Night Win

By Nancy Kress

This story went through several versions. Editors liked it, editors hated it—the same editors. I rewrote this story more than any other piece of work I’ve ever sweated over.

The original title was THAT THE NIGHT COME, from the Yeats poem of the same name. I’ve forgotten what the original ending was supposed to be—although I’m fairly sure it involved the same characters. When Shawna McCarthy finally chose one version for ISAAC ASIMOV’S SF MAGAZINE, I destroyed all the rewrites and regained the use of three large drawers.

The whole experience was undoubtedly a Metaphor. I just don’t know for what.

The river dissolved. One minute it tore through high, dim banks booming with the rapids around the bend; the next it lifted and spread, flooding the air with gray particles that turned from water to smoke to grainy nothingness behind Rachel’s eyelids, nothingness spreading in an even wash like blindness like sleep like entropy like stillness like—

“Rachel! Rachel!”

—nothingness—

“Rachel!”

Her ear muffs were yanked off so quickly that the flexible metal band snapped against her temple. She put up one hand to rub the temple, at first unaware that she did so, eyes focusing more slowly than hand. Always the eyes more slowly; the hand remembered first, not deceived. Instinct? It must be instinct. Over her chair, Don’s thin body leaned urgently. Her ear muffs dangled from his left hand. Even through the wispy nothingness she could feel the tautness in his body, gone sharp as a bowstring. If she touched him she would bleed.

“Rachel?”

The hospital room sprang into focus: metal bed, tightly woven blue blanket, blue-flowered drapes drawn against the night, miniature plants in a green ceramic pot, a gift from somebody. Dracaena, jade plant, philodendron, schefflera. The schefflera was wilting; probably over-watered. Under the blue blanket Rachel could see Mrs. Angstrom lying still, worn out with not dying.

“Are you all right?”

“I—lost it,” Rachel said. She closed her eyes, then forced them open again. Sounds, always the last to focus, came leaking in from the corridor: a linen cart rolling by, an elevator door opening with a soft whoosh of air. At the nurse’s station around the corner and down the hall someone chuckled. A second later a different voice murmured, the words indecipherable as a foreign language. Somewhere a phone rang.

“Rachel—can you get back In?”

“Can you?”

“Yes. But now. It has to be now.”

Sweat beaded on his upper lip. One hand, Rachel saw, was shaking. Always the hands—even for Don, who had so much control she sometimes hated him.

“It wasn’t like the last time,” Rachel said slowly. “This was—nothingness. Just nothingness. I lost it to nothingness.” Her big body shuddered.

“There’s no time. It has to be now!”

In the bed Mrs. Angstrom groaned and turned over.

“All right,” Rachel said. “All right. I’m ready.”

Don took her hand. She pulled it away, but then forced herself to leave it in his. He was right; she needed the extra contact, even at the price of the tactile distraction. His fingers were spindly and cold. With her free hand Rachel pulled the ear muffs over her head, leaned back, and closed her eyes.

She slipped In.

The raft had drifted farther towards the rapids—how had it gotten so far downstream? Don was splashing towards it, only his bony, naked shoulders and bobbing head showing above the slimy black water. Another ten yards and he would reach the raft, but the water flowed faster here and his splashing was not narrowing the distance. On the raft Mrs. Angstrom screamed, but Rachel heard no sound; the woman’s mouth was a silent black O. Rachel tried to move towards Don, but the water pressed in, stinging like needles. Cold—it was so cold. She tried to raise the temperature, but the water would not warm. Don must need it this cold; she couldn’t affect it at all.

Ahead of her Don reached the raft and grasped it with both hands at one corner. For a second Rachel could feel the wood, water-logged and spongy, bucking under his hands. Hands— not now! Don’t think of hands now! Don braced himself against an underwater rock, leaning backwards until his weight balanced the forward drag of the current against the raft, and called back over his shoulder for Rachel to help pull.

Her body, so big and ponderous on land, felt light in the water. Her breasts, blue-veined and fatty, floated in front of her. But the stinging was growing even worse; the water was so cold it burned. Rachel struggled to make herself take a step, to move through the black water over the unseen sand underneath. Just as she succeeded in lifting her naked foot and shoving it forward, a fish swam by her legs.

Startled, she stopped moving. A fish? There couldn’t be a fish, not here, not in this river. And it was beautiful—tapering slim shape and crimson dark scales, streaking across the dark water. But how could a fish have been—

“Rachel!”

“I’m coming!”

She splashed forward, flailing her arms. The raft had swung sidewise under Don’s backward pull. One corner pointed directly down the river, like a prow. Mrs. Angstrom was still screaming, and now Rachel could hear her over the rapids, a shrill scream with a scraping flutter in it, doubling and redoubling in echoes off the bluffs that crowded the river on both sides. Around her the slimy water moved faster, singing darkly.

Don’s skin felt clammy with gooseflesh. Rachel forced her hands around his waist and threw her weight backwards. He staggered, but then caught her rhythm and stepped back with her over the jagged rocks. (Jagged rocks? It had been sand when she started. Rocks, cold—why did he make everything as goddamn hard as possible?) The muscles in the back of Don’s neck knotted with each step. Slowly the raft eased backward, moving upstream, against the current.

