The Losers. David Eddings

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СКАЧАТЬ right,” Raphael said. “I can do that if I have to. Now, when do I get my wooden leg?”

      Quillian looked at him. “What?”

      “My peg leg? Whatever the hell you call it?”

      “Prosthesis, Taylor. The word is prosthesis. Haven’t you talked with your doctor yet?”

      “He’s too busy. Is there something else I’m supposed to know?”

      Quillian looked away for a moment, then looked back, his face angry. “Dammit,” he swore. “I’m not supposed to get mixed up in this.” He spun his wheelchair away and rolled across the room to a file cabinet. “Come over here, Taylor.” He jerked open a cabinet drawer and leafed through until he found a large brown envelope.

      Raphael crutched across the room, his movements smoother now.

      “Over to the viewer,” Quillian said harshly, wheeled, and snapped the switch on the fluorescent viewer. He stuck an X-ray picture on the plate.

      “What’s that?” Raphael asked.

      “That’s you, Taylor. That’s what’s left of you. Full front, lower segment. You don’t have a left hip socket. The left side of your pelvis is shattered. There’s no way that side of you could support your weight. There won’t be any prosthesis for you, Taylor. You’re on crutches for the rest of your life, boy. You might as well get that down in your mind.”

      Raphael stood on his crutches, looking at the X ray. “All right. I can live with that if I have to.”

      “You still want to try to get off the dope?”

      “Yes.” Raphael was still looking at the X ray, a horrible suspicion growing as he looked at the savagely disrupted remains of his pelvis that the shadowy picture revealed. “I think it’s time I got my head back together again.”

       ix

      “There really wasn’t any alternative, Raphael,” the doctor told him. “The damage was so extensive that there just wasn’t anything left to salvage. We were lucky to be able to restore normal urinary function.”

      “That’s the reason I’ve got this tube?” Raphael asked. “The catheter? Yes. That’s to allow the bladder time to heal. We should be able to remove it soon. There’ll be some discomfort at first, but that’ll pass and the function will be normal.”

      “Then there was no damage to the—uh—”

      “Some, but we were able to repair that—to a degree. That’s a pretty tricky area to work with. My guess is that even if we’d been able to save the scrotal area and one or both testes, normal sexual function probably couldn’t have been restored.”

      “Then I’m a eunuch.”

      “That’s a very old-fashioned term, Raphael,” the doctor said disapprovingly.

      Raphael laughed bitterly. “It’s an old-fashioned kind of condition. Will my voice change—all that kind of thing?”

      “That’s mythology. That kind of thing only happens if the removal takes place before puberty. Your voice won’t change, and your beard won’t fall out. You can check with an endocrinologist periodically if you like, but it won’t really be necessary.”

      “All right,” Raphael said, shifting uncomfortably in his chair. He’d begun to sweat again, and there was an unpleasant little twitching in his left hip.

      “Are you all right?” the doctor asked, looking at him with concern.

      “I can live with it.” Raphael’s left foot felt terribly cold.

      “Why don’t I have them increase your medication for a few days?” the doctor suggested.

      “No,” Raphael said sharply. He lifted himself up and got his crutches squared away.

      “In time it’ll begin to be less important, Raphael,” the doctor said sympathetically.

      “Sure. Thanks for your time. I know you’re busy.”

      “Can you make it back to your room okay?”

      “I can manage it.” Raphael turned and left the doctor’s office.

      

      Without the drugs he found that he slept very little. After nine, when the visitors left, the hospital became quiet, but never wholly silent. When he found his hand twitching, reaching almost of its own volition for the bell that would summon the nurse with the needle, he would get out of bed, take his crutches, and wander around in the halls. The effort and the concentration it required to walk helped to keep his mind off his body and its craving.

      His arms and shoulders were stronger now, and Quillian had given him his permanent crutches. They were called Canadian crutches, a term that seemed very funny to Raphael for some reason. They had leather cuffs that fit over his forearms, and they angled slightly at the handgrips. Using them was much less awkward, and he began to develop the smooth, almost stately pace of the one-legged man.

      He haunted the halls of the hospital during the long hours of the night, listening to the murmurs and the pain-filled moans of the sick and the dying. Although he realized that it might have been merely coincidence, a series of random occurrences of an event that could happen at any time, Raphael became persuaded that most people die at night. Usually they died quietly, but not always. Sometimes, in the exhaustion with which he sandbagged his craving body to sleep toward the morning of each interminable night, he wondered if it might not somehow be him. It seemed almost as if his ghosting passage down the dim halls, like the turbulence in the wake of a passing ship, reached in through the doors and walls to draw out those teetering souls. Sometimes in those last moments before sleep he almost saw himself as the Angel of Death.

      Once, during his restless midnight wandering, he heard a man screaming in agony. He angrily crutched his way to the nurses’ station. “Why don’t you give him a shot?” he demanded.

      “It wouldn’t do any good,” the starched young nurse replied sadly. “He’s an alcoholic. His liver’s failed. Nothing works with that. He’s dying, and there’s nothing we can give him to relieve the pain.”

      “You didn’t give him enough,” Raphael told her, his voice very quiet, even deadly.

      “We’ve given him the maximum dosage. Any more would kill him.”

      “So?”

      She was still quite young, so her ideals had not yet been eroded away. She stared at Raphael, her face deathly white. And then the tears began to run slowly down her cheeks.

      

      Shimpsie noted from Raphael’s chart that he had been refusing the painkilling medication, and she disapproved. “You must take your medication, Raphael,” she chided. “Why?”

      “Because the doctors know what’s best for you.”

      He made an indelicate sound. “I’ve got the free run of the hospital, Shimpsie,” he told her. “I’ve СКАЧАТЬ