Wolf Flow (5 page)

    There were two of them, younger ones, with drawn-in waists a man could circle with his hands. They had little skinny racquets in their hands, and a net between them, set up right on the groomed lawn. Badminton; he saw the shuttlecock, held by the feathers in the delicate hand of one of them, as she laughed and said something to her friend on the other side.

    Men also, in old-type fussy suits, with high, stiff collars, one in something with bright checks, knickers showing plaid stockings. Mustaches and muttonchops. They talked in low voices, their laughter, rarer than the women's, barking out suddenly.

    Some of the people were in wheelchairs. The old kind, with high wicker backs and wooden arms. Pushed by nurses with starched white caps, bigger than those nurses wore now. They looked like pictures of Florence Nightingale, with those short blue capes just covering their shoulders.

    It all looked like a picture, some period-piece engraving, an old photograph, silver etched on glass; a photograph come to life, or the shadow of it. In the moonlight, the figures in their old-fashioned clothes moved languidly, as though under a becalmed sea. Their voices and laughter drifted up to his ear as he watched their slow grace. One of the younger women moved her racquet in an underhand arc, and for a moment-and longer, forever-the shuttlecock hung motionless over the net.

    Then it lay on the grass. He hadn't seen it fall. Time had moved again, but differently now. The voices and the chiming laughter had stopped. The figures on the broad manicured lawns held still, only their heads turning.

    All toward him. Their faces lifted. The young women and the older ones; the men with their stiff collars and heavy mustaches; the ones in the wheelchairs, and the nurses standing behind them… They looked up to the window. At him. The pale light silvered their eyes, like coins or sparks of ice. They saw him-not smiling, not moving, their faces darkening as though a cloud had rolled across the moon. They watched him, their eyes locked on to his.

    One of the young women, the prettiest one, raised her badminton racquet up to her face as though it were a fan, her small hand touching its curved rim. She bent her head, her gaze shadowed by her lashes. Perhaps she smiled at him; he couldn't tell…

    He drew back from the open window. Before he could take a step away from it, he felt a hand touch his shoulder. His breath sucked in, a gasp, as his eyes darted around to the side.

    "Come along now."

    A nurse had laid hold of his shoulder, easily pulling him around, as though he had only a child's strength. She had on the old-style uniform, the same as the ones pushing the wheelchairs on the lawn, with the starched, winged hat, but without the short blue cape-that was for outdoors. A no-nonsense face, mouth set firm: she was older than the pretty ones outside.

    She took his arm. gently but firmly, and walked him down the corridor.

    "You're late." The words clipped out of her thin-lipped mouth. "The doctor's already waiting for you."

    He couldn't say anything-they were already at the end of the corridor, in front of one of the doors. This one wasn't numbered: in precise, gold-edged black letters, it read Examining Room.

    The nurse pushed open the door. "In you go." Her hand pressed at the small of his back, and he was inside the room.

    He heard the door close behind, but he couldn't tell if the nurse was still there with him. A light glared, blinding him; he raised his hand, shielding his eyes. The light burned between his fingers; tears welled under his squeezed-tight eyelids.

    The light swung away. Its afterimage swirled molten in the center of his gaze. He could just make out a figure in a white coat, head silhouetted black by the light behind him.

    "Lie down on the table, please."

    A doctor. He could make out the looped tubes of a stethoscope protruding from one of the pockets of the white coat. He saw the white-sleeved arm come up; a hand pressed against his chest. Pushing him backward-his own hands caught the edge of the table behind him.

    Then he was lying on his back, on the table. The glare dazzled his eyes again as the examining lamp was swung over him. He still couldn't see the doctor's face beyond the light. He turned his head on the table's thin pillow. The room tilted about him. He could see the cabinets mounted on the far wall, glass-fronted, bottles of dark blue with handwritten labels inside. The cabinets and other fixtures in the room looked like antiques, but new somehow, as if they'd just been built and put in here.

