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Leslie Thompkins slept in her clinic.
There were plenty of reasons for it—a commute through Crime Alley would be a loss of valuable time that also meant making a target of herself twice a day; being in the clinic at night meant she was available for local emergencies; she and her baseball bat could stand guard over the medicines at night; it saved money.
It also meant that when she had the occasional patient who couldn’t simply walk in and walk out, it required no major upset to her routine to keep an eye on them.
Her current inpatient should have been asleep right now, in the little bedroom tucked between the clinical floor and the stairs up to the small apartment where she lived. Not standing here in the dim, abandoned waiting room, where until this moment she had thought she was alone. It was eleven at night; the nurses and clerical volunteers had all gone home, and she had just locked up when she turned around and saw his silhouette in the window, black against the dull yellow glow of the one unbroken street light on this block.
It was no surprise he wasn’t sleeping well. There was no position he could lie in that wouldn’t put pressure on his injuries, the itch of healing tissues had to be overwhelming, and he was the restless type to begin with.
He still shouldn’t be out of bed.
“Do you know,” the man she’d heard called Jack and John and Jamie said, without turning around, as though he’d felt the pressure of her gaze on his back.
More likely he’d just heard her stop moving when she noticed him. The clink of the keys in her palm.
His voice was finally starting to lose that sepulchral hoarseness, recovering from the ravages of acid that had slipped down his throat while his mouth had been cut gaping, but it wasn’t smoothing out to the same voice he’d had before. The warm tenor singing voice he’d used to make a living. Odds were, nothing about him was ever going to be the same again.
Leslie hadn’t known the laughing young man well. A patient, one of hundreds; friendly but enigmatic, new to Gotham but seemingly from nowhere else. No insurance, no identification, no fixed name. It wasn’t her policy to inquire.
But ever since his first visit, he’d stood out, impossible to overlook despite being so utterly ordinary-looking. She had looked at the fey good humor and impulsive generosity, untempered by wisdom, the craving for attention and the keen sense of injustice, and seen someone very young and very naïve who would not last long, if he went on facing the world like he’d never heard of pain.
Leslie liked to be an optimist. Her only purpose in life was to help others, irrespective of considerations like what people had earned. All patients were equal, and deserving of what they needed, and she would give them whatever she could, and hope for the best. But she’d spent too long fighting like Cuchulainn against the sea not to have learned to pick out dooms she had no power to avert. Jim-Jacques-Jake, for all his mystery, had from the start been too open. Like a very young child, or a sunflower. Exposed.
Not sensitive, not in any normal sense of the word, not quite gullible, not quite guileless, but—open. He didn’t make friends with everyone he met, but never seemed to exclude the possibility, and his loyalty to those friends once he had them had landed him in her care at least a dozen times every year for the last four. (At least, that was how he had wound up in all his fights at first. Now…well. It wasn’t her policy to inquire.)
That charming, obnoxious young man had been no one she was willing to grow fond of, because she had never expected him to last.
“Do I know what?” she asked, after he’d let the silence draw on in darkness without finishing his question.
Save him, the dockworker who’d carried him here barely breathing had said. Hide him, the streetwalker who’d identified him by the string of glass beads on his apartment key had whispered. Help him, the stolid young man who’d brought the guitar that now lay untouched beside his bed had implored.
Three weeks since he’d been brought here. Two since he regained consciousness. One since the fever broke. She’d managed the first two requests, at least so far, but the last…she wasn’t sure anyone could.
“‘The world is a fine place, and worth the fighting for,’” rasped her patient, his black outline hunching a little, bandaged fingers flexing.
He was not a small man, but he’d never especially been a big one, or had flesh to spare, and even through the gauze that swathed him from head to toe and the baggy polyester pajamas, you could see he had lost a lot of weight over the course of his convalescence. “Who said that? Do you know?”
“Earnest Hemingway,” Leslie was able to reply, after some silent minutes racking her brain for the source of the half-familiar half-line. A fine place, worth fighting for, and I hate very much to leave it.
