Room for Recovery
by Martin Westlake
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Table of Contents parts 1, 2, 3 |
part 2
I was not sure I understood why there had to be a complete ban on flights into and out of the airport. After all, the object was doing absolutely nothing. It hadn’t moved at all. It wasn’t emitting any sort of dangerous rays or anything like that. But the scientists and the aviation officials and the military wonks thought it was better to err on the side of caution. So, Lara flew to the nearest city, and I drove there and back to pick her up.
It was worth the effort. Lara had soon taken over some of the visiting duties and could sit with her sister doing not very much — the Italian fa niente — much better than I ever could. And when fussing was required, she fussed around her sister like the most doting of mothers around a child.
In addition, her presence gave me a chance to start thinking about other things. I spoke Italian well and understood it even better, but the excited chatter between the two sisters about far-away family, friends and places gave me a chance to zone out. I soon realized that I hadn’t followed the news properly for almost a week. So, I turned to the newspapers and the websites and started to catch up.
The arrival of the mysterious column over the city was still front-page news and led all the news bulletins. It had certainly given the world something to think about, although the results so far were fairly encouraging. Was this a so-called “first encounter”? Nobody knew. The thing was non-responsive. How did it hover there? Nobody knew. Once the Americans had overcome their eternal suspicions of the Russians and the Chinese and vice-versa, and notwithstanding various ongoing proxy wars throughout the world, the three had sat down together at the U.N. in New York and discussed what might be done. Their collective reaction was also reassuring; basically, as far as I understood it, nothing much except wait and see.
Raffaella and Lara, together with Mollie and Catty on the ward, had turned themselves into a sort of discussion group.
“We’ve decided to call it the ‘visitor,’” said Mollie with a frown.
Raffaella, a trained chemist, gave me a broad wink.
“We just call it the ‘thing,’” said Lara, laughingly.
In fact, the ladies were divided in their points of view. Not surprisingly, Raffaella and Lara, who was a trained physicist, represented the scientific approach. Their point of departure was an assumption of no assumptions. Don’t assume anything about the thing. It had arrived. It had had flashing lights initially. It hovered impossibly in the air. Apart from that, it did nothing. Communication seemed impossible unless it was watching and listening without responding, but that would be to make several assumptions already. That was all we knew. We certainly didn’t know whether it was a “visitor” of any intentional sort.
Mollie and Catty represented a far more anthropomorphic approach. They did make assumptions. That the “visitor” was a vessel of some sort. That it was being operated by an intelligence of some kind. That its presence and its aspect had significance. That its arrival was not accidental. Cato spoke about it in almost personal terms, with a knowing smile.
Now that Lara was there, I came less often to the ward but, whenever I did, the four ladies seemed to be in a never-ending discussion. I could see that this was good for Raffaella. She was a tough lady anyway, but the discussions were a constant distraction from the post-operative pain and discomfort the doctors and nurses had warned her about. As far as I could make out from my talks with them, she was making a rapid recovery without any complications.
I was so happy for her and for us. All that time in the hospital before and during the operation had given me the time to think things through. I realised how lucky I was to have Raffaella, how much I loved her and needed her, how much of a team we were. And when the surgeon had been at his gravest, I had realised how much I depended on her and how my existence without hers was inconceivable.
* * *
The discussion group’s first topic was the flashing lights and their disappearance. For Catty and Mollie, as for the media huddle on the big screen, there had to be significance in this development. For Raffaella and Lara, meanwhile, that would once again be to read assumptions into the situation. The fact that there were no longer any flashing lights meant nothing or, rather, it didn’t necessarily have to mean anything. It could just be some completely random change in the appearance of the thing. But the other two ladies could not help but speculate.
“Why do we turn the lights off?” asked Mollie.
“Because we don’t wish to be seen?” Catty ventured.
“But we can still see it,” Mollie.
“Then because it’s going to sleep?” asked Catty.
“Perhaps,” said Mollie, who clearly already had a settled idea in mind. “But whatever it is, when you turn the lights off, you save energy, don’t you?”
“You think that’s what it is?”
Mollie smiled. “It’s saving energy,” she said. “Or it can’t afford to lose any more.”
Raffaella shot me a smile and put a finger to her lips. Lara had gone down to the coffee shop on the ground floor of the hospital, so we had a little bit of time to ourselves. I leaned over and kissed her on the lips; a long, lingering kiss. I held her hand and told her how much I loved her; how much I had realised I needed her, wanted her. She ran her fingers through my hair.
“Oh, Ciccio,” she said, in her no-nonsense way, “you can be a soppy sausage at times.”
I murmured some sweet nothings in her ear and then nibbled on the lobe. She was wearing perfume. Ah! I thought. She is well on the mend now. It was another small moment of release. My face in her hair, I swallowed back tears over and over. She held her hand to the back of my head and continued to run her fingers through my hair until my breathing had calmed. By the time Lara returned, I had dried my eyes and was sitting smilingly at Raffaella’s side.
“Have you seen the latest pictures?” said Lara.
“No!” said Raffaella, barely disguising her frustration at having been distracted. “What’s happening?” She turned to Mollie and Catty, whose eyes were glued to the screen.
“It’s damaged,” said Mollie.
“No, no,” said Catty with a knowing smile, “it’s wounded.”
“What do you mean?” asked Raffaella.
“There’s something wrong with it,” said Catty. “Look. They’ll show you in a few moments.”
“Turn the sound up,” said Raffaella, “please.”
There was a banner headline, “BREAKING NEWS,” running horizontally across the bottom of the screen. This was followed by, “Deep cut seen in mysterious object.” A few seconds later, the screen showed an image of the object from underneath. When the camera focused in, a long, narrow, black mark was visible. Journalists were calling it a cut.
“How do they know it’s a cut?” I asked.
