The Illumination_ A Novel - Kevin Brockmeier [92]
He stumbled into the entrance bay, where several tired-looking doctors sat watching people arrive, pointing, nodding, shaking their heads, as if at a street performance they were too exhausted to appreciate. No one seemed to know what was going on. The halides were altering the whites and yellows of everyone’s clothing, lending them a flat blue baseball-park color, but the strained tendons and broken bones of the incoming patients were still plainly visible, even to him. There was the one in the tank top, the young mother, two big shimmering battery bruises on her back. The one with the star cluster of hives on his face. The elderly one with a dog bite showing through her stockings, as round and dazzling as a crown tipped with diamonds. But in all that shining parade of injuries, none was so spectacular as his own. As the taxi sped away, the doctors saw him stumbling along the handicap ramp and sprang up from their benches, calling for a stretcher. A radio was playing at the front desk. He heard a newscaster intoning, “From all over the world this evening we are receiving similar reports—of the ailing and the wounded, shedding light from their bodies,” which meant it wasn’t just them, it wasn’t just here, it was everyone and it was everywhere.
Quickly he was wheeled down the hallway. In the waiting area, he saw a man he knew from the camps, the one with the old photo of himself heat-pressed onto his T-shirt, a young peroxide-blond lifeguard with a girlfriend on his arm and a stripe of zinc on his nose. And there at the water fountain was another, the one with the braided gray beard and the Scottish terrier. And later he would hear that a third, the one who sold hairbrushes from the sidewalk in front of Fantastic China, had been hospitalized and died that same night with six broken ribs and a cerebral hemorrhage.
Two of the doctors lifted him onto a bed, and the room flooded with technicians and orderlies, anesthesiologists and nurses. The one whose eyes were two different colors asked him his name. If ever there was a question whose answer he had rehearsed, it was this, but he must have been in more pain than he realized, because his tongue let him down again. “More. More Put. More.” He felt something brushing his fingers and looked down to find himself holding a notepad and pen. His left hand, his dominant one, the hand that was torn at the webbing, kept filling with a silver mercury he eventually recognized as his blood, so he used his right, spelling his name out one slow letter at a time: Morse Putnam Strawbridge.
“Well, Mr. Strawbridge, hang in there, and we’ll get you put back together.”
He watched as his clothes were shorn from his body, felt a pinch on his arm, and much later, when he woke up, a pair of women were standing over him, the high clouds of their faces hovering against the blue ceiling. The one with the hint of a headache glowing on her brow said, “It’s good to see you again, Mr. Putnam. Are you ready for your morning exercises? We’re going to start with the heel slides today. Last night we made it to ten. We’re going to shoot for fifteen this time, okay?”
He tried to swallow, and everything shuddered slightly. The one with the headache was Diane, and the one gazing out the window, watching the buckeye pluck at the wind with its leaves, was Cici. Cici, who believed she was so much better than Diane, so much prettier, so much more sophisticated. Cici, who earned twice the pay for half the work, the lazy sponge. Diane lifted Morse’s blanket aside, exposing the fearsome light show of his joints and muscles. Her temples were pounding. She didn’t want to touch him. There was dirt and then there was dirt, she thought, God’s good soil and the grime that sank into a person’s flesh and never went away, no matter how thoroughly you scrubbed his filthy body. Heaven forbid her Billy end up like that one day. It’s your job, Diane. You don’t have to like it.