Apprehensions and Other Delusions (20 page)

At the front of the room, Daniel cleared his throat and nervously raised his voice. “It’s gonna be a couple minutes more, folks. We’ll have the Cliquot in a little bit. It’s coming. Just be patient, please.” He looked over at Jessie as if to dare her to laugh now. “They’ll bring out glasses for everyone.”

“What’s the hold-up?” asked one of the mourners from out of town, a man in his fifties whom Jessie didn’t recognize.

“Who knows?” said Daniel. He coughed once to show he was aware of how much of an imposition this delay was.

As if on cue a deliveryman in denim coveralls swaggered in behind a hand-truck bearing four cases of premium champagne. He held out a clipboard, and, after a moment, Albert went and signed for it. There was a sudden surge in conversation, as if all the people in the reception hall had been waiting for this moment.

Jessie finished her vodka and handed the glass to the bartender. “Keep it,” she said. “And don’t give me any more, even if I ask for it.” She glanced away from the bartender; there were half-a-dozen guests gathering around the stack of cases. “Flies around honey.”

“In more ways than one,” said the bartender, and when Jessie glanced his way, winked at her.

In spite of her efforts, Jessie laughed again, this time without apology. As the others scowled and stared at her, she let herself continue to laugh. Finally it began to fade without any effort on her part, and, as three waiters distributed glasses of pale, fizzy champagne to the mourners, she wiped her eyes with her handkerchief and was surprised to see tears there. Why would she weep for that wretched old harpy? she asked herself. Marjorie had killed four grown men and five children, if she had told the truth. What on earth was there to cry about?

“You all right, ma’am?” the bartender asked.

When Jessie laughed again, there was a note of despair in it, a concession she had never expected to make. “She made me miss her, goddamnit.”

George swung around again. “Well, I should think so. There aren’t many women like Marjorie around. They don’t make them like her any more.”

As Jessie’s laughter welled afresh, she said, “Yes. Let’s hope,” and drank her champagne before Daniel could propose a toast.

About
Inappropriate Laughter

When I first wrote this, back in 1997, I hadn’t a clue where I could sell it. It falls in between so many forms that it ends up belonging in none of them.
The Spook
on-line magazine finally took it—trimmed down by 2,000 words—in 2002, and it is in that form that you see it now.

The story’s experiential inception, I think, stems from a memorial service I attended when I was 18. Two of my friends got the giggles about halfway through the event, and from that point on, small explosions of not-very-well-suppressed laughter punctuated the expressions of grief I remember wishing they could/would stop, but that seemed impossible. For the next five months the two regularly apologized for causing such an uproar, admitting that they couldn’t recall why it had seemed funny to them. Certainly their chagrin has infused the story, along with a host of implications that may or may not account for what is happening.

ON THE
third
day of battle, the bombing drove Sister Maggie off the roof where she had taken refuge in an abandoned dovecote; she returned to the enormous, wrecked hotel, dreading what she would find in the four floors of pillaged rooms. Since the local uprising—calling itself a revolution—destruction had escalated. It was worse than she feared: in what had been the lobby injured children were left to their own devices while their parents labored to shore up defenses or joined various ragtag resistance movements, nipping at the enemy with captured guns, with improvised weapons, with knives, with stones.

The smell was like a slaughterhouse in summer, pungent and heavy. A continual moan made up of all the cries and whimpers and grunts of the wounded ebbed and flowed through the pillared ruin. Most of the furniture had been broken up and now covered the large, gaping holes that had once been windows. Two of the long couches had been pressed into service as examining tables. The village’s midwife, usually shunned, was doing this work, practicing her own sort of triage.

Sister Maggie approached the old woman. “Let me help,” she pleaded. “I am a nurse.” She was reasonably certain she was the only person with clinical medical training for half a day’s journey in any direction. It wrung her soul that no one in the village would accept her assistance: she was here to give it, yet remained ostracized.

The midwife pretended she did not understand, although Sister Maggie spoke her language expertly. The peasant-woman continued to pour vodka looted from the hotel stores over the jagged, puffy flesh of a shrapnel wound.

“You’ve got to take the fragments out first,” said Sister Maggie desperately, wishing the clinic still existed. She could use the equipment there, and the antibiotics. “If you don’t clean it, it will fester and he’ll lose the whole leg. Or his life.” She crossed herself and noticed two of the children waiting for help make a sign to ward off the Evil Eye as she did so.

Finally the midwife looked at her, deep-probing eyes lost in furrowed wrinkles. “You have no right here. Leave us.”

“But I can help,” Sister Maggie protested.

“You have helped enough,” said one of the wounded children, a girl of fourteen who had lost an eye and whose body was starting to swell with her first pregnancy. Her resentment drove Sister Maggie away from her as a fire or a stench would have done.

