by Peter Straub
Beneath the flaring pain in his hips, groin, and right leg there moved another level of pain like a shark waiting to strike. This pain would obliterate the world. When he had experienced it he would never again be the person he had been. He would be set apart from himself and everything he had known. Tom expected this deep lurking pain to move upward and seize him, but it continued to circle inside his body, as lazily powerful as a threat.
Tom turned his head to look sideways, and caused only a minor flare from his right shoulder. As he did so, he unconsciously rubbed his left hand over the smooth rounded curve of his groin where his penis should have been—something down there was peeing, he could not imagine what, could not think about it or begin to picture it. Just past his head on the far end of the sheet stood three curved tubular guard rails that marked the edge of his bed, and past the bed was a white table with a glass holding water and a funny-looking straw. His mother’s straw bag lay on a chair. A door stood open on a white corridor. Two doctors walked past. I’m here, he wanted to shout, I’m alive! His throat refused to make any sound at all. The doctors continued past the door, and Tom realized that he had seen a glass of water. His eyes came back to the glass on the bedside table. Water! He reached for the glass with his left hand. In the instant his hand touched the table Tom heard his mother’s voice coming in through the open door.
“STOP IT!” she yelled. “I CAN’T TAKE IT ANYMORE!”
His hand jerked by itself and knocked the glass into a stack of books. Water sheeted out over the table and fell to the floor like a solid pane of silver.
“I TOOK IT ALL MY LIFE!” his father yelled back.
The secret pain deep in his body opened its mouth to devour him, and far too quietly to be heard Tom cried out and fainted again.
The next time he opened his eyes a jowly face peered down at him with quizzical seriousness.
“Well, young man,” said Dr. Bonaventure Milton. “I thought you were coming up for air. Some people have been waiting to talk to you.”
His great head swung back and away, and the faces of Tom’s parents crowded into the empty space.
“Hiya, kid,” his father said, and his mother said “Oh, Tommy.”
Victor Pasmore glared at his wife for a second, then turned back to his son. “How do you feel?”
“You don’t have to talk,” his mother said. “You’re going to get better now.” Her face flushed, and tears filled her eyes. “Oh, Tommy, we were so—you didn’t come home, and then we heard—but the doctors say you’re going to heal—”
“Of course he’s going to heal,” said his father. “What kind of guff is that?”
“Water,” Tom managed to say.
“You knocked that glass right off your table,” his father said. “Sounded like you threw a baseball through the window. You sure got our attention.”
“He wants a drink,” said Gloria.
“I’m the doctor, I’ll get a new glass,” the doctor said. Tom heard him walk out of the toom.
For a moment the Pasmores were silent.
“Keep breaking those glasses, you’ll cost us a fortune in glassware,” his father said.
His mother burst into outright tears.
Victor Pasmore leaned down closer to his son, bringing a dizzying mix of aftershave, tobacco, and alcohol. “You got pretty banged up, Tommy, but everything’s under control now, isn’t it?” He managed to shrug while leaning over the bed.
Tom forced words out through his throat. “Is my … am I …?”
“You got hit by a car, kiddo,” his father said.
And then he remembered the grille and the bumper advancing toward him.
“I had to go through hell and back to get a new glass,” complained Dr. Milton, coming back into the room. He stepped up alongside his father and looked down. “I think our patient could use some rest, don’t you?” He held the glass in front of Tom’s face and gently inserted the curved plastic straw between his lips.
The water, liquid silk, invaded him with the tastes of strawberries, milk, honey, air, sunshine. He drew another mouthful up from the glass, parted his lips to breathe, and the doctor slid the straw from his mouth.
“Enough for now, son,” he said.
His mother brushed his left hand with her fingers before stepping back.
Sometime after that, an hour or a day, Tom opened his eyes to a vision that seemed as unreal as a dream—at first he thought he had to be dreaming, for what he saw was the slim, fantastic figure of his cranky old neighbor on Eastern Shore Road, Lamont von Heilitz, gliding toward him from a dark corner of the room. Mr. von Heilitz was wearing one of his splendid suits, a pinstriped light grey, with a pale yellow vest that had wide lapels; in his left hand he held gloves of the same shade. Yes, it was a nightmare, for the darkness seemed to follow the old man as he approached the bed and blinking Tom, who feared that his strange neighbor would begin shaking his fist and screaming at him.
