Wonders of a Godless World. Andrew McGahan

      The next day the old doctor had called her into his office. He had explained that she was now a homeless little girl, but that she shouldn’t worry, because everyone was very fond of her, and it had been agreed she could stay on at the hospital. He had said that this was the best she could hope for, because otherwise she was motherless and fatherless and completely alone in the world. She was now, he had announced, an orphan.

      An orphan. The gravity of the word had impressed her deeply, and she had accepted it as her true identity, above all others.

      Of course, she was only a child at the time. She had grown up since then. The day the foreigner arrived was barely a month after her last birthday; the staff had thrown an especially large party, and declared that she was not a girl anymore, but a woman.

      She was, they said, twenty-one years old.

      

      The new patient, meanwhile, was an enigma.

      He was admitted to the front wards at first, so that he could be examined in detail. And although the orphan had initially thought of him as the sleeping man, it turned out that often his eyes were open. They were beautiful eyes—wide, the irises a deep brown, the whites unclouded—and yet they were unsettling. There was nothing behind them. No awareness. He might have been a dead thing, lying there.

      But he wasn’t dead. His body was warm and alive. His heart beat. His blood flowed. And, to a certain point, he functioned. It did not appear that he could stand, or walk, but if he was propped up in a sitting position, he would not slump over. If liquid was put into his mouth, or soup, or mashed food, he would swallow it. And if, once a day, he was placed in a wheelchair, pushed to the shower block and arranged on a toilet, he would piss and shit on command. Which was a miracle, from the orphan’s perspective. She could only wish that the other patients were all so talented and compliant.

      But it was only sleepwalking. There was no consciousness in him. No will. The foreigner never spoke, never looked at anything, never moved of his own volition. Left to himself he would lie motionless on his bed, and seemingly he would do so forever, uncomplaining, until starvation claimed him.

      The mystery was, why was he in such a state? The old doctor prodded and probed his new charge, and studied the papers from the hospital in the big town, but found nothing. The man had no infirmities, no diseases, and his only apparent injuries were the burns on his skin. Actually, it was just the one burn, only superficial, and already mostly healed—but it covered his entire body, every crevice, from head to toe. And every single hair had been singed away. He was as naked as a newborn.

      What did it mean? How had it happened? The orphan waited, but the old doctor, for all his patience, was unable to solve the riddle, or bring the sleeping man awake. Day after day went by, and he could only shake his head, at first in bafflement, then in frustration, and finally in failure. Of course—the orphan listened to the nurses discussing the situation—if the big hospital with all its experts and machines had failed, what was the old doctor supposed to do, with no money, and no equipment, and so many other patients to care for? Who could expect him to cure the man?

      No one. The foreigner hadn’t been sent there to be cured anyway. At length, as was inevitable, he was transferred to the back wards.

      

      The orphan’s home was not in fact the one hospital, but rather two quite separate hospitals in the one compound. There were the front wards, and there were the back wards, and they were very different places.

      The front wards, and the hospital offices, were in the forward section of the grounds, housed in a concrete-brick building. This was where the townspeople came if they had everyday medical problems—if, perhaps, they had cut themselves so badly they needed stitches, or if they had broken a bone, or had a cough that wouldn’t go away. It was a free clinic, but it was a long walk from town, uphill along a rutted track through the jungle, so only the common folk made much use of it. Anyone who was well off or important saw their own doctor in town.

      The front wards were also where women could come when they were pregnant, to have examinations and, if there were difficulties, to give birth. But it was considered ill-omened by the townspeople to bring a child into the world so close to the demented souls of the back wards, so only the poorest women ever chose to do so. The orphan herself had been born there. A nurse had once told her that it had been a terrible labour, long and bloody and damaging, and the orphan often wondered if perhaps that explained why she was the way she was. Certainly, the pregnant mothers regarded her with suspicion. Sometimes they would hiss curses at her and make signs to drive her away, as if she might spell a similar doom for their own children.

      The back wards, on the other hand, weren’t for everyday patients. The back wards were where the dying were kept. And the insane.

      The building was hidden behind the front wards, an elongated structure of several wings, with stone walls and high ceilings and narrow windows. It was very old, dating from other times entirely, before the hospital was even a hospital. It had been a grand house once, and grand folk had dwelt there. Or so the orphan was informed. But that was long ago, and she couldn’t imagine it. Now the plaster was flaking away from the walls and the stone was crumbling and the tin roof was red with rust. Inside, it was a grim maze of long wards and metal doors and echoing hallways.

      Many people were frightened of the building alone, never mind the inmates. But the orphan wasn’t frightened, no matter how gloomy the wards might be, and no matter how the inmates might scream or yell, no matter even how tangled their hair or bad their breath or shitty their sheets. It was only smell and noise, after all. The building was just a building, and most of the patients were harmless. (The ones who weren’t were kept in the locked ward, where she wasn’t allowed to go.)

      She was even happy to work in the back wards at night. The night nurse—coward that he was—was almost too scared to enter there after dark, but the orphan actually preferred it. It was cooler and quieter then, and she was less in people’s way. Most evenings—seeing that the night nurse, apart from being cowardly, was also purely lazy—the orphan was the only soul the inmates might see after lights-out. They liked her for that, and she liked them.

      She was less comfortable in the front wards. It wasn’t just the unfriendly looks she received from the townspeople—worse than that, the front wards were the territory of the surgeon, and she didn’t like the surgeon. He was the hospital’s only other doctor, much younger than the old doctor, and all the nurses thought he was very good-looking. But the orphan knew that he cut people open with knives, and whenever he glanced at her, his eyes unsmiling, she felt a little afraid.

      

      To begin with, they put the foreigner in the catatonic ward.

      The orphan did not quite understand the word, but to her, these patients were the empty people, the ones with nobody inside them. And of all the back wards inmates, they certainly resembled the foreigner most closely. One, for instance, was a woman who did nothing but sit and brush her hair for hours at a time, staring, even though she had long since brushed herself bald. Another was a boy who rocked back and forth ceaselessly on his bed, his arms clasped around his knees. Others simply slept all day, or gazed blindly at the ceiling, almost exactly as the foreigner himself did. None of them, beyond the occasional incoherent mutter or cry, ever spoke.

      But things changed after the foreigner moved in.

      Over the following days, the woman with the brush began to rake her skull so severely that blood was drawn. The boy’s rocking gradually became so violent he repeatedly threw himself to the floor. And the others started to moan and shout hoarsely from the depths of their sleep. The nurses were alarmed. What was happening? It was only when they noticed that things quietened down abruptly if the foreigner was removed—when he was taken to the shower, say—that they came to wonder if he might be the cause. True, he hadn’t moved or spoken in all that time, or done anything blameworthy. But there was something strange about him, they all agreed. Those beautiful eyes…

      The old doctor scoffed at the idea. He told the nurses that most likely the other catatonics didn’t even know the foreigner was there.