Woman Who Loved the Moon (27 page)

Behind the shimmer a body thickened, congealing slowly out of air. A snake’s head and body reared above them, immense tail poised, tongue flickering in the giant fanged mouth, ruby eyes sentient and cold and patient as the dark between stars. “You will sssstay.” it said. Susie hid her face on the chair.

“For how long?” whispered Lynellen.

The snake said nothing.

Angelo felt a wrenching sickness in his belly. “We have to stay,” he said. “But you can’t make us work. You’ll take us home when you get tired of feeding us.”

The fanged mouth opened wide. “What makessss you think you will be fed?”

* * *

The act unrolls against the spiral patterns of the stars. Ricky beats the bass drum as Tony and Lynellen and Angelo and Susie fly beneath the barest hint of a tent. An audience claps. Marvel stands in the ring. “Aren’t they GREAT, ladies and gentlemen,” his deep voice cries. But that is an illusion, made for their mind. If they look they can see the great hooded serpent head and the scorpion tail. They do not look too closely at him or at the audience.

After their act they walk home across a park to their trailers. The noises of the circus come to their ears on the wind. But there is no wind. Orion, striding across the night sky, is also an illusion. He never moves. Their nights are always moonless. The aliens have never bothered to make them a moon.

“Next week,” Lynellen says, “we’re playing in Cleveland.” Or Des Moines, or Toledo. She never says Chicago. Angelo agrees. Time passes. They eat and drink, sleep and make love, fight and make up.

But there is no time in the Circus. Months have passed, or is it years? “I’m asking Marvel for a raise,” Lynellen quips.

Sometimes, under the vast illusion of the big top, they think they see human beings. Ricky swears to have seen clowns. But they have never met the other beings in the ring. Other acts never look their way. Angelo wonders about the blue lizard people that he thinks he sees sometimes in a ring close to their own. But they know only each other, and the great snake-thing they still call Marvel. The universe has got very small. Was there, really, a place called Chicago, a planet named Earth, a gentle lioness named Lila? Angelo is no longer sure. He dreams of them, but they may be only dreams. The stars loom above them like rubious eyes, watching. The hiss on the wind may be laughter, or contempt, or applause. They do not know. There is only the Circus, after all. The Circus goes on forever.

The White King’s Dream

This is another one of my category-straddling stones. Although it was published in
Shadows 2,
I don’t think it’s really a horror story. It came out of five years of working in and around hospitals. The title comes from Lewis Carroll’s
Through The Looking Glass,
in which the Red King lies dreaming the world. Why, you ask, is my dreamer the White King?

Figure it out.

* * *

The straps across her shoulders were cutting through the thin cloth gown. I’m cold, she thought. “Okay, Louise, time to wake up now,” said a voice warm as honey—but I am awake, Luisa thought, and wondered why she could not see the light that she could feel falling on her eyes.

“Baby, I’ll move you into the sun while I change those dirty sheets. You messed the bed again, Louise. 1 know you can’t help it but I sure wish you wouldn’t do it.” At least I can hear, Luisa thought. She heard the voice, and a crying sound, quite close. The sheets were clammy under her. She smelled a stale and sour smell. The straps fell away. Something lifted her. She was afraid.

She was set in a hard chair. The straps came back. The chair was metal and cold. Now she was sitting in the sunlight. She wanted to say
thank you
but her mouth would not move. The close crying sound increased. It was herself; she was crying. The stale sour scent was her own. Helen. Day shift. Every day began like this, except the days when it rained. Helen still came, then, to change her bedclothes, wash her, feed her, shove pills down her shriveled throat; but there was no sunlight to sit in when it rained, and they would never open the windows so that she could smell the rain. All she smelled was her own melting flesh. In Lord Byron there was a fat man crying to get out, and in me there is a skeleton wailing for release.

“Baby, why you screwing up your face like that? Are you too hot?” No, Luisa wanted to scream, no, but Helen’s inexorable hands pulled her out of the warmth and dumped her into her cold barren bed. “Breakfast in a while, Louise. You just put your head back into the pillow and dream, now.”