But he did not. With webs of shadowy darkness dripping from his shoulders, Mr. von Heilitz quietly patted his left arm and looked down with far more compassion than Dr. Bonaventure Milton. “I want you to get better, Tom Pasmore,” he whispered. Mr. von Heilitz leaned down over Tom’s body, and Tom saw the shadows that accompanied him spread across the fine network of lines in his white forehead. The wings of his grey hair shone. “Remember this,” he whispered, stepped back into darkness that seemed to await him, and was gone.
The small window opposite Tom’s bed was no more than a hole punched into a dingy whiteness, smudged here and there with ancient stains. Dirty-looking spiderwebs darkened the walls near the ceiling. Periodically these would mysteriously disappear, and some few days later as mysteriously reappear. Next to his bed was a table that held a glass of water and his books. A tray beneath the table swung out toward him at mealtimes. Near the door were two green plastic chairs. Behind his bedside table stood the pole to which were attached the various bags and bottles that nourished him. Through the door he could see the hospital corridor with its black and white tile floor over which moved a constant traffic of doctors, nurses, cleaners, orderlies, visitors, and his fellow patients. Even with the door closed, Tom was unaware of this traffic only when his pain was at its most ambitious.
For the hospital was as noisy as a foundry. The cleaners roamed the corridors at all hours, talking to themselves and playing their radios as they mopped with bored, angry movements of their arms. Their carts rattled and squealed, and the metal clamps of their ammoniac mops rang against their pails. Someone was always hauling laundry through the corridors, someone was always greeting a visitor with loud outcries, most often someone was groaning or screaming. During visiting hours the halls were crowded with mobs of people talking in falsely cheerful voices, and children pounded from one end of the corridor to another, clutching the strings of balloons.
His world was dominated by physical pain and the necessity of controlling that pain. Every three hours a nurse holding a small square tray marched quickly across his room and lifted a tiny white paper cup from among the other similar cups on the tray even before she reached his bedside, so that by the time she reached him she was in position to extend the cup to his waiting lips. Then there was an agonizing period in which the sweet, oily stuff in the cup temporarily failed to work. Sometimes during this period, the nurse, if she were Nancy Vetiver or Hattie Bascombe, would hold his hand or stroke his hair.
These small coins of affection soothed him.
In a minute or two the pain that had come up out of his body’s deepest places began to settle like a large animal going to sleep, and all the sharp smaller pains would turn fuzzy and slow.
One day during Tom’s third week in the hospital Dr. Milton entered his room while he was having a conversation with Nancy Vetiver, one of his two favorite nurses. She was a slim young blond woman of twenty-six with close-set brown eyes and harsh lines at the sides of her mouth. Nancy had his hand in hers and was telling him a story about her first year at Shady Mount
—the raucous dormitory she had lived in, the food that had made her feel half-sick. Tom was hoping to get her to tell him something about the night nurse, Hattie Bascombe, whom he considered a wondrous and slightly fearsome character, but Nancy glanced over her shoulder as the doctor came in, squeezed his hand, and looked impassively at the doctor.
Tom saw Dr. Milton frown at their joined hands as he approached the bed. Nancy gently took her hand from his, and then stood up.
Dr. Milton tucked in his ample chin and frowned at her a moment before turning to Tom.
“Nurse Vetiver, isn’t it?” he asked.
Nancy was wearing a name tag, and Tom knew that the doctor must have encountered her many times before.
“It is,” she said.
“Aren’t there some essential aspects of your job that you ought to be seeing to?”
“This is an essential aspect of my job, Dr. Milton,” Nancy said.
“You feel—let me be sure I state this correctly—it medically beneficial to complain to this boy, who is of a good family, in fact a very good family”—here he glanced over at Tom with what was supposed to be a look of reassurance—“about the mutton served in the nurses’ residence?”
“That’s exactly what I feel, Doctor.”
