A terrible thought occurred to Ralph then; it shot across his mind like a meteor scratching momentary fire across a midnight summer sky: it might be better if he did finish the job. The thunderstruck baby's balloon-string had only been a stump, but it had been a healthy stump. The child might live for years, not knowing who he was or where he was, let alone why he was, watching people come and go like trees in the mist . . .
Lois was standing with her shoulders slumped, looking at the floor of the elevator car and radiating a sadness that squeezed Ralph's heart. He reached out, put a finger under her chin, and watched a delicate blue rose spin itself out of the place where his aura touched hers. He tilted her head up and was not surprised to see tears in her eyes.
'Do you still think it's all pretty wonderful, Lois?' he asked softly, and to this he received no answer, either with his ears or in his mind.
5
They were the only two to get out on the third floor, where the silence was as thick as the dust under library shelves. A pair of nurses stood halfway up the hall, clipboards held to white-clad bosoms, talking in low whispers. Anyone else standing by the elevators might have looked at them and surmised a conversation dealing with life, death, and heroic measures; Ralph and Lois, however, took one look at their overlapping auras and knew that the subject currently under discussion was where to go for a drink when their shift ended.
Ralph saw this and at the same time he didn't, the way a deeply preoccupied man sees and obeys traffic signals without really seeing them. Most of his mind was occupied with a deadly sense of deja vu which had washed over him the moment he and Lois stepped out of the elevator and into this world where the faint squeak of the nurses' shoes on the linoleum sounded almost exactly like the faint beep of the life-support equipment.
Even-numbered rooms on your left; odd-numbered rooms on your right, he thought, and 317, where Carolyn died, is up by the nurses' station. It was 317, all right - I remember. Now that I'm here I remember everything. How someone was always sticking her chart in the little pocket on the back of the door upside down. How the light from the window fell across the bed in a kind of crooked rectangle on sunny days. How you could sit in the visitor's chair and look out at the desk-nurse, whose job it is to monitor vital signs, incoming telephone calls, and outgoing pizza orders.
The same. All the same. It was early March again, the gloomy end of a leaden, overcast day, sleet beginning to spick-spack off the one window of Room 317, and he had been sitting in the visitor's chair with an unopened copy of Shirer's Rise and Fall of the Third Reich in his lap since early morning. Sitting there, not wanting to get up even long enough to use the bathroom because the deathwatch had almost run down by then, each tick was a lurch and the gap between each tick and the next was a lifetime; his long-time companion had a train to catch and he wanted to be on the platform to see her off. There would only be one chance to do it right.
It was very easy to hear the sleet as it picked up speed and velocity, because the life-support equipment had been turned off. Ralph had given up during the last week of February; it had taken Carolyn, who had never given up in her life, a little longer to get the message. And what, exactly, was that message? Why that, in a hard-fought ten-round match pitting Carolyn Roberts against Cancer, the winner was Cancer, that all-time heavyweight champeen, by a TKO.
He had sat in the visitor's chair, watching and waiting as her respiration grew more and more pronounced - the long, sighing exhale, the flat, moveless chest, the growing certainty that the last breath had indeed been the last breath, that the watch had run down, the train arrived in the station to take on its single passenger . . . and then another huge, unconscious gasp would come as she tore the next lungful out of the unfriendly air, no longer breathing in any normal sense but only lunging reflexively along from one gasp to the next like a drunk lurching down a long dark corridor in a cheap hotel.
Spickle-spickle-spackle-spackle: the sleet had gone on rapping invisible fingernails against the window as the dirty March day drew down to dirty March dark and Carolyn went on fighting the last half of her last round. By then she had been running completely on autopilot, of course; the brain which had once existed within that finely made skull was gone. It had been replaced by a mutant - a stupid gray-black delinquent that could not think or feel but only eat and eat and eat until it had gorged itself to death.