“In For Whom the Bell Tolls,” the nameless, faceless man agreed, sharply, with too much vigor, so that his wrecked voice caught and almost tipped over into another fit of coughing, and he had to stop and swallow, stickily, before continuing in a frustrated stage whisper. “But who says it? I can’t…remember. I can’t…”
His gauze-wrapped hand flew up against the window, so rapidly Leslie started forward, alarmed, to save hand and window both, but her motion petered out; the glass wasn’t cracked. It wasn’t even vibrating. The motion had stopped at the precise instant of contact, and now he was still again, as though all he had wanted was to affirm that the glass was really there.
Not that it was clean enough for that to actually require tactile confirmation. She should wash the windows. Have a volunteer wash the windows. Next time there was time.
“I’m sorry,” Leslie said, stock-still in the middle of her own clinic. Not hovering. She was the doctor, and there was no betraying anything but certainty. “I haven’t read it.”
She had known, vaguely, that the young musician liked to read. When there’d been nothing else in his wallet there’d been a library card. He’d talked Hugo and Sartre with a middle-aged meth addict in her waiting room for over an hour, once, while waiting to get stitches. Way cheaper than TV, he’d brushed the hobby off. With pause and rewind functions and everything. He was bright enough, but he could turn out to be a college graduate or a high school drop-out and she would be equally unsurprised.
“Me neither,” said the patient. “Not that I remember. It never seemed like it mattered, before. I knew everything I needed.”
“Before…you came to Gotham?” she prodded gently.
If he had family somewhere and was willing to reach out to them again, it should be encouraged. He was going to need all the support he could get.
He laughed, and that was too much for his abused throat, so it turned into coughing, and he doubled over, his silhouette almost vanishing entirely but his hand staying pressed against the glass. “There’s nothing before that,” he said, when he had breath again. The laughter was still there in his voice, along with the scraped rawness. “I don’t remember. I never remembered. I didn’t try to find out, once I realized there were maybe, didn’t want—if whoever I was before turned out to have people—I’d have to try to be him for them, right, and—
“And I’m selfish,” he shrugged, after a hesitation. “Either I’d break their hearts all over again or lose who I was, right? Or both. Better like this, I thought.”
He pulled his hand away from the window, and turned finally to look at her, though backlit as he was she couldn’t see his face. Even if she’d been able to, not much expression showed through the bandages.
“But if there are people, and I went to find them now—they wouldn’t recognize me, would they?”
Leslie closed her eyes. She hadn’t precisely hidden the damage from him—he’d been awake for changes of bandages, and now that the worst inflammation was receding, he had to have some idea of the state of his skin. And for all she had told him to keep his tongue away from the insides of his cheeks, he had to have some idea that they weren’t healing cleanly.
His half-conscious screaming in the first days hadn’t helped—he’d torn out the first round of sutures before she gagged him. She couldn’t afford enough of the good drugs to keep anyone under as constantly as a decent hospital would have put him. This kind of major trauma treatment wasn’t in her mandate. But there was nowhere else he could go.
Just surviving was an achievement. She’d told him that, but was careful not to repeat it too often. And now this.
“Would they?” he pressed, a manic note sliding in, and Leslie took another step forward.
“They might not,” she admitted. She lied to patients without shame when necessary, but she doubted it would help here. “But you have people here, in Gotham. A lot of them. They’re looking forward to your recovery.”
More of them than she’d expected, even. Word had gotten around, from one ear to another, and Leslie had dealt for a week and more with the lingering and malingering of people who just wanted to ask her how is he doing? Really? She was hoping none of the ears the news fell into would mean she had to deal with any inquiries that might prove…sharper in nature.
No one had ever quite told her about Jordan-Jerry-Jesse’s masked exploits, but most of what seemed to be his closest friends had impressed on her the need for absolute secrecy, and she’d never been deaf to rumor. Supposedly, the Red Hood had been killed at Ace Chemicals three weeks ago, and his body dissolved in acid. Stupid of the Owl, to make a martyr, much less to destroy the body, when that could so easily lend itself to half a dozen claimants to be the masked man miraculously escaped or revived.
(But then, anger always had damaged his judgment, and he never believed that anyone but himself could be strong.)
Her patient chuckled, more carefully than last time, and didn’t cough. “Yeah,” he agreed. “Yeah. Did ‘lonzo talk to you?”
“I didn’t ask for any names.”
