DAEMONOMANIA: Book Three of the Aegypt Cycle (32 page)

Bobby turned on the shower, and Rose without hesitation stripped off the last of her clothes and stepped in. Bobby stood for
a minute listening to the roar of water and observing Rose’s shadow, strangely fragmented, on the pebbled surface of the glass
shower door.

“You got somethn else to put on?”

“No. Not really. My raincoat’s downstairs.”

“I’ll get it.”

“Thanks, really. It’s a navy one. With leopard-print collar and cuffs. Sort of silly. You can’t miss it.”

Bobby went down again. She thought of the other time she had met this woman: how she had hugged her at the end of prayers,
as she had of course all the others. In the bathroom just now she had seen that Rose had shaved off her pubic hair, and she
wondered why, at whose suggestion or request.

When Bobby returned Rose stood wrapped in towels in the bedroom, shivering a little; she changed the towels for the coat Bobby
held out.

“Okay now?”

“Okay” She hugged herself. “What I need,” she said, “or
want
actually. Well. Is a cigarette.” She looked at her feet. “I guess they really wouldn’t want you to smoke.”

“Nope.”

“I’ve almost quit.”

“Me too,” Bobby said. She rummaged in her coat and brought out a pack, crumpled and nearly empty. She opened the window a
crack; they sat together on the littered bed and Bobby lit their smokes with a butane lighter.

“So you’re with us now?”

“Yes,” she said. “Yes. I am.”

“Seen benefits already.” Not a question. “You gone take the healing training?”

“I want to,” Rose said. “I’m going to. It’s … I just don’t know if I ever could. Really heal.”

“Well. It’s not everybody who can. You pray to be let to. Now I never.
I ain’t no healer. I just look to get healed. I get, I don’t give. That’s a different training.” She smiled. “You might be
one though.”

She considered Rose, and Rose looked down at her hands, then into Bobby’s eyes. But what Bobby was thinking, looking so closely
at Rose, was not that the woman might heal, now or ever. What she thought was: She is of the kind I am. She doesn’t know it,
but she is. I think she is.

“You never tried?” Rose asked.

“Got to
try
. I took some training. They start with you, yourself.” What was it, was it the woman’s hooded eyes, revealing and hiding
her at once; was it how she took in smoke so hard; was it the way that nothing had passed from her to Bobby in that embrace
she had once given Bobby, nothing at all?

“Is that hard?” she asked. “Starting on yourself?”

“Depends,” Bobby said. “On what’s inside you that has to come out.” She stabbed out the cigarette. “I ain’t gone tell you
what they drug outta me. Long as I’m shet of it.”

Rose looked within: Bobby recognized the look, the same look within that you see on people’s faces when you tell them you
just had a rotten tooth pulled, or found a lump in your breast. Checking.

Bobby believed she had known others of her own kind; she had usually been quickly certain of it, had revealed herself to them
too, without words for none were needed. People who had like a cast in their eye, couldn’t look straight ahead at what was
there to see, but hungry for it nonetheless; laughing maybe, good-timing, praying even maybe but always seeming to be straining
forward like starved dogs; not starved but never full. Bobby knew. Often she knew not only those ones but also the ones who
were in pursuit of them, years-long stories she would come across, pass by, encounter again: she knew them.

But of this one she wasn’t sure. Could she be one, and not know it?

“One thing they ask you,” she said, “is what you most want in the whole world. You got to answer that. If you know. And it
ain’t so easy, if you tell the truth.”

“I,” Rose said, and looked stricken, as though Bobby herself had demanded to know this of her, right now. “Oh boy,” she said.
“Oh man.”

Bobby took her hand. Felt the woman’s spirit beat, as though pulsing down through her ring finger from her heart. She is,
she isn’t, is, isn’t. “Cause God wants it for you. They’ll tell you that. What you most want. And you’ll get it.”

“Did you know?” she asked. “When they asked you? What did you say?”

“Yes mam.” If she could get close enough to the woman to smell her, Bobby thought, she could tell: if she could stick her
nose in the cleft of her butt, like a dog. “I said that what I wanted most in the whole world was a brand-new white convertible.
Stingray or a Vixen. With red leather seats.”