    There was something else, closer to the table; he could almost reach out and touch it with his hand. A machine, of black lacquered metal, with gold lettering and flourishes painted on. It took him a moment to realize what it was. An X-ray machine, an old one, a museum piece. But it was new as well, shiny and functional. A faint smell of ozone came from the machine.

    The doctor had turned his back to him. He heard the clink of metal as the doctor sorted through some small objects on a chrome tray.

    He couldn't move. He tried to raise his head from the table, but his strength had ebbed away. Only his eyes, straining to the side to see what the doctor was doing…

    The figure in the white coat turned around, stepping closer to the table. Light sparked from the scalpel he held up in his rubber-gloved hand. Behind the edge of the blade, the face moved for the first time from shadow into the glow seeping from the side of the lamp.

    An old face, carved down to the skull beneath the parchment skin, translucent enough that the teeth could be numbered behind the unsmiling lips. Black hole eyes that swallowed the light and gave none of it back.

    "Just relax." The doctor turned the black gaze to the scalpel in his hand, then to the patient on the table. "This won't take long… not long at all…"

    He watched the scalpel being lowered down toward his own face.

    Nothing more than the random firings of neurons-he told himself that. Disorganized cortical functioning. All of it: the figures outside on the lawn, the blue undersea light lying heavy on the grass, the badminton shuttlecock hung suspended in the warm night air of summer, the nurse, and the doctor.
Dreaming
…

    "A very simple procedure…"

    The point of the scalpel touched his cheek, a few centimeters under his eye. He felt it pushing; then the skin parted, and the thin metal sunk in. His breath caught, his heart laboring under a fear that he'd forgotten, that he'd thought had gone away forever-that made him a child again, frozen at the sight of broken glass sparkling around his hand and red welling up to hide again the things that had been revealed to him, white things like wet string and snot, inside him; and it scared him, more than the pain, it scared him to see those things…

    "Very simple… you'll hardly feel it at all…"

    The scalpel moved, cutting downward. Deeper; his tongue tasted the metal.

    Something was wet upon his face that wasn't the blood welling over the scalpel and the thin rubber fingers that held it. He squeezed his eyelids even tighter, and the tears broke through and ran, trailing down to the angle of his jaw. A sob, a child's, fought past his clenched breath.

    "Don't worry… everything's coming along fine…"

    The words inside his head were louder than the doctor's whisper.

    
Dreaming
… He shouted it. teeth grinding together, trying to swallow the fear that had clotted on his tongue.

    Or else he was dying. He knew that could be true as well And that would be all right, too. As long as it ended.

    "Just fine…"

    Far away now. The light gone; deep inside. The familiar dark had come out of the hole at the center of the doctor's eyes, and wrapped him up in its comfort, forgiving him. He had been stupid to have been so scared. Like a child.

    He let go and fell.

    

    

    He woke up, the hinges of his jaw aching. He wondered-dimly, at the edge of his consciousness-whether he had been shouting, or screaming, his mouth stretched open wide.

    With no one to hear him. He opened his eyes and saw early morning sunlight, thin and pale, seeping through the ragged curtains in narrow cuts between the boards nailed over the windows. The pieces of sun made straight-edged marks across the bare floor.

    The dream's panic eased away with his slowing pulse. But he remembered that other world, with its own light… its heavy motion, as though he'd been mired in some soft, perfectly transparent crystal. Until at last he'd been unable to move at all-that was the worst, to remember that. He closed his eyes again, working on one trembling breath after another, feeling each ache against his ribs. Something about… an examining room. He'd been up on the table, with the light pressing down on him. Everything in the room around him had been old-looking, period pieces: the cabinets, the black X-ray machine with its swirls of gold lettering, even the light itself, the fixture on its double-hinged arm. But all new at the same time, as though the cabinets had just been built a little while ago, the X-ray shipped out from the factory… that had been the weird part.