The patient dipped his head, acknowledging the line she walked. “I got good friends.” He sighed, let his hand slide down onto the windowsill and take part of his weight. “Heh. Everybody’s…counting on me to pull through, huh? Brought me my guitar an’ everything.”
The guitar he hadn’t even taken out of its case, even though he’d been lucid for days. The guitar he couldn’t strum without shredding the delicate new skin from his fingertips. Even very careful fretwork would undoubtedly hurt. But avoidance of pain had never been one of this man’s distinguishing characteristics. It had to be more than that.
“You don’t have to do anything you aren’t ready for,” she told him. Which was a lie, of course; even if he was never ready again, he’d have to go out and face the world once he healed up. Have to find work he could do in spite of his injuries, in spite of amnesia and namelessness. She didn’t have the resources to let people stay here past their first desperate need.
But he didn’t have to be Red Hood again. Even if that was what all the people waiting for him expected.
It made sense, now that she knew, that he would be an amnesiac. Even apart from the ever-shifting collage of first names. It fit together how he could have been well into his twenties, scratching out a subsistence-level existence in the worst parts of Gotham, and shown none of the weariness of those born to it, still less the horror of those fallen there from more advantaged childhoods. He was an adult, and this was all he had ever known—but he was also only a few years old, and the world hadn’t taught him despair or bitterness, not yet.
Not until now.
“You’re sweet, Doc,” he said, and there was a sound to his sawdust voice like he would have been smirking a little, if his cheek muscles could have afforded flexing that much. “But we both know it ain’t so.”
Leslie let out a long breath, wishing that the innocent, ignorant idiot were a little more stupid.
“You should drink some more water,” she said. “And sit down. You’re still healing, you shouldn’t put so much weight on your feet yet.”
A more cautious kind of laugh, now, air rushing out his nose—that had to hurt, too, because his sinuses had been scoured at least as badly as anything and that tissue was delicate, but maybe he didn’t register that pain as particularly more urgent than the rest of it. Or—and she had seen this before—maybe he’d reached the point where small, sharp pains were a welcome distraction. “Yeah, okay, doc.”
He turned from the window, shuffled the few feet out of the window frame, to the nearest lightweight waiting-room chair. Instead of obediently dropping himself into it, though, he wrapped his bandaged hand around the top bar and dragged the thing after him, back toward the window.
There was something macabre about the process, Leslie thought, as she watched in silence. The slackness of every muscle he wasn’t actually using, the wounded lurch, the way the chair scraped behind him on two legs. Backlit, the silhouette of his bandages standing out along the bridge of his nose, it seemed like a scene that belonged in a horror movie, like he should leave the chair where he settled it and go back to drag over an accompanying corpse by one leg.
But he simply collapsed, trusting the chair to hold him up, and he was either lucky or had a good sense of balance, because it swayed but didn’t tip. The windows were situated to allow a standing person a view out and maximum natural light in, and so when he was seated his chin didn’t quite clear the sill, but this didn’t seem to bother him, and he kept his eyes on the street, like someone watching for…
Actually, that would make sense.
“Are you expecting a hit squad?” she asked.
He snickered, the sensible, voiceless sort of laughing that shouldn’t strain his throat, but it went on a little too long, a sibilant huffing noise that shivered through the darkness like something not quite human.
“Oh, man, I hope not,” he wheezed. “Not in any shape for that. You haven’t been broadcasting that I’m here, have you?”
Leslie shrugged. “Your friends seem to have told each other.”
“And three can keep a secret if two are dead.” Her patient seemed to brood on that for a few seconds, then shrugged, a round-shouldered shrug calculated to not stretch the bandages. “Sorry, doc. Should I leave?”
Leslie pressed her lips together. The Owl wouldn’t attack during the day, not when night was so much more vulnerable, so much more his. (He would come in the front, likely as not, as a show of strength and a message to the public.) Which meant she wasn’t putting her other patients at risk by harboring this one. Only herself. “Not yet you shouldn’t.”
“Aww,” he whined. “And I’m feeling so cooped up.”
“Suck it up.”
That hissing laughter again. “Yes, ma’am.” He slumped back in his chair, managing to look comfortable even though that was completely impossible. The yellow sodium street light flickered. “I don’t want to make trouble for you,” he said. “You didn’t hafta help me.”
