Lana swallowed two mouthfuls, and then the doctor placed a Waterman fountain pen between the fingers of her right hand and opened the journal in her lap to a blank page.
“What’s your name?”
She wrote:
“You live in Silver—”
She stopped him with a raised hand, wrote:
He stared hard into her eyes, as if attempting to discern whether the claim was valid or just the raving of a madwoman.
“You stretching the blanket for me?”
She scrawled:
The doctor sighed.
“Why’d he do it?”
She shrugged, wrote:
He whispered, “How much?”
Dr. Primack stood up, said, “Excuse me, Miss Hartman,” and turned to the man in the rocker.
“Milton, could I speak with you in private?”
Lana craned her neck to peek out one of the windows beside her bed. The darkness was riddled and blurred with flecks of light like some syphilitic rash upon the town, the nefarious amusement of Blair Street and its salas and silver exchanges unrestrained even at this hour—pianos, dogs barking, aggressive laughter, breaking glass.
The door opened and the doctor walked in, alone.
He came and sat down on the bed and repositioned the pen between her fingers.
“How long have they been locked in?”
She wrote:
“Do they have food? Water?”
She shook her head.
“Where is this mine, exactly?”
She was becoming light-headed, and twice the pen slipped from her grasp and she had to start over, make the words legible. She finally wrote:
Dr. Primack looked annoyed as he rose from the bed and lifted the ruined, sodden garment from the board floor beside the dresser. He brought it over, said, “Why do you want this?”
Lana reached for it, her right hand slipping into the inner pocket, grasping the key.
“What’s that open?”
She wrote:
Lana was crying as Dr. Primack handed Milton the cloth, standing poised beside her left arm.
“I’ll have it off in two minutes.”
She stared at the finely serrated blade of the amputation saw dripping red water onto the bed, the collection of knives laid out on the sheets, the bottle of ether, the Kelly pad under her arm, the washtub glistening red under the electric light.
Though she was fading from the big dose of laudanum, her heart still reeled.
“Go ahead, Milton.”
Here came the cloth, sharp bite of ether in the back of her throat, and then she floated in a warm gray sea, flanked by swirling voices.
“Damn, that was fast.”
“Hold the cloth to her mouth.”
“She ain’t awake.”
“Do what I tell you or get the fuck out.”
Lana smiled, gleaming with morphine, and still in that same bed in that same room in the Grand Imperial, only now it was filled with the natural light of morning and noise from the street below.
She thought,
Beautiful Dr. Primack stood at the foot of her bed, speaking with another man—round and gray-bearded, holding a bowler against his thigh, a shiny object catching early sunlight pinned to his black frock coat.
When she tried to lift her right hand to catch their attention, she felt the straps binding both arms to her sides.
She made a noise with her throat.
