Hard Rain Falling - Don Carpenter [57]
At the county jail, someone noticed Jack’s fever and called a doctor, and Jack was taken to the county hospital. They had no prison ward at the hospital, so he was placed in a private room with wire mesh over the windows. The door was locked and a policeman was stationed outside the room. Jack was sick for almost two weeks, in a near-delirium, but he did not speak once during that entire time, not even to the doctors. His case was diagnosed as a bad attack of influenza.
When he had been drunk, everything had seemed rational; now nothing did. He did not know why he had been arrested. He could not understand why he had been charged with kidnaping and brought to this place. He could not understand why he was sick. At one point he was certain he was going to die. His body temperature kept dropping, and got as low as 97, and he felt cold inside, as if the life was deserting his cells and soon there would be nothing left of him but meat. In his delirium he thought that if he died they would prop his corpse up at the table in the courtroom and still go through the motions of the trial, calling witnesses Jack had never seen in his life to testify to things he had never done, and in the end the jury would bring in a verdict of guilty and his corpse would be taken to the gas chamber and gassed, and then it would be taken out and buried; and through all this he would be floating above it, watching, listening, trying to understand what was happening to his meat and bones, to the body he used to inhabit; and the corpse would just sit there, dead, in its chair, rotting, beginning to stink, everyone else in the courtroom pretending that the corpse did not stink, and he even saw his eyes shrivel, and finally drop out of their dead sockets and roll down onto the floor, and saw an attendant come over and pick them up and put them into his pocket, and the eyeless corpse just sat there, getting smaller and yellower as the trial droned on, and finally, when they carted it off to the gas chamber, it was so small and so light that one man carried it under his arm like a doll, and how tiny it looked in that big chair, eyeless, toothless, the nose half eaten away with decay, as the tiny octagonal room filled with the mists of cyanide gas and the corpse got soggy with it and began to fall to pieces so that several men had to pull it away from the chair in fragments and dump the fragments into a bag, and it all kept coming apart in their fingers, but they did not mind, they were even telling jokes to each other and laughing as the bits of soggy flesh and rotting bone stuck to their fingers and they had to wipe their hands off continually, stuffing the bag full and joking about the odor; while he, Jack, his spirit, hovered over them and watched and refused to speak. It was obscene, he knew this, but it did not move him.
He even dreamed that Denny accused him and he was being tried for his betrayal of Denny, and Denny was saying to him, yes, you betrayed me, you are my friend and you refused it, but Jack said, no, you don’t have any right to move into my body and take part of me as yours, but Denny said, yes, of course, I have every right to do that, you are my friend, I have a right to your body and your mind, to all of you, because I love you and need you, and everyone has this right, to take love away from each other and inhabit one another’s souls, but Jack said, no, no, I am my own body and soul and you are not part of me, you have no right, but Denny said, you don’t understand, we all have this right to each other, and no man is entitled to privacy because your privacy is my murder, don’t you see that yet, don’t you understand that just by being alive you are open to me, and I to you? Don’t you understand now? And Jack said no, he kept saying no, not to Denny because Denny was gone by this time, taken off to the hospital himself, and Jack was alone, not suffering, free of Denny; convicted but free. He knew that he could not afford to hate Denny, because that would be the same, that would be giving himself up to him. But