She thought of his limp, burned, wheezing form, and the pleading in the eyes of the man who’d carried him here, pounded at the back door until she woke up and came down. “Yes, I did,” she replied.
“Heh,” said her patient, glancing at her. He sounded like he wanted to smile. “Sorry.”
“It’s fine.”
“I just…feel bad, sometimes. That guy…whoever I used to be? I’ve always thought, when I’m deciding things, would he have wanted this? And, I mean…” His right hand came up, a gauze-swathed shadow, and just barely tapped the window once again. “I don’t know him. I don’t know what he’d’ve wanted. He’s some stranger, and he didn’t even leave me a note to remember him by, but I like to think he was a good guy, and I guess I always felt like I. Well. Owed him.”
He ran his fingers over the glass, bandages rearranging the dirt so that smudges became streaks. “So I had to make sure not to be someone he’d be ashamed to’ve turned into.”
This boy needed a whole team of psychologists.
What he had was one Leslie Thompkins, who wanted to go to bed.
But this was the most insight he’d allowed into his mental state since the screaming stopped, and he obviously needed to talk his way through some of the mess inside his head. Needed an impartial ear, if he could get it, rather than a friend he wouldn’t want to worry.
So she’d stay awake a little longer.
“I love this city,” he said, suddenly, absurdly. “You know?”
“Hm,” said Leslie. On one hand, she didn’t see how anyone could, this awful, grimy place, where hope went to die.
But on the other hand, it was her hometown too. She’d come back, after she left school. She hadn’t had to. There were other places she could have done just as much good. More. (She and Thomas Wayne, collapsed over their textbooks, two days from exams and unable to cram one more fact behind their eyes, or even open them, murmuring across the table about their city, the need there, endless and yawning, the strength like bones showing through the skin of an aging empress. Of what each of them could do, with the tools they had.)
She would be lying if she said she couldn’t see the link between what she did and what this patient had done. Young and violent and shattered as he was. Preventative medicine, she could have imagined him saying, before his injury, when he’d sprawled and grinned and thought nothing could hurt him.
Kindling hope in dark places. This was what it was all about.
“He wants to own it,” her patient said to the dirty window-glass. “Owlman.”
He already does, Leslie thought, but kept it locked behind her teeth. She didn’t know. She couldn’t afford to admit to herself that she suspected.
“And he’s smart,” the bandaged man said disgustedly. “Smart enough to know cities are made of people, so he wants to own them. Us. And…that’s not okay. I keep trying to make sense of him, you know? Not, like, lay him out all logic, I’m no good at that, but…feel him. It’s never been easy. He doesn’t think like most people.”
Leslie gave a little snort, at both the understatement and its source.
The nameless man made a sound like pfffffft that managed to convey wry agreement. “Yeah, well. Me talking. But I get the normal mobsters. I mean, I don’t approve, or anything, but most of them, they’re doing a job. Getting by, getting ahead. I get that.”
He tapped his bandaged fingers over his heart, as if to emphasize what kind of understanding he meant. “And being loyal, over everything else…I respect it, when they’re like that. I’ll fight ‘em, when they’re hurting people, always, but they have real reasons that make sense, even if I mostly don’t think they’re good enough ones.”
Tutted, tongue between teeth, sparing himself the pain of using his lips, but he lurched back onto his feet with a hand on the windowsill in the next second, at a speed that had to cause unnecessary agony.
“But that guy…” he said, only slightly breathless, staring out at the (vacant, still vacant) sidewalk, “he’s possessive of his people, but he’s not loyal. He doesn’t believe he owes them protection, or success. He’s not worried about losing, not even a little. He acts like nothing can scare him, but…I think he is scared, somewhere deep down. I think he’s terrified. Just not of anything in the game. Not even losing. It’s not real to him. It’s all just keeping score.
“What he does…it’s not about the money. It’s about sending a message.”
He turned his back on the window, one more time, and she couldn’t see him any better, but now he could see her.
