Wonders of a Godless World. Andrew McGahan

night nurse and the driver opened the rear doors of the van and from the dark interior they heaved forth a stretcher.

      A man lay on it, apparently sleeping, covered to the neck by a sheet. His skin was pale, and his face had a raw, scraped look, but there was no other sign as to what might be wrong with him. The night nurse and the driver carried him away inside, but the orphan didn’t follow. She lingered instead by the police car, hoping for clues. The old doctor and the police captain were leaning over the hood, talking, and studying a sheaf of papers the captain had spread there. It was not an easy conversation for the orphan to decipher, full of long words and quick allusions she could never hope to catch. But she had known the doctor most of her life, and the captain too. She was familiar with their voices and their mannerisms and their moods, and that was some help.

      She gathered, for instance, that the captain was displeased. It was too hot and he was working late because he had been called down to the big town to collect the new patient. He didn’t like the heat or working late, and he didn’t like the people in the big town. The word he used for them was devils, and they had made him sign a lot of papers and take responsibility for the sleeping man. The captain thought he had enough responsibility as it was. He held out a grimy pen. He wanted the old doctor to sign the papers and then the sleeping man would be the hospital’s problem.

      But the old doctor, who was the cleverest person the orphan knew, didn’t take the pen. Instead, he rubbed his chin and asked a very odd question. He wanted to know if the sleeping man had a name yet. At which the captain, odder still, gave him a disappointed look, and then sighed, lowering the pen. No, no one knew the man’s name yet. It was a mystery. The authorities had put his picture in the newspaper down in the big town, and even on television, but no one had claimed him, and it’d been weeks now. The only sure thing was that he wasn’t local to the island.

      A stranger, the orphan noted, her brow furrowed with the effort it cost her to take all this in. A foreigner.

      The conversation continued. The old doctor suggested that the man might perhaps be a tourist. After all, more and more tourists came to the island every year. And hadn’t he been found asleep on the beach? But the captain shook his head. None of the hotels down in the big town knew anything about the man. Neither did anyone at the airport. And besides, he had been in some kind of fire. His clothes were just ashes when they found him. Burnt to rags. The police in the big town thought that maybe there had been an explosion on a boat out at sea. Perhaps he was a sailor.

      The old doctor had another question. Why hadn’t the man woken up, or spoken, in all the time since? Was there a head injury? The captain only shrugged. He didn’t know. The doctors at the big hospital hadn’t told him anything. All they had said was that they couldn’t keep the man any longer. Perhaps if he had turned out to be rich, or someone important, then they would have let him stay. But it looked like he had no friends or family at all. And no money. So here he was.

      The old doctor finally nodded, resigned. It wasn’t for him to argue with the big hospital. The captain offered the grimy pen again, but the old doctor, unthinking, took out his own, and scribbled on the papers.

      The orphan let out a puff of air and saw spots floating before her eyes. That was that. And yet, did she understand right? The new patient had lost his name? Why, that was almost the same as her! Well, she hadn’t lost her name exactly. But she could never quite remember it either. Or anyone else’s. She knew that everyone had a name, of course—and that other things did too—but try as she might, she could never recall them. They simply refused to lodge in her mind. It was a symptom of her madness, she supposed. Most probably, the foreigner was mad too.

      The old doctor was walking back inside, holding the papers, his back bent painfully. He was too thin, the orphan had heard others say. He worked too hard, and was too old. Besides that, she knew, he was ill. The captain, meanwhile, who would never be thin, went to the door of his car. Noticing the orphan there, he winked and asked her a question. She understood him easily this time, because it was the same question people always asked her. He wanted to know if it would rain soon.

      The orphan looked up. She didn’t need to look, but people expected it, and were even a little unsettled if she didn’t. The sky was clear, but the stars were muddied by the humid air, and it certainly felt as if water-laden clouds would form soon, and cooling winds begin to blow, and lightning to flicker. It was the storm season, after all. But the orphan knew better. She could tell that the great eddies in the atmosphere were moving too slowly for now. It wouldn’t rain tonight, or the next night.

      She shook her head.

      The captain sighed once more, and wiped sweat from his face. Then he climbed into his car and drove off—heading, the orphan sensed, not for his little police station in the town square, and not for his home, where his wife and children waited, but instead for the jungle hut where his mistress lived. (The orphan had met both the wife and the mistress, and thought the mistress was nicer.) Shortly afterwards, the ambulance driver emerged and set off on his much longer trip back down to the coast.

      Alone, the orphan idled a moment, her bare feet twisting in the sand. She could hear distant noises from the back wards. The inmates would not be settling down any time soon. She stared into the night, restless still, and expectant. Was there something out there in the dark? Not a storm massing, but a subtler thing?

      Away below the hospital she could see the scattered lights of the town. They were surrounded by the wide darkness of the plantations. And much further off, in the sky beyond the rim of the plateau, was the glow thrown up by the big town, down upon the sea, where the rich people lived and no one ever slept.

      The orphan turned and gazed up, behind the hospital, to the mountain. The jungle on its lower slopes was thick and black and impenetrable, but high above, the peak was a lighter shadow against the stars.

      No, there was nothing out of place.

      But even as she stared, she felt again the tremble in the dust, felt the thrill run up her bones, making her belly squirm. Oh yes, something was on its way. The orphan smiled her mad smile, then skipped back inside to her chores.

       2

      Of course, she had not always been an orphan. In fact, she was most likely not an orphan even now. Her mother was dead, but her father was probably still alive, somewhere in the world.

      Not that she would ever know. When the orphan was much younger she had overheard a conversation between two pregnant women in the front wards. She had been cleaning nearby, and they had noticed her there and begun to talk about her as if she couldn’t hear them. In particular, they were shaking their heads about all the men the orphan’s mother had been with, and how she had gone down to the big town, where no decent girl would go, and involved herself with criminals. It was no wonder, the pregnant women agreed, that the orphan’s mother had caught a disease. And it was even less wonder that when she gave birth to an ugly little retarded daughter, no man would step forward and claim the child as his own. Why, the father could be anyone.

      Young as she had been, the orphan had understood a simple truth—anyone, when it came to fathers, meant the same as no one at all.

      She had long since worked out what retarded meant too. Retarded was the same as slow, the same as stupid. Retarded was another term for idiot girl, or for poor dumb child, or for any of the similar things she had heard herself called. Retarded was why she was incapable of speech, and why she had so much trouble understanding the speech of others. It was why she couldn’t read, or write, or do anything they had tried to teach her back in the horrible few years that she had gone to school.

      Indeed, throughout her early childhood, as she had no other name to use for herself, words like retarded and slow were the closest she came to an identity. But not long after her seventh birthday (she could remember numbers better than names) her mother had become even sicker than usual, and had been confined to the hospital. The orphan had nowhere else to go and so had stayed at the hospital too, looked after by the nurses. And