Catherine hesitated. She looked to Dan. Lucas became visible then. Catherine saw him.
She said, Lucas, I think wed better let them do it.
He nodded. He soared above all feeling save for the pain and Catherine. Lucas was strangely excited. She regarded him with such concern, such deep and abiding love.
Can you be brave? she asked. He nodded again. He could be brave. All right, then, she said to the doctor. Wise girl, he answered.
Can you get him to a bed now? Can you give him something for his pain?
We have no empty beds.
Surely one can be found.
Should I evict the woman dying in the room next to this one? Should I put out the man whose heart is failing?
This is monstrous.
A surgery room will be free in an hour or two. He will have to wait here until then.
Some medicine, then. He doesnt show his pain. He wouldnt.
We have very little medicine.
How can that be?
What we have, we must reserve for the gravest cases.
This is a grave case.
This is a boy about to lose his hand. When you compelled me to look at this boy, I had just left a man with a length of pipe driven through his skull. It entered here the doctor indicated a place above his left ear and came out here. He pointed to a spot just behind his right ear. He is still alive, somehow. We have morphine for him.
Catherine hesitated. She looked around the room (where the man lay whispering on the cot under the sisters ministrations, where the jars stood behind the glass) as if she thought she might find an answer there. Finding none, she said to the doctor in a lowered voice, Surely some provision can be made. As you can see, he is not quite right.
Miss, this is a charity hospital. Half the people who come here are not quite right.
Catherine paused again. Lucas saw her make a decision.
She said to the doctor, Could I speak to you privately?
The doctor said, Arent we private enough here?
She moved to the doorway, and the doctor followed. She spoke to him in a low tone. He nodded gravely.
Dan didnt speak. Lucas could feel him not speaking. The doctor listened to Catherine and produced yet another frown.
Lucas said, The nine months gone is in the parturition chamber, her faintness and pains are advancing.
Catherine said sharply, Lucas, be quiet.
He strove to be quiet. He ground his teeth together.
The doctor and Catherine returned. The doctor said, I will order him some morphine. Since youre so insistent.
Thank you, Catherine answered. I finish here at five oclock.
Ill see you then.
Ill see you then.
The doctor said, Ill send in one of the sisters with the morphine and fresh bandages. Ill return when the surgery room is free.
All right, Catherine said.
The doctor left them. They were there, they three, in the room with the sister and the murmuring man.
Catherine said to Dan, Well, then.
Dan didnt speak, though Catherine seemed to expect it. At length he said, I must go back to the works.
Yes, Catherine answered.
Lucas had not thought until that moment that anyone would return to his job. Hed forgotten. Hed been his hand and his pain, hed been Catherine. But Dan must return to the works.
Lucas said to Catherine, Will you stay with me?
Of course I will, she answered. Youll be all right, Dan told Lucas.
Lucas couldnt speak. He began to realize. Hed made an interruption and nothing more. If Dan must return to work now, Catherine would return tomorrow.
Youll be all right, Dan said again, more slowly and distinctly, as if he were uncertain whether Lucas had heard him the first time.
Lucas said, Which of the young men does she like best? Ah the homeliest of them is beautiful to her.
Goodbye now.
Goodbye, Catherine said.
Dan regarded her strangely. His face resembled Catherines face when Lucas brought her the bowl. Something had occurred between Dan and Catherine. She had shown him the bowl shed paid too much for. She had shown him her mangled hand. She stood defiantly, harmed and proud.
Because there was nothing to do or say, Dan left. After he had gone, Catherine said to Lucas, You must lie down. Im afraid it will have to be the floor.
He answered, I will go to the bank by the wood and become undisguised and naked, I am mad for it to be in contact with me.
Shh. Hush now. You must rest. You must rest and be quiet.
I am satisfied I see, dance, laugh, sing.
Come along now, Catherine said. You make yourself worse by raving.
She helped him to lie down on the floor. She sat on the floor herself so he could lie with his head on her lap. Here under his head were the starchy folds of her blue dress.
He said, You will stay with me?
I told you I would.
Not only today.
For as long as I need to.
Lucas was pain and Catherines lap. The pain was a cocoon that wrapped him like fiery bandages. In the cocoon, in Catherines lap, it was difficult to think of anything but that. Still, he struggled. He held to himself. He had brought her here, but hed only saved her from today. He must do something further. He could not know what.