“I’m not gonna be his message,” he said, and she felt his gaze pressing on her, dark and heavy. His vision was almost back up to 100%. Maybe it’d never be quite what it had been, but he was lucky not to be completely blind, and he knew it. Had closed his eyes so hard, as he drowned in green fire. “No matter what. I’m not gonna let the thing in the factory be the last chapter in that story, not gonna let him use me to tighten his grip on this city. Not as long as I can still draw breath.”
Leslie wanted to say that that might not be much longer, if he went up against the Owlman again. She didn’t need to believe even a fraction of the rumors to know how incredibly dangerous that bird-masked man was.
Wanted to say it. But didn’t.
It wasn’t her job to keep him alive once he walked out her doors. She couldn’t let it be her job, she’d realized long ago, or the job would kill her. She patched up youth gangs and drug addicts and the poorer, lower-tier dealers, and sent them out to go back to tearing apart themselves and each other, and while she might have advice for them, while she would give whatever help she could if people came to her, her responsibility stopped when they left her clinic. It had to. Caring, without caring too much, that was what kept you sane in her line of work.
(Thomas had once called it the Olympic triathlon version of rubbing your stomach and patting your head—‘maybe juggling while competing in a three-legged race, Les.’ There was a reason he had worked at the big, fancy hospital most of the time, performing complex, lifesaving surgeries, and given more money than time to workaday clinics like hers. He’d had the money to give, and he’d always been more sensible than Leslie, had saved enough of himself to love a family with. Much good had it done him.
She hated to think of Thomas more, the longer he had been dead, though she knew that was the opposite of how it should go. There were reasons, though. She didn’t like to think about those, either.)
Right now, her nameless patient needed all the will to live he could draw, from anywhere. She’d learned a lot more than she really wanted to know about him, playing psychologist tonight. Trying to measure the cleave of his sunflower-open soul. After three too-silent weeks of uncertainty, she had his measure again.
He was still exposed, it turned out. Exposed like a nerve. Raw, like the skin over his spirit had been ripped and dissolved as violently as his real one.
When she’d thought he was courting destruction, before this, she’d expected something more prosaic. Killed in a fight, if he was lucky. Crippled, if less so. Taken out in a drive-by shooting by one or another of the powers he kept defying. She’d thought the too-eager boy might wind up withdrawing into a bottle or a needle as his strength wore down, or arranging himself a short drop and a sudden stop—or more likely, considering his attention-mongering habits, staging a melodramatic dive off the tallest skyscraper he could scale. There had even been signs of the kind of deep anger that could lead to some stupid tragedy revenge shooting where the culprit ate his own gun at the end. He’d never seemed entirely sane, after all.
She hadn’t thought about it, just…seen it, with the same dispassionate weariness that recognized how likely the people she saved from ODs were to die the same way, or a worse one, soon enough; the way she knew too many of the youth gang members she patched together would never straighten out their lives, would die young and bloody and sad. He had been brittle and defenseless and afraid of nothing. He would break.
This had shattered him, this boy whose name wasn’t Jason or Joshua or Joaquin.
If he killed himself now, after everything she’d poured into saving him, she would be extremely irritated.
If he killed anybody else, she would be livid.
(…if he killed Owlman, she would simply be miserable. Not that she planned to say anything of the kind; it would be tantamount to permission.)
Leslie knew brokenness. It was all she saw, day in and day out, people coming to her broken in a thousand thousand ways, and always when she thought she must have seen every way a person could break, someone would appear with one way more.
It was not one of those parts of the infinite variety of humankind that filled her with warmth and inspiration.
But it was a reason to be strong.
It was always easier, though, when the patient was determined to recover. Carrying your partner through a race was always going to be more exhausting than making the effort to coordinate.
“What are you planning?” she asked.
He shook his head. “Do I look like a guy with a plan? I’m just lettin’ you know where I stand. So…” he paused, a second, not like he was hesitating but for some other reason. Possibly dramatic effect. “Couldja let me know?” Hesitation, not sure she knew what he was asking, or not wanting to be sure. “Where I stand. What I got left to work with.” He swallowed, and his throat clicked loud enough to hear across the room.
“You need to go back to bed,” Leslie told him.
“No, Doc,” her patient said, his voice cracking. “I need to see.”
“You still have a lot of healing to do…” she temporized.
“Is any of it going to seriously change how it looks?”
