The Hunger (18 page)

Sarah applied the stethoscope to the center of the chest. “Breathe deeply, please.” The lungs sounded as clear as a child’s. “You don’t smoke?”

“No.”

“Good for you.”

She continued the stethoscopic exam, exploring the heart sounds from the front, then asking Mrs. Blaylock to turn over and completing the procedure for both heart and lung on the back. As she worked she regained some of her composure. She was a doctor after all, and this was a patient. Women held no sexual attraction for her. “Turn back over, please.” She placed her hands around the crown of the woman’s left breast and gently felt downward to the base. “Any pain or discharge from your nipples at any time in the past three months?”

Mrs. Blaylock’s tongue glistened behind her teeth. Sarah saw Miriam’s hands come up, felt them cradle her face. She did not move, more from amazement than anything else. Her stunned mind thought only that she had never seen such pale eyes before. The hands guided her head downward and her lips touched the nipple.

The shock of pleasure was so great that she nearly collapsed across Mrs. Blaylock’s chest. Something within her, which she had been utterly unaware of, awakened in joy and gratitude. Her mind screamed at her — Doctor, Doctor, DOCTOR! For the love of God, this is not
you
!

But she had kissed the breast, she could taste its salt-sweetness, remember the tickle of the nipple against her lips. Mrs. Blaylock’s fingers brushed against her cheek.

Sarah’s heart sank. This was awful. Mrs. Blaylock lay almost indifferently on the examining table. “You’d better dry your face,” she said. “You’re sweating.” And she gave her a mischievous look.

As Sarah splashed water on her face and toweled herself dry, Mrs. Blaylock dressed. “Are breast exams part of the procedure?”

Sarah was startled. Until this moment the thought hadn’t even crossed her mind. Of course they weren’t part of the procedure. It was strictly blood, lungs and heart. Her cheeks grew hot, she could sense the woman staring at her back.

“I thought not,” Mrs. Blaylock said. Sarah hadn’t needed to speak, her silence was sufficiently eloquent. Mrs. Blaylock’s hands touched her shoulders, turned her around. She pulled Sarah to her and hugged her closely. Sarah had never felt quite this way before. The power in Mrs. Blaylock’s arms sent shuddering waves through her whole body. She was unable to move, she lay like a rag in them. The woman was strong, she easily lifted Sarah off the floor, then lowered her until she rode her knee. Intense little shivers coursed through her as Miriam moved her back and forth. “Open your eyes,” she said.

Sarah was ashamed, she could not look at Mrs. Blaylock. “We have to stop,” the woman said, “you’ll get my dress wet.” She slid Sarah down her leg a couple of inches, until her feet reached the floor.

Her heart was soaring, yet her mind was filled with shame.

“You’ve got to show me where I’m supposed to go, Doctor Roberts.”

If only there had been some scorn in that voice. But it was neutral and pleasant. There wasn’t a whisper of response to the emotional explosion that had occurred in Sarah.

“You’re going to five B,” Tom called from down the hall as they appeared in the corridor. “New room assignment.”

“Now I’m beginning to feel like this is a hotel,” Mrs. Blaylock laughed. When they reached the cubicle she was amused again. “Talk about small! It’s more like a Pullman berth.”

“You can spend the evening in the patients’ lounge,” Tom said.

Sarah was utterly miserable.

MIRIAM SAT in the grimly cheerful patients’ lounge with the other patients. She faced the television screen but her thoughts were elsewhere. The visitation had changed drastically in significance since Alice’s death.

She felt so wronged, so betrayed. Not since she had crawled exhausted up a beach in Ilium had she been this lost in the world. Even after her father’s death, wandering in strange lands, she had reconstructed her life. She intended to do it again. The little doctor was her new object. Before, Sarah Roberts would have been used and discarded. Now she would be kept.

In a way it was good; it would have been a pity to destroy such a person. Sarah was bright, full of kindness, and possessed of the rare avidity for life that was so basic to the development of hunger.

Miriam would think more on this during the next few days and weeks, but she was resolved to transform Sarah. If the choice had imperfections, they would have to be faced later. At least Sarah’s motive to solve the problem of transformation could not be better. Her own life would be at stake.

