And I saw a light-filled man emerge from the aforesaid dawn and pour his brightness over the aforementioned darkness; it repulsed him; he turned blood-red and pallid, but struck back against the darkness with such force that the man who was lying in the darkness became visible and resplendent through this contact, and standing up, he came forth out of the darkness. And thus the light-filled man, who had emerged from the dawn, appeared in greater splendor than any human tongue can express, and he proceeded to the utmost heights of immeasurable glory, where he shone out wondrously in the fullness of great fragrance and fruitfulness.
And I heard a voice speaking to me from the living fire I have mentioned: Insignificant earthly creature! Though as a woman you are uneducated in any doctrine of fleshly teachers in order to read writings with the understanding of the philosophers, nevertheless you are touched by my light, which touches your inner being with fire like the burning sun. Shout and tell!
PART V
What Is Your Relation?
Got any dynamite?” asks the receptionist in the Intensive Care Unit at the Vacca Vale Medical Center.
“Excuse me?” replies Joan Kowalski.
The receptionist laughs and pats his chest, where a sharp tooth hangs on a chain. “Just kidding! Kidding! Oh, you have to have a sense of humor around here. Things get prih-tee grim—fast!” His laugh simmers. “And what is your relation to her?”
“Oh.” Joan had not anticipated this question, despite its predictability. “How am I related to her?”
“That is the question,” the receptionist replies in a bad English accent, then laughs again, offensively jolly. The hospital smells like a swimming pool, which Joan associates with rare childhood stays at hotels and even rarer equilibrium between her parents. Joan looks around; no one else is in the lobby. It flickers. “We just need to know you’re not a villain, you know.” The receptionist winks. “We try to keep out the predators.”
It’s Friday—two days after three boys stabbed a girl named Blandine Watkins in La Lapinière Affordable Housing Complex. Today is payday. That morning, Joan fed her car forty dollars of gasoline and drove to the hospital on an instinct, stalked for days by guilt. Since she learned of the stabbing, Joan Kowalski has not slept or attended work, tormented by visions of a slashed belly. She had a fever that would not validate itself via thermometer. In the visions, it’s almost always a child’s belly, sometimes a kitten’s. During eleven years of employment at Rest in Peace, this is the first sick day that Joan has taken.
Joan is wearing a dress that belonged to her mother, rainwater dotting her shoulders and calves. She misses her mother like a phantom limb.
The receptionist—thirties, round, tired, friendly—looks familiar, but Joan cannot place him. A kettle of black tea circulates through her body, agitating everything.
“How are any of us related?” demands Joan. Her tone is weird, and she knows it. She has suffered some psychological earthquake, and the vials that previously kept her associations from contaminating each other have shattered. “Does it matter?”
The receptionist smiles at Joan with parental encouragement, as though she’s a child, improvising a tale.
Joan’s vision blurs. She grips her skull. “There’s this obituary—did you read it? The Elsie Blitz obituary?”
The receptionist shakes his head no.
“She wrote it herself, and—” Joan gets distracted as the receptionist scrawls Elsie Blitz obit on a piece of paper. He looks up at her expectantly.
“Well,” she continues. “Um. In her obituary, she says everything affects everything—something like that. It’s her son who tried to—punish me—but he got the wrong apartment, and . . . and I just—I think we should all take each other a little more seriously. I want to wake up. Do you know what I’m talking about?”
It’s just after nine in the morning. She can’t remember the last time she felt this much before lunch. Sweat, rain, and tea fill her up. Weigh her down. Make her hot. Make her shiver. When she speaks, the words feel like water. Her whole mouth feels like water.
After a beat, the receptionist laughs.
“Oh, you’re not afraid to get real!” He beams. “Love that, love that. I’ve been in a lot of therapy, too. And I like sermons. I listen to them all the time—sermons from all over the map, religion-wise. Talk radio, too. Can’t get enough of it. You’re really good. You should go on one of those shows in New York City.”
He grins dreamily.
Then it dawns on her: the receptionist looks familiar because he looks like a koala.
“So,” he says, snapping out of it. “Are you family, or . . .?”
