Nightbloom by Herbert Lieberman

Author:Herbert Lieberman [Lieberman, Herbert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780380698196
Publisher: Avon
Published: 1984-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

39

It was somewhere near 3:00 A.M. when he woke. His mouth was dry and something like a pulse throbbed inside his head. It wasn’t the pain that woke him, however, but the hyperventilation—the gulping for air and getting nowhere near enough. The fear of suffocation caused him to sit bolt upright. When he did, his head swam and he nearly toppled over.

The Demerol bottle beside the bed was empty, and the pain was of an order that transcended mere mortal pain. It was so great and all-engulfing that it had the effect of transporting him into some other state. Woozy, half-conscious, hallucinatory, the sense of slipping one’s moorings.

Then came those wracking paroxysms, the gasping for air, the awful terror that he might die (not the fear of death itself, but the idea of dying alone), his body undiscovered for weeks—mortification, decomposition, stench, all maggoty and obscene, discovered weeks later by strangers—some shapeless, reeking thing. The indignity, like fouling oneself in public.

When he threw a leg over the edge of the bed, his head shrieked and he sagged to the floor. The floor was uncarpeted and cold. He lay with his face flat down upon it, rolling his flamed cheeks against the cool wood as if to soothe himself.

He lay there for some time, vision unfocused and scintilla rocketing like comets across his visual field. Aware of a sound muffled and distant, like a moaning or whimpering that rose from the basement, he didn’t realize that it was himself. He knew he had to get up off the floor, dress and seek medication. On the other hand, motion of any sort produced pain in him of an order that was transfiguring.

Assuming that he could move, where could he go at that hour? All pharmacies were closed and he had long ago worn out his welcome at every hospital in the immediate area. He was known at every emergency room in the borough of Queens.

He would never recall how he managed to dress that night; how he pulled shoes and pants on over pajamas, and threw a raincoat on top of that. Every time he moved he had the distinct impression that his skull would blow apart, shatter into smithereens. Going down the steps to the front door, his legs felt waxen and he thought he would faint. Spark showers continued to rocket madly inside his head.

Outside, the streets were damp and deserted. There had been recent rain. Misty halations encircled the streetlamps at every corner. Suddenly, he was striding purposefully out toward Austin Street, the heels of his shoes ringing on the damp cobbles.

On 74th Road he rounded the corner, walked beneath the black dripping trestle of the LIRR and emerged onto the ghostly vacancy of the boulevard before dawn. There was something phantasmagoric about it—the traffic lights, the dimly illuminated shop windows, shimmering in the rain-slicked streets. Out on the boulevard a solitary taxi bound for some unknown destination hurtled onward into the night. Within that mottled, woozy landscape, Watford knew exactly where he was going.

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