“They can see that the wound is deep,” said Catty.
“You can see for yourself, surely,” said Mollie. “There’s clearly something wrong with the visitor.”
“Why didn’t they spot that earlier?” I asked.
“I’m sure the military did,” said Catty. “It’s only now that the journalists have realised.”
This new observation set off a fresh round of speculation and discussion among the ladies. The scientists urged caution with vocabulary. To use words, like “cut’ and “wound,” was to assume that the thing was something that could be cut and wounded. Precisely, the anthropomorphists argued back. How otherwise to explain the “wound” in the “belly” of the “visitor”? A simple examination of its appearance elsewhere showed that it was a uniform colour and texture and appearance with the sole exception of that long, deep, black mark underneath. As they watched the footage on screen it indeed became apparent that the “cut’ had probably been there all along. It was a matter of camera angles.
“That’s why it came,” said Catty. “It needed sanctuary.”
“Sanctuary?” Mollie squawked.
Catty smiled patiently, as a teacher would smile at a slow pupil. “We think immediately of predators, but what if the thing is the prey? And whatever is after it doesn’t dare to attack it here.”
“That’s a bit of a leap,” said Lara.
“You mean that the visitor might have led its predator to Earth?’ ask Mollie.
Catty nodded.
“Then we are in danger not from the visitor but from whatever is chasing it? Is that what you mean?”
Catty gave her best knowing smile.
It was almost one o’clock. I was going back to the office in the afternoons now, so I hastily said my farewells, blowing fond kisses to Raffaella, and made my way down to the car park. I turned the radio on as I drove to work and realised that not everybody was as benign in their interpretations of what might be happening with the object.
Several military talking heads argued that “the world” needed to keep a very careful eye on what the “cut” might signify. After all, it was on the lower side of the object. Could the “cut” be some sort of opening? Was this a potential threat? The politicians were more reassuring. The military forces assembled around the object, both on the ground and in the air, were carefully monitoring the object and would of course immediately report any development.
Lara called me in the early evening. “You’d better come,” she said.
“What’s happened?” I asked.
“There’s been some sort of complication.”
I felt a lurch in my stomach.
* * *
Raffaella’s bed had gone.
“They’ve taken her back down to the theatre,” Lara explained. “There was some sort of bleeding. That’s all they would say.”
“Don’t worry,” said Catty. “She’ll be fine.”
She and Mollie were watching the television screen, as always. For a few seconds I half-watched a rolling headline declaring that the dull glow had started to emerge from what everybody was now calling “the cut.”
“It’s healing,” Catty confidently asserted.
“Sshhh!” Lara urged her.
I heard Catty, but I wasn’t really listening. Everything had been going so well. Now, it seemed, Raffaella was at risk again. I felt sick at heart. Lara rubbed my arm reassuringly.
“It will be fine,” she said. “You’ll see.”
There was nothing to do but wait.
An hour went by. Mollie and Catty babbled on with completely inappropriate cheerfulness. Occasionally, Catty would give me a quick smile and a reassuring “she’ll be OK.” But I wasn’t reassured. All my worst fears had returned.
I was losing Raffaella!
Another hour went by, and then an unfamiliar nurse appeared. The poor lady had no news. God! Another hour went by. It wasn’t their fault, I knew, but I just wished Mollie and Catty would shut the hell up. Who cared about the visitor’s “wound”? My wife was in intensive care. Perhaps she was fighting for her life.
Finally, the doors rumbled at the end of the corridor and Raffaella’s “lovely lad” appeared. By then my teeth were grinding, and I swear I was almost ready to kill Catty and Mollie to stop their incessant speculation about the visitor and the glow emanating from its supposed cut.
The nurse smiled. The scare was over; the problem was fixed, and Raffaella would be back in the ward very soon. We still had to wait another hour —how time stretches in hospitals! — and then we again heard the lift doors rumbling at the end of the corridor and shortly after that the nurse reappeared, wheeling Raffaella’s bed back into the ward. She seemed fine. She smiled and waved at us.
“Welcome back,” said Catty. “I was telling your husband,” she continued, “that the visitor is healing.”
“Oh?” said Raffaella, but her voice was weak and for once I could see that she wasn’t as interested in the thing as she had been.
Lara, reading the situation, took control: “Perhaps we should all forget about the thing for tonight?” It was the sort of question that was really an order.
“Of course,” said Catty, using the remote to turn the screen off.
I leaned over Raffaella with a damp flannel and mopped her brow. She brushed my hand away.
“Why did you say that?” she asked Catty. The blood was beginning to return to her cheeks, I noted. She had been terribly pale when the nurse had first wheeled her back in.
“Say what?” asked Catty.
“About the thing healing.”
It was as though Raffaella had never been down in the ICU again!
“I don’t know,” Catty continued. “It’s just a hunch. If it’s wounded, it needs to heal itself, doesn’t it?”
Her fellow anthropomorphist was not so convinced.
“I agree it’s almost certainly a wound,” said Mollie, “but it sounds to me more like an infection.”
“An infection?”
“Yes. You know how wounds burn with heat when they get infected. That’s why it’s glowing.”
“I know we burn wounds to cauterise them,” said Catty, smilingly.
“Do you think that’s what it is, then?”
“Now, listen—” I began.
Raffaella gave my hand a squeeze. “Lascia stare,” she whispered.
“Do you think we could turn the screen back on for a few minutes?” asked Mollie plaintively.
“Of course,” said Raffaella.
I was furious. She needed rest! The two ladies turned their attentions back to the rolling news bulletin, and Raffaella, exhausted, turned her eyes towards the screen, too. I let her rest but sat there in silent fury. Where was the doctor? Above all, was Raffaella really okay? Was everything really alright?
Copyright © 2024 by Martin Westlake
