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My hands had stopped shaking, so I took that as a sign that I was ready to talk to the doctor. I was mistaken.
"All he needs now is rest," the doctor said, "which I am sure he can accomplish just as well from the comforts of home, after having received the very best medical care Calcutta has to offer."
Sometimes it's the subtle things that piss me off the most. There was a tone to his words that filled in the blanks: the very best medical care, provided by the very best English doctors, which your little native was lucky to get.
I was of a different opinion. I thought that Surrender-not's admission had less to do with luck and more to do with the quantity of other people's blood on my clothes when I carried him in through the front door. But I let it go.
"What about infection?" I said. After I'd received a knock on the head in France, I'd spent enough quality time in hospital to see many a man die from wounds gone complicated, and I had no intention of letting this happen to my sergeant.
"It's a straightforward bullet wound, Captain." The doctor's voice implied that this was rather a letdown than otherwise. Perhaps the simplicity of the wound had bored him. It hadn't bored me. "I believe he'll recover. If he shows any signs of worsening, I suggest you take him to a local doctor for further consultation."
I was starting to lose what little patience I had left. Not long ago, I had been shot in the arm, a mere scratch of a flesh wound, and that doctor had given me ointment and six morphine tablets. Surrender-not could hardly stand for the pain and yet all this man wanted was to get him out of the hospital as soon as possible.
"I can't allow him to leave without adequate means to prevent infection and help him sleep," I said. Let him deal with that. The man might not like us, but he certainly didn't have it in him to evict a wounded policeman from his hospital bed by force.
"It's all right," Surrender-not said from the bed behind me. "I'm all right."
This was a blatant lie and it made me furious. He could hardly speak.
"You see?" said the doctor. "Captain, I've worked in this country for many years, and I assure you, there is nothing to worry about. The natives are, in some respects, hardier than you or I. Just as they are less likely to succumb to tropical fevers, they don't react to pain in the same way. It's to do with irregularities in their nerve endings. An old professor of mine published a paper to that effect in the British Medical Journal…”
He said other things, too, only I couldn’t hear them. I felt my face go hot and my throat go thick and all I could think about was the car ride there, Surrender-not in my arms, those sounds that he made back in his throat, whimpers half-stifled. I kept wishing the driver would go faster and get us to the hospital and I kept wishing the driver would go easier so the car wouldn't jolt him and above all I kept wishing that he would stop making those sounds, until finally he did and I tried to wake him and I couldn’t, and it was as if the ground had given way beneath me and swallowed me up.
Next thing I knew, I was thudding into something big and warm and solid and then someone shoved me back a step. I skidded back, snarling. The doctor fled the room and I wrenched my eyes away from him to discover what had got in my way. It turned out to be Gillespie, Digby’s replacement, a mountain of a Scotsman whose size had come in useful. I had forgotten he was even there. There was a note of caution in his eyes; technically, he had just laid hands on a superior, and could be officially subject to a reprimand and unofficially subject to much worse.
"Well done, Gillespie," I said, when I'd got my breath back. "For all the tidying up we have to do after murders, it's nice to see one prevented."
He laughed weakly, but it was still more laughter than the joke deserved. If it had been wholly a joke. I wasn't sure it had been, and from the look on Gillespie’s face, neither was he. I clapped him on the shoulder to make completely clear that there were no hard feelings. The poor fellow was having a hard first day of it.
Then I turned to Surrender-not. I couldn’t be sure, but I thought that earlier, I had heard him say, Don’t— and it made me feel ashamed, like a child caught throwing a temper tantrum because he was frightened.
To be honest, I still was frightened. Some of the killers had themselves been killed, and others apprehended, Surrender-not was ready to go home, Taggart sounded like he wanted to knight me, and yet the thing didn’t feel over. It didn’t feel like a victory.
“I can get you into another hospital,” I said. Surrender-not shook his head no.
“Bet he’d rather see his missus than spend one more minute with this lot,” said Gillespie. Though he was not a naturally demonstrative man, he was making an effort to be cheerful, for Surrender-not’s sake. I decided I liked him.
“I don’t have a wife,” said Surrender-not quietly.
“You soon will, after all that,” said Gillespie. “Women like scars with heroic stories to match. Do you have family in Calcutta? I can call them up.”
