The Lost Weekend by Charles Jackson

Author:Charles Jackson [Jackson, Charles]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
Tags: Psychological, Fiction
ISBN: 9780307948731
Google: ppEdrO2sVL8C
Amazon: 0307948714
Goodreads: 13642134
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 1972-01-01T11:00:00+00:00

PART FOUR

The Dream

Like a fish of the deep rising to the surface of bright air and sun, he swam up to consciousness out of a dead blank into a whiter world than he had ever seen. The daylight was blinding. He heard voices very near at hand, as if just behind his ear, talking together quietly in a business-like way against a background medley of babblings and shrieks, moans and mutterings. He was lying prone and someone was working on his back—fingers probed at his spine. He flopped over, like a fish out of water, and found himself in a low bed, little more than a mattress, so low that the two men who worked over him were kneeling on the edge.

As surprised as he, they looked at him in impersonal silence, and then recovered themselves.

“Just a moment, take it easy, turn over again, please,” one of them said; and the other: “Take it easy, baby.”

They must have anticipated what he was going to say because here he was saying it—saying it all in a rush as if he hadn’t heard or as if he were too exasperated, angered, and offended to take it easy. “What’s going on here, where am I, what are you doing to me!”

“Just lie back again, it’ll only take a second,” the first man said; and the second murmured the classic “It won’t hurt a bit” as he himself cried out the still-more-classic “Where am I” again.

“You’re in the hospital.”

“What for!”

“Take it easy, baby.”

“What hospital?”

“The alcoholic ward.”

He didn’t get this, not any of it. He had awakened fightingmad, or at least bitterly offended and indignant because he couldn’t figure out where he was, because he was being taken advantage of, because he didn’t know who these two men were and what right had they to touch him? Now he heard the bedlam going on in the background and he was outraged at this further intrusion on his peace. “What’s all that racket!”

“The others.”

“Other what?”

“Patients. Now just turn over and relax, it won’t take a moment.”

“What do you think you’re doing! Who are you!”

“We want to draw off a little of the spinal fluid. Relieve the pressure on the brain.”

“Spinal tap, baby.”

He suddenly understood. “Oh no you’re not!” He drew up his knees against his chest, and as he did so his head exploded in pain above his eyes.

Both men straightened and stood back from the bed. One of them put his hands on his hips. The other’s already were.

He saw now the syringe and needle and also saw the two men more or less clearly for the first time. One was small, baldish, pleasant-looking, in his middle forties. Probably the doctor, though he looked more like a professor or teacher. The other was a big strapping fellow around thirty, broad and well-built but far from muscular. With a frame like a hammer-thrower, he was yet soft, just this side of fat. He stood looking down with a half-smile on his face, and the impression he gave was that of an enormous sleepy tomcat, indifferent, self-sufficient, yet predatory.

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