Читать книгу The Theoretical Foot - M. F. K. Fisher - Страница 7

1

He ran quickly up the stairs. At the first landing he stopped and waited with a strange expression on his fine goat-like face while his left leg seemed to yawn, as if it were breathless.

He leaned his forehead against the cool plastered wall, and while he reached with one hand to turn off the lights, he felt the breath come back to his leg. He waited a moment longer then stepped lightly, making his way upward to his high room. His feet knew every crack and led him willy-nilly to his love. But when he found the large bed empty and heard a quiet singing and the sound of water in the bathroom, he was glad—his leg no longer yawned, but now hurt like a cramp, like hollowed-out muscles. He lay down along one side of the bed.

A minute later he began to moan, to his own embarrassment. The woman came out, with water shining in the hair around her face, and looked stolidly at him, her heart leaping like a wounded rabbit against her ribs.

In five more minutes he was near insanity. He made strange barking noises and pulled at his hair until it stiffened with his pulling and his sweat into fantastic points above his incredibly tortured face.

A doctor came, and a nurse, and he thrust his bared arms at them as a thirsty animal thrusts forth its tongue for water. Oaoh oaoooh, he jabbered when they pressed the needles into him. More, more, he said. They could not keep ahead of the pain, though. It raced opiates and won, and all night long he howled and tore at himself, slippery with sweat, pinned to the wide bed of love by a leg that had turned cold and pure in color, a peg with five toes, shapely and hideous like a Greek carving in a glacier. Oaoh, oaoh, he clattered and held out his straining arms. There, there, more! He pointed wildly at the soft veins to show them where his blood thirsted for the opiate strong enough to slake the pain. But there was none and in his agony he forgot the needles that had been emptied there and was now filled with a cruel certainty that no earthly thing could succor him. He hated the doctor, and the monkish nurse, and the pinched flat face of his beloved, and he now knew he was alone.