The Illumination_ A Novel - Kevin Brockmeier [10]
She woke with a start. It was three in the morning. For a moment she thought she had left the television on, but the flickering she saw from the corner of her eye turned out to be her own arm, flung haphazardly over the pillow. Waves of light were following each other all the way from her hand to her shoulder, a display she might have found hypnotic if it hadn’t hurt so much. Her head ached, and so did her back. She was grinding her teeth, and there was an awful tightness in her stomach. Obviously, the pills had worn off, and with the sickness came the desperation—it had always been that way. The serenity she had accepted so naturally just a few hours before was gone now. She could hardly remember what it felt like. Here, in this place, her life seemed like one long litany of wounds, ending in these sweat-drenched sheets with half her thumb missing and stretching back through time in an unbroken sequence of bone fractures and muscle strains, sunburns and concussions, black eyes and canker sores. There was a light in her hand, and a light in her head, and doubtless a light in her memories, too. She had known days of happiness and beauty, rare moments of motionless wonder, but trying to relive them after they had vanished was like looking out the window at night from a partially lit room: no matter how interesting the view, there was always her own reflection, hovering over the landscape like a ghost. That face, it was the problem. Those eyes and that skin. She wished that she could throw the glass open for once and see things as they really were.
If she remained absolutely still, she thought, then maybe, just maybe, she would fall asleep again, and she lay on her side for a while watching the bands of light travel up her arm. When she realized the cause was hopeless, she got up to use the bathroom. After she was finished, she made the mistake of reaching for the faucet with her left hand and was hit by a jolt of pain so severe that her legs locked upright and she had to Frankenstein-walk back to her bed. It took a long time for her knees to loosen up, and even longer for the glow in them to subside.
Shortly after the sun rose, an orderly brought her a breakfast of orange juice and scrambled eggs. A nurse followed behind him with a chaser of blue pills. A few hours later, Dr. Alstadt found her staring out the window at the cars on the freeway, just sedated enough to be comfortable but just sober enough to be clearheaded. “Hello, Carol Ann,” he said. He reached out as if to take the loop of hair that was dangling over her eye and brush it back with his fingers, then thought better of it and dropped his hand. “How are you holding up?”
“Where’s Dr. Barrettes?”
“Dr. Barrettes?” He looked at her chart. “You mean Dr. Clovis. ‘Dr. Barrettes’—that’s good. Dr. Barrettes has gone home for the day. So, Carol Ann, I want to talk with you about what you said to me after the operation,” which made no sense, none at all. She would have remembered if she had seen him after the operation, and she hadn’t.
He gave her a quizzical look and pulled a chair up to her bed. “You don’t remember, do you? That happens sometimes when you’re still shaking off the effects of the anesthesia. Carol Ann, I sat here in this room