"Very good!" said Golze. "They're mostly on the freeway, just dabbling their toes in here for a few seconds at a time. While they're down here with us, they're carried along with the stream in the same direction we are. So each sentence is beginning-first, end-last, but the next remark for us is the previous remark to them."
"Lock it up," Rascasse said to Golze. "But leave the monitor on."
"Two days," whispered one last ghost, "I sat beside my body, staring at the holes in my chest."
Charlotte kept her attention on Golze, and watched his pudgy hands close the cabinet. The copper handles were miniature reproductions of the Vespers emblem: the Grail cup — two plain, smooth cones joined at the tips, one cone opening upward, the other downward, like a double-jigger measure in a Bauhaus bar.
Charlotte used Golze's brief glance to focus hungrily on the little copper chalices. Then he had straightened up and was looking at her.
"How does the Harmonic Converence bring out ghosts?" she asked, and Golze helpfully looked toward Rascasse.
"It's like Gargamelle," said Rascasse.
"What, Gargantua's mother? — in Rabelais?"
"No — or maybe they named it after that, what you said — Gigantor's mother — no, it's the name of a big bubble chamber at the CERN laboratory in Switzerland. Ten tons of liquid is kept very near its boiling temperature, but under high pressure; then they suddenly release the pressure, and any invisible particles shooting through the liquid form lines of bubbles. They become actual, manifest, rather than unseen potential."
Rascasse waved out at the night. "All these mystics on the mountaintops, emptying their minds all at once, have suddenly dropped the pressure in the common psychic water-table, and things are becoming actual that should only be low-probability potentials."
Charlotte dug coins out of the pocket of her jeans and held them out on her palm. Golze looked, and so she was able to see that it was three quarters and a nickel.
"I do have eighty cents," she said.
"If it was five coins they'd have been stumped," Golze said. "They're like some primitive culture, with five numbers: one, two, three, four, and countless."
Rascasse was leaning on the folded-down desk to look outside through one of the starboard bus windows. Charlotte shifted to his perspective, and was able to see the dots of orange light on the mountains.
"Fires all the way up from here to Humboldt and Trinity and Siskiyou," Rascasse said softly. "All started from lightning strikes at about noon yesterday."
"Well," said Golze, "A .50-caliber bullet will rip up dust under it as it goes by. And Lieserl Marity was moving a whole hell of a lot faster."
"A lot of rest you'll be getting in here," said Marrity.
He had pushed the heavy door nearly closed, but the voices and squeaking wheeled carts outside the room were still just as audible. The hospital hallways had a scent like the chlorophyll wood shavings at the bottom of a hamster's cage, but this room still smelled of lemon custard and beef gravy, even though a nurse had taken away Daphne's tray of pureed brown and white and yellow stuff half an hour ago. On the wall behind Daphne's bed was taped a page of typescript headed "Swallowing Instructions." There seemed to be a dozen crucial points. Daphne couldn't see it from where she lay.
A gauze pad was taped across her throat. Two of her ribs had been cracked during the useless Heimlich maneuver, but they hadn't required any tape or bandage.
Daphne picked up the pencil on the wheeled table beside her bed and wrote sleep pill probly on the top page of the pocket notebook he had fetched from the truck. Ask fr you too. The clear plastic bag on the IV pole swayed when she wrote; fortunately the tube was taped to her arm above her wrist where the needle was inserted, so it wasn't likely to be pulled out.
Marrity glanced at the blue canvas cot the nurse had brought in for him to sleep on after he had turned down the offer of a "cardiac chair," which had seemed to be a half-size hospital bed, complete with an electric motor bolted to the underside of it.
"I'll be fine," he told Daphne. He was sitting in one of the two plain wooden chairs in this half of the room; the other chair had a cotton square like a diaper laid across its seat, and he hadn't wanted to ask why.
St. Bernardine's Hospital had transferred Daphne here to the Arrowhead Pediatric Hospital after her emergency throat surgery, and Marrity was pleased that his frantic knife cut of this afternoon had only required four stitches in the skin of her throat. The surgeon had done "undermining," put in a row of sutures under the skin, to leave a negligible scar while still keeping the wound securely closed.
Marrity had called Cal State San Bernardino to cancel his Modern Novels class for tomorrow, and he was planning to sleep in his own bed as soon as Daphne was released in the morning. Sleep all day.
There was another bed in this room, farther from the door, but it was empty at the moment and Marrity hoped it would stay that way. The emergency room at St. Bernardine's had seemed to be full of hoboes who just wanted painkillers, and he didn't want another stranger imposed on his daughter when she was so helpless — she looked very frail in this up-tilted hospital bed, with the thin sheets and threadbare blankets tumbled around her. He would have fetched Rumbold for her, if Rumbold had not been burned up and buried.
She was idly drawing spirals on the pad, and his spirits fell further at the familiar sight of her bitten-down fingernails — then he saw that she had written more words.
Yr father was at Alfredo's?
"Yes," Marrity said. He didn't want to make her write more, so he added, "I guess he probably followed us."
She drew two dots with a V between them: frowning eyes.
"I agree." Marrity shifted in his chair. "He did seem to be very upset by… it all."
Daphne wrote some more: You saved my life. She didn't look up from the paper.
"Um — yes. I was glad to be able to."
must have been hard to do — cut me
He nodded, though her head was still lowered and her face was hidden behind her brown bangs.
"Yes," he said. "Yes, it was very hard to do."
A spot appeared on the paper; and then another. I love you
"I love you too, Daph," he said. He wanted to get up out of the chair and try to hug her, but he knew it would embarrass her; they never talked this way ordinarily. Marrity had always assumed that their avoidance of sentiment was an Irish thing, but today he had learned that they were not Irish. A Serbian thing, then.
"I'm — proud of you," she whispered, still looking down. "I hope it leaves a scar — excuse to brag about you."
"Don't stretch your voice box. They say it won't leave much of a scar at all. But — thanks."
She nodded and sat back against the sloping mattress and smiled at him, and when she closed her eyes she didn't open them again; and after a few moments Marrity took from his coat pocket a beat-up paperback copy of Tristram Shandy that he always kept in the truck. His briefcase was in the truck too, but he wasn't in the mood to read student papers and he didn't want to look at Grammar's old Peccavit letters in here.
He stood up to switch off the fluorescent tube over her bed, noting the spotty horizontal line of chips in the wall plaster at the height of the bed frame — what did they do, play bumper cars with the things? — and then he pulled the bed curtain closed on the hall side and resumed his seat, reading by the light from the hallway.
The book's chapters were short, and when he came to the black page at the end of Chapter Seven he found himself staring into the blackness, and exhaustion gave the page a faint green border. Vaguely he wondered if there might be words hidden in the black field.