“Your mind,” she said scathingly, quite un-Michalish, “is about as flexible and receptive as your two hands right now!” I resisted the impulse to try to flex my swollen joints. “Supposing I told you I didn’t believe you hurt anywhere! I can’t see your pain!”
I was jolted. I found myself snapping back at her as if I were on her age level. “Anyone knows arthritis—”
“Of course,” she cried. “Lots of people have it. It’s—it’s customary!” she flung my word back at me. She leaned towards me, her eyes blazing. “What if I’m customary somewhere?” We glared at each other a moment, then her face cleared and blanked of all emotion. She stepped back from the bed and walked slowly up to the ceiling, then, leaning forward, she hovered over me like a blue-jeaned angel, her hair—Michal-colored—spreading out fan-wise behind each shoulder, spilling light off its edges.
“I’m sorry,” she said down into my stupefaction, “I shouldn’t have got mad. It’s only that I am disappointed—”
“Hey!” Child Apfel was sitting up in bed, wide-eyed. “Can I do that, too? It looks fun!”
Michal drifted over to his bed and perched on the edge of it. I heard her hair whispering softly back down behind her shoulders.
“In your hospital gown?” she teased gently. “Besides, where’d you go? A remembery is much more fun and lots less work!”
“Yes! Yes!” It was the eager child. “Give me a remembery!” He burrowed down under his covers, leaned against his pillows, and smiled his soft, wet smile. “This time about when there were bonfires on every hilltop across the Scandinavian peninsula—”
Silence came into the room and I closed my gaping mouth.
Then she was back by my bed—feet safely at floor level. “I’ve told you true, Mr. Evans,” she said softly. “Will you please think about it—my past, I mean.”
“But—but—” The pleading eyes were too much to face. I turned stiffly away. “Yes, I’ll think.” A twinge twisted my hip joint and I snapped, “But I won’t believe!”
I thought about her, that’s true, but what could she expect from me? Professionally, I arrived at no answers. Could I conjure up a “past” for a twelve-year-old? And even if I could, she would probably be off on another interest tangent before I could formulate a story completely. I milled around in the dead-end of believing and disbelieving, ridiculing and wondering. Unhappily restless, I began to mutter to myself.
This undesirable state of affairs was sidetracked by Mrs. Norwich. She came in one afternoon and announced to me and Mr. Apfel in a half-questioning tone that implied permission to object, that another patient was to arrive the next day and have a bed in the corner of our room.
“Usually we have only two to a room,” she said, peering over her glasses at me. Mr. Apfel was busy breaking the teeth out of a new comb. “But this one is different.” She waited for comment. I lifted an eyebrow and waited silently for pain to slither down my leg again. “He won’t bother you any. He won’t do anything. He was injured in a car crash four months ago—a head injury that left him in a coma. Two cars had a head-on collision. There were seven dead altogether and one survivor in each car. And this man. No one knows him. No one ever saw him before. No one knows how he got involved in the accident. There was nothing to identify him by and he never wakens. They’ve kept him at the hospital trying everything in the book to waken him, but they need his bed now, and time is the only thing they haven’t tried.”
“After all,” said Mr. Apfel, lucidly, brushing the broken teeth of the comb to the floor, “you can’t bury a body as long as it keeps breathing, can you?”
They brought the new patient to our room and transferred him to his bed, newly installed in the corner. From my position I could see the cold clarity of his profile, the statue-like stillness of his body under the white sheet and spread. It reminded me of—I suppose it’s a crusader—who lies on his tomb in Salisbury Cathedral in England with just that same marble patience. The only difference was the slow rise and fall of the spread over his chest and the accompanying slight flaring of his nostrils. I wondered where he was—I mean where he was. His body was there on the crisp-cornered bed, but where was he? I was pursuing this line of thought, trying to pin down what I meant by “he.” I knew exactly what I meant, but when I tried to reduce it to a simple declarative sentence, it eluded me. All kinds of modifiers crowded around to be tried and discarded and I spent an absorbing few minutes before Mr. Apfel flipped his eyes open from one of his numerous cat-naps and spoke as though he hadn’t been asleep at all.
