“—bill that would have permitted involuntary sterilization of mothers of twenty-five or more children. A spokesman for—”
He was sure it had been Lara, perhaps on another channel, a channel with almost the same broadcasting frequency. This was Channel One. He tried Two and Thirteen, and got nothing. When he returned to One, mixed teams were playing some complicated game that involved the kidnapping of opposing players.
Restlessly he searched the other channels, finding only a lecturing teacher and soapy lovers engaged in the usual debate, enlivened now by contemporary role reversal.
“Don’t you see I want to make the way we feel about each other immortal, Beverly? Our love marching down the endless track of Time, showing the whole darn selfish human race that there are higher values than self.”
“No, Robin. You want to end our love forever.”
Slowly it dawned on him that he was in another city. At home there would have been eight working channels. He turned the lovers down to inaudibility, found the complex game again.
The nurse bustled in carrying a big vase of roses. “That was lucky! You rang for me, and I have these to deliver. I get to kill two birds with one stone. Aren’t they lovely?”
He nodded. Red, yellow, white, and pink roses, and roses of a dozen colorful mottlings, cinnabar shot with bronze, old gold touched with flame, seemed ready to spill—almost to leap—from the bowl.
“There’s a card table up in Furniture with a picture like that on it,” he said. “I’ve never seen a bouquet like that in real life. They’re always all one kind.”
The nurse looked arch. “Your little friend doesn’t believe in ho-hum arrangements, it seems. She went all out. Naturally, with her money …” She set the vase on the tiny white table, a few inches from his head. A minute card dangled from one of the handles of the vase on a gold thread.
He said, “I was wondering if you could bring me a phone. There’s somebody I ought to call.”
“Ahh!” Cupping spread fingers over her formidable breasts, the nurse inhaled deeply. “Don’t they smell lovely! Of course there is. I’ll get you a phone right away. You know, we would never have guessed you knew somebody like that.”
“Like Lara?” Who but Lara would have sent him flowers?
The nurse shook her head. “No, no! The goddess.” Seeing his startled look, she added, “The goddess of the silver screen—isn’t that what they call her? I’ll get your phone.”
As soon as she was gone, he turned on his side to examine the card. There was a border of gold surrounding a completely illegible monogram. He opened the card and found a photograph of Lara and the name “Marcella” printed in florid gold script.
Lara was a movie star—a star called Marcella. The nurse had looked at her picture and recognized her.
Yet he rented movies two or three times a week, and watched still more movies on Home Box Office; if Lara had been so much as a featured player, he would have recognized her at once. Nor did he recognize the picture inside the card, save as a picture of Lara—even her hair style was the same.
His bruised muscles ached. He rolled onto his back and saw that Lara’s face was once more on the screen; he reached for the remote control, but as soon as he moved his hand Lara shrank and vanished. Although he pushed the On button again and again, her face did not return. No button on the remote control made the set respond, and at length he pulled over the dwarfish chair and stood upon its seat to turn the knobs. Nothing he tried brought light to the screen again. He recalled a term from his days in Home Entertainment; there was no raster.
By the time the nurse returned with a telephone, he was back in bed. “I really hate to keep bothering you,” he said, “but my television seems to be broken.”
She tried the remote control without result. “No trouble. I just call the service. They’ll bring you a new one tomorrow.”
He felt a distinct thrill of triumph as she bent over to plug his telephone into the jack. “One more thing,” he said. “Would you please read my diagnosis from that chart down by my feet?”
Like the black attendant, she lifted the chart from its hook. “Concussion, multiple bruises, alcoholism.”
“Alcoholism?”
“I don’t diagnose,” she told him briskly. “Your doctor does that.”
“I’m not an alcoholic!”
“Then you shouldn’t have much trouble getting Dr. Pille to change your diagnosis. Do you drink?”
“Occasionally. It isn’t a problem.”
“Maybe the doctor sees it as more of a problem than you do. Particularly when he has a patient who falls down in the street and gets himself a concussion.”
“It really does say alcoholism?”
“I told you. Want to see it?”
“But it doesn’t say anything about a sex change?” That had been a lingering fear.
The nurse chuckled. “Somebody told you that. That’s what we call alcoholism sometimes. It cuts down on the testosterone in men. Your beard stops growing, and you hardly ever get bald.”
When she had gone, he reached for the telephone, but his hand was shaking so badly he drew it back. There was no mirror in the room. He got up anyway, feeling vaguely that there had to be one somewhere, and was startled to see his own drawn face reflected in the dark window glass.
The short winter day had ended. Outside, cars as high and awkward as Jeeps crawled along the street with blazing lights. Pedestrians were individually invisible; but it seemed to him that some black fluid, as thick and slow as heavy oil, flowed and swirled at the edges of the traffic.
And it came to him that this viscous ichor was perhaps the reality, that the faces and figures to which he was accustomed might be as false in essence as the photomicrographs printed in the newspapers on slow news days, pictures that showed human skin as a rocky desert, an ant or a fly as a bewhiskered monster. This was how God saw men and women; who could blame him then, if he damned them all or forgot them all?
“I know what ya thinking.”
He turned quickly, more than half embarrassed, at the sound of the voice. An extremely erect little man with a head like a polished ivory ball was looking through the doorway. He noticed with some relief that the little man wore hospital pajamas like his own.
“I was thinking about mail,” he lied. “Today somebody gave me a charm that’s supposed to bring you mail, and it seems to me that maybe I’ve been getting it.”
The little man stepped inside. “Let’s see it.”
“I meant these roses. And something I just saw on TV, but I can’t show you that.”
“Ya charm. Let’s see it.”
He shrugged. “I can’t show you that either. It’s in this locker, I suppose.”
“If Joe was ‘ere, ’e’d bust open this tin box for ya like dynamite.” The little man rattled the door.
“Is Joe the attendant?”
The little man grinned and shook his shiny head. “Joe’s my fighter. I’m a fight manager. Joe, he’s strong as a couple of bulls. ‘E’d tear this tin box apart for ya if I told ’im ta.”
“I doubt if the hospital would like that. Anyway, that’s where I think my charm is. I don’t really know; they’ve never given me an inventory or anything.”
“Joe’s ‘eavyweight champeen of the world. I used ta ’ave a couple other fighters, Mel and Larry. Only when Joe won us the champeenship, I dropped ’em. I made sure another manager took ’em on, a good manager. They understand. They know I’ll give ’em a break whenever I can. ’Ere’s my card.” The little man’s hand went toward the place where the breast pocket of his suit coat would have been, had he been wearing a suit instead of his hospital pajamas, and came away empty. The little man grinned again, this time sheepishly.
He sat on the bed and waved toward the chair. “Why don’t you sit down? I had an accident, and I guess I’m still a bit shaky; besides, we might as well sit if we’re going to talk.”