Mountain of Black Glass (42 page)

When they were inside and the car was traveling back up, Del Ray fumbled the surgical scrubs out of the paper bag. “Hurry up,” he hissed as Joseph laboriously transferred the contents of his pockets, including a squeeze bottle half-full of wine the color of cough syrup. “For God's sake, just put it on!”

By the time the door clanged open on the second floor, their own clothes were in the bag and they were both wearing institutional garments, although Long Joseph's showed an alarming amount of calf above his white socks. Del Ray led him quickly down the hallway, which by good luck was deserted, and into the orderlies' changing room. Ensuits hung on hooks all down one wall like the discarded cocoons of giant butterflies. A pair of men were talking and laughing in the shower, just out of sight around a tiled partition. Del Ray took Joseph by the elbow, ignoring the older man's mumble of irritated protest, and shoved him toward the wall of environment suits. Despite some fumbling with the closures, in less than a minute they had them on and were back out in the hallway again.

Del Ray was struggling to reach his pocket and had to stop and unseal the suit to get his hand into his surgical scrubs. He pulled out the folded map his cousin had drawn for them. It was not the most reliable-looking of documents: the cousin was no draftsman to begin with, and his tenure as a hospital custodian had been brief, ending with an argument with his supervisor over punctuality, something that Del Ray's cousin apparently hadn't been any better at than drawing.

“You see a man called Nation Uhimwe,” the cousin had told them, “the head custodian, you feel free to stop and punch his head.”

According to the map, Long-Term Care was on the fourth floor. After a whispered argument, Del Ray prevailed in his determination to stay out of elevators as much as possible, where their homemade badges might not survive close scrutiny. He led Joseph to the nearest stairwell.

At the top they peered around the door before stepping out into the corridor. A small group of doctors or nurses—everyone looked much the same in the slightly opaque Ensuits—crossed the hallway a few yards ahead, talking with their heads together, bound for another part of the floor. Del Ray led Joseph to a water fountain, then had a moment of panic when he realized it was impossible to drink through the plastic masks, so it made a very poor alibi. After a moment's agonized consideration he pulled the older man into a side corridor where there was likely to be less traffic; a few moments later another pair of hospital workers passed the spot where they had just stood.

As Del Ray held his cousin's map up to the off-white fluorescent lights, trying to orient himself, Joseph watched in irritation. The younger man was clearly not the kind of lion-heart that should undertake a job like this, he reflected. He was a businessman, and should never have started waving guns and driving kidnap cars around in the first place. Joseph thought he himself had handled the whole thing quite well. He was barely nervous at all, for one thing. Perhaps just a bit. And now that he thought about it, a drink would help steady his nerves, so that when Del Ray went to pieces Joseph would be ready to step in and take charge.

A moment's consideration told him that it would not be a good idea to take off his mask and have a swig right there in the hallway where anyone coming around the corner could see him. Del Ray was still turning the raggedy paper from side to side, squinting, so Joseph took a few steps down the hall, heading toward an open door. It was shadowy and silent inside, so he stepped in and tugged at the seal along the base of his mask, trying to find the bead Del Ray had shown him that would cause the top part to let go of the bottom. He found it at last and scrunched the mask up so that even though he could no longer see, he could reach his mouth. A mighty swallow nearly emptied the squeeze bottle, and he was just debating whether to finish it off or to keep it in reserve for further emergencies when someone moved on the bed at the far end of the room, startling Joseph so much that he dropped the bottle.

He kept his head admirably: despite his alarm, he managed to catch up to the bottle before it stopped spinning. As he grasped it, he stood to see a heavy Afrikaaner woman shoving herself away from her pillows, struggling to sit up.

“I've been ringing and ringing for ten minutes,” she said, her scowling face full of pain and annoyance. She looked Joseph up and down. “You took your time, didn't you? I need help!”

Joseph stared at her for a moment and felt the wine turning to warm gold in his stomach. “You do, yes,” he said, backing toward the door, “but there is no cure for ugly.”

“Good God!” Del Ray said when he saw him, “where the hell have you been? What are you grinning about?”

“Why we standing around in this hall?” Long Joseph asked. “Time to get going.”

Del Ray shook his head and led him back into the main corridor.

For a small local hospital, Durban Outskirt seemed to squeeze in a lot of rooms: it took them another ten minutes to find Long-Term Care. Despite how important it was they avoid embarrassing meetings, Joseph was outraged on behalf of his son and himself that there were so few staff.

“All shooting drugs and having sex,” he muttered, “like on the net. No wonder they can't cure nobody.”

Del Ray at last found the proper corridor. Three-quarters of the way down, past a dozen open doors, each one leading like the mouth of a tomb to a chamber full of dim, tented bodies, was the room with
Sulaweyo, Stephen
in the little name rack beside the door, beneath three others.

At first it was hard to tell which of the four beds was Stephen's, and for a grim moment Joseph almost did not want to know. He suddenly could not help feeling it would be better just to turn back. What would be accomplished? If the boy was still here then the doctors hadn't done anything to make him better, as Joseph had known in his heart of hearts that they wouldn't. He wanted very badly to have another drink, but Del Ray had already made his way down to the far bed on the left side and was waiting for Joseph there.

