Dr Frank Blood wasn’t bothered when people made jokes about his name. After all, it gave his patients and their families something to laugh about, and in his line of work there weren’t too many laughs.
In fact, Dr Blood found that if a new acquaintance didn’t pick up on his name, it was a sure sign that they took things too seriously. This was the first thing he noted about the man standing in his office on the Euston Road one Friday morning in mid-April. The second thing he noted, as the man removed his coat, was that his visitor wore a black shirt and a smart white dog-collar.
‘Do sit down,’ said Blood.
The cleric smiled, as if a small electrical charge was being applied to his facial muscles. He took a chair, but didn’t introduce himself. He was a thin, severe-looking man, with a face composed of tight, horizontal lines: a wrinkled forehead, small dark eyes, and a narrow, colourless mouth. He smelt of medicated shampoo and cough sweets. Blood reckoned the man was just a little younger than himself, about forty-five or so.
‘I wonder if you could tell me what you’re here to see me about,’ Blood prompted. ‘My secretary was a little vague on the details.’
The cleric leaned forward. ‘This is a very sensitive matter, Dr Blood. I need you to promise me absolute secrecy.’
‘Confidentiality is all part of the job,’ Blood said, irritably.
‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to offend you.’
‘Quite all right,’ Blood replied, although his tone implied that it wasn’t.
‘The thing is,’ said the cleric, ‘I’m here to offer you a job.’
‘Eh?’
‘A position has just become vacant.’
Blood’s interest was piqued.
‘What sort of job is it?’ he asked.
The cleric fiddled with his collar.
‘It’s a private post. You’d be a kind of – personal physician.’
The cleric pursed his lips and took Blood’s silence as his cue to continue.
‘The client is a very important man. You’ll get paid a lot of money,’ he said, in the sort of tone he probably used to entice a reluctant godson on a trip to the zoo.
‘I’m happy here,’ said Blood.
‘Why not come along and meet the patient? No obligation,’ the cleric wheedled.
‘I can do,’ said Blood, ‘but there’s a problem.’
‘What is it?’ asked the cleric.
‘I’m an intensive care consultant.’
‘Why is that a problem?’
‘Well,’ said Blood, ‘my specialty is keeping people going when they’re really on the ropes. I can’t help but think that you’re looking for a GP rather than someone like me.’
‘Don’t worry about that, Dr Blood,’ said the cleric, ‘you’re exactly what we’re looking for.’
*
The car that picked Blood up the next day was large and sturdy, with plush leather upholstery. The cleric sat in the back, sipping tea from a Thermos. The traffic was bad going out of town, but at last they rattled over the potholes of a long driveway up to a large, red-brick building. The cleric explained that it was an old stately home that had been requisitioned during the war and used as a military hospital. It had stayed in use as a district general hospital for a few decades after that, until it had gone over to the sole use of one very important patient.
The cleric led Blood through the entrance hall and up the grand central staircase to an old Nightingale-style ward. Ten beds were arranged facing each other along the sides of the room; a greyish, nineteen forties sort of light filtered down through the dust of the windows and skylight. Nine of the beds were empty, stripped of their mattresses so that only the skeletons of bed frames with their chipped, bone-coloured paint remained.
The tenth, at the far end of the room, was occupied.
Around the bed hung a blue curtain made of the same thick, papery material as the ones in Blood’s unit. Blood noted approvingly that the date of the last curtain change was written in neat black marker-pen on a white tag. Pushing it aside, the cleric gestured for him to come in.
The patient was hard to spot at first in the midst of the life-support equipment. Anyone unfamiliar with modern medicine would have thought the small man in clean white pyjamas was some sort of decorative afterthought to all the machinery.
‘That’s your patient,’ said the cleric, ‘I don’t like to talk about patients as if they aren’t there, but I think this gentleman must be used to it by now.’
‘What do you mean?’ asked Blood.
‘If you choose to accept, you will be the personal physician to the Almighty himself.’
Blood glanced at the readout screens, all displaying stable lines and sounding out predictable rhythms. He felt a little giddy, and pulled up a chair to sit down. To save face, he put his fingers on the patient’s radial pulse. It felt fast and thready.
‘How can this be?’ he asked.
‘A question modern man has been asking for quite some time. How can God be?’
‘No,’ said Blood, ‘how can God be in an intensive care bed in a closed-down hospital just outside of Slough?’
‘He’s been here for a good while now,’ said the cleric. ‘Oh, we’re sure it’s him. Before he became ill, he gave us some quite conclusive demonstrations of his power. He showed us that the universe is composed of his thoughts. Your whole life is a little electrical impulse flickering away somewhere inside his brain. People think they’re real, and God is imaginary. It’s quite the opposite. God is real. We, however, are imaginary.’
Blood surveyed the supine body of the patient. ‘He’s shorter than I imagined,’ he said.
‘I thought that, too,’ said the cleric, sympathetically.
‘Otherwise he looks just like I pictured him.’
‘The long white beard, you mean. We just haven’t given him a shave for a while.’
