Hollow Saint

(POV: Vesper)

The ward is quiet at three-eleven the way only a sealed wing of a hospital can be quiet. A vent. A clock. The small electric hum of the nurses’ station. My pen on the chart.

I write Pierre’s pulse, sixty-eight, and date the entry the way the day shift wants it dated and push the chart back into the slot. The back of my left wrist has eight small pencil marks on it. I drew them at the start of the shift. They are still there.

Down the corridor the airlock clicks. That is the only sound for a long second.

Then the security feed flickers on its own.

I look up because I work nights and I have learned to look at the things that change. A man is standing in the corridor outside the locked door. He is not on any list. Clean shoes. No badge. He is carrying something brass, the size of a child’s fist, with a wooden handle and a tongue. A handbell. He is not moving, and I can see, even on the feed, that his fingers are very steady.

I do not move.

I count to eight, the way I have counted since I was eight, and I do not move.

He turns his head toward the camera. Not as a stranger looks at a camera. Like a man looks at a door he has the key to. He lifts the bell.

The fire alarm, the one I tested last Sunday with Bertha at admin, starts the half-noise it makes when it is about to ring. The little intake before the ring. And then it does not ring.

It dies in the wire.

Two years I have worked here. The alarm has gone off eleven times. It has never stopped before.

I stand up. The chair scrapes. In the small monitor under my elbow Pierre’s line is still steady. Sixty-eight. Sixty-eight. Sixty-seven.

The walls breathe.

I want to say I imagine it. I do not. The wall by the medication cart lifts and falls and lifts again, once, like a sleeper, and the paint moves with it. Water in the cooler tilts and rights itself without anyone touching it. Above bed three a light flickers and steadies. The light above bed seven does not flicker. It goes a slow, sick yellow and holds.

Bed seven is Pierre.

I am running before I have decided to run.

There are ten beds in this ward and I know which boards creak and I run the route that doesn’t creak. My shoes do not squeak; I bought them for that. I pass bed three. Mrs. Aliyev, asleep, mouth open. Bed five, empty since Tuesday. The curtain around bed seven is half-drawn. Pierre’s foot is showing past the blanket. It is twitching like a foot whose leg has not been told it is moving.

I pull the curtain. Pierre’s eyes are open. His mouth is open. He is looking at the ceiling, and he is not looking at the ceiling, and his right hand is on the rail, and his left is in the air above his chest, fingers splayed, reaching for something that is not there.

“Pierre.”

He does not look at me. The cords in his neck stand up. He is trying to say a thing. He gets one syllable up out of his throat, then another, and what comes out is not his voice, it is the voice underneath his voice, the voice a body uses when the man has already left the room.

“Vesper.”

He says my name. Only my name. He has never said my name. For six months he has called me the night one, because he could not remember and was embarrassed.

Then he convulses.

His back comes off the mattress. The rail rattles. The monitor starts a noise I have heard before in other rooms and never wanted to hear in this one. I am already moving. Turning him. Going for the rail, the call button, the side of the bed where the kit is. I do the things I have been taught to do, in the order I have been taught to do them, and on the third thing my hand finds his.

I will not push back the dose.

It is not a decision. My fingers close on his the way training older than the training moves, as you take the hand of a child you cannot save.

The pain unzips up my arm.

Not a metaphor. A zipper. It starts in the pad of my thumb where it touches the inside of his wrist and runs up the bone of my forearm and into the meat of my shoulder, and it pulls something open as it goes. Something I did not know was closed. The corridor, the alarm, the brass in the man’s grip — all of it goes very small, and very far, all at once.

I see fire.

Not in the corridor. Behind my eyes, like a shape sitting behind the lid after someone has shone a torch into your face. Orange. White at the centre. Moving along a corridor that is the corridor I am standing in. Moving along the wall I just watched breathe.

Then I smell it.

The smell is hospital. Plastic, alcohol, hot rubber. Under it, the older smell, the one I will not be able to wash out of my hair for a week. Smoke. The kind that means a thing has caught.

No sprinklers come on.

I am still holding him. My fingers will not let go. The zipper is going both ways now, up into my chest and down out of my palm, and I understand, in some part of myself that is not afraid yet because the afraid part is busy, that something is moving from him into me and I am the one moving it. I do not know how I know. I know.

The lights go.

The whole ward, at once. Monitors die. The hum at the nurses’ station dies. For one second the only light is the half-yellow over bed seven, and then that goes too, and then the orange begins at the far end of the corridor and comes toward us along the ceiling tiles like something walking on its hands.

Pierre stops convulsing.

Pierre stops.

The hand in mine goes the temperature a hand goes when a man has gone out of it. I know that temperature. My mother’s right palm was that temperature on a Tuesday in October, and the pad of my right index finger has not forgotten.

I am still holding him when the ceiling above bed three gives. Still holding when the curtain catches. My fingers will not open. The heat comes across my back like a palm laid flat between my shoulder blades, with intent.

A piece of me thinks: get up. Get up. Get up.

A piece of me cannot.

The last thing I see in the ward is the door at the end of the corridor, the locked one, the airlock, with a man-shape standing inside it. Clean shoes. Brass at his side. He is not ringing it. Only watching.

He lifts the bell once, as if to a congregation, and lowers it.

Then the fire eats the picture.

I come up out of the dark in pieces.

There is a siren. Not the alarm. A different one — outside, moving, the kind that pulls instead of warns. Across my chest, a strap. Above me, a hard white light. Someone is saying numbers to someone else and the numbers are about me. A bag of saline swings on a hook above my head and the hook is the wrong shape for the ward, which is when I understand I am not in the ward.

I am in an ambulance.

The doors at the back are closed. The light is the cold overhead. A paramedic is kneeling by my hip. He has a young face and another face laid over the young face, the face people put on when they want a person not to know how bad a thing is.

“Ma’am,” he says. “Ma’am, can you tell me your name.”

I can. I do not, yet.

I lift my right hand because I want to know where it is. It comes up. The fingers work. The skin is not burned. Not even warm. No soot on it. No blood. Nothing on it that should be on the palm of a woman who has just come out of a building on fire.

I lift the left one. Same.

I look at my hands in the ambulance light and see them, finally, for what they are: full.