I Never Promised You A Rose Garden (26 page)

Slowly and steadily, Deborah began to see the colors in the world. She saw the form and the colors of the trees and the walkway and the hedge and over the hedge to the winter sky. If the sun went down and the tones began to vibrate in the twilight, giving still more dimension to the Preserve. And in a slow, oncoming way, widening from a beginning, it appeared to Deborah that she would not die. It came upon her with a steady, mounting clarity that she was going to be more than undead, that she was going to be alive. It had a sense of wonder and awe, great joy and trepidation. “When will it begin?” she said to the gradual night. It came to her that it was already beginning.

The night had fully arrived when she opened the door of the bathtub room and went out on the ward again. The Third Dimension, the meaning, persevered in the bare lines of walls and doors and the planes of people’s faces and bodies. There was a great temptation to watch—to keep seeing and hearing, sensing and reveling
in the meaning and the light—the senses and planes of reality, but Deborah was the veteran of many deceits and she was cautious. She would subject this new thing to Furii’s time-hunter and let it shoot its arrows.

She ate supper and found herself capable of suffering that she had to do it messily, with fingers and a wooden spoon. The food tasted. It was substantial under her teeth and afterward she remembered having eaten it.

“Whatever this thing is …” she muttered, “… I wonder when they will pull it out from under.” She spent the evening listening to the attendants talking to one another like lonely outpost sentinels in a strange and barren land. They wouldn’t know what this thing was, but it was beginning to frighten Deborah because she didn’t know what it was going to turn into. Maybe it was another part of the Game, that always recurring last laugh of the world.

When she gulped down her sedative and walked to bed she said to Yr,
Suffer, gods.

Suffer, Bird-one, we are waiting….

I have a question: Two natives are in a comic strip, but they don’t know it, and think themselves alive. They are building a campfire on an island, which is really the back of a hippo who is standing in a river. They begin to cook their dinner. When the heat reaches through the hippo’s hide, he gets up and walks away, carrying the natives with astonished faces. Then the reader of this comic strip laughs and turns the page on which are natives, astonishment, jungle, river, hippo, and fire. The question is: What can their faces show now? What can they do now?

One would have to wait in order to find out,
Anterrabae said.
Who knows, this happening may be gone by tomorrow.

You may not even have to do anything about it,
Lactamaeon said.
You may not even have to think about it.

Maybe it was just a symptom,
Deborah said.

In the morning she lay in bed awake, but wondering if it would be wise for her to open her eyes. Someone was
screaming in the hall, and she could hear a student close by—rustling apron and apprehension—trying to wake Dowben’s Mary. Through her closed eyes the light from the morning sun was red. The lucky ones by the windows got all the benefit of the sun, but every morning the day reached out for all of them for a little while at least, and this morning it made Deborah search in her mind for something that had changed in her.

“Something happened to me …” she whispered to herself, “… something yesterday. What was it? What was it?”

“Come on, Miss Blau, rise and shine,” the student said.

“What’s for breakfast?” Deborah asked, not wishing to give any of her questions away.

“Typical regional cooking,” Fiorentini’s Mary chirped. “They never say what region, but I have some ideas!”

“What kind of regional cooking do they have for people who are out of this world?” someone asked.

Then it came to Deborah what had happened last night, with the color and the form and the meaning infusing it and the sense of life. Was it still there, waiting beyond the eyelids? She opened her eyes wide and at once. The world was still there. She got up, wrapped herself in her blanket, and went out on the hall and to the nursing station.

“Excuse me, do I see my doctor today?” She had been a thousand times a mendicant before that door, but this time it seemed to be different, although no one acted as if it were.

“Just a minute. Yes, you’re down for off the ward today. Two o’clock.”

“Can I go by myself?”

The suspicion came up like a surgical mask over the nurse’s face. “I’ll have to get a written order from the ward administrator. You know that by now.”

“Can I see him when he comes?”

“He’s not going to be on the ward today.”

“Will you write my name down, please?”

“All right.” And the nurse turned away.

