'I have

no feeling, no feeling,' he told the anesthetist; then he went limp and sleepy and closed his eyes. 'If you're going to take everything out of that suitcase,' he grumbled, 'you're going to put it all back, too.'

While I got out all the sugar-sampling vials and set up the test-tube rack above the sink, Biggie whispered with the harpies in the doorway, about the fact that the racing season was over, that there was no curfew, that the team's car had been lent in good faith, that it must be returned.

'Merrill has a car ...' I told Biggie in German, 'if you would like to stay.'

'Why would I like to do that?' she asked.

Recalling Merrill's lie, I said, 'I'll show you my poem about you.'

'I'm sorry, Boggle,' Merrill murmured, 'but they were such great boobs - Jesus, such a target - I just had to take a crack at them.' But he was sound asleep, out of the fray.

'The car ...' said one of the uglies. 'Really, Biggie ...'

'We've simply got to take it back,' the other one told her. Biggie looked around Merrill's room, looked me over too, with a cool questioning gaze. Where does the former pole-vaulter keep his pole?

'No, not now, please,' Merrill announced to everyone. 'I have to pee, oh, yes.'

Juggling the vials and tubes for his urine test, I turned to the girls in the doorway, repeating to Biggie in German: 'He has to pee.' And I added hopefully to her, 'You could wait outside ...' You warm solid hunk of velour!

Then I was shut off from their mumbles in the hall outside Merrill's door, where I could hear only the harsh whisperings of the unwanted teammates and Biggie's quiet, solid indifference.

'You know there's a breakfast meeting ...'

'So who's missing breakfast?'

'They'll ask you about tonight ...'

'Biggie, what about Bill?'

Bill? I wondered, as I led Merrill unsteadily to the sink, his arms flopping in the wild take-off motions of some weak, ungainly bird.

'What about Bill?' Biggie hissed in the hall.

Right! Tell old Bill she's taken up with a pole-vaulter!

But Merrill's precarious stance at the sink needed all my attention. On the glass shelf where the toothpaste goes was the test-tube rack with the gay-colored solutions for testing sugar in urine. Overturf gazed at these in the way I'd seen him ogle the bright bottles behind a bar, and I had to keep his elbows from slipping on the sink while I aimed his floppy prod into his special pee mug, a beer stein he'd stolen in Vienna: he liked it because it had a lid and held almost a quart.

'OK, Merrill,' I told him. 'Let it come.' But he just gawked at his test-tube rack as if he'd never seen it before. 'Wake up, baby,' I told him. 'Fill 'er up!' But Merrill was squinting through the test-tube rack at his own death-gray face reflected in the mirror. Over his shoulder he saw me looming behind him - pressed evilly close to him, struggling to hold him up. He stared at my reflection with great hostility; he didn't know me at all. 'Let go of my prick, you,' he told the mirror.

'Merrill, shut up and pee.'

'Is that all you ever think about?' Biggie hissed at her friends in the hall.

'Well, what are we going to tell Bill?' a harpy asked her. 'I mean, I'm not going to lie - if he asks me, I'm going to tell him.'

I opened the door, then, holding Merrill around the waist, pointing his pecker down into the pee mug. 'Why don't you tell him even if he doesn't ask you?' I said to the appalled harpies. Then I closed the door again and steered Merrill back toward the sink. Somewhere along the way, he began to pee. Biggie's sharp laugh must have touched some nervous part of him, for he twitched, loosening my thumb's grip on the stein's lid, and found himself clamped in the pee mug. Wrestling away, he peed all over my knee. I caught up with him at the foot of his bed, where he spun about, still peeing in a high arch, his face with a child's look of bewildered pain. I stiff-armed him over the footboard and he landed limp on the bed, peed a final burst straight up in the air, then threw up on his pillow. I set the pee mug down, washed off his face, turned his pillow over and covered him with a heavy puff, but he lay rigid in the bed with his eyes like fuses. I washed the pee off me and used the medicine dropper to take pee from the pee mug and plunk it into the different test tubes: red, green, blue, yellow. Then I realized that I didn't know where the color chart was. I didn't know what color the red was supposed to change to, or what color was dangerous for the blue to change to, and whether the green was supposed to stay clear or get cloudy, and what yellow was for. I'd only watched Merrill test himself, because he'd always come around in time to interpret the colors. I went over to the bed where he now seemed to be sleeping and hit him a good one in the face; he clenched his teeth together, grunted and went right on sleeping, so I tagged him a really solid blow in his stomach. But it just went thok! Merrill didn't flinch.

So I started tearing through his rucksack until I found all his syringes, needles, injector-bottles of insulin, bags of candy, his hash pipe and, at the bottom, the color chart. It said it was OK if the red got orange, if the green and blue became the same, and if the yellow got cloudy-crimson; it was not OK for the red to change 'too quickly' to cloudy-crimson, or for the green and blue to behave differently, or for the yellow to turn orange and stay clear.

But when I turned back to the test-tube rack, the colors had already changed, and I realized that I had forgotten which ones were which colors to begin with. Then I read the color chart to find out what to do if you estimated your blood sugar to be dangerously high or low. You were supposed to get in touch with a doctor, of course.

There was silence from the hall outside the door, and I grieved that Biggie had gone away while I was in here fumbling with Merrill's pecker. Then I got a little worried about him, so I sat him upright by hauling him up by his hair; then I held his head and delivered a good roundhouse slap to his gray cheek, and then another and another, until his eyes rolled open and he pulled his chin down on his chest. He spoke to the closet, or to some spot over my shoulder: a high-spirited, defiant holler in the face of pain. 'Fuck you!' Merrill shouted. 'Fuck you to death!'

Then he called me Boggle in a perfectly normal voice and said he was terribly thirsty. So I gave him water, lots of it, and poured all the crimson, blue-green, orange pee-colors down the sink and rinsed the test tubes out so that if he woke up in the night, berserk, he couldn't drink those too.

When I finished cleaning up, he was asleep, and because I was furious with him I wrung the washcloth out in his ear. But he never moved, and I dried his ear for him, turned out the light and listened in the dark to his breathing, just to be sure he was all right.

Tags: John Irving Fiction
Source: readsnovelonline.net