Mrs. Angstrom went on screaming.

They were almost back to where Rachel stood before, angling in towards a rock shelf at the foot of the bluff, when a fish swam by again. Suddenly there were two of them, slashing the coldness with bright streaks of warm color. She tried to yell to Don to look at the fish, but he didn’t turn his head. Wood chips from the raft, smelling of rot and slime, hung in his hair.

How quick the fish were! How alive and yet not alive, glowing with passionate flashes of red, more intense than any color she had ever seen. More intense than any being she had ever seen—pure, whole, free, and with a passion glimpsed only in night dreams. Passionately red. Streaking across the night blackness, burning deeper and deeper, the searing crimson flaring out like a nova until the water itself was warmed. How could she have thought it was cold? It was only cold until you were used to it, then warm and bright with the glow, the yearning, the flowing between your legs like black velvet. Red fins and slim tapering bodies leading you down into the sweet silent water, the longed-for, half-remembered temperature, salty and thick, warm as blood.

She let go of Don and slipped in a slow sliding curve under the blood-warm water.

“MorMedic Campbell. Come on, now, wake up. This is Nurse Ferrier. Wake up, now.”

The young voice trying to be old went on and on, patiently. Rachel turned over and tried to pull the blanket over her head.

“None of that. Come on, MorMedic—Rachel. Wake up, now. Please wake up.”

A hand began slapping her hesitantly on the cheeks, first the left one, then the right. When Rachel reached up to bat the hand away it caught her wrist and pulled a little.

“Rachel, come on. You’re supposed to wake up now.”

“I’m awake.”

“Then open your eyes. Please open your eyes.”

The face was leaning over her, blocking the window. Chubby cheeks, blond curls, oily skin: Rachel recognized her as the latest of the young nurses who followed Don around, smiling wistfully. Sarah, Sandy—Susan. Susan something. The nurse moved her head and Rachel was assaulted by sunlight, then memory. Abruptly she sat up.

“Mrs. Angstrom—”

“Alive. The fever broke. She’s over the worst.”

“She’ll make it?”

“The prognosis is hopeful,” the nurse said primly. The corners of her young mouth turned down. Rachel saw the grimace for what it was: the involuntary distrust of the technician of the body for the technician of the mind, of the concrete for the shadowy, of the dutifully licensed for the hired outsider. Probably Nurse Ferrier didn’t even notice what her mouth was doing; that didn’t help.

Why the hell were they like that? It seemed to Rachel that nearly all of them, all the hospital personnel and the academic researchers and even the next-of-kin who paid for the services of a Mortality Medical Team, spent most of their living energies in wilful, edgy misunderstanding of what that team did.

Not that there was much about metaphorical healing that was concrete enough to understand. So many unknowns: how did MorMedics ease themselves into synchronous trance? How did they wordlessly choose and construct a metaphor for death, and then ensnare the minds of the dying into becoming passive participants in the metaphor? How did they pull the dying back from the idea of death, and why should the body often follow the idea? Often, so often, but not always. Why not always? Why at all? Why this, why that, why was this stupid girl standing here blushing at her, why, why—

Why did I let go of the raft?

“Of course,” Susan Ferrier said awkwardly, “I know I don’t understand any of it. I didn’t mean to imply—I know that Don—MorMedic Bareis—he does wonderful work. So many people have said they—not that there’s any way of knowing it wasn’t just the basic medical care that wasn’t really the cause for—but he really does give it everything he’s got. He really tries. And you, too, of course,” she added hastily.

“Of course,” Rachel said sourly, and swung her heavy legs over the side of the bed.

“Let me help you. Do you feel all right?”

“You couldn’t do anything about it if I didn’t,” Rachel said, and waited for the girl to take offense. But instead she smiled, a smile so patient and open that it changed her whole face, making even the bad skin a shiny reflection for the sunlight that filled the room, a meek acceptance of whatever was offered. Rachel felt dimly ashamed; she scowled and looked away.

Don lay in an empty bed parked in an unused alcove by the linen room. He was still asleep. Lying on his left side, his legs drawn up, he looked even smaller than usual. Where did it come from, all that power in that delicate, balding skull with the last sideburns in Boston? His right shoulder hunched up toward his chin; Rachel could see where the collarbone, chicken-skinny, met the shoulder. Such delicate shoulders; so much unseen, over-regulated power.

Holding those shoulders in her arms had never been able to excite her. She had tried—God knows she had tried, wanting to make their obligatory intercourse something more than the required playing through of common sexual metaphors. Her metaphors, violent and restless, had repelled him; his metaphors, stately and secretive, had bored her. Or maybe his had never really surfaced at all, never really broken through all that awesome control. Always that control, that careful consideration of ends rather then means. Not that she didn’t admire it professionally, of course. But in all six months that they had lived together, she had never had an orgasm. She had come to know Don through and through, and nowhere had she found that abandonment, that complexity, that passionate struggle that might have made her respond to him. She had lain next to him, holding him as she gazed out his window at the night clouds whipping over Boston Bay, and it had been like holding a child in her arms.

