Secret Dreams (27 page)

The wrapped mummy mumbled at him.

“What? I can't hear …”

The mummy spoke. “We have some mail for you, Herr Doktor.”

No, not the mummy — Nurse Bosch. She had brought him a letter.

“How long have Î been out?” “All night.”

“Was Emma here?” “She's here now, …” Nurse Bosch quietly withdrew.

He saw a soft armchair had been brought into the room. Emma's body folded into it, sunk in a deep, limp sleep. She had brought clothes for him: his slippers, his checked bathrobe. He felt remarkably better, like someone recovering from a hangover when it lifts its gray weight at last. Nurse Bosch had left the letter on the bed. His eyes focused slowly on the print. Addressed to the girl. From the father. Ach! The last thing in the world he could deal with now. He flicked it across the room, and it landed on his folded bathrobe.

Emma did not stir. She had curled up with Leaman's
Anatomy
and still clutched it…. Had Fräulein evacuated during the night? Had she eaten? He had promised to lecture her today. He tested his joints, feeling his limbs, twisting his neck around. Everything ached. He could manage a little.

His mouth felt dry and parched. A pitcher of water stood on a table by Emma's chair. He picked it up and put it to his lips. The water ran down his chin. His genitals felt cool and hidden. “Genitals” seemed the right word. So inoffensive. So harmless …

Emma shifted in the chair, her narrow bottom pressed toward him, showing its curve through her woolen skirt. For a second he saw himself locking the door. Saw himself rip open his robe. Yank aside her skirt.

Rape her.

Covering her mouth so no one would hear.

But … the doors didn't lock inside. And then there was the viewing slit. He sighed and put the pitcher down.

Before he left the room, he slipped the book from Emma's grasp. Her fingers clutched the air for a moment, then went still again.

“Herr Doktor!” Orderly Zeïk started from his seat in the puritan chair. “Feeling much better, Zeik, thank you.”

Nurse Bosch stormed down the hall to face him. “Herr Doktor, we have strict orders about you too! Now back in you go —”

He stowed the book under his arm and took both of Nurse Bosch's hands in his own, feeling her cool, dry skin. “Thank you for yesterday. Thank you for taking care of me.”

She drew her hands away shyly, rubbing them … telling him what he wanted to know.

“No evacuation last night. And she ate about half her meal.”

The nurse glanced at her wristwatch. “It's about noon now. Time for lunch. Shall I fetch hers?”

Nurse Bosch brought the meal while he sat in her room. When he held the steaming dish in his lap he imagined Fräuleins swollen belly, ready to split, intestines distended, too packed to breathe. If only he could pass his hand along her stomach to feel inside. Had either Nurse Bosch or Bolzen noticed the state of her belly when they tried to force an enema on her?

What if there was blockage?

What if the girl had swallowed something and stopped her bowels? Giving her an enema might have revealed that — or even freed the blocking object. In which case, the enema, forced or otherwise,
would
have been the correct procedure. His halting its implementation might cause a rupture…. She could hemorrhage, the contents of her bowel spilling into her lower body cavity. In a few days she'd be dead of fever or infection.

He tried to recall if he'd ever heard of a case of a person physically retaining bowel movements. Holding on to them … What an insane force of will! But to what end? What purpose did it serve? Pain an end in itself? Eating and eating and holding and holding until she became a carcass packed solid with food and feces … Pah! Ridiculous.

The smell of the steaming plate wafted into his face: knockwurst and sauerkraut. Now the folds in her mummy wrappings were moving. Was she really going to eat?

Ja, the hands beneath her wrappings rippled back and forth. A grunt came from the sightless burnoose, a wet gurgling. He placed her plate on the bed. A claw snatched a handful of kraut and knockwurst and vanished under the covers. The mummy made the sounds of chewing and slavering. God, still
hungry
… He willed himself to.

Very soon the food disappeared. Why had she let him back into her presence so quickly? He had imagined months of knocking at her door, begging, “May I come in? May I this, may I that?” But in his blunted, fevered state he had completely forgotten to knock when he came to her room — just barged right in! And now of all times — why was she eating in front of him? He prayed she'd move her bowels, right where she hunched, anywhere — just so she wouldn't rupture, die, and end it all too soon…. Before he got to see her face alive.

