Nelson Algren - The Man with the Golden Arm

For she was on to all their tricks and knew a thing or two she wasn’t telling. She wasn’t telling one of them of the magic skate she wore which got her back, all the way, every time, because of a certain skater who showed her the way, far up ahead with a sort of light about him no matter how dark and cold it was behind.

Small wonder they didn’t want her to leave, they were getting paid well enough to keep her. What they were really afraid of was that she’d bring her business elsewhere.

That was why they wouldn’t return her clothes, why they kept on taking her temperature to pretend they thought she was sick. That was why they took to surprising her. The door would open without warning in the middle of the night and the light would go on – they’d catch her at it then, her head in her hands and her knees drawn up. It got to be something of a game: when she lost she got the needle.

They never knew of the times they never caught her at all.

At first she had fought against them, spat their thermometers out on the floor, bitten a nurse’s hand and refused their food, their voices, their hands and their terrible eyes.

Then, too abruptly, had turned strangely docile. ‘That’s a real good girl,’ she heard the nurse tell the doctor. ‘She’s just as good as she can be now, Doctor, we’re ever so proud of her.’ Without looking at their eyes Sophie was pleased. She had caught the falseness of the nurse’s tone and sensed her sudden docility had them more worried now than had her hostility. They didn’t know how to bring her out of it. They knew that her docility was feigned; but couldn’t reach her through it. For it wasn’t docility. It was a wall.

Behind it she began evading them. So what they wanted of her now was exactly what they had first punished her for: to weep against them, to curse them, to beg them to let her go and to throw the food on the floor in a biting spite.

Now she ate only so long as they guided her hand to her mouth and not one spoonful more.

‘Just try eating this yourself. You can eat and walk too. If you just wanted to.’ Underneath the warmth of the nurse’s tone was a concealed rage at this one who wouldn’t come out of the shell and was wiser in her spite, somehow, than any of them.

Right along with breakfast, the next morning, the nurse brought a deck of cards to test this one’s wisdom, and Sophie understood right away. When she had all the cards in the world counted she could go home. That would show them she was as smart as could be, so they would have to let her go.

So it was that, knowing they watched her secretly, yet feeling wonderfully at peace with herself, she sorted the cards most carefully and counted them one at a time to be sure not to make a single mistake and spoil all her chances. She could tell by the way they stood, a bit to the side, so white and stiff and proper, the way good doctors and nurses must always stand until they are told to go away.

Sorted and counted so carefully, according to some strange, wanton pattern drifting like a rainbow-colored fog bank through her mind, counting by color and whim and a wayward cunning the way she’d counted falling snow from a window that faced the El.

And when they were all properly counted began throwing them one by one, selecting this one and rejecting that, because this one was a good little card and that one had been naughty – and always somehow picking the one they hadn’t expected at all – the very one she knew they hadn’t seen, since it had been hiding from everyone but herself. Tossing them according to the slow suspended motion of the snow that had fallen so slowly all night long and he hadn’t come home at all.

Tossed them toward the cot’s iron corners, making each one come down face up or face however she wished, just by telling each, in her mind, which way to land as it fell; so each did his trick just as he was told.

When it was all done at last and time to go home she looked up and told the doctor pleasantly, ‘Now you must tell the precinct captain to bring my new-look dress and the green babushka so I can go home looking nice,’ and added, just because it always pleased her to say it, ‘you with the cooky duster.’

‘I’ll tell the precinct captain,’ Cooky Duster assured her, his grave gray eyes never leaving her face for a moment. ‘I’ll tell him you’re moving to another precinct.’

She looked at them both then, with such seeming trust, that something of pity stirred beneath the white-starched hospital jackets. For they saw a child’s face, puffed by some muted suffering she could never tell. The face she had rouged, from the nurse’s compact, so it was that of a child painted to look like a clown’s.

And the eyes so dark and buttoned so tightly. So pinched by that private, midnight-colored grief.

The doctor nodded to the nurse, saying something Sophie wasn’t supposed to hear at all. So she spoke right up and told them to their faces, ‘You can just tell them the whole business is a dirty lie and everyone has to stop pretending it isn’t right this minute.’ She saw their look of genuine amazement and paused in a quick fear that somehow she had given herself away and would not be going home after all. For both at once urged her to say more, say something more, anything more. She made a slow, weaving motion then with her hand and sang teasingly, just for Cooky Duster to hear: ‘Oh, Doctor – you do me so much good.’ Then hid herself behind her eyes and grew so rigid, under the nurse’s stroking, that the doctor had to tell the woman to stop.

‘There’s real spite for you,’ Sophie heard the nurse decide.

That night, just to show what she thought of them both, Sophie went down the street lined with the picture-postcard trees, pushing herself on the single skate; trying to keep the skater ahead in view all the way to the porch with the leaves strewn along the arc lamp’s broken light.

But there, for the first time, she was left all alone in the dark. It was later than ever before and he had not waited to show her the way back. So dark, so cold, so far to go with leaves rustling so darkly all around. Till the chimes of old St Stephen’s rang once and the wind began blowing the flies away. The lights went on and a voice said right in her ear: ‘What are you thinking of right now, Sophie?’

She drew her knees to her chin and showed the voice what it was like to be dead.

Whenever they peered into the whitewashed room after that they saw only a gently rocking shadow in a long gray nightgown on the built-in cot, her head in her hands and her knees to her chin with the playing cards scattered and forgotten. Like everything else she had scattered and forgotten, across the cold gray concrete at her feet.

When they gathered the cards off the floor at last and took them away in a neat little box she said in a whisper, for she knew then she had won: ‘The wind is blowing the flies away. God has forgotten us all.’

Nor ever asked again for anything more but a sense of a white-washed stillness about her rising each day higher and more white.

The everlasting walls of Nowhere Land, higher than any hospital wall.

From which is no returning.

The wind had blown the summer flies away. God had forgotten His own.

As soon as he got the shoe off he pried at the naked heel with a razor blade to get at the lead in the flesh. But the blood began again, the wrist went weak as water and he lay back with the blood-smeared paw across his forehead and the naked foot resting upon the crumpled tabloids with the pain beating straight through the morning line to the unclean cover on which he lay. He felt the blood drying on the dated headline under his ankle.

Once he got up, fetched a scrap of soap off the washstand and began rubbing it across the ankle to get the blood off. But the light was too strong and he fell back on the bed with his checkered cap doubled under his head for a pillow, still clutching the sliver of soap in his hand. He wished that somebody would make the light stop swinging or shade it.