But, free of sexual metaphors, they had made such ideal working partners! His the initiation and control, hers the passion and energy. They were the best team on the East Coast, once they had worked at an operation on a former president of United Europe. But that had been years ago; she had never lost the metaphor then, never given in to—what?

Leaning against the wall of the linen room, Rachel felt the sour little bubbles rise in her stomach, and scowled. She hated, above all else, the rare times she felt afraid.

Don was awake. He lay looking at her, his light gray eyes compassionate.

“I’m sorry, Don. I lost it. I was with you and then I just … lost it.”

“Rachel—”

“No. Don’t. I know.”

He looked away from her, into the linen room. Crumpled sheets lay in a pile on the floor. His small, delicate-veined hand clenched at his side, and she spoke quickly, anything, before he could speak.

“How did you get the raft to shore?”

“I didn’t.”

“Then—”

“It happened to snag on a rock, so I left it to pull you out. The rock wasn’t mine. Yours?”

“You know better than that.”

“Then it must have been hers. Latent ability, maybe, I don’t know—it was just sheer luck. The one-in-a-thousand chance. Not something I could count on again. Rachel—”

“Was I hard to get out?”

“No. You had already swallowed enough water by the time I could grab you.”

“Did Mrs. Angstrom try at all to—”

“Rachel. Stop it.”

“Don’t tell me what I can ask or not ask about a—”

“I can’t work with you any more.”

She looked at him. Somewhere, down the hall, around a corner where she couldn’t see, a patient coughed.

“Don’t look at me like that, Rachel. Rachel—”

Why were people always doing that, always starting their speeches to her with her name? Nobody else was addressed so much by name. Did they think it gained them something: time, her attention, her favor? Fools. She hated her name. “Rachel, weeping for her children, because they are no more …” She fought, not wept. It was the wrong metaphor.

“Rachel, at least listen to me. To start with, you need some time off, a few weeks to rest. Tiredness—”

“If you know I was tired, why did you use the river? You knew I have trouble with all the water constructs, we’ve been over this a hundred times, yet you go right ahead and use it anyway, you don’t seem to—”

“Don’t attack, Rachel. Attacking won’t help.”

“‘Attack’. God, you even talk in metaphors.”

He passed a hand over his eyes, but he wasn’t deterred. They had worked together for fourteen years, had been mortal friends for twelve.

“A rest would do you—”

“No, it wouldn’t. I’d go crazy. I need to work, you know that!”

“You could do some of your gardening, take a trip. Visit your sister in Detroit.”

“I can’t stand my sister in Detroit. I need to work.”

“So take a job at an algae factory!” Don snapped, and despite the panic in her stomach, Rachel grinned. It still had the power to surprise her, this unexpected exasperation that could break the surface of his bland, slow patience. Impulsively she reached out and put a hand on his shoulder.

“No, Rachel. I mean it. Mrs. Angstrom, and last week the brain surgery. Shapiro.”

“They both pulled through!”

“You deserted me in the middle. Shapiro wasn’t water, either.”

It had been night, the oldest metaphor of all. Don and she had crouched on a vast plain, plying enormous bellows, pumping toward a tiny spark of fire on a pile of messy ashes. They leaned on hands and knees to blow with exhausted breaths until the veins in her cheeks swelled and popped. The plain had been dark, cave-coffin-womb dark, except for that wavering spark from the inert mass on the operating table. And then suddenly Rachel had seen how much more beautiful the velvety darkness was, how much more pregnant with mysterious huntings and yearned-for promises, than the grotesque shadows cast by the grubby little spark. The most natural, the lightest thing in the world, was to turn her back on the dingy ashes and face the spacious, gravid, sweet-scented dark, just face it and listen for what it surely had to whisper to her, what unfettered vast secrets—she hated O.R. work, anyway. The electronic instruments were a subtle distraction, their rhythms never exactly matching the ones Don set, and so were all those others, the endless personnel which conventional medicine thought it needed, moving and talking and breathing and filling up the crowded room with their petty static. It was no wonder she’d lost the metaphor! So many of them, always, you’d think an operation was a goddamn football game, all spectators welcome. Next time she should sell tickets. Next time she—

“You don’t just need a rest, anyway, Rachel. Let’s not argue about the rest. What you need, the second thing—the most important thing—is an analysis.”

“No.”

“This is serious. I can’t risk your going out on me with a patient again. Will you at least talk to a psychiatrist about this weird death wish—”

“Spare me the pop jargon!”

“If you—”

“Why do you push me on the same stupid thing? We’ve been over this a hundred times! No, no, no!”

Don sat up in the bed. The blanket slipped and Rachel saw the thin gray scar on his chest, souvenir of a mugging in the Public Gardens on his way home from an emergency night operation. Over the years she had raged against that chest, storming as various men had let her down, had turned out to be only pygmy gusts instead of the nature-shaping gales she had thought them, had after all not been enough for her. Not been large enough. Don had always been there, always listened, contained and patient, waiting for the passing of emotional storms he never shared.