For a moment the nurse and the doctor merely stared at each other. Tom saw Dr. Milton decide that it was not worth his while to debate hospital etiquette with this underling. He sighed. “I’ll want you to think about what you owe to this institution,” he said in a weary voice that suggested that he had said similar things many times before. “But we do have a patient, and an important one”—another curdled smile for Tom—“to deal with at the moment, Nurse Vetiver. This young man’s grandfather, my good friend Glen Upshaw, is still on the board of this hospital. Perhaps you might be good enough to let me conduct an examination?”
Nancy stepped back, and Dr. Milton leaned down to peer at Tom’s face.
“Feeling better, are we?”
“I guess,” Tom said.
“How’s the pain?”
“Pretty bad at times.”
“You’ll be back on your feet in no time,” the doctor said. “Nature is a great healer. I suppose we could increase your medication …?” He straightened up and turned his head to glance at Nancy. “Suppose we think about increasing his medication, shall we?”
“We’ll think about it,” she said. “Yes, sir.”
“Very good, then.” He vaguely patted Tom’s cast. “I thought it might be useful for me to pop in and have a chat with the boy, and now I see that it was. Yes, very useful. Everything going all right, nurse?”
Nancy smiled at the doctor with a face subtly changed, older, tougher, more cynical. She looked less beautiful to Tom, but more impressive. “Of course,” she said. She glanced at Tom, and when Tom met her eyes he understood: nothing said by Dr. Milton was of any importance at all.
“I’ll just add a note on his chart, then,” the doctor said, and busied himself with his pen for a moment.
He hooked the chart back on the bottom of his bed, gave Nancy a glance full of meaning Tom did not know how to interpret, and said, “I’ll tell your grandfather you’re doing splendidly, good mental attitude, all that sort of thing. He’ll be pleased.” He looked at his watch. “Well. You’re eating well, I assume? No mutton here, is there, Nurse? You must eat, you know—that’s nature’s way. Sometimes good solid food is the best medicine you can have.” Another glance at his watch. “Important appointment, I’m afraid. Glad we could get that little matter straightened out, Nurse Vetiver.”
“It’s a great relief to us all,” Nancy said.
Dr. Bonaventure Milton cast Nancy a lazy glance, nearly smiled with the same indifferent laziness, and after nodding to Tom, wandered out of the room. “Yes, sir,” Nancy said, as if to herself. So Tom understood everything he would ever have to understand about his doctor.
Later there was a “complication” with his leg, which had begun to feel as if helium were being pumped into it, making it so light that it threatened to shatter its cast and sail away into the air. Tom had ignored this feeling for as long as he could, but within a week it became a part of the pain that threatened to devour the whole of the world, and he had to confess it to someone. Nancy Vetiver said to tell Dr. Milton, really tell him; Hattie Bascombe, speaking from the darkness in the middle of the night, said, “You save up your knife from your supper, and when old Boney starts pattin’ your cast and tellin’ you that you just imaginin’ that feeling, you take that knife and stick it in his old fat fish-colored hand.” Tom thought that Hattie Bascombe was the other side of Nancy Vetiver, and then thought that every object and person must have its other, opposite side—the side that belonged to night.
As Hattie predicted, Dr. Milton scoffed at his story of a “light” pain, an “airy” pain, and even his parents did not believe in it. They did not want to believe that their doctor, the distinguished Bonaventure Milton, could be in error (nor did the surgeon, a Dr. Bostwick, an otherwise blameless man), and above all they did not want to believe that Tom would need yet another operation. Nor did Tom—he just wanted them to cut open the cast and let the air out. Of course that was no solution, the doctors would not do that. And so the abscess within his leg grew and grew, and by the time Nancy and Hattie got Dr. Bostwick to examine this “imaginary” complaint, Tom was found to need a new operation, which would not only remove the abscess but reset his leg. Which meant that first they would have to break it again—it was precisely as though he were to be propped up on Calle Burleigh and run over again.
Hattie Bascombe leaned toward him out of the night and said, “You’re a scholar, and this here is your school. Your lessons are hard—hard—but you gotta learn ’em. Most people don’t learn what you bein’ taught until they a lot older. Nothing is safe, that’s what you been learnin’. Nothing is whole, not for too damned long. The world is half night. Don’t matter who your granddaddy is.”
