T. Boyle - World's End

It hurt. Oh, god, did it hurt. “What do you think?” he said.

At that moment Joey let out with a whoop that might have been derisive but then again might only have been symptomatic of upper respiratory distress, and buried his face in a polka dot handkerchief the size of a prayer rug. Walter’s eyes shot to him. Were his shoulders twitching? Did he find this funny, was that it?

Mardi took Walter’s hand. “So now,” she said, looking for a way in, “now you, uh, you won’t be able to ride the bike anymore, I guess, huh?”

The bitterness welled up in him, shot through his veins like embalming fluid. Bike? He’d be lucky to walk, though Huysterkark had breezily assured him he’d be on his feet in a month, walking without support in two. Without support. He knew what it would be like, no balance, no connection, staggering down the sidewalk like a drunk walking barefoot over a bed of hot coals. He wanted to cry. And he might have, too, but for the presence of Joey and the dominion of cool. Would Lafcadio have cried? Would Meursault? “It was all you,” he said suddenly, choking up despite himself. “It was you — you left me there, you bitch.”

Mardi’s face went cold. She dropped his hand and pushed herself up from the bed. “Don’t lay it on me,” she said, her voice riding up the register, a single deep groove cut between her perfect eyebrows. “It was you — drunk, stoned on your ass … shit, you almost killed us pulling up to the porch — or did you forget about that, huh? And if you want to know, we looked all over for you — must’ve traipsed through that craphole twenty times, didn’t we, Joey?”

Joey was looking out the window. He said nothing.

“You fucking vampire!” Walter shrieked. “Ghoul!”

A nurse appeared in the doorway, the color drained from her face. “I’m very sorry,” she said, bustling into the room, “but the patient really mustn’t—”

Hostile, deliberate, with her glacial eyes and untameable hair, Mardi wheeled around on her. “Stuff it,” she snarled, and the nurse backed away from her. Then she turned to Walter. “And don’t you ever call me a bitch,” she said, her voice sunk low in her throat, “you, you footless wonder.”

This time Joey really did laugh — it was unmistakable — a high brazen bellow choked off in mid-guffaw. And then he was flashing Walter the peace sign and following Mardi’s cape out the door. But that wasn’t the end of it. Not quite. He paused in the doorway to look back over his shoulder and give Walter a showman’s wink. “Later, bro,” he said.

It all came loose right there. Walter fought off the nurse and sat up rigid, the veins in his neck purple with fury. He began to shout. Curses, jeers, nursery school taunts — anything that came into his head. He shouted like a bloody-nosed mama’s boy in the middle of the playground, cried out every cunt and cocksucker and motherfucker he could muster, howled out his rage and impotence till the corridors echoed like the dayroom at the asylum, and he was shrieking and cursing and babbling still when the rough arms of the attendants pinned him to the bed and the hypodermic found its mark.

When he woke — next day? day after that? — the first thing he noticed was that the bed in the corner was occupied. The curtains were drawn, but he could see the IV stand poking out beneath them, and at the foot of the bed the folds parted to reveal a plastered limb hanging suspended over the crisp white plane of the sheets. He looked hard, as if he could somehow penetrate the curtains, curious in an idle, just-waking, bedridden sort of way — what else was there but lunch, Huysterkark and TV? — and at the same time perversely gratified: someone else was suffering too.

It wasn’t until lunch — soup that was like gravy, gravy that was like soup, eight all-but-indigestible wax beans, a lump of an indefinable meatlike substance and Jello, ubiquitous Jello — that the nurse drew back the curtains to reveal his roommate and fellow sufferer. At first, Walter could barely locate him in the confusion of pillows and sheets, his view obstructed by the expansive backside of Nurse Rosenschweig, who was leaning over to minister to the new arrival’s alimentary needs — good god, were his hands gone too? — but then, when the nurse straightened up, he was rewarded with his first good look at his fellow victim. A child. Shrunken, tiny, propped up in the enormous bed like a stuffed toy.

Then he looked again.

He saw a flurry of pale blanched hairy-knuckled little hands, the glint of knife and fork and, before his field of vision was occluded once again by the fearsome interposition of Nurse Rosenschweig’s nates, a snatch of hair as white as a patriarch’s. Peculiar child, he was thinking, reaching idly to itch at the bandage constricting his calf, when suddenly the nurse was gone and he found himself staring slack-jawed into the face of his dreams.

Piet — for Piet it was, unmistakable, unforgettable, as loathsome and arresting as a tick nestled behind a dog’s ear — was inclined at a forty-five-degree angle, blithely impaling cubes of glistening emerald Jello on the tines of his fork. His nose and ears were enormous, absurdly disproportionate to his foreshortened limbs, white hair sprouted from his nostrils like frost-killed weed, his lips were slack and pouty and there was a dribble of gravy on his chin. A full five seconds thundered past before he turned to Walter. “Howdy, Chief,” he said, grinning diabolically, “good chow, huh?”

Walter was lost in a chamber of horrors, a room with no exit, the dripping dark dungeon of the asylum. He was frightened. Terrified. Certain, finally, that he’d lost his mind. He turned away from the leering little homunculus and stared numbly at the slop on his tray, trying desperately to review his sins, his lips trembling in what might have been prayer if only he knew what prayer was.

“What’s the matter,” Piet rasped, “cat got your tongue? Hey, you: I’m talking to you.”

The misery lay so heavily upon him that Walter could barely bring himself to raise his eyes. What were the five stages of dying, he was thinking, as he slowly swiveled his head: Fear, Anger, Renunciation, Acceptance and—?

Piet, hunched over his floating leg like a sorrowful gargoyle, was regarding him sympathetically now. “Don’t take it so hard, kid,” he said finally, “you’ll get over it. You’re young and strong yet, got your whole life ahead of you. Here,” he was reaching out a stunted arm, at the stunted extremity of which appeared a stunted hand clasping a half-empty bowl of Jello, “you want my dessert?”

Walter’s rage uncoiled with all the vehemence of a striking snake. “What do you want from me?” he spat.

The little man looked puzzled. “From you? I don’t want nothin’ from you — I’m offering you my dessert. I might of ate a bite or two of it, but hey, it’s no big deal — I mean I’m not in here for bubonic plague or anything.” He withdrew the Jello and indicated the plaster-bound foot that swayed above him. “Stubbed my toe!” he hooted, and let out a crazed choking peal of laughter.

He was chortling to himself when the nurse returned. “I just told him I … I … I stubbed my”—he couldn’t go on; it was too much. He was a deflated balloon, all the air knocked out of him with the sheer debilitating hilarity of it. “My toe!” he finally bawled, subsiding into giggles.

Nurse Rosenschweig watched him patiently through all his droll contortions, her big moon face constellated with freckles, her drooping underlip coaching him on. Her only comment, once he’d delivered his punch line, was: “Well, aren’t we lively today.” Then she turned to Walter.

“Hey, sister!” the little man suddenly shouted, his voice twittering with mirth. “Want to dance?”