The unremarkable man at the stern of the passing vaporetto looks surprised for a few moments, then sneezes.
(Italian, English, Greek, Turkish, Russian, Mandarin.)
Mavis Bocklite, a genial pensioner from Baxley, Georgia, USA, who is sitting across from him, says, “Bless you, sir.”
Finally! I smile and nod. “Grazie, signora.”
15
Patient 8262
I think I am well,” I tell the broad doctor who had the dolls in her desk. I know her name now. She is called Dr Valspitter. “I think I am okay now to leave.” My grasp of the local language has improved markedly. It is called Itic. Dr Valspitter looks at me, lips pursed, brows gathered in the middle as though by a pulled thread. “I appreciate everything all here have done for me,” I tell her.
“What do you remember of your past life?” the doctor asks me.
“Not very much,” I confess.
“What would you do if you returned to the outside world?”
“I would look for a place to stay and for work to do. I am able to work.”
“Not at your old job, perhaps.”
“Ordinary labourer. I could do ordinary labour. I know building sites. That I could do. Ordinary labouring.”
“You feel you could do this?”
“Yes, I feel I could do this.”
“How would you find a place to live?”
“I would go to the Municipal Available Local Lodgings Clearing Office.”
Dr Valspitter looks approving, nods and makes a note. “Good. And how would you find work?”
The obvious next question. “I would approach building site managers, but also I would go to the Municipal Local Employment Exchange.”
The doctor makes another note. I think I’m doing all right here. I need to. I have to get out. I have to get away.
Last night I found I could not sleep and took another small-hours wander along the corridor, down the stairwell and along to what I still thought of as the silent ward. I could not help it; I felt drawn there. I don’t think that’s what woke me up but once I was awake I found myself thinking obsessively about the rows of still beds with their vacant-eyed, near-silent patients, and the contrast with their appearance in daylight when they were awake. I couldn’t think what good padding down to look at them would do, but I couldn’t think of anything else to do either and maybe just seeing them for real rather than in my mind’s eye would let me get back to sleep eventually.
So I went, I looked – they were all just the same, though there were cards and personal items on the bedside cabinets and a few chairs scattered throughout the ward, all the things I’d convinced myself hadn’t been present on my first two visits but which I suppose were always there – then I came back again.
There was somebody in my room. I had left the door closed and my light off, but now I could see some light showing beneath the door, reflecting dimly off the shiny floor. At first, of course, I thought it would just be the duty nurse again.
Then I saw more movement, at the far end of the corridor, somewhere inside the day room. A pale figure, moving across the dark space, disappearing then reappearing and coming towards the low lights of the corridor. The figure in the day room emerged into the half-light of the night-dimmed corridor lights and was revealed as the duty nurse, walking back to his desk at the end of the corridor holding a magazine and flicking its pages, intent on it. He did not look up, so did not see me.
I felt a sudden terror and shrank back against the wall as far as I could, hiding behind a metal cupboard holding fire-fighting equipment. The duty nurse sat down at his station at the far end of the corridor, feet up on the desk, still flicking through the magazine. He stretched out to one side – I could hear the wheels of his chair squeaking – and turned on the radio at a low volume. Tinny pop music sounded.
I could no longer see the door to my room. Who was in there if not the nurse? Was it my former attacker, whoever had tried to interfere with me? Perhaps I ought to go to the door, fling it open, confront them, the noise and commotion of course attracting the attention of the duty nurse. Or perhaps I should just approach the duty nurse directly and tell him there was somebody in my room, let him deal with whoever it was.
I had decided on the latter course and was about to step out from behind the fire-equipment cupboard and walk towards the duty nurse’s station, when, from the far end of the corridor, I heard a toilet flush.
A door creaked and closed. I stepped along the wall to the nearest door, twisted the handle and let myself in. This should be a private visiting room, empty at this time of night. Sound came from somewhere near the toilets. Slipper-slapping footsteps came, and I recognised one of the old boys, a not-quite slack-jaw capable of holding a conversation and talking about something other than television or the weather. He went, head hunched, past where I watched via the cracked door.
Somebody said something and he looked up, waving down the corridor, no doubt at the duty nurse. I opened the door a little further to watch him go. When he was opposite the door to my room, a couple of doors short of his own room, the door to my room was flung open and light spilled out. “Mr Kel?” I heard a strong male voice say.
The old guy stood looking confused, staring blinking at whoever had addressed him from my room and then down the corridor. I heard seat wheels squeal as the nurse said something, voice inflected in a question.
Then a bright light shone into the old fellow’s face, he put his hand up to shield his eyes, the duty nurse shouted something, the bright light went out and a man – tall, well-built, in a dark suit – went running past me and away down the corridor towards the stair well. He held a chunky-looking torch in one hand. In the other hand he was carrying something else. He thrust it inside his jacket as he ran past me. It was dark and heavy-looking and I knew it was a gun.
So:
“Can I leave?” I ask Dr Valspitter. “Can I go? Please?”