“I push you on the same thing because I have to, Rachel. Now be rational. If you go under when we’re on a crucial case where I can’t let—”

“Analysis won’t help!”

“How can you say that when you haven’t even—”

“No, damn it! No, no, no!”

“Rachel—if you don’t have an analysis you don’t work with me.”

“Fine! I’ll find another partner!”

He drew a deep breath. The scar on his chest quivered under the fluorescent light.

“If you don’t have an analysis, you don’t work.”

“You can’t—”

“Yes. I can.”

She flung out one arm, the gesture meaningless, and struck a shelf beside her. Glass shattered; metal clattered to the floor. Unheeding, Don looked at her directly, those gray eyes that absorbed light steady in his delicate face. He looked absurd, like a child playing king, playing petty dictator, playing with the only thing in her stupid life vital enough to mean anything. He looked like a scrawny chicken, trying to outface a falling cliff. She could snap those twiggy little bones with one hand, she could crush him right where he lay.

“See the psychiatrist.”

“Don’t talk to me with that mealy-mouth superiority! Didn’t you ever make a mistake, didn’t you ever mess up a construct?”

“No, I didn’t. Lives are at stake.”

“God, you’re so smug! So sure-of-yourself prissy smug!”

“See the psychiatrist. I know what you’re thinking, Rachel—but just because it happened to D’Amato doesn’t mean it’ll happen to you.”

“And do you know what D’Amato’s doing now?” Rachel shouted. “Selling life insurance! Gone, all gone, as soon as some Freud-fly started poking around—not even you know how to get In, and you’re an initiator! Not even you—”

Susan Ferrier stood in the hall, in a patch of sunlight crawling with dust motes, her hand to her mouth. Rachel jerked around and stared fiercely, pointlessly, into the linen room, her back to both of them. She could never work alone. Whatever it took to make the initial link, that catching of the unguarded dying that drew in their what?—essence? will to live? soul? Nobody knew, that was the whole damn point— whatever it took, she didn’t have it. She was only the raw energy, the lightning without a ship’s mast, the flooding river, rampaging lost beyond its banks.

“Rachel, see the psychiatrist.”

Under his even tone she heard the jaggedness that might have been pain, but when she turned his face was still controlled, closed as a fortress. Beyond him Susan Ferrier had not moved, her hand still to her mouth in the dusty sunshine. They were both such small people, such controlled, bodiless, sunlit people, so content with what they had … Rachel pushed past them, shoving Susan out of the way with one hand.

“I need you, Rachel,” Don said. He had climbed out of bed and stood naked on the tile floor; the top of his head reached her chin. He looked defenseless, vulnerable—deliberately vulnerable? On the floor his bony toes splayed outward.

“I need you.”

“I’d take you Under first!”

He shook his head, but whether to deny her words or just to deflect them, Rachel didn’t see. She kept on pushing down the hall, not looking back, the sunlight white and placid behind her.

She began to remember her dreams. That had never happened when she was working; it had been years since dreams had made the crossing to her conscious mind. In the night she would sit up and cry out, waking herself, sweat clammy under her nightgown. Her hands would be clenching the metal bed frame so hard the welts would stay on her palms for hours. Yet the dreams themselves were calm, ordinary: she was picking a bouquet of early asters in the garden, she was stirring the rice in its enameled pot on the stove, she was painting a window frame in her tiny Commonwealth Avenue apartment. Sunshine washed through the window and over the wet paint, making moving shadows where her hand swished back and forth. The paint smelled clean and permanent, like glue. When the frame was painted, she cleaned her brush in warm water, slapping the bristles back and forth, each separate bristle distinct and pleasantly tingling against her hands.

Hands—always hands. But she woke screaming.

During the day Rachel worked in the garden. She had chosen the shabby, cramped apartment on Commonwealth Avenue for its fenced garden, a luxury left over from the time when the Back Bay had been a pleasant, safe part of the city. Now it was neither; fights and muggings and curses echoed nightly over her wooden fence. But—there was the garden, and a tiny redwood sundeck that overlooked it. She worked frantically, jabbing her spade with the rapid-fire rhythm of a jack-hammer, or a machine gun. “Slow down, Rachel,” Don said from the sundeck, a drink in his hand. “Slow down, you don’t have to plant Eden in one afternoon.” She scowled at the image from ten years ago and hoed the ground around her tomatoes as if rescuing them from strangulation. “Take it easy,” the image said. “All that storm and strife could kill you.”

At night she dreamed of fixing a pipe. She could feel her hands grip the wrench as it tightened on the joint collars. She woke screaming.

After a few weeks the gardening ran out. There was only so much to do. The beans had all been propped on poles; the cigarette butts and beer cans passersby had tossed over the fence had all been cleared out; the flowers had all been pruned. Rachel’s neighbors, made uneasy by the fierce order of her marigolds and the harsh measure of her scowl, left her alone.