“Do you suppose he’s dead and just forgot to turn his body off?”
“I don’t know,” I said, caught by the aptness of the suggestion. “I’ve been wondering about that myself. I wonder where he is?”
“I don’t suppose they’ll let him through the Gates until his body stops, will they?” he asked, troubled.
“Sorry, I’m no authority,” I said.
“I’m worried,” he said. “What if he’s in there and wants to get out and can’t? Like Jake. He wanted to talk and he couldn’t. Not until he died. Maybe this one wants to open his eyes and move and talk.” Mr. Apfel’s voice was rising in dismay. “What if he doesn’t know what happened to him! What if he’s scared! Somewhere in the dark! And no one will find him!” And Child Apfel wept great unwiped tears down his sorrowing face.
“There, there,” I said clumsily, trying to find words appropriate to the Child Apfel. “He’s just sleeping. Don’t worry.” But he turned his face to his pillow and sobbed.
Michal was in the doorway and then by Mr. Apfel’s bed. He turned and, clutching her hands, wailed, “Find him, Michal! Find out if he’s there!”
Michal looked back over her shoulder at me. “Is that the man-in-a-coma?”
“Yes,” I said. “And Mr. Apfel’s all upset because he thinks the man is like Jake—wanting to communicate and not being able to.”
Michal loosened her hands from Mr. Apfel’s grasp and slowly approached the new bed. She knelt down by it. It was so high that her eyes just overtopped the mattress. She turned the man’s head gently so they were face to face.
“Are you there?” she whispered. “Please, are you there?”
There was no response, of course. There was a silence that lengthened and lengthened as Michal knelt there. I was about to summon Mrs. Norwich when finally Michal moved. She got up slowly from her knees and turned the man’s head back straight on the pillow.
She walked—most unlike her usual moving—over to my bed.
“I went in,” she said, slowly and thoughtfully. “I squirmed and elbowed my mind into his. It’s as dark in there as if God had blotted up all the light He ever made. It was like trying to move around in corridors that were flexible and that pushed me from every side. I heard nothing, nothing at all from him, not even so much as the creep-and-eat that’s in a caterpillar’s mind.”
“Couldn’t—couldn’t you rouse him?” I asked, believing for a split second.
“No.” She settled down on the chair, her troubled look still on the man. “I screamed as loud as a mind can scream. I thought light so bright, so dazzling, that I wonder you didn’t see the outline of his face bones like holding your hand up to a light globe. Nothing I did even changed his breathing.” Her mouth drooped and her slender shoulders slumped.
“Michal!” I said sharply. “Don’t sound so—so involved. A child your age shouldn’t concern herself with such morbid matters. The man’s simply in a coma. He’s nothing to you—”
“There’s nobody who’s nothing to me,” said Michal, her eyes turned in my direction but seeing nothing of me. “But there’s something else—something special.” I was startled to see the tears start to slide down her cheeks. “When I touched him, I felt as though I were folding the hands of my own dead. I’ve never folded the hands of my own dead and he isn’t dead—is he? Is he?”
“Mr. Apfel thinks he is. He thinks he just forget to turn his body off,” I offered.
�
��Michal!” Mrs. Norwich called from the hall. Michal turned her face away from me and when she looked back, the tears were gone, the trouble was gone from her face, and she answered, “Here, Aunt Lydie!” without a quaver in her voice.
Mrs. Norwich stood in the doorway, looking sharply at Michal. “You are not to start worrying about this man,” she stated flatly. “If you make yourself unhappy over him, I will forbid your coming up here among the patients.”
“Yes, Aunt Lydie,” said Michal meekly, and was gone without another word.
“What makes you think—” I began.
“I don’t have to think,” she said shortly. “She was just getting home from school when they brought him. I could feel her getting all worked up.” Mrs. Norwich reddened and brushed a brisk hand back over her hair. “It’s catching,” she defended. “Michal’s always ‘feeling’ things about the patients. I’m getting so I ‘feel’ things about her.”
