World's End (40 page)

As he lay there, his face as composed as a sleeping child's—not a mark on him, the hair swept back from his brow where Lola's hand had rested, his lips parted and eyelids trembling in the deeps beyond consciousness—he was assailed by dreams. But this time everything was different, this time his dreams were free of mocking fathers, sententious grandmothers and carcasses stripped to the bone. He dreamed instead of an unpeopled landscape, misted and opaque, where sky and earth seemed to meld into one and the air was like a blanket pulled over his face. When he woke, smothering, Jessica was leaning over him.

“Oh, Walter,” she moaned, a low rumble of grief rising up like gas from deep inside her. “Oh, Walter.” Her eyes were wet for some reason, and two sooty streaks of mascara traced the delicate flanges of her nose.

Walter looked around the room in bewilderment, looked at the gleaming instruments, the IV bag suspended above him, the empty bed in the corner and the cold gray eye of the television mounted on the wall. He gazed on the chipper yellow of the wall itself, that uplifting, breakfast-nook yellow, and closed his eyes again. Jessica's voice came to him out of the darkness. “Oh, Walter, Walter … I feel so bad for you.”

Bad? For him? Why should she feel bad for him?

This time he didn't take her hand, press his lips to hers, fumble with the buttons of her blouse. He merely flashed open his eyes to give her a venomous look, a look of resentment and reproach, the look of the antihero on his way out the door; when he spoke, he barely moved his lips. “Go away,” he murmured. “I don't need you.”

Walter didn't become fully aware of his predicament until late that afternoon, when, on waking to the hellish heat of his invalid's room and a blur of snow across the window, he glanced up to see Huysterkark grinning and scraping his way into the room. Then, and only then, did he feel for his left foot—his favorite, his precious, his only foot—and understand that it was no longer a part of him. The image of the deserted landscape of his dream fused in that moment with the leering face of his father.

“Well, well, well, well,” Huysterkark said, rubbing his hands together and grinning, grinning. “Mr. Van Brunt—
Walter
Van Brunt. Yes.” Clamped firmly between his right arm and chest as if it were a rolled-up copy of the
Times
was the new prosthetic foot. “Well,” Huysterkark beamed, drawing up a chair and crab-walking to the bed, “and how are we on this fine blizzardy afternoon?”

How were we? There was no way to answer that question. We were panicked, in the throes of despair and denial. We were angry. “You, you—” Walter sputtered. “You took my, my only—” He found himself overwhelmed by self-pity and sorrow. “Son of a bitch,” he snarled, tears in his eyes. “You couldn't save it? You couldn't try?”

The question hung between them. Snow drove at the windows.
Dr. Rotifer to Emergency, Dr. Rotifer,
crackled the intercom.

“You're a very lucky young man,” Huysterkark said finally, wagging his head and pressing a pensive finger to his blanched lips. His voice dropped and he extracted the foot from the nest of his underarm. “Lucky,” he whispered.

Walter had been out for two days, Huysterkark informed him. When they'd got him into Emergency it was nearly dawn and he was frozen half to death. He was lucky to be alive. Lucky he hadn't lost his fingers and nose to frostbite in the bargain. Did he think the staff here was incompetent? Or apathetic? Did he understand just how mangled
that foot had been—comminuted fracture, ankle joint demolished, soft tissue mashed to pulp? Did he know how Doctors Yong, Ik and Perlmutter had worked over him for two and a half hours, trying to restore circulation, set fragmented bones, reattach blood vessels and nerves? He was lucky he hadn't gone down someplace upstate or on the other side of the river—or what about in the Deep South or in Italy or Nebraska or some other godforsaken place where they didn't have Hopkins-trained physicians like Yong and Ik and Perlmutter? Did he realize just how fortunate he was?

Walter didn't realize it, no, though he tried. Though he listened to Huysterkark's voice sail through its range of expression, through the sforzando of intimidation to the allegro of thanksgiving and the bustling hearty brio of salesmanship. He could think of one thing only, and that was the unfairness of it all, the relentless, crippling, terrifying assault of history and predestination and lurking conscious fate that was aimed at him and him alone. It boiled in him till he closed his eyes and let Huysterkark do with him what he would, closed his eyes and fell back into his dream.