She smiles. “Perhaps. I will need other doctor to come to same opinion, but I think you can.”
“Wonderful! Can we get other doctor, their opinion, today?”
“You are in such a hurry to leave?”
“I am. I want to get out,” I say. “Today.”
She shakes her head, frowning just a little. “Not today. Maybe tomorrow if other doctor agrees with me and we can complete all required paperwork and provide you with clothing and belongings and money and so on. Maybe tomorrow. I cannot promise. But soon, I think. Maybe tomorrow. We shall see. You must understand. You must be patient.”
I want to protest, but I am aware that I have pushed things quite far enough already. If I seem too desperate to get out they might take that as a sign that I’m unbalanced or neurotic or something. I do my best to smile. “Tomorrow, then,” I say. “I hope,” I add, before the frowning doctor can reiterate that it’s still only maybe.
“No!” I wail, staring at the two beige pills lying in the bottom of the little cup. The cup is colourless, translucent plastic, and tiny; a stingy measure of drink if you were serving spirits in it, and yet to me it seems like it’s as deep, dark and dangerous as a mine shaft. I stare hopelessly into it and despair. “I not want to!” I am aware that I sound like a recalcitrant child.
“You must,” the old nurse tells me. She is starting to lose patience with me, I can tell. “They harmless, Mr Kel. They give you a good night’s sleep, that’s all.”
“But I sleep good!”
“Doctor say you must have them, Mr Kel,” the old nurse tells me firmly, as though this trumps everything. “Do you want me to go and get doctor?”
This is a threat. If she fetches a doctor and I still refuse to take the sleeping pills I may well find that such a protest too will count against me when I ask to be released from the clinic. “Please not make me,” I say, biting my bottom lip. Perhaps I can appeal to her emotions. This is only partially an act. However, she is not moved. She has seen it all before. Perhaps a younger nurse might have been persuaded but this old o
ne is taking no nonsense.
“Very well, we get doctor.” She turns to go and I have to reach out to her and say,
“No! All right!” She turns back, and at least has the decency not to look smug. “I take them,” I tell her.
First line of defence: I think I can fool her and just keep the pills under my tongue until she has gone and then spit them out, but she insists on inspecting my mouth afterwards and so I have no choice but to swallow them.
Second line of defence: I’ll go to the toilets and throw them up. But the nurse is watching for me to do this as she goes down the corridor dispensing drugs and twice shoos me back to bed with the threat that she’ll inject me with a sedative if I insist on going to the toilets. She knows I already went not ten minutes ago.
Third line of defence: I’ll throw up here in my room, into my water jug or out of the window if I have to. I can sign myself out voluntarily if I have to. Everything subsequently will be harder if I have done so – the finding a place to live and a job and so on – but not impossible. I am not stupid, I can survive.
Some time later I am vaguely aware of being pushed gently upright and something – the water jug, perhaps – being taken out of my hands. I am tucked into bed and the light is turned out. I feel very sleepy and in a way happy to be so, cosy in my wrapping of sheets and the feeling of dozing quietly off, while another part of me is shrieking with fury and terror, screaming at me to wake up and get away, do something, anything.
He comes for me again during that night. The drug still holds me, and it is as though everything happens through layers and layers of swaddling, through multiple bundlings of something insulating and muddling, making everything vague and fuzzy round the edges.
There is an impression of the quality of the light and sound around me changing somehow, of the door being opened and closed very quietly. And then there is the feeling that somebody else is here in the room with me. At first I feel no sense of threat. I have a vague, groundless and completely stupid feeling that this person is here to protect and look after me, to tend to me. Then I feel something happening to my bed. I still persist with the vague sensation that all is well and I am being cared for. They must be tucking me in. How nice. How like being a child, safe and warm and loved and quietly looked after.
But I am not being looked after, and the bed is being unmade, not made, untucked, sheets and blanket loosened, a way being made clear.
I feel the sliding, spiderly-creeping, probing hand slide into the bed and over my body at my hip. I feel my pyjamas being touched and investigated and then the cord that ties them being found, and – gently at first – tugged at. The knot does not give, and the tugging becomes harder, more impatient and aggressive.
In all of this it is as though I am watching everything on a screen, feeling it not as something that is happening to me but as something that is happening somewhere else to somebody else and the sensations accompanying the experience – the sensations that are the experience – are being transmitted to me through some technology or ability I have not heard of. I am dissociated from what’s going on. This is not happening, or at least not to me. So I have no need to react, to try to do anything, because what good would that do? It’s not happening to me.
Except, of course – as one part of my mind has known all along, and is still bellowing and yowling about – it entirely is happening to me.