Catherine? he said.
Shh. Dont speak.
You have to come away with me.
Forget about that. Forget everything.
He strove not to forget. He said, You were wrong, yesterday.
Not another word.
You must take the baby and go away.
Hush. Hush.
He saw it, through the fiery cocoon. She must take the baby and go to a place like the park at night, a place of grass and silence. She must go out searching, as Walt had told Lucas to do. There were such places, not only the park. Hed seen the pictures. There were fields and mountains. There were woods and lakes. He could take her to a place like that, he thought. He would find a way to do it.
From the cot, the man murmured on.
A sister came into the room. Her black habit was alive; it had created within itself her face, which was carved from wood. She wrapped Lucass hand in new bandages. She produced (had it been inside her habit?) a syringe full of clear liquid. She took his other arm, the undamaged one, with the practiced calm of a boot maker nailing a sole. She put the needle in, which stung like a bee, a small pain, an interesting one, differently alive, like a tiny flame. She withdrew the needle and departed. She had not spoken at all. Because her face was carved from wood, she wasnt able to speak.
After some time, a flower blossomed in Lucass mind. He felt it, an unfurling of petals, a transformation from bud to bloom. The pain was there still, but it was not in him anymore. The pain had left him as the spirit leaves the body of the deceased. It had made of itself a curtain, shimmering, as if curtains could be made of glass and the glass were veined with colors and tiny instances of light. The curtain hovered, fragile as glass, around Lucas and Catherine. It encircled them. Pain ran through it in capillaries of blue and green, of softest pink. Where it was most intense, pain produced watery quiverings of illumination, like light on a river. Pain surrounded them, and they were here, inside it.
Lucas didnt think he slept. He didnt think he dreamed. He was able, though, to see things he ordinarily saw in dreams. He saw that outside the pain curtain, outside the walls of the room, was the hospital, with its patiently damaged supplicants and its crying man. Outside the hospital was the city, with its houses and factories, its streets where Walt walked, marveling at everything, at smiths sweating over their forges and women strolling under feathered hats, at gulls circling in the sky like dreams the hats were having. Outside the city was the book, which invented what Walt saw and loved, because the book loved Walt and wanted to delight him. Outside the book was there anything outside the book? Lucas couldnt be sure. He thought he saw a distance, an immensity that was in the book and outside it. He thought he saw fields and mountains, forests and lakes, though they were not as they appeared in the pictures. He had thought from pictures that they were flat and drab, all murky greens and limpid, shallow blues. He saw now that they were alive and brilliantly colored. There were oceans of grass, swaying. There were mountains blindingly white.
Lucass forehead was caressed. Catherine whispered to him. He couldnt tell what she said.
Something said, Lucas, its time. What was it time for?
Everything changed. He stood in the room again, though it was the room as it truly was, a scrim shaped like a room, with a city around it and an ocean of grass beyond. He wondered if others knew. He wondered if the wooden nun knew, for here she was, here was the back of her, and here was Catherines arm, helping him. He was walking, he seemed to be walking. The curtain of pain followed him, blinking and coalescing.
He was in the corridor where the waiting waited. They were bright with their own pain, suffused by it, rendered beautiful and strange, phosphorescent. As he walked among them, he knew they were his friends. He knew that the harmed, all of them, were his family, relations he had not met but knew by blood.
Then he saw Simon. Simon walked out of a door and stood in the hallway before him.
Lucas stopped. His brother was terrible to see. His face was pulp, with one dark eye staring blindly from its socket and the other vanished entirely. What remained of his hair was matted, plastered to what remained of his skull. His right arm, the one that had been taken by the clamp and pulled under the wheel, was tatters clinging to bone. The fabric of his shirt had gotten muddled up with his chest, so that fabric and flesh were one. His heart, intact, bigger than Lucas would have expected it to be, glistened between the clean lines of his yellow-white ribs.
It was Simon released, finally, from the machine and the box. It was the Simon they had not been permitted to see. How had he gotten out?
Simon said, Youve brought her to me.
Lucas, what is it? Catherine asked.
Simon said, Thank you. Im glad to have her here.
A sister came and took Simons arm, the other one, the one not yet ruined. She hurried him away.
Its all right, Catherine said. That man has been terribly hurt. Theres nothing we can do for him. Come along.