The Zahir Page 0,52

to avoid loss of blood. When it sees that the danger is over, the vessels open up again, the blood starts to flow, and that feels painful, but that's all it is. Anyway, if you like, I can give you something to help you sleep."

I refused. And as if surfacing from some dark corner of my soul, I remembered the words I had heard the day before:

"The voice says that it will only allow these things to happen when the time is right."

He couldn't have known. It wasn't possible that everything that had happened on the corner of Boulevard St-Germain and Rue des Sts-Peres was the result of some universal conspiracy, of something predetermined by the gods, who, despite being fully occupied in taking care of this precariously balanced planet on the verge of extinction, had all downed tools merely to prevent me from going in search of the Zahir. Mikhail could not possibly have foreseen the future, unless he really had heard a voice and there was a plan and this was all far more important than I imagined.

Everything was beginning to be too much for me: Marie's smiles, the possibility that someone really had heard a voice, the increasingly agonizing pain in my head.

"Doctor, I've changed my mind. I want to sleep. I can't stand the pain."

She said something to one of the nurses pushing the trolley, who went off and returned even before we had reached my room. I felt a prick in my arm and immediately fell asleep.

When I woke up, I wanted to know exactly what had happened; I wanted to know if the woman passing me on the pavement had escaped injury and what had happened to her baby. Marie said that I needed to rest, but, by then, Dr. Louit, my doctor and friend, had arrived and felt that there was no reason not to tell me. I had been knocked down by a motorbike. The body I had seen lying on the ground beside me had been the young male driver. He had been taken to the same hospital and, like me, had escaped with only minor abrasions. The police investigation carried out immediately after the accident made it clear that I had been standing in the middle of the road at the time of the accident, thus putting the motorcyclist's life at risk.

It was, apparently, all my fault, but the motorcyclist had decided not to press charges. Marie had been to see him and talk to him; she had learned that he was an immigrant working illegally and was afraid of having any dealings with the police. He had been discharged twenty-four hours later, because he had been wearing a helmet, which lessened the risk of any damage to the brain.

"Did you say he left twenty-four hours later? Does that mean I've been in here more than a day?"

"You've been in here for three days. When you came out of the body scanner, the doctor here phoned me to ask if she could keep you on sedatives. It seemed to me that you'd been rather tense, irritated, and depressed lately, and so I told her she could."

"So what happens next?"

"Two more days in the hospital and then three weeks with that contraption around your neck; you're through the critical forty-eight-hour period. Of course, part of your body could still rebel against the idea of continuing to behave itself and then we'd have a problem on our hands. But let's face that emergency if and when it arises; there's no point in worrying unnecessarily."

"So, I could still die?"

"As you well know, all of us not only can, but will, die."

"Yes, but could I still die as a result of the accident?"

Dr. Louit paused.

"Yes. There's always the chance that a blood clot could have formed which the machines have failed to pick up and that it could break free at any moment and cause an embolism. There's also the possibility that a cell has gone berserk and is starting to form a cancer."

"You shouldn't say things like that," said Marie.

"We've been friends for five years. He asked me a question and I gave him an answer. And now, if you don't mind, I have to get back to my office. Medicine isn't quite as you think. In the world we live in, if a boy goes out to buy five apples, but arrives home with only two, people would conclude that he had eaten the three missing apples. In my world, there are