Ralph saw this and at the same time he didn’t, the way a deeply preoccupied man sees and obeys traffic signals without really seeing them. Most of his mind was occupied with a deadly sense of deja vu which had washed over him the moment he and Lois stepped out of the ’ elevator and into this world where the faint squeak of the nurses shoes on the linoleum sounded almost exactly like the faint beep of the life-support equipment.
Even-numbered rooms on your left,-odd-numbered rooms on your right, he thought, and 317, where Carolyn died, is up by the nurses’ station. It was 317, all right-I remember. Now that I’m here I remember everything. How someone was always sticking her chart in the little pocket on the back of the door upside down. How the light from the window fell across the bed in a kind of crooked rectangle on sunny days. How you could sit in the visitor’s chair and look out at the desk-nurse, whose job it is to monitor vital signs, incoming telephone calls, and outgoing pizza orders.
The same. All the same. It was early March again, the gloomy end of a leaden, overcast day, sleet beginning to spick-spack off the one window of Room 317, and he had been sitting in the visitor’s chair with an unopened copy of Shirer’s Rise and Fall of the Third Reich in his lap since early morning. Sitting there, not wanting to get up even long enough to use the bathroom because the deathwatch had almost run down by then, each tick was a lurch and the gap between each tick and the next was a lifetime; his long-time companion had a train to catch and he wanted to be on the platform to see her off.
There would only be one chance to do it right.
It was very easy to hear the sleet as it picked up speed and velocity, because the life-support equipment had been turned off.
Ralph had given up during the last week of February; it had taken Carolyn, I who had never g yen up in her I’fe, a little longer to get the message.
And what, exactly, was that message? Why that, in a hard-fought ten-round match pitting Carolyn Roberts against Cancer, the winner was Cancer, that all-time heavyweight champeen, by a TKO.
He had sat in the visitor’s chair, watching and waiting as her respiration long, sighing exhale, grew more and more pronounced-the the flat, moveless chest, the growing certainty that the last breath had indeed been the last breath, that the watch had run down, the train arrived in the station to take on its single passenger… and then another huge, unconscious gasp would come as she tore the next lungful out of the unfriendly air, no longer breathing in any normal sense but only lunging reflexively along from one gasp to the next like a drunk lurching down a long dark corridor in a cheap hotel.
Spickle-spickle-spackle-spackle: the sleet had gone on rapping invisible fingernails against the window as the dirty March day drew down to dirty March dark and Carolyn went on fighting the last half of her last round. By then she had been running completely on autopilot, of course; the brain which had once existed within that finely made skull was gone. It had been replaced by a mutant-a stupid gray-black delinquent that could not think or feel but only eat and eat and eat until it had gorged itself to death.
SPickle-,vpickle-spackle-spackle, and he had seen that the T-shaped breathing apparatus in her nose had come askew. He waited for her to tear one of her awful, labored breaths out of the air and then, as she exhaled, he had leaned forward and replaced the small plastic nosepiece. He had gotten a little mucus on his fingers, he remembered, and had wiped it off on a tissue from the box on the bedside table.
He had sat back, waiting for the next breath, wanting to make sure the nosepiece didn’t come askew again, but there Ivasn’t aiiv next breath, and he realized that the ticking sound he had heard coming from everywhere since the previous summer seemed to have stopped. He remembered waiting as the minutes passed-one, then three, then six-unable to believe that all the good years and good times (not to mention the few bad ones) had ended in this flat and toneless fashion.
Her radio, tuned to the local easy-listening station, was playing ing softly in the corner and he listened to Simon and Garfunkel s’ “Scarborough Fair.” They sang it all the way to the end.
Wayne Newton came on next, and began to sing “Danke Schoen.” He sang it all the way to the end. The weather report came next, but before the disc jockey could finish telling about how the weather was to be on Ralph Roberts’s first full day as a widower, all that stuff about clearing and colder and winds shifting around to the northeast, Ralph finally got it through his head. The watch had stopped ticking, the train had come, the boxing match was over. All the metaphors had fallen down, leaving only the woman in the room, silent at last. Ralph began to cry. Still crying, he had blundered over into the corner and turned off the radio. He remembered the summer they had taken a fingerpaint class, and the night they had ended up fingerpainting each other’s naked bodies. This memory made him cry harder. He went to the window and leaned his head against the cold glass and cried. In that first terrible minute of understanding, he had wanted only one thing: to be dead himself. A nurse heard him crying and came in. She tried to take Carolyn’s pulse. Ralph told her to stop being a goddam fool.
She came over to Ralph and for a moment he thought she was going to try to take his pulse.
Instead, she had put her arms around him. She[“Ralph? Ralph, are you all right?”
He looked around at Lois, started to say he was fine, and then remembered there was precious little he could hide from her while they were in this state.
[“Feeling sad. Too many memories in here. Not good others.”] [“I understand… but look on, Look on the floor,, Ralph He did, and his eyes widened. The floor was covered with an overlay of multicolored tracks, some fresh, most fading to invisibi Its.
Two sets stood out clearly from the rest, as brilliant as diamonds ill a litter of paste imitations. They were a deep green-gold in which ai few tiny reddish flecks still swam.
[“Do they belong to the ones we’re looking for, Ralph?”] [“Yes-the docs are here.”] Ralph took Lois’s hand-it felt very cold-and began to lead her slowly up the hall.
CHAPTER 17
They hadn’t gone far when something very strange and rather frightening happened. For a moment the world bled white in front of them. The doors to the rooms ranged along the hall, barely visible in this bright white haze, expanded to the size of warehouse loading bays.
The corridor itself seemed to simultaneously elongate and grow taller.
Ralph felt the bottom go out of his stomach the way it often had back when he was a teenager, and a frequent customer on the Dust Devil roller coaster at Old Orchard Beach. He heard Lois moan, and she squeezed his hand with panicky tightness.
The whiteout lasted only a second, and when the colors swarmed back into the world, they were brighter and crisper than they had been a moment before. Normal perspective returned, but objects looked thicker, somehow. The auras were still there, but they appeared both thinner and paler-pastel coronas instead of spraypainted primary colors. At the same time Ralph realized he could see every crack and pore in the Sheetrocked wall to his left… and then he realized he could see the pipes, wires, and insulation behind the walls, if he wanted to; all he had to do was look.
Oh my God, he thought. Is this really happening? Can this really, be happening?
Sounds were everywhere: hushed bells, a toilet being flushed, muted laughter. Sounds a person normally took for granted, as part of everyday life, but not now. Not here. Like the visible reality of things, the sounds seemed to have an extraordinarily sensuous texture, like thin overlapping scallops of silk and steel.