“Is there any reason why this particular one should upset her more than any of the others?” I asked.
“Only that he has a mystery about him,” she said. “If he’d open his eyes and say, ‘I’m Joe Doakes,’ she’d be satisfied. She’s the flighty kind that puts herself in others’ shoes too much. She’s probably worrying about where he is, during this long unconsciousness.”
Mr. Apfel and I exchanged glances and then we both said, simultaneously, “Well, where is he?”
Mrs. Norwich plumped her two hands on her hips and let out an exasperated breath. “Not you two, too! It’s worse than measles!”
I was lying awake that night with my customary insomnia, watching the moonlight squeeze through the maple by the window to make little wavering gold coins on the bedroom walls, when Michal came in, in her voluminous gown and robe. She drifted over to the man’s bed and, gathering up a double handful of the light, she tipped it carefully over the man’s face. She studied his features closely until the light all drained away and the room was dim in the shivery semi-light again. “What is your name?” she whispered, and again and again, “What is your name, what is your name?”
“Sometimes,” she said, her hand gently on my pillow, though I had not seen her move, “sometimes you can reach them by their names, but I don’t even have a name to call him by—”
“Must you?” I whispered.
“I must,” she said. “May I use you?”
“Use me?” I gaped.
“Yes,” she said. “If I can think with me and with you, it’ll be stronger and maybe I can reach him. Maybe he’s waiting now—waiting just on the edge of the shock that blanked him out—”
“But I—but I—” I stammered, not wanting to compound a childish illusion, and yet—
“I think you’re first cousin to the cat anyway,” she said with a glint of amusement. “So if not because that’s what love does, then do it for the sake of your curiosity.”
I must have consented because suddenly Michal and I were pouring a thought out together, What is your name? What is your name? until the words lost their identity and meaning, at least for me. Then suddenly, it was as though there were three voices, Michal’s, mine, and another one, echoing.
What is your name? we reiterated and heard our thought split and double and come back a repetition, What is your name?
Michal! we thought back sharply.
Michal, came the reply. I clenched my fists and then clenched my teeth against the resulting pain. Michal was kneeling by his bedside.
What is your name?
And this time, perceptibly behind our question, came the echo, What is your name?
Michal! we returned quickly.
Michael! came the echo, with an e!
“Michael?” Michal verbalized silently, with me.
“Michael,” came the reply, verbalized this time.
“What is your other name?” we asked quickly. We were answered only by silence, but this time there was a difference in the silence. It was a not-answering, surely, but not the not-there-ness it had been before.
“Your other name?” we insisted.
The thought of laughter came, warm and light, into our minds.
“Must there be two?” came the amused answer. “I’ve only just now found out that there are words and that either a word is me or I am a word. Don’t be greedy!”
And after that, no matter what we thought, there was no reply.
Michal drifted back to my bed. “Thank you,” she said. “I knew you could help me if you would.”
“Do you customarily hook up sending stations like this?” I asked, feeling a little giddy with the recent developments.
“Never before,” she said. “I didn’t know I could. I couldn’t. We did.” She began to drift towards the door. “I knew I had to—I just had to. I suppose you think we were communicating in English.” And she was gone.
Stung, I glared after her in the dark. “It was English to me!” I shouted in a whisper, and was answered by the thought of her laughter.
With no one in the room to gather up the light, it trembled and wavered through the cooling air and showed me only the white hump of the man’s bed—and the glare from Mr. Apfel’s blazing eyes.
“First you—then him!” he gritted harshly. “Everybody comes to take Michal away from me. You go away! Jake went away! You go away the same way! Michal is for me. She’s to give me rememberies and—and—she hasn’t got any time for anybody else. You go away!” His glare was as though he had spit at me, and he shoved himself vigorously down into the bed, hauling up the bedclothes with such vigor that his bony old feet were left out—coldly uncomfortable and hotly defiant.