Still caught in the intensity of the girl’s stare, Sister Maggie almost tripped over a three-year-old with a savage scalp wound. The child, pathetically thin and breathing in fast, shallow gasps, was already sinking into coma; as Sister Maggie watched, his breathing became more irregular. He would be dead in less than an hour without concerted treatment for shock. Without such intervention, he would die quickly, if God was kind. Sister Maggie paid no attention to the angry faces around her as she knelt to cross herself, and traced the sign of the cross on the boy’s forehead, saying her prayers for him silently so that she would not be ordered to stop.

“Leave him alone!” shouted one of the old men guarding the place. In his arthritic hands he carried a rifle that was more than fifty years old.

“But I can help,” Sister Maggie protested.

“No one can help him,” the old man declared with the authority of age.

Sister Maggie moved away at once, leaving the dying child. She hoped God would understand and show His forgiveness, not only to her but to these people as well. There was so much she had asked Him to understand over the past five years, and always with the conviction that she would eventually be given the opportunity to make amends.

There was another boy, nine or ten, although he looked younger; everyone called him the Rat because he was the most adept thief and scavenger in the hotel, possibly in the entire village. He was especially good at raiding opposition materiel, but for this prized skill he was distrusted, too, and avoided. He was off in a corner of the lobby by himself, ignored and neglected. His right sleeve was stiff with dried blood. His huge eyes, a deep, soft brown, showed a cynicism that would have been troubling in a grown man; in this boy it was appalling. He watched the nun in the patched jumpsuit come toward him, saving nothing, his face expressionless, even of pain.

“Hello, Rat,” said Sister Maggie, speaking his language with the ease of practice.

“Hello,” he answered without emotion.

This would be difficult; she had been afraid he might not be willing to speak with her at all. She decided to behave as if the calamity around them were usual. “Has anyone had a chance to look at you yet? That arm could use—”

He regarded her with scorn. “Why would they look? What will they do?” He attempted to wave it, to show how minor a matter it was. His mangled hand flapped uselessly; unshed tears brightened his eyes, though he steadfastly refused to cry.

“Because they want you to keep stealing ammunition from the revolutionaries, and you need both hands working to do that,” said Sister Maggie in her most reasonable voice. “Do you mind if I look at it?” She prepared herself for a rebuff and offered a short, inward prayer to the Virgin, hoping she could offer up the shame as well as her lost opportunity to serve.

“They don’t care who steals the ammunition as long as someone does,” the Rat said, but let Sister Maggie come over to him and cut away the lower part of his sleeve with the scissors of her Swiss Army knife. The only indication of his concern for his injury was in his reluctance to look at it. “There have been worse.”

But not where a hand could be saved, thought Sister Maggie as she looked at what had happened to bone and muscle and flesh: an explosive had shattered half his hand and the lower end of the ulna. Fragile tendons showed above shattered bone. The Rat would be fortunate if he could salvage a thumb and the first two fingers, and that would require expert medical treatment. It was a grim prospect for the boy. What would he do with his life after such a loss? The possibilities were unbearably grim. “You should go to a hospital. You need help. You could lose ...”

The Rat laughed.

“I mean it, Rat. You need a doctor, with drugs and medicines and machines to help him. That hand should be ...” She made herself look away from the terrible damage. There had to be a way to save him. She had to do something. She wished she were not the only one left from the clinic—that the clinic was not a burn-scarred ruin. “A surgeon could save your hand, or some of it, and it would work right afterward. There is a hospital at the army depot, isn’t there? It’s only two days from here.”

“Two days if there’s no fighting and the roads are open. But if I go to the army, they will not help me, they will arrest me. They will put me in a cell with other boys, or keep me to amuse an officer. The army is like that. The soldiers are given their choice of men or women, for rewards. You have light hair. You are a Sister. A lot of them will want you.” His smile showed how completely he understood his predicament, and hers, and what little patience he had for her suggestion. “I won’t go to the army.”

“Where else can you find a doctor?” Sister Maggie asked helplessly. “There must be a doctor who is not part of the army, or who does not answer to the army. Not all the doctors live in fear of the soldiers, do they?” Since Father Kenster died two years ago, she had not been able to find anyone willing to take his place—the village was too remote and in a district where rebel and counterinsurgent bands roamed at will, taking what they could carry and burning the rest in the name of reform and revenge. “What about the ... the town where they have the sheep market?” She could not remember the name, if she had ever known it.

“The sheep market?” The Rat made a contemptuous motion with his good hand, smiling without mirth. “Everyone thinks there are doctors at the sheep market. There are. For the sheep. None of them would touch me, or anyone like me.”

“Then where?” Sister Maggie demanded.

