Waking the Moon

minutes.”

He leaned against the door and watched me go. “Tell Oliver I hope he feels better.” With a soft, nervous giggle he turned away.

Oliver’s room was on the second floor of the hospital. Down the hall a woman wailed in an eerie childish voice. A family composed of father, mother, little girl sat in a dreary waiting area, holding magazines in their laps and staring out the window at the parking lot. When I peered through the door of Room 1141 saw Oliver on the bed, reading The Ginger Man, a copy of the Washington Post Book World atop his pillow. There were bars on the window behind him but no shades or blinds, no curtain pulls or chains or cords. On one pale green wall an unadorned wooden cross hung above a wooden chair. Oliver was very pale. His right foot had been bandaged and was propped awkwardly before him on the bed, like a superfluous piece of luggage. The bandage and green hospital robe, coupled with his shaved head and blanched face, made him look like someone terribly, perhaps fatally, ill.

Seeing him like that terrified me—how long had he looked like this, why hadn’t I noticed before?

Because you were too fucked up yourself, I thought. Too fucked up, too selfish, too fucking stupid to stop him!

Anger and self-loathing flooded me. How could I just have let him go like this? The drugs, of course it was the drugs: he’d been eating acid and mescaline and hashish and god knows what else, eating it like candy for months, maybe years. And this is what it came to—

For one awful moment I thought of turning around and leaving, before he could look up to see me. But then I remembered how he had hugged me the night before, holding me so desperately I almost wept to think of it.

Save me, Sweeney. Don’t fear me…

“Oliver.” I forced a smile as I stepped into the room. “What’s shaking?”

He glanced up. When he saw it was me he grinned and tossed his book onto the pillow. “Smelly O’Keefe! What took you so long?”

I plucked at the sleeve of my shirt and made a face. “Stinky Cassidy, more like it. They let you read that stuff in here?”

He pulled me onto the bed next to him. “Ow. Watch the gam.”

I nodded sympathetically. “Looks pretty gross.”

“Septic poisoning. How’d you get up here?”

“Just walked.”

“Did you sign in?”

“Was I supposed to?”

Right on cue a nurse popped his head through the door. “Somebody at the station said you have a visitor? Oh, hi there—did you sign in? No? Well, don’t get up, what’s your name, I’ll do it, I’ve got to give him meds anyway. Right back.”

“That’s Joe,” explained Oliver. “He’s my keeper—”

Before he could finish Joe was back. “All right, six o’clock, time for these.” He handed Oliver a paper cup of water and another little cup containing two tiny red pills. Oliver waved away the water, tapped the pills into his hand, and swallowed them.

“Ugh. How can you do that, I could never do that.” Joe gave me a measured look, checking me out, I guess to determine if I had a hacksaw stuck down my jeans. “More friends,” he said after a moment. “This boy has more friends. Oh, and Oliver, another one of your brothers called, he said he’d try again tonight. Do you want dinner, sweetheart?”

This to me. I shook my head. “No, thanks.”

“All right, then. Visiting hours on this floor are officially over at seven, but I won’t do a bed check till eight.” He grinned, took the little plastic cup from Oliver’s hand, and left.

When he was gone Oliver got up and crossed the room to the door. He moved slowly, like a gunfighter in an old Western, and I tried not to think about what the hospital robe must be hiding. He closed the door and stayed there for a long moment with his back to me. A moment later I heard him gagging.

“Oliver! Are you okay—”

He turned and nodded, eyes watering, and opened his hand. His palm was wet, streaked with crimson; but before I could cry out he shook his head.

“Thorazine.” He automatically reached for a pocket; then remembered he was wearing a hospital robe. He turned to get a tissue from his nightstand. He wiped his hand and went into the bathroom and flushed the toilet, then walked over to the chair beneath the little wooden cross. “They gave it to me in the ER last night. I was under restraint so I couldn’t do anything about it. It made me hallucinate; I thought I was totally brain damaged. So now I cough them up.”

He kicked absently at the chair, then turned and crossed to the narrow bed, motioning me to join him. “I guess I could save them for you.”

“No thanks.” I smiled. “First time I’ve ever seen you turn down drugs.”

His pale blue eyes were sharp and guileless as he gazed at me. “I’m not crazy, Sweeney.”

“I know you’re not crazy. You don’t look crazy,” I lied. “But…”

But normal people don’t try to cut off their dicks with a Swiss Army knife.

“I don’t look crazy because I’m not crazy.”

I said nothing. After a moment I raised my head to look at him: the dark stubble covering his skull, the crimson web where he’d cut himself with the razor; his cheeks and chin still smooth as a boy’s though I was certain he hadn’t shaved in days.

It was like gazing at someone who had been consumed by fire, a lovely porcelain figurine left too long in the kiln; and now all that remained was this human ash, frail and white and cold. Except for his eyes, those madly burning blue eyes that still might without warning burst into flame.

He covered my hand with his—so cold, surely he shouldn’t be this cold?

“I’m not crazy, Sweeney. I’m just not what they wanted,” he said softly. “Angelica and my father, Warnick and all the rest of them—they all wanted different things, they all wanted something from me I can’t give. They wanted me to be strong, they wanted me to give them a champion. But I can’t, Sweeney. They don’t understand. I’m not like that.

“I wanted to—”

He stopped, stared at his hands with their bitten-down nails.

“I wanted to mend things,” he said at last. He looked at me and sighed. “I know it sounds stupid, but I thought—all this bullshit about darkness, and light, and different powers for men and women—all this fighting, all this, this hatred the Benandanti and the rest of them have—I thought I could make it different, somehow. At least I thought I could escape it,” he added with a grim smile. “But I was wrong, Sweeney. I can’t. No one can. We’ll never understand each other, any of us. Not ever.”

I nodded like I understood, although of course I didn’t. After a moment I asked, “But—if you’re not what the Benandanti want you to be, or Angelica—what are you?”

He tipped his head and smiled.

“I’m lovely,” he sang in his sweet quavering voice. “All I am is lovely…”

I laughed even as my eyes filled with tears, and touched his poor ugly scalp. “Well, you’ll be lovely again, Oliver. It’ll grow back.”

With sudden vehemence he shook his head. “No. Does the reed once cut return? Will the trees now barren turn again to greet the spring? What name did Achilles take among the women? Does the Eagle know what is in the pit?”

His hand shot out to grab my wrist, tightening like a wire as he pulled me to him. “Why is a raven like a writing desk?”

“O-Oliver,” I stammered. His face had twisted into a bitter mask, still smiling, but it was a contorted smile