The Thousand - Kevin Guilfoile [153]
“Why are you awake? Did you hit your head?”
Canada wondered if a voice asking if she was awake was proof that she must be, or if it was a trick, a fancy twist employed by her dream self. She blinked at the dark figure between the beam of light in her eyes, one of those tiny flashlights, and the unsparing fluorescent illumination overhead. He was the doctor. She couldn’t remember his name.
“If you have a concussion, that will complicate things.”
That made her laugh, possibly out loud. Complicate things? Things, at the moment, were already hopelessly complicated, beyond any possibility of comprehension. She was like a mouse born into a house where the doors tasted like trees and the countertops felt like rocks and there seemed to be an infinite amount to discover, but for all the thinking and exploring and questioning the mouse might do, she could never hope to understand how that house was conceived, how it was built, or for what purpose. And she realized now that her whole life had been like that: Everything she thought she understood was really something else, created for some other purpose. She had been that mouse and the universe was that house, able to be explored but never understood.
Now she was flying again, for real this time. No, she was being carried. She could feel the fabric of his shirt sleeve against her thighs under her short hemline—what dress was this?—and another hand around her shoulders and she could smell him, his sweat and cologne, her face pressed against his neck and she knew he was carrying her back to the bed, the hospital bed, and she remembered that they wanted to cut her open and take out her spider, but she’d never had a chance to explain to her mother that the spider was really her, and now that it was turned off, she knew it for sure, that this thing that was left behind when her spider was off was somebody else entirely, that just like the dream self who hides inside your head when you’re awake but can tell you a story in your sleep that you don’t know the ending to, the spider was her real self, her first self, Nada, and if they took it from her, they would be taking her, killing her, leaving a stranger in charge of her body, but there was no way for her to explain that, no combination of words that she could assemble in her mouth to say all that now, no way for her to be understood, and so she opened her eyes and followed the tendons in his neck up to the doctor’s ear and she opened her mouth like she might whisper something to him.
Instead, she bit hard into the rubbery flesh, straight through the cartilage, until she tasted copper, and she clenched her teeth and gave her head a violent shake and then he dropped her and fell away howling, hands to the wound, while she still had a bloody crescent-shaped piece of him in her mouth, and before she spit it to the floor, the doctor’s blood pooling in the well between teeth and lip, she sucked the severed lobe against her incisors, and it reminded her of the mouthpiece they used to give her during those prespider teenage seizures to stop her from swallowing her tongue.
61
A HUNDRED Whole Foogees were lined up along North Avenue, assaulting the Mercedes sedans and limousines with a shower of rocks and sticks. Bobby cut the ignition and climbed out of his truck and tried to shout them down, but they ignored him. When he grabbed a forearm in full windup, ready to hurl a baseball-size stone, the kid punched him in the stomach with his weak hand, hard enough to double Bobby over his knees. He coughed and straightened. Bobby felt for the place on his chest where his star should have been hanging. “I’m a cop!” The kid spit in his face and threw the rock anyway.
What am I going to do? Kloska thought. Arrest him?
Bobby sent the kid sprawling with one punch to the middle of his face. He howled, covering his nose with both hands as blood gushed between his fingers. “Pig!” the