Even dreams are dreams, Luisa thought.
Y los suenos suenos son.
Dreams no longer meant sleep, and what good was sleep when she had to wake from it again? Sleep just meant the Night shift, and then the Day shift, the sun looking through the windows,
busy old fool, unruly sun.
Breakfast, she thought with loathing. They fed her with a tube down her throat. Sometimes they put a tube like an arm into her and pumped air through her, making her breathe. She hated tubes. Is that Freudian, she wondered, to hate tubes? She wanted to be back in the sunlight, in the warm. She began to cry again, a cat-mewl of sound. Helen might hear it; Helen listened, sometimes, and might understand; and might put her back into the sun.

* * *

“They just like babies,” Helen said. “They’re over ninety, most of them, and they can’t hardly talk, but they can cry. If you watch their eyes you can figure out what it is they want—I can, anyways. You’ll get the hang of it.”

I don’t give a damn, thought Mark Wald. But he nodded. The odors of feces and ammonia fought in the halls. He hated the geriatrics homes, but it was the only place he could get work anymore; the hospitals wouldn’t hire him. The best thing about this place is that the lockers are in the basement and I can go down there to do my drinking in private, the way a man should drink. Unhurried snorts. He would read—he had the latest paperback thriller in his locker now—and drink, slowly, decently. No one would notice on the graveyard shift. During the day there were five aides, three orderlies, two R.N.s on duty. Graveyard shift there were two orderlies, two aides, one R.N., no baths to give or beds to make or people to feed. Stay up all night riding herd on a bunch of whimpering zombies—then go home and sleep till way past noon. Helen was still talking about the patients as if it mattered what they had once done or been. They were zombies now. This one had been a doctor. This one a lawyer. He pretended to listen as she stuck her head into every room.

“Honey, what is it?”

The old lady in the bed had a blind wrinkled face like a sun-struck turtle. She whimpered. “You wet? No, you not wet. Straps too tight?” She loosened the posey straps that held the thin gawk of a woman in bed. “This is Louise; she was a teacher in a college.” The sounds went on. Helen laid a broad black hand on the woman’s forehead and reached for her pulse with the other. “Your pulse’s okay. You cold? I could put you back in the sun.”

The crying stopped.

“That’s it, right? Okay, baby, we’ll put you in the chair. This is Mark, here, he’s a new night shift worker.” She was taking off the cloth restraints as she talked. Mark pulled the wheelchair over to the bed. Together they let down the high sides of the bed, helped Luisa to a sitting position, picked her up, and put her in the chair. Her long fingernails scratched lightly against Mark’s neck. He shuddered.

I won’t get old, he thought. Blind, half dead, a piece of meat in a bed for others to haul around. I’ll die decently. Pills, or gas, or maybe I’ll jump off the bridge. The alcohol will do it for me. He saw himself in an alcoholic stupor, staggering along the road... getting hit by a car, and dying, instantly, no pain, no bedpans, or tubes up his arms and in his ass and down his throat.

It was an old vision. Usually it waited till he was decently asleep. It was always night or early morning in the dream, and the car was always a red car. “Excuse me,” he said to Helen. He ran downstairs. Let her think he had to piss. He twirled the dial of the combination lock on his locker, got it wrong, did it again, got it right, uncapped the bottle, and took a swallow. The bourbon eased down warmly—that was better. Sometimes he felt it was the only warm thing in the world. He screwed the cap on the bottle, locked it up, and sauntered up the stairs. They would know, of course. That Helen would smell it on him. What the hell, they wouldn’t fire him unless he made a mistake. He wouldn’t make a mistake.

Helen was waiting for him at the nursing station. “Let’s hope he doesn’t end up like Harold,” he heard her say. Who the hell was Harold? The nurse at the desk was old and stringy, on her way to looking like that senile crock down the hall.

“Hi,” he said, smiling. “I’m Mark Wald, the new night shift orderly.”

