Rick Moody - The Diviners

He produces a small flashlight of some kind, it is clipped onto his shirt, and he says that he is going to shine this flashlight in her eyes, and he does so, and the light is so bright that it seems to be shining all the way into the dark places of her body. She closes her eyes. He asks her to open her eyes, and she opens them, and he shines the light, and then she closes her eyes. He says okay let’s move on. He asks her to stretch out her arms. She stretches out her arms. He asks her to keep her eyes closed and to please touch her nose. She doesn’t know what this means, really, and yet she attempts to touch her nose, but unfortunately her hands go wide, her hands seem to have no force guiding them, no volition. After she attempts to do as she is told, there is some silence in the room, and she recognizes that she has not passed this particular test. The doctor asks if she can turn sideways in the bed, so that he can see her feet, and he asks her to close her eyes again. He asks if she can feel this and this, and she wonders what he is doing, because she can feel something, but she is not certain what it is, nor where it is meant to be occurring on the surface of her body.

The doctor introduces himself and tells her his name, and she says, “Pleased to meet you.”

“Can you tell me how you came to be here?”

“Where am I?”

“You’re in the hospital.”

“Why am I in the hospital?”

“You’ve had an accident,” he says. “And I’m interested for the moment in whether you remember anything before your accident. Am I right in assuming that you don’t remember much about that time?”

The questions seem difficult. They must be trick questions. She thinks there are right answers and wrong answers, and also answers that are both right and wrong, and answers that will have something to do with Utica, with Asia, with bricks, and with women, but she is frightened at the possibility of giving the wrong answer or of people knowing the degree of uncertainty that she has about the questions, and so she begins to cry. The tears are involuntary, and she does nothing to conceal them, and because of the tears the doctor says that probably it is best if she rests. And the rest is not like a gentle interval in the day, a sweet and relaxing nap, it’s like a sickness, which apparently it is, because before she knows it she is back in a place that is no place and that is indefinite and characterized by blackness; in this place there are emotions now, and the emotions rotate through her chaotically: frustration, boredom, sadness, apprehensiveness. It is worth noting that never does she feel a pleasant emotion.

Why shouldn’t she just feel happy about the fact that she has consciousness and that her consciousness is separate, she now realizes, from the consciousness of a brick? Why can’t she feel good about not being a brick? Wednesday would perhaps be the day to feel good about it, but Wednesday is the day when they begin to assume that she is going to be awake on a regular basis, and because she is awake, they now believe that she should be doing some things besides simply sleeping and eating and listening to the horrible television on the wall. She doesn’t know what she thought before, if there even was a before, but she knows that she hates that device because everything on the television is like the explosion of lights in her head, and that explosion was so violent that she hopes she never has to experience anything like it again; better to be asleep. Yet every day, every minute, the television is like an explosion of light, and at the end of every one of these explosions it seems as if someone is getting punched or shot or stabbed or arrested by the authorities.

Meanwhile, the torture that is designed for today is the torture referred to as physical therapy. They mean to take her to the floor where exercises are done and see how much she can do. And this is because she has begun attempting to make it unassisted to the bathroom of her semiprivate room. Thus, there is a pair of nurses, and they lift her up, and she puts an arm around each of them, and they lift her away from the bed and they put a robe on her, and now her feet are touching the ground, or, if she looks down, it looks as though her feet are touching the ground, and one of the nurses says that they are going to walk toward the door, and they just need her to put one foot in front of the other foot, that’s the job for now. This sounds so easy when it is said in this particular way.

One nurse says, “You’re our little miracle, right?”

The victim says, “What?”

“We’re just so glad you’re up and around, Samantha. You’re our miracle of the eighth floor.”

“Thanks,” she says. “I guess.” And she thinks that she should get used to the fact that she’s named Samantha. No one seems to be calling her anything else.

Walking is harder than anyone explained. The phenomenon of balance seems as if it must be magic. Is it something that people have to learn or can they just balance themselves? Because whenever the nurses loosen their grip on her, in the thirteen steps to the door, where there seems to be a wheelchair waiting for her, she slumps sideways, collapses, and feels horribly dizzy. The dizziness is overwhelming, and her legs do not do what they are supposed to do, and she begins to tremble at the difficulty of the whole project. Where are those people, the people who must certainly be her parents? They are always here, but today they are not. Why aren’t they seeing this?

Nonetheless, there are things out in the hall. And there are people to see. For example, there is a policeman who seems to guard her room and only her room, though she doesn’t know why, and, though he probably has other things on his mind, he always seems to smile at her. He smiles when she makes it out of the room and into the hall, and he says, “Looking good.” And there’s something about the officer that she forgets at first but then recalls. The officer is an African American police officer. Some of the nurses are also African American. How could she have forgotten about these things?

Everyone seems very happy to see her in the wheelchair. She is the sort of person whom people are very happy to see out in the hall. People actually stare at her, which reminds her that she should know what she looks like. She must look either beautiful or repulsive if everyone is pointing at her. But she doesn’t really have time to think about this too much. Before she can think about it, she’s asleep. Right there, in the wheelchair.

In the night, in the incomplete darkness, there is time to think, and she knows that there was something about being African American that was important. She has to make a note to look at herself when she gets the chance, because she keeps forgetting.

When she is next aware of the day it is a weekend, and the breakfast tray is in front of her. How is it possible that she has been awake for hours before noticing? She has eaten half of her breakfast, and maybe she has even carried on conversations, before being aware of any of these things. How can she eat this appalling food? Everything in her body hurts, and something terrible has happened to her, because she was not always this way. There was a time before this time, and there was a self before this self, and there was a Samantha who wasn’t this Samantha, and therefore this is the moment when she asks of the woman who is often by her bed, “Tell me what happened to me. I want to know what happened.”

The woman looks at her husband, and this is how the victim knows that this woman must be her mother, because, she thinks, a mother is a person who does not want to give bad news to a person, and apparently the victim is a person who is loved by this woman, and so this woman must be her mother, because the mother looks so stricken at the idea that she has to tell the victim what has happened that she passes along the responsibility to the father, who sets aside his newspaper, because he is a man who spends a lot of time reading the newspaper, and so it is given to the man to be the husband of the mother. A father is the person who brings the worst news.