Someone to Watch Over Me - Softcover

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He was on the wrong train and he had to get off.  As he crawled from his seat, grappling for the door amid the scramble of passengers, he was seized by the conviction that there was no such thing as the world except insofar as it was defined by his personal and specific pain.  The world was turning all to smoke and aquarelles, whereas his pain was as precise and ruthless as a panther.  His pain, in fact, was carving out its own identity, a private timestrand, snarling and obscene.  It was athletic, gifted--bewildering--so that when the train whirled away he was left swaying on the platform while his senses, one by one, crunched down toward singularity, eliminating the world and admitting nothing but--you guessed it--pain.

This probably meant he was about to pass out.

Voices; shuffling bodies.  Fearful of collapsing in public, he checked his thoughts: agony is vulgar.  Tamed by discipline.  Think about something else.  Zagreb.  The conductor said Zagreb.  Luckily he still had his bag.  Better keep moving.  Find a hotel.  If any bones were broken, they weren't important ones.  He would buy drugs, sleep for one day, and then on to New York.  There, if still coughing blood, hospital.

He was moving unsteadily toward a welter of kiosks.  Embarrassment was surely called for.  Or anger.  Or fear.  But at the moment he was strictly into feeling sorry for himself.  The Watcher had abandoned him; his role now would be merely to slither away and lick his wounds.  He had been put in his place.  No one would care what he did anymore, so why keep up pretenses?  He permitted himself the luxury of limping.

There weren't enough taxis lined up to cope with the crowd.  It was just occurring to him that if he had to stand and wait he would probably faint, when he saw this girl at the far end of the row of cabs.  She leaned against her car smoking a cigarette and watching the throng approach.  The car was either parked or broken down, a fragile-looking doorless affair, piebald with rust.  She had presence, or he was giddy with pain, or both, because he made an effort to stop gasping and dragging his right leg.  Her leather jacket and old trainers were stained, but the way she inhabited them made their condition immaterial.  He wondered if the bruises on his face were visible yet.  He gritted his teeth and told himself to beat the two businessmen who were also bearing down on the girl, conversing in rapid Chinese.  Picking up his feet, he shouldered past them, muttering, "Discourteous occidental fuck coming through."  He flung himself ahead, falling with a wheeze on the hood of the car.  Clutching his midsection, he lowered his head toward the gutter and loosed a long cough; he could feel her eyes on him, so he swallowed the warm, foul admixture of bodily fluids and tried to straighten up.

She put out her cigarette delicately against the rusted iron and pushed herself off the car with one movement, coming toward him with the smoke flying out of her nostrils and her dark hair lifting off her face and her cinematic eyes fixed on him so that he no longer wanted to move.  He flashed the thoughts: She is an angel.  She will save me.

She did not look pleased.  She shouted something in Croatian, and he saw her waving at the two Chinese over his head.  He shut his eyes against new insurrections in his chest, leg, kidneys and head and found some money in the pocket of his jeans.  He thrust it toward her, but she was still tearing strips out of him by the tone of her voice.

"No Croatian," he groaned.  "Hotel.  Hotel.  Just take me to a fucking hotel.  Please."

He straightened, coaxing down a wave of nausea.  His head pounded.  When he thought he was fully upright, he opened his eyes.  She was not beautiful, not even close, but she was ...  she was ...

"You need hospital, not the hotel," she said.  She looked at the money, and then back at him, as if she could not reconcile the two.  "Get in."

He folded himself into the car.  "No hospital.  Hotel."

She started the car.  He stared at the dashboard, which moved closer and then farther away.

"Which hotel?"

"Good hotel.  Money hotel."

She pulled out into traffic.  "No respectable hotel wants you like this.  They will throw you out, the concierge.  Anyway, you don't need the car in city center."

"Your English is very good."

"Thank you."  She took a sharp turn and he had to grab the door frame to keep from sliding out.

"We could go to your place," he said.  "You could nurse me back to health and I could ..."  It was odd, but he was forgetting how to speak.  He knew the words, but the correct movements of the tongue and jaw were suddenly mysterious.  He closed his eyes again.

"Protect me from crazy foreigners who fall on my car?"  She was laughing; that would normally be a good sign but something told him she was still a long way from flirting with him.  "I will take you to hotel where all Americans stay."

"Oh, no...please." His words were becoming syrupy.  "You wouldn't do that to me.  Can't you take me somewhere quiet, where I won't be bothered?"

"You have no reservation?  Not good.  I do what I can."

He heard the engine blast into a lower gear as they began to ascend into the residential districts, but he must have lost consciousness after that because the next thing he knew the car had stopped and she was shaking him.

"We are here.  Are you getting out?  If you don't get out now, I take you to hospital and they must deal with you."

"I'm getting out." He did it gingerly, then leaned back through the place where the door should be and proffered some more money.

"You already paid me too much.  You paid five times the fare."  She seemed to be struggling to keep a straight face.

"Will you wait for me, then?  I still need you.  This place is small: it might be full.  I'll be right back."  Without waiting for an answer, he hobbled into the hotel and tossed an ax card on the counter before the oiled and unfriendly clerk.  He filled in the registration card and came up with some cash for tips.  The clerk was saying something about no rooms, sir, you are a disgrace to his hotel, leave at once before I call security.  He turned the registration card over and wrote: "3 large steel bowls.  Cotton.  Syringes.  Vodka.  Scissors.  Adhesive tape.  Penicillin."

He glanced up, thinking, and glimpsed himself in the mirror behind the reception desk.  His green eyes were bloodshot.  His white braids were caked with some unpleasant substance, and instead of sticking out from his head at all angles as they were meant to, some of them were clumped into an unsightly mat.  His dark skin had a green cast, like an old statue.  His upper lip was swollen and furry with dried blood.

The clerk fumbled with the phone.  The only word he understood was "Milicija"--police.

He put the pen down and tugged the cord out of the phone.

"Get me a room," he said, "before I jump over this desk and redecorate you.  Police.  Ha.  You make me laugh." He coughed.  "Take the ax card.  There's plenty of money on it."

He returned his attention to the list.  "One dozen red roses.  Ice.  Clean white sheet torn in strips 180 x 30.  Latex gloves."

He thought a second and then added: "Sewing kit."

Horror and disbelief were wrestling with one another on the clerk's face.  The ax card was handed back to him.  His balance had been noted; he saw the clerk swallow.

"Can you read this?"  He passed over the list.  The clerk frowned.

"Yes, but, sir, you wish to see doctor.  We cannot allow you inside like this."

"No."  He put his palm down over the list.  "No doctor.  No disturb.  You understand? I want quiet and I want rest."  When he picked his hand up there was money beneath it.  The clerk looked at it as though afraid to touch it.  But the key was given to him, the bell was rung, the bag was taken.  He was tempted to follow the bellboy upstairs and collapse, but instead he pocketed the key and went outside.  Her car was still there.  He got in.

"Look," he said, turning to her with effort.  "My name is Adrien Reyes.  I know I don't look so good, but I can't go to the hospital.  I just need to get some medicine.  Can you please take me somewhere I can get good drugs.  Morphine, valium, something like that."

"Why can't you go to hospital?  I am not drug dealer.  Adrien."

He ground his teeth.  "I'll pay you anything you want, but don't ask me questions.  Just take me somewhere I can get dru...