Charles De Lint - Memory and Dream

No, Izzy thought. There’ll be no forgiveness this time. But she couldn’t seem to talk. Her mouth was swollen, her lips bruised. There wasn’t a part of her body that didn’t ache. Every breath she took woke a piercing stitch of pain in her side.

With fumbling fingers she pushed herself away from the easel and tried to stand. She only got as far as her knees. She crouched there on the floor, regarding Rushkin through a flood of tears, both of them kneeling as though they were supplicants in a church of pain.

“Go,” he told her in a broken voice. “Get away. Now. While you can. Before the madness takes hold of me again.”

She wanted to move, but it hurt too much. “I ... I can’t ....”

She flinched when he rose to his feet and reached for her. He hauled her up and half carried, half dragged her toward the door. The gust of cold air that hit her face when he opened the door helped to revive her a little, but everything seemed to spin in her sight as he pushed her outside. She fell in the snow on the landing, unable to make her way down the stairs. When the door opened behind her again, she ducked her head, but not in time.

“Go!” Rushkin cried, and he flung her backpack at her.

The weight of it hitting her was enough to knock her away from the landing and she went tumbling down the stairs with only the snow to cushion her fall as she hit the various steps on her way down. The fall seemed to take forever, but finally she reached the bottom. She lay there in the snow, trying to breathe as shallowly as she could to stop the fierce pain in her side. She looked up when the door slammed above her, but her vision was so blurred that she couldn’t see a thing.

She pulled herself up into a sitting position by grabbing hold of the bottom rail, then bent over again to vomit up the remains of her breakfast. Her head drooped until it was almost touching the foul-smelling puddle. It seemed hours before she could move once more. She shivered as much from the cold as from shock and finally managed to make it to her feet.

She didn’t think she’d ever make it home. She fell three times on the way, but no one helped her.

Everyone who passed by stepped around her, avoided looking at her. They probably thought she was drunk, or stoned. Whenever she could get up and move, she stumbled along, holding on to the sides of buildings with one hand, dragging her backpack with the other. She didn’t know why she didn’t just leave it behind, but she couldn’t seem to open her hand enough to let it fall. Thoughts were too hard to form clearly, but she got the strange idea that if she let go of the backpack, she’d be letting go of everything. She’d never get home, never survive, never stop hurting.

So she clutched her backpack and dragged herself along, one painful step at a time.

VIII

Kathy was in her bedroom, working on a new story, when a weak thumping on the front door of the apartment brought her out to investigate the source of the sound. She opened the door and at first didn’t recognize the small figure leaning up against the doorjamb, arms wrapped around herself, backpack trailing onto the ground by her feet. It wasn’t until Izzy lifted her head that Kathy realized who it was. It took her a moment longer for Izzy’s battered condition to register on her.

“Sorry,” Izzy mumbled. “Couldn’t ... find ... my key ....”

“My god!” Kathy cried. “What happened to you?”

Izzy tried to focus as three or four images of her roommate’s face did a slow spin in her blurry gaze.

All the Kathys looked worried, so she attempted a smile to assure them that it wasn’t as bad as it looked, that she just wanted to have a bit of a lie down, really, and then she’d be fine, but her lips were so stiff from the cold, so bruised and swollen from the beating and subsequent falls, that after those first few words she couldn’t do much more than speak in monosyllables.

“Got ... got mugged,” she managed.

Now why did she say that? she found herself wondering. Why didn’t she just tell the truth? But what was the truth? The harder she tried, the less she could remember of what had happened. Memory and last night’s dreams were all mixed up in her head. Rushkin and John and Paddyjack. Rushkin attacking her, Rushkin attacking Paddyjack, John attacking Rushkin. Crossbow quarrels and dead cats with wings and ribbons fluttering in a crazy pattern that sounded like someone going tap-tap-tap against a hollow stick. Falling down a flight of stairs into the snow. Had that been her, or Paddyjack? Or both of them?

‘just need ... need to ... to lie down,” she mumbled through her swollen lips. “Tha’s all.”

And then she collapsed into Kathy’s arms.

As Kathy carefully pulled her into the apartment and stretched her out on the carpet, Izzy’s fingers finally relaxed enough to let go of her backpack. What happened next took place in a blur of disjointed images and sounds. Izzy kept fading in and out of consciousness, feeling like someone working a faulty radio dial who couldn’t quite tune into the station she was looking for. She heard Kathy on the phone.

She thought she remembered riding in the ambulance. She was sure she’d been lucid while the doctor was talking to her, but then why had the doctor looked exactly like Jilly? She closed her eyes so that she only had to listen.

“—couple of cracked ribs, multiple bruises, mild concussion,” the Jilly/doctor was saying in a Pakistani accent.

It was like she was ticking off items on a grocery list, Izzy thought. Standing inside Injuries ‘R.’ Us, saying, And yes, I’ll have one of those broken arms, too, but only if they’re fresh.

“You say she was mugged?” the doctor went on.

“That’s what she said.”

Kathy’s voice, responding. It sounded as though it came from very far away. The other side of the room. The other side of the city.

“Have you spoken to the police?”

“God, I hadn’t even thought of it. Is she going to be okay?”

“We’d like to keep her in for observation overnight, but I think with a little rest she’ll soon be back on her ...”

The station in Izzy’s head faded out again. It went to static, then blank. The next time she woke up she was in a hospital room. She stared up at the white-tiled ceiling and tried to remember what she was doing here. Behind her temples, a gang of little men appeared to have been commissioned by someone to dismantle her brain. She could feel the demolition ball swinging back and forth, crashing into either side of her head with a throbbing regularity. Then the image changed and it wasn’t little men inside her head, but a gang of teenage boys, surprising her in the lane by Rushkin’s studio, laughing as they knocked her down and then started to kick her ....

The mugging, she thought. That’s why she was here. She’d been mugged. She could remember curling up into as small a ball as she could, trying to shield herself from the blows, trying to survive. No wonder she felt the way she did. Every part of her body bruised and her head filled with this awful stabbing pain.

She wondered if there were any painkillers on her bedside table. Slowly turning her head, she found Kathy instead, dozing on the chair beside her bed. Kathy’s eyes flickered open as though sensing Izzy’s gaze upon her.

“How long have you been sitting there?” Izzy asked.

Her lips were still swollen and her mouth and jaw still hurt, but she could talk at least. She had a vague memory of standing in the hallway of their apartment and not being able to shape anything but the simplest of words.

“All night,” Kathy replied. “But I slept through most of it. How’re you doing?”

“Okay, I guess. My head hurts.”

“I don’t wonder.”