“I've promised you the first-year university lecture. And so you shall have it.” He cleared his throat, opened Leaman's
Anatomy
to the frontispiece and then to the table of contents. “The study of anatomy is the study of the body structure — that is, the body's structural relationships: skeleton to organs, organs to nervous and pulmonary systems, and those systems to the musculature. None of these systems is independent,- all of them are connected and integrated. In this lecture I shall deal with the precise nature of the human skeleton, the nomenclature of its parts and their functions,- from there, the muscle fibers working from the extremities toward the trunk,- and the contents of the body cavity itself. Then the head, its bones and muscles, the organs of the eyes, throat, and ears, and finally the nervous system. My last lecture will end with the brain.”

He caught his breath. He had not fully thrown off the grippe. His brow was damp. “Even naming all the body's parts is a considerable task, and those proficient in its naming have been held in high esteem for many thousands of years.”

He went on with his lecture for another half hour, devoting himself to the skeleton and musculature of the foot, starting with the phalanges, the little toes, working through the various cuneiforms, metatarsals, and cuboids. He found he was incredibly rusty and needed constantly to refer to Leaman's text for the Latin names. At the end of this stint his body felt chilled and slightly loose in the bowels.

The mummy had devoured her plate of knockwurst.

Emma stayed the night with him in his room across the hall, curled up as before, like a lanky cat in a soft armchair. He could not know that for most of the night she lay awake and watchful, simply staring at the dull glare from the hall lights shining through the smoky glass of the viewing slit in their door. The lights from outside made the viewing slit an oblong full moon in the black sky of the darkened room. At last she fell off, long after the sick one muttered himself to sleep.

In the morning he went back to 401 in his bathrobe and slippers. This was the eleventh or twelfth day of her retention, and he lectured her on the skeleton and musculature from the tarsus, the heel, to the patella, the knee joint. When he first entered her room he thought he heard her whimper. In gladness or fear? Did she actually
want
to void herself now? Or was she afraid?

That evening, the unwashed claw snatched another plate of food. He had to interrupt his second lecture of the day, on the fibula and tibia, to rush off to the hall lavatory and let his guts run out. It seemed he could keep nothing in. Whatever he ate turned to water. In the dead of night he voided himself again, begging the girl silently to go, damn you! go! While Emma stared at him, saying nothing as she lay awake …

On the morning of the thirteenth day of Fräulein Schanderein's retention, his lecture had at last reached the pelvic area, including the first spinal disks, the sacrum, the coccyx, and the contents of the pelvic cavity. He wondered whether to go directly to the lower bowel or begin with the bladder and urinary tract.

He stood at the window, staring down at the winter garden. Frost covered the gravel pathways, the ground ice glittering in the morning sun like glass dust. Holly leaves clung stubbornly to the shrubs by the path. The other trees were bare and dark, brittle sentinels on a winter day. He decided on the bowels….

“The intestines of the bowels are the tubular portions of the alimentary canal. They extend from the stomach to the anus, leading from and forming an arch about the convolutions of the small intestines.” In the brightness of the morning light he saw his own reflection in the glass, his face a ghastly thing, hollow cheeked, pinched. He saw a flicker of movement in the glass. The mummy had crept toward the edge of the bed, as though about to rise. He tried to go on, to keep his voice on an even keel.

“Food mass is carried along within the intestines by contractions of the muscular walls. The small intestine, a tube of approximately twenty-three feet in length, is where bile, pancreatic juice, and the acidic secretions of the glands within the small intestine's lining complete the digestion of proteins, fats, and carbohydrates. The digested nutrients pass through the tubular lining and into the blood and lymph systems.”

The ghostly reflection of Fräulein Schanderein in the window moved again. The mummy, swathings and all, vanished from the corner of his eye.

He heard the hollow grating ring of the brass chamber pot being pulled across the floor. If someone knocked now, he would kill him, beat his brains to a pulp in a rage. If someone knocked now.

