Lanark_ a life in 4 books - Alasdair Gray [29]
Lanark could not sleep. He lay at the edge of the glow surrounding the sick man, turned his back to the bony head and played the radio under the pillow. Munro had said his institute was understaffed but the staff was still very large. In ten minutes he heard forty different doctors summoned in tones indicating an emergency to places and tasks he was wholly unable to picture. One call said, “Will Dr. Gibson go to the sink? There is resistance on the north rim.” Another said, “Ward R-sixty requires an osteopath. There is twittering. Will any free osteopath go at once to deterioration ward R-sixty.” He was greatly puzzled by a call which said, “Here is a warning for the engineers from Professor Ozenfant. A salamander will discharge in chamber eleven at approximately fifteen-fifteen.” At last he switched the clamour off and dozed uneasily.
He was wakened by a low cry and sat up. The sick man was craning forward from his pillows, moving his head from side to side as if seeking something, yet Lanark was still unable to see eyes in the black sockets. The man said loudly, “Is anybody there? Who are you?”
“I’m here. I’m a patient, like yourself. Should I call a doctor?”
“How tall am I?”
Lanark stared at the thin figure beneath the blue coverlet. He said “Quite tall.”
The man was sweating. He gave a dreadful shriek. “How tall?”
“Nearly six feet.”
The man lay back on the pillow and his thin mouth curled in a surprisingly sweet smile. After a moment he said languidly,
“And I don’t glitter.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’m not covered with … you know, red, white, blue, green sparkles.”
“Certainly not. Should I call a doctor?”
“No no. I expect these fellows have done what they can.”
The man’s skull was no longer a reminder of death. Feeling had softened it and now it seemed a daringly austere work of art commemorating human consciousness. The thin lips still curved in a faint smile. They opened and said, “What brought you here?”
Lanark considered several answers and decided to use the shortest. “Dragonhide.”
The man seemed not to hear. At last Lanark asked, “What brought you?”
The man cleared his throat. “Crystalline hypertrophy of the connective tissue. That’s the medical name. Laymen like you or I call it rigor.”
“Twittering rigor?”
“I did not twitter. All the same, it came as a shock.”
He seemed to become thoughtful and Lanark fell asleep. He was wakened by the man crying out, “Are you there? Am I boring you?”
“I’m here. Please go on.”
“You see, I loved the human image and I hated the way people degraded it, overdeveloping some bits to gain temporary advantage and breaking others off to get relief from very ordinary pain. I seemed surrounded by leeches, using their vitality to steal vitality from others, and by sponges, hiding behind too many mouths, and by crustaceans, swapping their feelings for armour. I saw that a decent human life should contain discipline, and exertion, and adventure, and be unselfish. So I joined the army. Can you tell me what other organization I could have joined? Yet in spite of five dangerous missions behind enemy lines, and in spite of launching the Q39 programme, I grew to be nine feet tall and as brittle as glass. I could exert fantastic pressure vertically, upward or downward, but the slightest sideways blow would have cracked me open. We do crack, you know, in the army.”
Indignation had entered his voice and exhausted it. He lay breathing deeply for a while; then his lips curved in the surprising smile. He said, “Can you guess what I did?”
“No.”
“I did something rather unusual. Instead of waiting till I cracked and leaving the pit to eat up the pieces I invoked the pit. I asked for a way out, and the pit came to me, and I entered it in a perfectly decorous and manly fashion.”
“So did I.”
For a moment the man looked indignant again, then he asked in a low voice, “How many of us are there in this room?”
“Just you and I.”
“Good. Good. That means we are