Someone in white said, “He’s awake.”
Faces blossomed above him, an amorphous mass that only slowly separated. Nurses’ faces, glancing sideways at each other. A short, olive-skinned doctor, his left eye twitching frantically. The twitch reached Drew: He saw the man’s nervousness, his fear, as a jagged red line that suddenly grew, took three-dimensional shape, and as it did the other thing in Drew’s head moved gracefully forward to meet it. It met, too, the shapes of fear and guilt from the corners of his mind, detached from him and yet still his. The shapes of the doctor’s fear and of Drew’s merged—Eric, the Molotov cocktails, Karl burning—and Drew looked at those shapes, and felt them, and he knew that he knew this man. This doctor, who all his life took chances on the edge of fear not for the good fortune the chances might bring, but to escape the nothingness he carried inside. This man for whom success was never enough—could I have done it better? Will someone else do it better?—but for whom failure was annihilation. Drew saw the shapes for how the doctor would have reacted to a failed test in medical school, to an appointment that went to someone else, to an arrest for this facility here, now. The first two were the defeated hunched shapes of failure; the third was a burning glee in failure that he had not caused himself, that had been inflicted on him from the outside. And so it was a kind of triumph, and Drew saw the shapes for that too, shapes without words, that fastened not on his heart—he felt no particular sympathy—but through the successive layers of his mind, like a plant putting down very deep roots. An unshakable tree. The tree of knowledge, wordless, as all trees are wordless against a still sky.
Drew blinked. It had all taken only a moment. And he would know it forever.
“Lift your head,” the doctor said harshly, as if Drew had been the one to injure him and not the other way around, and Drew saw the shapes for the harshness, too. Other shapes from deep in himself drifted toward it, merged with it. Drew watched. The shapes were him, but he was something else, too, something separate, something that watched and understood.
He lifted his head. A screen to his right began to beep softly, in an atonal pattern. The doctor studied the screen intently.
Leisha rushed into the room.
At the sight of her, so many shapes exploded in Drew’s head that he couldn’t speak. She bent over him, glancing at the screen, putting a cool hand on his forehead. “Drew…”
“Hello, Leisha.”
“How…how are you feeling?”
He smiled, because the question was so impossible to answer.
She said tightly, “You’re going to be all right, but there’s a lot you have a right to know,” and Drew saw how clearly the words took the shape of Leisha herself: a right to know. He saw the shape, the intricate balance, of all the questions of rights and privileges she had struggled with all her life, had made into her life. He saw the clean, basically austere shape of Leisha herself, struggling with the messy other shapes that sent off shoots and pseudopods and could not be captured, as she consistently struggled to do, in principles and laws. The struggle itself had a shape, and he groped to find a word for it, but the words were not there. For him, the words had seldom been there. The closest word he could find was an antique one—knight—and it was wrong, was too pale for the intense poignancy of the shape of Leisha struggling to codify the lawless world. The word was wrong. He frowned.
Leisha said “Oh—don’t cry, Drew, dear heart!”
He had been nowhere near crying. She didn’t understand. How could she? He didn’t understand himself this thing that had happened to him, or been done to him, or whatever it was. Eric had wanted to hurt him, yes, but this wasn’t hurt, this was only making Drew more himself, like a man who had been able to run two miles and now could run ten. Still himself—his muscles, his bones, his heart—but more so, and that more moved him from something ordinary to something…else. Extraordinary. He seemed to himself extraordinary.
Leisha said, “Doctor, he can’t speak!”
“He can speak,” the doctor said shortly, and briefly his shapes came to Drew again: the hysterical pumped-up excitement that was fear, the triumph of not showing it. “The brain scans show no impairment in the speech centers!”
“Say something, Drew!” Leisha begged.
“You are beautiful.”
He had never seen it before: how could he not have seen it? Leisha bent above him, her hair golden as a young girl’s, her face stamped with the decisive power of a woman in her prime. Drew saw the shapes that had formed that power: they were the shapes of intelligence and suffering. How could he not have seen it before? Her breasts swelled softly under the thin fabric of her shirt; her neck rose from the shirt like a warm column, white hollowed delicately with blue. And he’d never seen it before. Not at all. How beautiful Leisha was.
Leisha drew back slightly, frowning. She said, “Drew—what year is it? What town were you arrested in?”
He laughed. The laugh hurt his chest, and he realized for the first time that there was tape across his ribs, and that his arms were still strapped down. Eric entered the room and stood at the foot of Drew’s bed, and at the sight of Eric’s rigid face more shapes crowded Drew’s head. He saw why Eric had done what he had done, all of it, clear back to the day by the cottonwood when two boys had fought to what would have been the death if either of them had been strong enough to make it so. Following that came the shapes for Drew’s father, beating his children in a drunken rage, and for Karl pierced and burning from the bomb he had failed to hurl high enough. They were all, in fact, the same shape, and so ugly that for the first time Drew felt the other, separate self, the self who watched the shapes, burned by them. He closed his eyes.
“He’s fainted!” Leisha said, and the doctor snapped back, “No, he hasn’t!” and even with his eyes closed Drew saw the shapes he and Eric had made, so there was no point in keeping his eyes closed. He opened them. He knew now what the point was. Would have to be.
“Leisha…” His voice surprised him: it came out weak and faint. Yet he didn’t feel weak. He tried again. “Leisha, I need…”
“Yes? What? Anything, Drew, anything.”
That other day came back to him, the day he had been crippled. Lying on the bed just like this, Eric’s father bending above him saying, “We’ll do everything we can…everything,” and himself thinking, now I’ve got them. The same shapes. Always, throughout a man’s life—and more than his own life—testified deep shapes stirring far down in his mind, flicking tails and fluttering gills, more than his own life.
“What, Drew? What do you need?”
“A Staunton-Carey programmable hologram projector.”
“A—”
“Yes,” Drew whispered with the last of his strength. “Now. I need it now.”
21
Miri was thirteen. For a year she had been watching the Sleeper broadcasts, on both the Liver and the donkey newsgrids. The first few months the grids were absorbing because they raised so many questions: Why were scooter races so important? Why did the beautiful young men and women on Bedtime Stories change sex partners so often when they seemed so ecstatic with the ones they already had? Why did the women have such huge breasts, the men such big penises? Why should a congresswoman from Iowa make a resentful speech about the spending of a congressman from Texas when, it seemed, the congresswoman was spending just as much herself, and they weren’t members of the same community anyway? At least, they didn’t seem to define themselves that way. Why did all the newsgrids praise the Livers for doing nothing—“creative leisure”—and hardly mention the people who worked to run things, when it turned out the people who ran things also ran the newsgrids?