no, not here now, but just had been. They had been in the middle of a conversation, and now he’d lost the thread, or no, that wasn’t it, it was that he suddenly couldn’t remember how long they’d been talking, and it was so strange to have been talking all this time together, and not recall how it started!
He was suddenly trying to clear his head, and have a better look at the guy, but what had the man just said? It was all very confusing because there was no one there to talk to, no one but her, but yes, he’d just said to the brown-haired man, “Of course, stop the injections … ” and the absolute rectitude of his position was beyond doubt, the old doctor—“A fool, yes!” said the brown-haired man—would just have to listen!
This was monstrous all this, and the daughter in California …
He shook himself. He stood up on the porch. What had happened? He had fallen asleep in the wicker chair. He had been dreaming. The murmur of the bees grew disconcertingly loud in his ears and the fragrance of the gardenias seemed to drug him suddenly. He looked down over the railing at the patio to his left. Had something moved there?
Only the limbs of the trees beyond as the breeze traveled through them. He’d seen it a thousand times in New Orleans, that graceful dance, as if one tree releases the breeze to another. Such lovely embracing heat. Stop the injections! She will wake.
Slowly, awkwardly, a monarch butterfly climbed the screen in front of him. Gorgeous wings. But gradually he focused upon the body of the thing, small and glossy and black. It ceased to be a butterfly and became an insect—loathsome!
“I have to go home,” he said aloud to no one. “I don’t feel right exactly, I think I should lie down.”
The man’s name. What was it? He’d known it just a moment ago, such a remarkable name—ah, so that’s what the word means, you are—Actually, quite beautiful—But wait. It was happening again. He would not let it!
“Miss Nancy!” He stood up out of the chair.
His patient stared forward, unchanged, the heavy emerald pendant gleaming against her gown. All the world was filled with green light, with shivering leaves, the faint blur of the bougainvillea.
“Yes, the heat,” he whispered. “Have I given her the shot?” Good Lord. He had actually dropped the syringe, and it had broken.
“You called for me, Doctor?” said Miss Nancy. There she stood in the parlor door, staring at him, wiping her hands on her apron. The colored woman was there too, and the nurse behind her.
“Nothing, just the heat,” he murmured. “I dropped it, the needle. But I have another, of course.”
How they looked at him, studied him. You think I’m going crazy, too?
It was on the following Friday afternoon that he saw the man again.
The doctor was late, he’d had an emergency at the sanitarium. He was sprinting up First Street in the early fall dusk. He didn’t want to disturb the family dinner. He was running by the time he reached the gate.
The man was standing in the shadows of the open front porch. He watched the doctor, his arms folded, his shoulder against the porch column, his eyes dark and rather wide, as though he were lost in contemplation. Tall, slender, clothes beautifully fitted.
“Ah, so there you are,” the doctor murmured aloud. Flush of relief. He had his hand out as he came up the steps. “Dr. Petrie is my name, how do you do?”
And—how to describe it? There was simply no man there.
“Now, I know this happened!” he said to Miss Carl in the kitchen. “I saw him on that porch and he vanished into thin air.”
“Well, what business is it of ours what you saw, Doctor?” said the woman. Strange choice of words. And she was so hard, this lady. Nothing feeble about her in her old age. She stood very straight in her dark blue gabardine suit, glaring at him through her wire-rimmed glasses, her mouth withered to a thin line.
“Miss Carl, I’ve seen this man with my patient. Now the patient, as we all know, is a helpless woman. If an unidentified person is coming and going on these premises—”
But the words were unimportant. Either the woman didn’t believe him or the woman didn’t care. And Miss Nancy, at the kitchen table, never even looked up from her plate as she scraped up the food noisily onto her fork.