“No.” She sighs. “No. I’m her neighbor.”
“Oh, that’s fine. Don’t look so terrified! Oh, love, you look like you’re about to cry! Need a tissue? Here, take it. Unused! Ha! Nothing to fear, here. Nonfamily members have visiting rights. They sure do. If we only let family visit, well. That would be downright antidemocratic. Personally, in my own case, if I found myself in this ward, knock on wood”—he knocks hard on the desk, which is not made of wood—“if I wound up in a pickle, you know, in the ICU, the last people I’d want to see would be my blood relatives. It would be sick if my real family—my chosen family—were forbidden to see me because we share no DNA.” He smiles at Joan, who is trying to blow her nose without making any noise. A cloud passes over his features. “Not that I would expect this particular patient to welcome visitors, all things considered. Her story . . . well. We see some bleak crap around here. It’s not like we rank the patients’ stories, of course, but some are worse than others, obviously, and we’ve got to keep perspective—you understand. And her story . . . it’s the one that made me feel the worst. I had to go to therapy about it. Want to know the first thing she said when she got out of surgery?”
Joan doesn’t, actually. “What?”
“She said she’d take any visitor who came to see her. I mean, I wasn’t there, but I hear things. She demanded it. Fierce! But . . .” His face falls, and he touches his shark-tooth necklace again, fiddling with it nervously. “Nobody’s visited her yet. Except for this one social worker, who didn’t even stick around. It just makes me so sad.” He pauses. When he speaks again, he’s whispering. “She didn’t have an emergency contact. How tragic is that?”
Joan accepts this news like it’s a dreaded but suspected diagnosis. One that pertains to her own cells.
“So it’s good of you to be here,” concludes the receptionist gently. “Now, keep all that between us—what I told you. I might’ve breached some kind of confidentiality. I don’t know. Just don’t kidnap her! Ha! And no dynamite, you hear? Oh, we try to keep it light around here. Dark times, you know.” He hands Joan the entire tissue box. “Here, keep them.” A phone rings, and his eyes dart to it. “Take it easy, okay? The nurse will be with you soon. You’re a terrific neighbor.”
Delicately, as though her body is made of loose soil, Joan walks to the sitting area, where she installs herself in a cold leather chair. For a long time, she stares at a knitting magazine. At last, she notices a copy of Friday’s Gazette on the table and picks it up.
The story of what happened in Apartment C4 of La Lapinière Affordable Housing Complex on the night of Wednesday, July seventeenth, has migrated to the middle of the newspaper. No longer front-page material, already approaching irrelevance. Joan learns that the suspected boys have been arrested—one under suspicion of attempted second-degree murder, two under suspicion of complicity, all three under proof of animal cruelty, illegal marijuana possession, and underage drinking. Early in the questioning, officials obtained three harmonious confessions that matched the video evidence, which had been published online. Two witnesses confirmed the story. Joan gathers that this kind of narrative coherence is atypical, almost unprecedented. The boys face a trial, at which they will plead guilty. The reporter cites a similar case elsewhere in Indiana—abdominal stabbing, survival, multiple perpetrators. The criminals in that case were charged for a level-three felony: aggravated battery that posed a substantial risk of death. They were convicted and held in prison for $25,000 cash-only bonds. The fate of these boys, however, writes the reporter, depends upon their intent to kill. Questions remain to be answered. Reasonable threat? Self-defense? Who started it?
More opossums have been found at the Wooden Lady. This time in the hot tub. This time they were alive.
A photo depicts Mayor Douglas Barrington, urban designer Benjamin Ritter, and white-suited Maxwell Pinky grinning in hard hats at a ceremonial tree cutting in Chastity Valley. Clearing a Path Toward the Future, the photo is captioned. The ceremony occurred yesterday, launching the Valley revitalization.
The search continues for the development dinner attackers.
“We just don’t know enough,” Officer Stevens told the reporter. “We may never know enough.”
“Joan Kowalski?”
Joan looks up. A nurse grips a clipboard, purses her lips.
“For Blandine Watkins?”
“Yes.”
“You can follow me.”