Wonders of a Godless World

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 grandmother 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.

4

But even though the foreigner was now safely isolated and confined in his cell, the orphan couldn’t put him out of her mind.

Why that should be, she didn’t know. For all his mystery, he was just another patient, one of dozens that she had to attend to in her rounds. Among them were inmates she’d known for years, inmates who talked to her and laughed with her; inmates who played hide and seek with her when it was shower time, who loved to play in the mud when it rained, who did a thousand interesting things that the foreigner didn’t; inmates she liked and inmates she hated. But at the end of each evening, as she lay in her bed, the only face that came into her thoughts was his.

True, she spent considerable time with him. Someone had to spoonfeed him his mush and give him water. Someone had to change his sheets, and sponge his body down, and wrestle him into a wheelchair for toilet trips. If the nurses were busy—and they were always busy—many of those tasks fell to the orphan. Indeed it seemed that most of the tasks involving the foreigner fell to her. But that didn’t explain her fixation. She dealt every day with patients who were likewise unconscious, and sad as it might be, such inmates were little more than bodies to her—an anonymous collection of mouths and bowels and bladders that merely needed to be fed and cleaned up after.

The foreigner was different. From the moment she entered his cell, bent on one chore or another, she was aware of him—in the same way that she might be aware of a spider sitting high in a corner, one of the big hairy jungle spiders that came into the wards sometimes. It was not that the spiders were a threat, they weren’t poisonous, but they made her uneasy, and she always knew if one was there. It was the same with the sleeping man.

He was no physical danger. She’d already proved that to herself. He was naked in the bed, and while changing his sheets she had studied him from head to toe. His body was slight and soft and pale—his new skin clean of blemishes—and quite defenceless. She could do anything to him. She had bent his fingers back until they cracked, she had pinched at his nipples, she had even clutched his hairless balls for an instant and squeezed hard…nothing elicited any response. But still, some instinctive part of her remained wary of him, no matter what her reason told her.

And there was another thing. The vibrations had come back—the buzz against the orphan’s heels, the machine humming far underground, the same tremors that had first appeared on the very day the foreigner arrived at the hospital. They had faded away again on that occasion, but the morning after he was moved to the crematorium, the vibrations returned. Only subtly to begin with, but as the days went by, they grew ever more intense. And even though she could not have explained how, the orphan was convinced that in some way the foreigner was to blame.

It became so bad she could hardly sleep. Even masturbating did nothing to relieve the tension. Yet she knew too that the buzzing was only imaginary. She studied tubs of water in the laundry, looking for some ripple of confirmation, but the liquid’s surface was always smooth. Crockery on shelves didn’t rattle, neither did windowpanes. Walls didn’t creak or groan. Her bones might twitch, and the earth might feel as if it was crawling underfoot, but everything around her was solid and steady.

So it had to be madness, and only that. And the foreigner could have nothing to do with it. But then one morning, as the orphan worked with her mop, hiding how frantic she felt on the inside, a nurse came to her with a message.

It had been arranged, the woman said, that the patients in the crematorium were to be taken outside, to sit in the sun for a while. It would be the orphan’s job, and her job alone, to ensure that the sleeping man joined them.

The orphan leant on her mop and stared. What was this? Yes, sometimes patients were taken outside for an airing. But it was always done in the afternoon, never in the morning. Moreover, it was only done in fine weather, and on cooler days. This particular morning was hot and humid, and heavy showers of rain were crossing over the hospital periodically. Besides, the other four crematorium patients were free to go outside whenever they liked. They were never taken. They didn’t need to be taken. Who had ordered this? For what purpose? And why had they included the foreigner, when he was supposed to be in isolation?

But she could enunciate no such questions, and the nurse seemed to think the outing an entirely innocent affair. Indeed, ever since the sleeping man had been shifted, the staff were satisfied that the problems with him were over. The odd behaviour in the catatonic and geriatric wards had ceased, everyone agreed. And nothing unusual had happened anywhere else, not even in the crematorium.

