This time, stilting in silence, the robed and hooded bearers of the dead convey the corpse along a hospital corridor where the roof and ceiling have been scalped away, allowing moonlight to bathe the scene. They enter Bibi’s room, and the face of one so shocks and horrifies, as always before, that she rebels against consideration of it and sits up in bed, sits up and wakes not from the dream, but from one dream scene to another. Gone are Death’s two henchmen, or whatever they might be. In one of the chairs by the window, in the red radiance of a sunset, sits the corpse cocooned in a white shroud glowing with the reflection of the burning sky. The fabric masking its face stretches, and a shallow concavity appears as its mouth opens. From it comes the voice that she knows well: “The forms…the forms…things unknown.” Frightened of hearing more, she sits up once again, but this time not in another dream scene, this time—
—in the real hospital room.
Morning had come with a difference in it.
The tingling in her left side had completely relented, head to foot. Not one prickle, tickle, shiver, no static in the nerve paths.
Sitting in bed, she flexed her left hand, which had at times seemed to be the instrument of another Bibi than her, some other self who wished to use it to her own—and different—purposes. Now she had full control of it once more. No weakness. She closed it into a fist, and though her fist was small, she liked the look of it.
No headache. No dizziness. No foul taste.
With an exhilarating quickness, she said, “Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers. She sells seashells by the seashore.” Each word escaped her perfectly formed, without a slur or slip of tongue.
She put down one of the safety railings and sat on the edge of the bed, where for a moment she hesitated, warning herself that the cessation of symptoms didn’t mean that she was somehow cured. If she dared to cry out in wonder and celebration, her voice might trigger an abrupt collapse into her previous condition. But no. That was pure and foolish superstition. There were not three goddesses of destiny as the ancient Greeks had believed, no sisters spinning and measuring out and cutting the thread of each life, who might take offense at her delight in having escaped the fate of cancer. She got out of bed and into her slippers, walked the room, walked it and then did a silly little dance, and in each case her left foot, just like her right, performed as she demanded without a moment of stiffness or a misstep.
Through the doorway came a nurse, Petronella, whose hair was pulled tight and braided at the back. She’d been on duty the previous day and proved to be an efficient and confident woman who had seen everything that anyone in her career could expect to see and who seemed never to have been for a moment unsettled or caught unaware by any of it. Her chocolate-brown face warmed now with surprise and amusement as she stopped just inside the threshold and said, “Girl, what’s gotten into you this morning?”
“I can dance,” Bibi said as she performed a modest soft-shoe number.
“Maybe you can,” the nurse said, “but I’ll wait to see the evidence.”
Bibi laughed and clapped her hands three times quickly. “No funky left foot, no tingling head to toe, no nothing. Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers—perfectly pronounced, Petronella. I’m not sick anymore.”
The nurse’s smile first froze and then melted. With pity in her eyes and sympathy in her voice, she said, “Things come and go, then they come again, child. It’s best to stay real with that.”
Bibi shook her head. “It’s true. It’s real. I don’t know what the hell just happened, but something sure did. I can feel it through and through. Clean. Healthy. I need to talk to Dr. Chandra. He needs to see me. We’ve got to take another look at this.”
After another two-week reprieve from temptation: the Sunday-morning quiet, the sunless day fogbound and chilly, the key in the lock, the creak of the hinges, the white vase on the table without flowers this time, the open inner door, the living-room threshold, the living room itself, the closed bedroom door. If the blood on the doorknob had been real on her previous visit, someone had wiped the brass clean in the meantime.