Wonders of a Godless World Read online

  She was even happy to work in the back wards at night. The night nurse—coward that he was—was almost too scared to enter there after dark, but the orphan actually preferred it. It was cooler and quieter then, and she was less in people’s way. Most evenings—seeing that the night nurse, apart from being cowardly, was also purely lazy—the orphan was the only soul the inmates might see after lights-out. They liked her for that, and she liked them.

  She was less comfortable in the front wards. It wasn’t just the unfriendly looks she received from the townspeople—worse than that, the front wards were the territory of the surgeon, and she didn’t like the surgeon. He was the hospital’s only other doctor, much younger than the old doctor, and all the nurses thought he was very good-looking. But the orphan knew that he cut people open with knives, and whenever he glanced at her, his eyes unsmiling, she felt a little afraid.

  To begin with, they put the foreigner in the catatonic ward.

  The orphan did not quite understand the word, but to her, these patients were the empty people, the ones with nobody inside them. And of all the back wards inmates, they certainly resembled the foreigner most closely. One, for instance, was a woman who did nothing but sit and brush her hair for hours at a time, staring, even though she had long since brushed herself bald. Another was a boy who rocked back and forth ceaselessly on his bed, his arms clasped around his knees. Others simply slept all day, or gazed blindly at the ceiling, almost exactly as the foreigner himself did. None of them, beyond the occasional incoherent mutter or cry, ever spoke.

  But things changed after the foreigner moved in.

  Over the following days, the woman with the brush began to rake her skull so severely that blood was drawn. The boy’s rocking gradually became so violent he repeatedly threw himself to the floor. And the others started to moan and shout hoarsely from the depths of their sleep. The nurses were alarmed. What was happening? It was only when they noticed that things quietened down abruptly if the foreigner was removed—when he was taken to the shower, say—that they came to wonder if he might be the cause. True, he hadn’t moved or spoken in all that time, or done anything blameworthy. But there was something strange about him, they all agreed. Those beautiful eyes…

  The old doctor scoffed at the idea. He told the nurses that most likely the other catatonics didn’t even know the foreigner was there. But if they really wanted to move him somewhere else, then he wouldn’t stop them.

  This time they put him in with the geriatrics.

  It was another ward that was usually sleepy and subdued, for only the very old ended up there. Many of the inmates weren’t even all that mad, they were just too infirm to survive on their own, and had no one else to look after them. Others, however, had retreated into deep senility. They drooled, they leered, they smiled and laughed, and sometimes they yelled and cried, but mostly—thanks to the pills they were given morning and night—they dozed in silence. The foreigner, admittedly, was too young to belong there. Although exactly how old he was, no one knew. With his smooth, burnt skin, he didn’t look any particular age. Not young. But not old either.

  In any event, he had a peculiar effect on the geriatrics. One old man complained that he was not getting any sleep because the foreigner was climbing out of bed and dancing all night. Other patients concurred. But the orphan knew it wasn’t so. She checked the ward regularly on her evening rounds, and the foreigner never moved. His bedclothes were never even ruffled. Then one morning an old woman, a vague, timid creature who had never made any sort of fuss, was discovered completely naked upon the foreigner’s bed, legs astride his hips, shuddering back and forth in delight. When she was dragged away, she insisted that he had lured her there and possessed her with his eyes and that she would love him till she died. But even while she was on top of him, the man had remained as limp and unconscious as ever.

  That was enough for the nurses. Clearly the foreigner was a devil (that word again) of some kind. They wanted him shifted once more. The old doctor was doubtful. It didn’t matter what the old people claimed, he said. They were mad, they imagined things. But the nurses insisted. Of course, they weren’t educated people like the old doctor. They were just working women from the town, full of strange stories and superstitions. But the hospital couldn’t run without them, and so somewhere had to be found to keep the foreigner quietly out of their way.

