Джоанн Гринберг - I Never Promised You a Rose Garden

Sometime later a nurse came in to tell her something. Perhaps she smelled the burned flesh, for she forgot what her message was and left, and soon a doctor was there. Deborah saw through her mask, with relief, the picture of the face of Dr. Halle. That it was summertime somewhere else and that the picture was in fact a living being, she accepted on faith, like facts too remote to be worth debating—the number of miles in the earth’s circumference, or the statistical variations of waves of light.

“What do you mean by a backfire?” he was saying.

“It seems necessary,” answered a representative of the volcano.

“Where?”

“On the surface.”

“Show me.” The words were careful but not critical or hypocritical.

The sleeve was now stuck to the burned place, but she pulled it off before he could cry the civilized “Don’t!”, instinctively wincing a little and thrusting his hand out as if she were made of real flesh.

After he looked, he said, a little sadly she thought, “I think I’d better take you up to …D.’ ”

“Whatever.”

“Well”—and with a hint of a gentling—“you’ll be one of my patients there. I’ve just taken over the administration of that ward.”

She gave the Yri hand-gesture of compliance with the slightly upward tilt, meaning that whether or not there was darkness, at least she felt safer because Halle could be spoken to and never gave the Number Three with Smile. He took her, with his usual decent lack of fuss, back to the D ward. When they stood inside the double-locked doors, someone from Yr said, Look at him. See? He feels safer now.

Poor man, she answered.

“You’ve made pretty much of a mess there,” Dr. Halle said, studying the burned place. “It’ll have to be cleaned up and it’s going to hurt.”

A student, delighted to be “medical” again, was standing by with an impressive tray full of medical metal. Dr. Halle began to scrub and clean the burn. A faint sensation followed his instruments, but there was no pain. For his concern and the time he was taking, Deborah wanted to give him a present. She remembered Furii and the gift of the cyclamen.

She is dead, though, Anterrabae said.

But you can give him a flower, Lactamaeon whispered.

I have nothing tangible.

Furii gave you a memory of hers, Lactamaeon said. She thanked Lactamaeon with the Yri thanks: Go warm-shod and well lighted in the mind.

She tried to think of a truth to tell the doctor as a present. Perhaps it might be the one about seeing—that even when seeing every line and plane and color of a thing, if there was no meaning, the sight was irrelevant and one was just as well blind; that perhaps even the famous Third Dimension is only meaning, the gift which translates a bunch of planes into a box or a madonna or a Dr. Halle with antiseptic bottle.

“I’m being as gentle as I can,” he was saying.

She looked at him sharply to see if he was trying to burden her with the responsibility of gratitude. No. She wondered if he was immune to her poisonous nganon. She decided that her gift would be a reassurance that he could touch her and not die.

“Don’t worry,” she said graciously, “the time of contact is so short that there is no chance of infection.”

“That’s why I’m using this,” he said, swabbing away. As he was bandaging, she realized that he had not understood, so she decided to tell him about the meaning of the third dimension of sight. It came out in a single blurted sentence.

“Vision isn’t everything!”

“No, I guess not,” he said, finishing up. Then, as if he had caught something, he said, “Do you have trouble with your eyes?”

“Well”—Deborah was embarrassed by the suddenness of the truth—“when I get upset … I usually have trouble seeing properly.”

Oh. really? How interesting, the Collect said sarcastically.

“Shut up! I can’t hear myself think!” Deborah shouted at them.

“What?” Dr. Halle turned. Deborah looked at him in horror. Her words to Yr had pierced the barriers of the Earth’s hearing. The clamor from the Collect built higher until it was an overwhelming roar and the gray vision went red. Without warning the full Punishment fell like an executioner’s hand and the testimony of light, space, time, gravity, and the five senses became meaningless. Heat froze and light hurled tactile stabbing rays. She had no sense of where her body was; there was no up or down, no location or distance, no chain of cause and effect….

She endured outside of time and beyond exhaustion, and then she came up in world’s daytime, a pack, a strange doctor.

“Hi.”

“Hi.”

“How are you?”

“I don’t know. How long …” But she realized that he could not know when she had started down. “How long since I have been up here?”

“Oh, three days or four.”

She became aware of aching in her hands and little aches along her arms and shoulders. She became terrified. “Did I hit anybody? Did I hurt anybody?”

“No.” He smiled a little. “You were having quite a go at the doors and windows, though.”

In revulsion and shame she tried to turn away, but a neck cramp caught her so that she began to cough and had to turn back toward him to work it away. “I don’t know you. How come you are here?”

“Oh, I’m on call today. I stopped in to see if you were okay.”

“Good God!” she said in awe. “I must have torn the place down. They never call a doctor unless somebody’s killed himself.”

He laughed a little. “That’s not true for me; I’m a new doctor. Can you come out? Do you feel ready?”

“I don’t know,” she said.

“Well, we’ll give you another half hour. Don’t worry about that aching. A lot of it is just tension. Well—so long.” She heard his key busy in the lock and the inexpertness was strangely moving.

When she returned to her bed on “D”—it was one which she had had before in the front dorm—she found it surrounded by woe. In the shuffle of comings and goings, the Wife of the Abdicated had been moved two beds down and Deborah was now between Fiorentini’s Mary and Sylvia, still mute and vacant about the face. The Punishment had exhausted Deborah and she lay on her bed watching the world’s shadows draw long, shading the world’s time toward evening.

Mary lay resting on the next bed. After a while she said gaily, “Kid, I never knew you had it in you. You can really fight!”

“I didn’t hit anyone …” Deborah said, feeling a little sick at the mention of it and wondering if she had, in spite of what the young “new” doctor had said.

“Oh, but the talent is there; the talent is definitely there!” Mary laughed her laugh like breaking glass, an imitation of mirth from one who had never understood it. “But, you are insane of course, out of your mind—didn’t know what you were doing.” Again she used a light voice, a parody of an actress in a sophisticated comedy.

“Yes,” Deborah said quietly, “but I can’t figure out why I came out of it … why it stopped. …”

“Well, really, every case like you ought to realize that that hell ”—and she began to shake with shudders of high, shrill laughter—“can’t last any more than you can stand it. It’s like physical pain—tee-hee-hee—there’s just so much and then, no more!”

“You mean that there is a limit to the thing?”

“Well, more would be obscene, my dear, simply obscene! ” And the high, young-girl giggle broke again into a sharp, back-bristling laughter.

Deborah wondered if Mary were right and if, in the nightmare of no laws, there were at least boundaries. The light faded and the dormitory grew dim. Perhaps there was mercy even in Hell. Her vision cleared a little and the softened lines of the beds and the walls and the bodies of the breathing dead around her took on the faint glow of the summer dusk. The overhead lights went on and with them came the knowledge that Mary, agony and all and with her awful laughter, had reached out with what little help she could summon, if only to say that there was, indeed, a limit. Even poisonous persons could, if they threw all their courage and energy into it, help one another. Carla had done it, Helene had done it, Sylvia in her death as furniture had done it, and now Mary had offered from herself a fragment of hard wisdom.