Catherine said sharply, 'Lucas, be quiet.'
He strove to be quiet. He ground his teeth together.
The doctor and Catherine returned. The doctor said, 'I will order him some morphine. Since you're so insistent.'
'Thank you,' Catherine answered. 'I finish here at five o'clock.' 'I'll see you then.'
The doctor said, 'I'll send in one of the sisters with the morphine and fresh bandages. I'll return when the surgery room is free.'
'All right,' Catherine said.
The doctor left them. They were there, they three, in the room with the sister and the murmuring man.
Catherine said to Dan, 'Well, then.'
Dan didn't speak, though Catherine seemed to expect it. At length he said, 'I must go back to the works.'
'Yes,' Catherine answered.
Lucas had not thought until that moment that anyone would return to his job. He'd forgotten. He'd been his hand and his pain, he'd been Catherine. But Dan must return to the works.
Lucas said to Catherine, 'Will you stay with me?' 'Of course I will,' she answered. 'You'll be all right,' Dan told Lucas.
Lucas couldn't speak. He began to realize. He'd made an interruption and nothing more. If Dan must return to work now, Catherine would return tomorrow.
'You'll be all right,' Dan said again, more slowly and distinctly, as if he were uncertain whether Lucas had heard him the first time.
Lucas said, 'Which of the young men does she like best? Ah the homeliest of them is beautiful to her.'
'Goodbye now.' 'Goodbye,' Catherine said.
Dan regarded her strangely. His face resembled Catherine's face when Lucas brought her the bowl. Something had occurred between Dan and Catherine. She had shown him the bowl she'd paid too much for. She had shown him her mangled hand. She stood defiantly, harmed and proud.
Because there was nothing to do or say, Dan left. After he had gone, Catherine said to Lucas, 'You must lie down. I'm afraid it will have to be the floor.'
He answered, 'I will go to the bank by the wood and become undisguised and naked, I am mad for it to be in contact with me.'
'Shh. Hush now. You must rest. You must rest and be quiet.'
'I am satisfied I see, dance, laugh, sing.'
'Come along now,' Catherine said. 'You make yourself worse by raving.'
She helped him to lie down on the floor. She sat on the floor herself so he could lie with his head on her lap. Here under his head were the starchy folds of her blue dress.
He said, 'You will stay with me?'
'I told you I would.'
'Not only today.'
'For as long as I need to.'
Lucas was pain and Catherine's lap. The pain was a cocoon that wrapped him like fiery bandages. In the cocoon, in Catherine's lap, it was difficult to think of anything but that. Still, he struggled. He held to himself. He had brought her here, but he'd only saved her from today. He must do something further. He could not know what.
'Catherine?' he said.
'Shh. Don't speak.'
'You have to come away with me.'
'Forget about that. Forget everything.'
He strove not to forget. He said, 'You were wrong, yesterday.'
'Not another word.'
'You must take the baby and go away.'
'Hush. Hush.'
He saw it, through the fiery cocoon. She must take the baby and go to a place like the park at night, a place of grass and silence. She must go out searching, as Walt had told Lucas to do. There were such places, not only the park. He'd seen the pictures. There were fields and mountains. There were woods and lakes. He could take her to a place like that, he thought. He would find a way to do it.
From the cot, the man murmured on.
A sister came into the room. Her black habit was alive; it had created within itself her face, which was carved from wood. She wrapped Lucas's hand in new bandages. She produced (had it been inside her habit?) a syringe full of clear liquid. She took his other arm, the undamaged one, with the practiced calm of a boot maker nailing a sole. She put the needle in, which stung like a bee, a small pain, an interesting one, differently alive, like a tiny flame. She withdrew the needle and departed. She had not spoken at all. Because her face was carved from wood, she wasn't able to speak.
After some time, a flower blossomed in Lucas's mind. He felt it, an unfurling of petals, a transformation from bud to bloom. The pain was there still, but it was not in him anymore. The pain had left him as the spirit leaves the body of the deceased. It had made of itself a curtain, shimmering, as if curtains could be made of glass and the glass were veined with colors and tiny instances of light. The curtain hovered, fragile as glass, around Lucas and Catherine. It encircled them. Pain ran through it in capillaries of blue and green, of softest pink. Where it was most intense, pain produced watery quiverings of illumination, like light on a river. Pain surrounded them, and they were here, inside it.
Lucas didn't think he slept. He didn't think he dreamed. He was able, though, to see things he ordinarily saw in dreams. He saw that outside the pain curtain, outside the walls of the room, was the hospital, with its patiently damaged supplicants and its crying man. Outside the hospital was the city, with its houses and factories, its streets where Walt walked, marveling at everything, at smiths sweating over their forges and women strolling under feathered hats, at gulls circling in the sky like dreams the hats were having. Outside the city was the book, which invented what Walt saw and loved, because the book loved Walt and wanted to delight him. Outside the book… was there anything outside the book? Lucas couldn't be sure. He thought he saw a distance, an immensity that was in the book and outside it. He thought he saw fields and mountains, forests and lakes, though they were not as they appeared in the pictures. He had thought from pictures that they were flat and drab, all murky greens and limpid, shallow blues. He saw now that they were alive and brilliantly colored. There were oceans of grass, swaying. There were mountains blindingly white.
Lucas's forehead was caressed. Catherine whispered to him. He couldn't tell what she said.
Something said, Lucas, it's time. What was it time for?
Everything changed. He stood in the room again, though it was the room as it truly was, a scrim shaped like a room, with a city around it and an ocean of grass beyond. He wondered if others knew. He wondered if the wooden nun knew, for here she was, here was the back of her, and here was Catherine's arm, helping him. He was walking, he seemed to be walking. The curtain of pain followed him, blinking and coalescing.
He was in the corridor where the waiting waited. They were bright with their own pain, suffused by it, rendered beautiful and strange, phosphorescent. As he walked among them, he knew they were his friends. He knew that the harmed, all of them, were his family, relations he had not met but knew by blood.
Then he saw Simon. Simon walked out of a door and stood in the hallway before him.
Lucas stopped. His brother was terrible to see. His face was pulp, with one dark eye staring blindly from its socket and the other vanished entirely. What remained of his hair was matted, plastered to what remained of his skull. His right arm, the one that had been taken by the clamp and pulled under the wheel, was tatters clinging to bone. The fabric of his shirt had gotten muddled up with his chest, so that fabric and flesh were one. His heart, intact, bigger than Lucas would have expected it to be, glistened between the clean lines of his yellow-white ribs.
It was Simon released, finally, from the machine and the box. It was the Simon they had not been permitted to see. How had he gotten out?
Simon said, You've brought her to me.
'Lucas, what is it?' Catherine asked.
