Thorns

ELEVEN: TWO IF BY NIGHT

The hospital lay at the very edge of the desert. It was a U-shaped building, long and low, whose limbs pointed toward the east. Early sunlight, rising, crept along them until it splashed against the long horizontal bar linking the parallel vertical wings. The construction was of gray sandstone tinged with red. Just to the west of the building—that is, behind its main section—was a narrow garden strip, and beyond the garden began the zone of dry brownish desert.

The desert was not without life of its own. Somber tufts of sagebrush were common. Beneath the parched surface were the tunnels of rodents. Kangaroo mice could be seen by the lucky at night, grasshoppers during the day. Cacti and euphorbias and other succulents studded the earth.

Some of the desert’s abundant life had invaded the hospital grounds themselves. The garden in the rear was a desert garden, thick with the thorned things of dryness. The courtyard between the two limbs of the U had been planted with cacti also. Here stood a saguaro six times the height of a man, with rugged central trunk and five skyward arms. There, framing it, were two specimens of the bizarre variant form, the cancer cactus, solid trunk, two small arms crying help, and a cluster of gnarled, twisted growths at the summit. Down the path, tree-high, the grotesque white cholla. Facing it, squat, sturdy, the thorn-girdled barrel of a water cactus. Spiny canes of an opuntia; flat grayish pads of the prickly pear; looping loveliness of a cereus. At other times of the year these formidable, bristling, stolid gargoyles bore tender blossoms, yellow and violet and pink, pale and delicate. But this was winter. The air was dry, the sky blue in a hard way and cloudless, though snow never fell here. This was a timeless place, the humidity close to zero. The winds could be chilling, free of weather, going through a fifty-degree shift of temperature from summer to winter but otherwise remaining unaltered.

This was the place to which Lona Kelvin had been brought in summer, six months ago, after her attempt at suicide. Most of the cacti had already flowered by then. Now she was back, and she had missed the flowering season once more, coming three months too soon instead of three months too late. It would have been better for her to time her self-destructive impulses more precisely.

The doctors stood above her bed, speaking of her as though she were elsewhere.

“It’ll be easier to repair her this time. No need to heal bones. Just a lung graft or so and she’ll be all right.”

“Until she tries again.”

“That’s not for me to worry about. Let them send her for psychotherapy. All I do is repair the shattered body.”

“Not shattered just now, though. Just badly used.”

“She’ll get herself sooner or later. A really determined self-destroyer always succeeds. Let them step into nuclear converters, or something permanent like that. Jump from ninety floors up. We can’t paste a smear of molecules together.”

“Aren’t you afraid you’ll give her ideas?”

“If she’s listening. But she could have thought of that herself if she wanted to.”

“You’ve got something there. Maybe she’s not a really determined self-destroyer. Maybe she’s just a self-advertiser.”

“I think I agree. Two suicide attempts in six months, both of them botched—when all she needed to do was open the window and jump—”

“What’s the alveolar count?”

“Not bad.”

“Her blood pressure?”

“Rising. Adrenocortical flow’s down. Respiration up two points. She’s coming along.”

“We’ll have her walking in the desert in three days.”

“She’ll need rest. Someone to talk to her. Why the hell does she want to be dead, anyway?”

“Who knows? I wouldn’t think she was bright enough to want to kill herself.”

“Fear and trembling. The sickness unto death.”

“Anomie is supposedly reserved for more complex-…”

They moved away from her bed, still talking. Lona did not open her eyes. She had not even been able to decide how many of them had been over her. Three, she guessed. More than two, less than four—so it had seemed. But their voices were so similar. And they didn’t really argue with each other; they simply placed one slab of statement atop the next, gluing them carefully in place. Why had they saved her if they thought so little of her?

This time she had been certain she was going to die.

There are ways and ways of getting killed. Lona was shrewd enough to conceive of the most reliable ones, yet somehow had not permitted herself to try them, not out of fear of meeting death but out of fear of what she might encounter on the road. That other time she had hurled herself in front of a truck. Not on a highway, where vehicles hurtling toward her at a hundred and fifty miles an hour would swiftly and effectively mince her, but on a city street, where she was caught and tossed and slammed down, broken but not totally shattered, against the side of a building. So they had rebuilt her bones, and she had walked again in a month, and she was without outer scars.

