#ohstar

He can feel something in the darkness.  A surface under his fingertips.  He touches it.  Firm. Not hard but firm.  Neither warm nor cold.  Motionless; not something alive.  When he moves his hand, curls his fingers, his nails find a faint texture beneath them.  Roughness, very delicate, structured, something interwoven, woven.  Fabric.

He can’t open his eyes, because dead men do not see.  Then he does; and sees nothing.  Lies in the dark, remembering with a brilliant vividness the young woman walking away from him, her straight back, swinging hips, sweet beauty going into the dark.  He’s there now in the depths of darkness and it still isn’t over.  He wonders how long it truly takes to die.

His breathing seems to be quite steady, and the pain has vanished.  So there’s that at least.  Interesting to know.  Dying, in these final stages; not painful.

He wonders if all the men he’s killed had a split second of this stillness in them, this quiet, troubled peace, before their shot hearts stopped.

On his left there’s something that isn’t darkness.  It looks, weirdly, like the outline of a door, with a light behind it.

Gabriel would laugh if he had the strength or the breath left for it.  The door to heaven, right there, shut in his face.  Fair enough.  It’s hardly a surprise to learn he didn’t do enough to merit redemption. Even now, even from here on the wrong side, the light beyond the door is strangely beautiful.  Thin lines like the angels’ lances, violent unearthly light of paradise, cutting through the endless night.  Even if he didn’t make it, then, heaven does exist.

Curious how comforting that is.  It’s not for him, but it is there, for others.  Blessed Mother of God and the words float up into his mind and he can’t remember the next line but even the start of the prayer sounds sweet Blessed Mother of God

Blessed Mother of God

Is this my consolation?

If this is all, I am content

Darkness

**

The next time he wakes, he sees a regular door, and daylight; and he’s in a small grey room, in a bed, with a pillow beneath his head.  Things bleep.

His left side and his hand both hurt.  He has no idea why his hand hurts.

It isn’t until a nurse comes in, and he tries to say “What happened?” and cannot speak that he realises he’s been intubated.  One of the beeping machines is helping him to keep breathing.

It’s really true, then. He’s alive.

“Ah, good morning,” says the nurse when his desperate eyes meet hers.  “Good, good.”  He blinks at her.  She nods her head though she cannot possibly know what he’s trying to say; checks the machinery, leaves him alone again.  He lies looking up, staring at the reality of not being dead.

Later, for the rest of the day, doctors and other nurses come and go, and in between their visits he stares up and sees the plaster panels overhead, the support struts, the light fitting with the plain fabric shade. In his hearing all they will say is courteous, neutral, encouraging things, like relax, you need to rest and it was touch and go for a while there but you’ll pull through and excellent, normal blood pressure.

Someone must have called an ambulance.  The man behind the counter, perhaps.  How wonderful after all his dark deeds to owe his life to some ordinary act of compassion, a little man at a diner counter making a telephone call.

And someone must be footing the cost of all this.  Félix, presumably, the sonofabitch would do a thing like that, after all.  No doubt he’ll refuse ever to speak to Gabriel again, but he’ll still pay his hospital bill; out of some sick sense of honour, or to prove his ownership, one last time.

On the second day he has a visitor.  Not Félix, not any of the crew, but Doña Cecilia.  He can see the shadows of her guards outside, one on either side of the door, but she comes in alone and stands looking down at him.   Gives him a faint smile from on high, like the royalty she is.

“So, young Archangel, you’re still with us, then.  You have a little breathing space.  Time to think things through, eh? - make that decision we talked about.”

She doesn’t stay long, and doesn’t tell him anything about the rest of them.  That’s bad, he thinks, with a coldness settling in his chest alongside the pain that seems to live there now.  It could mean many things, and none of them are good.

They take the breathing tube out two days later.  He wonders what to ask, now that he’ll be able to speak again.  Outside this little grey room, he has no idea of the shape of the world anymore.  No idea even of who is living and who is dead.  All he knows is that he should have been among the latter, and somehow he is not.

The doctor supervising the extubation asks him a couple of pointless questions, inspects his stitches, listens to his chest and abdomen, congratulates him on being alive; leaves.  The nurses renew the dressing on his wound, check his catheter  and the drip in his arm, give him sips of water from a cup like a baby’s beaker and promise him a first taste of solid food that evening.  Soup, they say, as though it were manna.  It sounds like manna.  Chicken soup with vegetables.

It’s then that he decides to ask one question; the only one he has some hope will be safe.  His voice sounds like sawdust.  “Please, who called the ambulance?”  

“Señor?”