Blood looked again at the patient. He could have been any age between fifty and ninety. With only the pfft-pfft of the pressure-relieving mattress and the bleep of machines to soothe him, the deity lay there dreaming dreams of all things bright and beautiful, great and small.
*
Blood took the job, of course. The cleric arranged it all with a couple of phone calls. Within a week, he had made several changes to the patient’s medication, and he seemed to perk up a little as a result. Blood moved into accommodation on the hospital grounds to be nearer to his patient, and worked long hours both at the bedside and in the library, reading up on the latest advances.
Around two months after he had started, Blood was woken by someone banging on his door in the early hours of the morning. He dressed in yesterday’s shirt and crumpled trousers and was on the ward in less than five minutes. The night nurse thoughtfully handed him a mug of tea as he approached the bedside. He pushed the curtain aside with his free hand, and walked in to find the patient sitting up in bed shaving his beard off, using a kidney-dish as a basin. Clean-shaven, he looked years younger; his skin was tight and flushed, and his eyes glinted as if everything amused him. Dr Blood pulled up a chair and sat down. The patient carefully replaced the safety razor in the dish, and put it on the side-table.
‘I have to thank you, Dr Blood, for your expert care and attention,’ he said. ‘Of course, they had almost nothing to do with my miraculous recovery.’
Blood nodded his head, feeling vaguely insulted. The patient looked at him sympathetically.
‘I’m sorry. I sometimes talk before I think. I didn’t mean to start making the universe with light, for example; it would’ve been far more logical to start with time. But before I knew it, it was out. Let there be light, I said, and there was light. I had to improvise from then on. Anyway,’ he straightened his pyjama jacket, ‘you and I need to have a serious chat. About where we go from here.’
Blood had been secretly dreading this.
‘There was nothing in the notes,’ he said, ‘I assumed - ’
‘Yes, you assumed. A lot of people assume things on my behalf,’ the patient replied.
Blood realised how Adam had felt when, suddenly aware of his nakedness, he had reached for the nearest fig-leaf.
‘If you’d like to discuss it now, I can talk you through the options,’ he said.
The patient looked at the nurse. ‘I could do with a glass of milk and some biscuits. Chocolate digestives, if you have any.’
When the nurse had left, he turned back to face Blood.
‘All right,’ said the patient, ‘I’ll tell you what’s what. This is only a brief rally before I go under again. When I do, I don’t want any heroics from you.’
‘But have you thought about the consequences?’ asked Blood. ‘If you decide not to be resuscitated, won’t that mean the end of everything else as well?’
The patient began to chuckle. Then he starting laughing hoarsely, and finally coughing in great sonic booms that rattled his chest and made the veins stand out on his head.
‘The end?’ he said, sipping from a glass of water to soothe his throat, ‘Oh no, that’s just one of those concepts you humans use to explain the world to yourselves. Nothing really stops, though, does it? Everything’s got to move on somewhere.’
‘What about you?’ asked Blood, ‘Where will you move to?’
The patient winked. Blood noticed that the water in his glass was now a pale golden colour, like whisky.
‘Don’t worry about me, sonny. I’ve got plans. I’ve got plans within plans. Anyway, I’m an old man. It’s cruel to keep me here like this. Stop stringing it out.’
Blood paused for a moment, then opened the drawer of forms next to the patient’s bed. He took out the one with the bright red border, ticked and deleted the relevant parts, and gave it to the patient.
‘I wouldn’t look too closely at the signature,’ the patient advised, moving the pen across the page with a flourish. ‘My very name is enough to drive men mad, or make them burst into flames. Apparently.’
The patient had barely time to hand the paper back before his skin turned suddenly ashen, and he started wheezing. The lines on the monitors went haywire and all the alarms sounded at once, followed by the earth-shattering blare of what sounded like an air-raid siren. Blood heard footsteps running towards him. The curtain was thrust open to reveal a resuscitation team headed by the cleric.
‘Well don’t just stand there!’ the cleric shouted.
A scrum of bodies converged on the bed. Blood forced himself between the team and the patient. He waved the ‘Do Not Resuscitate’ order above his head.
‘No!’ he shouted, ‘No! Let him go!’
Someone grabbed the paper from his hands and started tearing it. The fragments flew like confetti. But it was too late. A deep bass note had begun to sound, one that drowned out all of the alarms. Blood felt the ground shake beneath him and heard the ceiling splinter apart. He found himself lifted up, up out of the struggle, dissolving as he went. He was broken down into a mass of tissue and fluid and electricity, and then he was divided and divided again into atoms, protons, electrons, neutrons, gluons, quarks, all hurtling through an endless tunnel of blinding, brilliant white light.
*
This story is entirely true. You, however, are imaginary.
Now Stop Worrying and Enjoy your Life by Niall Boyce was read by Ray Newe at the Liars' League Bridge & Tunnel event on 14 April 2009.
Niall (pronounced Nile) Boyce lives and works in London. He has previously published with Liars' League and Tales of the DeCongested. A new story, Demonology, will appear in the May issue of the online magazine, The Absent Willow Review. Linkage to his work is provided at strange-powers.blogspot.com/
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