And yesterday—it had seemed so simple to go down the hall to the dissolver room, and carefully disregard the rules by opening the disposal sac, and thrust her head in, and take a deep breath of the acrid fumes—

Throat and lungs and throbbing heart should have dissolved away. Given an hour’s time, as she lay twitching on the cold floor, and they would have. But within minutes Lona was in helpful hands. Forcing down her throat some neutralizing substance. Thrusting her into a car. The first-aid station. Then the hospital, a thousand miles from home.

She was alive.

She was injured, of course. She had burned her nasal passages, had damaged her throat, had lost a considerable chunk of lung tissue. They had repaired the minor damage last night, and already nose and throat were healing. In a few days her lungs would be whole again. Death had no dominion in this land any longer.

Pale sunlight caressed her cheeks. It was late afternoon; the sun was behind the hospital, sinking toward the Pacific. Lona’s eyes fluttered open. White robes, white sheets, green walls. A few books, a few tapes. An array of medical equipment thoughtfully sealed behind a locked sheet of clear sprayon. A private room! Who was paying for that? The last time the government scientists had paid. But now?

From her window she could see the twisted, tormented, thorny shapes of the cacti in the rear garden. Frowning, she made out two figures moving between the rows of rigid plants. One, quite a tall man, wore a buff-colored hospital gown. His shoulders were unusually broad. His hands and face were bandaged. He’s been in a fire, Lona thought. The poor man. Beside him was a shorter man in business clothes, lean, restless. The tall one was pointing out a cactus to the other. Telling him something, perhaps lecturing him on cactus botany. And now reaching out with a bandaged hand. Touching the long, sharp spines. Watch out! You’ll hurt yourself! He’s sticking his hand right on the spines! Turning to the little one now. Pointing. The little one shaking his head—no, he doesn’t want to stick himself on the spines.

The big one must be a little crazy, Lona decided.

She watched as they came nearer her window. She saw the smaller man’s pointed ears and beady grey eyes. She could see nothing of the bigger man’s face at all. Only the tiniest of slits broke the white wall of his bandage. Lona’s mind quickly supplied the details of his mutilation: the corrugated skin, the flesh runneled and puddled by the flames, the lips drawn aside in a fixed sneer. But they could fix that. Surely they could give him a new face here. He would be all right.

Lona felt a profound envy. Yes, this man had suffered pain, but soon the doctors would repair all that. His pain was only on the outside. They’d send him away, tall and strong and once more handsome, back to his wife, back to his…

…children.

The door opened. A nurse entered, a human one, not a robot. Though she might just as well have been. The smile was blank, impersonal.

“So you’re up, dear? Did you sleep well? Don’t try to talk, just nod. That’s so good! I’ve come to get you ready. We’re going to fix your lungs up a bit. It won’t be any trouble at all for you—you’ll just close your eyes, and when you wake up, you’ll be breathing good as new!”

It was merely the truth, as usual.

When they brought her back to her room, it was morning, so Lona knew that they had worked her over for several hours and then stored her in the post-op room. Now she was swathed in bandages herself. They had opened her body, had given her new segments of lung, and had closed her again. She felt no pain, not yet. The throbbing would come later. Would there be a scar? Sometimes there were scars after surgery even now, though generally not. Lona saw a jagged red track running from the hollow of her throat down between her breasts. Please, no, no scar.

She had hoped to die on the operating table. It had seemed like her last chance. Now she would have to go home, alive, unaltered.

The tall man was walking in the garden again. This time he was alone. And now he was without his bandages. Though his back was to her, Lona saw the bare neck, the edge of jaw. Once more he was examining the cacti. What was it about those ugly plants that drew him so? Down on his knees now, prodding at the spines. Now standing up. Turning.

Oh, the poor man!

Lona stared in shock and wonder at his face. He was too far away for the details to be visible, but the wrongness of it was plain to her.

This must have been the way they fixed him up, she thought. After the fire. But why couldn’t they have given him an ordinary face? Why did they do that to him?

She could not take her eyes away. The sight of those artificial features fascinated her. He sauntered toward the building, moving slowly, confidently. A powerful man. A man who could suffer and bear it. I feel so sorry for him. I wish I could do something to help him.

She told herself she was being silly. He had a family. He’d get along.