The Woman in the Room - Stephen King, ebook, CALIBRE SFF 1970s, Temp 2
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THE WOMAN IN THE ROOMTHE WOMAN IN THE ROOMThe question is: Can he do it?He doesn't know. He knows that she chews them sometimes, her face wrinkling atthe awful orange taste, and a sound comes from her mouth like splinteringpopsicle sticks. But these are different pills . . . gelatine capsules. The boxsays DARVON COMPLEX on the outside. He found them in her medicine cabinet andturned them over in his hands, thinking. Something the doctor gave her beforeshe had to go back to the hospital. Something for the ticking nights. Themedicine cabinet is full of remedies, neatly lined up like a voodoo doctor'scures. Gris-gris of the Western world. FLEET SUPPOSITOUES. He has never used asuppository in his life and the thought of putting a waxy something in hisrectum to soften by body heat makes him feel ill. There is no dignity in puttingthings up your ass. PHILLIPS MILK OF MAGNESIA. ANACIN ARTHRITIS PAIN FORMULA.PEPTO-BISMOL. More. He can trace the course of her illness through themedicines.But these pills are different. They are like regular Darvon only in that theyare grey gelatine capsules. But they are bigger, what his dead father used tocall hosscock pills. The box says Asp. 350 gr, Darvon 100 gr, and could she chewthem even if he was to give them to her? Would she? The house is still running;the refrigerator runs and shuts off, the furnace kicks in and out, every now andthen the Cuckoo bird pokes grumpily out of the clock to announce an hour or ahalf. He supposes that after she dies it will fall to Kevin and him to break uphousekeeping. She's gone, all right. The whole house says so. She is in theCentral Maine Hospital, in Lewiston. Room 312. She went when the pain got so badshe could no longer go out to the kitchen to make her own coffee. At times, whenhe visited, she cried without knowing it.The elevator creaks going up, and he finds himself examining the blue elevatorcertificate. The certificate makes it clear that the elevator is safe, creaks orno creaks. She has been here for nearly three weeks now and today they gave heran operation called a 'cortotomy'. He is not sure if that is how it's spelled,but that is how it sounds. The doctor has told her that the 'cortotomy' involvessticking a needle into her neck and then into her brain. The doctor has told herthat this is like sticking a pin into an orange and spearing a seed. When theneedle has poked into her pain centre, a radio signal will be sent down to thetip of the needle and the pain centre will be blown out. Like unplugging a TV.Then the cancer in her belly will stop being such a nuisance.The thought of this operation makes him even more uneasy than the thought ofsuppositories melting warmly in his anus. It makes him think of a book byMichael Crichton called The Terminal Man, which deals with putting wires inpeople's heads. According to Crichton, this can be a very bad scene. You betterbelieve it.The elevator door opens on the third floor and he steps out. This is the oldwing of the hospital, and it smells like the sweet-smelling sawdust theysprinkle over puke at a county fair. He has left the pills in the glovecompartment of his car. He has not had anything to drink before this visit.The walls up here are two-tone: brown on the bottom and white on top. He thinksthat the only two-tone combination in the whole world that might be moredepressing than brown and white would be pink and black. Hospital corridors likegiant Good 'n' Plentys. The thought makes him smile and feel nauseated at thesame time.Two corridors meet in a T in front of the elevator, and there is a drinkingfountain where he always stops to put things off a little. There are pieces ofhospital equipment here and there, like strange playground toys. A litter withchrome sides and rubber wheels, the sort of thing they use to wheel you up tothe 'OR' when they are ready to give you your 'cortotomy'. There is a largecircular object whose function is unknown to him. It looks like the wheels yousometimes see in squirrel cages. There is a rolling IV tray with two bottleshung from it, like a Salvador Dali dream of tits. Down one of the two corridorsis the nurses' station, and laughter fuelled by coffee drifts out to him.He gets his drink and then saunters down towards her room. He is scared of whathe may find and hopes she will be sleeping. If she is, he will not wake her up.Above the door of every room there is a small square light. When a patientpushes his call button this light goes on, glowing red. Up and down the hallpatients are walking slowly, wearing cheap hospital robes over their hospitalunderwear. The robes have blue and white pinstripes and round collars. Thehospital underwear is called a 