Angels can fly, because they take themselves lightly.
—G. K. Chesterton
Early July 1914
A smell in his nostrils reminded him of his childhood. He felt like a piece of his brain had been removed, but he still knew that if it had, he would not know it. It was not just the smell that brought back a memory; it was the numb state behind his eyes. It was also the clinking and clanking of metal objects, the girls’ chatter and the rapid, clipped sound their shoes made on the tiled floors.
“Hospital,” he managed.
“That’s right, precious. Just relax.”
It was that same angelic tone he had heard as a child after the deer had impaled him. He felt clean, crisp linen up to his chest. His large head (the unstoppable force) sank into a concrete slab of regulation hospital pillow (the immovable object).
He dared to squint one eye open to see the bleach white of a hospital ward for the second time in his life. It seemed as if no time had lapsed in between. The truth was that things could not have changed more radically; he would soon discover this in a report in a week-old newspaper. Ambassadors from Moscow, Paris, and London were making noises, echoing those of Belgrade. From Berlin and Vienna, Teutonic gutturals countered. Johan’s brain was not too fuzzy to forget the principal Law of Physics, half confirmed by the headline EUROPE DAYS FROM WAR. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. What the physics professor omits is that in real life, opposite reactions are rarely equal.
On an inside page, diplomatic releases from consulates around the continent were backed up by pictures of the state funeral. Johan recalled the death rattles. Boys from Frankfurt, Lyons, and Glasgow were now preparing to mobilize, all because he had been thinking about his (and/or her) nether regions.
The debut of a storm lightly tapped, with little rhythm, on the window behind him. A porcelain-faced angel in white appeared at his side.
“Your things, your jacket, your bag—everything is safe, my dear,” she whispered. Johan remembered the kit bag and started to sweat. He reengaged his brain to focus on what the nurse had actually said.
“You’re a lucky boy.” Her breath touched his ear. “The farmer’s lad who brought you in thought not to check your satchel or your pockets. People would smother your pretty face in the night for a lot less than that, you know. So, you behave and do as I say, and I will not tell them. Hmm?”
The angel’s accent had a heavy Croatian clip to it. This confirmed that he had indeed been trekking west. She dried his frowning brow, slowly.
“Thank you,” Johan said. He fell back into a slumber, relaxed by the cocktail of heavy opiates in his veins and the now rhythmic pentameter of a matured summer storm, finger-drumming on the cracked pane behind him. The nurse’s sublime Gregorian mantra delivered him deeper, to near-coma.
You need to sleep, my sweets. You need to sleep. Sleep. Sleep, was its generous refrain.
* * *
The rain still battered the window when he stirred the next day, and the horror to which he opened his eyes possessed the breath of a blowtorch. Mickey was his name. A deranged, degenerate Irishman. Wild-eyed and near toothless, he was intent on finding out where his daughter, who he seemed to be convinced was frolicking with the devil, had hidden the whiskey.
“That bitch has horns under that hat! She-devil!” Mickey breathed into Johan’s nostrils, and halitosis from hell made Johan violently retch from the deep south of his solar plexus.
“For God’s sake, let me be.” This was no time for his usual politeness.
“But it’s not your grog she’s taken, you selfish little arse. It’s not right!”
“It certainly is not right!” Johan said, referring more to the Irishman’s breath.
He had now stumbled back into full consciousness.
“You’d think Irish butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth, but Mickey knows the truth. She is the dark one, all right. I’m no fecking idiot!” Johan shifted to the far side of his narrow bed as Mickey retreated upon hearing a nurse’s footsteps in the hall.
Johan breathed again.
“Argh, by Jesus! You do know that this is the halfway house to hell? You can tell that by the way all the nurses talk to her, or I should say to him, Mephisto. What’s your name, lad?” Mickey stood still, looked directly at Johan, and pointed with a gnarly digit.
“Please leave me be.”
“Aye. Maybe I will do that. But I have to see if I might beat the Dark One, that I do,” Mickey said, winking madly in time with his Irish lilt as he came closer again, working himself back into a froth. Johan reeled as far back as he could and raised his left knee to prevent any further encroachment.
Johan’s main concern was now that he had perhaps been committed to a mental asylum. He glanced around the ward. There were two other beds, but one just revealed a bump under the covers, and the other was concealed behind a graying curtain, beyond which emanated the squelches of bodily ablutions and various moans.
Mickey’s face was sunken, sullen, his eyes set deep, his cheekbones sharp and angular, like wrenches in a thinning sock. His green irises, their pupils dilated into black saucers, sat on yellowy whites with thin pink-veined corners. He was maybe five foot ten, but as he was crooked down toward Johan’s bed, it was hard for the poor lad to judge. Mickey’s bony hands had raised blue veins resembling pencils, and alabaster, yellowed fingers. They could have taken out an eye at two paces. His hair was thinning and curly. His eyes were off center. He had seen this in other drinkers. The long-term effects of his booze intake had permanently loosened his retinal musculature. His pajama top was unevenly buttoned and exposed a sunburned neck like a turkey’s wattle. His earlobes sprouted fluff, which was lit by the daylight struggling through the grubby windows. One hirsute ear was significantly larger than the other and seemed to be erect, which, allied to his angular and sunken features, gave the impression of his having swallowed a coat hanger.
Mickey threw his arms toward the high ceilings of the Victorian ward to illustrate the size of the alleged horns on his daughter’s head. His stained dressing gown fell open, and Johan spotted the weeping sores collected around his groin.
