I Never Promised You A Rose Garden (22 page)

She tried to think of a truth to tell the doctor as a present. Perhaps it might be the one about seeing—that even when seeing every line and plane and color of a thing, if there was no meaning, the sight was irrelevant and one was just as well blind; that perhaps even the famous Third Dimension is only meaning, the gift which translates a bunch of planes into a box or a madonna or a Dr. Halle with antiseptic bottle.

“I’m being as gentle as I can,” he was saying.

She looked at him sharply to see if he was trying to burden her with the responsibility of gratitude. No. She wondered if he was immune to her poisonous
nganon.
She decided that her gift would be a reassurance that he could touch her and not die.

“Don’t worry,” she said graciously, “the time of contact is so short that there is no chance of infection.”

“That’s why I’m using this,” he said, swabbing away. As he was bandaging, she realized that he had not understood, so she decided to tell him about the meaning of the third dimension of sight. It came out in a single blurted sentence.

“Vision isn’t everything!”

“No, I guess not,” he said, finishing up. Then, as if he had caught something, he said, “Do you have trouble with your eyes?”

“Well”—Deborah was embarrassed by the suddenness of the truth—“when I get upset … I usually have trouble seeing properly.”

Oh. really? How interesting,
the Collect said sarcastically.

“Shut up! I can’t hear myself think!” Deborah shouted at them.

“What?” Dr. Halle turned. Deborah looked at him in horror. Her words to Yr had pierced the barriers of the Earth’s hearing. The clamor from the Collect built higher until it was an overwhelming roar and the gray vision went red. Without warning the full Punishment fell like an executioner’s hand and the testimony of light, space, time, gravity, and the five senses became meaningless. Heat froze and light hurled tactile stabbing rays. She had no sense of where her body was; there was no up or down, no location or distance, no chain of cause and effect….

She endured outside of time and beyond exhaustion, and then she came up in world’s daytime, a pack, a strange doctor.

“Hi.”

“Hi.”

“How are you?”

“I don’t know. How long …” But she realized that he could not know when she had started down. “How long since I have been up here?”

“Oh, three days or four.”

She became aware of aching in her hands and little aches along her arms and shoulders. She became terrified. “Did I hit anybody? Did I hurt anybody?”

“No.” He smiled a little. “You were having quite a go at the doors and windows, though.”

In revulsion and shame she tried to turn away, but a neck cramp caught her so that she began to cough and had to turn back toward him to work it away. “I don’t know you. How come you are here?”

“Oh, I’m on call today. I stopped in to see if you were okay.”

“Good God!” she said in awe. “I must have torn the place down. They never call a doctor unless somebody’s killed himself.”

He laughed a little. “That’s not true for me; I’m a new doctor. Can you come out? Do you feel ready?”

“I don’t know,” she said.

“Well, we’ll give you another half hour. Don’t worry about that aching. A lot of it is just tension. Well—so long.” She heard his key busy in the lock and the inexpertness was strangely moving.

When she returned to her bed on “D”—it was one which she had had before in the front dorm—she found it surrounded by woe. In the shuffle of comings and goings, the Wife of the Abdicated had been moved two beds down and Deborah was now between Fiorentini’s Mary and Sylvia, still mute and vacant about the face. The Punishment had exhausted Deborah and she lay on her bed watching the world’s shadows draw long, shading the world’s time toward evening.

Mary lay resting on the next bed. After a while she said gaily, “Kid, I never knew you had it in you. You can really fight!”

“I didn’t hit anyone …” Deborah said, feeling a little sick at the mention of it and wondering if she had, in spite of what the young “new” doctor had said.

“Oh, but the talent is there; the talent is definitely
there!” Mary laughed her laugh like breaking glass, an imitation of mirth from one who had never understood it. “But, you are insane of course, out of your mind—didn’t know what you were doing.” Again she used a light voice, a parody of an actress in a sophisticated comedy.

“Yes,” Deborah said quietly, “but I can’t figure out why I came out of it … why it stopped.
…”

“Well, really, every
case
like you ought to realize that
that hell
”—and she began to shake with shudders of high, shrill laughter—“can’t last any more than you can stand it. It’s like physical pain—tee-hee-hee—there’s just so much and then, no more!”

“You mean that there is a limit to the thing?”

