Thirteen
In the morning, the sunlight came down from nearly ceiling-height. It streamed down through a narrow strip of windows, that being up so high, were clearly not meant for looking out, but rather for maintaining whomever might be occupying the room in a state of healthy orientation with the cycling of night and day. The shaft of light put a blob of golden dazzle on the opposite wall, above the bed, that the morning’s advance made slide down, until it had come to rest on the center of Willie’s back. After a minute, Willie felt the sizzle through his pale blue pajama top, let his knees come down away from his chest, and let his hands at last slip off the headboard riser bars. He rolled over onto his back, and opening his eyes painfully in the brightness, looked between his feet at the gleaming, white footboard. Between the riser bars, a stubborn nothingness began to collect itself, threatened to remain dark in Willie’s vision for an instant, but then lightened and became a view through, through to a chest of drawers that mounded out of the wall with an unsettling uniformity of same-color paint.
” Light green.” Willie tried to speak aloud, at first only moving his lips, then practicing the effort, until finally the sounds emerged in a whisper. He turned his face into the shaft of sunlight, diminished and dirtied though it was, and felt the warmth draw him out of the hospital bed and further, out into the circle of an imaginary society. Then the silence assailed him; not only the present silence, there in the light green room with a light green chest of drawers and a light green night table and the diagonal, negating slash of sun that struck at and ignited an already too-white bed. But he was also assailed by the slightly older silence in the glass walled office, where the officers had questioned him. He understood that, though separated by a ride to the hospital in the police car, a short trip in the wheelchair to the room, and then the episode with the goblin, the two silences were really continuous and the same. He felt a muting choke-hold round his throat, and put his own hand there to feel for it. A grief welled up inside him, a grieving for the absence of sound, a grieving for all the lost colors of the world and their last, failing attempt to touch him now with a dirty ray of sun.
“Light green!” He cried out, and put all the grief into the words.
“Light green…” With all the squelched wind in his aching lungs