‘What?’ The linguist was jolted off course, yanked from the slipstream of his ranting.
‘Kurtzberg. Is he living here too? With you?’
There was a full minute of silence. ‘We had a falling out,’ said the linguist at last. ‘You might say it was… a philosophical disagreement.’
Peter couldn’t speak anymore, but uttered a noise of incomprehension.
‘It was about the สีฐฉั,’ Tartaglione explained. ‘Those creepy, insipid, dickless, ass-licking little pastel-coloured vermin.’ A slurp of the beaker, a glug of the gullet. ‘He loved them.’
More time passed. The air whispered softly, making its endless reconnaissance of the boundaries and emptinesses in the room, testing the ceiling, prodding the joins of the walls, brushing the floor, measuring bodies, combing hair, licking skin. Two men breathed, one of them strenuously, one of them barely at all. It seemed that the linguist had said all he was going to say, and was now lost in his own stoic despair.
‘Plus,’ he added, in the final moments before Peter lost consciousness, ‘I cannot stand a guy who won’t have a drink with you.’
24. The Technique of Jesus
The night was supposed to last longer. Much, much longer. Darkness should have kept him captive for hundreds, maybe even thousands of years until the Resurrection came and God pulled all the dead from the ground.
That’s what confused him, when he opened his eyes. He was supposed to be underneath the earth, or hidden under a blanket in an unlit house in an abandoned city, not even decomposed yet, just a lump of inert material that couldn’t feel or see. There wasn’t supposed to be light. Especially not such dazzling white light, brighter than the sky.
It was not the light of Afterlife; it was the light of a hospital. Yes, he remembered now. He had broken his ankles, running from the law, and he’d been taken to hospital and pumped full of anaesthetic so that mysterious figures in masks could mend his splintered bones. There would be no more running; he would have to take what was coming to him. A woman’s face floated down over his own. The face of a beautiful woman. Bending over him as if he was a baby in a crib. On her bosom, a name tag that said Beatrice. She was a nurse. He liked her instinctively, as though he’d been waiting for her to turn up all his life. He might even marry her one day, if she said yes.
‘Bea,’ he croaked.
‘Try again,’ said the woman. Her face grew rounder, her eyes changed colour, her neck shortened, her hair rearranged itself into a boyish cut.
‘Grainger,’ he said.
‘You got it,’ she said wearily.
‘Where am I?’ The light hurt his eyes. He turned his head aside, into a pale green cotton pillow.
‘In the infirmary,’ said Grainger. ‘Whoah — keep that arm still, it’s got an IV drip in it.’
He did as he was told. A thin tube dangled against his cheek. ‘How did I get here?’
‘I told you I’d always look out for you, didn’t I?’ said Grainger. Then, after a pause: ‘Which is more than you can say for God.’
He let his tethered arm fall back onto the coverlet and smiled. ‘Maybe God is working through you.’
‘Yeah? Well, as a matter of fact there’s medications for thoughts like that. Lurasidone. Asenapine. I can prescribe you some anytime you’re ready.’
Still squinting against the light, he craned his head round to look at the bag that fed his intravenous line. The liquid in it was transparent. Glucose or saline, not blood.
‘The poison,’ he said. ‘What happened?’
‘You weren’t poisoned,’ said Grainger, with a tinge of exasperation in her voice. ‘You just got dehydrated, that’s all. You didn’t drink enough. You could have died.’
He laughed, and the laughter morphed into sobs. He laid his fingers on his chest, roughly where the inky crucifix was or used to be. The fabric was sticky and cold. He’d poured Tartaglione’s vile liquor down his chin and onto his breast, pretending to drink it. Here in the sterile air conditioning, its sweet stench of ferment was bad enough to choke the breath.
‘Did you bring Tartaglione back?’ he asked.
‘Tartaglione?’ Grainger’s voice was augmented by muted exclamations of surprise from elsewhere in the room: they were not alone.
‘You didn’t see him?’ said Peter.
‘He was there?’
‘Yes, he was there,’ said Peter. ‘That’s where he lives. Out in the ruins. He’s not a well man. He probably needs to go home.’
‘Home? Well, fancy that.’ Grainger sounded bitter. ‘Who would’ve thought it.’
Moving out of his range of sight, she did something he couldn’t identify, some emphatic or even violent physical action which caused a clattering noise.
‘Are you all right, Grainger?’ A male voice, half-sympathetic, half-cautioning. The doctor from New Zealand. Austin.
‘Don’t touch me,’ said Grainger. ‘I’m fine. Finefinefine.’
Peter realised all of a sudden that the alcohol he could smell was not emanating solely from his own clothing. There was an additional tang in the air, a spirits tang, which might have been created by tearing open a few dozen disposable surgical wipes, but could just as easily have come from a few shots of whiskey. Whiskey consumed by Alex Grainger.
‘Maybe Tartaglione is happy where he is.’ A female voice this time. Flores, the nurse. She spoke calmly, as though to a child, as though a cat had been sighted in a tree and a naïve youngster was insisting that somebody should climb up to rescue it.
‘Oh, yeah, I’m sure he’s happy as a clam,’ retorted Grainger, her sarcasm escalating so fast that Peter was no longer in any doubt she was disinhibited by booze. ‘Happy as the day is long. Hey, you like that? — “As the day is long”. That’s a pun, right? Or maybe not a pun… Maybe irony? What would you call it, Peter?’
‘Might be best to let our patient recover a bit more,’ suggested Austin.
Grainger ignored him. ‘Tartaglione was a real Italian, did any of you know that? Like, genuine. He grew up in Ontario, but he was born in… I forget the name of the place… he told me once… ’
‘Perhaps not relevant to our work here just now?’ suggested Austin. Masculine as his voice was, it had taken on a slightly whiny edge. He wasn’t used to dealing with unreasonable colleagues.
‘Right, right,’ said Grainger. ‘None of us come from anywhere, I forgot, excuse me. We’re the Foreign fucking Legion, like Tuska keeps saying. And anyway, who’d want to go home? Who’d want to go home when everything there is so fucked up and everything here is so fantastic? You’d have to be crazy, right?’
‘Please, Grainger,’ warned Flores.
‘Don’t do this to yourself,’ said Austin.
Grainger started to weep.
‘You’re not human, you people. You’re just not fucking human.’
‘There’s no need for that,’ said Flores.
‘What do you know about need?’ cried Grainger, hysterical now. ‘Keep your fucking hands off me!’
‘We’re not touching you, we’re not touching you,’ said Austin.
There was another crash of toppled equipment: a metal IV-stand, perhaps. ‘Where’s my daddy?’ Grainger whimpered, as she stumbled out. ‘I want my daddy!’
After the door slammed, the infirmary went quiet. Peter wasn’t even sure if Austin was still around, but fancied he could hear Flores fussing about, beyond his field of vision. His neck was stiff and he had a pounding headache. The liquid in his IV bag drained unhurriedly into his vein. When it was all gone and the bag hung limp and wrinkled as a condom, he asked to be allowed to leave.