Butcher's Moon

Thirty-seven

When the doctor left he switched off the light, leaving the room in total darkness. A window was open to let in the warm night air, but no illumination entered with it. The sky was black, dotted with high thin stars that showed nothing but themselves. The room remained black and silent, undefined except by the vaguely lighter rectangle of the window and the hair-thin line of yellow light under the door.

After two hours the sliver of moon appeared in the left edge of the window. Tomorrow night it would finish its monthly wink, closing down completely, but tonight it was still visible, though heavy-lidded. It gave very little more light than the stars, an almost unnoticeable pallor that wouldn’t be able to make its presence known if there was any other light source at all.

But in the bedroom there wasn’t. The gray light crept at an angle across the room, picking up a dresser against the wall and a corner of the foot of the bed. As the moon eased across the sky, more of the bed came into existence, until the light touched on a bandaged hand. Dr. Beiny, being as considerate as possible, had taken the last finger of the left hand.

The moon’s angle reached Grofield’s face, the skin as pale and bloodless as the light that defined it. His breathing was very slow and very shallow, and his eyes did no moving at all behind the closed lids. At times his brain fluttered weakly with incoherent dreams that he wouldn’t remember if he ever woke up, but mostly he was quiescent.

The bullet had gone through his body, entering between two ribs and taking a small chip from one of them, passing near the heart, tearing tissue and lung, and exiting through a much larger hole in the back. Dr. Beiny had filled this body with medicines meant to promote healing and guard against infection, had closed and bandaged both holes, had added blood to the depleted store, and was feeding Grofield intravenously with a liquid composed mostly of protein and sugar. The apparatus in the room, chrome and glass, glinting dimly in the moonlight, gave the place the air of a hospital or a medical station near a battlefield: inverted bottle suspended from a chrome armature, syringes, beakers, full and empty squat medicine bottles with cork stoppers through which the hypodermic needle would be thrust.

By midnight the moon was halfway across the window space. A small sound occurred in Grofield’s throat, his eyes twitched inside the lids, the remaining fingers of his left hand contracted slightly. His heart beat slowly but erratically, and then it stopped. The fingers opened out a bit again, losing their tension. The eyes became still. The heart thudded again, blundered forward like a blind man in a dense woods. A long, slow, almost silent sigh emerged through Grofield’s slightly parted lips; not quite the soul leaving the body.

The shred of moon moved on, showing other parts of the room, gradually leaving the bed in darkness. Toward morning Grofield died again, this time for three seconds, in silence and total darkness; then lived again, tenuous, clutching.