winning. He had never given much thought to heaven before, but now he was certain it existed. Without God, the body won, and that couldn’t be possible. He was one thing, his body a different thing altogether, and he was willing a separation, in which he went off to eternal repair while it suffered its due fate of rough handling, dirt, and rot.
Then he was made to stand and walk.
As the wind picked up and the snow grew frenzied he entered a small town. He walked barefoot and near-naked on the side of the road, his belly distended and his leg dragging along. No one can see me, no one would stop me, no one could help me anyway. They would just call the ________ but it would be too late. My only regret is ________. She’d have the coffee on. There was a time during my search for a cure when I tried everything to stop walking including giving up ________. The smell filled the ________. I loved to drink a ________ of ________ in the ________, to say ________; to ________ after we’d spent another ________; together. I’d tell her now it’s going okay except for the poison. It’s going okay except for how much I miss her and ________. ________?
________?! I’ve never been a very good ________.
He came up a final hill alongside a street opposite a multilevel parking lot and a courtyard with a fountain and a few other professional buildings. He wondered where he would end up, in what outpost of trees or behind what building, inside what unused doorway or, if he was lucky, what unlocked bathroom or backseat, his final resting place. But then the other let go of its mineral grip and he saw the doors part before him.
He went down on his knees on the rubber mat. “You son of a bitch! You can’t change the rules.”
The nurse saw him and started from behind the station.
“He changed the rules!” he cried, as an emergency crew came forward.
You didn’t really think I would let you kill us, did you?
He was lacking identification and admitted to the ICU under the name Richard Doe. He had renal failure, an enlarged spleen, sepsis-induced hypotension, cellular damage to the heart. He had trench foot and a case of dysentery. He required assisted breathing and intravenous antibiotics. He did not wake day or night.
The other made him say things. “Oof!” was one of them, “aaa, aaa” another. They entered into the type of interminable conversations that often break out in fevered dreams.
Q: What did you do for a living?
A: I was a ________.
Q: “Lawyer”?
A: Yes, that’s it. Is this an interrogation?
Q: A simple word, “lawyer.” Why can’t you remember it?
A: Intelligence has its limits. Knowledge cannot determine in its entirety the measure of a man’s ________.
Q: His what?
A: You know, his ________.
Q: “Soul”?
A: That’s it, soul, yes.
Q: You believe in the soul now?
A: I do.
Q: I wasn’t aware you gave any thought to such things.
A: I haven’t, typically.
Q: Then what accounts for your sudden mystical impulse?
A: Without God, you win.
He didn’t think the taunting was fair, but then the other had proven it didn’t play fair. But how was it feasible? The other had co-opted his powers of recall and discourse. In his former life as a lawyer, the stress of an upcoming trial would cause him to dream of cross-examining expert witnesses on technical matters about which he knew nothing—handwriting analysis, abstruse accounting methods. The author of such dreams, he played both parts, interrogator and expert, but he knew only the interrogator’s questions. When it came time for answers, he listened as the expert whom he had conjured conveniently mumbled, or spoke too softly, or omitted entire words.
It was like that now, only the other was the interrogator and he the muttering subject of its dream.
He was hooked to machines and monitors. He heard their pulse and suspiration, the steady mechanical beep of his heart. He realized that the other was content simply to lie there, to let the drips and antibiotics work their magic. He wasn’t going to walk, the son of a bitch. The wily cunt wasn’t going to walk. The wily cunt had been made to suffer and brought close to death and then he changed the rules. It wasn’t fair. Tim tried to tear himself free. In so doing he learned how many fingers and parts of fingers he had lost. He was too weak to pull out a single IV and