-tight eyelids.

  The light swung away. Its afterimage swirled molten in the center of his gaze. He could just make out a figure in a white coat, head silhouetted black by the light behind him.

  "Lie down on the table, please."

  A doctor. He could make out the looped tubes of a stethoscope protruding from one of the pockets of the white coat. He saw the white-sleeved arm come up; a hand pressed against his chest. Pushing him backward-his own hands caught the edge of the table behind him.

  Then he was lying on his back, on the table. The glare dazzled his eyes again as the examining lamp was swung over him. He still couldn't see the doctor's face beyond the light. He turned his head on the table's thin pillow. The room tilted about him. He could see the cabinets mounted on the far wall, glass-fronted, bottles of dark blue with handwritten labels inside. The cabinets and other fixtures in the room looked like antiques, but new somehow, as if they'd just been built and put in here.

  There was something else, closer to the table; he could almost reach out and touch it with his hand. A machine, of black lacquered metal, with gold lettering and flourishes painted on. It took him a moment to realize what it was. An X-ray machine, an old one, a museum piece. But it was new as well, shiny and functional. A faint smell of ozone came from the machine.

  The doctor had turned his back to him. He heard the clink of metal as the doctor sorted through some small objects on a chrome tray.

  He couldn't move. He tried to raise his head from the table, but his strength had ebbed away. Only his eyes, straining to the side to see what the doctor was doing…

  The figure in the white coat turned around, stepping closer to the table. Light sparked from the scalpel he held up in his rubber-gloved hand. Behind the edge of the blade, the face moved for the first time from shadow into the glow seeping from the side of the lamp.

  An old face, carved down to the skull beneath the parchment skin, translucent enough that the teeth could be numbered behind the unsmiling lips. Black hole eyes that swallowed the light and gave none of it back.

  "Just relax." The doctor turned the black gaze to the scalpel in his hand, then to the patient on the table. "This won't take long… not long at all…"

  He watched the scalpel being lowered down toward his own face.

  Nothing more than the random firings of neurons-he told himself that. Disorganized cortical functioning. All of it: the figures outside on the lawn, the blue undersea light lying heavy on the grass, the badminton shuttlecock hung suspended in the warm night air of summer, the nurse, and the doctor. Dreaming…

  "A very simple procedure…"

  The point of the scalpel touched his cheek, a few centimeters under his eye. He felt it pushing; then the skin parted, and the thin metal sunk in. His breath caught, his heart laboring under a fear that he'd forgotten, that he'd thought had gone away forever-that made him a child again, frozen at the sight of broken glass sparkling around his hand and red welling up to hide again the things that had been revealed to him, white things like wet string and snot, inside him; and it scared him, more than the pain, it scared him to see those things…

  "Very simple… you'll hardly feel it at all…"

  The scalpel moved, cutting downward. Deeper; his tongue tasted the metal.

  Something was wet upon his face that wasn't the blood welling over the scalpel and the thin rubber fingers that held it. He squeezed his eyelids even tighter, and the tears broke through and ran, trailing down to the angle of his jaw. A sob, a child's, fought past his clenched breath.

  "Don't worry… everything's coming along fine…"

  The words inside his head were louder than the doctor's whisper.

  Dreaming… He shouted it. teeth grinding together, trying to swallow the fear that had clotted on his tongue.

  Or else he was dying. He knew that could be true as well And that would be all right, too. As long as it ended.

  "Just fine…"

  Far away now. The light gone; deep inside. The familiar dark had come out of the hole at the center of the doctor's eyes, and wrapped him up in its comfort, forgiving him. He had been stupid to have been so scared. Like a child.

  He let go and fell.

  FIVE

  He woke up, the hinges of his jaw aching. He wondered-dimly, at the edge of his consciousness-whether he had been shouting, or screaming, his mouth stretched open wide.

  With no one to hear him. He opened his eyes and saw early morning sunlight, thin and pale, seeping through the ragged curtains in narrow cuts between the boards nailed over the windows. The pieces of sun made straight-edged marks across the bare floor.

