He could not account for it, but he was smiling.
The children slept, fitfully dreaming.
Little Tony Word, dying of leukocytes, of clear, white, colorless cells watering his blood and turning it pale, of petechia and purpura, the petty hemorrhages across his face like so many false freckles, of fatigue and fever and bone pain, of malignant cells buttering his marrow with contamination, of major and minor infections exploding inside his body like ordnance, of the inability of his blood to clot, of his outsized, improperly functioning organs, all the cheap cuts — his liver, his kidneys — of his compromised meat — of leukemia — of the broad palette of chemicals with which his oncologists painted his blood, going over it, careful as art restorers, chipping away at the white smear that poisoned it, bringing back the brisk, original color from their tubes of vincristine and prednisone and asparaginase and dexamethasone and mercaptopurine and allopurinol and methotrexate and cyclophosphamide and doxorubicin and other assorted hues — dying, too, of time itself, of the five- and six- and seven-year survival rate (Tony is now two years beyond his last remission but freckles have begun to reappear along his jawline and his renal functions are in an early stage of failure) — little Tony Word dreams of his low-salt meals, of the liquids and fruit juices he is forced to swallow, almost, or so it seems to him, by the pailful, of all the rind fruits he must eat, and which, because of the invisible germs and hidden dirts which might be on his mother’s hands, he must peel himself — the sealed orange, the difficult apple, the impossible pear, the ordeal of a grape, which he handles with specially sterilized toothpicks, as he does everything, to avoid the accident of cuts which will not stanch — encouraged, too, to prepare his own well-balanced, nutritious meals (though he’s not allowed to go near a stove), his boiled and scrubbed green leafy vegetables, washing lettuce, kale and cauliflower, broccoli, sprouts, cabbage; washing everything, eggplant and potatoes, shallots and mushrooms, then consuming the congealed pot liquor which he has to scrape from the side of the pot with a spoon and spread on toasted sandwiches (from which he first must tear away the crusts) just to be able to get it down, or drinking the broth, thick as barium, to get at the vitamins and minerals, and eating the flaccid vegetable flesh; preparing the meats, too, scrubbing (this much, at least, his own idea, the scared kid’s) his veal and ham, his steaks and chops, his joints and shanks, so that everything he eats, or so he thinks, tastes of a light seasoning of dishwashing detergent, learning to cook even at four and already at ten an accomplished chef, teased for this, for this only, not for his weak and sickly ways, his inability at games (which he would not have been permitted to play anyway), or even his high anxiety as a spectator sitting well back in the stands in the gymnasium lest he be hit by a stray ball, or far away from the sidelines when what they would surely snicker at him for should he call them his mates went outdoors to play, but because they know he cooks, have heard him brag of it who has nothing else to boast of (save his pain, save his endurance, save the one or two or, at the outside, three years he has left to live perhaps, and which he has never mentioned), seen him in the lunchroom chewing his queer veggie remnant sandwiches with their vitamin slime and viscous mineral fillings, have seen him fastidiously peel his fruits and drink his juices, his quart of bottled water from which someone else has first to remove the cap and then pour into a paper cup lest Tony cut his finger on the saw-toothed cap or the bottle opener or the drinking glass he was not even permitted to use accidentally break. So the small dying boy tosses and turns, dreaming his breakfasts of champions, his athlete’s meals, his health faddist’s strict dietary laws, sated in sleep, stuffed, full as a glutton, who has never been hungry, dreaming of food who is not hungry now.
Charles Mudd-Gaddis, that little old man, dreams of his first birthday. He dreams the cake and dreams the candles, dreams the balloons and dreams the streamers; he dreams the toys, he dreams the clapping. And dreams he’s three, the little boy, who would have been a man by now — twenty, twenty-one. Then dreams the girl, six, to him a woman. And now he’s five and pushing forty. Ah, to be thirty-four again! he dreams. And dreams he’s seven and confusion comes, that white aphasia of the heart and head. And dreams in awful clarity it’s now, and can’t recall how old he really is.
Rena Morgan can’t tell if she’s awake or sleeping. She’d sensed Miss Cottle pass down the aisle, the trace of tobacco scent clinging to her clothes and skin like an odor backed up in a cellar. In what is more likely sleep than not, she brings a hanky, which she is never without, up to her nostrils, and mildly blows, delicately, ladylike, folding the discharge into a dry patch of handkerchief as expertly as a magician hiding a coin. She has taught herself to make these passes at her face before actual mirrors, using as her model images she’s picked up of tragic ladies dabbing at tears in the corners of their eyes, her fingertip eased along a groove of linen so that, when it works, as it almost always does now that she so perfectly executes the gesture, it isn’t as if she were wiping tears away at all so much as brushing cosmetics into her flesh or whisking flecks of mascara and excess powder out of her vision — even in sleep there is exactly that look of concentrated dispassion on her face — doing all the last-minute repairs and touch-ups of grace. Yet it is really as tears that she thinks of her mucus, some vast reservoir of the sorrowful, her sad pain treasury. She fills her hankies and disposes of them in her sleep, folding them neatly into pockets, putting them under pillows, a kind of controlled, sedentary somnambulism, her tricky cardsharp slumber. She doesn’t know why she does this (or even how), though she supposes it a form of pride, some maidenly self-governance, romantic even, the hope-chest antics of the heart. But has no time for dreams and, vigilant, ever on her toes, can never quite tell whether she dozes or is wide awake.
In Monte Carlo, Benny Maxine held a bad hand and waited for the croupier to scoop in his losses.
The amputee, Noah Cloth, held up his bad hand and counted his losses.
This was the best time, thought Nedra Carp. The children all tucked and making their bye-byes. She even enjoyed their little snores. Hardly snores, really. Barely rustles. Just only some tinny nasality of warmed air. In with the good, out with the bad. Though she couldn’t hear even this. Not over the husky drone of the motors. (Engines, would they be?) Or, for that matter, even see her charges. Only, on her right, Charles Mudd-Gaddis and, on her left, Rena, who, in her sleep, raises hankies to her eyes as though she dreams something sad, watching whatever it is like some warmhearted little dear at a play or cinema. She likes such tenderness, enjoys being with children who can’t hold back their tears when Bambi’s mother dies or, at the pantomime, when Cinderella’s wicked stepmother and stepsisters plot against her. She doesn’t care what they say, sentiment is the only true breeding. Prince Andrew had shocked her when he’d been small and had watched with cool indifference and unalterably dry eyes the terrible sufferings of Hansel and Gretel when they finally realized that their father, that hen-pecked woodcutter, meant actually to abandon them in the forest just because his shrew of a wife told him there wasn’t enough food to go round. It’s a jolly good thing for the U.K., Nedra Carp thinks, that Andrew is so far removed from the succession. Monarchs ought to be properly compassionate, she feels, to understand that not all their subjects are as well-off as themselves. Ho. Not half, they aren’t. (And wasn’t that woodchopper’s wife another stepmother? Though Nedra doesn’t let the husband off so easily. The reconciliation at the end is all very well, but if she were those two she wouldn’t have been so quick to jump back into his arms. Suppose times turned bad again. Suppose…Well. Once burned, twice sorry.)