398
DAVID ZANE MAIROWITZ
quickly returned to her sanctuary. She could have borne this pain for
two days.
"I'm afraid I can't stay. You see ..."
"You must, Miss Luxemburg. We have strict orders. We have
lovely gardens for you to wander in, you can relax, you won't be
kept in a bed. We'll notify your family for you."
"No. Don't."
"All right then, we'll keep it confidential."
She reckons all is not lost.
If
she can leave in the morning, it
will give her several hours before the arrival of her emissary. It may
not be noticed at all.
She is given further tests, bloodlettings and injections. For her
pain there is morphine, an institutional gown to wrap her in and
the door leading to the sprawling lawns of the clinic where she must
relax. She walks about in nervous anticipation, and the skin of her
fingers is the worse for it. More than anything else, her defiance of
Kropotkin is at stake. This now overrides any shred of political com–
mitment as her explosive striking force. It is to shatter his Look in
her blast that she lives for her moment of detonation. She gathers
the hatred of him, in her catastrophe of pain, and calculates bringing
him up on charges, before the Brigade, of entering her confinement
and of attempting to block the mission through acts of psychic provo–
cation.
She doesn't quite remember how she has sunk to the grass, can't
recall a sudden short circuit. The current stopped and she fell through
gravitational space in desperate free fall, the forces of her delirium
tugged her windward and the echo of her thud informed a distracted
earth of her affliction.
Now the Sun relates a spectacle in the midst of which she
is
released from her coma. She is aware first of a sense of space, vast
and green, and she is shaken from the traps of her confinement. De–
spite the sterility of the grounds, she finds a benevolence here in the
languid shrubbery of the afternoon. Slowly her body drifts out of its
morphine shell and the pains begin to mount again; yet, she is calm.
Somewhere, somehow, she feels that a crisis has passed or is just
passing. It is the delicious twilight leave-taking of morphine. Her
hand reaches beneath her gown and returns to her a pale green. Be–
tween her legs a ravaged city is undergoing a postwar experience. She
~