Johan tried to look away, but he had already seen that a green slime had collected at the tip of Mickey’s urethra. It had coagulated into a teasing gloopy drip toward the sterilized tile. The wad fell with a splat onto the floor and formed its very own Emerald Isle. Mickey took his time in pulling the unfortunate robe together and knotting the belt.
The shameless Irishman blushed not as he continued on about his lot with Mephisto-Syphilis.
“Did I tell you that I am in love with a pretty one back in Ireland? She’s a belter.”
And with that, he pulled out a picture of the most angelic, pretty-featured Irish market girl. Even in sepia, one could make out eyes greener than Mickey’s used and gonorrheal towels. Mickey got close again. In his bed, Johan shuffled away from the hot, dry, beastly winds from Mickey’s back teeth. If the devil did indeed exist in Mickey’s head, it was behind his crumbling teeth and on his crusty, felty tongue.
Johan turned onto his right side, hoping Mickey would get the hint and leave him be. He thought of his own girl, Lorelei, and where she would be right now. He needed a cigarette to forget.
“Damned lunatic!” Johan blurted in a tight spasm, a tic now in his left eye. Fortunately, Mickey was well out of radar.
As the madman trekked off to his corner, diagonal to Johan’s, in swept the disinfected angel. The ridiculous deferred to the sublime.
“Nurse, where am I?” Johan asked with slight panic.
“Do not worry, my sweet. They are not all like our Irish friend. His daughter works here. My best friend. He followed her here from Ireland. Mad. As for the others, the poor boy over there has rare cancer or something.” She gestured to the corner of the ward to his right.
“Only a kid. Maybe only has two months. Opposite is Gabriel. Lost his foot in the farmyard, silly lad. Though we were a bit concerned about your babble and nonsense when you came in, you are not in Mickey’s league. Not yet, anyway. And to answer your question, you are about ten miles to the east of Mostar, Johan Thoms.”
He did not feel surprised as she addressed him by his full name.
His body, however, filled with adrenaline.
“Does my name mean anything to you?” he asked.
“Should it, my sweet? Are you famous?”
Johan looked away. “No, no. Forget it. Am I all right? What happened to me? Am I allowed to leave?”
“Slow down, handsome. You only have headaches, on one side. You are free to leave at any time. Unless you are on the run from the police? Is that why I should know who you are? Is that why you have all that money in that kit bag? Did you kill someone? Did you rob a bank?”
Johan was clearly nervous. He felt his heart racing. “No, no, no . . .”
“Joking, my sweet.” The angel smiled.
She was in her late twenties, and her angelic features hid the kind of wisdom, which is easily learned in a hospital ward. She leaned forward to plump his unplumpable pillow and breathed in his left ear. “Though robbing a bank would be very naughty, handsome boy. It’s not often we get your type in here. We have Mickeys to deal with. Or poor souls like him next to you. Nothing we can do, they say. Parents don’t even visit him. No one does. He was abandoned. He’s riddled, we think. Or like Gabriel, village idiots not keen on holding on to their limbs. What does the village do without its performing monkey? But you . . . you make a girl want to come to work in the morning.” She straightened his bedsheets, adding extra tension to those which covered his pelvic area.
“Headaches? Are they dangerous?”
“Relax, my sweet.” She touched his cheek. “You have headaches, that’s all. They are a rare kind, though. Sometimes it’s a tumor, but the doctor thinks you’re all right. Headaches like these do start around the solstices, though, apparently. Now, isn’t that weird? You been having them for long?”
“Don’t know. What day is it?”
“It is July the thirteenth, handsome. You have been here ten days or more, I guess. You used up nearly all our morphine, you selfish brute. Still, fewer bedpans for you! I am teasing, love.” She mopped his brow with a cool hand towel.
“I remember I got a headache when I was still in the city. I thought nothing of it then. It was about the last week of June.”
“There you go. I’m just a nurse, love. I clean up Mickey. Do what the doctors tell me. We girls, we obey the moon. Johan Thoms, you go for the sun, it seems, my special one.”
“Will they go away soon? I feel like my eyes will pop out.”
“They will, but you need to look after yourself. Get to the Adriatic. Go swimming. Stay out of the city and be nice to yourself. Get some sun on you. Eat lots of oranges. Some fish. You looked good when they brought you in. I checked you into your pajamas myself.” She stared deep into his eyes, one side of her mouth fractionally raised with an accompanying eyebrow. “Perk of the job, handsome. Though you are heading toward looking like a ghost right now. You seen yourself?”
“Not for a while, not since . . . God knows when.”
Angel clipped across the tiles with her heels and returned momentarily with a mirror, which she held to his face. Dark rings had developed around his young eyes, he saw.
“I look like death.”
“Don’t say that, Johan, my angel! Look to your right sometime soon. When that poor creature emerges from those sheets, you will see what death looks like. And in a boy probably not yet ten years old. And unlikely to reach it.”
Johan blushed. Changing the subject, he asked, “Do you have a newspaper, please, Nurse?”
He feared his mug shot and the words wanted and reward.
“Maybe from Zagreb, two days ago. Anything in particular?”
“No, no, no . . .” he said, way too keenly, he thought.
“Well, I will have a look, my sweet, and sometime soon, we need to think about getting you well and out of here. When you read the news, you will see for yourself. This place is going to be full to the rafters by the end of the month, they say. It is a sad, sad world. Why do you silly men insist of spilling guts, for us poor girls to run around and clean up?”