She sat up later and later. All the curtains were drawn tightly and pinned over closed windows. She did not trust herself to even smell the summer night, heavy with lush promise— instead she watched TV news shows, hospital shows, old space dramas and even older Westerns. People were laser-fried by aliens and died. People fell off horses and died. People contracted odd strains of mutated viruses and died. Rachel watched it all, wrapped in an old hand-knitted afghan, glaring at the TV. Contestants won refrigerators, diplomats made the shuttle trip to the moon, patients fought off the odd mutated viruses and lived. Once, during a news segment about a spectacular transplant operation, she glimpsed Don in the background of the O.R., looking small and exhausted. Not even that made her turn off the TV. She let it all wash over her, staying with it right to the early morning sex shows, wanting only to stay awake, not to sleep, not to dream the calm, ordinary, useful dreams.

“MorMedic Campbell?”

“Nurse Ferrier.”

“May I come in?”

“No.”

Susan Ferrier blinked, whether at the rudeness or Rachel’s appearance, Rachel couldn’t tell. She knew how she looked. Soiled bathrobe, uncombed hair, pasty skin with dark circles under the eyes—hadn’t missed a cliché, had she? The whole theatrical repertoire of panic. Touched all the bases. At the absurdity of this flash of perverted vanity, Rachel smiled sourly and Susan, mistaking the smile, walked in.

“It’s about—well, about Don. I see him around the hospital, and he always looks so tired. Just spent. I know I probably shouldn’t interfere, MorMedic—Rachel—”

“MorMedic.”

The girl flushed. “Working alone is just too much for him. It’s really none of my business—”

“No. It’s not.”

“—but he can’t find another assistant, and frankly, I’m worried about him. He needs another assistant. He really does. But there aren’t too many of—of you.”

Rachel walked to the stove. She was out of coffee. A mug lay on its side, the last dregs soggy in the bottom. Three brown bags of garbage rotted in the sunshine from the window. She had just not been much interested in removing them. Through the glass, she could see a dented beer can caught in the rose bush.

“Of us what?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“You don’t have it. Not too many of us what? Death rats? Decay-diddlers? Infidels? Frauds? What exactly do you think MorMedics are, Nurse Ferrier?”

“Mental healers,” Susan said quietly. Rachel saw what she had missed before: dignity. The girl was timid, washed-out, bland, but she had dignity.

“Faith healers. But not their faith—ours. Does Don know you’re here?”

“No. But—”

“Presumptuous, then, isn’t it?”

“I just thought—”

“No. You didn’t.”

Susan drew a deep breath. Her oily skin mottled with red. “I’m not going to fence with you. I don’t know what you’re so angry about all the time, anyway. I don’t know why you never relax, never—but Don lost three this week. All of them should have made it. One was an eight-year-old boy.”

Rachel sat down. She lowered herself into a chair slowly, back straight, as if something were fragile.

“Tell me.”

“The first one was on Tuesday. My head nurse said it was gastric tumor, and the surgeon—”

“Not that. What was Don using with the kid.”

Susan hesitated. “I don’t know, exactly. He wouldn’t talk about it afterwards, even though he was really upset. But somebody said it was something about a cliff.”

She could feel it. Hauling the child in a rope-sling up the sheer face of the mountain, the body groggy but not completely inert, so that it flailed and groaned at the end of the rope. An eight-year-old would be heavy on those thin shoulders. Because he was Don, it would be cold. The snow would whip past his goggles, sometimes blinding him to the ledge above, the safe ledge which, if he only could reach it, would let him keep the kid safe—let him put the small body in the back near the rocks, under the overhang, and shield it from the wind with his own body. Would let him pull off his gloves and wipe the blood off hands raw from hauling on ropes and hammering in spikes for hours. It would have been hours. And then the unexpected shift of the rope, the child sickeningly light for the blind moment before the snow gusted and Don could see the fall, slow and unstoppable as the fall of night. At the base of the cliff, in the waiting room, the parents who had hired Don would lift their eyes from unread magazines, to scan his face as he walked toward them. And he would have to tell them.

“MorMedic Campbell?”

“But Carl D’Amato is selling life insurance!”

“Who?”

Rachel closed her eyes. When she didn’t answer Susan squirmed a little, an abortive half-moment that in another girl might have been a shrug, or a flick of impatience, or a plea for attention.

“The third case was O.R. A knife-fight victim. Actually, the patient came through the surgery and we thought he would make it, but Don was still with him in post-op, and he was using the—”

“No. Don’t tell me.”

“Rachel—”

“Don’t tell me!”

Sunshine streamed in the window. Susan stood still, waiting. Rachel fidgeted, stacking the salt shaker on top of the pepper, ringing both with torn bits of advertising circular, making and unmaking frentic designs her intent eyes did not even see. The child fell from the cliff.

“All right. I’ll see your psychiatrist.”

“Oh, Don will be so—”

“Yes. Set it up for tomorrow.”

“Maybe today the doctor could fit in a—”

“Tomorrow.”

The girl nodded. They looked at each other across the littered table, Susan smiling uncertainly, Rachel fierce. There was nothing else to say. They might have been two different species, circling each other warily around the water hole of Rachel’s shabby kitchen. A fly buzzed monotonously across the sunlit silence.

