Tom turned his head to look sideways, and caused only a minor flare from his right shoulder. As he did so, he unconsciously rubbed his left hand over the smooth rounded curve of his groin where his penis should have been—something down there was peeing, he could not imagine what, could not think about it or begin to picture it. Just past his head on the far end of the sheet stood three curved tubular guard rails that marked the edge of his bed, and past the bed was a white table with a glass holding water and a funny-looking straw. His mother’s straw bag lay on a chair. A door stood open on a white corridor. Two doctors walked past. I’m here, he wanted to shout, I’m alive! His throat refused to make any sound at all. The doctors continued past the door, and Tom realized that he had seen a glass of water. His eyes came back to the glass on the bedside table. Water! He reached for the glass with his left hand. In the instant his hand touched the table Tom heard his mother’s voice coming in through the open door.
“STOP IT!” she yelled. “I CAN’T TAKE IT ANYMORE!”
His hand jerked by itself and knocked the glass into a stack of books. Water sheeted out over the table and fell to the floor like a solid pane of silver.
“I TOOK IT ALL MY LIFE!” his father yelled back.
The secret pain deep in his body opened its mouth to devour him, and far too quietly to be heard Tom cried out and fainted again.
The next time he opened his eyes a jowly face peered down at him with quizzical seriousness.
“Well, young man,” said Dr. Bonaventure Milton. “I thought you were coming up for air. Some people have been waiting to talk to you.”
His great head swung back and away, and the faces of Tom’s parents crowded into the empty space.
“Hiya, kid,” his father said, and his mother said “Oh, Tommy.”
Victor Pasmore glared at his wife for a second, then turned back to his son. “How do you feel?”
“You don’t have to talk,” his mother said. “You’re going to get better now.” Her face flushed, and tears filled her eyes. “Oh, Tommy, we were so—you didn’t come home, and then we heard—but the doctors say you’re going to heal—”
“Of course he’s going to heal,” said his father. “What kind of guff is that?”
“Water,” Tom managed to say.
“You knocked that glass right off your table,” his father said. “Sounded like you threw a baseball through the window. You sure got our attention.”
“He wants a drink,” said Gloria.
“I’m the doctor, I’ll get a new glass,” the doctor said. Tom heard him walk out of the toom.
For a moment the Pasmores were silent.
“Keep breaking those glasses, you’ll cost us a fortune in glassware,” his father said.
His mother burst into outright tears.
Victor Pasmore leaned down closer to his son, bringing a dizzying mix of aftershave, tobacco, and alcohol. “You got pretty banged up, Tommy, but everything’s under control now, isn’t it?” He managed to shrug while leaning over the bed.
Tom forced words out through his throat. “Is my … am I …?”
“You got hit by a car, kiddo,” his father said.
And then he remembered the grille and the bumper advancing toward him.
“I had to go through hell and back to get a new glass,” complained Dr. Milton, coming back into the room. He stepped up alongside his father and looked down. “I think our patient could use some rest, don’t you?” He held the glass in front of Tom’s face and gently inserted the curved plastic straw between his lips.
The water, liquid silk, invaded him with the tastes of strawberries, milk, honey, air, sunshine. He drew another mouthful up from the glass, parted his lips to breathe, and the doctor slid the straw from his mouth.
“Enough for now, son,” he said.
His mother brushed his left hand with her fingers before stepping back.
Sometime after that, an hour or a day, Tom opened his eyes to a vision that seemed as unreal as a dream—at first he thought he had to be dreaming, for what he saw was the slim, fantastic figure of his cranky old neighbor on Eastern Shore Road, Lamont von Heilitz, gliding toward him from a dark corner of the room. Mr. von Heilitz was wearing one of his splendid suits, a pinstriped light grey, with a pale yellow vest that had wide lapels; in his left hand he held gloves of the same shade. Yes, it was a nightmare, for the darkness seemed to follow the old man as he approached the bed and blinking Tom, who feared that his strange neighbor would begin shaking his fist and screaming at him.
But he did not. With webs of shadowy darkness dripping from his shoulders, Mr. von Heilitz quietly patted his left arm and looked down with far more compassion than Dr. Bonaventure Milton. “I want you to get better, Tom Pasmore,” he whispered. Mr. von Heilitz leaned down over Tom’s body, and Tom saw the shadows that accompanied him spread across the fine network of lines in his white forehead. The wings of his grey hair shone. “Remember this,” he whispered, stepped back into darkness that seemed to await him, and was gone.
The small window opposite Tom’s bed was no more than a hole punched into a dingy whiteness, smudged here and there with ancient stains. Dirty-looking spiderwebs darkened the walls near the ceiling. Periodically these would mysteriously disappear, and some few days later as mysteriously reappear. Next to his bed was a table that held a glass of water and his books. A tray beneath the table swung out toward him at mealtimes. Near the door were two green plastic chairs. Behind his bedside table stood the pole to which were attached the various bags and bottles that nourished him. Through the door he could see the hospital corridor with its black and white tile floor over which moved a constant traffic of doctors, nurses, cleaners, orderlies, visitors, and his fellow patients. Even with the door closed, Tom was unaware of this traffic only when his pain was at its most ambitious.
For the hospital was as noisy as a foundry. The cleaners roamed the corridors at all hours, talking to themselves and playing their radios as they mopped with bored, angry movements of their arms. Their carts rattled and squealed, and the metal clamps of their ammoniac mops rang against their pails. Someone was always hauling laundry through the corridors, someone was always greeting a visitor with loud outcries, most often someone was groaning or screaming. During visiting hours the halls were crowded with mobs of people talking in falsely cheerful voices, and children pounded from one end of the corridor to another, clutching the strings of balloons.
His world was dominated by physical pain and the necessity of controlling that pain. Every three hours a nurse holding a small square tray marched quickly across his room and lifted a tiny white paper cup from among the other similar cups on the tray even before she reached his bedside, so that by the time she reached him she was in position to extend the cup to his waiting lips. Then there was an agonizing period in which the sweet, oily stuff in the cup temporarily failed to work. Sometimes during this period, the nurse, if she were Nancy Vetiver or Hattie Bascombe, would hold his hand or stroke his hair.
These small coins of affection soothed him.
In a minute or two the pain that had come up out of his body’s deepest places began to settle like a large animal going to sleep, and all the sharp smaller pains would turn fuzzy and slow.
One day during Tom’s third week in the hospital Dr. Milton entered his room while he was having a conversation with Nancy Vetiver, one of his two favorite nurses. She was a slim young blond woman of twenty-six with close-set brown eyes and harsh lines at the sides of her mouth. Nancy had his hand in hers and was telling him a story about her first year at Shady Mount—the raucous dormitory she had lived in, the food that had made her feel half-sick. Tom was hoping to get her to tell him something about the night nurse, Hattie Bascombe, whom he considered a wondrous and slightly fearsome character, but Nancy glanced over her shoulder as the doctor came in, squeezed his hand, and looked impassively at the doctor.