A sound behind her made her start. Miriam felt like an animal in an open cage in this place, waiting to hear the clang of the shutting bars. By revealing herself to them she would certainly draw Sarah’s total and absolute interest — but it was a dangerous technique. She could imagine herself strapped to some table, the victim of rampant scientific curiosity and the fact that human laws would not protect her once they discovered that she was not one of them. Sarah’s was a ruthlessly predatory personality. She, the one who had so indifferently destroyed Methuselah and no doubt dozens of other primates, would capture Miriam. Intelligence might or might not convey rights in the mind of such a person. If their curiosity was intense enough, their ambition sufficiently excited, Miriam had no doubt that Sarah and her colleagues would not hesitate to commit her, or simply confine her as an experimental animal “for the good of humanity and the furtherance of science.”

The thought that she might be confined, unable to serve her hunger, was terrifying. She had seen up close what extremes of suffering that involved. Such anguish lived in her own attic, stirring restlessly in the boxes.

The more she considered Sarah, the more certain she became that she had a companion — or a jailer. The trick would be to excite hunger in Sarah before she could fully understand what was happening to her. Hunger would ride like the red moon over her psychic landscape. Sarah would be ripe then for whatever harvest might suit Miriam’s needs.

It would be a matter of exploiting Sarah’s need for love. Each age and each human being betrayed itself with a characteristic falseness. The Romans had their decadence, the Middle Ages its religion, the Victorian Era its morality. This age, so full of equivocation and guilt, was much more complex than the others. It was the age of the lie. Its nations were built on lies, and so were the hearts of its people. Miriam could fill the hollow that a lie leaves in a human being. She could fill the hollow in Sarah.

She remembered the trembling shoulders, the humid touch of her lips on her breast . . . she breathed deeply, closed her eyes, tried to
touch
Sarah’s heart.

There was an impression of an empty forest. Here was Sarah, desperately lonely, rushing into the details of her outer life to avoid the secret emptiness within.

Miriam could bring Sarah the gift she most craved: the opportunity to fill that void, absent as it was of real purpose, bounded by the terror of a pointless death. The forest could be peopled with meaning and love and direction. Miriam sat, her eyes narrowed, looking inward. Sarah had despaired of ever really being loved. She wanted Tom, enjoyed him sexually, but the old hollowness asserted itself, the reality once again emerging. Miriam could work in the forest of Sarah’s emotions. She knew well her role in this age: the bringer of truth.

Tom scraped his mug as he stirred his coffee. To Sarah the small sound was like screeching chalk. The horrible, unbelievable pleasure of the thing that had happened in the examining room made her want to retreat from any sort of intimacy. Tom turned toward her, kissed her cheek. To escape she shuffled the Blaylock computer printout. “Let’s check out the cubical again.” She couldn’t endure kissing him right now, facing his love of her.

“You enjoy that? We’ve already done it twice.”

“So let’s do it again. I don’t want any problems. I can’t afford to spend another night up here.”

“You were invited, Sarah, not commanded.”

“I had to come. The woman’s got night terrors.”

“You aren’t the only doctor who can treat night terrors.”

“I’m the only one —” She broke off. She had been about to say, the only one who can treat
her
. But why? What was so special about her? What made Sarah react to her like a confused adolescent? She jabbed the checklist code into the computer console. Instantly, the screen printed a list of functions: electroencephalogram, electrocardiogram, galvanic skin response, electro-oculogram, respiration monitor. Each was confirmed functional. Next, she opened up the intercom and turned on the TV monitor.

“It’s all perfect,” Tom said, “just like it was ten minutes ago.” There was an edge of humor in his voice, as if he was amused by what he assumed was her oversolicitousness. He laid his big hand on hers, his familiar gesture. She looked down at it, felt its weight. It might as well be the hand of a statue. Earlier Sarah had wanted him here tonight to keep her company. Now she wished that she had let one of the regular console operators do the job.

“I really want to get this over with,” she said.

“I hope she has a night terror, then. For your sake.”

“Tom, will you do me a favor?”

“Sure.”

“Please don’t touch me.”

He snapped his hand away, glaring needles of hurt anger. “OK, what did I do?”