Spickle-spickle-spackle-spackle, and he had seen that the T-shaped breathing apparatus in her nose had come askew. He waited for her to tear one of her awful, labored breaths out of the air and then, as she exhaled, he had leaned forward and replaced the small plastic nosepiece. He had gotten a little mucus on his fingers, he remembered, and had wiped it off on a tissue from the box on the bedside table. He had sat back, waiting for the next breath, wanting to make sure the nosepiece didn't come askew again, but there wasn't any next breath, and he realized that the ticking sound he had heard coming from everywhere since the previous summer seemed to have stopped.
He remembered waiting as the minutes passed - one, then three, then six - unable to believe that all the good years and good times (not to mention the few bad ones) had ended in this flat and toneless fashion. Her radio, tuned to the local easy-listening station, was playing softly in the corner and he listened to Simon and Garfunkel sing 'Scarborough Fair'. They sang it all the way to the end. Wayne Newton came on next, and began to sing 'Danke Shoen'. He sang it all the way to the end. The weather report came next, but before the disc jockey could finish telling about how the weather was going to be on Ralph Roberts's first full day as a widower, all that stuff about clearing and colder and winds shifting around to the north-east, Ralph finally got it through his head. The watch had stopped ticking, the train had come, the boxing match was over. All the metaphors had fallen down, leaving only the woman in the room, silent at last. Ralph began to cry. Still crying, he had blundered over into the corner and turned off the radio. He remembered the summer they had taken a fingerpaint class, and the night they had ended up fingerpainting each other's naked bodies. This memory made him cry harder. He went to the window and leaned his head against the cold glass and cried. In that first terrible minute of understanding, he had wanted only one thing: to be dead himself. A nurse heard him crying and came in. She tried to take Carolyn's pulse. Ralph told her to stop being a goddam fool. She came over to Ralph and for a moment he thought she was going to try to take his pulse. Instead, she had put her arms around him. She--
['Ralph? Ralph, are you all right?']
He looked around at Lois, started to say he was fine, and then remembered there was precious little he could hide from her while they were in this state.
['Feeling sad. Too many memories in here. Not good ones.']
['I understand . . . but look down, Ralph! Look on the floor!']
He did, and his eyes widened. The floor was covered with an overlay of multicolored tracks, some fresh, most fading to invisibility. Two sets stood out clearly from the rest, as brilliant as diamonds in a litter of paste imitations. They were a deep green-gold in which a few tiny reddish flecks still swam.
['Do they belong to the ones we're looking for, Ralph?']
['Yes - the docs are here.']
Ralph took Lois's hand - it felt very cold - and began to lead her slowly up the hall.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
* * *
1
They hadn't gone far when something very strange and rather frightening happened. For a moment the world bled white in front of them. The doors to the rooms ranged along the hall, barely visible in this bright white haze, expanded to the size of warehouse loading bays. The corridor itself seemed to simultaneously elongate and grow taller. Ralph felt the bottom go out of his stomach the way it often had back when he was a teenager, and a frequent customer on the Dust Devil roller coaster at Old Orchard Beach. He heard Lois moan, and she squeezed his hand with panicky tightness.
The whiteout lasted only a second, and when the colors swarmed back into the
world, they were brighter and crisper than they had been a moment before. Normal perspective returned, but objects looked thicker, somehow. The auras were still there, but they appeared both thinner and paler - pastel coronas instead of spray-painted primary colors. At the same time Ralph realized he could see every crack and pore in the Sheetrocked wall to his left . . . and then he realized he could see the pipes, wires, and insulation behind the walls, if he wanted to; all he had to do was look.
Oh my God, he thought. Is this really happening? Can this really be happening?
Sounds were everywhere: hushed bells, a toilet being flushed, muted laughter. Sounds a person normally took for granted, as part of everyday life, but not now. Not here. Like the visible reality of things, the sounds seemed to have an extraordinarily sensuous texture, like thin overlapping scallops of silk and steel.