  The dream's panic eased away with his slowing pulse. But he remembered that other world, with its own light… its heavy motion, as though he'd been mired in some soft, perfectly transparent crystal. Until at last he'd been unable to move at all-that was the worst, to remember that. He closed his eyes again, working on one trembling breath after another, feeling each ache against his ribs. Something about… an examining room. He'd been up on the table, with the light pressing down on him. Everything in the room around him had been old-looking, period pieces: the cabinets, the black X-ray machine with its swirls of gold lettering, even the light itself, the fixture on its double-hinged arm. But all new at the same time, as though the cabinets had just been built a little while ago, the X-ray shipped out from the factory… that had been the weird part.
>
  More of the dream came back to him, as he drew one breath after another, letting the sleep weight drain from him. The people who'd been out on the lawn, in their funny old clothes… but not old. Old-fashioned; that was it. Costume party stuff. Or like they'd been shooting a movie, and he hadn't spotted the cameras. Something like The Great Gatsby. No; he shook his head, wincing at a stab of pain up his neck. That'd be too late. Flappers and shit. Maybe something by Henry James. Cybill Shepherd in Daisy Miller. That was it. Parasols and those high-waisted long dresses that made girls' breasts look so nice, choker lace up to their chins…

  He burst out laughing, eyes squeezed shut, his throat barking dry, realizing that he'd started to work himself into a hard-on. Must not be dead… yet. Fat lot of good it would do him-you dumb shit-and it was already dwindling away, chased by the pain that the laughing had pulled out of his ribs. Like some goddamn old Lenny Bruce routine: you're dying, you've been beaten to death and kicked out in the boonies, and what do you think about? Shit. He gulped little shallow breaths, letting the pain fold back in on itself, become something small enough so that he could stand opening his eyes to the strip of sunlight he felt on his face.

  Still, the girl with the badminton racquet, the youngest one, had been good-looking enough. Skinny little thing. Even if she had stared up at him with the same dead face and coin-blank eyes that all the rest of them had had, the other women and the men with their muttonchops and walrus mustaches. All of them, the whole costume party on the lawn. The dream.

  Lindy would have looked good in one of those old period-piece dresses. He felt a little sad thinking about that; a different tear welled at the corner of his eyelid. With her hair pulled back and lifted off her neck, instead of all tangled-out to the width of her shoulders. That fucking bimbo style. If he pulled through this, if he ever made it back-big ifs-he'd do that, he'd get her one of those dresses, he'd have it made for her. She might go for it if she thought it was kinky enough, some particular fantasy of his that he was dressing her up for and inserting in place. A change from all those little numbers that just barely covered her ass, and all that Melrose Avenue crap. It'd be nice… something to think about…

  He felt himself falling again, into the soft dark, and pulled himself back up. If he went under, he knew he might not make it back to the light. He was that close; he could feel it, like working on a cardiac arrest in the ER and sensing it slipping away, beyond the reach of his hands and all their cleverness.

  He forced his eyes open. The wedge of sun fell right on them, dazzling him for a moment. He turned his head away. With his cheek against the bare plank floor, he could see across the space to the round, marble-topped counter and the grand staircase curving beyond. The same as he'd seen in his dreaming, only now covered with dust and dust-clotted cobwebs. One of the mahogany panels at the front of the counter had been kicked in, leaving jagged splinters. A big section of the reception desk's marble top had been pulled away and thrown to the floor; the pale, veined shards were scattered across the floor like bits of sugar candy.

  Something else was different. Different from when the truck driver had dragged him in here and laid him down on the floor. He lifted his hand-the left one; his whole right arm was still a floppy, useless appendage-and touched his side. He didn't feel the bare skin and crusted blood over his ribs; instead, the texture of soft cloth, bound tight. Lifting his head from the blanket underneath, chin pressing against his collarbone, he saw the white bandages wrapped around his chest. They were smudged with dust from the floor, and red had started to leak through, from a torn place in the skin beneath his arm. His breath strained against the bandages, the broken ribs twinging sharply.

  The effort of moving had drained him. He fell back, his head thumping on the blanket. The ceiling above him blurred, his eyes losing focus. Raising his hand, he touched the side of his head and felt the bandages there. He could even catch the faint scent of some kind of disinfectant.

  He let his hand flop out to the side, and it hit something soft. He clutched his fingers into it, and drew it to him. He could just make out its color, but that was enough-it was his green scrub shirt, with his name stenciled on the breast pocket, from the hospital laundry. He held it close to his bandaged chest, panting from the exertion of the last few moments. The ceiling's cracked plaster kept on blurring and swimming about; he had to close his eyes.

  Thinking about it kept him from slipping back under. Somebody had bandaged him up while he'd still been unconscious-maybe that was what the dream, at least the doctor part of it, had been all about. Though it wouldn't have had to have been a doctor; a boy scout with a merit badge in first aid could have done as much as this. Still… the image of the bony face, the skull with skin over it that he'd seen, came back unbidden. With the scalpel, and all that other creepy shit. His eyes flew open, to the comforting sunlight.