“How did I get here? – the guy in the diner, did he call an ambulance, was it him?  I’d like to thank him, when I get out.”  

Saying that much has made everything hurt, and the nearer of the two nurses touches his hand gently.  “I don’t know, Señor, but I can find out for you. Would you like that?  Now you need to rest, you’ve had a tiring day.”

Strange to be petted, so, and spoken to like that; as though he’s a sick five-year-old, not a grown man and a murderer.  

He nods, whispers a thank you, accepting her authority and her kindness.  Stares up at the ceiling when the two of them leave, and is asleep within minutes.

**

“I found out the answer, Señor.  To your question.  I checked the records and apparently it was an anonymous caller.   A young woman, calling from a cell-phone.”

Blessed Mother of God, is this my consolation?  If this is to be all, I am content.  I remembered her, and she did not forget me.  Holy Mary, Mother of God, thank you, thank you…

“It’s nice to see a patient smile like that,” one nurse is saying to the other as they leave the room. “He looks happy to be alive for the first time.”

**

Doña Cecelia comes again the next day, and the rest of his questions are answered; and after that conversation, he lies shaking and unable to sleep, long into the night, in the darkness.

**

By the time Gabriel stands in front of a mirror for the first time and looks at himself with his bandages and dressings off, Félix and the boys, and the Señora, are all long buried, and he knows that there has been a guard on the door of his room the entire time, not just when Doña Cecelia visits.  The same guard who is now outside the hospital bathroom where he’s being prepared for his shower.  He’s too weak to do the job for himself safely (and though his spirit bridles at hearing that, he has to admit the doctor is right; he can barely stand unaided after these weeks bedbound and inert).  He must bear being manhandled and washed by a stranger; like a small boy, like an orphan.  It’s a peculiarly precise embarrassment.

He hangs on to the handles in the tiled wall with shaking arms, looks straight ahead, refuses to acknowledge the humiliation.   Thanks the nurse afterwards.

The mirror had steamed up within moments.  He’d had enough of the view anyway.  Always lean, he’s now painfully thin; cheekbones jutting, muscles wasted and slack.  Yet his beard has grown well.  He looks like a revolutionary out of a kids’ history book; gaunt and angry, savage-eyed, and superbly moustachioed.

The scar on his abdomen is huge; easily four times the length he’d anticipated when he first felt the wound.  Where the knife went in there’s a ragged three centimetre slash but that’s just the start; it extends above and off to the side now, neat surgical incisions.  Its whole length sutured up with stitches black as boars’ bristles, delicate as lace.  

It itches and aches, and it feels as though every organ inside hurts too, despite the analgesia.  

The cannula in his hand itches too, and the skin under the tape holding it down is inflamed.  It won’t be taken out for another three to four days.  They’re still pumping antibiotics into him through it.  The consultant tells him smoothly that he should focus on making a good recovery instead of grumbling about a few square centimetres of rash. Partial splenectomy, traumatic injury to the large and small intestines and the left lobe of the liver, a punctured lung, and massive blood loss; plus a chip out of the anterior end of one rib. He had to ask for explanations of some of the medical terms, but now he knows, he’ll remember.

“You nearly died,” Doña Cecelia tells him firmly.  “Next time don’t be so slow.  I shouldn’t have to keep telling you these things.  It’s time to get out of this life, Gabriel.”  She stands over him, looking down her regal nose; although her voice is kind she’s never lowered herself to the level of giving him so much as a pat on the hand.  “I’ll pay to keep you alive,” she tells him now “because you were always a good boy to me and I don’t like the idea of your handsome face wasting into dust just yet. But I won’t give you a job, after. You need to understand that.  You were Félix’s man and I don’t want that association.”  

“Of course, Doña Cecelia. And thank you.  I am forever in your debt, beyond anything I can ever hope to repay.”

“Really?  Well, since you put it so nicely, you young gallant. So - don’t be an idiot, then.  Live, and make a new start.  Since that idiot Félix made you his residuary heir and his poor whore of a wife predeceased him, you aren’t without resources.”

“I don’t want to carry on that business.”

“I should hope not! That isn’t what I’m paying good money for.  You’d be back in this place, in the morgue, within a week, the way things are at present. Why do you think I have a man stationed outside here right now, eh?  The business has as good as collapsed anyway.  But the properties he owned, those still have solid value.  Think about it; make up your mind what to do, and then do it.  Action has a magic of its own.  Didn’t some poet say that?  So act.”

“I will, Doña Cecelia. I know what I’m going to do.”

She smiles at that.  “Tell a lady your plans?  I’d like to think of you going out from here soon and finding yourself a life that won’t kill you.  What are you off to do, then?”