The nurse returned with a new pillow. She straightened the bed and put the pillow under his head in a way that said, See that it stays there. She looked at her wristwatch. "I'll get you an injection."
Audrey lay back looking at the ceiling. He felt calm and relaxed. He must have had a nightmare. He couldn't remember what it was and it all seemed very remote and unimportant. Just a pillow. Well, he had a new pillow now. The nurse was back with a hypo on a little silver tray. He rolled back his sleeve, felt the alcohol on his arm—and the prick of the needle. GOM one quarter grain.
He woke in gray dawnlight and lay there trying to remember. When had it all started? In London with Jerry Green and John Everson. His first real habit.
He had chippied around in New York with cut shit but this was pure H dispensed by a woman doctor with a title. The Countess, they called her. If she liked you she would write for any amount of heroin and coke or both. She liked the "boys," as she called them.
Then, suddenly, the terrible news. The Countess was dead of a heart attack. The Home Office was clamping down. Time to move.
So Audrey, Jerry and John set out for Katmandu in a second-hand car that got them as far as Trieste, where they took a boat arriving in Athens in the middle of the summer.
The boat was like an oven. They finally found quarters in a hosteclass="underline" a bare room with three cots. The proprietor had inquisitive unpleasant eyes. Everything about him said "police informer." But they were thin and the room was cooler than the street. The boys stripped to their underwear and sat down on the cots.
"I feel terrible," said Audrey.
"I got some kinda awful hives," said Jerry scratching at a red welt on his ribs.
"Probably just the heat and being sick," said John. "Let's see what we've got left." He stood up and swayed and put a hand to his forehead.
Audrey stood up to steady him and silver spots boiled in front of his eyes. They both sat down again, then got up very slowly and took a little Chinese H and some cotton from the knapsacks. They cooked it all together and split it.
Ten minutes later, Audrey was down with Cotton Fever. Teeth chattering, his whole body shaking, he lay on the bed, knees up to his chin, hands clenched in front of his face.
Finally, he got two Nembutals down and the shivering stopped. He went to sleep.
He dreamed he was back in Saint Louis as a child. He was eating orange ice very fast for the sharp headache and the relief that comes from sipping a little water. Just as he reached for the water, he woke up with a pounding searing headache, his body burning with fever. He knew that he was very sick, perhaps dying.
He tried to get up and fell on his knees by Jerry's bed. He shook Jerry's shoulder. The flesh was burning-hot. Jerry muttered something.
"Wake up, Jerry. We have to get help."
The door opened. The light was turned on. Three Greek cops and the proprietor were watching from the doorway. The cops pointed to the boys and said something in excited Greek. They backed out of the room stuffing handkerchiefs in front of their faces. Leaving once cop at the door, they called an ambulance.
Audrey vaguely remembered being lifted onto a stretcher by masked figures. As he was carried down the stairs, he saw words in front of his eyes: a lattice of black words on white paper shifting and rotating. He could make out the first sentence:
"The name is Clem Snide. I am a private asshole."
The nurse stood by his bed with a thermometer. She put it in his mouth and left the room. She came back with a breakfast tray. She drew out the thermometer and looked at it. "Well, almost down to normal now."
Audrey sat up in bed, drank the orange juice greedily, ate a boiled egg and a piece of toast and was drinking his coffee when Doctor Dimitri came in. The face looked familiar and seemed to stir and concentrate the vague shapes of the dream. Of course, Audrey thought. I've been delirious and he was the doctor.
"Well, I see you're a lot better. You should be out of here in a few days now."
"How long have I been here?"
"Ten days. You've been very sick."
"What was it?"
"Don't know exactly ... a virus ... new ones keep turning up. We thought at first it was scarlet fever but when there was no reaction to antibiotics, we shifted to purely symptomatic treatment. I don't mind telling you it was a close thing ... temperatures up to a hundred and six ... your two friends are here ... exactly the same syndrome."
"And I've been delirious all this time?"
"Completely. Do you remember any of it?"
"Last thing I remember is being carried out of the hostel."
"The remarkable thing is that you, Jerry, and John all seemed to be in the same delirium. I've made a few notes...." He flipped open a small loose-leaf notebook. "Does this mean anything to you? Tamaghis ... Ba'dan ... Yass-Waddah ... Waghdas ... Naufana ... or Ghadis?"
"No."
"Cities of the Red Night?"
Audrey glimpsed a red sky and mud walls .... "Just a flash."
"And now, there is the matter of my fee."
"My father will pay you."
"He has already agreed to do so but he has refused to pay the hospital costs—pleading his income tax. This is awkward. However, if you will sign an agreement to pay ... your father suggests that you apply to the American Embassy for repatriation...."
*
The boys are at the reception desk of the hospital, signing papers. Doctor Dimitri stands there in a dark suit.
Audrey looks around: something very strange about this hospital ... for one thing, no one seems to be wearing white uniforms. Perhaps, he thinks egocentrically, they are all waiting for us to go home so they can leave—but then another shift would be coming on. In fact, he decides, this doesn't look like a hospital at all ... more like the American Embassy.
A cab pulls up under the portico. Doctor Dimitri shakes hands with a rapidly disappearing smile.
As soon as the boys are gone, he walks through a series of doors, each guarded by an armed security man who nods him through.
He is in a room with a computer panel attached to a battery of tape recorders. He flicks a switch.
"The Consul will see you now."
A black wooden slate on the desk said "Mr. Pierson." The Consul was a thin young man in a gray seersucker suit with an ascetic disdainful Wasp face and very cold gray eyes.
He stood up, shook hands without smiling, and motioned the three boys to chairs. He spoke in a cultivated academic voice from which all traces of warmth had been carefully excised. "You realize that there is a considerable hospital bill outstanding?"
"We have signed an agreement to pay."
"The Greek authorities could prevent you from leaving the country."
The three boys spoke at once:
Audrey: "It wasn't our fault...."
Jerry: "We got sick...."
John: "It was ..."
Audrey: "A virus ..."
Jerry: "A new virus." He smiled seductively at the Consul, who did not smile back.
All together: "We almost died!" They rolled their eyes back and made a death-rattle sound.
"The police found evidence of drug-taking in your room. You are lucky not to be in jail."
"We're certainly grateful to you, Mr. Pierson. And lucky to be here—like you say," said Audrey. He tried to sound impulsive and boyish but it came out all slimy and insinuating.
The others nodded in agreement.
"Don't thank me," said the Consul dryly. "It was Doctor Dimitri who put in a word with the police. He is interested in your case. A new virus, it seems...." He looked at the boys severely, as if they had committed some gross breach of decorum.
"Doctor Dimitri is quite an influential man."
All together, plaintively: "We want to go home."
"I daresay. And who will pay for it?"
"We will—when we can," said Audrey.
The others nodded in agreement.
"And when will that be? Have you ever thought about working?" asked Mr. Pierson.