Instantly she felt a wave of regret. Why do that, why be nasty to him? The devil of it was, she felt under a compulsion to do it. The thought of Miriam Blaylock burned in her mind. She told herself that what had happened between them was a sort of accident. She was under pressure; she was exhausted. And yet if she had observed such behavior in another she would have considered it an intolerable professional lapse. She tried to be as hard on herself, but explanations kept demanding attention. She hated herself for it, perfectly well aware of what she was doing. “Honey? What did I do?” He was pressing for an answer, his face full of wounded decency.

She clung to him, to the faint smell of Old Spice on the stubbly face, to the scratched-up glasses nobody could possibly see through, and most of all to the patent honesty of his attempt at love, his flawed attempt.

He hugged back, no doubt not understanding at all what was happening, but willing to accept whatever part in it she might choose for him. Her own disdain for him, her angry rejection of the way the various parts of him used one another with ugly facility, now seemed extremely ungenerous. The man was trying to love. He wasn’t good at it, never would be. He was not free enough for it; the goodness of his heart was corrupted by his overweaning ambition. So be it. He was no girlish dream, though, he was real. If you kicked him he hurt. If you felt sorry for him he was diminished. If you loved him something might — or might not — come of it.

“Ten-thirty and I’m tired,” she said at last. She wanted to close the curtain, go on to another act. The situation obliged her: a chime rang in the patients’ lounge. Time for the sleepless to seek their rest. People began filing past the open door of control room three. The other staff members followed them, intent on their charges. “I’d better go tape her up,” Sarah said. “I’ll be right back.” She glanced away from him as she left, unwilling to meet the eyes that sought hers.

Miriam Blaylock lay in her cubicle in a magnificent and wildly inappropriate silk dressing gown. It was pink and white, embroidered with the flowers of some past and distant place. In this austere little room it looked like a museum piece. So did Miriam Blaylock, for that matter. Her face had the closed, secret look you see in old photographs. It was a face from another time, when people hid out of social necessity all that was in their hearts.

“Do I get undressed for you again?” There was just the edge of a smirk in her tone.

“That won’t be necessary, Mrs. Blaylock.”

She sat up in the bed, her eyes wide. Incongruously, Sarah recalled the black Statue of Isis in the Egyptian Section of the Met. “You needn’t sound like ice,” Mrs. Blaylock said. Sarah felt herself flush. The professional distance of her tone had been used by Miriam to do exactly what Sarah didn’t want, to create intimacy. She was suddenly aware of the smell in the room, heavy and sharp but with an underlying vulgar sweetness.

“I’m going to apply a group of connectors to your forehead, the sides of your face and around your heart. They don’t hurt and they won’t give you an electric shock.” She used the litany remembered from her clinical days, even took a certain pleasure in it. To begin she applied conductive gel for the facial group and then taped down the electrodes one by one. “I’ll have to ask you to open your clothes.” Miriam removed her robe.

“The nightgown goes over my head.”

“Raise it, please.”

Mrs. Blaylock laughed, touched Sarah’s wrist. “You really mustn’t be so afraid, dear. It was just an accident. We don’t ever need to think of it again.” Her eyes twinkled. “It doesn’t mean a thing.”

Sarah was absurdly, ridiculously grateful, but she controlled the hot embarrassment. “Let me apply these connectors, and then you can try to get to sleep.”

Mrs. Blaylock took off the nightgown. The electrodes went on quickly. Sarah told herself that this was just another female body, no different from all the others she had seen and touched in her career. As soon as she was finished she turned to leave. Mrs. Blaylock’s hand came up, took her wrist. Sarah stopped, did not move.

“Wait.” It was a command, beyond resistance, delivered as softly as a plea. Sarah turned and stood before her. Despite the forest of electrodes and her nakedness Mrs. Blaylock seemed no less imperial. “Your generation has no respect for what is sacred.” Sarah glanced at her. Whose generation? Miriam Blaylock was easily five years younger than Sarah herself. “Love matters, Doctor. It cannot be imprisoned.”

“Of course not.”

Very slowly, with the exaggerated humility of a bad actress, Mrs. Blaylock inclined her head. It should have been laughable, the set piece of some dreary melodrama, but instead it moved Sarah deeply, making her feel brutal and indifferent to the delicacy of the human heart.