Part 73 (2/2)

The nurse who came to get him looked rattled. ”Your friends are here,”

she said in her Boris-and-Natasha accent, and gave him a disapproving look as she disconnected his hoses and pipes so swiftly he didn't have time to register the pain he felt. She pulled on a pair of Salvation Army underpants -- the first pair he'd worn in weeks -- and a pair of new, dark blue-jeans and a Rotary picnic t-s.h.i.+rt dated three years before. The s.h.i.+rt was a small and it still hung from him like a tent.

”You will use canes?” she asked. He'd had some physiotherapy that week and he could take one or two doddering steps on crutches, but canes?

No way.

”I can't,” he said, picturing himself sprawled on the polished concrete floor, with what was left of his face bashed in from the fall.

”Wheelchair,” she said to someone in the hall, and an orderly came in pus.h.i.+ng a chair with a squeaky wheel -- though the chair itself was a pretty good one, at least as good as the ones they rented at Disney, which were nearly indestructible. He let the nurse transfer him to it with her strong hands in his armpits and under his knees. A bag containing his laptop and a few cards and things that had shown up at the hospital was dumped into his lap and he clutched it to himself as he was wheeled to the end of the corridor and around the corner, where the nurse's station, the elevators, the common area and his *fans*

were.

They weren't just his pals, though there were a few of them there, but also a big crowd of people he'd never met, didn't recognize. There were goths, skinny and pale and draped in black, but they were outnumbered by the subculture civilians, normal-looking, slightly hippieish, old and young. When he hove into sight, they burst into a wild cheer. The orderly stopped pus.h.i.+ng his chair and the nurse rushed forward to shush them sternly, but it barely dampened the calls. There were wolf whistles, cheers, calls, disorganized chants, and then two very pretty girls -- he hadn't thought about ”pretty” anything in a long, long time -- unfurled a banner that said DEATH WAITS in glittery hand-drawn letters, with a little skull dotting the I in WAITS.

The nurse read the banner and reached to tear it out of their hands, but they folded it back. She came to him and hissed in his ear, something about getting security to get rid of these people if they were bothering him, and he realized that she thought DEATH WAITS was a *threat* and that made him laugh so hard he choked, and she flounced off in a deeply Slavic huff.

And then he was among his welcoming party, and it *was* a party -- there were cake and clove cigarettes in smoke-savers and cans of licorice coffee, and everyone wanted to talk with him and take their pictures with him, and the two pretty girls took turns making up his face, highlighting his scars to make him fit for a Bela Lugosi role. The were called Lacey and Tracey, and they were sisters who went to the ride every day, they said breathlessly, and they'd seen the story he'd described, seen it with their own eyes, and it was something that was as personal as the twin language they'd developed to communicate with one another when they were little girls.

His old friends surrounded him: guys who marveled at his recovery, girls who kissed his cheek and messed up Tracey and Lacey's makeup. Some of them had new tattoos to show him -- one girl had gotten a full-leg piece showing scenes from the ride, and she slyly pulled her skirt all the way up, all the way up, to show him where it all started.

Security showed up and threw them all out into the street, where the heat was oppressive and wet, but the air was fresh and full of smells that weren't sickness or medicine, which made Death Waits feel like he could get up and dance. Effervescent citrus and biodiesel fumes, moist vegetation and the hum of lazy high noon bugs.

”Now, it's all arranged,” one of the straight-looking ones told him. He'd figured out that these were the pure story people, who'd read his descriptions and concluded that he'd seen something more than anyone else. They all wanted a chance to talk to him, but didn't seem too put out that he was spending most of his time with his old mates. ”Don't worry about a thing.” Car after car appeared, taking away more of the party. ”Here you go.”

Another car pulled up, an all-electric kneeling number with a huge cargo s.p.a.ce. They wheeled the chair right into it, and then two of the story-hippies helped him transfer into the seat. ”My mom was in a wheelchair for ten years before she pa.s.sed,” a hippie told him. He was older and looked like an English teacher Death Waits had quite liked in grade ten. He strapped Death Waits in like a pro and off they went.

They were ten minutes into Melbourne traffic -- Death marveling at buildings, signs, people, in every color, without the oppressive white-and-gore colors of everything in the hospital -- when the English teacher dude looked shyly at Death.

”You think it's real -- the Story, I mean -- don't you?”

Death thought about this for a second. He'd been very focused on the Park-in-a-Box printers for the past week, which felt like an eternity to him, but he remembered his obsession with the story fondly. It required a kind of floaty non-concentration to really see it, a meditative state he'd found easy to attain with all the painkillers.

”It's real,” he said.

The English teacher and two of his friends seemed to relax a little. ”We think so too.”

They pulled up to his condo -- how'd they know where he lived? -- and parked right next to his car! He could see where the tow had kind of f.u.c.ked-up the rear b.u.mper, but other than that, it was just as he remembered it, and it looked like someone had given it a wash, too. The English teacher put his car in park and came around to open his door just as the rest of the welcoming party came out of his building, pus.h.i.+ng --

A stair-climbing wheelchair, the same kind that they used in the ride. Death laughed aloud with delight when he saw it rolling toward him, handling the curb easily, hardly a b.u.mp, and the two pretty girls, Tracey and Lacey, transferred him into it, and both contrived to brush their b.r.e.a.s.t.s and jasmine-scented hair across his cheeks as they did so, and he felt the first stirrings in his ruined groin that he'd felt since before his beating.

He laughed like a wild-man, and they all laughed with him and someone put a clove cigarette between his lips and he drew on it, coughed a little, and then had another drag before he rolled into the elevator.

The girls put him to bed hours later. His apartment had been spotless and he had every confidence that it would be spotless again come night-time. The party had spent the rest of the day and most of the night talking about the story that they'd seen in the ride, where they'd seen it, what it meant. There was a lot of debate about whether they had any business rating things now that the story had shown itself to them. The story was the product of unconscious effort, and it should be left to unconscious effort.

But the counter-argument was that they had a duty to garden the story, or possibly to sharpen its telling, or to protect it from people who couldn't see it or wouldn't see it.

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