Ineffable

XLII

  The Doctor shoved another twenty needles into The Young Cripple, and the tip of each one bent as if they were made of straw. The music was blaring now, yet as loud as it was, it still sounded like it was being gently hymned with the most careful addressing of each word and elongated syllable. And The Young Cripple wept, thinking not of herself, but of others whose fates were worse than her own.

  She thought of the people she had saved, in all the towns that she had travelled. She thought of every person with whom she had sat, and so-called healed. She thought of their faces and the sound of their voices as they all told their stories, as she noted each one down. Their words sounded like spitting rain, which here, in the absence of any emotional climate, was like pure bliss. They spoke of sadness, loss, and inexplicable yearning; but juxtaposed, they also spoke of companionship, purpose, and more so, unequivocal love.

  The Young Cripple remembered every story as if they were her own, and she ran each one over in her mind as she lay, strapped on the table, being poked and prodded in a vain attempt to be pricked and stabbed, by an array of medical instruments, some of which were acute enough to draw blood from a fly, while others were hulking brass contraptions which could extract a goat from the side of a mountain.

  As her thoughts littered with the confessions of a hundred million people, in her mind, The Young Cripple apologized to each one. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t know it would be like this. Please forgive me.”

  There was one thought, though, of which she struggled to consolidate. As she lay on the bed - her ankles and wrists purple from the constant struggling – The Young Cripple’s mind became stained with the clear and lamentable sight of The Young Boy, whose heart she had taken, long before his soul.

  His smile was wide and kind, yet distressing. It was as if he were slowly boiling in a pot, unaware of what love was doing to his insides; thinking of himself as arrested and detained by quaint affection when in fact, as the result of some perverse mathematical formula, he was an unwitting slave to an infection that would end his life in three days.

  As she thought of him, his face started to bubble and melt. His skin ran down his body like thick globs of paint, and his teeth fell from his mouth, only to get picked up by the wind and blown back over his shoulder like little squares of confetti. And the whole time, he never ceased to smile.

  “I’m so sorry,” said The Young Cripple, sobbing. “I’ll make things right, I promise.”

  “That’s a good girl,” said The Doctor, crawling out from beneath the table. “I am certain now, that these instruments are not suitable for this kind of work. Orderly,” he shouted. “Prepare the Introspecter.”

  There were two orderlies waiting right behind him. One was reading verses from The Good Story while the other was assembling a contraption that looked as if it were more fitting for boring oil than the prospection of a young girl’s Light.

  “Will this work?” asked The Orderly.

  He looked beset upon by doubt. The Doctor stared at his assistant as if he had uttered a profanity or flatulated in a moment of tender embrace. He grabbed the orderly by the collars of his jacket and he shook him raggedly.

  “Of course it will work,” he shouted, as he shook. “It is the instrument of my choice. It will work, as I do, according to its design. But you for that matter. You are sick,” he said, kicking the orderly’s legs from beneath him.

  The orderly collapsed on the floor. He curled his body into a tight ball and hid his face behind his hands. The other orderlies in the room and out in the hall gathered round their colleague, and they too started to exhibit strange, unexpected behaviour.

  “Sit down, all of you, you’re all sick.” shouted The Doctor.

  The orderlies did as The Doctor said. They sat down beside one another and held hands. It was an entirely peculiar sight. At first there were four or five, but within a minute or so, there was a line of orderlies, sitting side by side and holding hands, which started in The Doctor’s office and continued out into the hallway, all the way to the rec room, where a commotion was starting to build.

  The Doctor rushed out into the hallway. Whatever this was, it was spreading fast. Once good natured and equanimous folk were now acting like savages. Their behaviour was entirely unpredictable.

  “The contagion has begun,” said The Doctor.

  All around him, the walls were starting to secrete rancid smelling glue. There wasn’t a dry wall in the entire ward; each one perspired thick globs of what The Doctor could only assume was cancer or worse yet - Light. The fact alone that he himself had even assumed something to be true showed that he too was infected.

  The Doctor ran back into his office.

  “Who are you?” he screamed, feeling doubt and indecision, scorching his skin like sunburned blisters. “What are you doing here?”

  He stood over The Young Cripple, holding the Introspecter beneath her chin.

  “What have you done?” he shouted.

  In the cage beside the table, the sick prisoners revolted. They all screamed passionately, some of them weeping and others laughing hysterically. There were some that eschewed insult and threat, and their others that sang the most delicate harmonies, as if they were alone on a beach, calling their shipwrecked lovers back to shore.

  And then came the chant.

  “The rain, the wind, the thunder;

  With love did they speak;

  Of Heaven torn asunder.”

  “Heaven torn asunder,” sang the sick prisoners, over and over. “Heaven torn asunder.”

  The Doctor looked back at the girl, and she at him. He held the horrible looking Introspecter in his shaking hands. Its weight was immense, and he had to summon all of his strength so as not to tumble over and cut himself in half.

  “Stop what you’re doing,” he said.

  The Young Cripple ignored his threat. She looked into his eyes and she felt pity for she knew that look. She had seen it a dozen times before.

  “I’m sorry,” she said to The Doctor. “For what we did. We thought that sadness was an illness. We thought that without fear, all beings of Light would exist in eternal tranquillity. I’m sorry. For my part, I apologise. I’ve never felt as bad as I do right now.”

  “Stop it,” screamed The Doctor, readying his instrument of torture and extraction.

  The Young Cripple couldn’t stop, though. She thought of this horrible place, and of all the people she doomed unto it; all those people whose Light had been stolen from them. She looked into the cage beside her bed and she stared at the prisoners – some of them just babies – and her concern grew until her guilt and her depression met with love and compassion; and inside her heart, they collided.

  The result was momentous.