Chapter 19
Van couldn’t sleep, so he sat in the straight-backed chair in front of his picture window, staring into the corridor, which
is how he happened to be awake the night Nurse Dover came back.
There was a nighttime setting for the lights in the corridor. Only one in every three fluorescents was on, creating little
blocks of brightness between long stretches of darkness, a bit like a document that has been heavily redacted by some government
agency, black bars covering all but a word here and there.
At some point a procession began to approach, appearing in flashes, approaching through those scattered cubes of lit hallway.
Men in polo shirts pushed gurneys past the window, without looking at Van. Van had the impression that not only had they not
observed him, but that he wasn’t there at all. He was asleep in bed and the version of him that sat at the window was an astral
projection.
There were corpses under the sheets. One, two, three, a fourth. The maintenance crew. The last was imperfectly covered. A
swollen, soggy foot protruded, blue from cold, the toenails painted a cheery red. Some straggly blond hair, still dripping
from the sea, spilled out from beneath the sheet at the other end of the gurney. A crab, hardly bigger than a half-dollar,
crawled along some of her locks, then fell suddenly to the floor.
When the parade of security men and their dead were gone, he watched the almost translucent crab. For a long time, it remained
as still as Van himself. Then it crept slyly sideways, into the darkness, and was gone.