T
he resident, tidy in his white coat, held out a huge hairy yellow-nailed palm to Sam. “Shake,” he said. Sam stared at him
in horror, not the comic Halloween horror he’d been aiming at but what seemed to be social horror, as at a breach of manners.
She didn’t take his hand, though she stared unsmiling at it; she kept her grip on Rosie’s pants.

“This is Sam,” the aide said—Bobby, the same who had guided them here before. “The one’s got a name like mine.”

The resident pulled off the King Kong gloves and hunkered down before Sam.

“You’re not going to believe this,” he said. “
My
name is Sam.” He pointed to his name tag, where a teddy-bear sticker was affixed beside his name, Dr. Samuel Rosenblatt,
which Sam couldn’t read. Rosie had the impression that the young doctors who did most of the work here were childless, their
hours too long, medical school too tough; they had a bantering tone that suggested they didn’t know much about kids as people,
however much they might know about them in other ways. She wondered what they thought about having kids themselves, after
being here, seeing so many of them so sick.

“Okay, well,” he said, after looking deeply into Sam’s eyes for a moment, “let’s see what we’re going to do.”

Rosie had hoped that the test would be given in the newer part of the hospital, in a big clean ward painted freshly in modern
colors like the lobby, pale salmon and wintergreen; but Neurology hadn’t moved. The same walls, battered by collisions with
rolling beds; the same teacolored stain across the ceiling tiles. The amateurish murals of forest animals, chipmunks and bunnies,
given what seemed to be serious medical defects by sloppy drawing, walleyes and pinheads and twisted grins. Maybe once they’d
seemed cheerful; now they seemed like a
mean joke played on the kids being treated here, a joke so pointlessly mean and clumsy and sinister that Rosie did laugh,
laughed with covered mouth, embarrassed.

Dr. Marlborough hadn’t appeared, though all the lesser doctors who came to look at Sam and check her wires and read the results
were careful to say that they worked with (never for or under) him. Rosie pondered why they all had their stethoscopes, clipped
around their necks or slung over their shoulders like pet snakes, and decided it was not because they expected to use them
but because having one marked you as a doctor; only the doctors seemed to be allowed to wear them.

There were two others being tested, as Sam was, to discover the sources of their seizures,
in the program
as they said, a teenage boy who didn’t leave his room and a boy two or three years older than Sam and apparently worse off.
Pretty seriously involved
the nurse had said to her, and then no more, seeming to be sorry she’d said even that much. This boy was introduced to Sam;
they faced each other, heads shaved in neat spots, both wired up and tethered to the recorders beside them on tall chrome
rolling stands. They regarded each other momentarily with the usual kid mix of indifferent incomprehension and simple acceptance,
not joined by what grown-ups assumed would join them. The boy, pinch-faced and with eyes of scary intensity, was named Doyle.

“Doyle don’t need no outfit,” said the aide. “He’s gone be a Martian, right honey?”

Doyle in sudden understanding contorted his face, held out his arms and began stalking stiff-legged around the ward, Martian,
robot, mechanical man of any kind; Rosie suspected that having got the idea he was going to do it for some time, and he did,
for hours, machinelike, stopping only to plug himself in at various likely-looking places to recharge.

Sam ignored him. She didn’t seem to feel Martian, or mechanical. She touched with awful care the wires attached to her head,
and took no steps to do anything, sit, play, explore. At the nurses’ station now a doctor in a high-collared black paper cape
and whiteface checked reports and bared his phosphorescent fangs at the nurses, who took it calmly. Not everybody had got
into the spirit, but many patients and nurses had masks and black-and-orange bags of candy.

What were they thinking, though, really, or didn’t they think. Making jokes, the usual jokes, about blood and death. Rosie
remembered that doctor outfits, including organs or bloody scalpels, had always been a regular Halloween choice. She thought
of how she would describe this night, this scene later to someone, to Spofford or to Pierce, how she would tell about the
doctors dressed as predatory monsters and
some kids with masks no worse than their own faces; how odd it was, more than dreadful; what the lesson of it was, which she
might know by then.

