The Best American Noir of the Century

“You will never again take a single step for all the rest of your life. You are hopelessly, irreparably paralyzed from the waist down. Surgery, everything, has been tried. Accept this …Now you know — and so now be brave.”

“I am. I will be,” she said trustfully. “I’ll learn a craft of some kind, that will occupy my days and earn me a living. Perhaps you can find a nursing home for me at the start until I get adjusted, and then maybe later I can find a little place all to myself and manage there on my own. There are such places, with ramps instead of stairs — “

He smiled deprecatingly at her oversight.

“All that won’t be necessary You’re forgetting. There is someone who will look after you. Look after you well. You’ll be in good capable hands. Your husband is coming to take you home with him today.”

Her scream was like the death cry of a wounded animal. So strident, so unbelievable, that in the stillness of its aftermath could be heard the slithering and rustling of people looking out the other ward-room doors along the corridor, nurses and ambulatory patients, asking one another what that terrified cry had been and where it had come from.

“Two cc’s of M, and hurry,” the doctor instructed the nurse tautly. “It’s just the reaction from what she’s been through. This sometimes happens — going-home happiness becomes hysteria.”

The wet kiss of alcohol on her arm. Then the needle again — the needle meant to be kind.

One of them patted her on the head and said, “You’ll be all right now.”

A tear came to the corner of her eyes, and just lay there, unable to retreat, unable to fall…

* * *

Myopically she watched them dress her and put her in her chair. Her mind remained awake, but everything was downgraded in intensity — the will to struggle had become reluctance, fear had become unease. She still knew there was ‘cause to scream, but the distance had become too great, the message had too far to travel.

Through lazy, contracting pupils she looked over and saw Mark standing in the doorway, talking to the doctor, shaking the nurse’s hand and leaving something behind in it for which she smiled her thanks.

Then he went around in back of her wheelchair, with a phantom breath for a kiss to the top of her head, and started to sidle it toward the door that was being held open for the two of them. He tipped the front of the chair ever so slightly, careful to avoid the least jar or impact or roughness, as if determined that she reach her destination with him in impeccable condition, unmarked and unmarred.

And as she craned her neck and looked up overhead, and then around and into his face, backward, the unspoken message was so plain, in his shining eyes and in the grim grin he showed his teeth in, that though he didn’t say it aloud, there was no need to; it reached from his mind into hers without sound or the need of sound just as surely as though he had said it aloud.

Now I’ve got you.

Now he had her — for the rest of her life.

1972 DAVID MORRELL THE DRIPPING