“I’ll get him to his people, and they’ll take care of him,” I said. “You can go home. It’s been a long day.” If one could still say that at two in the morning.
“If you’re sure, Captain.”
“I’m sure.”
“Will I go get that medication before I leave?”
I gave him a crooked smile, more for his sake than anything. “Better you than me.”
When the door closed behind him, I went and sat down on the bed next to Surrender-not, careful not to jostle him. His eyes were closed. He looked awful.
“I haven’t got any people left, you know,” he said.
“I’m your people,” I said. “I’ll take care of you.”
Watching him sleep calmed me nearly as much as the whiskey. His breaths were shallow, but thanks to the morphine, they were even. I could hear them from where I was sitting. I had dragged an armchair into his room because I couldn’t shift my bed there all by myself, and I didn’t want to bother Sandesh, for fear that he would claim a share in the vigil and try to shoo me off to bed. The thought of leaving Surrender-not's room made me feel brittle.
I didn’t know what time it was, and I didn’t care. Tomorrow there was a hangover coming for me, my head still ached from where I’d bashed it against a windowsill in all the commotion, and although I had stripped off my blood-stiffened clothes, I still smelled like gutter. I truly didn’t care. Leaning my head against the back of the chair, I counted his breaths: in and out, in and out. It was hypnotizing. I drifted.
When I woke up, I woke up to Surrender-not's eyes like two black stones, staring past me, empty and flat. I have seen that look more times than I can count. Sandesh found me pinned to my chair by those eyes, like I was afraid that moving even one muscle would make it real. He made sympathetic noises. I didn't want that. I wanted him to do something about those eyes.
"But surely sahib has seen many of his friends die over the years," Sandesh said. "Death is an old friend, you once said. You said you were numb to it by now." He said it in a friendly voice, but it felt like an accusation. Everything he said was true, but I shook my head. Taggart looked up from his desk.
"What in hell is the matter with you?" he demanded. He was angry, but I saw that he was a little sorry for me, too, the way anyone would feel sorry when they saw a beaten dog.
"I haven't got any people left, you know," I said.
"Is that all?"
"Yes," I lied. I was sweating. Taggart stared at me as if he knew I was lying, but wasn't sure it was worth his time to press the point.
"Go on, then," he said, after a while.
So I went down the stairs into the bowels of the building and picked out a new sergeant like I was picking a doll off the wall of the world's shittest toy store. They were all in front of me: English, Welsh, Scottish, Bengali, in straight lines like they were on parade, and which of them could I stand to look at? I chose one at random and five seconds' conversation was enough for me to know that this sergeant wouldn't blush when I teased him, that this sergeant couldn't have given less of a damn about my opinion if he was Digby reincarnated, that this sergeant had a monstrous ego. But all this would have been nothing if he could lie. When I heard him try to lie and fail utterly, a great wave of tiredness came over me and I felt so overwhelmed, it verged on panic.
Behind me, outside the doors, in numbers far greater than the rows of sergeants in front of me, were a great many men who would, under future circumstances, simply prefer me dead the way that you would prefer a mosquito in your house to be dead. There were cases out there, but to face them now I would have to face them alone.
There was nobody in front of me who knew how to lie. There was nobody to talk to. There was nobody to trust. There was nobody with good aim on the way; there was nobody on the way at all. The only thing I had left was my hardheadedness, and I was so alone that even spite felt like a moot point. I didn't even have any enemies who truly cared about my existence, only a couple of people with vague professional distrust towards me. They would not even be particularly pleased if I died. I was a footnote at best in the lives of a few indifferent men.
When I got home and found the house empty, I was almost relieved, because I knew I would have said something terrible to Sandesh if he had spoken to me, I would have done something terrible if anyone with eyes had even looked at me. There was an empty chair at the dinner table. I stared at it for a while, and then I left the house to go get him back.
"I haven't got any people left, you know," I said to Surrender-not, and he looked up at me with an annoyed expression, as if I had asked after a report that he had put on my desk hours ago.
"So?" he said.
"That's your cue," I said. "Now you say, 'I'm your people. I'll take care of you.'"
"I was, and I did," Surrender-not said. "But now it's too late."
