Andrew McGahan - Wonders of a Godless World

No one. The foreigner hadn’t been sent there to be cured anyway. At length, as was inevitable, he was transferred to the back wards.

The orphan’s home was not in fact the one hospital, but rather two quite separate hospitals in the one compound. There were the front wards, and there were the back wards, and they were very different places.

The front wards, and the hospital offices, were in the forward section of the grounds, housed in a concrete-brick building. This was where the townspeople came if they had everyday medical problems—if, perhaps, they had cut themselves so badly they needed stitches, or if they had broken a bone, or had a cough that wouldn’t go away. It was a free clinic, but it was a long walk from town, uphill along a rutted track through the jungle, so only the common folk made much use of it. Anyone who was well off or important saw their own doctor in town.

The front wards were also where women could come when they were pregnant, to have examinations and, if there were difficulties, to give birth. But it was considered ill-omened by the townspeople to bring a child into the world so close to the demented souls of the back wards, so only the poorest women ever chose to do so. The orphan herself had been born there. A nurse had once told her that it had been a terrible labour, long and bloody and damaging, and the orphan often wondered if perhaps that explained why she was the way she was. Certainly, the pregnant mothers regarded her with suspicion. Sometimes they would hiss curses at her and make signs to drive her away, as if she might spell a similar doom for their own children.

The back wards, on the other hand, weren’t for everyday patients. The back wards were where the dying were kept. And the insane.

The building was hidden behind the front wards, an elongated structure of several wings, with stone walls and high ceilings and narrow windows. It was very old, dating from other times entirely, before the hospital was even a hospital. It had been a grand house once, and grand folk had dwelt there. Or so the orphan was informed. But that was long ago, and she couldn’t imagine it. Now the plaster was flaking away from the walls and the stone was crumbling and the tin roof was red with rust. Inside, it was a grim maze of long wards and metal doors and echoing hallways.

Many people were frightened of the building alone, never mind the inmates. But the orphan wasn’t frightened, no matter how gloomy the wards might be, and no matter how the inmates might scream or yell, no matter even how tangled their hair or bad their breath or shitty their sheets. It was only smell and noise, after all. The building was just a building, and most of the patients were harmless. (The ones who weren’t were kept in the locked ward, where she wasn’t allowed to go.)

She was even happy to work in the back wards at night. The night nurse—coward that he was—was almost too scared to enter there after dark, but the orphan actually preferred it. It was cooler and quieter then, and she was less in people’s way. Most evenings—seeing that the night nurse, apart from being cowardly, was also purely lazy—the orphan was the only soul the inmates might see after lights-out. They liked her for that, and she liked them.

She was less comfortable in the front wards. It wasn’t just the unfriendly looks she received from the townspeople—worse than that, the front wards were the territory of the surgeon, and she didn’t like the surgeon. He was the hospital’s only other doctor, much younger than the old doctor, and all the nurses thought he was very good-looking. But the orphan knew that he cut people open with knives, and whenever he glanced at her, his eyes unsmiling, she felt a little afraid.

To begin with, they put the foreigner in the catatonic ward.

The orphan did not quite understand the word, but to her, these patients were the empty people, the ones with nobody inside them. And of all the back wards inmates, they certainly resembled the foreigner most closely. One, for instance, was a woman who did nothing but sit and brush her hair for hours at a time, staring, even though she had long since brushed herself bald. Another was a boy who rocked back and forth ceaselessly on his bed, his arms clasped around his knees. Others simply slept all day, or gazed blindly at the ceiling, almost exactly as the foreigner himself did. None of them, beyond the occasional incoherent mutter or cry, ever spoke.

But things changed after the foreigner moved in.

Over the following days, the woman with the brush began to rake her skull so severely that blood was drawn. The boy’s rocking gradually became so violent he repeatedly threw himself to the floor. And the others started to moan and shout hoarsely from the depths of their sleep. The nurses were alarmed. What was happening? It was only when they noticed that things quietened down abruptly if the foreigner was removed—when he was taken to the shower, say—that they came to wonder if he might be the cause. True, he hadn’t moved or spoken in all that time, or done anything blameworthy. But there was something strange about him, they all agreed. Those beautiful eyes…

The old doctor scoffed at the idea. He told the nurses that most likely the other catatonics didn’t even know the foreigner was there. But if they really wanted to move him somewhere else, then he wouldn’t stop them.

This time they put him in with the geriatrics .

It was another ward that was usually sleepy and subdued, for only the very old ended up there. Many of the inmates weren’t even all that mad, they were just too infirm to survive on their own, and had no one else to look after them. Others, however, had retreated into deep senility. They drooled, they leered, they smiled and laughed, and sometimes they yelled and cried, but mostly—thanks to the pills they were given morning and night—they dozed in silence. The foreigner, admittedly, was too young to belong there. Although exactly how old he was, no one knew. With his smooth, burnt skin, he didn’t look any particular age. Not young. But not old either.

In any event, he had a peculiar effect on the geriatrics. One old man complained that he was not getting any sleep because the foreigner was climbing out of bed and dancing all night. Other patients concurred. But the orphan knew it wasn’t so. She checked the ward regularly on her evening rounds, and the foreigner never moved. His bedclothes were never even ruffled. Then one morning an old woman, a vague, timid creature who had never made any sort of fuss, was discovered completely naked upon the foreigner’s bed, legs astride his hips, shuddering back and forth in delight. When she was dragged away, she insisted that he had lured her there and possessed her with his eyes and that she would love him till she died. But even while she was on top of him, the man had remained as limp and unconscious as ever.

That was enough for the nurses. Clearly the foreigner was a devil (that word again) of some kind. They wanted him shifted once more. The old doctor was doubtful. It didn’t matter what the old people claimed, he said. They were mad, they imagined things. But the nurses insisted. Of course, they weren’t educated people like the old doctor. They were just working women from the town, full of strange stories and superstitions. But the hospital couldn’t run without them, and so somewhere had to be found to keep the foreigner quietly out of their way.

One option was to lose him among the general community, the everyday mad folk who made up the bulk of the hospital’s inmates. But those wards were chaotic places, full of yelling and running and wrestling, and in fairness, no one thought they were a fitting home for a man who was bedridden and immobile.