“Well,
more
would be
obscene,
my dear, simply
obscene!
” And the high, young-girl giggle broke again into a sharp, back-bristling laughter.

Deborah wondered if Mary were right and if, in the nightmare of no laws, there were at least boundaries. The light faded and the dormitory grew dim. Perhaps there was mercy even in Hell. Her vision cleared a little and the softened lines of the beds and the walls and the bodies of the breathing dead around her took on the faint glow of the summer dusk. The overhead lights went on and with them came the knowledge that Mary, agony and all and with her awful laughter, had reached out with what little help she could summon, if only to say that there was, indeed, a limit. Even poisonous persons could, if they threw all their courage and energy into it, help one another. Carla had done it, Helene had done it, Sylvia in her death as furniture had done it, and now Mary had offered from herself a fragment of hard wisdom.

Deborah remembered her first meeting with Mary and laughed. She had said, “I’m Deborah,” and pointed to her bed, “over there.” Mary, with her omnipresent mirthless grin, had replied, “I’m bedlam as seen by Walt Disney.”

In the evening Deborah felt a need and got up to scout the ward for fuel for another backfire.

For Deborah, the backfires became the only way of easing the pressure of the stifled volcano inside her. She continued to burn the same places over and over, setting layers of burns on top of one another. Cigarette butts and matches were easy to obtain, although they were supposedly guarded with great care; even D ward’s precautions were no match for the intensity of her need. Because the effects of the burnings lasted only an hour or so and because she could only bear the building up of pressure for three or four hours, she had to have a large supply of used cigarettes and the matches to relight them.

For a few days the wounds remained secret, even though she had to change the site of the burning when they began to infect and drain. She was amused but not surprised at how oblivious the nurses and attendants were. The wounds drained and stank and no one noticed. She thought: It’s because they don’t really want to look at us.

At the end of the week, the new doctor came up to the ward again. “You look a lot better,” he said, stopping by Deborah in the dayroom.

“I ought to,” she said a little acidly. “I’ve had to work like hell to keep it up.”

“Well, with such an improvement, you should be ready to go back to B ward very soon.”

When she heard this, she realized that B ward, with its unprotected time and free matches, was a perfect chance for the death she thought she wanted. Then she noticed that she was terrified, and wondered why. If he was letting her die as she wished, why was she angry?

“I have some more burns,” she said simply.

He looked shocked, recovered quickly, and said, “I’m glad you told me.”

She began to pull on her sweater, twisting it like wet laundry in her hands.
If I want to die, what am I saving myself for?
she demanded, still angry at the mental image of him permitting her to burn herself to death on B ward.

You told him because you are a coward!
the Collect said. They began the old jibes again.

“How is the old sore?” the doctor said, loosening the bandaged place. She did not answer him because he was seeing for himself. The burn was stubbornly refusing to heal. “You haven’t done any more to this?” he asked, a little bit accusingly and afraid to make it stronger.

“No,” she said.

“We’ll try another kind of bandage. Let me see the new burn.” He looked at the other arm. “How many times did you burn this?”

“About eight.”

He bandaged both places and left, no doubt to scold the nurses about the carelessness of leaving dangerous, firemaking materials on the ward. The burning cigarette he left behind him in the dayroom was long enough for two series of burnings.

When the lawgivers of D ward discovered that its patients were not so safe as they had thought, they swept the ward up and down with reforms to widen still further the distance between themselves and the patients. The fork that had been introduced on “D” a year before was
now rescinded. The Age of Metal gave way to the Age of Wood and fire prevailed only within the precincts of the nursing station, the modern era. In the Pleistocene beyond, Pithecanthropus erectus shambled and muttered gibberish, ate with its fingers, and wet on the floor.

“Thanks a lot, kid,” Lee Miller said sarcastically as she walked past Deborah into the lighted place where Modern Man supplied the patients with his status-symbols—cigarette and match.

“Go to Hell,” Deborah answered, but her tone lacked conviction. Later the Wife of the Abdicated accused her of being a spy and in league with the Secretary of the Interior, and as Deborah already knew, the Secretary of the Interior was one of the worst Enemies.

Getting matches and butts now became difficult, but by no means impossible. Modern Man was careless with the fire-tipped cylinders he burned and breathed, and waiting beside him was a fire-hungry primitive whose gray and flat world magically included the cigarette in sharp focus, color, smell, and three dimensions of form.