  One option was to lose him among the general community, the everyday mad folk who made up the bulk of the hospital’s inmates. But those wards were chaotic places, full of yelling and running and wrestling, and in fairness, no one thought they were a fitting home for a man who was bedridden and immobile.

  Someone then suggested the locked ward. Usually, only violent patients were sent there, to be kept in individual cells, with barred windows, and with strong male nurses on hand. Still, the foreigner would certainly be out of the way. (Indeed, the orphan would never have seen him again.) But the nurses protested. If he had disturbed the otherwise peaceful catatonics and geriatrics so much, what might result if he was placed in proximity to inmates who were already aggressive and unstable?

  Somewhere he would do no harm, that’s where he had to go.

  In the end, they settled on the crematorium.

  3

  The crematorium was the nicest of all the back wards. It was somewhat separate from the rest, being contained in a thick-walled bunker that was semi-detached from one end of the main building, accessible only through a single passageway. A large furnace had once been installed there to burn the hospital’s rubbish—including, from time to time, body parts. The stump of a chimney, its upper reaches collapsed, still rose next to one wall. But these days the hospital waste was taken away by truck and the furnace had long ago been removed. The bunker now hosted a cosy little ward with its own dayroom and two small bedrooms.

  Such privacy was a rare thing, and reserved for just four lucky patients. They had been placed in the crematorium, these four, mainly because they were the most stable and reliable of the inmates, and thus could be left largely to themselves. Which was not to say they weren’t mad. They assuredly were. It was just that their madness was different. More…coherent. Indeed, the orphan had always found that their particular kind of madness reminded her closely of her own. And the word she had heard used most often to describe the four of them was this—delusional.

  It meant, she knew, they believed things that weren’t real. They didn’t spit or rave, but nor did they live in the same world as everyone else. There were two men in one of the bedrooms, and two women in the other. The orphan could never remember their names, of course, but she had titles for each of them, learnt from the nurses.

  They were: the duke, the witch, the archangel and the virgin.

  Strangely enough, the orphan herself, in her fourteen years at the hospital, had never actually been diagnosed as mad. On the contrary, the nurses had discovered, even when she was a child, that she could be put to good use around the wards. Schoolwork may have been beyond her, but if she was shown how to perform simple tasks, then she was entirely capable. So they had taught her how to mop floors, and how to make beds, and how to bathe the patients and help them change clothes, and how to perform all sorts of other minor but necessary duties about the hospital. The work made the orphan happy, because it was such a relief to be useful to someone at last.

  Nevertheless, she knew that there was madness in her.

  It wasn’t just that she was retarded. Retarded wasn’t the same as insane, she was sure of that. Her mind was slow maybe, filled with fog, and understanding always came hard, but that wasn’t madness. The madness involved her other senses, her special senses. The things she felt and saw and heard that no one else did. The way she could read the movements of the sky, for example. No one else could do that, and it wasn’t simply a seeing thing or a smelling thing, it was a kind of reaching out from herself into the air—in fact, a way of becoming the air…well, she didn’t know precisely how she did it, she just knew that
she could, and had always been able to.

  That, of course, had to be a delusion. There was no surer indicator of insanity than the act of seeing or hearing or feeling things that no one else could.

  Except…Was it still madness if the supposed delusion was proven real? After all, she genuinely could predict the weather. Everyone knew it.

  Ah yes, but there was a madman in one of the wards with an even rarer ability. He could read minds. If someone stood near him and thought of a colour, he could always guess which colour it was. Always. He was never wrong.

  But so what? It didn’t make him sane. The same man was incapable of feeding or dressing himself. He was a useless oddity, that was all. Perhaps the orphan herself was no better. Perhaps no one was, in the whole madhouse.

  The duke was a straight-backed old gentleman, and his delusion was that he owned the hospital, and that the staff were supposed to take orders from him, not the other way around. He thought he was a rich man. In fact, he claimed to own virtually the entire island, which was why the nurses had laughingly given him his nickname. In reality, though, he was only a poor man. No rich men ever came to the back wards.

