The blue walls of the med room made him feel as if he were hanging, dangling precariously from the center of the sky. The thin silver instruments on the table, the stark functional furniture, the university degrees on the walls, the anatomical chart above the operating table as if the surgeon followed a paint-by-number method in removing an appendix—all seemed like flotsam and jetsam swirling around in the crystal sky, remnants of mankind’s achievements hurled into the stratosphere after a violent swipe of a disgusted God’s powerful hand.
“What does he have?”
Abner stared at the diagnostic machine’s readings. “Could be a tumor.”
“Could be?”
“Could be half a dozen other things. It’s hidden in the maze of tissues in his bowels. Maybe I found it. Maybe not.
“What can you do?”
“Nothing.”
“He’ll die?”
“We don’t have the most modern hospital devised by mankind at our disposal.”
“I’m not blaming you, Abe.”
“I am.”
“He will die, then?”
“Yes. And because I don’t understand. I don’t understand.”
At night, while Dante slept, Menchen died. But the poet didn’t know. No one would know until the morning. And it would disturb no one’s sleep. A thousand sparrows could fall at once . . .
A thousand sparrows, a million sparrows fell from the sky, between the snowflakes. They crashed silently into the pavement. They tangled in the telephone wires—looking like notes in a staff of copper, separated by pole-bars into economical musical measures. But there was no music.
After they fell, he stood, the collar of his coat turned up to ward off the cold, and looked at their bodies, broken and bleeding. And he did not understand.
Looking up into the gray sky from whence came the snow swirling like a thousand dandelion puffs blown on by children, he searched hopefully for the source of the coldness.
Far away, tires screeching . . .
Metal shredding . . .
Ghostly screams in the night, a woman in agony . . .
Perhaps, he thought, if I could look with a mirror, I could see and know. Perhaps, seeing everything backwards, the world makes sense. Maybe, if we change our perspective . . .
“Yes,” said a voice.
He turned and looked at the snakes in her head, and he could not keep his eyes from dropping to hers. And slowly, forever and for always, he turned to stone, crying: “From another perspective you might be love and not hatred.”
“Yes,” she said, smiling.
Waking, sweating, he knew the answer. It was just crazy enough to work. But he could not say anything. Marshall would see his effort as an attempt to gain power. It would, of necessity, be a secret project.
He turned on the bed lamp, forced himself totally awake, and set to dismantling his dressing mirror.
He was the last down the stairway at the dragon warning.
“Did you hear?” Twain asked.
“Hear what?”
“Menchen died during the night.”
“Now there might be your only truth. Death.”
“What?”
“It is indisputable, inevitable, and impossible of misinterpretation.”
He walked away from Twain and secreted himself in a, corner hoping to blend into oblivion. It was a corner near a stairwell. Roll was called, and all were found to be present. An hour into the warning, he rose, meandered through a clot of men to the edge of the stairs. Suddenly, like a tired apparition, he was gone.
At the head of the stairs, he unsealed the door, stepped into the corridor, closed the porfal behind. Carefully, he removed the delicate, makeshift spectacles from his pocket. They were diamond-like, circus-prop spectacles of glittering looking glass and golden wire. They worked roughly like a periscope so that the wearer saw a mirror reflection of what was in front of him.
Sucking in his breath, he swung open the outside door and stepped onto the black soil.
The humming of giant wings sung above him.
Slowly, he turned his head to the skies.
The far-darting beams of the spirit, the un’loos’d dreams, he thought.
They were spirits and fairies above him. They were orange and magenta and coffee brown and crayon brown and pecan brown. They were white and chrome yellow and peach yellow and pear yellow.