When he reached it, Long Joseph stood for several moments, looking down and trying to make sense of what he saw.

At first he felt a kind of relief. It was all a mistake, that was clear. This couldn't be Stephen, although his name was on the little screen at the end of the bed, so perhaps they had cured him after all, just forgotten to change the names and whatnot. But as Joseph stared at the emaciated figure in the oxygen tent, the arms curled on the chest, hands clenched in bony fists, knees drawn up beneath the covers so that the thing on the bed almost looked like a baby inside a pregnant woman's stomach that he had seen in a magazine photo, Joseph saw the familiar shape of the face—the curve of his mother's cheek, the broad nose that Joseph had often told Miriam was the only proof she had that she hadn't been stepping out on him. It was Stephen.

Del Ray, standing beside him, was wide-eyed behind the steamy mask.

“Oh, my poor boy,” Joseph whispered. At that moment, all the wine in the world would not have quenched his thirst. “Oh, sweet Jesus, what have they done to you?”

Wires trailed from patches on Stephen's forehead like creeping vines; others were taped to his chest or tangled around his arms. Joseph thought he looked like he had fallen down in the jungle and the plants had begun to swallow him up. Or like the life was being bled out of him into all those machines. What had Renie said? That the people were using the net and all those wires and such to hurt the children? Joseph thought for a moment of tearing them all loose, of grabbing fists full of wires like dry grass and just yanking them free so that the quietly humming machines wouldn't suck out any more of his boy's life. But he could not move. As helpless as Stephen himself, Joseph could only stare down into the bed as he had stared into his wife's coffin.

That Mfaweze,
he remembered,
that damn funeral director, he wanted to tell me I shouldn't see her. Like I hadn't seen her the whole time she was in this very same damn hospital, all burned up.
He had wanted to kill the funeral man, kill
somebody,
had only wrestled down the big black charge of hateful electricity inside himself by getting so drunk he had not been able to walk out of the church when the service was over and had just sat for an hour after everyone else had left. But now there wasn't even a Mfaweze to hate. There was nothing but the shell of his son, eyes closed, mouth slack, his whole body curling like a dying leaf.

Beside him, Del Ray looked up in alarm. A shape had appeared in the doorway, wide-hipped and dark-faced, the Ensuit not disguising the fact that it was a woman. She took a few steps forward and then stopped, staring at the two of them.

Joseph felt too empty to speak. A nurse, a doctor—she was nothing. She could do nothing. And nothing mattered.

“Can I help you?” she demanded, her voice distorted by the mask.

“We're . . . we're doctors,” Del Ray said. “Everything's under control here. You just go on about your business.”

The nurse surveyed them for a moment longer, then took a step back toward the door. “You are not doctors.”

Long Joseph felt Del Ray stiffen, and somehow this was enough to start him moving. He took a step toward the woman, lifting his big hand and pointing a finger at her masked face.

“You just leave him alone,” he said. “Don't you do that boy any more harm. Take those wires off him—let him breathe!”

The woman stepped backward until she was practically falling into the bed of the patient behind her. “I am calling security!” she declared.

Del Ray caught at Joseph's arm and yanked him away from the nurse and toward the door. “Everything is all right,” Del Ray said idiotically, and almost ran into the doorjamb. “Don't worry. We're just going.”

“Don't you touch him!” Joseph shouted at her, clutching at the doorframe as Del Ray tried to tug him through and into the corridor. Beyond her he could see the outline of Stephen's oxygen tent, like a sand dune, desolate, lifeless. “Just leave that child alone!”

Del Ray jerked him once again, even harder, and Joseph slid out into the corridor as his companion turned and sprinted toward the stairwell. Joseph walked after him in a kind of dull dream, only speeding to a trot when he was halfway down the corridor. His chest was heaving, and even he himself could not tell whether he was about to laugh or cry.

 

The nurse stepped over to examine the patient's tent and monitors even as she pulled the pad from her pocket. It was only after her first call was completed, to a black van with mirrored windows which had been stationed more or less permanently in the front parking lot for weeks waiting for just this call, and after she had allowed a good five minutes more to make sure that the intruders would escape the building, that she called hospital security to report a breach of quarantine.

P
AUL woke with an aching head, an even sharper pain in his arm, and his mouth half full of brine.

He spat up a great deal of seawater, then groaned and tried to stand, but something was twisting his arm behind his body. It took him a few moments before he could make sense of his position. The feather-veil was still looped around his wrist, a wet tangle binding him to the tiller. The force of Charybdis' watery eruption, which had lifted his little boat on a great jet of tide, had also crashed him back against the ocean so powerfully that he was lucky his arm had not been torn out of the socket.

He released himself with small movements, trying to be delicate with elbow and shoulder, which both felt like they had been injected with something caustic. The ship was reassuringly stable, the only motion a slight rocking. The sun stood high overhead, hot and steady, and he was desperate to get back under his shelter.