Leslie paused. Tried to figure out a way to answer that question that wouldn’t make things worse. Damn patients who made the Hippocratic Oath impossible to keep, anyway. “Probably not,” she admitted at last, folding her hands in front of her. She wasn’t all that old, yet, but they felt papery anyway, dried out from too many talcum-powdered latex gloves and not enough attention to details like skin care. “Not very much.”
The patient nodded, once, like a man accepting a dignified surrender. Repeated himself: “I need to see. I’m a performer, Doc,” he added, when she didn’t answer fast enough. “Being looked at, getting people to listen, it’s what I do. I already know my voice is messed up. I need….”
The need was real. She could hear it.
He might not be strong enough to take the truth. She could hear some of the faultlines in him, too, the ones that had already been there and those that were probably new. But from now on he was only going to dig at himself with the fear of what could be under the bandages that was worse than what he’d already guessed. He wasn’t going to become any more able to bear it with more time.
And she was going to have to put him at the mercy of the world all too soon. He deserved a while to come to terms with his situation, before that happened.
It was too late at night to deal with this. It had been a long day; she wanted to sleep. But when was she going to choose instead? The middle of the day, when the clinic was hopping with too many patients and not enough staff?
“Come on, then,” she said, beckoning. “This way.” Exam room. Light, and equipment, and privacy. (And, she’d admitted long ago, the illusion of control. That tiny, sterile universe where a doctor could reduce all awfulness to what she could do to help.)
He followed her, padding in the battered slippers one of his whispering friends had brought him from wherever he lived.
Her patient sat patiently while she sets up a mirror on the countertop. Drank the bottle of water she handed him. Patiently. She thought it would be easier for him to watch the bandages come off, slowly, to adjust to effects one by one instead of all at once, so she gave him the mirror he wanted. Let him sit face to face with the situation.
He accepted the pallor that emerged as she began unwinding from just behind his left ear. Already knew to expect it from peeks at the backs of his hands; drowned-thing white, blotched with raw pink where the worst burns were still mending. A few of those patches were slightly raised, threatening to become hypertrophic scars. He brightened a little, when he saw his eyes set under the ridge of his eyebrow, the curve of eyelid, bleached and scab-riddled but not changed, and that was all she needed to be sure that he had seen pictures of just how disfiguring acid could really be, the drooping look of flesh like melted plastic.
Keep that in mind, she thought, as she unwrapped the gauze over the bridge of his nose and his head cocked, slightly, to one side, trying to decide if this was the same, or different. If it was just the color that made his long pointy nose look even longer and narrower. Well, if he couldn’t tell, she most assuredly couldn’t. Remember how bad it could have been.
She had never seen vitigo set it so quickly, on tissue that was still so flexible. She’d certainly never seen it cover such a wide area. No one seemed to know exactly what had been in that acid solution. Some of his friends had gone to poke around at the scene of the accident, and found the place cleared out.
He leaned toward the mirror, reached up and brushed his fingertips over the skin just above a still-pink burned spot on his cheekbone. “That’s…really weird.”
“Yes,” she admitted. No use sugarcoating that. And kept uwrapping.
The corner of the left-cheek wound—half scar now—emerged too soon.
“Oh.” The syllable came out very small. He reached up again.
“Don’t touch.” He shouldn’t even have touched the burn. It was still prone to infection. But this hadn’t fully closed up yet, and those bandages on his hands were not clean.
He stopped trying to stick his fingers in his wound, but he pulled away from her, too. Tugged the bandages away from her careful unveiling and grabbed the slack up himself, flinging it around his head in a rapid unfurling that had no consideration for anywhere the gauze might stick, until the last loop fell loose around his neck and there he was, grinning fixedly into the mirror, with no smile in his eyes at all.
A thin whispering whine of—not quite disbelief, she didn’t think, but rejection. “Hhhhhhn,” he aspirated. Reached up again, but touched his reflection instead of his face. Traced still-bandaged fingers over mirror as delicately as he had against the window-glass, following the garish line of scar up his right cheek. The part that had torn instead of being cut was less clean, but healing better—whether that was the slightly different lengths of the broken muscle fibers anchoring the wound against sliding open as they knit, or simply that he put that tissue under less stress trying to use his mouth normally. “Hahhhhh.”
