Michael Cunningham - Specimen Days

He heard the sound of the others. Someone it would be Tom pulled the second lever, which reversed the wheel. Someone else, it was Dan, put his own hand over Lucas’s wrist as the machine began slowly to release it. Lucas saw Dan’s big hand, with its two missing fingers, receive his own.

His hand had been flattened. He thought for a moment that it was unharmed, that it was only larger. But no. Blood welled up around his fingernails. He held up his big, bleeding hand. He wanted to show it to himself and Dan. Briefly, his fingernails were outlined in red. The blood increased. It ran in streams down his fingers.

He fell. He hadn’t meant to fall. One moment he was standing looking at his hand, and then he was on the floor, with the black ceiling over him. There were the pulleys and hooks. The floor smelled sharply of oil and tar.

Dan’s face arrived. Tom’s face arrived. Tom put his arm under Lucas’s head. Who’d have imagined him capable of such tenderness?

Dan’s face said, “Stay here with him.” Dan’s face departed.

Tom’s face said, “My God.” Tom’s mouth was broad, its lips rough. Its teeth were the color of old ivory.

Lucas said to Tom’s mouth, “Please, sir. Send for Catherine Fitzhugh, at the Mannahatta Company. Tell her I’ve been hurt.”

In the hospital, a man stood crying. He was dressed for his work, in a butcher’s apron smeared with animals’ blood. His affliction was uncertain. He appeared to be whole. He stood with grave formality, as a singer might stand on a stage.

Around him were the others. They sat in what chairs there were. They sat or lay on the floor. There were men, some old and some not yet old, wounded in ways that could be seen (one bled extravagantly from a gash in his forehead, another tenderly stroked his mangled leg) and in ways that could not. There were women who sat quietly, as if whatever sickness had brought them here were as ordinary as sitting in their parlors; one of them, in a tobacco-colored kerchief, coughed demurely, a sound like paper tearing, and leaned forward now and again to spit on the floor between her feet. A man and a woman and a child huddled together on the floor, rocking and moaning as if they shared an injury among them. There was the smell of sweat and other humors mixed with ammonia, as if humanness itself had been made into medicine.

Sisters in black habits and a doctor in white no, there were two doctors hurried among those who waited. Sometimes a name was called, and one of the people rose and went away. The man went on standing in the room’s center, crying with a low, unwavering insistence. He was the waiting room’s host, as Mr. Cain was the host of Lucas’s block, its wounded and inspired angel.

Lucas sat on the floor with his back against the wall. Dan stood over him. Pain was a hot, brilliant whiteness that suffused Lucas’s body and bled into the air around him. Lucas held in his lap the bundle that was his hand, wrapped in rags soaked through with blood. Pain originated in his hand but filled him as fire fills a room with heat and light. He made no sound. He had gone too far away to speak or cry. Pain was in him like the book or the works. He had always been here, waiting in this room.

He leaned his shoulder against Dan’s leg. Dan reached down and stroked his hair with the fingers he had left.

Lucas couldn’t tell how much time had passed. Time in the waiting room was like time in his parents’ bedroom and time at the works. It passed in its own way; it couldn’t be measured. After a span of time had passed, Catherine came. She walked into the room in her blue dress, alive and unharmed. She stood at the entrance, searching.

Lucas’s heart banged hotly against his ribs. It hurt him, as if his heart were an ember, harmless when it hung in the bell of his chest but painful when it touched bone. He said, Catherine, but couldn’t be sure if he had actually spoken. He made to rise but couldn’t.

She saw him. She came and knelt before him. She said, “Are you all right?”

He nodded. Tears sprang unbidden to his eyes. He had an urge to conceal his hand from her, as if he had done something shameful; as if, seeing his hand, she would know some final secret about him.

Catherine looked up at Dan. She said, “Why is he still out here?”

“They told us to wait,” Dan answered. “We’ll see about that.”

Catherine rose. Lucas could hear the rustle of her dress. She went among the others, stepping around them. She stood near the crying man until a sister passed, carrying something on a tray, something that had made a red stain on the cloth that covered it. Catherine spoke to the sister. Lucas couldn’t hear what she said. The sister replied and walked away.

Catherine returned. She bent over, put her face close to Lucas’s. She said, “Are you in much pain?”

He shook his head. It was true and not true. He had entered pain. He had become it.

She said to Dan, “He’s still bleeding.” Dan nodded. It would be foolish to deny it. “How long have you been here?” she asked. “I don’t know,” Dan said.

Catherine made her stern face. For a moment, Lucas felt as if he had come home, as if the hospital were where he lived.

A doctor, one of the doctors, came out of the door through which they took the people whose names were called. The doctor was thin (there was another who was not thin) and grave. Lucas thought briefly that the doctor was one of the men in the cages at the works, the men who scowled over papers and counted out the pay. One of them was a doctor, too. No. The doctor was someone else. Catherine went to the doctor with dispatch (she moved so quickly among the prone bodies of the ill) and spoke to him. The doctor frowned. He looked at Lucas, frowning. Lucas understood. There is always someone poorer than you. There is always someone sicker, more grievously harmed.

Catherine took the doctor’s arm. They might have been lovers meeting. Catherine might have been the doctor’s fiancee, taking his arm and insisting as a woman could that he accompany her on an errand she knew to be necessary. Lucas wondered if she and the doctor had met before.

The doctor frowned differently he had a language of frowns at Catherine’s hand on his white-sleeved elbow. But, like a lover, he came with her. She led him among the bodies to where Lucas sat.

She said, “He’s had his hand crushed at the works.”

The doctor offered a new frown. He was a marvel of frowns. This one was canted, rakish.

The doctor said, “Someone over there has had his leg half torn off. The surgery rooms are full. We are doing all we can.”

“He is a child.”

“There are others here before him.”

“He is a child who supports his parents, who does work much too hard for him, and he has had his hand crushed. His brother died less than a week ago. You must attend to him.”

“We will attend to him presently.”

“You must do it now.”

The doctor made his face darker. He retracted his eyes, made them smaller but brighter in his darkened face. “What did you say, miss?”

“I beg your pardon, sir,” Catherine answered. “I don’t mean to be rude. But please, please attend to this boy. As you can see, we’re beside ourselves.”

The doctor made a decision. It was easier, the doctor decided, to comply. Others were here before Lucas, but they would wait, as they’d learned to do.

“Come with me,” the doctor said.

Dan helped Lucas to stand. He put his arm around Lucas’s back and helped him walk, as Lucas had helped his mother back to bed once. When had that been? The doctor led them, though it seemed it should be Catherine who led.

They passed through the door. It opened onto a corridor that was full of other people. Like those in the waiting room they sat or lay upon the floor. They left a narrow aisle through which the not sick could pass. Lucas wondered if the hospital was like the works, if it was room after room, each different and each the same, leading on and on like a series of caverns until at some length they reached what? Healing itself. A living jewel, a ball of green-gold fire.