IN DEFENSE OF SILENCE
H
ere’s the conundrum about nurses: the young ones are beautiful but incompetent, and the old ones are competent but ugly. When my complaint is mild, I seek out a young, beautiful nurse. She will take twice as long to dress my wound (and do half as good a job) as an old nurse, but her wide eyes, smooth skin, and rose-red lips—these have a healing power that well-applied bandages do not. When I’m in grave shape, though, I look for the oldest, ugliest nurse around. She will work with grim dispatch, doing exactly the right thing and not relying on weeping eyes or pouting lips to heal me.
The charge nurse at the Prefargier Sanatorium was ancient and hideous—and thus brilliant. She unwrapped my shoulder wound and picked two more bits of bullet from it and debrided it of dead flesh and sanitized it and stitched up the gulf, all while wondering why a young man would run for his life when his father was in mortal danger. She also redressed the wound on my neck and taught me why Scotch—in any proof—is not equal to wood alcohol administered by an expert.
“All right. You’re fine,” she said, “better than you could’ve hoped—and for free. Now, you’ve got to get out of here. We’ve got no beds for folks that don’t pay”
I was about to agree—the streets of Bern are not inhospitable to the man who knows how to purloin an apple or a carrot—but then Silence screamed.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“Treatment,” the nurse said solemnly.
“What sort of …” I stood up, trailing a final bandage from my arm and heading toward the beveled-glass window. Gazing through it, I saw a sight I couldn’t believe.
Silence lay there on some kind of segmented examination table, his neck and hands and legs tied down, and alligator clips clinging to ears and fingers and toes. Electricity vaulted through him—arms flexing against his bonds, abdomen clenching above the main table, legs arcing as energy moved through them. His electrified figure formed the shape of a pentacle—a five-pointed star—but there was something more. Silence’s spirit seemed to be driven up from his body, an ectoplasmic presence that roiled in the air. It was as if this electric therapy had exorcised his soul from his body.
I thought of my plenary worm … dead one moment, electrified the next, and alive the third. But that had been science. This was—exorcism.
I looked to Dr. Burckhardt, who crouched beside Silence and cranked the demonic box that sent charges through him.
“No!” I shouted, and pushed open the door and rushed forward to grab the box that the doctor cranked. “No!” I cried again, and pulled the wires loose from Silence and hurled the box away It slid, sparking, across the tiles of the operating theater.
“You!” shouted Dr. Burckhardt. “Out! Out, I say!” He grabbed my newly bandaged shoulder and hauled me out of the operating theater and dragged me across the floor of the waiting room. Ahead of us, a semicircle of insane people
seated around the perimeter of the room pulled their feet up from the floor as we passed, as if we were floodwaters. Reaching the double doors of the sanatorium, Dr. Burckhardt barked a few words in German and hurled me out onto the stone steps.
I tumbled to a halt, shaken, bruised, and not a little bit annoyed. You haven’t been thrown out of a place until you have been thrown out by someone barking at you in German.
My plan had failed.
For a scamp, there’s nothing worse than a failed plan. It is as if a carpenter built a shed that fell down, or a priest baptized someone, accidentally, into the worship of the devil. A failed plan for a scamp—or for a scientist, and I was both—meant that I was perhaps too inept at my chosen profession to survive.
I sat on the steps that Silence and I had scaled and took stock of my situation. “I wonder if I’ll ever see him again.”
All right, Thomas, I thought, you’re in a spot now—kicked out of an asylum with Silence kicked in. What’s your next brilliant plan?
I had a heavy feeling in my gut. What was it: responsibility? No. It was stronger than that. Guilt? Honestly? I’d already saved Silence five times over, and I didn’t owe him a sixth … . But I couldn’t just leave him in the hands of that mad scientist and his brutal breadbox.
Think, Thomas! Think!
