Spickle-spickle-spackle-spackle: the sleet had gone on rapping invisible fingernails against the window as the dirty March day drew down to dirty March dark and Carolyn went on fighting the last half of her last round. By then she had been running completely on autopilot, of course; the brain which had once existed within that finely made skull was gone. It had been replaced by a mutant-a stupid gray-black delinquent that could not think or feel but only eat and eat and eat until it had gorged itself to death.
SPickle-,vpickle-spackle-spackle, and he had seen that the T-shaped breathing apparatus in her nose had come askew. He waited for her to tear one of her awful, labored breaths out of the air and then, as she exhaled, he had leaned forward and replaced the small plastic nosepiece. He had gotten a little mucus on his fingers, he remembered, and had wiped it off on a tissue from the box on the bedside table.
He had sat back, waiting for the next breath, wanting to make sure the nosepiece didn’t come askew again, but there Ivasn’t aiiv next breath, and he realized that the ticking sound he had heard coming from everywhere since the previous summer seemed to have stopped. He remembered waiting as the minutes passed-one, then three, then six-unable to believe that all the good years and good times (not to mention the few bad ones) had ended in this flat and toneless fashion.
Her radio, tuned to the local easy-listening station, was playing ing softly in the corner and he listened to Simon and Garfunkel s’ “Scarborough Fair.” They sang it all the way to the end.
Wayne Newton came on next, and began to sing “Danke Schoen.” He sang it all the way to the end. The weather report came next, but before the disc jockey could finish telling about how the weather was to be on Ralph Roberts’s first full day as a widower, all that stuff about clearing and colder and winds shifting around to the northeast, Ralph finally got it through his head. The watch had stopped ticking, the train had come, the boxing match was over. All the metaphors had fallen down, leaving only the woman in the room, silent at last. Ralph began to cry. Still crying, he had blundered over into the corner and turned off the radio. He remembered the summer they had taken a fingerpaint class, and the night they had ended up fingerpainting each other’s naked bodies. This memory made him cry harder. He went to the window and leaned his head against the cold glass and cried. In that first terrible minute of understanding, he had wanted only one thing: to be dead himself. A nurse heard him crying and came in. She tried to take Carolyn’s pulse. Ralph told her to stop being a goddam fool.
She came over to Ralph and for a moment he thought she was going to try to take his pulse.
Instead, she had put her arms around him. She[“Ralph? Ralph, are you all right?”
He looked around at Lois, started to say he was fine, and then remembered there was precious little he could hide from her while they were in this state.
[“Feeling sad. Too many memories in here. Not good others.”] [“I understand… but look on, Look on the floor,, Ralph He did, and his eyes widened. The floor was covered with an overlay of multicolored tracks, some fresh, most fading to invisibi Its.
Two sets stood out clearly from the rest, as brilliant as diamonds ill a litter of paste imitations. They were a deep green-gold in which ai few tiny reddish flecks still swam.
[“Do they belong to the ones we’re looking for, Ralph?”] [“Yes-the docs are here.”] Ralph took Lois’s hand-it felt very cold-and began to lead her slowly up the hall.
CHAPTER 17
They hadn’t gone far when something very strange and rather frightening happened. For a moment the world bled white in front of them. The doors to the rooms ranged along the hall, barely visible in this bright white haze, expanded to the size of warehouse loading bays.
The corridor itself seemed to simultaneously elongate and grow taller.
Ralph felt the bottom go out of his stomach the way it often had back when he was a teenager, and a frequent customer on the Dust Devil roller coaster at Old Orchard Beach. He heard Lois moan, and she squeezed his hand with panicky tightness.
The whiteout lasted only a second, and when the colors swarmed back into the world, they were brighter and crisper than they had been a moment before. Normal perspective returned, but objects looked thicker, somehow. The auras were still there, but they appeared both thinner and paler-pastel coronas instead of spraypainted primary colors. At the same time Ralph realized he could see every crack and pore in the Sheetrocked wall to his left… and then he realized he could see the pipes, wires, and insulation behind the walls, if he wanted to; all he had to do was look.
Oh my God, he thought. Is this really happening? Can this really, be happening?
Sounds were everywhere: hushed bells, a toilet being flushed, muted laughter. Sounds a person normally took for granted, as part of everyday life, but not now. Not here. Like the visible reality of things, the sounds seemed to have an extraordinarily sensuous texture, like thin overlapping scallops of silk and steel.
Nor were all the sounds ordinary; there were a great many exotic ones weaving their way through the mix. He heard a fly buzzing deep in a heating duct. The fine-grain sandpaper sound of a nurse adjusting her pantyhose in the staff bathroom. Beating hearts. Circulating blood. The soft tidal flow of respiration. Each sound was perfect on its own; fitted into the others, they made a beautiful and complicated auditory ballet-a hidden Swan Lake of gurgling stomachs, humming power outlets, hurricane hairdryers, whispering wheels on hospital gurneys.
Ralph could hear a TV at the end of the hall beyond the nurses’ station. It was coming from Room 340, where Mr. Thomas Wren, a kidney patient, was watching Kirk Douglas and Lana Turner in The Bad and the Beautiful. “If you team up with me, baby, we’ll turn this town on its ear,” Kirk was saying, and Ralph knew from the aura which surrounded the words that Mr. Douglas had been suffering a toothache on the day that particular scene was filmed. Nor was that all; he knew he could go (higher? deeper? wider?) if he wanted. Ralph most definitely did not want. This was the forest of Arden, and a man could get lost in its thickets.
Or eaten by tigers.
[“Jesus It’s another level-it must be, Lois A whole other level [“I know.
[“Are you okay with this?” [“I think I am, Ralph… are you?”] [“I guess so, for now… but if the bottom drops out again, I don’t know. Come on.”] But before they could begin following the green-gold tracks again, Bill McGovern and a man Ralph didn’t know came out of Room 313. They were in deep conversation.
Lois turned a horror-struck face toward Ralph.
[“Oh, o.” Oh God, no! Do you see, Ralph? Do you see?”] Ralph gripped her hand more tightly. He saw, all right. McGovern’s friend was surrounded by a plum-colored aura. It didn’t look especially healthy, but Ralph didn’t think the man was seriously ill, either; it was just a lot of chronic stuff like rheumatism and kidney gravel. A balloon-string of the same mottled purple shade rose from the top of the man’s aura, wavering hesitantly back and forth like a diver’s air-hose in a mild current.
McGovern’s aura, however, was totally black. The stump of what had once been a balloon-string jutted stiffly up from it. The thunderstruck baby’s balloon-string had been short but healthy; what they were looking at now was the decaying remnant of a crude amputation. Ralph had a momentary image, so strong it was almost a hallucination, of McGovern’s eyes first bulging and then popping out of their sockets, knocked loose by a flood of black bugs. He had to close his own eyes for a moment to keep from screaming, and when he opened them again, Lois was no longer at his side.