“Well, I guess I better be—”

“What is death to you?” Rachel asked abruptly, and waited. She expected an evasion or an embarrassed stare, something that would justify her dislike. But again Susan surprised her. She answered promptly, meeting Rachel’s eyes directly, her uncertain smile gone.

“The enemy.”

“Always?”

“Of course.” The girl’s eyes widened suddenly. “Isn’t it always to—”

“Go home, Nurse Ferrier.”

“But—”

“Go home.”

Now even watching TV was impossible. Her mind skidded crazily, missing whole chunks of plot, entire countries’ worth of news.

“—and now the NBS newsbreak. Fighting has intensified along the Niger-Barmou border, with losses estimated as high as 4,000 men, women and children. A high official in nearby Mali, who declined to be identified, confirmed genetically altered bacteria in an attempt to gain control—”

Control, Rachel, control. You might be an initiator if you could just keep your own needs out of the metaphor.

And the great Don might be decent in bed if you’d just let any of yours in!

That wasn’t called for.

“—called for an end to the death and destruction in a Security Council Meeting earlier today. Locally, purse-snatchings and muggings in the downtown area—”

Of course it hurt. What sort of question is that? No, don’t touch there, it’s still tender.

Don—what did you feel when the mugger pulled the knife?

I felt afraid.

Is that all? Nothing more complicated, more—mixed?

Of course not.

“—return you to the Himalayas and NBS coverage via telesatellite of the death-teasing struggle of seven American mountain climbers to climb the—”

Turn it off.

I want to see it.

Good God, Rachel, why?

I don’t know. It’s beautiful. No, it’s not. It’s outrageous, dangerous, big—I don’t know. Don’t you ever think that if you weren’t a MorMedic, you might live that way? Pushing life to the limit?

Never. What’s the point?

Does there have to be a point? Maybe they’re just trying to escape all this endless cramped discontent that the rest of us live in!

I don’t feel either cramped or discontent.

God, I hate your self-righteousness!

Do you? I’m sorry. But adolescent longings for some vague passionate grandeur don’t interest me.

Self-righteous, mundane, limited—

“—limited to four days more of food and water, before facing a lingering death on this lonely Himalayan slope battered by winds of up to—”

Rachel turned off the TV. Silence filled the apartment. Hunched in her chair, pulling closely around her shoulders a shawl pointless in the summer heat, she stared at the blank screen. Beyond the drawn curtains she could feel the night, curling around the city like a sleek, stretching cat.

She dreamed she was building a new frame for the kitchen window. She chose the nail; under her fingers it felt cold and solid. She held it straight and drove it in with clean blows, her hand bringing the hammer down over the exact center of the nail head, again and again. The kitchen filled with steady, balanced pounding and with the clean smell of new wood. The windowsill was nearly finished; it lay to one side on the floor, sturdy in the sunshine. She woke screaming.

The pounding went on.

It was the wind, fiercely blowing over the vast, deserted plain outside her window, pounding at the apartment. Rachel tore open the locks on the barred grill and ran out onto the sundeck. Below her the garden lay crystalline in starlight. Beyond the fence a group of boys went by on Commonwealth Avenue, insulting each other in Spanish. A beer can was tossed over the fence, but just before it hit the dahlias the wind screamed and Rachel dropped to the deck, grabbed the railing, and hung on. She was out on the plain, alone in the howling wind. The few cotton woods on the plain were twisted by the wind into grotesque knots. Tumbleweeds slammed into rocks that were themselves crumbled into tortured deformities by centuries of wind. A cotton wood crashed over, raking the air with branches, and the wind wailed and screamed. She would be swept away, she would be torn in half by this wind that could not exist. Not here, not at this distance, not without any contact or agreement. Not even Don could initiate such a metaphor—but it had to be Don’s, he was the only one teamed to take her In at all. But how, and why? Whom was he rescuing? Who was dying?

A sudden gale force gust slapped her from behind, hurling her hair forward over her face, blinding her. Flat on her stomach, she grabbed handfuls of the tough prairie grass and tried to raise her head enough to see where the twister was. Dirt and grit blew into her eyes, then tore at her lips and tongue when she screamed.

A night moth fluttered gently over to the dahlias, folding pale wings.

She was crawling against the wind, looking for Don. She could move only a few inches at a time, grabbing fistfuls of grass to pull herself along. The grass came up at the roots; most of it was torn from her hands by the wind. Her hair jerked abruptly away from her face and pulled at the scalp so hard it hurt. Weeds and grit howled overhead, making a tearing gray sky only inches above her head.

“Don! Don!”

He was ahead of her, a dim shape in the shrieking gloom, trying to stand up. Rachel could see his body, naked to the waist, rise a few feet above the plain. Even as she raised her head to call again he was knocked to his knees, then spun sideways a few feet and slammed to the ground. She felt rather than heard the sharp crack of bone at the left elbow. A second later, he was trying to stagger to his knees. What was he trying to do? Where was the patient he was rescuing?

