A Monstrous Regiment of Women - Laurie R. King [98]
Mama? But the word was too far down in my throat to find its way out. Words around me, weighty words that surfaced like bubbles from a murky pool from the vague noise I lay in: doctor, infection, fever, dosage, weak.
Someone was ill in this clean, bright room. Someone began to groan, a wavering sound that instantly cut off the words and replaced them with a more urgent rustle, a few curt commands. There was too much light in this room, terrible and harsh and white, and white shapes moving around me, topped with darker blobs—hair, heads, hands, touching me, a face coming into focus, emitting furry noises. I closed my eyes, felt the pain build like a demon, possessing me, hip and chest and head, building, and then another groan, higher in pitch, and hands, these ones cool and deft, and a brief flurry of angry sounds followed by a sharp jab in my upper arm, and then a wavering sensation as if the room were a celluloid film beginning to melt in front of the projectionist’s bulb before it rippled and faded from view.
Back in the darkening cellar, I was sick again, this time into a canvas bucket I found in my hands. The clang of bolts echoed long in the cellar, leaving me on the cold and lonely stones in the darkness. When the echoes had faded, it was immensely quiet, apart from my laboured breathing and the heavy reverberations within my skull. I patted around me until I came across the straw pallet, moved over to it, and tried to grasp something that was me in the maelstrom. All I came up with was, appropriately enough, Job.
“I have made my bed in the darkness,” I said aloud, and began to giggle dangerously. After a while, I put my head down, and I wept.
I was not at the time certain what He had injected me with, but it was similar enough to the painkillers I had known that I thought it might be morphine, or more probably the stronger derivative, heroin. His plan gained dimension in my mind: sure signs of drug use, the marks of the needle in my arm, the drug in my bloodstream. However, the same doubts as before still applied: Were these signs to be used to discredit some testimony of mine, or to explain my death? A third possibility occurred to me: Might He possibly believe that by a systematic exposure to heroin I would become inescapably addicted to the stuff, permanently corrupted to his nefarious purposes? Even in my muzzy state this seemed to me sheer romantic claptrap, a Victorian fancy akin to white slavery, but it was just possible that He might believe it. I should encourage the idea in his mind, I decided.
All this took some time to sort itself out. At first, I just lay and shivered and was sick again, into the bucket, but after a time my reasoning faculties began to return to me, although my body felt very peculiar.
Opiates leave one with a profound disinclination to do much of anything. It is not exactly difficult to go through the motions of life, or to think (other than the first half hour or so following an injection), but it is difficult to want to move, or eat, or think. One feels so very satisfied with life, the only improvement is actual slumber.
My only hope of salvation lay in my will, lay in contradicting the almost overwhelming desire to sit, and nod, and sleep, in refusing to submit to Lethe’s seductive charms. I staggered to my feet and demanded that my disinterested limbs carry me around the walls of my prison, once, and again, and again, until I began to feel that my legs were my own again. The movement helped. Finding my way deliberately in the darkness helped. Thinking about the number of steps in a circuit and the number of circuits in a mile helped. Thirty circuits to the mile. I did two miles, ending at a jog trot and barely touching the walls, so that by the time I quit, my right shoulder hurt where I had scraped the wall a few times, and one of my toes was bleeding, but the soles of my feet knew the smoothness