I stood up and walked down the steps. Something about the rhythm of feet on pavement—it always untangled my thoughts. How could I get in? I couldn’t return as a patient. Nurse Cragface would recognize me right away. I couldn’t disguise myself as a doctor—not young as I was, dressed as I was, with a British accent. If only they had a maintenance crew, or a carpentry crew, or an exterminator … .
I imagined myself in a pair of overalls, a metal cylinder at my waist and a spray nozzle in my grip. “I haff come to spritz zee rats!” Laughing, I stepped into the street …
And was nearly run down by a four-wheeled phaeton. The horse whickered at me, and the driver knocked me back with the butt of his whip. He growled something in German: “
Ver
-
dammter Tourist!”
I staggered back. Well, that would’ve been one way into the hospital—or the morgue.
A lamplighter passed by, carrying a wick stick in one hand and a slender ladder in the other. He leaned the ladder against a lamppost, climbed, reached up with his lighting stick, and flicked the glass open. The wick darted in to ignite the lamp, and then he flipped the glass closed again. I looked to the light, only then realizing how dark the sky was becoming. A black ribbon of soot rolled up from the lantern and twisted into the night sky.
There was something in that smoke—the key to my predicament.
I turned toward the sanatorium and saw a similar line of smoke drifting from the top of a cigar-shaped smokestack. The smoke waved to me and then swept down in a gray ribbon across the street before dissipating on the wind. There was a faint stench in it, the stench of burned flesh.
“Crematorium!” I said in glee. I was, perhaps, the first person in the history of the world to say that word that way. Trying to clamp down on my enthusiasm, I strode excitedly toward the smokestack. A wooden fence shielded it from the road, sheltering an alley just wide enough for the ash man to wheel his cart up and shovel out the bones and ash.
Ah-ha! The ash clean-out. I reached down to grab the large metal handle and pulled. A six-foot-long drawer slid out on hidden rollers, revealing a wide pan filled with ashes and
bones. Heat rose from the remains—not killing heat, but the spanking radiance of spent coals. With a final glance behind me, I brushed back the waste, curled up in the drawer, and gingerly rolled myself into the incinerator.
As the drawer slid closed, darkness enveloped me. Darkness and heat. I reached up, feeling the warm edges of a brick chute, and above it, wide-spaced bars that were crusted with grease. I shoved on the bars, and the whole grillwork lifted loose. Then I scampered up through it, pushed open the incinerator door, and climbed out onto the tiled floor of the crematorium.
“I’m in!” I said to myself excitedly.
“
Qu’est-ce que c’etait?”
someone else said in the nearby hallway. Footsteps approached.
I had to hide, but the room was small and bare. Fighting every instinct, I opened the incinerator door and climbed back in, closing it behind me.
I heard the men step into the room. They whispered suspiciously to each other, and their voices grew nearer. One of the men barked something that made me lurch, my foot striking the incinerator door with a bang. I stilled myself, held my breath, even kept my eyeballs from moving. I lay there in that stiff terror for three long seconds before hearing the creak of the incinerator door lifting.
“Merde!”
one of the men said as he clapped eyes on me.
I held still, legs and arms and body and lungs and all and tried to play dead. Out of my peripheral vision, I could sense that they were blinking in disbelief, their mouths hanging wide. In time, movement came to those slack jaws. They spoke to each other in brusque whispers, nodded once in unison, and eased the door of the incinerator closed.
I breathed again at last.
Then the blue flames burst out below me.
I smashed against the incinerator door, bashing back the two faces that had been just outside, and dropped to the floor. Little flames clung to my clothes, but I rolled over to extinguish them. The men danced back and shouted in consternation—giving me room to roll until the fires were out. Wide-eyed and terrified, I stopped on hands and buttocks and heels and stared up at the two men.
“I’m alive!” I said. “I’m alive!”
They returned my amazed look. “
Pas encore une fois.
”
One man shut off the gas, and both swept forward, hoisted me, and carried me toward the door of the crematorium. With their free hands, they brushed off the ash that clung to my clothes. When I tried to explain, one man clamped his hand over my mouth, and the other man shushed me.