Nor were all the sounds ordinary; there were a great many exotic ones weaving their way through the mix. He heard a fly buzzing deep in a heating duct. The fine-grain sandpaper sound of a nurse adjusting her pantyhose in the staff bathroom. Beating hearts. Circulating blood. The soft tidal flow of respiration. Each sound was perfect on its own; fitted into the others, they made a beautiful and complicated auditory ballet - a hidden Swan Lake of gurgling stomachs, humming power outlets, hurricane hairdryers, whispering wheels on hospital gurneys. Ralph could hear a TV at the end of the hall beyond the nurses' station. It was coming from Room 340, where Mr Thomas Wren, a kidney patient, was watching Kirk Douglas and Lana Turner in The Bad and the Beautiful. 'If you team up with me, baby, we'll turn this town on its ear,' Kirk was saying, and Ralph knew from the aura which surrounded the words that Mr Douglas had been suffering a toothache on the day that particular scene was filmed. Nor was that all; he knew he could go (higher? deeper? wider?) if he wanted. Ralph most definitely did not want. This was the forest of Arden, and a man could get lost in its thickets.
Or eaten by tigers.
['Jesus! It's another level - it must be, Lois! A whole other level!']
['I know.']
['Are you okay with this?']
['I think I am, Ralph . . . are you?']
['I guess so, for now . . . but if the bottom drops out again, I don't know. Come on.']
But before they could begin following the green-gold tracks again, Bill McGovern and a man Ralph didn't know came out of Room 313. They were in deep conversation.
Lois turned a horror-struck face toward Ralph.
['Oh, no! Oh God, no! Do you see, Ralph? Do you see?']
Ralph gripped her hand more tightly. He saw, all right. McGovern's friend was surrounded by a plum-colored aura. It didn't look especially healthy, but Ralph didn't think the man was seriously ill, either; it was just a lot of chronic stuff like rheumatism and kidney gravel. A balloon-string of the same mottled purple shade rose from the top of the man's aura, wavering hesitantly back and forth like a diver's air-hose in a mild current.
McGovern's aura, however, was totally black. The stump of what had once been a balloon-string jutted stiffly up from it. The thunderstruck baby's balloon-string had been short but healthy; what they were looking at now was the decaying remnant of a crude amputation. Ralph had a momentary image, so strong it was almost a hallucination, of McGovern's eyes first bulging and then popping out of their sockets, knocked loose by a flood of black bugs. He had to close his own eyes for a moment to keep from screaming, and when he opened them again, Lois was no longer at his side.
2
McGovern and his friend were walking in the direction of the nurses' station, probably bound for the water-fountain. Lois was in hot pursuit, trotting up the corridor, bosom heaving. Her aura flashed with twizzling pinkish sparks that looked like neon-flavored asterisks. Ralph bolted after her. He didn't know what would happen if she caught McGovern's attention, and didn't really want to find out. He thought he was probably going to, however.
['Lois! Lois, don't do that!']
She ignored him.
['Bill, stop! You have to listen to me! Something's wrong with you!']
McGovern paid no attention to her; he was talking about Bob Polhurst's manuscript, Later That Summer. 'Best damned book on the Civil War I ever read,' he told the man inside the plum-colored aura, 'but when I suggested that he publish, he told me that was out of the question. Can you believe it? A possible Pulitzer Prize winner, but--'
['Lois, come back! Don't go near him!']
['Bill! Bill! B--']
Lois reached McGovern just before Ralph was able to reach her. She put out her hand to grab his shoulder. Ralph saw her fingers plunge into the murk which surrounded him . . . and then slide into him.
Her aura changed at once, from a gray-blue shot with those pinkish sparks to a red as bright as the side of a fire engine. Jagged flocks of black shot through it like clouds of tiny swarming insects. Lois screamed and pulled her hand back. The expression on her face was a mixture of terror and loathing. She held her hand up in front of her eyes and screamed again, although Ralph could see nothing on it. Narrow black stripes were now whirring giddily around the outer edges of her aura; to Ralph they looked like planetary orbits marked on a map of the solar system. She turned to flee. Ralph grabbed her by the upper arms and she beat at him blindly.
McGovern and his friend, meanwhile, continued their placid amble up the hall to the drinking fountain, completely unaware of the shrieking, struggling woman not ten feet behind them. 'When I asked Bob why he wouldn't publish the book,' McGovern was continuing, 'he said that I of all people should understand his reasons. I told him . . .'
Lois drowned him out, shrieking like a firebell.
['!!! - - - - - - !!! - - - - - - - - - - !!!']
