Eli"s lips left his. She let go of his head, took a step back. Even though it scared him, Oskar tried to hold onto the image of the castle room again, but it was gone. Eli scrutinized him. Oskar rubbed his eyes, nodded.
"It really happened, didn"t it?"
"Yes."
They stood there for a while, not saying anything. Then Eli said: "Do you want to come in?"
Oskar didn"t reply. Eli pulled on her T-shirt, lifted her hands, let them fall.
"I"m never going to hurt you."
"I know that."
"What are you thinking about?"
"That T-shirt. Is it from the trash room?"
... yes. yes.
"Have you washed it?"
Eli didn"t answer.
"You"re a little gross, you know that?"
"I can change, if you like."
"Good. Do that."
He had read about the man on the gurney, under the sheet. The Ritual Killer.
Benke Edwards had wheeled all sorts through these corridors, to cold storage. Men and women of all ages and sizes. Children. There was no particular gurney for children and few things made Benke feel as uncomfortable as seeing the empty s.p.a.ces left over on the trolley when he was transporting the body of a child; the little figure under the white cover, pushed up against the headboard. The whole lower half empty, the sheet smooth. That flat sheet was death itself.
But now he was dealing with a grown man, and not only that, a celebrity.
He guided the gurney through the silent corridors. The only sound was the squeak of the rubber wheels against the linoleum floor. There were no colored markings on this floor. On the few occasions they ever had a visitor here they were always accompanied by a member of the staff. Benke had waited outside the hospital while the police took photographs of the body. A few members of the press had been standing around with their cameras, outside the restricted area, taking pictures of the hospital with their powerful flashes. Tomorrow the pictures would be in the papers, complete with a dotted line showing how the man had fallen. A celebrity.
The lump under the sheet gave no indication of any such thing. A lump of flesh like any other. He knew the man looked like a monster, that his body had exploded like a water balloon when he hit the ground, and he was thankful for the cover. Under the cover we are all alike. Even so, many people were probably grateful that this particular lump of no-longer-living flesh was now being wheeled into cold storage, awaiting later transport to the crematorium when the police pathologists were done with it. The man had a wound in his throat that the police photographer had been particularly interested in getting on film. But did it matter?
Benke saw himself as a philosopher of sorts. Probably came with the job. He had seen so much of what people really were, when you got down to it, and he had developed a theory and it was relatively uncomplicated.
"Everything is in the brain."
His voice echoed in the empty corridors as he stopped the gurney in front of the doors to the morgue, entered in the code, and opened the door.
Yes. Everything is in the brain. From the beginning. The body is simply a kind of service unit that that brain is forced to be burdened with in order to keep itself alive. But everything is there from the beginning, in the brain. And the only way to change someone like this man under the sheet would be to operate on the brain.
Or turn it off.
The lock that was programmed to keep the door open for ten seconds after the code had been entered had still not been repaired and Benke was forced to hold the door open with one hand as he grabbed the head of the gurney with the other and guided it into the room. The trolley b.u.mped against the door post and Benke swore.
If this had been the OR, it would have been fixed in five seconds flat. Then he noticed something unusual. Then he noticed something unusual.
On the sheet, to the left of and slightly underneath the raised area that was the man"s face, there was a brownish stain. The door locked behind them as Benke bent down to take a closer look. The stain was slowly growing.
He"s bleeding.
Benke was not one to be easily shaken. This kind of thing had been known to happen before. Probably an acc.u.mulation of blood in the skull that had been jolted and started to drain when the trolley hit the door post.
The stain on the sheet grew larger.
Benke went over to a first aid cabinet and took out surgical tape and gauze. He had always thought it was funny that there was one in a place like this, but of course the supplies were here in case a living person injured themselves, got their finger caught on a gurney or some such thing. With his hand on the sheet slightly above the stain he steeled himself. He was, of course, not afraid of dead bodies but this one had looked pretty bad. And now Benke had to bandage him up. He was the one who would get in trouble if a bunch of blood spilled and messed up the floor in here.
So he swallowed, and folded the sheet down.
The man"s face defied all description. Impossible to imagine how he had lived for a whole week with this face. Nothing there that looked even remotely human with the exception of an ear and an . . . eye. Couldn"t they have... taped it shut? Couldn"t they have... taped it shut?
The eye was open. Of course. There was hardly any eyelid to close it. And the eye itself was so badly damaged it looked as if scar tissue had formed in the eyeball.
Benke tore himself away from the dead man"s gaze and concentrated on the task at hand. The source of the stain looked to be that wound on his throat.
He heard a soft dripping sound and quickly looked around. d.a.m.n. He must be a little on edge after all. Another drip. That came from his feet. He looked down. A drop of water had fallen from the gurney and landed on his shoe. Plop.
Water?
He examined the wound on the man"s throat. The liquid had formed a small pool underneath it and was spilling out over the metal rim of the stretcher.
Plop.
He moved his foot. Another drop fell onto the tile floor.
Plip.
He stirred the pool of liquid with his index finger, then rubbed his finger and thumb together. It wasn"t water. It was some slippery, transparent fluid. He smelled his hand. Nothing he recognized.
When he looked down at the white floor he saw a veritable puddle had formed down there. The liquid was not transparent after all; it had a pink tinge. It reminded him of when blood separates in transfusion bags. The stuff that is left over when the red blood cells sink to the bottom. Plasma. Plasma.
