Thicker Than Water

But I could see, more or less, how the man I was staring at now could have been the boy I’d grown up with half a lifetime ago. And that recognition had the eeriest feel to it of all: I mean, obviously I’ve never woken up to find a horse’s head in my bed - yet - but as a memento mori Kenny had most of the competition beat cold.

I didn’t bother to look at his med chart because it wouldn’t have told me anything. I did look into the locker next to his bed, out of pure habit, and found nothing there except a plastic pitcher of water with a flip-close lid, a plastic tumbler still shrink-wrapped for your germ-free convenience and a Gideon Bible.

If Kenny had had anything on him when they brought him in, someone had taken it away for safe keeping.

Which meant that Kenny himself was going to be my only source of information here. Maybe he’d obligingly be dreaming about the guy who took a razor to his brachio-cephalic artery, and I could just take a psychic snapshot as I drove by. But most likely not.

The little tasters and teasers I get from skin contact are seldom coherent enough for that: it’s a long way from a video download.

I could have put my hand on Kenny’s forehead, but I didn’t want to: it had the wrong kind of overtones, somehow. Instead I pulled aside a corner of the blanket so I could touch his hand. Then I just stood there, stupidly, staring at his wrist with the blanket peeled back.

Anomalies with the interior of the car, Basquiat had said.

Well, there were anomalies with Kenny, too, and I was looking at one of them. His wrist had been bandaged where he’d taken the cuts in the course of the attack, and the bandage was fairly wide. But the livid-edged furrows of older cuts, inadequately healed, showed clearly both above and below it. These weren’t defence injuries - not unless he lived with a ninja and they fought for the last Jaffa cake every day of the bloody week. These were the marks of old suicide attempts, or of regular, unremitting self-harm.

I reached out and touched the tips of my fingers to his open palm. Silence. Nobody home. I stood as still as I could, eyes tight shut, trying to find Kenny’s frequency through the emotional effluvia pooling all around me - the gone-but-not-erased emotions that had soaked into the hospital’s walls over the course of the last century and a half and now seemed to my strained perceptions to be sweating out of the brickwork.