Mantissa Read Free

what?”
    “Couches. You know.”
    “Psychiatrist?”
    “That’s it.”
    “Neurologist. Abnormal brain function. My special field is mnemonology.”
    “What’s that?”
    “How memory works.”
    “Or doesn’t.”
    “Sometimes. Temporarily.”
    Her hair was tied at the nape by a wisp of scarf, the only feminine touch about her clothes. The ends showed an alternate pattern of tiny printed roses and detached elliptical leaves, black on white.
    “I don’t know your name.”
    She turned towards him on the edge of the bed and slipped her thumb under the left lapel of the tunic. There was a small plastic name-tag: DR. A. DELFIE. But then, as if revealing even this tiny bureaucratic detail about herself was unclinical, she stood.
    “Oh where
is
that nurse.”
    She went to the door and looked out; in vain, since she returned once more beside the bed and pressed the bell, long and insistently this time. She glanced down, her mouth wryly pressed, exonerating him from any blame over her impatience.
    “How long have I been here?”
    “Just a few pages.”
    “Pages?”
    She had folded her arms, and yet again there was the ghost of a quiz in her watching eyes. “What should I have said?”
    “Days?”
    She smiled more openly. “Good.”
    “Why did you say ‘pages’?”
    “You’ve mislaid your identity, Mr. Green. What I have to work on is your basic sense of reality. And that seems in good shape.”
    “It’s like losing all one’s luggage.”
    “Better luggage than limbs. As they say.”
    He stared at the ceiling, struggling to reconquer a past, a place, a purpose.
    “I must be running away from something.”
    “Perhaps. That’s what we’re here for. To help you dig back.” She touched his bare shoulder. “But the thing now is not to worry. Just relax.”
    She moved once more to the door. It was strangely dark beyond, he could see nothing. He stared at the domed and quilted ceiling, its forest of little hanging pods, each with its end-button. For all their greyness they were breastlike, line after line of schoolgirls’ breasts, a canopy of nippled buds. He felt like pointing this out to the doctor, but she remained waiting in the open door; and then an instinct told him it was not something he could say to a woman physician. It was too personal, too whimsical, and might offend her.
    At last the doctor turned. Someone came quickly in behind her: a young West Indian nurse, white cap and brown face over a starched blue-and-white uniform. In one hand she carried a coiled red cylinder of rubber sheeting. She rolled her eyes at the doctor.
    “Sister on the warpath. For a change.”
    The doctor gave a resigned nod, then spoke down to him.
    “This is Nurse Cory.”
    “Nice to have you with us, Mr. Green.”
    He made a sheepish grimace up at the nurse.
    “Sorry.”
    She raised a mock-stern finger; a flash of brown eyes, a rich Antillean voice.
    “Now no sorry. Else you get smacked.”
    A pretty girl, a humor, a jolly bossiness. By some rare coincidence in what otherwise must have been very different racial genes, her eyes were exactly the same color as the doctor’s.
    “Close the door, nurse, would you? I want to do the primaries.”
    “Sure.”
    Once again Dr. Delfie had her arms folded, in what was evidently a favorite pose. Her gaze down at him seemed for a moment to be curiously speculative, as if she had not yet fully made up her mind what his treatment should be; as if she saw him as less a person than a problem. But then she gave a small smile.
    “They won’t hurt. Many patients find them pleasantly relaxing.” She glanced across at the nurse, who had returned to the other side of the bed. “Okay?”
    They stooped and with a familiar expertise eased up the mattress first on one side, then on the other. The bedclothes were released and in a quick series of folds stowed away to the end of the bed. He tried to sit. But the two were at once back beside him, forcing him firmly but gently down