Fourteen
The morning continued its advance, and by the time the shaft of sun had burned over the top of the bed and come to lay across the tiled floor, a knocking at the door gave Willie a startle where he sat. The three concussions were instantly recognized as that universal manner of rapping that bids entry, and then ends unfailingly in an expectant sort of silence. It is a silence to be filled with perhaps a spoken “Yes?” or an “I’m coming…” or even with three rejoining raps, if just to confound the knocker or to serve up some giddy, knuckled dialogue. But should the space of silence go unfilled, that rapping go unanswered, then the trying of the knob comes inevitably. The knocker’s wrist would turn, letting itself ask, is it locked? An assured self-admittance would be permitted by silent default, and later, thinking on it, one would see it plain, and know that it had been fear that let them in. Willie’s fear. And this was now clearly a master at the other side of the door, for the silence was being given a long, long reign, long enough to be felt as a thing between knocker and door and Willie’s ear. And when the precise moment came, and only then, when the pulse gonged and the world shrank into a tiny patch of light green door, did any sound come at all. The metallic fumbling of an indifferent mechanism, came loud as cracks of thunder, as tumbler spun and bolt withdrew inexorably, and this part slow, achingly slow: the door opened, and the boy drew his legs more tightly into his chest. Not another Goblin! The door opened, and the room seemed to escape out into the corridor, as every fleck of dust stood at attention. The door opened, and a bald man with an alarming white crescent of hair from temple to temple and a white beard, and wire glasses that clung miraculously to the farthest outreach of his nose, entered shyly, a master. He noticed the empty bed, and with an internal Hmm? and Where is he?, fingered the light switch.
“Oh, there you are. Good morning William,” and after a long regard of absorption, seeing the fear, “I’m Doctor Heimbinder.”
The Doctor looked around and noticed there wasn’t a chair in the room. He dragged one in from the corridor and set it in the center of the room facing Willie and the window.
“Would you like to sit there William, or come over and sit on the bed so we can talk a little while?”
Willie had tucked himself into a corner of the room, and was sitting on the floor. He looked at the Doctor over the tops of his knees and from under the black shock of hair. The Doctor’s bald head was so polished that it cast a perpendicular shaft of reflected sunlight up onto the ceiling, that moved as the doctor did, and drew the boy’s eyes like a game.
“William? Well, I suppose there’s no harm if you want to sit… I’m sorry, I didn’t quite hear you. Say again.”
Willie mumbled something from behind his knees.
“What!?”
The knees parted, and the lips now visible, made movements of gasping, that somehow made the words: “I said, did you operate on me?”
“I heard you the first time. Whatever in the world makes you think that we did, my boy?”
Willie dropped his legs flat, and placed a hand over his stomach.
“What have you got there?” The Doctor walked over to Willie’s dim corner, and stood him up. “Here, let me see…”, lifting the boy’s pajama top.
“Why there’s nothing…does that hurt?” The doctor asked, palpating.
Willie looked down over his un-scarred middle, saw the smooth, boyishly perfect concavity of his own abdomen, felt the gentle heave and dip of his breathing ribs, the Doctor’s pressing fingers. Then his eyes lost that plane of focus, and fell instead to the tile floor, a checkered black and white boundary, the surface of which led him to a miserable memory. He fell limply against the Doctor’s white coat, and the arms came up enormously to support him.
“William? Oh dear boy, its all right…you go ahead…that’s just fine. If you want…Oh, that’s fine.”
But Willie wasn’t weeping. The gaze of one perfectly dry eye persisted on the tiled floor, the other was crushed shut by a white linen arm. Then the doctor, moved by a warming sense of his own charity, began to sway the child gently, further compressing the one smothered eye as he did, producing those neon blobs in that darkened half of Willie’s vision. The blue and green neon blobs pooled for strength then drifted under the bridge of Willie’s nose, and impaired the sight of even the unobstructed eye.
“Crying is the healthiest thing in the world. Don’t let…”
The squeezing arms and the neon blob invasion blurred and skewed the floor from the horizontal, so that the far left corner of the room, with the bed in it, scended upwards, and the right wall and door fell sideways, down into gray oblivion. Then in response to that repositioned gravity, through some magic of anamorphosis, Willie saw the black floor tiles run liquidly over the white, in streaks of steaming, molten tar.
“William?” … silence… “William?”
The Doctor bounced Willie from his chest, to look at him in the light.
“Oh dear…” He said, wiping the rivulet of saliva from the boy’s chin, and looking into the glazed and absent eyes.
“Oh dear.”