The elevator stopped on the second floor and the doors wheezed open. The woman with the baby turned to Ralph.
The blanket shifted slightly as she did and Ralph got a look at the crown of its head.
There was a deep crease in the tiny skull. A red scar ran the length of it. To Ralph it looked like a rill of tainted water standing at the bottom of a ditch. The ugly and confused yellow-gray aura which surrounded the baby was emerging from this scar like steam from a crack in the earth. The baby’s balloon-string was the same color as its aura, and it was unlike any other balloon-string Ralph had seen so far-not unhealthy in appearance but short, ugly, and no more than a stub.
“Didn’t your mother ever teach you any manners?” the baby’s mother asked Ralph, and what cut him wasn’t so much the admonotion as the way she made it. He had scared her badly, “Madam, I assure you-”
“Yeah, go on and assure my fanny,” she said, and stepped out of the car. The elevator doors started to slide closed. Ralph glanced at Lois and the two of them exchanged a moment of brief but total understanding. Lois shook her finger at the doors as if scolding them, and a gray, meshlike substance fanned out from its tip. The doors struck this and then slid back into their slots, as they were programmed to do upon encountering any barrier to their progress.
[“Madam!ill The woman stopped and turned around, clearly confused. She shot suspicious glances about her, trying to identify who had spoken.
Her aura was a dark, buttery yellow with faint tints of orange spoking out from its inner edges. Ralph fixed her eyes with his.
[“I’m sorry if I offended you. This is all very new to my friend and me. We’re like children at a formal dinner. I apologize.
He didn’t know just what she was trying to communicate-it was like watching someone talk inside a soundproof booth-but he sensed relief and deep unease… the sort Of unease people feel when they think they may have been observed doing something they shouldn’t. Her doubtful eyes remained on his face a moment or two longer, then she turned and began to walk rapidly down the corridor in the direction of a sign reading NEUROLOGICAL SURVEY.
The gray mesh Lois had cast at the door was thinning, and when the doors tried to close again, they cut neatly through it. The car continued its slow upward journey.
[“Ralph… Ralph, I think I know what happened to that baby.”] She reached toward his face with her right hand and slipped it between his nose and mouth with her palm down. She pressed the pad of her thumb lightly against one of his cheekbones and the pad of her index finger lightly against the other. It was done so quickly and confidently that no one else in the elevator noticed. If one of the three other riders had noticed, he or she would have seen something that looked like a neatness-minded wife smoothing away a blot of skin-lotion or a dollop of leftover shaving cream.
Ralph felt as if someone had pulled a high-voltage switch inside his brain, one that turned on whole banks of blazing stadium lights.
In their raw, momentary glow, he saw a terrible image: hands clad in a violent brownish-purple aura reaching into a crib and snatching up the baby they had just seen. He was shaken back and forth, head snapping and rolling on the thin stalk of neck like the head of a Raggedy Andy doll -and thrown The lights in his head went black then, and Ralph let out a harsh, shuddery sigh of relief. He thought of the pro-life protestors he’d seen on the evening news just last night, men and women waving signs with Susan Day’s picture and WANTED FOR MURDER on them, men and women in Grim Reaper robes, men and women carrying a banner which read LIFE, WHAT A BEAUTIFUL CHOICE.
He wondered if the thunderstruck baby might have a differing opinion on that last one. He met Lois’s amazed, agonized eyes with his own, and groped out to take her hands.
[“Father did it, right? Threw the kid against the [”)’es. The hah. Couldn’t stop coming.” [“And she knows. She knows, but she hasn’t told anyone.
[“No… but she might, Ralph. She’s the knowing about it.”] [“She might also wait until he does it again. An next time he might finish the job.” A terrible thought occurred to Ralph then; it shot across his mind like a meteor scratching momentary fire across a midnight summer sky: it might be better if he did finish the job. The thunderstruck baby’s balloon-string had only been a stump, but it had been a healthy stump. The child might live for years, not knowing who he was or where he was, let alone why he was, watching people come and go like trees in the mist…
Lois was standing with her shoulders slumped, looking at the floor of the elevator car and radiating a sadness that squeezed Ralph’s heart. He reached out, put a finger under her chin, and watched a delicate blue rose spin itself out of the place where his aura touched hers. He tilted her head up and was not surprised to see tears in her eyes.
“Do you still think it’s all pretty wonderful, Lois?” he asked softly, and to this he received no answer, either with his ears or in his mind.
They were the only two to get out on the third floor, where the silence was as thick as the dust under library shelves. A pair of nurses stood halfway up the hall, clipboards held to white-clad bosoms, talking in low whispers. Anyone else standing by the elevators might have looked at them and surmised a conversation dealing with life, death, and heroic measures; Ralph and Lois, however, took one look at their overlapping auras and knew that the subject currently under discussion was where to go for a drink when their shift ended.
Ralph saw this and at the same time he didn’t, the way a deeply preoccupied man sees and obeys traffic signals without really seeing them. Most of his mind was occupied with a deadly sense of deja vu which had washed over him the moment he and Lois stepped out of the ’ elevator and into this world where the faint squeak of the nurses shoes on the linoleum sounded almost exactly like the faint beep of the life-support equipment.
Even-numbered rooms on your left,-odd-numbered rooms on your right, he thought, and 317, where Carolyn died, is up by the nurses’ station. It was 317, all right-I remember. Now that I’m here I remember everything. How someone was always sticking her chart in the little pocket on the back of the door upside down. How the light from the window fell across the bed in a kind of crooked rectangle on sunny days. How you could sit in the visitor’s chair and look out at the desk-nurse, whose job it is to monitor vital signs, incoming telephone calls, and outgoing pizza orders.
The same. All the same. It was early March again, the gloomy end of a leaden, overcast day, sleet beginning to spick-spack off the one window of Room 317, and he had been sitting in the visitor’s chair with an unopened copy of Shirer’s Rise and Fall of the Third Reich in his lap since early morning. Sitting there, not wanting to get up even long enough to use the bathroom because the deathwatch had almost run down by then, each tick was a lurch and the gap between each tick and the next was a lifetime; his long-time companion had a train to catch and he wanted to be on the platform to see her off.
There would only be one chance to do it right.
It was very easy to hear the sleet as it picked up speed and velocity, because the life-support equipment had been turned off.
Ralph had given up during the last week of February; it had taken Carolyn, I who had never g yen up in her I’fe, a little longer to get the message.
And what, exactly, was that message? Why that, in a hard-fought ten-round match pitting Carolyn Roberts against Cancer, the winner was Cancer, that all-time heavyweight champeen, by a TKO.
He had sat in the visitor’s chair, watching and waiting as her respiration long, sighing exhale, grew more and more pronounced-the the flat, moveless chest, the growing certainty that the last breath had indeed been the last breath, that the watch had run down, the train arrived in the station to take on its single passenger… and then another huge, unconscious gasp would come as she tore the next lungful out of the unfriendly air, no longer breathing in any normal sense but only lunging reflexively along from one gasp to the next like a drunk lurching down a long dark corridor in a cheap hotel.