Henry arrived at the booth as Cy was putting the last board up for the night. There was an awful, clear sobriety about him, though he had drunk almost a half bottle of Grey Goose in the bar by then on his night off, and in addition his blood was shimmering with several other ephedrine or opiate chemicals. He had a beautiful, soft, southern voice, Cy remembered thinking that night, like down on a Georgia peach, and that made the ensuing story seem like one even children would be entranced to hear, frightening and monstrous elements though there were. If anyone else had told Cyril Parks of the events minutes ago he might have laid out his fists before thinking of the guiltless messenger. Like Eliot Riley would have, when anger got the better of him, disabling his reason and he’d go about duffing the air, too drunk to reach the offender. Cy might have hooked the words right off another man’s face with his knuckles, having suddenly and fully inherited the bare-knuckle legacy of Riley, when he heard about Grace. But for that soft southern voice that made the story he was hearing into a happier imitation of the truth. Then, when the tale was told, Henry said he couldn’t truly tell how much morphine he’d given Grace. And that he might have given her so much morphine as to accidentally kill her, if the acid hadn’t killed her already. But her pain had been so bad it had made him sorry for her, sorry enough that his thumb went down twice on the plunger, once to the postoperative millimetre marker, then beyond it to that privileged realm meant for only those long acquainted with the lag. And what would Cy recommend he do with this?
Henry took a hand out of his pocket and his two fingers were still tucked through the brass loops of the syringe and his thumb was sitting on its plunger, so it looked like he was pulling out a bizarre revolver.
— It seems you ain’t the only man with Miss Grace’s blood on your needle, Mr Parks.
Then the two of them walked down to the end of Steeplechase Pier and took a weight from one of the crab traps stacked on the edge and they tied it round the syringe and the empty box of glass silos and tossed it all into the water.
In the aftermath, when Grace had been taken to the hospital, everyone wanted to know about the villain who had attacked her, what his name was, where he came from, what he ate for dinner. That was the talk at Coney Island. It was as if the rankness of the act was tantamount to the incident, and the crime won the day in terms of public curiosity and attention. Not many people asked about Grace, she had received only the vengeful smite of the newly infamous. And she was, in any case, a slut to trouble, was she not? Sedak was fined forty dollars to clean up the bar and he was remanded to the Brooklyn asylum. There was talk in the newspapers of getting restrictions put on the sales of chemical substances and fertilizers, tightening up the laws, until the distributors argued back in letters to the editors that such recourse would damage their private individual sales and send them under, and the debate blew away. This was America. Consumer freedom was what made the country great. And if the public could not be trusted with what they bought, that did not constitute a penalty in rights, did it?
Grace did not die. She struggled to keep her body a consistent element. Though she was not allowed visitors for fear of infection, the nurses kept Cy informed of her condition while he stayed at the hospital, which was not good, not good at all. He arrived the night of the attack and was greeted by a creeping crêpe-bandage and disinfectant smell identical to that which he had encountered in the Lancaster infirmary years ago, and he slept along the wooden chairs in the waiting room, while the floor was polished by a man with a loud machine spinning a buffer. In his dreams the noise became the sound of his electric needle as he put blue ink along the mastectomy-buckled chest of his mother.
— Are you a relative?
He was asked this simple question time and again, hourly, as if in the continual asking there might be some sudden change of status that allowed him access to Grace, because she had no one else, no blood connection, and that deeply troubled the nurses — that lack of an immediate family. The only answer he could give was a shake of his head and nonsense.
— She lives in my building. I painted her. She’s my Sistine Chapel, you see.
It was all the relationship he had to make his claim with. Then, towards the end of the first night, when he grew exhausted with hypnotic dreaming on the uncomfortable wooden chairs, and he grew desperate for news of her well-being, he began to unravel and he gave out confidential material.
— I love her, I’m in love with her, you see. She lives in my building with her horse, though I never see her there, ordinarily I see her at the bar and at work, and I love her.
The faces of the nurses were dull with work and unsmiling, but not unkind. He was polite enough, this man, if unkempt and odd and throwback looking. And love went a small way towards repairing the damage they imagined caused to Grace by her missing people. They would keep him informed, they said, as best they could.
For four days he lived in the hospital reception and waiting area, his eyes red ringed, his clothes becoming sweat stained, under the watchful and ever patience-diminishing gaze of the nurses as they moved past with metal trays bearing equipment and food and medication for patients. Occasionally there was a bustle to the uniformed women, a flap and squawk of activity, as an ambulance van howled up to the double doors of the hospital and a bloody wreck was admitted. Cy noticed the differing shapes of shotgun and revolver holes in bodies as they were wheeled past him, and he thought back to a time in the Bayview when he had first been made privy to the visceral despair of the human body, its remarkable waste. After each frenzy he would lie back down and stare at die fans on the damp-stained ceiling, the nurses looming above him like gulls. The walls began to shrink in. Just walking to the water fountain mounted on the tiled wall opposite the chairs seemed too far to travel. After two days he was disallowed use of the orderlies’ washroom. The antiseptic smell began to make him paranoid, convincing him the nurses knew Grace was dead but were not telling him so, and convincing him that all the women in the wards were destined to share the tragic fate of his mother, that if he ran in among them they would all seem beautiful and meaningful in their beds just because for the time being they were still living.
Claudia and Arturas came and sat silently next to him, then left, no more able to gain access to Grace that he. One or two other people came and went quickly, acquaintances of Grace’s, characters that were furtive and suspect and seemed unwilling to talk to him. He slept through the day while the tubular lights burned the back of his eyelids and he left the chairs at night to wander the grounds when the air cooled and the receptionist ushered him out, her sympathy also at last waning. The third day he took a shit in an alleyway next to the kitchens at dusk and got some on his foot, so he was aware that he smelled of it back in the waiting room and that the nurses could smell it too, but he was beyond caring by then. He remembered the occasion he’d dressed up like a boggart in the Lune marshes and how the smell of dirt had stayed on him a week after he washed it off, how humiliated he’d felt. But even fouled and derelict, he would not leave to get cleaned up, he would stay for Grace’s sake. Superstition told him that desertion, even temporary, would signal her immediate death, and tiredness and hunger pumped that ominous sense around his wrecked and ransacked brain.