  The orphan liked the duke very much, for he was always kind to her, and softly spoken. He had been permitted to live unsupervised in the crematorium for years, and she used to wonder why he was in hospital at all, for his madness seemed so benign. But then one day she heard that for the first decade of his confinement, he had been kept in a cell in the locked ward. He had then been considered the most violent and dangerous man on the premises. It was almost impossible to believe, looking at him now. He passed the bulk of his days merely wandering the grounds, or gently working in the gardens.

  The orphan too liked wandering the grounds. They were red and bare and dusty in the dry season, and red and bare and muddy in the wet, but still there was a kind of beauty in them. Occasionally she would walk with the duke, and it pleased her that he seemed to see the beauty too, if only through his dementia.

  Then there was the witch, who believed that she could cast magic spells. She was a bent old woman, and ugly, and most of her time was spent hunched over her collection of chicken bones, pronouncing curses or blessings upon the world. She wasn’t supposed to have the bones, the orphan knew, and now and then the nurses would confiscate her collection, but she always managed to forage more from the kitchen rubbish.

  But if it was only a matter of chicken bones and spells, the witch wouldn’t have been in hospital, let alone the back wards. The real problem was that long ago in the outside world, as a young woman, she had started to dig up human graves. Apparently, for her purposes, human bones were best. The authorities had committed her, and she had lived at the hospital ever since, nearly as long as the duke.

  Some of the staff believed she really did have powers, and went to her for charms. The orphan, however, knew full well there was no such thing as magic—there were only magic tricks. She’d seen magicians perform in the town square, and had always been able to detect the sleight of hand by which they achieved their marvels. So the old woman could glare and mutter and point bones and frighten people all she liked, it was only nonsense. In fact, it made the orphan laugh. And yet, sometimes, when she caught the witch’s eye, there was a sly sense of recognition between them, as if the witch knew what the orphan was thinking and laughed in return. That wasn’t so amusing.

  Next was the archangel. He was a young man, close to the orphan’s own age, and very handsome—striking even—if a little too thin. For the orphan though he was a far more alien figure than the duke or the witch. This was, partly, because his madness was so centred around the book he always carried.

  The orphan was wary of books. They embarrassed her, for the black marks on the paper conveyed nothing to her mind. Even children’s books, which she was told contained pretty things to look at, simple things, were impossible to decipher. She could never see the dogs or cats that were supposedly there, she saw only shapeless blobs—and anyway, how could a dog or a cat be flat on a page? Books were an ordeal.

  But to the archangel, his book was the most precious item in the world, even though it was worn and battered, its front cover missing, its many pages creased and greasy from where his fingers ran over the lines. The youth studied it perpetually. He prayed a lot too, on his knees. The orphan couldn’t quite grasp how prayer worked. There was a powerful being somewhere in the sky it seemed—a god—and other beings too, and prayer was how people talked to them. Even normal folk did it. Yet the orphan had searched the sky, many times, and never seen anyone up there.

  But that was an old puzzle, and unsolvable. Anyway, the young man wasn’t in hospital because of his prayer. He was there because, as a teenage boy, he had begun harming himself. He cut himself with knives. To the death almost. Suicidal, the authorities declared, and sent him to the back wards. Like the duke, he had been placed in the locked ward at first, but the suicide attempts had abated, and now, as long as he had his book, he was no threat to himself or to anyone. He was, indeed, angelic.

  He also had a very big penis, which the nurses liked to joke about. Sometimes they flirted with him, but he never noticed. The orphan didn’t fully understand the jokes, but she too rather fancied the archangel. And not just because he was so handsome. There was a hunger in him, she saw, a passion in the way he studied his book and in the way his lips moved when he prayed, that made something turn pleasantly in her stomach, imagining what those lips might be like on her own.

