Wake up, wake up.
I’m awake. Or am I? Reality and illusion commingled, and I can’t separate them. I don’t know where I am. Yielding softness beneath me, the faint creak of springs-bed? Yes, bed, but a bed should be warm and I’m cold, cold, so cold. And trembling. My whole being vibrates, muscles spasm, appendages jerk like an epileptic in a clonic seizure. Sounds fumble incoherently from my throat. Cold, cold, trembling, cold.
A blanket floats out of nowhere and covers me. A second materializes from the darkness. I pull them tight around me, so cold, but the trembling does not stop. A voice shimmers into the half-reality. “Dan,” it says. “Dan.”
Female voice, Tina’s voice. “Tina,” I hear myself say. “I’m so cold.”
“… no more blankets…”
“So cold,” I say, “so cold.”
Springs creak louder, movement beside me, hands touching me, warm hands, oh warm hands, and warm flesh too, stretching out, fitting to me, warming me, the hands stroking my neck and shoulders, holding me, and Tina’s voice whispering words I can’t quite understand. I clutch the warmth. Soft flesh, naked flesh. I hold it, I pull it to me, I cover myself with it. Warmth, warmth. A breast, a thigh, a hip, a spinal ridge. Tina. Warm body warming cold body, easing the trembling, soft Tina.
“Sleep,” she whispers. “Sleep, Dan.”
“Sleep…”
Cold gone, trembling gone, warm flesh, warm Tina, warm…
… and silent black.
I opened my eyes.
Morning. Or afternoon. Sunlight filtered through louvered shutters on a window across the room. Room. I felt a brief moment of disorientation, and then it passed and I realized I was in bed-a big double bed in a small bedroom. The sheets above and beneath my body were twisted and sodden. A pair of blankets were bunched at the foot of the bed and half-draped onto the floor, where I apparently had kicked them.
I lay quietly, not moving. There was a curious odor in my nostrils, and after a time I managed to decipher it as three parts sour fever-sweat and one part sandalwood perfume. My thoughts seemed to be clear now, and I could remember the events of the previous night-and remember, too, the dreams and the half-dream with Tina that seemed to have been reality after all.
Weakness made my body ache faintly, but it was the weakness of a broken fever rather than that of debilitation. I wondered if the sleep had done it, or if Tina had fed me some kind of antibiotic. My right arm throbbed distantly, like a vague but annoying toothache-the same sort of throbbing that plagued my temples. I lifted the arm a few inches off the bedclothes, flexing the fingers gingerly; in spite of a cramped stiffness throughout the limb, the musculature was unparalyzed and functioning sufficiently to allow me limited use of it.
I leaned my weight on my left side and raised myself slowly into a sitting position. A thin wave of gray-black dots washed dizzyingly in back of my eyes-and vanished; nausea spread through my stomach-and vanished. I got my legs around and onto the floor, held a breath, and launched myself into an upright position, hanging onto the headboard of the bed for support. I stood there like that, breathing rapidly now, dressed in nothing more than a pair of shorts-and the bedroom door opened and Tina looked in.
She said, “Dan, be careful!”
“I’m all right,” I told her. My voice sounded thick and hoarse. “I just need a minute to get my bearings.”
“You’d better let me help you-”
“I can make it, I think.”
She worried her lower lip, watching me. She had her dark hair pulled into a horsetail, and in a pair of white hip-hugger slacks and a white blouse she still looked like somebody’s teen-age daughter. “How do you feel?” she asked.
“Not as bad as I should.”
“You gave me an awful scare last night, passing out the way you did.”
“I can imagine. How did you get me to bed?”
“I don’t know, really. You were very heavy. It must have taken me half an hour to get you in here and undressed.”
“It was a bad night all around.”
“You were trembling and half-delirious, and I knew you had a fever. There were some pills in the medicine cabinet and I forced some of them down your throat. I guess they worked.”
“I guess they did.”
“I tried to sleep on the couch,” Tina said, “but you were moaning and tossing so badly in here that I was afraid you were going into a coma or something. I’ve never seen anybody shake the way you were shaking. I put some blankets on you, but that didn’t seem to do any good.” Her cheeks colored faintly. “So I got into bed with you and held you until you calmed down and stopped trembling and slept.”
“I remember, vaguely.”
“Nothing happened. I just held you.”
“I didn’t think anything had, in my condition.”
“You kept saying a name, over and over. Pete.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Listen, what time is it?”
“About one P.M.”
“What did you do with my clothes?”
“I had to put them in the garbage. They were torn and caked with blood and mud.”
“Do you think you could go out and buy me some new ones?”
“I suppose so.”
“Good girl.”
“But I’d better make you something to eat first.”
“All right. I should have some food, I guess.”
“Eggs and coffee?”
“Fine.”
She watched me solicitously as I released my hold on the headboard and took a step, and another, and a third. My legs wobbled a little, but they did not give way under my weight. When Tina saw that I could get around without assistance, she backed out and closed the bedroom door. I shuffled across to a tiny bathroom, moving like a coronary patient, and leaned on the heart-shaped basin to have a look at myself in the medicine cabinet mirror.
Not bad, not good. There was a swelling on my right temple, and the bandage Tina had applied only partially covered the discolored area there. A bruise of unknown origin made a faint, inverted half-moon on my left cheekbone, and my lips were cracked and puffy. My cheeks seemed hollow, the skin parched and dry. The heavy black beard stubble coating each gave me the look of a derelict, and the wild tangle of my hair, the blood-veined whites of my eyes, added substance to the image.
Tina had swabbed iodine on the puncture marks on my left wrist where the langsat mongrel had gripped me with its teeth, and there was no pain in the vicinity. I couldn’t see the bullet wounds in my right arm because of the bandages, but there was no swelling and no localized pain. Infection seemed unlikely.
I found a washcloth and filled the basin full and washed myself awkwardly with my left hand; there was a stall shower in there, but I didn’t think it a wise idea to get any of the bandages wet. Inside the cabinet was a bottle of mouthwash, and I used some of that to dispel the dry, bitter, after-fever taste in my mouth. There was also a Japanese razor with a new blade. I lathered my face with soap and spent ten minutes trying to shave. I couldn’t move my right arm enough to maneuver the razor, and using my left was slow and clumsy. The result was a patchy shave and a couple of bleeding nicks that I covered with moistened shreds of toilet paper.
The shorts I wore were soiled and malodorous, but I decided to leave them on anyway. I wrapped a bathtowel around myself, brushed my hair down, and took my time walking through the bedroom and into the small living room of the apartment. The weakness in my legs seemed to have abated; all things considered, I wasn’t doing badly.
Tina had a plate of brown-crusted eggs and a mug of thick coffee waiting on the half-table. The apartment contained a scorched-food smell. “I’m not much of a cook,” she said apologetically.
“These look fine.”
“So do you. Much better.”
“I’ve got a tough and durable hide.”
“Dan-have you thought about what you’re going to do?”
“Yeah, I’ve thought about it.”
“And?”