* * *

Graveyard shift was a breeze. The old crocks wheezed and cried and slept. The aides took turns sleeping in the bed in the back room. Mark read paperbacks and sucked on his bottle of bourbon. The other night orderly was an old fag named Morton. He liked playing cards. Mark preferred to read. Morton sulked and played solitaire at the nursing station desk.

“Who was Harold?”

Morton looked up from putting a red queen on a black king. “Oh, it’s you.”

“Who the hell else would it be?”

“Harold was the dude before you. Black and built. Younger than you.”

“He was a fag, too?”

“The word is faggot, sweetie. No. Straight as they come, if you’ll excuse the phrase.”

“What happened to him—he get tired of this dump?”

Morton looked up again. “No, sweetie. He ripped off dope from the narcotics box and O.D.’d on it. Morphine, I think.”

Now why should that Helen even think he would be like some blood who needled himself to death? He hated drugs.

“Su-i-cide, they called it,” said Morton.

“Huh.”

“They come and go. I’ve been working here five years, you know that? Only Helen’s been here longer than I have.” His hands kept placing the cards. He had soft, pudgy hands.

“Helen said this place is a rich people’s dump.”

“It is. Look at the equipment we got! Monitors, crash carts. Those things are for hospitals. The nurses all have standing orders, so that if someone goes Code Red they can give the drugs without calling the doctor on the phone. Ever try to find a doctor at dinnertime? Forget it. All these old bags have money, and their sons and daughters have guilt complexes waiting for them to die.”

“It’s still a dump,” Mark said. His knee brushed the table and all the cards slewed sideways off their piles, “Sorry.”

Morton bent down. “Sure you are, sweetie,” he said. “Sure you are.”

Mark went down to his locker again. He sat with the bottle in his hand. The basement walls were dirty gray and nubby, like the stubble of old men’s beards. He checked his watch. Near 4
a.m., time for somebody to die. It was true they often died at 4
a.m. They had had one respiratory failure that night already, the old lady in 209. Maybe she would die.

As if his thought had done it, a blinker over the basement door started flashing frantic red. Code Red, cardiac arrest. He stuck the bottle in the locker hastily and went up the stairs.

When he got to the room they were all in there. The EKG was jumping like a scalded mouse and the nurse was using the defibrillator. They all stood clear of the metal bedfrarne. The body on the bed jerked. Damn, Mark thought, in a nursing home they were supposed to let you die in peace.

“Call St. Francis’ admitting,” the R.N. said. “This one has to be in CCU.”

Morton went to do that. Waste of time and money, Mark thought. Why can’t they just let the bastards die?

* * *

It is a sophism to imagine that there is any strict dividing line between the waking world and the world of dreams,
prospero’S cell, by Lawrence Durrell, Luisa thought. Today she was feeling strong, almost strong enough to tongue the respirator tube out of her throat. They would never let her do that. She had been to Greece, though not to Durrell’s Corcyra.
Somewhere between Calabria and Corfu the blue really begins.
That was the book’s first line. She tried to remember the blue and white, all the colors, the scent of lemon trees...”Hi, baby. They told us at report you had a bad night! What’d you want to stop breathing for, huh? You know they won’t let you do that around here.” Helen was moving closer to the bed. “It was busy here last night. That Friedman in 211, he arrested last night. They took him to St. Francis.”

Yes,
Luisa thought,
oh yes?

Helen’s voice was gentle as a kiss. “They called this morning to say he passed, baby.” She went on. “Your son’s coming in to see you today, baby; won’t that be nice? He called to say he be in after lunch.”

Johnny—she recalled a little boy named Johnny, who did not at all go with the man-sized voice that sometimes came and talked over her. Be nice, Johnny. She had often had to tell him that, a cranky little boy who liked to fuss...What could she tell him today? That they fed her through a tube and that she could no longer breathe through her own power? That food has no taste when it goes through a tube? That the sea around Greece is blue? How had she borne such an unimaginative child! He had sent her a postcard from Europe, where he had dutifully gone to honeymoon: a picture of the Paris Metro, a giant pneumatic tube. Tubes. Could she tell him she was sick of tubes?