The rooms were small, and there were two children in most; parents and relatives came and went, bringing clutches of balloons
with cheerful faces on them or stuffed animals larger sometimes than their child; the sicker the kid the larger the animal,
maybe. Parents sat and watched inane TV shows beside their children or helped with meals or sat on chairs in the doorways
of their rooms like housewives along an old-world alley, talking to one another and swapping inquiries and complaints. Some
of them seemed like old hands; they knew how to just nod when a neighbor’s condition or treatment was named, and to ask questions
but not to show pity or alarm at the answers. Rosie supposed that she would be one herself someday, that a part of her life
was going to be spent here, nobody could tell her how much; that this was life too, after all, being lived, here where kids
got shots and Easter baskets and Christmas presents in their beds and got well or didn’t and died; and that was the lesson,
maybe, or part of it.

Their roommates were a solid woman older than Rosie, with great sympathetic eyes, and her youngest child—three more at home,
she said, twin girls and a teenage boy. She had been here three days already “this time,” knew the nurses and even some of
the patients, who had happened to be here at other times when she was; she gossiped generously about them.
The seizure kids
, she’d say,
the cancer kid
across the hall.

“Doyle is bad,” Sam said. “He won’t take his medicine.”

“Doyle,” said the woman, “hasn’t taken his medicine
yet
without a fight. Spoiled,” she said to Rosie. “I mean you can understand, but. The poor nurses.”

“I have to take my medicine,” said Sam. “But if I need to, I can cancel.”

“Oh yes?” Rosie said, wondering who had said that in Sam’s hearing. “You think so?”

Sam nodded. She took hold of the tall rolling tripod that carried her recorder, and carefully, as though it were a delicate
pet, baby giraffe or willowy orang, she guided it out the door.

“Going for a walk?” Rosie asked.

She didn’t answer.

“Cute,” said their roommate.

Her own child, delicate and beautiful, was already asleep; about eighteen months, Rosie guessed, maybe two years, with pale
curls on one side of her head, the other wearing the common badge of fourth-floor neurology, a temple shaved and bandaged.

“She’s got a plastic tube in her head,” her mother said. She and Rosie leaned on the crib’s edge looking down as into a fish
tank. “Because her spinal cord didn’t form right. The tube drains off the cerebrospinal fluid. Otherwise, she’d get a big
head—you know, water on the brain.”

“How long does she need it?”

“Oh. Always. Part of her now. Except it got plugged up, and she had to get it fixed.”

“Oh. Well. I hope,” she started, but thought no, no hoping. “It’s nice you get to stay with her.”

“Well yes. They only just started that. They didn’t use to. You could hardly see the kid.”

Rosie remembered. Her mother came down from home every day on the bus, two hours, to sit with her for the length of visiting
hours, after which she would leave again for the two-hour ride home, and the vacancy would settle again over the room and
the halls; Rosie never decided if she was more relieved to see her mother come in the morning with her schoolwork and her
clean jammies, or to see her go, leave her alone with the others who belonged here, the kids in their beds and the nurses
and rare doctors and the mild shy candy-striper who offered her books and magazines in which she could read about the world
she had come from. Worse was when her father came, so hurt, so tense and combative, ordering around the nurses and disrupting
the routine. How afraid he had been of the girl, what had her name been, in the bed beside hers.

Lilith. The curtains drawn quick around her bed, the rattle of their hooks and the muslin rising like wings.

“You were here? On this floor?”

“Not on this floor. Somewhere. I don’t know where.”

“What was wrong?”

“A cough. I don’t know really. They could never figure it out. I was here for a couple of weeks. Maybe more.”

“Jeez. A couple of weeks. Get insurance to pay for that nowadays.”

“I think my parents paid.”

“You got better?”

“I don’t know.” The past time, that other hospital contained inside this one, reached toward her, trying to come clear. “I
mean yes, I got better, but I wasn’t cured. The girl in the bed next to mine died.”