Surrender-not was saying something to me and then I saw his face, grave and clear in a cold sheet of moonlight the window had thrown over him. I knew this was real. My cheeks were wet, but I didn't have it in me to be ashamed by this because my heart was still hammering rabbitquick and my chest felt like someone was pressing me to death with stones and breathing, breathing was difficult.
"I can't—" I heard my own voice crack. It sobered me up a little. "I mean, I shouldn't drink at night." I tried to remember what he had been saying, and I couldn't. His eyes were dark and luminous and alive, so beautiful it made it hard for me to think, and piercing with absolute certainty, which scared me, given the circumstances.
"Whiskey makes me dream odd things," I said. "Was I talking?"
“Come here,” he said, gentle.
My chest seized up. For a moment I was sure he was speaking to me, but then I remembered the morphine he'd taken, and along with the guilt, I wanted to know: who was I supposed to be? His brother? His mother, his father? Who else was there? Back in his Cambridge days, maybe, some long-lost—
“Sam,” he said. “Come to bed.”
I felt more than ever like a madman. I couldn't understand what he was saying. And then he said my name again, like a question, and I had to stop myself from saying, you've never called me that before, because I didn't want him to notice. The world was all shards and I had to move very carefully so I wouldn't get cut, but also, I was finally beginning to understand the words come to bed as more than three syllables strung together, and that idea made more sense than anything else, so I did.
When I got up out of my chair, everything tilted, which meant that I hadn't slept much and I was still drunk and clumsy and ill-suited to be near an injured man, so I had to remind myself: I couldn't touch him. Though I already couldn't touch him, drink or no drink. I was very sure of that. So I crawled up from the foot of the bed, taking care to stay well away, until I was laying on my side, facing him, my shoulder blades pressed to the wall.
With that fine-featured face, Surrender-not would always seem young, but his expression as he looked at me made him seem as old as the hills. "Oh, Sam," he said. He said it so compassionately. He knew.
I flinched away, but I couldn't get any further away than I already was, and I ended up thudding my head against the wall. His lips tightened, like I'd hurt him.
"I can't come to you," he murmured. "You have to come to me."
I knew this was true. After I had carried him up the stairs, I kept walking until we were in his room, until I could put him down on his bed, because I couldn't stand the tortured determination in his eyes when he tried to walk with his arm around my shoulders. I knew he couldn't so much as move closer to me on the bed without hurting himself, and yet as I pushed myself towards him, I held myself tight and coiled, my shoulders up, my elbows bent, my hands between us.
It made no sense, but I was sure he was going to hit me. I set my teeth so hard I could feel it in my jaw.
Very slowly, so slowly that it must have cost him much effort, Surrender-not reached for me, and willing myself not to move was all I could do. Presently, his hand, slim-fingered and cool, was caressing my cheek. I shuddered, and closed my eyes.
It was cowardice, but it did not feel like cowardice, it felt like self-preservation. Looking at him felt like looking directly at the sun; he was looking back at me, touching me, with such tenderness as I had never allowed myself to contemplate, such tenderness as though he had great reserves inside himself which he had only now let me glimpse. Like a well so deep you could throw a penny in, and never hear the splash. With my eyes closed, I could still feel it.
I was too drunk to know what time had passed, but eventually his hand slipped down my face and landed on the bed between us. He was asleep. I looked at his hand against the white sheets and thought about touching him back. I didn't want to wake him, but he had been so cold. After a little while, I gingerly lifted his hand and put it back beneath the blankets, and I tugged the blankets up to just under his chin. That felt better. I was quite close to him now, and the moon must have been nearly full, because I could make out his fine eyelashes against his cheek, the bump on his neck from a bug bite. I took in the shape of him thoroughly, I took in every detail, I studied him until I could still see him when I closed my eyes.
At some point, I knew that I was awake and that he was moving a little, that he was making soft caught sounds. I crawled back down off the bed and fetched him the bottle of pills and a cup of water, and as I climbed the stairs with the water in my hand, I felt like I might be dreaming, my head felt so woolly, but one thought managed to cut through, for just a second: I wanted opium more than I had wanted it ever before in my life, save for when the actual withdrawal had set in, but I had morphine in my hand and I was not going to use it for myself. I even sat by the bed and looked at the little white pill and imagined myself swallowing it down with the water, and all the relief that would follow, and at the end of it I was still sure. It calmed me, though I hadn't known before that I needed calming.