It sounded more like a maybe, but Deborah knew by now that it was not good form to seem too insistent, even though the world might be gone by the time the permission came through.

At her hour she was shy and frightened that speaking of it might end it, but after a time of groping she told Furii about the seeing and, more importantly, about the meaning and the thing that had come attached to the meaning: the slow, opening hope.

“It was not like what usually happens in Yr,” she said. “It reminded me of you because it was just a simple statement in my mind that I was going to live, to come up alive.”

Furii gave her the familiar testing look. “Do you believe that this is a true prognosis?”

“I don’t want to say because I may have to hang by my thumbs from it.”

“No, you won’t. Nothing will change for us.”

“Well … I think … I think that it may be true.”

“We prove it then,” Furii said. “We get to work.”

They spent the time cutting ways to the old secrets and seeing facets of them that needed the new hunger for life to come real. Deborah saw that she had taken the part of the enemy Japanese as an answer to the hate of the ones at the summer camp, his foreignness and violence being an embodiment of anger. A part of the same insight opened on to the subject of martyrdom—that being martyred had something to do with Christ, the pride and terror of every Jew.

“Anger and martyrdom,” she said, “that’s what being a Japanese soldier was, and I gave the doctors the …good soldier’ that they wanted. Anger and martyrdom … It sounds like something more … like the description of something I know….”

“What more?” Furii asked. “It must have had many walls to have supported itself for all these years.”

“It’s a description of … why … why, it’s
grandfather
!” Deborah cried, having unearthed the familiar tyrannical Latvian to whom she had given such an unrecognizable mask. It was a description of him and it fitted him better than height or weight or number of teeth. “The secret soldier that I was is a
mulu
—what Yr calls a kind of hiding image of my kinship with him.”

“Coming to see this … does it hurt so much?”

“A good hurt,” Deborah said.

“The symptoms and the sickness and the secrets have many reasons for being. The parts and facets sustain one another, locking in and strengthening one another. If it were not so, we could give you a nice shot of this or that drug or a quick hypnosis and say, …Craziness, begone!’ and it would be an easy job. But these symptoms are built of many needs and serve many purposes, and that is why getting them away makes so much suffering.”

“Now that I have the … realness … will I have to give up Yr … all of it … right away?”

“Never
pretend
to give it up. I think you will want to give it up when you have the real world to replace it, but there is no pact with me. I do not ask you to give up your gods for mine. When you are ready, you will choose.” Then she said gravely, “Don’t let them torture you every time you let some of the world’s good light in your windows.”

The “burn-squad” was waiting for her when she got back on the ward. It was Dr. Venner this time. She had nicknamed him “Lost Horizons” because he never seemed to see anyone, but kept looking out as if to sea, past the people he was supposed to be treating. The name had stuck. Now he was impatient because she had not been ready and waiting for his ministrations in a properly chastened frame of mind, because the burns had resisted for months now, and because cleaning them should have given her the pain she deserved and yet she seemed always above it. Deborah did not like Dr. Venner and she expressed this by joking to Quentin Dobshansky,
who held the bandages and winced whenever the doctor’s rough swabbing pulled the raw flesh away.

“Hold that arm still,” Venner growled at the limb held motionless before him. In his anger he jerked the swab hard and blood from the healthy tissue underneath welled up and covered the wound. “Damn it!” he breathed.

“Heck, Dr. Venner,” she said softly, “you don’t have to get angry. I’ve got a fake tumor that more than makes up for what I’m missing here.”

Dobshansky bit his lip to keep from laughing, but the instrument dug sharply again and he drew in his breath. “Uhh! Easy, Deb!”

“The hurting is only theoretical, Quentin,” she said. “What hurts is being kicked by the forces that everyone else lives by and years of being nuts and not being able to tell anyone and have them believe you. Every time you double up with a theoretical tumor pain, some professor is there to tell you why it can’t be hurting. As a courtesy, they give you a shot or two of the experience the other way.”

“Keep quiet!” Dr. Venner said. “I’m concentrating on this.”