His hand clenched, suddenly, on the edge of the mirror, and a tremble was all the warning she had before he flung it across the room, where it shattered on the far wall. “Hhhah. Hhah. HahahahahahHAHAHA!”
Blood ran as the stitches holding his face together tore free, and he kept laughing.
“Mister—” Leslie began, and stumbled over herself, over the fact that she had no name to call him that was more real than any other, to be firm with. He’d never used the same one twice. He didn’t know his real name.
She’d been firm in the face of greater obstacles. “Mister Hood. Calm down. You need to be calm.” Lips thinning, she reached for, if not a last resort, then still a late one. She knew enough about his exploits to know it would be beyond stupid to lay hands on him in the middle of a panic attack, or psychotic break, or whatever this turned out to be. “Mister Hood, if you can’t stop hurting yourself, I’m going to have to sedate you.”
He seemed to find this warning terribly hilarious. He lurched sideways, nearly fell out of his chair, laughing.
Leslie jammed the needle into his neck.
Despite how television would have it, even the most powerful sedatives didn’t instantly induce unconsciousness, not at remotely safe dosages, and this was relatively mild. His cackles faded slowly to giggles, which subsided into small, formless vocalizations, and he sagged, even closer to toppling over.
“Come on, Mister Hood,” she said, discarding the needle. Pulled his arm up over her shoulders, and half-carried him into the next room, toward the bed. His feet dragged against the floor in at least a vague attempt to cooperate. He’d be alright. She turned him into the bed again, took off his slippers.
Leslie allowed herself a single sigh, and then got down to the grim business of suturing the corners of her patient’s mouth for a third time. She gave him two shots of numbing agent first, but that just meant he could feel less pain at the needle moved through his face, making another set of punctures. He whimpered softly as she worked, self-restraint worn to nothing by emotion and sedation. At least he hadn’t torn them all the way back.
‘The world is a fine place,’ he’d said, not an hour ago. ‘And worth the fighting for.’
Communicating through somebody else’s words always suggested a certain level of dissimulation, to Leslie. Obliqueness. Dissociation. Then again, sometimes it was easier to be honest from behind a mask.
A Hemingway novel she had read was A Farewell to Arms. Years and years ago, now, before med school, when she’d been a young girl with free time and intellectual pretensions.
It had been the mixture of magnificent bleakness, and appeal to the strength of the human spirit, and casual sexism that she understood Hemingway novels generally were, and she’d generally liked it, or at least been impressed by it, but found it too emotionally taxing and vaguely irritating to ever wish to repeat the experience. Not when she had the real world and all its real needs to confront.
She couldn’t remember the main character’s name, or recall the stages of his not-especially-inspiring romance with a woman most probably named either Catherine or Caroline, who died in childbirth due to having no qualified medical assistance, but some parts had stayed with her. The sense of betrayal around the middle, before whatever-his-name-was deserted to save his life from an unjust command structure, a few descriptions of war injury and early twentieth century medicine, and one actual passage.
It had stuck in her mind and replayed there the first time the unconquerable vastness of suffering had truly confronted her with her own powerlessness to change the wide cruel world, and returned again every time she came to the edge of capitulation ever since, so that now she couldn’t say she remembered the passage so much as she did her own memory of it.
The world breaks everyone, was the thing she remembered, and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially.
If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.
The man without a name had broken, and not died. There was no part of him left that was not either wound or scar.
If he was very lucky, the wounds would close, the scars would not be too stiff and the breaks would knit together stronger than ever, and he would push on, one way or another. And if not….
“Hey, Doc,” her patient said. She had finished the stitches and then poured him into his bed with the last of her strength, and was now contemplating whether to face the stairs or simply collapse into the other bed in the room for the next five and a half hours that were all she had left before it was time to get up to reopen the clinic. “Hey, Doc?” his voice was a low creak, and he seemed to be doing his best to keep his lips still and let the new stitches at least try to set. She ignored him, hoping he’d be quiet. “It’s kinda pretty, isn’t it? The purple? It’s a nice color.”
“Yes,” Leslie told him quietly. “Yes, it’s a very nice color.”