The hand undoes the knot on my pyjama bottoms and pulls them forcibly down. There is a roughness and an urgency to the hand’s movements now that was not there before. I think that whoever is doing this realises that I am truly in a deeply drugged sleep and so am not likely to wake up and start resisting or screaming. And there is, too – horribly, horribly – a feeling of something like the uncaring passion that infects lovers, when they cannot wait to get at each other, when clothes are ripped off the self and the other, when hands shake, when bruises happen, unmeant, unfelt at the time, when shouts and screams and crashings and bangings ring out without a care who hears them, when we abandon ourselves utterly to something that is neither fully ourselves or them any more but something that lies between us, aside from us, beyond us. I think I can remember feeling like that: wanting somebody like that, being wanted like that. This – this single-handed furtiveness, this selfish, unmindful groping, however urgent, however needy – dear fuck, this is a sad, pathetic, petty thing in comparison.
Something inside me wants to cry, confronted with the memory of such wild and joyous passion, such fervently mutualised desire, contrasted with this sordid, sweaty feeling and grabbing and squeezing. I think I do feel hot tears in my eyes and on my cheeks. So I can feel, at least, if not react. Would I rather this than outright unconsciousness, until it’s all over? Is it better to witness such violation and know that it most surely happened, or better to know nothing until one wakes up sore, bemused, suspecting perhaps, but able to dismiss it, forget about it? I don’t know. Anyway, I seem to have no choice, either about it happening to me or about the fact that I am aware of it.
The hand tires of manipulating my genitals and starts trying to turn me over, onto my side, rotating my body so that my exposed rear is turned towards my violator.
What heat there is in tears of such frustration. How can I let this happen to me? How can somebody do something so base and selfish and debased to another person? My brain is still minutes behind events but my heart seems to be waking up to what is occurring. It thrashes and spasms in my chest, as though trying to wake me up through the sheer physical disturbance pulsing through my body. I feel something happening with my behind. I think my arms and hands might be flapping now, trying to move, to beat away, though I could be imagining this. I go with the feeling anyway, trying to reinforce and strengthen it, imaginary or not.
Something enters me. A finger, into my anus. Too thin and hard and jointed to be a penis. No worse than a doctor’s dispassionate probing, in theory, but this is not dispassionate, this is not for my own good, this is only for the pleasure of the person doing this to me.
Motherfucker. How fucking dare they. I summon one vast wave of disgust and fury and put it all into one arm, striking back at my assailant. Then I squeeze my lungs, contract my belly, throwing a pulse of sound out upwards through my throat, vomiting a scream that quickly turns into a cough and a terrible, squeezing, constricting pain all across my chest, imprisoning me.
The finger pulls roughly out of me. I heave myself onto my back, getting a glimpse of my attacker as they send the seat clattering to the floor and dash for the door.
I recognise him. It is the duty nurse from downstairs, the fellow who whistled, his uniform covered by a patient’s dressing gown. He puts his head down and hunches his shoulders as he makes his escape into the corridor outside. I hear the duty nurse on this floor, a female nurse tonight, saying something, then shouting. My door slams shut.
Outside, I hear running, but I am flat on my back, hardly hearing it for the noise in my chest, hardly caring about anything any more except the sensation that a ten-tonne iron giant is pinning me down, one knee planted firmly on my chest as he squeezes the life out of me. The band around my chest cinches tighter and the pain grows a little worse. The last thing I’m fully aware of is the nurse coming into my room, taking one look at me and running off. Is that the reaction of a seasoned professional health worker? I’m not sure about this, but somehow it scarcely seems to matter any more. This crushing, constricting pain beyond pain is all that matters.
An alarm sounds, not that I can hear it very well in the vast, over-everything silence that seems to be dropping onto me like some inky overcast, raining pain. Then I think the door bangs open and somebody starts thumping me on the chest. As though I haven’t had enough to endure this night.
They tear open my pyjama top and I want to protest. Please; passion, something shared, wanted, yearned for, not imposed, not this. Wrong. They put my head back, put their lips to mine, and kiss, blowing into me. I smell her perfume. Oh, that old sweetness. I will
miss that. But still unasked for, still a sort of violation. Also, frankly, been eating garlic. More thumping and thudding against the hollow cavern of quietness that is my chest.
I drift away, despite the smashing and whacking and the regular, purposeful, breathful kissing trying to fill the void caged by my ribs. Then voices and lights and a feeling of crowding. Come all ye in. There is plenty of room here, my loves, in my empty chest and increasingly vacant mind, if nowhere else. So be at home, my guests; I’ll stay so long and then so long.
Something pulls across me like a hawser, side to side, plucking me like some thick and fleshy string set vibrating, forcing my back bowing up off the bed, jangling every nerve and fibre of my being before releasing me, letting me fall back with relief.
Something resumes, some regularity returns to matters, like a stopped engine at last coughing hesitantly back into life. I think. I don’t know. I’m still sort of drifting, like a boat at a quayside, half disconnected, just one painter securing it, letting it move and wheel and jerk according to the vagaries of tides, currents and winds. It would not take much of a tug to separate me altogether from this mooring, but I am lucky and it does not happen.
Feeling myself drift into a sort of warm fog-bank, a pocket of peace, I bump against the pier again and am secured once more.