第17章 What the Dying Want

There were two left who could still talk to her, and Edie spent the last nights of October with them, and she stopped pretending to herself that she was collecting data, because by then it had become something else, and the something else was that she had come to be useful to them in a way the day could not be. Hugo Blaise had weeks. He lay on his side and watched the door and did not want it closed and did not want it open, and one night at two he said, without preamble, that he had made his peace, and then, at three, he revised that. "I've been thinking about the board," he said. "The thing it carries. I want to know what's on it." "Why." "Because if it's a list then I'm on a list and I'd like to know what a list is for." He turned his head. "You've seen it. You're the only one who's seen it and stayed in the building. Tell me what it writes." Edie told him the truth, which was that she did not know, and then told him the other truth, which was what she had assembled from the accounts, and she said it plainly, because she had decided somewhere in the last week that the dying deserved plainness and that the thing she had been raised to do instead of plainness, which was to be gentle, was a tool of the day. "I think it takes something," she said. "I think it takes the pain off you the way you take a coat off a hook, and puts it back, and writes the number. I think it's counting what you're carrying. I don't think it's cruel. I think it's doing a job, and the job is measuring, and the measuring is the reason the deaths come when they come." Hugo was quiet for a while. "Then it's not stealing," he said. "It's setting a price." "Maybe." "No," he said, and there was something almost eager in it. "Listen. A lot of people in here want to be told it's over, that they'll go easy, that there's no more of the carrying to do. And they get told that by everyone, all day, and it's not true, because the carrying doesn't stop, it gets heavier, up to the last. So when something comes at three in the morning and takes the whole weight off you for one night and lays it on the floor where you can look at it, and then puts it back and writes down how heavy it was — that's not cruelty, nurse. That's the only honest thing in the building. That's somebody finally telling the truth about what it costs." He closed his eyes. "I don't mind being weighed. I mind not knowing by who." She sat with that in the dark of his room, and it fit a thing that had been sitting wrong in her for weeks, and the thing that had been sitting wrong was that she had been calling the visitor an intruder, and the dying had been treating it, most of them, more like an auditor, or a night nurse from another floor, someone who had come to take over the shift and had not yet explained the handover. What frightened them was not the coat or the smell. It was the being spoken about to someone who was not there. It was the being filed. "What do you want me to do," she said. "Nothing," Hugo said. "It's not a thing you fight. But you asked, so I'll tell you one thing, and then you can stop sitting up with me if you like. When it comes, don't answer it. You've been answering it for weeks. I can hear it in you. You're the kind that answers." He opened his eyes and looked at her with the flat kindness of the very tired. "My mother used to say the devil can't take you if you can't be counted, and I always thought that was a stupid thing to say to a child. Now I'm not so sure it's stupid. Not that there's a devil. That there's a counting. And you can be counted or you can be uncounted, and the uncounted ones die out here in the dark without anybody there, and the counted ones go down the corridor with a coat on." Edie did not sleep that night either. At three she made the round and the corridor light went soft at the far end and the taste of copper came up into her mouth and she stood in the middle of the hall with the water pitcher in her hand, exactly as she had on the first night, months ago, before she had a page and a register and a name for what was happening, and she did not answer. She said nothing at all. She stood in the soft light and let the smell come and go and did not turn her head, and the boards by the kitchen door complained under a step that was not hers, and above her, in bed eight, Hugo Blaise coughed once and was quiet, and the corridor was the corridor, and the house took the night the way it took every night, and nobody was counted, and it was the longest four minutes of her life. Hugo Blaise went down through the last week of October in the way the register had taught her to expect, and Edie sat with him most of it, and it was ordinary, which was its own kind of mercy. He stopped eating on the Monday and stopped talking on the Thursday and on the Friday he could still hear, and she told him the true things, quietly, into his ear, the way a nurse does when the end is close and the words are for the hearing and not for the answer. She told him his sister had called twice that day and would come on the weekend, and that the room was warm, and that nobody was going to leave him alone. She did not tell him the other things, the things she had been learning about the house, because the dying do not need the night nurse's private weather when they have their own to carry out. Leon Odell lasted longer, because his disease had its own pace and did not consult the schedule. He lasted into November, and he talked less and less, and on the good days he watched Edie the way he had watched her from the first, with the flat appraising eyes of a man who has driven every road in the county and has not yet been told where this one goes. On one of the good days he said something that stayed with her. "You never said what it is," he said. "I gave you everything I've got and you never once told me what it is, and I've decided that means you don't know either, and I've decided I can live with that, if you can." "I can," Edie said. "Then don't answer it," Leon said. "That's my advice. I'm a delivery driver. I know a signature when I see one. You sign for a parcel and it's yours. Whatever it hands you, don't sign for it." It was almost exactly what Hugo had said, and the two men had never met, and Edie carried the coincidence the way she carried everything else now, without surprise, because by November nothing that arrived in that building surprised her, and surprise had been the first thing the house had taken from her, back when she still thought the visitor was a ghost. ---