['Quit it, Lois! Quit it right now! Whatever happened to you is over now! It's over and you're all right!']
But Lois continued to struggle, dinning those inarticulate screams into his head, trying to tell him how awful it had been, how he'd been rotting, that there were things inside him, eating him alive, and that was bad enough, but it wasn't the worst. Those things were aware, she said, they were bad, and they had known she was there.
['Lois, you're with me! You're with me and it's all r--']
One of her flying fists clipped the side of his jaw and Ralph saw stars. He understood that they had passed to a plane of reality where physical contact with others was impossible - hadn't he seen Lois's hand pass directly into McGovern, like the hand of a ghost? - but they were obviously still real enough to each other; he had the bruised jaw to prove it.
He slipped his arms around her and hugged her against him, imprisoning her fists between her breasts and his chest. Her cries ['!!! - - - - - - - - - !!! - - - - - - - - !!!']
continued to rant and blast in his head, however. He locked his hands together between her shoulderblades and squeezed. He felt the power leap out of him again, as it had that morning, only this time it felt entirely different. Blue light spilled through Lois's turbulent red-black aura, soothing it. Her struggles slowed and then ceased. He felt her draw a shuddering breath. Above and around her, the blue glow was expanding and fading. The black bands disappeared from her aura, one after the other, from the bottom up, and then that alarming shade of infected red also began to fade. She put her head against his arm.
['I'm sorry, Ralph - I went nuclear again, didn't I?']
['I suppose so, but never mind. You're okay now. That's the important thing.']
['If you knew how horrible that was . . . touching him that way . . .']
['You put it across very well, Lois.']
She glanced down the corridor, where McGovern's friend was now getting a drink. McGovern lounged against the wall next to him, talking about how the Exalted & Revered Bob Polhurst had always done the Sunday New York Times crossword puzzle in ink. 'He used to tell me that wasn't pride but optimism,' McGovern said, and the deathbag swirled sluggishly around him as he spoke, flowing in and out of his mouth and between the fingers of his gesturing, eloquent hand.
['We can'
t help him, can we, Ralph? There's not a thing in the world we can do.']
Ralph gave her a brief, strong hug. Her aura, he saw, had entirely returned to normal.
McGovern and his friend were walking back down the corridor toward them. Acting on impulse, Ralph disengaged himself from Lois and stepped directly in front of Mr Plum, who was listening to McGovern hold forth on the tragedy of old age and nodding in the right places.
['Ralph, don't do that!']
['It's okay, don't worry.']
But all at once he wasn't so sure it was okay. He might have stepped back, given another second. Before he could, however, Mr Plum glanced unseeingly into his face and walked right through him. The sensation that swept through Ralph's body at his passage was perfectly familiar; it was the pins-and-needles feeling one gets when a sleeping limb starts to wake up. For one moment his aura and Mr Plum's mingled, and Ralph knew everything about the man that there was to know, including the dreams he'd had in his mother's womb.
Mr Plum stopped short.
'Something wrong?' McGovern asked.
'I guess not, but . . . did you hear a bang someplace? Like a firecracker, or a car backfire?'
'Can't say I did, but my hearing isn't what it used to be.' McGovern chuckled. 'If something did blow up, I certainly hope it wasn't in one of the radiation labs.'
'I don't hear anything now. Probably just my imagination.' They turned into Bob Polhurst's room.
Ralph thought, Mrs Perrine said it sounded like a gunshot. Lois's friend thought there was a bug on her, maybe biting her. Just a difference in touch, maybe, the way different piano-players have different touches. Either way, they feel it when we mess with them. They may not know what it is, but they sure do feel it.
Lois took his hand and led him to the door of Room 313. They stood in the hall, looking in as McGovern seated himself in a plastic contour chair at the foot of the bed. There were at least eight people crammed into the room and Ralph couldn't see Bob Polhurst clearly, but he could see one thing: although he was deep within his own deathbag, Polhurst's balloon-string was still intact. It was as filthy as a rusty exhaust pipe, peeling in some places and cracked in others . . . but it was still intact. He turned to Lois.