Surrender-not was murmuring in a language I couldn't understand. I shook his shoulder. It didn't take much to wake him, and he woke badly, his eyes snapping open, his head jerking up off the pillow before the pain visibly lanced through him and brought him back down.
I sat on the bed beside him, slipped my arm behind his back and helped lift him, so that when he tipped his head back to swallow the water, the back of his head rested on my collarbone. When I tried to put him back down, he said, "Wait," and I did. I could feel the shape of his spine against my chest, with only the thin layer of his shirt between us. I wondered if he could hear my heart beating as fast as if we were under attack. I hoped it wouldn't frighten him.
My heart couldn't beat that fast forever. And when it slowed, I reached across his chest with my free hand, cupped his cheek, and brought him closer. His hair was itchy against my skin, and when he moved his head, trying to find the right spot, it sent a scattering of sparks through me. He settled, and I thought he would fall asleep then, but he didn't. He was looking up at me, and in his great dark eyes I imagined all kinds of questions. I was so tired that even standing up would have been a trial, but I managed to scrape together a relevant thought. I thought he deserved an answer of some kind. As much as I could give.
While staring at the darkness of the far wall, I kissed his forehead, once, and felt Surrender-not sag against me. He fisted a hand in my shirt in reply, just as briefly; I understood.
I don't know which of us fell asleep first.
The morphine was good. Surrrender-not only woke one more time, early in the morning when the explosion of sound and sunlight came in through the window. I laid him down as gently as I could, and then I went to close the curtains and lock the door.
“You’re going to be late for work,” was all he said.
“I’m not going to work today,” I said. “Go back to sleep.”
"Come back to bed," he said. And I did.
He felt natural in my arms.
He woke me up, shaking my arm and saying my name loudly, and it took me a while to understand where I was or what was happening. I felt guilty for being so difficult to rouse, and then it was mere logistics and straining to carry Surrender-not down the hall because he had to take a piss, and then it was explaining to Sandesh all that had happened and asking him to see about something soft and easy for Surrender-not's breakfast. By that time, on my feet and with a raging hangover, awash in harsh daylight, I felt that any magic on me had broken completely. Outside, there was the sound of a man arguing with the madam of the brothel next door, who wouldn't let him in because he had been an arse last week, and I wondered if I would have to go out there and make him fuck off, and if I even had it in me to do that.
Sandesh returned to help Surrender-not back down the hall and into bed—I resented him for that—and then again, to bring my morning omelette, tea, and the newspaper. When he left, I wanted to lock the door again, but I knew better than that. I sat down in a chair beside the bed and opened the newspaper, instead. Surrender-not sipped my tea. It was very easy to sit four feet apart. It took no effort at all. Perhaps it was better to do things the easy way.
The newspaper informed me that I was gallant, that I had solved an unsolvable mystery, that I had single-handedly fought off a horde of kidnappers. It made not mention of Surrender-not. I briefly contemplated fire-bombing the place.
And then Surrender-not was talking. "I'm sorry," I said. "What?"
“I think I called you Sam, last night,” he said to the cup in his hand.
I couldn't think of anything else to say but the truth. “You did. I didn’t mind it.”
A leaden silence fell over us. More than once, I thought Surrender-not was going to speak, but he stopped himself. And then, finally, he said, “You could call me Surendranath. If you wanted.” When he looked up at me, I could see that he was as scared as I was. “I know it will be different, out there. But in here…”
“I’d like that,” I said.
His face reflected my relief back at me, and then, unexpectedly, he smiled. I hadn't thought I would be happy, all night; I had only thought of my own instincts as I tried to avoid pain, and couldn't, tried to get close enough to satisfy myself, and couldn't. But now. God, when he smiled. I had forgotten what this felt like. Then I heard footsteps on the stairs.
When Sandesh opened the door, he found us each reading a different section of the newspaper, quietly. He brought some extra toast for me, and from a cook friend of his at a fancier establishment a couple doors down, he brought an egg custard for Surendranath.