The man was bleeding plasma.
How that was possible was a question the experts would have to deal with tomorrow, or rather, later today. His job was simply to patch it so it didn"t make a mess. Wanted to go home now. To crawl into bed beside his sleeping wife, read a few pages of The Abominable Man From Saffle, The Abominable Man From Saffle, and then sleep. and then sleep.
Benke folded the gauze into a thick compress and pushed it up against the wound. How the h.e.l.l was he supposed to secure it with tape? Even the rest of the man"s throat and neck was so damaged as to offer almost no area of undamaged skin to attach the tape to. But what did he care. He wanted to go home now. He pulled off long strips of the adhesive, weaving them this way and that across the neck, an arrangement he would probably be criticized for later, but what the h.e.l.l.
I"m a janitor, not a surgeon.
When the compress was in place he wiped off the stretcher and mopped the floor. Then he rolled the corpse into room four, rubbed his hands together. Mission accomplished. A job well done and a story to tell in the future. While he made a last check and turned off the light he was already working on his formulations.
You know that murderer who fell from the top floor? Well, I was in charge of him later and when I wheeled him down to the morgue I saw charge of him later and when I wheeled him down to the morgue I saw something strange. .. something strange. ..
He took the elevator up to his room, washed his hands thoroughly, changed, and threw his coat into the laundry on his way out. He walked down to the parking lot, got into his car, and smoked a single cigarette before he started the engine. After he stubbed it out in the ashtray- which really needed to be emptied-he turned the key in the ignition. The car was resisting as it always did when it was cold or damp. It always started in the end, though. You only had to keep at it. As the wah- wah- wah wah sound on the third attempt transformed into a hacking engine roar he suddenly thought of it. sound on the third attempt transformed into a hacking engine roar he suddenly thought of it.
It doesn"t coagulate.
No. The stuff seeping out of the man"s neck was not going to coagulate under the compress. It would soak through and then spill onto the floor .
. . and when they opened the door in a few hours . . .
s.h.i.t!
He pulled the key out of the ignition, thrust it angrily into his pocket, got out of the car, and headed back to the hospital.
The living room was not as empty as the hall and the kitchen. Here there was a sofa, an armchair, and a large coffee table with a lot of little things on it. A lone floor lamp sent a soft yellow glow over the table. But that was all. No carpets, no pictures, no TV. Thick blankets had been draped over the windows.
It looks like a prison. A big prison cell.
Oskar whistled, tentatively. Yes. There was an echo, but not too much. Probably because of the blankets. He put his bag down next to the armchair. The click when the bottom of it landed on the hard cork flooring was amplified, sounded desolate.
He had started to look at the things on the table when Eli came out of the next room, now wearing her too-big checkered shirt. Oskar waved his arm, indicating the living room.
"Are you two moving?"
"No. Why?"
"I was just thinking."
You two?
Why didn"t he think of it before? Oskar let his gaze travel over the things on the table. Looked like toys, every last one of them. Old toys.
"That old man who was here before. That wasn"t your dad, was it?"
"No."
"Was he also?. . ."
"No."
Oskar nodded. Looked around the room again. Hard to imagine anyone could live like this. Except if...
"Are you sort of. . . poor?"
Eli walked over to the table, picked up a box that looked like a black egg, and handed it to Oskar. He leaned over, held it under the lamp in order to see better.
The surface of the egg was rough and when Oskar looked more closely he saw hundreds of complex strands of gold thread. The egg was heavy, as if the whole thing was made of some kind of metal. Oskar turned it this way and that, looked at the gold threads embedded on the egg"s surface. Eli stood next to Oskar. He smelled it again ... the smell of rust.
"What"s it worth, do you think?"
"Don"t know. A lot?"
"There are only two of them in the world. If you had both of them you could sell them and buy yourself... a nuclear power plant, maybe."
"Nooo?. . ."
"Well, I don"t know. What does a nuclear power plant cost? Fifty million?"
"I think it would cost. .. billions."
"Really? In that case I guess you couldn"t."
"What would you do with a nuclear power plant?"
Eli laughed.
"Put it between your hands. Like this. Cup them. And then you let it roll back and forth."
Oskar did as Eli said. Rolled the egg gently back and forth in his cupped hands and felt the egg ... crack, collapse between his palms. He gasped and removed the upper hand. The egg was now just a heap of hundreds .
. . thousands of tiny slivers.
"Gosh, I"m sorry. I was was careful, I-" careful, I-"
"Shhh. It"s supposed to be like that. Make sure you don"t drop any of it. Pour them out onto this."
Eli pointed to a piece of white paper on the table. Oskar held his breath as he gently let the glittering shards fall out of his hand. The individual pieces were smaller than drops of water and Oskar had to use his other hand to wipe his palm free of every last one.
"But it broke."
"Here. Look."
Eli pulled the lamp closer to the table, concentrated its dim light on the heap of metal slivers. Oskar leaned over and looked. One piece, no bigger than a tick, lay on its own to one side of the stack, and when he looked very closely he could see that it had indentations and notches on a few sides, almost microscopic light bulb-shaped protrusions on the other. He got it.
"It"s a puzzle."
"Yes."
"But... can you put it together again?"
"I think so."
"It must take forever."
"Yes."