Stanislaw Lem - Hospital of the Transfiguration

Minutes passed as the rain beat on the roof and the low electric hum persisted, but the noise coming from the cages did not let up. Something was rustling, scraping, buzzing, as if a living being was dashing about and pushing in all directions: the strange sounds came from opposite ends of the cage in turn, from the bottom and then from the top near the ceiling. The mysterious thing seemed to be jerking more and more violently behind the steel screen. A blue flash suddenly filled two of the cages, grew stronger, casting distorted shadows of the two men against the opposite wall, then vanished. An acrid, searing smell burned Stefan’s nostrils. There was another sharp hiss and a crackling flame winked in the depths of another cage; a flurry of sparks shot from the metal bar that stuck out under the screen.

Old Pościk stood up, stuffed his pipe into his apron pocket, and, standing rigidly erect, looked silently at Woch. The operator grabbed him tightly by the arm and, his face twisted into what could have been anger, shouted something that was swallowed up by the clap of a nearby thunderbolt. A sudden flash ripped through three of the cages, extinguishing the lights for an instant, and the whole wall looked as if it was on fire. Woch pushed the old man toward Stefan and with his hands in front of him slowly went to the control panel. It sounded as though someone was shooting a pistol in the cages, and blue and red flames poured through the screens. Choking on the smell of ozone, Stefan backed off down the corridor, stopping at the door. The old man hunched beside him and Woch, after taking a last look at the apparatus, sprang after them with a youthful stride. They stood together in the corridor. Things quieted down behind the screens. A few small blue flames still danced in the comers. The thunder was receding, but the rain still drummed steadily on the roof.

“It’s over,” the old man finally said, taking the pipe out of his pocket. His hands seemed to be trembling, but it was too dark to tell.

“Well, we’re still alive,” Woch said. He walked back into the room, stretched as though awakening from a good sleep, slapped his hands against his hips, and sat down abruptly on a stool.

“It’s all right now,” he nodded to Stefan, “you can come in.”

The thunder stopped completely but the rain still fell as though it might go on forever. The old man shuffled around the room, making notes on a sheet of graph paper. Then, opening a door in the comer that Stefan had not noticed, he disappeared inside and rummaged around, making a lot of noise that sounded like metal clattering. He came back carrying a frying pan, a spirit stove, and a pot of peeled potatoes. He put things on the table and the floor and set about preparing a meal. Murmuring “What can I offer you” over and over, he tiptoed around, disappeared, came back, put the pan on, and, enveloped in a cloud of burning fat, broke and sniffed the eggs with an expression of devout concentration. In the meantime, Woch formally invited Stefan to wait out the rain in the substation.

Stefan asked what had happened. Woch explained about the lightning rods that protected them, about circuit breakers, and about the excess current, and although Stefan did not understand everything, he felt that something else had happened and that Woch was minimizing the danger for reasons known only to himself. Stefan had no doubt that there had been danger—he could tell that from the way the two operators had acted. Woch showed him around the room, naming all the equipment, and even let him look into the back room where he had first gone to talk to Pościk. An iron drum hung on the wall with copper rails leading down from it, and on the floor was a large container full of coils which, Woch explained, would protect against fire if the drum, which was a breaker, sprayed out burning oil.

“What’s under the coils?” asked Stefan, trying to sound reasonable and relevant.

Woch looked at him coolly. “Why should anything be under the coils? There’s nothing.”

They went back to the room. A small bottle of eighty-proof vodka and a sliced pickle had appeared on the table. Woch poured out tiny glasses, drank to Stefan’s health, then corked the bottle and hid it behind a pillar, announcing: “Vodka is bad for us.”

He said nothing more about what had happened during the storm, but he got friendlier. He ignored the old man, as if he were not even there. He took off his jacket and hung it over" the back of his chair. His gray sweater stretched across his chest. He took out a tin tobacco box and some cigarette papers and offered them to Stefan. “It’s strong,” he warned.

Stefan tried to roll a cigarette, eventually producing a crooked weed whose ragged ends he licked so hard that the tobacco fell out. Woch, who had been pretending not to watch, took a paper and a pinch of sawdust-like tobacco between two stubby fingers, snapped his thumb up, and handed Stefan a cigarette ready to be licked. Stefan thanked him and bent over Woch’s lighter. The flame nearly burned his eyebrows, but Woch deftly moved it aside. The first puff choked Stefan, tears came to his eyes, but he tried his best to look natural. Woch pretended not to notice again. He made another cigarette for himself, lit it, and they sat silently as the smoke merged into a single blue cloud under the lamp above their heads.

“How long have you been working in this field?” Stefan asked, realizing that the question might sound foolish but unable to think of anything else. The operator puffed on his cigarette as if he had not heard, then suddenly slapped his hand down.

“I went to work when I was a boy this high,” he said, holding out his hand. “No, this high,” he said, lowering it. “In Małachowice. They didn’t have electricity yet. The French came to set up the turbines. The foreman was an honest man. When he shouted in the boiler room, you could hear him out on the ramp. But he didn’t scream at kids, he was patient and tried to teach them. The first time you went up on the high-tension circuit-breaker to dust it off—because that’s how you start—he’d show you the brush with the dead man’s hand on it. You never forgot that.”

“I don’t understand,” Stefan said.

“Just a regular paintbrush. Horsehair. That’s what you use to dust. But the current has to be off in the cables, no tension. If you forget and touch a live cable, flame shoots out and that’s it. Anyway, this was a brush from someone who forgot. A guy fresh from the village. I didn’t know him, he was before my time. His fingerprints were burned into the handle, black as coal. In fact, the corpse was black as coal from head to toe. Burned to a crisp.

“Anyway,” Woch went on, “that’s the way to do it. Nobody ever learned our trade from talking. Good eyes, good hands—that’s what you need. And always look alive. I liked the work. And my boss liked me. I went from low voltage to high voltage. I worked on the lines for a while, but my heart wasn’t in it. The lines aren’t for me. Put on the irons, climb up, climb down, pull the lines, over and over again, from pole to pole. Everyone gets sick of it, so they have to keep hiring new people. Vodka is the only joy in that work. One mistake, one wrong cable, and bang! Everlasting glory.”

The half-finished cigarette stuck to his lip so he had both hands free, though he wasn’t using them at the moment.

“I worked with a guy named Józef Fijałka. All he did was drink. He was already drunk by the time he got to work and he never talked, just mumbled, but he was a good worker as long as he was on his feet. He drank from payday until his money was gone. The first half of the month, he was an angel, the second half, the hell with him. Once he disappeared right after payday. They looked everywhere and finally found him in the switching station. He’d gone to sleep right between the high-tension cables, but he was drunk and nothing happened. They picked him up by the legs and pulled him out. Very carefully. Eventually he got himself killed. It was on a transformer. I went to see him in the hospital, and he was covered with bandages. He asked me to lift up his arm, and when I did, there was nothing in his armpit. Just bones. All the flesh was gone. He died fast.”