The woman only shook her head minutely. Rosie could not remember if she had ever told anyone these things, and wondered if
she could tell them now without weeping. Lilith. Rosie’s father had been shocked that they could not save her, seemed to think
it impossible, and that if
they could not save her they should somehow keep the knowledge of their failure from her, and certainly from his own daughter
in the next bed; some of them there did try, and answered Rosie’s questions with cheerful evasiveness, but not most of them.
And Lilith knew: she knew she was there to die, not to get better, and they were there to help, and attend on her. Not everyone
gets better; she taught Rosie that, and Rosie wanted her father to learn it and be quiet.

“It must have been leukemia. She would get cards from her friends at school, and open them and read them to herself, and give
them to the nurse; and the nurse tacked them up where she could see them. She didn’t say anything about them except who they
were from.” She was dark-haired and white, and grew whiter as she lost weight; her eyes bigger too, from the weight she lost,
like the huge-eyed kids starving in famine photographs: though Rosie had thought then that her eyes grew big from what she
saw approaching.

“It was way late one night,” she said, “and I was awake; I don’t know what woke me. They were around her bed, and then they
drew her curtains. And I thought”—Rosie only at that moment remembered that she had thought so, she had forgotten till now—“I
thought that they did that so she could pass in private, with just them. But I guess she was already dead, and they were just.”

“Yes.”

“After that I got better,” Rosie said.

“Huh. Just like that.”

“I guess I thought: you’re not that sick. You’ve got no right to be here. Get serious.”

“Funny how kids can be. So smart.”

“Smart and not smart at once.”

“Not like us,” the woman said, and laughed.

Come night, nothing ceased; the halls weren’t dimmed, though the room’s curtains could be drawn and the lights turned off.
The blinking monitors stayed on, and the intercom, though the voice issuing calls and names grew softer, sadder, sleepier.
She got Sam into her hospital johnny, open in the back, made to fit over IVs and machinery such as Sam was hooked to. The
nurse helped her manage. A new shift had come on; several of the women Rosie had first met now gone and replaced by others,
this one older and smelling of cigarettes, a silver cross between her freckled breasts.

“They’re going to give Doyle a shot,” Sam said. “Bobby said so.” She looked at her mother. “Bobby knows Daddy.”

“No. Really?”

“Yets take this off for sleeping,” Sam said. She reached up to touch her Medusa curls.

“No no honey, no sweetie,” the nurse said. “Got to keep those on.”

Sam looked at her, and lay back against the pillow, that look of unreal resignation in her face that frightened Rosie. “I’m
going to sleep too,” she said to Sam. “I’m tired.”

“Sleep,” said Sam. “Go to sleep.”

“Okay.”

The nurse showed her where to find sheets and a thin blanket (it was a hothouse in the room and would be all night, she guessed)
and how to unfold the chair into a sort of half bed. Rosie’s roommate was already in a cotton nightgown; Rosie would not go
so far, intended to stay in her clothes and tough it out through a probably sleepless night; the woman shrugged.

“Okay?” Rosie said to Sam. “I’m ready.”

“Lie down,” Sam said.

“Okay. You want anything more?”

Sam thought. “Sing,” she said.

“Oh Sam.”

“Sing.”

“Well what song? We have to be quiet for the baby.”

“‘Aiken Drum.’”

“Really?”

Sam nodded, definite. This song about a monstrous hero and his battle on the moon she had learned at day care, it wasn’t one
Rosie had ever known or sung. Almost in a whisper, Rosie began: “His head is a … What’s his head?”

“A doughnut!” said Sam.

It was different every time. Rosie sang:

The fun of the song was the assembling of Aiken out of things you chose, the queerer the better. What’s his heart? “A button,”
Sam said instantly.

“His arms are spaghetti,” Sam sang out next, “his arms are spaghetti, his arms are spaghetti and his name is
Aiken Drum!
”

“Sh, Sam, sh.” Rosie found the song unsettling, creepy even, Aiken pathetic in his odd inanimate parts; the song seemed to
mock him in his insufficiency, and Rosie felt his struggle to stay together and do battle. She met things like that in dreams,
coming toward her, malevolent or needful.