It was on the afternoon of the third day that Mardi showed up. She'd abandoned the raccoon skin for a black velvet cape that sculpted her shoulders and hung from her like a shroud. Underneath it she was wearing blue jeans, painted cowgirl boots and a see-through blouse in a shade of pink that glowed like Broadway on a rainy night. And beads. Eight or ten strands of them. In the doorway behind her was a guy Walter had never seen before.

There was the pain killer, the drowsy stuffiness of the room, the leaden sky with its angry black bands of cloud that stretched like bars across the window. “You poor thing,” she cooed, clacking across the linoleum to bend over him in a blast of perfume and briefly insert her tongue in his mouth. He could feel the nimbus of her hair framing his face, tendrils of sensation poking through the flat dead field of his pain, and despite himself experienced the first faint stirrings of arousal. Then she was straightening up, unfastening the clasp of the cape and indicating her companion with a jerk of her head. “This is Joey,” she said.

Walter's eyes cut to him like knives. Joey was in the room now,
but he wasn't looking at Walter. He was looking out the window. “Joey's a musician,” Mardi said.

Joey was dressed like Little Richard's wardrobe designer, in three clashing paisleys and a Tillamook-colored cravat that fell to his waist. After a moment he stole a glance at Walter, laid out flat and footless in bed, and said “What's happening, man?” without a hint of irony.

Happening? What was happening? Mutilation, that's what. Dismemberment. The reduction of the flesh, the drawing and quartering of the spirit, the metastasis of horror.

“God,” Mardi said, perched on the bed now, the cape fallen open to reveal the see-through blouse and all there was to see beneath it, “if only you'd come with Joey and Richie and me the other night—down to Times Square, I mean. …” She didn't finish the thought. Finishing the thought would have meant admitting the inadmissible. She settled for a pronouncement on the lack of proportion in the cosmos: “It's just so bizarre.”

To this point, Walter hadn't uttered a word. He wanted to utter a few, though. He wanted to give vent to the outrage percolating inside him, wanted to ask her what she meant by leaving him in a house full of strangers while she trotted off to New York with this chinless fop in the Beatle boots and cheesy necktie, wanted to ask if she loved him still, if she'd have sex with him, if she'd shut the door and pull the shades and tell Joey to go take a hike, but her eyes went strange all of a sudden and he checked himself. Her slow gaze took in the length of him stretched supine on the bed, and then she turned to look him in the face. “Does it hurt?” she murmured.

It hurt. Oh, god, did it hurt. “What do you think?” he said.

At that moment Joey let out with a whoop that might have been derisive but then again might only have been symptomatic of upper respiratory distress, and buried his face in a polka dot handkerchief the size of a prayer rug. Walter's eyes shot to him. Were his shoulders twitching? Did he find this funny, was that it?

Mardi took Walter's hand. “So now,” she said, looking for a way in, “now you, uh, you won't be able to ride the bike anymore, I guess, huh?”

The bitterness welled up in him, shot through his veins like embalming fluid. Bike? He'd be lucky to walk, though Huysterkark had
breezily assured him he'd be on his feet in a month, walking without support in two. Without support. He knew what it would be like, no balance, no connection, staggering down the sidewalk like a drunk walking barefoot over a bed of hot coals. He wanted to cry. And he might have, too, but for the presence of Joey and the dominion of cool. Would Lafcadio have cried? Would Meursault? “It was all you,” he said suddenly, choking up despite himself. “It was you—you left me there, you bitch.”

Mardi's face went cold. She dropped his hand and pushed herself up from the bed. “Don't lay it on me,” she said, her voice riding up the register, a single deep groove cut between her perfect eyebrows. “It was you—drunk, stoned on your ass … shit, you almost killed us pulling up to the porch—or did you forget about that, huh? And if you want to know, we looked all over for you—must've traipsed through that craphole twenty times, didn't we, Joey?”

Joey was looking out the window. He said nothing.

“You fucking vampire!” Walter shrieked. “Ghoul!”

A nurse appeared in the doorway, the color drained from her face. “I'm very sorry,” she said, bustling into the room, “but the patient really mustn't—”

Hostile, deliberate, with her glacial eyes and untameable hair, Mardi wheeled around on her. “Stuff it,” she snarled, and the nurse backed away from her. Then she turned to Walter. “And don't you ever call me a bitch,” she said, her voice sunk low in her throat, “you, you footless wonder.”