Crawling forward, Rachel reached up and pulled Don down by his belt. Instead of grasping her hand or shouting to her what was going on, Don twisted his body and clawed at her face with his one good hand. Rachel gasped and beat his hand away, finally pinning his wrist behind him. He jabbed upward with his knee but she was quicker, throwing her body full length on top of his. Her right elbow came down on his broken one; even over the demonic wind she heard him scream. Their faces were inches apart, but when he spat at her the spittle whipped away horizontally.

“Listen! Don!”

He wouldn’t hear her. Rachel’s body, ten centimeters longer and twenty kilos heavier, couldn’t hold his. The wind was lifting him from underneath, gusting up from the earth itself like some live, demented spirit.

“What the hell are you doing? The metaphor doesn’t go like this!” Rachel screamed. Don’s face strained beneath her, blank with concentration. They were three inches off the ground, locked together like rammed galleys, when Don’s head fell backward; he closed his eyes and smiled as the wind slammed him in the face. Rachel hit him in the nose. Blood spurted out and was blown by the wind. She leaned over and tried to snatch at the whipping grass, and when her fist finally closed over a clump she pulled hard. They tilted forward, her body riding his, until the grasses tore and their heads shot upward. Don’s body slid sideways under Rachel’s and she rolled off him, landing hard on the ground.

Free of her weight, Don rose another few inches. His broken left arm flopped like a puppet’s. Rachel rolled under him and grabbed upward; her arms and then her legs wrapped around Don, dragging him down to her and tightening like a vise. The hair on the back of his head lashed at her mouth, tasting of sweat. He tried to flail backwards at her with his right arm, but she was beyond his reach, and he began prying at her hands clutching his chest. She locked his fingers and squeezed until something under them cracked.

At first her weight pulled them toward the ground, but then the impossible wind again began to blast them from underneath. It was warmer now, a warm raging wind as solid as tropic rapids. At three inches they began to rotate, but Rachel couldn’t see through the flying hair and grit whether Don was using a twister in his senseless battle with—what? What the hell was he fighting her off to do? And where was the patient in this hellish metaphor? Above her Don gave a long, low sound: not a moan or a cry but a drawn-out breathy keening of such yearning and hope that Rachel tightened her hold until skin and blood jammed under her fingernails, and then she understood.

Don was the one dying. Dying not as a passive construct in somebody else’s metaphor, but as an active participant in his own, both initiator and victim. He wasn’t being tossed by the wind, he was riding it. Voluntarily mounting it higher and higher, back to the beginning, back where the wind blew from flowed to fell from the side of the cliff, slow and unstoppable as the fall of night. Night—night was there, mysterious and passionate and terrible enough to fill all those aches and yearnings that the glare of sunlight only exposed—

“No, damn it!” she screamed into his bloody hair. “Not you! Not you!”

Night. He was going to night, on top of the sky, above the wind. He was going to night, to the warmth and throbbing as the crimson blood rushed into her breasts, between her legs. Crimson flaring out like a nova spreading engulfing the longed-for, half-remembered temperature, blood-warm, salty dark—

Throwing her head forward, Rachel closed her teeth on Don’s right shoulder. Blood filled her mouth, rushing in with outraged scream. The jerks of his body as he tried to rip free of her teeth tilted them crazily to the right, but not enough to flip over their locked bodies and leave her on top. The wind from beneath became stronger and louder; they were rising faster. Rachel spit out Don’s shoulder—he had stopped the keening— and screamed “Fight it, damn you! You told me to fight it!” There was no sign he heard. She tried to make the wind colder, harsher—hail, sleet, blowing sand—anything but this seductive warmth, cleaner by the moment, lifting them higher and higher. She succeeded in lowering the temperature a few degrees, but then the demented howling began to sound more regular, swelling and pulsing and mounting to a crescendo of power that was music and thunder and orgasm, that held her transfixed, no longer fighting.

They were being blown upward and northward, at an angle, towards the night. The plain unfolded below them, tattered and unimportant. Ahead the sky throbbed black and crimson, never wholly one or the other but a passionate, relentless blending, flashing lightning—under her legs, clamped around Don’s, Rachel could feel the force of his erection. The wind sang past them, hot and alive. Rachel cried out, didn’t hear herself, and closed her eyes, smiling into the night as the night flowed into her, and then blackness came.

The first thing she became aware of was her neck. It ached; the muscles were cramped and tense. Awareness of the rest of her body followed. There was no part of her that was not bruised and battered. Slowly, Rachel opened her eyes. At the same second, she realized mat the wind had stopped and the air hung as still and heavy as she and Don were hanging.

They were in the branches of a huge cottonwood. Other trees, unseen before in the dust of the twister, dotted the prairie. Don lay pressed against the cottonwood’s trunk, circled and pinned by Rachel’s arms. Next to the trunk her hands clung to two of the branches; it was her hands that had held them in the tree. Rachel tried to open her fingers. At first she could not, so desperately were they knotted around the solid wood. When she had forced open her scraped and cramped hands, Rachel spread them in front of her, shifted Don’s weight slightly so he would not fall out of the tree, and then stared at her spread hands. She turned them over and back, palms up and palms down. It was as though they belonged to someone else, as though she had never seen them before.

Hands. Driving a nail, picking a bouquet, stirring the rice, painting a window frame. Holding on for dear life, even when the mind desired otherwise. For dear life.