Michal and I teamed up several nights following our initial venture, but nothing happened, except that we started calling him Mike.
“Mike?” asked Mrs. Norwich when she first heard the name. “Why Mike?”
“Well, we can’t go on calling him the-man-in-a-coma,” said Michal. “And Mike is easy to remember.”
“And very like Michal,” said Mrs. Norwich, narrowing a little. “I don’t particularly care for your twinning yourself with him.”
“We could call him Merihildo Esteven,” I offered.
Mrs. Norwich’s mouth-corners betrayed what she thought of my levity. “I suppose it is handier to have a name to call him by, and if you’ve set on Mike already, Mike it will be.”
“I call him a—” Vindictive Apfel, who was so often in evidence now, went on extremely explicitly with an amazingly comprehensive vocabulary. Mrs. Norwich shooed Michal out of the door and advanced on him with a bar of soap in one hand. Vindictive Apfel choked over some wild-sounding foreign word and became suddenly Child Apfel and burrowed down under his covers to escape the threatened mouth-washing.
A day or two later, he said suddenly as though continuing a conversation, “I’m mad at Michal.”
“Are you really?” I asked idly.
“Yes,” he persisted. “She’s spending all her time with that—” He looked what he was afraid to say.
“It hasn’t done any good,” I said. “Since that first night, we haven’t heard a word.”
“We?” Vindictive Apfel laughed shortly. “What makes you think she’d bother with you, once she got through to him? Ask her about last night. Yap, yap, yap! Kept me awake to all hours!”
“She wasn’t even in here last night,” I said patiently. “She’s coming tonight. We’re going to try again.”
“Try again!” he sneered. “Since when does Michal have to be here to talk to anyone? Ask her—go on—ask her tonight!”
I felt a sharp pang that I diagnosed, at first, as a shoulder joint. But, after careful consideration, decided might be jealousy. Jealousy! Of a child and a man-in-a-coma! Of Michal and Michael—with an e! I didn’t want to believe it, but I held my reaction up against Vindictive Apfel’s reaction and decided that they were practically the same jealousy. Still, I had only the word of a change-with-the-wind old man. I’d ask her, as soon as she came in again. I felt very little of the patien
ce I had developed of necessity over the last few afflicted years, but the hours finally seeped out to evening.
It seemed to me that I could sense Michal’s coming, though this may have been hindsight, but finally she was there, her cheeks theatrically reddened by the brisk outdoor wind before which she had fled home from the store. I barely had time to wonder what I could know about anything brisk and out-of-doors since I was almost hermetically sealed in this room, in this bed, in this body, when Michal exclaimed,
“How odd! That’s almost the exact way he went—almost exactly!”
I surveyed her coolly, still conscious of what Apfel had said. “I presume you plan to explain that remark,” I said. “It lacks intelligibility in its present form.”
She smiled at me, slowly and warmly. I felt heat surge up into my face and tried to turn away from her eyes. “No,” she said, her hand going out to me. “Don’t mind. I suppose Mr. Apfel Told All. Last night—” she moved closer to me, eagerly. “Last night he came looking for me. Michael, I mean. He wanted to know where he was. That’s what I meant by my unintelligible remark. I told him he was in a nursing home, but that didn’t satisfy him. Then in a bed. In a room. But he wanted it closer. So I told him he was in a body. That’s when the anguish came.”
Then I suddenly knew she was no longer speaking. She was thinking to me and I was so busy listening to her that I had no time to protest the impossibility of such a thing. Words went. Her story was reenacted somewhere in my perceiving.
“A body?” Mike said slowly. “And just always dark? Just always night? Just always no any other thing!” He was in anguish.
“Mike,” Michal spoke to him comfortingly. “You’ve been hurt. It won’t—it wasn’t always just dark. Remember, Mike. Do you remember before?”
“Remember before—?”
There was a long blank wait and then she fairly staggered under his outcry. So did I!
“I remember to fall!” he cried wildly. “I remember to hurt! I remember to blind!”
Ingathering Page 69