“Nowhere, you idiotic woman.” He let his voice drop, his face haggard. “There are no doctors for us. Doctors do not come here. It is only a lie to tell people when they get sick, so that they may be taken away when they are dying, and no one will make trouble about it. ‘We are going to the doctor,’ they tell the dying ones, and everyone is satisfied.” At last the Rat looked at the destruction of his hand. Aside from turning white around the mouth, his face might have been set in cement for all it revealed.

“You need medical treatment.” She said it more forcefully, watching the boy, wishing she still had even a few basic supplies. She wanted to know his blood pressure, body temperature, pulse rate; she wanted to monitor him for shock. But the last of the supplies had been lost when Father Kenster died defending the clinic.

“Your medicine is wrong. It would kill me.” He stared at her. “I don’t want it.”

“But—” Sister Maggie squatted down beside the Rat. “You can’t ask me to ignore you. I can’t forget what’s been—” She gestured toward his sleeve.

He swung away from her. “I will forget. I am forgetting already. You will forget. The others”—he jutted his chin toward the children lying in the refuse of the lobby—“will forget. It means nothing.”

“I can’t do that,” she insisted. “I’m a nun. I took vows, Rat. I made promises to God and the Church, before you were born. I promised to help people.” It was sixteen years ago, she realized distantly. The idealistic young nurse in her habit and veil and wimple was a third of the world and a third of her life away. It had seemed so wonderful, being a medical missionary, someone who could actually make a difference in the world, someone would could heal the body as well as the soul. Sixteen years ago, in Boston, it had all seemed so possible.

“God will not mind if you stop being a nun after so long,” the Rat said with something like kindness, all he was capable of offering her. “Forget your vows. You cannot keep them here, and your Church has already forgotten you.”

“You don’t understand,” said Sister Maggie, grateful for his attempts at softening the blow; steady, seductive despair tugged at her, tantalizing her with the balm of helplessness. “It would make me a ... a fraud.” The word was softer than the one she had chosen at first, but she doubted the Rat know who Judas was, or cared.

On the north side of the village the bombing steadily increased.

At dusk the next evening the Rat found Sister Maggie back on the roof in the remnants of her dovecote. He was looking pasty but for his wounded hand, which was ruddy and swollen, shiny of skin and hot to the touch; corruption had set in. “Not even the birds want to live here anymore. Why do you?”

“For peace,” she said, refusing to be distracted by the tracer bullets against the northern sky. “It was this or the streets.”

“But the bombs will ruin it. If not now, soon. At first it was just pistols, then rifles, but now they are serious. You could die.” He was feverish, his eyes brilliant as broken glass. “It was stupid, getting hurt. I picked up a bomb. I couldn’t throw it away fast enough.” He laughed angrily, rocking with pain.

“Come out of the sun,” said Sister Maggie, trying to lead the boy to what shelter remained of her dovecote.

“No.” He lunged away from her. “Keep back.”

She reached out to the boy. “Don’t do this, Rat. Please don’t do this.”

“Why?” His voice broke. “Because it makes you unhappy? Because you don’t have a way to stop it?” He could not swagger the way he liked but he was able to get an arrogant lift to his chin. “You came here! We didn’t ask you, you came! None of us wanted you. We wanted help to kill our enemies. We didn’t want a clinic, we wanted guns.”

Hearing this from the infection-dazed boy, she had to struggle to maintain a little composure. “If you outlive your enemies, if you can live better than they do, then you triumph over them,” she said patiently.

He spat. “They will come and take everything.” He moved his good hand in an encompassing gesture. “The village will be gone before the year is out. Now that they have noticed us, there is nothing we can do to save it.”

“They killed Father Kenster, and the other Sisters,” said Sister Maggie, crossing herself as much out of habit as conviction. “May God forgive them for their sins.”

“May God fill them with the plague that kills and kills and kills, and rots their bodies to nothing for ten generations!” He stumbled and would have fallen if Sister Maggie had not caught him. She settled him back gently onto the sheet metal and planking that made up most of the roof. “Get away from me,” he muttered. “I do not want your help.”

“You will have to endure it, anyway,” she said, almost grateful to the boy for collapsing. At last there was a chance— slim one but a chance—to do something for him, to expiate the many times she had not been able to help. She did not want this boy to be like the others, turning away from her. She might not have all the tools she wanted, but she was a good nurse as well as a nun, and neither of those callings had changed because her circumstances had. As long as she had her skill, her training, and her faith, there was hope. The lessons learned long ago were still with her. She went about her tasks with the automatic ease of long practice. First she felt the pulse in his throat, finding his heartbeat fast, not quite regular; his forehead and palms were hot, dry; his body had a meaty odor about it. She would get one of her blankets to put over him, that was a start. When night fell, she would give him her own blanket as well,
so that he would not be chilled. His feet ought to be raised above the level of his head, to lessen the work his heart had to do, but she had no means to accomplish this, and abandoned the effort.