But firing back at the volcano did not change its surface, its granite garment, as Anterrabae called it. And gods and Collect and Censor were wildly and inexplicably free with the Punishment. Even the logic of Yr seemed to have been erased and the laws overturned. Deborah began to believe that the volcano would erupt and explode. She remembered that the Last Deception had not yet come.

The days had long since become an Earth-form that was only a grammatical nicety. She woke up in one of them and found herself in pack, as so often before. A key turned in the lock of the door and a nurse entered. Behind the nurse, looking unbelievably different because she had not changed at all, stood Furii.

“All right,” she said, and came in. The nurse brought a chair for her, and Deborah began to wish that she might escape the woman’s face and the disgust she saw in it.
Furii looked all around, sat beside the bed, and nodded with a kind of awe.

“My goodness!” “You’re back,” Deborah said. The self-hate, terror, shame, pity, vanity, and despair never crossed the stone surface. “Did you have a good time?”

“My goodness,” Furii repeated. “What happened? You were doing very well when I left, and now, back here.
…” She looked around again.

Deborah was afraid of the joy she felt in seeing Furii alive. She said, “You’ve seen this … awfulness before; why are you so shocked?”

“Yes, I have seen it. I am only sorry to see you in it, and suffering so much.”

Deborah closed her eyes. She was stricken with shame and she wanted to escape to the Pit, to be dark and blank, but Furii was back and there was no hiding place. Her mind held. “I didn’t know you were coming.”

“It is the day I said I would be back,” Furii said.

“Is it?”

“It is, and I think maybe you got in this bad shape to tell me how angry you are that I went off and left you.”

“That’s not true—” Deborah said. “I tried with Royson—I really did, but you were dead—at least I thought you were—and he wanted only to prove how right he was and how smart. I forgot that you would come back….”

She began to thrash again, even though she was exhausted. “I’m all stopped and closed … like it was before I came here … only the volcano is burning hotter and hotter while the surface doesn’t even know if it is alive or not!”

The doctor moved closer. “It is one of these times,” she said quietly, “when what you say is most important.”

Deborah pushed her head hard into the bed. “I can’t even sort them out—the words.”

“Well then, just let it come to us.”

“Are you that strong?”

“We are both that strong.”

Deborah took a breath. “I am poisonous and I hate it. I am going to be destroyed in shame and degradation and I hate it. I hate myself and the deceivers. I hate my life and my death. For my truth the world gives only lies; I tried with Royson time after time, but I saw that all he wanted was to be right. He might as well have said, …Come to your senses and stop the silliness’—what they said for the years and years when I was disappointing them on the surface and lying to them with the inmost part of Yr and me and the enemy soldier. God curse me! God curse me!”

A soft scraping sound, a breathed rasp, came after, as she tried to cry, but the sound of it was so ridiculous and ugly that she soon stopped.

“Maybe when I leave,” Furii said, “you can learn to cry. For now, let me say this: measure the hate you feel now, and the shame. That quantity is your capacity also to love and to feel joy and to have compassion. Also, I will see you tomorrow.”

She left.

That evening Miss Coral came to Deborah holding a book. “Look,” she said timidly, “my doctor has left this with me. It is a book of plays and I wondered if perhaps you might not wish to read them with me.”

Deborah looked over at Helene, who was sitting against the wall. Had Helene been offering the book, she would have kicked it across the floor to Deborah, perhaps with a taunt. Did any two people, even in the World, speak the same language?

As she answered, Deborah could hear herself mirroring some of Miss Coral’s elaborate form of speech and also her shyness.
“Which one would you prefer?” Miss Coral asked. They began to read
The Importance of Being Earnest,
with Deborah doing most of the men and Miss Coral doing most of the women. Soon Lee and Helene and Fiorentini’s Mary were reading, too. With the actors parodying themselves, the play was uproarious. Mary,
laugh and all, was Ernest as a wellborn bedlamite, while Miss Coral as Gwendolyn reeked with magnolias and spiderwebs. Oscar Wilde’s urbane and elegant comedy was being presented on the nightmare canvas of Hieronymus Bosch. They read the whole play through, and then another, aware that the attendants were laughing with them as well as at them, and thinking, for all the fear it caused, that it was a good night, one which, magically, was not included in their damnation.