The world is half night—that was what he knew.
Tom spent the entire summer in Shady Mount Hospital. His parents visited him with the irregularity he came to expect of them, for he knew that they saw their visits as disruptive and upsetting, in some way harmful to his recovery: they sent books and toys, and while most of the toys came to pieces in his hands or were useless to one confined to bed, the books were always perfect, every one. When his parents appeared in his room, they seemed quieter and older than he remembered them, survivors of another life, and what they spoke of was the saga of what they had endured on the day of his accident.
The one time his grandfather came to the hospital, he stood beside the bed leaning on the umbrella he used as a cane, with something tight and hard in his face that doubted Tom, wondered about him. This, Tom suddenly remembered, was overwhelmingly familiar—the sensation that his grandfather disliked him.
Had he been running away?
No, of course not, why would he run away?
He didn’t have any friends out there, did he? Had he maybe been going to Elm Cove? Two boys in his old class at Brooks-Lowood lived in Elm Cove, maybe he had taken it into his head to go all the way out there and see them?
His class was now his old class because he would miss a year of school.
Maybe, he said. I don’t remember. I just don’t remember. He could vaguely remember the day of his accident, could remember the milk cart and the NO PASSENGERS ALLOWED sign and the driver asking him about girlfriends.
Well, which one had he been going to see?
His memory turned to sludge, to pure resistance. His grandfather’s insistent questions felt like blows.
Why had his accident happened on Calle Burleigh, eight miles east of Elm Cove? Had he been hitchhiking?
“Why are you asking me all these questions?” Tom blurted, and burst into tears.
There came a muted shocked exhalation from the door, and Tom knew that some of the hospital staff were lingering there to get a look at his grandfather.
“You’d better stick to your own part of town,” his grandfather said, and the young doctors and lounging orderlies gave almost inaudible noises of approval.
At the end of August, during the last thirty minutes of visiting hours, a girl named Sarah Spence walked into his room. Tom put down his book and looked at her in astonishment. Sarah, too, seemed astonished to find herself in a hospital room, and looked around at everything in a wondering, wide-eyed way before she came across the room to his bed. For a moment Tom thought that yes, it was astonishing that he should be here, and that she should see him like this. In that moment he was the old Tom Pasmore, and when he saw how Sarah shyly inspected his massive cast with a smile of dismay, it seemed to him ridiculous that he should have been so unhappy.
Sarah Spence had been a friend of his since their earliest days at school, and when she met his eyes he felt restored to his life. He saw at once that her shyness had left her, and that unlike the boys from their class who had come to visit his room, she was not intimidated by the evidences of his injuries. By now his head wound had healed, and his right arm was out of its bandages and cast, so he looked far more like his old self than he had during most of July.
As they took each other in for a moment before speaking, Tom realized that Sarah’s face was no longer that of a little girl, but almost a woman’s, and her taller body was beginning to be a woman’s too. He saw that Sarah was very much aware of the difference in her face and body.
“Oh, my God,” she said. “Would you look at that cast?”
“I look at it a lot, actually,” he said.
She smiled, and raised her eyes to meet his. “Oh, Tom,” she said, and for a moment there hovered between them the possibility that Sarah Spence would hold his hand, or touch his cheek, or kiss him, or burst into tears and do all three—Tom almost went dizzy with his desire for her touch, and Sarah herself scarcely knew what she wished to do, or how to express the wave of tenderness and grief that had passed through her with his joke. She took a step nearer to him, and was on the verge of reaching out to touch him when she saw how pale his skin was, ashy just beneath the golden surface, and that his hair looked lank and matted. For just a moment her fifth-grade friend Tom Pasmore looked like a stranger. He seemed shrunken, and his bones were prominent, and even though this familiar stranger before her was a little boy—a little boy—he had ugly dark smudges under his eyes like an old man. Then Tom’s face seemed to settle into well-known lines, and he was not a little boy with an old man’s eyes but on the verge of adolescence again, the boy she liked best in her class, the friend who had spent hours every day talking and playing with her in summers and weekends past—but by then she had unconsciously taken a half-step backwards, and was folding her hands together at her waist.