  Getting up from the floor almost killed him: the pain burst and sparked along his spinal column, his breath hammering against his broken ribs as he rolled onto his side, then pushed with his good hand. On his knees, with his paralyzed arm curled under him, he looked across the room to the counter and staircase, miles away. He knew he'd never be able to crawl that far, not with the one hand useless; he was already hunched over, his weight borne on his other forearm. If he could get to his feet, stay upright…

  The rotted fabric of the curtains came apart, into dust and threads, as he grabbed it, dumping him onto the point of his shoulder. But the fall had brought him closer to a chair, an oval-backed wooden one, against the wall; his fingers closed around the curved leg, and he drew it toward himself.

  The chair's seat was broken out, spilling cotton stuffing and canvas tatters toward the floor. He dragged himself upright with it, finally resting his stomach on the back's rounded top edge. Jackknifed, his good hand gripping the wood, he let his breath fill up his lungs again.

  He was afraid to let go of the chair. If he fell from this height and struck his head, the chances of staying conscious were slim-if it didn't kill him outright. The fragile tissues inside his skull were already swollen with an influx of blood, like a balloon filled with strawberry jam; one good jolt, and the overstretched rubber would split. There weren't any boy scout bandages that would fix that one up.

  The chair slid forward a couple of inches as he shifted his weight on it. He saw how he could do it now. He pushed with his feet and the chair scraped across the planks, leaving its thin marks in the dust.

  He reached the reception desk. Raising his head, he looked over the counter's marble top. He already knew what he'd see. Just as in the dream-the funky old switchboard, with its snake's nest of cables, the woven black covering frayed next to the brass-tipped plugs; the pigeon holes for the guests' mail, with the room numbers on tiny enameled badges under each one. A bell sitting on the counter, like another prop from a movie. Boy! Take the doctor's luggage to Room 309, right away! He balanced his weight on the chair, reached out and struck the bell's little plunger with the palm of his hand. It made no sound except for a muffled thunk. He had to grab the side of the chair to keep from falling. And have the maid draw the bath; the doctor's been traveling a long way. He closed his eyes, letting the fantasy unreel inside his wobbling head. There's a shiny new quarter for you if you're quick about it…

  His sight was starting to blur when he opened his eyes again. He could just make out a sheet of paper, yellowed, with curling brown edges, stuck with a pushpin by the switchboard. The ink scrawled on it had faded to a few grey curlicues, but a sepia-toned vignette of a building remained visible in the upper left corner: three stories, rows of windows, some kind of covered verandah or walkway around the front, big letters on a metal framework at the top that spelled out THERMALENE. Printed under the engraving in tiny italics were the words Your Health Is Your Only Treasure. Then the piece of paper doubled and swam about in his vision, and he couldn't see the words anymore.

  Some kind of hotel, or health resort, then. He looked back across the lobby to the
boarded-over doors in the distance. He wondered how long ago the place had folded. Long enough for the dust to have seeped in, the curtains and the chairs to have rotted, the air to have thickened with the silent years.

  He heard a voice niggling at the back of his head. Get rid of him… haul him back out… The truck driver had managed that well enough. It didn't look as if anyone had been inside the place in half a century, at least.

  A coughing spasm, the dust lodged in his throat, bent him double over the chair back. He spit a red wad out onto the floor and pushed himself upright again. The lobby tilted, his blurred view of it speckled with swarming black dots. The dots took several minutes to fade away.

  He pushed the chair along the length of the reception counter. At the counter's end, where the marble had been broken off and shattered on the floor, he leaned his shoulder against the mahogany. The foot of the grand staircase, which swept on up to the next floor, was a few yards farther on.

  A real bad idea-he knew that, as he looked at the stairs mounting like a frozen waterfall. What he should do was to creep back to the nest of blankets in the middle of the floor, collapse in them, and use as much of his strength as he had left for the simple acts of breathing and moving his blood through his damaged frame. Just try to keep living, for as long as he could. He had a dim memory of the truck driver saying he'd send somebody around to check up on him. If he could hold out that long… then maybe he could make it. All the way through to the other side. Where he wouldn't be dead, and he could take care of the things he had to do.

  Go back and lie down… just breathe, one after another… The water that the truck driver had left for him was back there by the blankets, and he suddenly realized how dehydrated he was, his throat dry and cracking like old leather.