'johnny'. The 'johnnies' look all right on thewomen but decidedly strange on the men because they are like knee-length dressesor slips. The men always seem to wear brown imitation-leather slippers on theirfeet. The women favour knitted slippers with balls of yarn on them. His motherhas a pair of these and calls them 'mules'.The patients remind him of a horror movie called The Night of the Living Dead.They all walk slowly, as if someone had unscrewed the tops of their organs likemayonnaise jars and liquids were sloshing around inside. Some of them use canes.Their slow gait as they promenade up and down the halls is frightening but alsodignified. It is the walk of people who are going nowhere slowly, the walk ofcollege students in caps and gowns filing into a convocation hall.Ectoplasmic music drifts everywhere from transistor radios. Voices babble. Hecan hear Black Oak Arkansas singing 'Jim Dandy' ('Go Jim Dandy, go Jim Dandy' afalsetto voice screams merrily at the slow hall walkers). He can hear atalk-show host discussing Nixon in tones that have been dipped in acid likesmoking quills. He can hear a polka with French lyrics - Lewiston is still aFrench-speaking town and they love their jigs and reels almost as much as theylove to cut each other in the bars on lower Lisbon Street.He pauses outside his mother's room and for a while there he was freaked enoughto come drunk. It made him ashamed to be drunk in front of his mother eventhough she was too doped and full of Elavil to know. Elavil is a tranquilizerthey give to cancer patients so it won't bother them so much that they're dying.The way he worked it was to buy two six-packs of Black Label beer at Sonny'sMarket in the afternoon. He would sit with the kids and watch their afternoonprogrammes on TV. Three beers with 'Sesame Street', two beers during 'MisterRogers', one beer during 'Electric Company'. Then one with supper.He took the other five beers in the car. It was a twenty-two-mile drive fromRaymond to Lewiston, via Routes 302 and 202, and it was possible to be prettywell in the bag by the time he got to the hospital, with one or two beers leftover. He would bring things for his mother and leave them in the car so therewould be an excuse to go back and get them and also drink another half beer andkeep the high going.It also gave him an excuse to piss outdoors, and somehow that was the best ofthe whole miserable business. He always parked in the side lot, which wasrutted, frozen November dirt, and the cold night air assured full bladdercontraction. Pissing in one of the hospital bathrooms was too much like anapotheosis of the whole hospital experience: the nurse's call button beside thehopper, the chrome handle bolted at a 45-degree angle, the bottle of pinkdisinfectant over the sink. Bad news. You better believe it.The urge to drink going home was nil. So left-over beers collected in the iceboxat home and when there were six of them, he would never have come if he hadknown it was going to be this bad. The first thought that crosses his mind isShe's no orange and the second thought is She's really dying quick now, as ifshe had a train to catch out there in nullity. She is straining in the bed, notmoving except for her eyes, but straining inside her body, something is movingin there. Her neck has been smeared orange with stuff that looks likeMercurochrome, and there is a bandage below her left ear where some hummingdoctor put the radio needle in and blew out 60 per cent of her motor controlsalong with the pain centre. Her eyes follow him like the eyes of apaint-by-the-numbers Jesus.- I don't think you better see me tonight, Johnny. I'm not so good. Maybe I'llbe better tomorrow.- What is it?- It itches. I itch all over. Are my legs together?He can't see if her legs are together. They are just a raised V under the ribbedhospital sheet. It's very hot in the room. No one is in the other bed right now.He thinks:Room-mates come and room-mates go, but my mom stays on for ever. Christ!- They're together, Mom.- Move them down, can you, Johnny? Then you better go. I've never been in a fixlike this before. I can't move anything. My nose itches. Isn't that a pitifulway to be, with your nose itching and not able to scratch it?He scratches her nose and then takes hold of her calves through the sheet andpulls them down. He can put one hand around both calves with no trouble at all,although his hands are not particularly large. She groans. Tears are runningdown her cheeks to her ears.- Momma?- Can you move my legs down?-I just did.- Oh. That's all right, then. I think I'm crying. I don't mean to cry in frontof you. I wish I was out of this. I'd do anything to be out of this- Would you like a smoke?- Could you get me a drink of water first, Johnny? ...
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