“What remains of the food mass are various undigestible compounds, which finally pass into the large intestine, up the ascending colon, across the arch of the transverse colon and down the descending colon to the rectum — and at last to the anal canal.”

À deep grunt came from the floor. Another deep grunt and a gasp for air. Then a long pause ending in a pleasant sigh of relief…. The girl began to breathe in deep drafts, He forgot the lecture and smiled down into the garden below, A satisfied silence filled the room. It might be cold outside, but inside, the heat whistled up the metal radiator, and his toes were warm and dry in his bedroom slippers.

The patient went back to the bed. And he to his chair, his own dearly beloved room 401 chair. All the time sitting in that chair, all the effort and patience and doubt… No, nothing in vain. He glanced at the chamber pot. Fräuleins stool lay there — a meager five pellets the size of deer droppings. Somehow he had desperately wanted to see more, a pound or two at least. But logically he knew this impossible,- the body could not hold a pound or two for thirteen days. The stool's compactness revealed that her body had used up the greater portion of her waste product. The clawed meals and half rations went part of the way to account for this, but not all. In order to consume that much of the indigestible bulk, the patient's metabolism must be operating at a furious rate. She digested food and burned calories like a hard laborer working in the deathly cold. Yet all she had done was sit in bed. This — obviously — was not rest in the normal sense. He saw the truth in the saying; “Sitting still is harder than jumping about.”

Great hands clamped about his gut. He wiped away some tears that had sprung to his eyes….

“Thank you, Fräulein, for attending my lecture.”

He picked up the chamber pot and went out into the hall. Zeik jumped to his feet, followed closely by Nurse Bosch. They halted at attention a pace away,

“We have now resolved the issue of elimination,” he said.

He presented Orderly Zeik with the chamber pot, and the orderly accepted it as if it held the holy relics of an ancient order.

“Nurse Bosch,” he commanded, “the contents of this chamber pot shall be noted as belonging to the occupant of room 401.”

“Yes, Herr Doktor,”

“Furthermore, the contents of this chamber pot shall be labeled immediately as such.”

“As you wish, Herr Doktor.”

“Moreover, a specimen of the contents of this chamber pot, one sample from each of the five deposits, shall be presented to Senior Physician Nekken for dissection and analysis. It is my personal request that he handle the dissection himself and oversee all the details of its execution. The specimen of the patients stools shall be examined for trace elements and compound residue persisting from the patient's meals during the last thirteen-day period, I shall help Herr Nekken work up a full report, stating all the findings and any suitable comments thereon, complete with laboratory analysis and forensic results. Copies to myself, Direktor Bleuler, the entire intern staff, the patient herself, and appropriate members of the hospital support personnel …”He paused to catch his breath. “Will you please be so kind as to draw up a memo to this effect for me at once.”

Nurse Bosch preened with hidden delight. “It shall be done as you instruct, Herr Doktor.”

À great wave of relief seemed to have swept over the three of them, a feeling of conspiracy and triumph. As though the doctor, nurse, and orderly were the girl's secret helpers, having begged her to go all this time, wishing they could go
for
her. After the days of waiting, no fuss, no dissection, no amount of paperwork was too great regarding the girl's meager pellets.

“At the very least,” Herr Doktor said slyly, “no one will accuse us of supplying the specimens ourselves.”

Nurse Bosch and Zeik both bowed. “No, Herr Doktor.”

The five small specimens were taken away.

Herr Doktor ordered tea in his room for himself and Emma. But he saw her comfortable chair empty, save for the impression of her body.

She left only a note behind:
Glad you're feeling better. Dinner at six. E
.

Not even love and kisses; no, not her way — beautiful, cold Emma. Either the master of her face or spent and sated beneath his body. He tried to remember if he had heard her laugh recently. Yes, not long ago when he spilled egg down his front and almost walked out of the house with it congealed on his shirt.

Now, where the devil had she stuck his clothes? He poked his nose into the small closet, but all he found was his overcoat. Pinned to the lapel another note from Emma, this one reading:
Remember, don't be late!