In front of her spread hands, Don moaned softly.

The moth left the dahlias. It hovered over the beer can, flew to the deck, and settled on a fold of Rachel’s nightgown. She sat up, looking at her hands. The moth flew away, wings pale in the moonlight as any ghost.

“Awake?”

“Yes.”

“Rachel—”

“Don’t.” She put her finger to his lips. He looked exhausted, white ridges sagging on either side of his mouth, but whole. Irrationally, she had half-expected to see the broken arm and bitten shoulder. But there was only the old scar on his chest, and the new lump on her forehead where the gun butt had come down.

“It was a mugger,” she said. “Just another stupid, greedy mugger. You must look like an easy target. He gave you a concussion, and you went into severe shock.”

“I know. Susan Ferrier told me.” His voice was flat, stretched like taut canvas over the pain underneath.

“So now you get to be a medical-first. After all, nobody else has ever initiated his own metaphor to finish killing himself. You’ll be a celebrity, a real psychiatrist’s dream. ‘Metaphoric Death Wish Among the Metaphoric Healers: A Reverse Phenomenon.’ Still want me to see the Freud-fly?”

Don didn’t answer. After a moment Rachel looked away and said, “I’m sorry. God, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that.”

“I had it coming,” Don said. “All these weeks—all these weeks I thought it was you. Mrs. Angstrom. Shapiro. I thought it was you. But you must have been picking it up all along from me, some crazy repressed fascination with death I didn’t even know I had—”

“From you?” Rachel said. It was a new idea. But then she thought of the calm, ordinary dreams that brought her awake screaming, of the delicious blood-warm water, of the wind mounting upward under her. “No. No, I don’t think it was only you.”

“What then?”

“I think,” she said slowly, “I think it was both of us. There might have been something I was picking up from you, something you couldn’t express directly—control—but then I—it wasn’t all you. No.”

Don reached up and fingered the bruise on his forehead. He deliberately pushed it, Rachel saw, hard enough to hurt, and she closed her eyes.

“Don’t, Don. Don’t blame yourself.”

“I could have killed us both. Only I didn’t even know you were going to be there, in the metaphor. How did you get In? I didn’t call you.”

“Yes. You did. You must have, or the prairie metaphor wouldn’t have reached me … wait. I was asleep, I was dreaming. Your trance reached my dream.”

Again Don put his hands to either side of his head. This time the touch was tentative, probing; in his gray eyes brimmed a strange light, fascinated and horrified. “I wanted to die. I wanted it. I constructed a metaphor to hurry towards it, not to stop it—”

“I know,” Rachel said. “I know. But you also reached out to me, or your trance did. And you must have known, at some level, that I would stop you.”

“Why did you? Why did you try to stop me? You tried to get there yourself, before—with Mrs. Angstrom. With Shapiro. Why stop me? Why didn’t you join me from the beginning?”

“I don’t know,” Rachel said. “Why did you stop me before, and this time want to go on yourself?”

There was a long silence. In the corridor footsteps passed. Somewhere a phone jangled softly. Don squeezed his eyes shut. “I’ll have to see a psychiatrist, if I’m going to work again. We both will.”

“No!”

“Rachel, I have to. If I don’t talk about it, if I let it go, it will grow, don’t you see? It will grow, and next time—”

“Then not to me. Don’t talk about it to me.”

“Ever?”

“No.”

“It would help you.”

“No. It would help you, because for you the important thing is to get it out, bring out whatever—once you get it out in the sunlight, you can take it apart and label all the parts and make each one just another tool. Then you won’t be in danger of giving in. But I don’t work that way. I can’t.”

Don chewed on his lip. A long moment went by, and Rachel held her breath.

“If you can’t,” he said finally, “then you can’t. But maybe if I can understand what I’m doing, how whatever need in me starts you changing the metaphor—if I can get my end under control—Rachel, I need to work with you. It has to be you, now. You’re the only one who would know what’s happening and would stop me if—”

“Hush,” Rachel said. “Hush. We’ll stop each other.”

Don groped for her hand. She held it, feeling the scrawny wrist bones and the blood in his pulse and the callus on the third finger where he held a pencil. Her fingernails dug into the bony knobs of his knuckles. She could feel there, in the veins and nerves and delicate bones of his hands, the question he hadn’t yet asked, and she waited.

“The night in the metaphor,” he said, finally, “the Night. Death. Is it really as beautiful as I felt? As desirable?”

“Oh, God, Don. How do I know? The only other one who has seen it is you, and you were linked with me. How can I tell if it’s really that beautiful, or if it’s just that I—that we need it to be like that?”

Don’s hand tightened on hers. Rachel gripped it hard, grateful for the blood and bone and flesh next to her palm.

“We’ll stop each other,” Don said. “Rachel?”

She nodded. Unsmiling, they looked at each other. Both were careful to keep their eyes focused, to stare straight ahead at the other’s face, to avert their heads from the parted yellow drapes fluttering at the sill, from what lay beyond the yellow drapes.

Their two hands clasped desperately. For dear life.

Outside the window, night came.

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