‘Ezawa thinks he might be seein’ bioenergy… auras.’ Laura closed the door behind them and flexed the lacquered nails of her left hand as if they were blood-tipped claws. ‘I’ll get it out of him! He’s becoming more and more aroused. If his body hadn’t been so enervated to begin with, he’d already be chasin’ me around the bed.’
Laura went down to the commissary to prepare Magnusson’s lunch, and Jocundra, in no hurry to rejoin Donnell, wandered the hallway. Half of the rooms were untenanted,, all furnished with mahogany antiques and the walls covered with the same pattern of wallpaper: an infancy of rosebud cottages and grapevines. Cards were set into brass mounts on the doors of the occupied rooms, and she read them as she idled along. Clarice Monroe. That would be the black girl, the one who believed herself to be a dancer and had taught herself to walk after only a few weeks. Marilyn Ramsburgh, Kline Lee French, Jack Richmond. Beneath each name was a coded entry revealing the specifics of treatment and the prognosis. There were two green dots after Magnusson’s name, signifying the new strain; his current prognosis was for three months plus or minus a week. That meant Donnell would have eight or nine months unless his youthfulness further retarded the bacterial action. A long time to spend with anyone, longer than her marriage. The Thirty Weeks War, or so Charlie had called it. She had seen him a month before. He had cut his hair and trimmed his beard, was deeply tanned and dressed in an expensive jacket, gold chains around his neck, a gold watch, gold rings… the petered-out claim of his body salted with gold. She smiled at her cattiness. He wasn’t so terrible. Now that he had become just another figment of the French Quarter, working around the clock at his restaurant, clinking wineglasses with sagging divorcees and posing a sexual Everest for disillusioned housewives to scale, he bore little resemblance to the man she had married, and this was doubtless the reason she could now tolerate him: it had been the original she disliked.
She had been standing beside Magnusson’s door for less than a minute when she noticed her right side - that nearest the door - was prickly with… not cold exactly, more an animal chill that raised gooseflesh on her arm. She assumed it was nerves, fatigue; but on touching the door she discovered that it, too, was cold, and a vibration tingled her fingertips as if a charge had passed through the wood from an X-ray machine briefly in operation. Nerves, she thought again. And, indeed, the cold dissipated the instant she cracked the door. Still, she was curious. What would the old man be like apart from Laura’s influence? She cracked the door wider, and his scent of bay rum and corruption leaked out. White hallway light spilled across shelves lined with gilt and leather medical texts, sweeping back the darkness, compacting it. She leaned on the doorknob, peering inside, and the sharp shadows angled from beneath the desk and chair quivered, poised - she imagined - to snick through the blood and bone of her ankles if she trespassed. Feeling foolish at her apprehension, she pushed the door wide open. He sat in his wheelchair facing the far wall, a dim green oval of his reflected stare puddled head-high on the wallpaper. The uncanny sight gave her pause, and she was uncertain whether or not to call his name.
‘Go away,’ he whispered without turning.
A thrill ran across the muscles of her abdomen. His head wobbled and his hand fell off the arm of the chair, half a gesture of dismissal, half collapse. He whispered once more, ‘Go away.’ She jumped back, pulling the door shut behind her, and she leaned against the doorframe trembling, unable to stop trembling no matter how insistently she told herself that her fright was the product of stress alone. His voice had terrified her. Though it had been the same decrepit wheeze he had spoken in earlier, this time it had been full of potent menace, the voice of a spirit speaking through a cobwebbed throat, its whisper created by the straining and snapping of spider silk stretched apart by desiccated muscles. And yet, for all its implicit power, it had been wavering and faint, as if a wind and a world lay between them.
Chapter 4
February 11 - March 24, 1987
Every morning at nine-thirty or thereabouts an astringent odor of aftershave stung Donnell’s nostrils, and the enormous shadow of Dr Edman hove into view. Sometimes, though not this morning, the less imposing shadow of Dr Brauer slunk by his side, his smell a mingling of stale tobacco and sweat, his voice holding an edge of mean condescension. Edman’s voice, however, gave Donnell a feeling of superiority; it was the mellifluous croon of a cartoon owl to whom the forest animals would come for sage but unreliable advice.
‘Lungs clear, heart rate… gooood.’ Edman thumped Donnell’s chest and chuckled. ‘Now, if we can just get your head on straight.’
Irritated by the attempt to jolly him, Donnell maintained a frosty silence. Edman finished the examination and went to sit on the bed; the bedsprings squealed, giving up the ghost.
‘Had a recurrence of that shift in focus?’ he asked.
‘Not lately.’
‘Donnell!’ said Jocundra chidingly; he heard the whisk of her stockings as she uncrossed her legs behind him.
He gripped the arms of the wheelchair so his vertigo would not be apparent and concentrated on Edman’s bloated gray shape; then he blinked, strained, and shifted his field of focus forward. A patch of lab coat swooped toward him from the shadow, swelling to dominate his vision completely: several pens clipped to a sagging pocket. By tracking his sight like a searchlight across Edman’s frame, he assembled the image of a grossly fat, middle-aged man with slicked-back brown hair and a flourishing mustache, the ends of which were waxed and curled. Hectic spots of color dappled his cheeks, and his eyes were startling bits of blue china. Donnell fixed on the left eye, noticing the pink gullies of flesh in the corners, the road map of capillaries: Edman hadn’t been sleeping.
‘Actually’ - Donnell thought how best to exploit Edman’s lack of sleep - ‘actually, I had one just when you came in, but it was different…’ He pretended to be struggling with a difficult concept.
‘How so?’ Papers rustled on Edman’s clipboard, his ballpoint clicked. His eyelids drooped, and the blue eye rolled wetly down.
‘The light was spraying out the pores of your hand, intense light, like the kind you find in an all-night restaurant, but even brighter, and deep in the light something moved, something pale and multiform,’ Donnell whispered melodramatically. ‘Something I soon realized was a sea of ghastly, tormented faces…’
‘My God, Donnell!’ Edman smacked the bed with his clipboard.
‘Right!’ said Donnell with mock enthusiasm. ‘I can’t be sure, but it may have been…’
‘Donnell!’ Edman sighed, a forlorn lover’s sigh. ‘Will you please consider what our process means to other terminal patients? At least do that, if you don’t care about yourself.’
‘Oh, yeah. There must be thousands of less fortunate stiffs just begging for the chance.’ Donnell laughed. ‘It really changes your perspective on the goddamn afterlife. Groping, bashing your head on the sink when you go to spit.’
‘You know that’s going to improve, damn it!’ The blue eye blinked rapidly. ‘You’re retarding your own progress with this childish attitude.’
‘What’ll you give me?’ Jocundra stroked his shoulder, soothing, but Donnell shrugged off her hand. ‘How much if I spill the secrets of my vital signs?’