This time Joey really did laugh—it was unmistakable—a high brazen bellow choked off in mid-guffaw. And then he was flashing Walter the peace sign and following Mardi's cape out the door. But that wasn't the end of it. Not quite. He paused in the doorway to look back over his shoulder and give Walter a showman's wink. “Later, bro,” he said.

It all came loose right there. Walter fought off the nurse and sat up rigid, the veins in his neck purple with fury. He began to shout. Curses, jeers, nursery school taunts—anything that came into his head. He shouted like a bloody-nosed mama's boy in the middle of the playground, cried out every cunt and cocksucker and motherfucker he could muster, howled out his rage and impotence till the corridors
echoed like the dayroom at the asylum, and he was shrieking and cursing and babbling still when the rough arms of the attendants pinned him to the bed and the hypodermic found its mark.

When he woke—next day? day after that?—the first thing he noticed was that the bed in the corner was occupied. The curtains were drawn, but he could see the IV stand poking out beneath them, and at the foot of the bed the folds parted to reveal a plastered limb hanging suspended over the crisp white plane of the sheets. He looked hard, as if he could somehow penetrate the curtains, curious in an idle, just-waking, bedridden sort of way—what else was there but lunch, Huysterkark and TV?—and at the same time perversely gratified: someone else was suffering too.

It wasn't until lunch—soup that was like gravy, gravy that was like soup, eight all-but-indigestible wax beans, a lump of an indefinable meatlike substance and Jello, ubiquitous Jello—that the nurse drew back the curtains to reveal his roommate and fellow sufferer. At first, Walter could barely locate him in the confusion of pillows and sheets, his view obstructed by the expansive backside of Nurse Rosenschweig, who was leaning over to minister to the new arrival's alimentary needs—good god, were his hands gone too?—but then, when the nurse straightened up, he was rewarded with his first good look at his fellow victim. A child. Shrunken, tiny, propped up in the enormous bed like a stuffed toy.

Then he looked again.

He saw a flurry of pale blanched hairy-knuckled little hands, the glint of knife and fork and, before his field of vision was occluded once again by the fearsome interposition of Nurse Rosenschweig's nates, a snatch of hair as white as a patriarch's. Peculiar child, he was thinking, reaching idly to itch at the bandage constricting his calf, when suddenly the nurse was gone and he found himself staring slack-jawed into the face of his dreams.

Piet—for Piet it was, unmistakable, unforgettable, as loathsome and arresting as a tick nestled behind a dog's ear—was inclined at a forty-five-degree angle, blithely impaling cubes of glistening emerald Jello on the tines of his fork. His nose and ears were enormous, absurdly disproportionate to his foreshortened limbs, white hair
sprouted from his nostrils like frost-killed weed, his lips were slack and pouty and there was a dribble of gravy on his chin. A full five seconds thundered past before he turned to Walter. “Howdy, Chief,” he said, grinning diabolically, “good chow, huh?”

Walter was lost in a chamber of horrors, a room with no exit, the dripping dark dungeon of the asylum. He was frightened. Terrified. Certain, finally, that he'd lost his mind. He turned away from the leering little homunculus and stared numbly at the slop on his tray, trying desperately to review his sins, his lips trembling in what might have been prayer if only he knew what prayer was.

“What's the matter,” Piet rasped, “cat got your tongue? Hey, you: I'm talking to you.”

The misery lay so heavily upon him that Walter could barely bring himself to raise his eyes. What were the five stages of dying, he was thinking, as he slowly swiveled his head: Fear, Anger, Renunciation, Acceptance and—?

Piet, hunched over his floating leg like a sorrowful gargoyle, was regarding him sympathetically now. “Don't take it so hard, kid,” he said finally, “you'll get over it. You're young and strong yet, got your whole life ahead of you. Here,” he was reaching out a stunted arm, at the stunted extremity of which appeared a stunted hand clasping a half-empty bowl of Jello, “you want my dessert?”

Walter's rage uncoiled with all the vehemence of a striking snake. “What do you want from me?” he spat.

The little man looked puzzled. “From you? I don't want nothin' from you—I'm offering you my dessert. I might of ate a bite or two of it, but hey, it's no big deal—I mean I'm not in here for bubonic plague or anything.” He withdrew the Jello and indicated the plaster-bound foot that swayed above him. “Stubbed my toe!” he hooted, and let out a crazed choking peal of laughter.