    More of the dream came back to him, as he drew one breath after another, letting the sleep weight drain from him. The people who'd been out on the lawn, in their funny old clothes… but not old. Old-fashioned; that was it. Costume party stuff. Or like they'd been shooting a movie, and he hadn't spotted the cameras. Something like
The Great Gatsby
. No; he shook his head, wincing at a stab of pain up his neck. That'd be too late. Flappers and shit. Maybe something by Henry James. Cybill Shepherd in
Daisy Miller
. That was it. Parasols and those high-waisted long dresses that made girls' breasts look so nice, choker lace up to their chins…

    He burst out laughing, eyes squeezed shut, his throat barking dry, realizing that he'd started to work himself into a hard-on.
Must not be dead
…
yet
. Fat lot of good it would do him-
you dumb shit
-and it was already dwindling away, chased by the pain that the laughing had pulled out of his ribs. Like some goddamn old Lenny Bruce routine: you're dying, you've been beaten to death and kicked out in the boonies, and what do you think about?
Shit
. He gulped little shallow breaths, letting the pain fold back in on itself, become something small enough so that he could stand opening his eyes to the strip of sunlight he felt on his face.

    Still, the girl with the badminton racquet, the youngest one, had been good-looking enough. Skinny little thing. Even if she had stared up at him with the same dead face and coin-blank eyes that all the rest of them had had, the other women and the men with their muttonchops and walrus mustaches. All of them, the whole costume party on the lawn. The dream.

    Lindy would have looked good in one of those old period-piece dresses. He felt a little sad thinking about that; a different tear welled at the corner of his eyelid. With her hair pulled back and lifted off her neck, instead of all tangled-out to the width of her shoulders. That fucking bimbo style. If he pulled through this, if he ever made it back-big ifs-he'd do that, he'd get her one of those dresses, he'd have it made for her. She might go for it if she thought it was kinky enough, some particular fantasy of his that he was dressing her up for and inserting in place. A change from all those little numbers that just barely covered her ass, and all that Melrose Avenue crap. It'd be nice… something to think about…

    He felt himself falling again, into the soft dark, and pulled himself back up. If he went under, he knew he might not make it back to the light. He was that close; he could feel it, like working on a cardiac arrest in the ER and sensing it slipping away, beyond the reach of his hands and all their cleverness.

    He forced his eyes open. The wedge of sun fell right on them, dazzling him for a moment. He turned his head away. With his cheek against the bare plank floor, he could see across the space to the round, marble-topped counter and the grand staircase curving beyond. The same as he'd seen in his dreaming, only now covered with dust and dust-clotted cobwebs. One of the mahogany panels at the front of the counter had been kicked in, leaving jagged splinters. A big section of the reception desk's marble top had been pulled away and thrown to the floor; the pale, veined shards were scattered across the floor like bits of sugar candy.

    Something else was different. Different from when the truck driver had dragged him in here and laid him down on the floor. He lifted his hand-the left one; his whole right arm was still a floppy, useless appendage-and touched his side. He didn't feel the bare skin and crusted blood over his ribs; instead, the texture of soft cloth, bound tight. Lifting his head from the blanket underneath, chin pressing against his collarbone, he saw the white bandages wrapped around his chest. They were smudged with dust from the floor, and red had started to leak through, from a torn place in the skin beneath his arm. His breath strained against the bandages, the broken ribs twinging sharply.

    The effort of moving had drained him. He fell back, his head thumping on the blanket. The ceiling above him blurred, his eyes losing focus. Raising his hand, he touched the side of his head and felt the bandages there. He could even catch the faint scent of some kind of disinfectant.

    He let his hand flop out to the side, and it hit something soft. He clutched his fingers into it, and drew it to him. He could just make out its color, but that was enough-it was his green scrub shirt, with his name stenciled on the breast pocket, from the hospital laundry. He held it close to his bandaged chest, panting from the exertion of the last few moments. The ceiling's cracked plaster kept on blurring and swimming about; he had to close his eyes.