Tom McCarthy - C

“I use another,” she says. “Show me card.”

He shows it to her. She copies his name and number onto a small piece of paper and hands the card back to him. “Next time, bring.”

“Next time?”

She looks back at him without replying. Her look’s not unkind, just knowing and indulgent, like Maureen’s back at Versoie.

The sharpness brought on by the enema stays with him for a while: the air around the park as he walks back through it seems brighter, clearer and less flecked. The feeling lasts for an hour or so; then the gauze contracts and thickens again, veiling the world back up. As he heads to his bedroom after a dinner of soured milk and what looks like horse-food, he passes the stuffed otters, eels and pikes, and realises that he should have compared his vision, when describing it to Dr. Filip, to the glass of their cases: it has the same clouded quality, the same fine-filamented graininess as everything he sees. The glass of the bottled water in his room as well: when he picks one of the bottles up, it’s like holding a miniature and concentrated version of the world-his world at least. The bottle’s got the heart-and-cherub logo on its label and, beneath that, a patent number. Serge pops its top and pours the water out: it, too, is cloudy, darkened, sooty. As he lies in bed, its bitter taste lingers in his mouth despite two vigorous brushings…

The hydrotherapy begins the next morning. After a fruit and yoghurt breakfast and a wander round the Mir fountain with a glass purchased from the kiosk by the signpost, he visits the complex in which hydrotherapy is offered. It’s the Maxbrenner building, built, like the Letna one in which he got his enema yesterday, around the spring whose name it bears. Serge presents his card at the front desk, and is ushered on towards the building’s innards. A musty smell fills its corridors; the air itself is moist and sulphurous. Opening the door of the room he’s been directed to, he’s attacked by vapour which invades his nostrils and half-scalds his lips. Inside, against a wall, are rows of cabinets, large escritoires with hinged covers, like the one that Widsun did his correspondence at when he was visiting Versoie. Some of these are open; others, closed, contain men, locked inside them with only their heads protruding from the top like unsprung jack-in-boxes. Other men’s heads jut out horizontally from blankets wrapped tightly round their bodies as they lie on benches, steaming. They look like insects, like pupating larvae lifted from boiling water. Tubes loll and snake around the room, running from cabinet to cabinet and bench to bench, forming a vapour-gushing mesh in which the human chrysalises all sit, lie or swoon.

A nurse takes Serge’s card and leads him first to a changing booth, then, towel-loined, to a cabinet inside which she seats him, clamping its door shut around his neck. Steam swirls around his enclosed limbs and torso, making them wet and dry at the same time, immersing him without immersing him in anything. Drops form on his forehead and run down his face. It’s sweat and sulphur mixed together: licking it from his lips since he can’t use his constrained hands to wipe it off, Serge tastes the bitter sootiness again. He spends what seems like hours inside the cabinet. To pass the time, he thinks of the ink set next to Widsun’s headed government paper: how he’d dip the signature-seal in the ink and stamp the man’s name out across his forearm while Sophie sat at the desk learning all those cipher sequences. When he’s finally released he sees that the sweat that’s poured from him is dirty, a blue-black, as though he were full of ink.

He’s sent through to an adjoining room to be massaged. The nurse who performs this is only two or three years older than him, short and dark-haired. Her hands make circular passes around his navel, the ball of the hand pressing down into his abdomen before descending in spiralling ovals towards his pelvis; then they move up and down his sides, slapping and sawing. Her body, as she bends above him, seems a funny shape. Her skin is ruddy; her arms and chest give off the same musty, sulphurous smell that pervades the corridors, as though her flesh had imbibed it and turned each of her pores into mini-fountains. When she finishes the massage and straightens up, Serge realises that the unusual shape of her body wasn’t just due to her position as she bent, stroking and kneading, over him: her back is slightly crooked.

“Finish now. Same again tomorrow,” she says. Her voice is low and earthy. She has a glazed look, not quite in the present, as though she were staring through him, or around him, at something that was there before he came and will be there after he leaves.

Serge is meant to have a class with Clair after lunch, but he’s too exhausted. He sleeps till almost four, then makes his way over to Dr. Filip’s. In the waiting room he picks up the Lazensky Soutek, which, as far as he can make out, is a kind of local Bathing Times. It’s amateurish, badly printed onto thick, rough paper. On its front page is a grainy image showing some kind of spectacle taking place, with girls on a stage holding up cut-out suns. That’s what Serge assumes the objects are: they’re sun-shaped but, due to the saturation in the printed photograph, much darker than the girls who hold them. Is that what the Dutch woman was talking about? Do they do Pageants here, just like at Versoie? There’s a text beneath the image, but Serge doesn’t understand it. He looks up from the paper. The other patients are resting their sample-filled jars across their knees, or on the seat beside them. His is waiting for him in Dr. Filip’s office: the doctor’s holding it up, turning it around and inspecting it when he walks in.

“Not good; very much not good,” Dr. Filip says disapprovingly. “Please to look.”

He hands the jar to Serge. On its outside is a label bearing the handwriting of the nurse who hydro-mined him for its contents. The matter inside is solid, liquorice-black, with an undulating surface in whose folds and creases small reserves of dark red moisture have collected.

“Blood,” says Dr. Filip, pointing. “You have cachectic condition: encumbrances in bowel causing autointoxication. Ptomaines, toxins, pathogens all enter bloodstream. Look how dark it is.”

“You mean the blood?” Serge asks. “Or…”

“Both,” snaps Dr. Filip. “And if not treated, more. You have a poison factory in you that secretes to arteries, liver, kidneys and beyond. To brain too, when we don’t prevent.”

“What’s causing it?” Serge asks.

“Morbid matter!” Dr. Filip’s thin voice pipes from his small mouth. “Bad stuff. If I am speaking several hundred years ago I call it chole, bile-black bile: mela chole. Now, I can call it epigastritis, alimentary toxemia, intestinal putrefaction, or six or seven other names-but these do not explain what causes it. It needs a host to nurture it, and you are willing. Yesterday you spoke to me of what it wants, which means you serve its needs, make them your own. This we must change.”

“How?” Serge asks.

Dr. Filip’s whiskers rustle as his lips curl in a wry smile. “I cannot tell you this,” he says. “You must discover. I can prescribe treatment and diet, monitor symptoms. The rest is for you.” He slips a sheet of paper from his drawer and starts to write. “Take this to chemist,” he tells Serge. “The pills, one time each day-not more: too many all at once will kill you. And drink the water, always, all day long. If abdomen distends a little, not to worry. Like your own Lord poet Tennyson has said of faith: ‘Let it grow.’ ” His eyes glow slightly, like thin filaments, registering satisfaction at the quip he’s just made. Then their grey-metallic colour returns as he tells Serge: “Please to go now.”