Andrew McGahan - Wonders of a Godless World

The old doctor was walking back inside, holding the papers, his back bent painfully. He was too thin, the orphan had heard others say. He worked too hard, and was too old. Besides that, she knew, he was ill. The captain, meanwhile, who would never be thin, went to the door of his car. Noticing the orphan there, he winked and asked her a question. She understood him easily this time, because it was the same question people always asked her. He wanted to know if it would rain soon.

The orphan looked up. She didn’t need to look, but people expected it, and were even a little unsettled if she didn’t. The sky was clear, but the stars were muddied by the humid air, and it certainly felt as if water-laden clouds would form soon, and cooling winds begin to blow, and lightning to flicker. It was the storm season, after all. But the orphan knew better. She could tell that the great eddies in the atmosphere were moving too slowly for now. It wouldn’t rain tonight, or the next night.

She shook her head.

The captain sighed once more, and wiped sweat from his face. Then he climbed into his car and drove off—heading, the orphan sensed, not for his little police station in the town square, and not for his home, where his wife and children waited, but instead for the jungle hut where his mistress lived. (The orphan had met both the wife and the mistress, and thought the mistress was nicer.) Shortly afterwards, the ambulance driver emerged and set off on his much longer trip back down to the coast.

Alone, the orphan idled a moment, her bare feet twisting in the sand. She could hear distant noises from the back wards. The inmates would not be settling down any time soon. She stared into the night, restless still, and expectant. Was there something out there in the dark? Not a storm massing, but a subtler thing?

Away below the hospital she could see the scattered lights of the town. They were surrounded by the wide darkness of the plantations. And much further off, in the sky beyond the rim of the plateau, was the glow thrown up by the big town, down upon the sea, where the rich people lived and no one ever slept.

The orphan turned and gazed up, behind the hospital, to the mountain. The jungle on its lower slopes was thick and black and impenetrable, but high above, the peak was a lighter shadow against the stars.

No, there was nothing out of place.

But even as she stared, she felt again the tremble in the dust, felt the thrill run up her bones, making her belly squirm. Oh yes, something was on its way. The orphan smiled her mad smile, then skipped back inside to her chores.

Of course, she had not always been an orphan. In fact, she was most likely not an orphan even now. Her mother was dead, but her father was probably still alive, somewhere in the world.

Not that she would ever know. When the orphan was much younger she had overheard a conversation between two pregnant women in the front wards. She had been cleaning nearby, and they had noticed her there and begun to talk about her as if she couldn’t hear them. In particular, they were shaking their heads about all the men the orphan’s mother had been with, and how she had gone down to the big town, where no decent girl would go, and involved herself with criminals. It was no wonder, the pregnant women agreed, that the orphan’s mother had caught a disease. And it was even less wonder that when she gave birth to an ugly little retarded daughter, no man would step forward and claim the child as his own. Why, the father could be anyone.

Young as she had been, the orphan had understood a simple truth— anyone , when it came to fathers, meant the same as no one at all.

She had long since worked out what retarded meant too. Retarded was the same as slow , the same as stupid . Retarded was another term for idiot girl , or for poor dumb child , or for any of the similar things she had heard herself called. Retarded was why she was incapable of speech, and why she had so much trouble understanding the speech of others. It was why she couldn’t read, or write, or do anything they had tried to teach her back in the horrible few years that she had gone to school.

Indeed, throughout her early childhood, as she had no other name to use for herself, words like retarded and slow were the closest she came to an identity. But not long after her seventh birthday (she could remember numbers better than names) her mother had become even sicker than usual, and had been confined to the hospital. The orphan had nowhere else to go and so had stayed at the hospital too, looked after by the nurses. And eventually, after long suffering, her mother had died.

The next day the old doctor had called her into his office. He had explained that she was now a homeless little girl, but that she shouldn’t worry, because everyone was very fond of her, and it had been agreed she could stay on at the hospital. He had said that this was the best she could hope for, because otherwise she was motherless and fatherless and completely alone in the world. She was now, he had announced, an orphan.

An orphan. The gravity of the word had impressed her deeply, and she had accepted it as her true identity, above all others.

Of course, she was only a child at the time. She had grown up since then. The day the foreigner arrived was barely a month after her last birthday; the staff had thrown an especially large party, and declared that she was not a girl anymore, but a woman.

She was, they said, twenty-one years old.

The new patient, meanwhile, was an enigma.

He was admitted to the front wards at first, so that he could be examined in detail. And although the orphan had initially thought of him as the sleeping man , it turned out that often his eyes were open. They were beautiful eyes—wide, the irises a deep brown, the whites unclouded—and yet they were unsettling. There was nothing behind them. No awareness. He might have been a dead thing, lying there.

But he wasn’t dead. His body was warm and alive. His heart beat. His blood flowed. And, to a certain point, he functioned. It did not appear that he could stand, or walk, but if he was propped up in a sitting position, he would not slump over. If liquid was put into his mouth, or soup, or mashed food, he would swallow it. And if, once a day, he was placed in a wheelchair, pushed to the shower block and arranged on a toilet, he would piss and shit on command. Which was a miracle, from the orphan’s perspective. She could only wish that the other patients were all so talented and compliant.

But it was only sleepwalking. There was no consciousness in him. No will. The foreigner never spoke, never looked at anything, never moved of his own volition. Left to himself he would lie motionless on his bed, and seemingly he would do so forever, uncomplaining, until starvation claimed him.

The mystery was, why was he in such a state? The old doctor prodded and probed his new charge, and studied the papers from the hospital in the big town, but found nothing. The man had no infirmities, no diseases, and his only apparent injuries were the burns on his skin. Actually, it was just the one burn, only superficial, and already mostly healed—but it covered his entire body, every crevice, from head to toe. And every single hair had been singed away. He was as naked as a newborn.

What did it mean? How had it happened? The orphan waited, but the old doctor, for all his patience, was unable to solve the riddle, or bring the sleeping man awake. Day after day went by, and he could only shake his head, at first in bafflement, then in frustration, and finally in failure. Of course—the orphan listened to the nurses discussing the situation—if the big hospital with all its experts and machines had failed, what was the old doctor supposed to do, with no money, and no equipment, and so many other patients to care for? Who could expect him to cure the man?