They conveyed me out of the crematorium and up a long white stairway. At its top, we passed through another hall and into a ward that was lined on both sides with beds. Anguished souls lay in them in various states of consciousness. With another shush, the men carried me to an empty bed, dragged back the covers, shoved me in, covered me up, and stalked nervously away.
I struggled to hold still, but laughter jiggled up in my throat. I couldn’t hold the sound and let loose. My giggles turned to chortles to guffaws that rang from the vault above. Luckily, insane laughter was commonplace in the Prefargier Sanatorium.
After the jag was done, I lay still and felt the sweetness of the silence, the softness of the pillow, the sense that nothing could harm me. I felt invulnerable.
It was time to find Harold Silence.
Sliding my legs out from under the covers, I stepped out across the ward. The first bed held an ancient fellow. His
leathery face was surrounded by a shock of white hair and a beard that shuddered with each voluminous snore. Obviously not Silence. The second bed held a young man who watched me with cloudy eyes and moaned, “Clarice … Clarice … Clarice …” I stalked past another blasted soul, and another, but none was the blasted soul of my friend. I checked every bed in the ward, but no Silence.
Creeping to the doorway of the ward, I looked out. Beyond was the circular receiving room with another ward opening on the other side. Smack in the middle, however, sat Nurse Cragface. She continued her grim itemizations, her eyes as keen as they had been two hours before.
I’d never get past her, unless …
Retreating to the nearest bed, I stooped down in hopes of finding—yes, a metal bedpan. As I gingerly lifted it from the floor, I discovered it was full. “All the better.”
I judged the distance between me and the poor sod who was muttering “Clarice,” cocked the bedpan in my arm, and hurled it. The missile flew with a wobbly motion over three sleepers, its contents sloshing ominously, before it descended. The metal pan struck the foot board of the young lunatic’s bed, clanging monstrously, and then plunged to hit the tiles with a wet, tumbling racket.
The young lunatic shouted, “CLARICE!”
Hard-soled shoes clacked beyond the door, approaching, and I ducked down into a shadow beside one bed.
Next moment, Nurse Cragface arrived, feet planted wide like a rugby player’s and hands angrily jammed on hips. “Meister Boniface!” she roared, striding now between the rows of beds.
“CLARICE!” he responded in desperate apology.
Though some inmates had slept through the clanging
chamber pot, none remained asleep after this exchange. Patients sat up and yelped to see the formidable nurse marching toward the patient.
In the general tumult, I scuttled from my hiding place and stole out of the ward.
The receiving room beyond was deserted and silent. I rushed past the nurse’s desk and into the opposite ward, skidding to a halt between two long rows of beds.
This ward was different—utterly silent, utterly still. Each bed had an occupant, but the patients were not free. Straitjackets fastened hands to shoulders and tied ankles together. Bed straps bound bodies in place. Gags filled mouths, propped jaws open, kept tongues from being bitten off—or from forming words. I stared in pity at the patients and heard the quiet panic of breath in eighty straining nostrils.
I stalked among the beds and studied the fugitive faces in their sterile white wrappings. Some could be ruled out by sight—that redheaded berserker, that black-headed boy, that man with the double eye patches. Others required a check of the chart that dangled from the foot of the bed: “Johannes T Godiva—melancholic” … “Michael Hartwick—megalomaniac” … “Jean Paul Rouel—opium addict …” Such perfectly sane names beside such damning diagnoses. “Fritz G. Heimsen—sodomite” … “Casimir Thoris Storaski—deviant” … “James Thomas—violent addlepate.”
“Addlepate, perhaps—but violent?”
I stopped and stared. I would hardly have recognized him—his eyes closed, his skin sunken, the gag across his mouth biting into sallow cheeks, hair spiking on the pillow. Silence looked like a corpse, wrapped in straitjacket and straps … .