That was—thought the orphan—until now.

But she did as she was told. She collected a wheelchair and pushed it through to the foreigner’s cell. The nurse was getting the other patients ready; the orphan could hear her snapping impatiently, and the witch shrieking, and the duke muttering in annoyance. This wasn’t part of anyone’s schedule. But in the little furnace room, cocooned by thick walls, the foreigner waited silently in the dark. The orphan hesitated, feeling the floor buzz under her feet. She could see the gleam of his open eyes.

It couldn’t have anything to do with him, could it?

She pulled back the sheet, dressed him in pyjamas, then heaved him from the bed into the wheelchair. It was a familiar enough task, and easier than it might have been. He was not a big man, she was a strong girl, and his arms and legs went where she put them and stayed there. But then in the dimness she thought she saw, very faint on his lips, a momentary smile.

No. When she looked properly there was nothing. He was not capable of smiling. He would not even know that he was being moved. She pushed him along the hall and out through the dayroom, following the nurse and the others.

Outside, the latest burst of rain had just passed, and steam was rising from the ground. Blue sky showed through broken clouds. The wheelchair splashed in puddles. They came to an open area next to the laundry, right up against the back fence of the compound, where the jungle reached down from the mountainside, and where a few old wooden benches and chairs were arranged about a concrete slab. It was here that patients were normally taken on fine days, to sit quietly in the sun.

The absurdity of the whole exercise hit the orphan again. The crematorium patients would never sit quietly. And yet to her great surprise the duke and the witch and the archangel and the virgin all suffered themselves to be led to the benches and chairs. The nurse fussed about them for a few moments, and then—after announcing that she would be back in an hour—she made off again to the wards.

The orphan pushed the wheelchair to one end of the slab and set it there so that the foreigner was facing all the others. A hot silence enfolded them. Even the laundry had fallen quiet. This was becoming more and more weird. The orphan could feel the vibrations so intensely through the cement that she had to keep shifting her weight from one foot to the other, like a child who needed to go to the toilet. Why were they there? What were they meant to do? Whose idea had this been?

And then she realised that the four inmates were watching her. No, they weren’t watching her, they were watching the foreigner, sitting in his chair in front of her. They were doing so shyly, secretly, the witch glancing from under her brows, the duke pretending to study the sky. The archangel wasn’t looking in any direction at all, but for once his book lay unopened and unheeded on his lap, his attention elsewhere. And although the virgin’s gaze was as blind and indifferent as ever, her body leant forward, as if trying to gauge the foreigner by sound.

It occurred to the orphan that none of the four had seen their new wardmate out in the open until now. He had always been alone in his cell, behind a shut door. Naturally they would be curious about him. But this wasn’t natural. She had seen the way inmates behaved when they were curious, especially ones like the witch and the duke. They investigated, they intruded, they intimidated, they poked and prodded and picked fights. They didn’t simply watch in this silent, timid manner.

Was there a low throb in the air? An unheard thunder?

And then, at last, she saw it. Off to the side of the concrete was a muddy puddle, and the surface of the water was juddering in a series of tiny waves.

The vibrations—they were real!

But there was no time for wonder, because a rumbling was suddenly audible, like a hundred trucks driving past the hospital. The ground shook and the orphan, startled, looked up, over the foreigner’s head, to the mountain. She saw that a giant fist of grey smoke had appeared from nowhere and was rising into the sky, and that it came, amazingly, from a high cleft near the mountain’s peak.

Boom! A great, grinding detonation came rolling down.

Linkages flared in the orphan’s mind, one after the other. The mountain, that was the answer! That’s where the vibrations had come from all along. They had been a warning of this event. But what was happening? What process? What violence within the mountain was driving it? And with that thought—using her new awareness, sharp and alive, and without even knowing how—she reached out and felt at the earth.