Dobshansky winked at the nurse who had come in and Deborah was grateful to them that they had permitted her to be a witness.

The New Doctor came up a few days later to do his stint as call-doctor for the day. “It’s time for another look at those burns,” he said.

“Venner was the last one and if he didn’t hit bone, no one else will.”

The comment was disturbing and took New Doctor by surprise. “I’ve been worrying about those burns,” he said quickly to cover his unprofessional reaction, and she caught him in another professional blunder as he remembered some page of some tome that preached, “Never Tell a Patient You Are Worried.” His surprise at what he had said was plain on his face, and he began the wiping away of the look, hastily and piecemeal, so that a part of it was left. “Well, let’s say
concerned
, and I thought
of something that might just work.” He took a little tube of medicine out of his pocket. Then he dismissed the massing burn-squad and the two of them smiled a little at each other like conspirators. They both breathed easier.

He looked at her arms. The bandages were rank and the flesh around the burns was beginning to take on the mushiness of the burned area.

“Well, we’ll give it a try.” She saw in his face that the burns were worse than he had remembered. When he was through, he said, “I tried to go easy. I hope it didn’t hurt too much.”

“Don’t worry,” Deborah said, and rose the tremendous distance from the falling Anterrabae to be capable of a smile. “Someday, maybe it will.”

When the nurses cut the bandages two days later, the putrefaction was gone.

“What was that stuff he used!” The head nurse shook her head in wonder.

“He left it for her in number six cabinet,” said little Cleary.

Deborah turned to the nurse. “I’ll have my contribution ready.”

“And what is that?” she said with the impatience of the expert.

“Why, the smile.”

Because she was going to live, because she had begun to live already, the new colors, dimensions, and knowledges became suffused with a kind of passionate urgency. As form and light and law became more constant, Deborah began to look into the faces of people, to talk with them and hear them. Although she was shy and stunted in the subjects on which people spoke to one another, she began to find the D ward with its lost patients and harried staff too thin a reality. Impatient and eager on the hospital’s ponderous wheel, she began her slow ascent; she could almost hear a creak as the wheel groaned under her weight. Bit by bit she regained the distance by which the doctors measured responsibility: Alone to Her Doctor’s Office (100 ft. [.dotmath] 1 hr. sane); Alone on Front Grounds (200 ft. [.dotmath] 3 hrs. sane); Alone on Front and Back Grounds (1 mi. [.dotmath] 5 hrs. sane); and at last she applied to go to B ward, where the foot-hour rule would be given the whole inward sweep of books and pencils and sketch pads. Now that she held this tremulous but growing conviction that she was alive, she began to be in love with the new world.

“If I’m alive, then I must be of their substance—the
same
substance,
don’t you see!” she told Furii in her excitement, gesturing outward to the world. The last time she had been on B ward there had been only darkness and silence except for the roaring of the Collect and the building up of the volcano. She had seen no one and nothing, but the way to the bathroom and the way to the food and sedative line. This time she took her bedding eagerly, looking into the faces of the nurses, and asked their names and hoped for a room up front where it was noisy and alive.

The head nurse cocked her head. “You know Carla Stoneham, don’t you?”

“Is she back? I … I thought she was gone.”

“Well, she was an outpatient for a while,” the nurse said, trying to keep anything but the dead level from her voice. “She’s back now.”

Carla was sitting on her bed. Looking at her, Deborah felt a special warmth in the eye.

“Well, you girls know each other.” The nurse put the extra blanket on the other bed and left.

“Hi, Deb….” Carla seemed glad to see her, but Deborah could see that she was subdued because of shame, and Deborah’s mind, warm as her eyes toward Carla, began to plead: I am your friend—don’t be ashamed because of this. She closed her eyes and pushed the English words of commitment across her Yri tongue.

“I don’t care if it is selfish. I’m glad you’re here because it’s where I am.” Then she began to make her bed and put her clothes away while they gossiped about this and that: Miss Coral, Helene, Mary’s latest crack, and the nurses on “B” (which one would come if there was trouble and which would not).