From the Corner of His Eye

Chapter 14

A SEVERE THIRST INDICATED to Agnes that she wasn't dead. There would be no thirst in paradise.

Of course, she might be making an erroneous assumption about her sentence at Judgment. Thirst would likely afflict the legions of Hell, a fierce, never-ending thirst, made worse by meals consisting of salt and sulfur and ashes, nary a blueberry pie, so perhaps she was indeed dead and forever cast down among murderers and thieves and cannibals and people who drove thirty-five miles per hour in a twenty-five-mile-per hour school zone.

She was suffering from chills, too, and she'd never heard that Hades had a heating problem, so perhaps she hadn't been condemned to damnation, after all. That would be nice.

Sometimes she saw people hovering over her, but they were just shapes, their faces without detail, as her vision was blurred. They might have been angels or demons, but she was pretty sure they were ordinary people, because one of them cursed, which an angel would never do, and they were trying to make her more comfortable, whereas any self respecting demon would be thrusting lit matches up her nose or jabbing needles in her tongue or tormenting her in some hideous fashion that it had learned in whatever trade school demons attended before certification.

They also used words that didn't fit the tongues of angels or demons: hypodermoclysis ... intravenous oxytocin ... maintain perfect asepsis, and I mean perfect, at all times ... a few oral preparations of ergot as soon as it's safe to give her anything by mouth More than not, she floated in darkness or in dreams.

For a while, she was in The Searchers She and Joey were riding with a deeply troubled John Wayne while the delightful David Niven floated along overhead in a basket suspended from a huge, colorful hot-air balloon.

Waking from a starry night in the Old West into electric light, gazing up into a blur of faces sans cowboy hats, Agnes felt someone moving a piece of ice in slow circles over her bare abdomen. Shivering as the cold water trickled down her sides, she tried to ask them why they were applying ice when she was already chilled to the bone, but she couldn't find her voice.

Suddenly she realized-Good Lord! — that someone else had a had inside her, up the very center of her, massaging her uterus in the same lazy pattern as that made by the piece of melting ice on her belly.

“She'll need another transfusion."

This voice she recognized. Dr. Joshua Nunn. Her physician.

She'd heard him earlier but hadn't identified him then.

Something was very wrong with her, and she tried to speak, but again her voice failed her.

Embarrassed, cold, abruptly frightened, she returned to the Old West, where night on the low desert was warm. The campfire flickereded welcomingly. John Wayne put an arm around her and said, “There are no dead husbands or dead babies here,” and though he intended only to reassure her, she was overcome by misery until Shirley MacLaine took her aside for some heart-to-heart girl talk. Agnes woke again and was no longer chilled, but feverish. Her lips were cracked, her tongue rough and dry.

The hospital room was softly lighted, and shadows roosted on all sides like a flock of slumbering birds.

When Agnes groaned, one of the shadows spread its wings, moved closer, to the right side of the bed, and resolved into a nurse. Agnes's vision had cleared. The nurse was a pretty young woman with black hair and indigo eyes.

“Thirsty,” Agnes rasped. Her voice was Sahara sand abrading anienct stone, the dry whisper of a pharaoh's mummy talking to itself in a vaulted sealed for three thousand years.

“You can't take much of anything by mouth for a few hours yet,” said the nurse. “Nausea is too great a risk. Retching might start you hemorrhaging again."

“Ice,” said someone on the left side of the bed.

The nurse raised her eyes from Agnes to this other person. “Yes a chip of ice would be all right."

When Agnes turned her head and saw Maria Elena Gonzalez, she thought she must be dreaming again.

On the nightstand stood a stainless-steel carafe beaded with condensation. Maria took the cap off the water carafe, and with a longhandled spoon, she scooped out a chip of ice. Cupping her left hand under the spoon to catch drips, she conveyed the shimmering sliver to Agnes's mouth.

The ice was not merely cold and wet; it was delicious, and it seemed strangely sweet, as though it were a morsel of dark chocolate.

When Agnes crunched the ice, the nurse said, “No, no. Don't swallow it all at once. Let it melt."

This admonition, made in all seriousness, left Agnes shaken. If such If such a small quantity of crushed ice, taken in a single swallow, might cause nausea and renewed hemorrhaging, she must be extremely fragile. One of the roosting shadows might still be Death, holding a stubborn vigil.

She was so hot that the ice melted quickly. A thin trickle slid down her throat, but not enough to take the Sahara out of her voice when she said, “More."

“Just one,” the nurse allowed.

Maria fished another chip from the sweating carafe, rejected it, and scooped out a larger piece. She hesitated, staring at it for a moment, and then spooned it between Agnes's lips. “Water can to be broken if it will be first made into ice."

This seemed to be a statement of great mystery and beauty, and Agnes was still contemplating it when the last of the ice melted on her tongue. Instead of more ice, sleep was spooned into her, as dark and rich as baker's chocolate.