The Fourth Watcher

45

He has been underground a long time. Stones push down on his chest. Some of them have been sharpened to points. Every time he breathes, he has to push the stones up with

his chest to make room for the air. The air smells surprisingly of linoleum, alcohol, something unidentifiable that’s as sweet and heavy as syrup, and, floating on top of all the other smells, a razor-sharp note of fresh linen.

The light comes closer. It seems to be finding its way by touch, spreading pale tendrils in all directions: forward, left and right, up and down, but always moving toward him. He waits, pushing up the stones with every half breath, watching the light extend itself toward him, now not so much smoke as a shining vine. When the vine reaches him, it will wrap itself around him, put down microscopic roots, fill him with light. Once he is charged with light, feels it surging tidally through his body until he is radiant with it, he will be able to lift the stones.

The bum-BUM noise has increased in frequency, faster now, and then faster still, until it begins to vibrate inside him, not unpleasantly but with the urgency of an indecipherable message. Bum-BUM, he thinks, pairs; what’s so important about pairs? Pairs of drumbeats, pairs of breaths, pairs of people, pairs of numbers.

Pairs of numbers?

Something dims the light. Whatever it is, it’s not between him and the light; it seems to be behind it somehow, throwing a shadow that travels down the vine like dirty water in a clear stream, and as the light thins and clouds, the stones feel heavier and sharper, and they grate against one another, a sand-gritty sound, less like stones than like. . what? A room, he sees a room, and it’s a terrible shade of green. It, too, smells of linoleum. Someone is with him, someone who doesn’t like the sound of a shoe scraping over dirty-

A shoe. On linoleum.

Then the vine brightens again, blooming with light, and he opens one eye, just a crack, narrow as a blind drawn against the massed brightness of the day, to see a world of white. Close to him, only a foot or two away, is a white shape, white without outlines but brighter than the white beyond it, and it is moving. Moving parallel to him, away from his feet and toward his head, and he hears the scraping sound again, and then a whisper.

There is a second figure, this one brown, a brown he knows very well. A brown that makes him think for a second or half a second that he is looking at himself; he is out of his own body and looking at it as it moves across this white room, following the figure in white. He closes the eye, but the urgency of the tom-tom sound warns him to open it again, and he forces the lid up. The light floods into him and strengthens him, and he can focus.

A hospital room. White but for a darker rectangle where black is in the slow act of giving itself over to blue, with a note of orange bleeding upward, warming it from below. A window. Dawn? What dawn? How long has-

A doctor, dressed in white. Masked in white. Behind him a Bangkok policeman. Dawn through the window, the sharp pain of the stones on his chest, the smells, the sound of shoes on linoleum, a brilliantly clear sudden memory of a dark room, a big man, some kind of enormous, rib-caving punch to the chest, a slow fall. A girl in white.

White. The white-clad doctor, at the head of the bed now, reaching up. A gentle tug at the wrist, no more intense than a fly landing on it. The doctor has a clear plastic bag in one hand, filled with a liquid as transparent as water. In the other hand is a hypodermic syringe.

The policeman comes closer, watching the doctor. He is close enough for the man on the bed to see his face, a new face, a face he doesn’t know, and to read the name tag on the uniform. The name tag says petchara.

Arthit’s eyes open wider as the doctor inserts the syringe into the top of the clear IV bag and pushes the plunger. Something-some tensing in his body-brings Petchara’s eyes down to the bed, and he starts to speak, but Arthit rides a bolt of ten thousand volts of neural electricity to rip the intravenous needle from his own wrist and shove it into Petchara’s thigh, while with his other hand he grabs the clear plastic bag and squeezes. Petchara leaps away, and Arthit lets the bag drop and sees the policeman stagger, dragging the bag with him, until his back hits the window where dawn is announcing itself, and finally it occurs to him to yank the needle. He stares at it in his hand, stares at the mostly empty bag, and then all his muscles let go, and he drops, loose-jointed and as awkward as a marionette, to the floor.

The doctor is already out the door when Arthit finds and pushes the big red button on the side of his bed. He can no longer hold his head up. His vision blurs and darkens at the edges, narrows, and the room disappears, leaving nothing but the rectangle of dawn, more orange now, framed by the window.

He sleeps.