Hugo paces in front of the window in his hospital room while the nurse pours water from a plastic pitcher. They call it a ‘recovery centre,’ but it’s full of doctors and nurses and machines and pills. A hospital for misfits and lunatics and those who won’t co-operate. But it is the ‘best’ in the country, Dora always reminds him, so he gets his own room, with a door that locks from the outside. Out on the rolling, green lawn, automata glide, unfocused jelly in place of eyes. These, he thinks, are his final days, and that nurse is laughing at him.
They want to scour his brain, dig out the girl at the core of it, the star of the fruit, the one in the middle. The midst. I get midstsy, he sings. Hopeless as a kid lost at sea.
How purple! says laughy nurse, and the window behind her shatters, exposing more humanoids slumped in wheelchairs, silently pushed along. His ears are weeping blood and his very thoughts show themselves to her, raised red welts on tumid skin. Purple indeed! What would life in any prison be without extravagant thoughts?
You’re conspiring to leave me.
A corona of light pulses around her head. She recedes with each cry, then surges forth, brighter, more awful than before. Eyes platinum, tears of molten silver, cheeks stained with pomegranate.
Take me with you! My heart is singing.
Atomized, his daughter scatters on the south wind. She says it’s not time yet.
Today, she’s trying to dope him up with a handful of Dora’s Black Beauties—they would have him disintegrate in this place.
Never mind, you duchess of nothing, it fortifies me, trifling with tarts like you. Come, come, merkin, don’t run off—it’s this meandrous limb of mine, indifferent to my virtue. (But she is gone, and he’s alone again.) That one’s not to be trusted. Scent of dying flowers: alyssum, pasques, love-lies-bleeding. All gone, all rotten. Garçonete, cauterize this spoilt portion of my meat! He was a sophisticated man once. Evie, Magda? What is that racket in the hallway? Is it his daughters? Or Dora, spreading anxiety wherever she goes? I wish it were my best one, my Luiza, my gone one. Gone on the wind. She quick-churned into a dancing stream, broadcast on the ocean, far-flung. Abandoned? Drops of her still come out the taps, even here.
I’ll dance with you soon.
He is dilating. Stricken with a cursed languor. But meiosis begins to contrive within him, until there is enough matter hatched to make two of him, then four—an army of Hugos! Gemini, with golf club rising. The feeling of glass cracking, giving way, shattering as I wailed. And later, his organs, shifting beneath my fist. Even on a plate, they would make a sad offering in exchange for all he took from me. Hear our name resound. Hugo! they will say. But even the old king stinks of mortality, while I moan and die.
Ow! Watch it with that fucking thing. Needles now. Pills too pedestrian. She whispers, Sleep now, Papa.