The Quick

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LAURA SPINNEY

I arrived at the hospital seven years after DL. I brought with me quite a reputation, and by the time I took up my post it was understood that I would see only the most difficult cases. It was therefore only a matter of time before I came across her, she who was to become my obsession, the most tantalising and elusive of my patients. She had already been there so long she was considered a part of the fabric of the place, as essential to it as the lift shafts, operating theatres and incinerators. It was as if Patient DL, or someone like her, had always occupied that small room at the end of the corridor on the fifth floor.

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But I’m getting ahead of myself. I had been at the hospital three years, and in that time I hadn’t heard a whisper from him. It was a longer silence than usual, but that didn’t worry me. I felt sure, though he had never explicitly told me, that he followed my work closely through the journals, perhaps also through word of mouth. He never neglected to congratulate me on a paper that had received polite reviews, and his praise was a source of great pride to me. I ran over it in my mind for days afterwards, savouring every word. He watched my star steadily rise, and I strove not to disappoint him. I knew also that as sure as summer follows spring, I would one day receive a note from him, asking me to return to what he called my ‘real’ work.

At last it came. It was a cold afternoon towards the end of January, the last in a week of freezing fogs and snowstorms. The sky beyond the window was darkening, the lights across the way burned more brightly than usual. I was working on a difficult case, a lawyer from Cardiff who, following a car accident and a mild concussion, had reported seeing things: ants filing across his pillow, bears crouching in corners. He suffered from hallucinations, all right, but since his accident he had become immune to the common-or-garden visual illusions – the Necker cube, Escher’s reversible staircase or some of the other ambiguous images.

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