  But of course he never noticed the orphan any more than he noticed the nurses. Even if he ever did, what would he see? A fat, ugly girl, mopping the floor. No, she wasn’t a fool, there was no point dreaming about that.

  Lastly, there was the virgin. She was not much more than a girl, slender and slight, but the orphan found her the most intriguing crematorium inmate of all. There was an ethereal air about her. When she moved, she drifted. Languid. Indifferent to her surroundings. In fact, she barely seemed aware of her surroundings. She might have been blind, and deaf too. She never spoke, and if she was touched, she would turn away with an aloof displeasure, and shift carefully out of reach.

  And yet she wasn’t really blind or deaf, the orphan knew, because the virgin liked to watch television. There were two sets in the back wards. One was in the main dayroom, placed high on a wall, behind wire mesh, where it was yelled at (or occasionally pelted with food) by crowds of inmates. But the other was in the crematorium, in the little dayroom, where the virgin had it to herself. Whenever it was switched on, a dreamy light would come into her eyes and she would fold her long legs to sit on the floor in front of the screen. She could sit unmoving like that all day, watching.

  But if books were a riddle to the orphan, then television was an utter mystery. She knew that everyone else saw something fascinating on the screen, but all she ever saw were patterns of colour, randomly swirling. It didn’t matter how hard she tried. When she was very young, her mother had often left her alone in front of the television for hours on end. She had gazed at their little set until her head hurt, the flickering light teasing and promising her, eternally on the verge of becoming something…but invariably she’d had to look away, eyes aching, before she could see what it was.

  Nor could she understand the sounds a television set made. Or the sounds that came out of a radio. They could be hypnotic, those sounds, rising and falling like peculiar voices, or thumping with rhythms that matched the beat of her heart. But if there was meaning there, it eluded her. So it baffled the orphan greatly that the girl in the crematorium apparently saw and heard so much when watching TV, her eyes fixed, her head tilted in repose, her mouth open in a distant rapture.

  The staff called her the virgin out of mockery. There was her hatred of physical contact, for one thing. But it was also because of her only relative—an elderly grandmother who sometimes came to visit. The old woman would berate the girl endlessly for being such a disappointment and a burden. Oh, if the girl had been marriageable, the grandmo
ther would declare to anyone nearby, it might have been different. Once, men had come calling. Men with money, men with fine houses. But a woman had duties, and what man would want a wife—even a beautiful one—who did nothing but watch TV all day, and who would shrink away every time he reached between her legs?

  Well, she would find no man now, not in a madhouse. And with that settled, the old woman would be on her way. The nurses would laugh about it once she was gone, but the orphan never did. She didn’t know what delusion possessed the girl’s mind, but she knew one thing: she didn’t like the grandmother any more than the virgin did.

  The foreigner wasn’t like any of these four, and didn’t belong in the crematorium, but that was of no importance to the nurses. They never intended that he should mix with the others anyway. He was a devil and needed to be isolated. The crematorium had a storeroom—reached down a short hall from the dayroom—and it was in there, on his own, that they meant to finally settle him.

  The orphan herself helped to convert the room into accommodation, and she did not like the feel of it very much. There was barely space to install a bed, with one narrow chair beside it, and there was no window, only a grate that led into the blackness of the old chimney. The room was, in fact, the remains of the original furnace. It was dim and stuffy, and body parts had been burnt there once.

  But it wasn’t for her to question the decisions of the nurses. And she was on hand again when they transferred the foreigner from the geriatric ward. He was in a wheelchair, sitting up calmly, his eyes open and clear. But he looked neither left nor right as he was rolled through the hallways and then down the passage to the crematorium. The place was empty. The duke, the witch, the archangel, they were all elsewhere. Even the virgin was away from her television. So none of them saw him arrive. The nurses navigated the chair through to the storeroom, and then manhandled the foreigner into bed. His eyes were open the whole time. And they were still open, staring up, the orphan saw, as they closed the door to leave him there, alone in the dark.