Outnumbering the Dead

1

Although the place is a hospital, or as much like a hospital as makes no difference, it doesn't smell like one. It certainly doesn't look like one. With the flowering vines climbing its walls and the soothing, gentle plink-tink of the tiny waterfall at the head of the bed, it looks more like the deluxe suite in some old no-tell motel. Rafiel is now spruced up, replumbed and ready to go for another five years before he needs to come back to this place for more of the same, and so he doesn't look much like a hospital patient, either. He looks like a movie star, which he more or less is, who is maybe forty years old and has kept himself fit enough to pass for twenty-something. That part's wrong, though. After all the snipping and reaming and implanting they've done to him in the last eleven days, what he is, is a remarkably fit man of ninety-two.

When Rafiel began to wake from his designer dream he was very hungry (that was due to the eleven days he had been on intravenous feeding) and quite horny, too (that was the last of the designer dream). 'B'jour, Rafiel,' said the soft, sweet voice of the nurser, intruding on his therapeutic dream as the last of it melted away. Rafiel felt the nurser's gentle touch removing the electrodes from his cheekbones, and, knowing very well just where he was and what he had been doing there, he opened his eyes.

He sat up in the bed, pushing away the nurser's velvety helping hand. While he was unconscious they had filled his room with flowers. There were great blankets of roses along one wall, bright red and yellow poppies on the windowsill that looked out on the deep interior court. Momenta, please,' he said to the nurser, and experimentally stretched his naked body. They had done a good job. That annoying little pain in the shoulder was gone and, when he held one hand before him, he saw that so were the age spots on his skin. He was also pleased to find that he had awakened with a perfectly immense erection. 'Seems okay,' he said, satisfied.

'Hai, claro,' the nurser said. That was the server's programmed all-purpose response to the sorts of sense-free or irrelevant things hospital patients said when they first woke up. 'Your amis are waiting to come in.'

'They can wait.' Rafiel yawned, pleasantly remembering the last dream. Then, his tumescence subsiding, he slid his feet over the edge of the bed and stood up. He waved the nurser away and scowled in surprise. 'Shit. They didn't fix this little dizziness I've been having.'

'Voulez see your chart?' the nurser offered. But Rafiel didn't at all want to know what they'd done to him. He took an experimental step or two, and then the nurser would no longer be denied. Firmly it took his arm and helped him toward the sanitary room. It stood by as he used the toilet and joined him watchfully in the spray shower, the moisture rolling harmlessly down its metal flanks. As it dried him off, one of its hands caught his finger and held on for a moment - heartbeat, blood pressure, who knew what it was measuring? - before saying, 'You may leave whenever you like, Rafiel.'

'You're very kind,' Rafiel said, because it was his nature to be polite even to machines. To human beings too, of course. Especially to humans, as far as possible anyway, because humans were what became audiences and no sensible performer wanted to antagonize audiences. But with humans it was harder for Rafiel to be always polite, since his inner feelings, where all the resentments lay, were so frequently urging him to be the opposite - to be rude, insulting, even violent; to spit in some of these handsome young faces sometimes out of the anger that was always burning out of sight inside him. He had every right to that smouldering rage, since he was so terribly cheated in his life, but - he was a fair man - his special problem wasn't really their fault, was it? And besides, the human race in general had one trait that forgave them most others: they adored Rafiel. At least the surveys showed that 36.9 per cent of them provably did, a rating which only a handful of utter superstars could ever hope to beat.

That sort of audience devotion imposed certain obligations on a performer. Appearance was one, and so Rafiel considered carefully before deciding what to wear for his release from the hospital. From the limited selection his hospital closet offered he chose red pantaloons, a luminous blue blouse and a silk cap to cover his unmade hair. On his feet he wore only moleskin slippers, but that was all right. He wouldn't be performing, and needed no more on the warm, soft, mossy flooring of his hospital room.

He time-stepped to the window, glancing out at the distant figures on the galleries of the hundred-metre atrium of the arcology he lived and worked in, and at the bright costumes of those strolling across the airy bridges, before he opaqued the window to study his reflection. That was satisfactory, though it would have been better if he'd had the closets in his condo to choose from. He was ready for the public who would be waiting for him - and for all the other things that would be waiting for him, too. He wondered how much time he had lost. He wondered if the redecoration of his condo had been completed, as it was supposed to have been while he was in the medical facility; he wondered if his agent had succeeded in re-booking the personal appearances he had had to miss, and whether the new show - what was it based on? Yes. Oedipus Rex. Whatever that was - had come together.

He was suddenly impatient to get on with his life, so he said, 'All right, they can come in now' - and a moment later, when the nurser had signalled the receptionists outside that it was all right, in they all came, his friends and colleagues from the new show: pale, tiny Docilia flying over to him with a quick kiss, Mosay, his dramaturge, bearing still more flowers, a corsage to go on Rafiel's blouse, Victorium with his music box hung around his neck, all grinning and welcoming him back to life. 'And comment va our Oedipus this morning?' Mosay asked, with pretend solicitude. Mosay didn't mean the solicitude to be taken seriously, of course, because there was really nothing for anyone to be solicitous about. The nursers wouldn't have awakened Rafiel if all the work hadn't been successfully done.

'Tutto bene,' Rafiel answered as expected, letting Mosay press the bunch of little pink violets to his blouse and smelling their sweet scent appreciatively. 'Ready for work. Oh, and having faim, too.'

'But of course you are, after all that,' said Docilia, hugging him, 'and we have a lunch all set up for you. Can you go now?' she asked him, but looking at the nurser - which answered only by opening the door for them. Warmly clutching his arm and fondly chattering in his ear, Docilia led him out of the room where, for eleven days, he had lain unconscious while the doctors and the servers poked and cut and jabbed and mended him.

Rafiel didn't even look back as he entered this next serial instalment of his life. There wasn't any nostalgia in the place for him. He had seen it all too often before.