I CAN'T TELL IT. MY FACE IS growing red already at the thought. My mother would be pleased; I am playing the lady. She's not here now. There are no ladies here, now. They are superfluous, these days, at any rate. Where would a lady fit in, anymore? What role would fit into her?

I've changed. There can be no aloof square holes for crowding round pegs. Or the other way around. I forget how it goes. I'm flexible, I bend now. I can be whatever's needed. A man taught me that.

Already I am beginning to tell it. I can't do that. Let someone else. I hear her crying again, in the other room. I hurry over, bend into the crib and lift. Suddenly the phone is ringing too. My mother. That's who calls, these days. Things have changed. I can't answer her now. Mary called first. If she's calling "just to listen, baby," like always, someone else will have to tell her the story.]

! A sunny spring day.

!A congregation murmurs around an ambulance, brilliantly white and shining in the morning. Freshly washed.

"It's the full moon causes these things. Lunar cycles. Usually at night, when it first sails up. The dark helps. Just look -- can't you see it still? Like a cloud, just a wisp left now." Her ancient face turns up to the sky as if in worship, her words directed at no one in particular. The crowd swarms over her, obliterating her view of the sky above wrapping what little was left of the moon in robes of blue.

"Did they get him?"

"No, but look. There. They got her."

"Poor thing."

"Well. You never really know."

In someone else's kitchen, at lunchtime:

"All I saw was the medics throw open the backside of th'ambulance, and these cops bring the lady from the park. Suddenly she spooks and struggles away -- from the cops! They were just sort of holding her -- up, you know -- but she runs to th'ambulance and tries climbing and clawing in, but the medics don't let her, and she starts screaming out -'Let me in! Let me in for a change!' She was wild, man. A wild woman. They really had to hold her down."

Her eyes were closed against the fierce lights beating down from their neatly boxed rows, packaged sets of virgin suns, a myriad fluorescent holy children held in ceiling incubators. Surrounding her, borders to her world, were the cot's starched linen, one pale scaly wall, and the bleached cotton curtain circling her protectively. Each worshiped the shining deities above, reflecting them with their own surface whiteness like livery.

She was a shape lying under this, under a single sheet. A thin pillow had been jammed beneath her head. Only her bleached face was uncovered, only the curve of one bleached cheek illuminated. The rest, the matted brown hair, scrapes, bruises, she turned away from their condemning gaze. She knew her body must look dirty against the bedding. Her clothes had been taken away for testing. There was, so far, not even a gown to replace them. When it came it was blue and ruined the scene.

( This is called the third-person narrative. It's like a chaperone to the story. On the whole, it's much safer this way. The third-person, like the third wheel, is sufficiently uninvolved to attend to details -- ensuring the lighting is correct, for instance. The chaperone, walking a seemly several paces behind, is (mercifully) safely removed from what the other two parties may be feeling. )

Nurses came and asked questions, penning her answers in the appropriate boxes on sheets fastened to clipboards. She signed registration forms, insurance forms, release forms. Doctors came and introduced their names to her, and then the names of the metal and rubber tools they carried with them. Then they used those tools in the appropriate

empty spaces in her. The doctors were kind, and thought they were thorough. They tried hard. All were nervous. For most, it was their first time in such a delicate situation.

She lay on the cot and opened her eyes, letting the fluorescent glare bore into her black pupils, already very small, until they shrunk away to tiny aching dots -- as if she were trying to deaden her optic nerve, most vulnerable to her own attack, under the obliging presence of the lights.

( This is an error -- an example of intrusive narration. Usually it is called omniscient intrusive, since with it the narrator claims access to the inner beings of all his characters. 'Omniscient' is, however, a touch grandiose in this particular situation. This delicate situation. Delicate and rare, as butterflies are ceaselessly described. The critical question is, how do they count them? There are so many hiding places. The clinical question is, how do they measure delicacy? What do they do to those butterflies, out there? The grammatical question is, who is 'they'? The narrator appears to have lost control of the antagonistic thread of the story. Perhaps she never had sufficient control to begin with.)

She muttered something once. The doctor begged her pardon. She did not know how to respond to that. So she repeated her thought for the man working at the foot of the bed where her legs dangled.

"Deja vu."

(Something I have to say myself is that all that time, the thing that got to me the most was not 'humiliation' or those other non-entities they expected me to talk 'out' with the psychologist -- so I did, wondering why they couldn't just poke around and pull them out along with everything else. I talked it out without speaking out, so they could put stiff little check marks in the right and necessary places on the papers.

Instead, it was such a petty thing. What nearly drove me mad in my little cubicle was the wretched scraping of the metal curtain hooks along the rod. Not an awful noise, really. Just bewilderingly irritating. So many human forms, swathed in white, rushing in and out, tearing that curtain open again and again without warning. Again and again, yes.

So I can't say I didn't expect it. The warning that there would be another was implicit in the number who had invaded my allotted container before. Swarms, skinning my eardrums with that sound. There are some things which one cannot become steeled against. Steel on steel.

I could hear other curtains, too, torn open along the roomful of similar cubicles, aligned and enclosed like the lights above. This soon settled into background noise, only a vague threat, until clicking heels approached again and I clenched my teeth. In apprehension. The wrenching sound. I held my tongue. Mother would be pleased. No simply offended, had I done otherwise.

I cried about it, while the third doctor was at me. It's funny now. I was crying about curtain rods; he glanced up and I'm pretty sure that's when he scribbled on his little white pad: counselling required. Hysteria. Humiliation. Psychology prescribed. Insisting it's all in your mind, even while they all but dissect your living deadened body.)

Throughout most of the exams there was no unusual response from the woman on the bed. She answered questions softly, her voice rough. She cleared her throat frequently. Occasionally, her face flinched before it cleared away to the empty expression with which the staff had become familiar. Once, a few tears slid across her face and fell sideways along her cheeks, each drop hanging from her ears for a moment like jewellery.

Later, a nurse rushed in, balancing two paper cups and a chart on a tray. She was already speaking as she yanked the screeching curtain shut behind her. Her voice was at once conspiratorial and blaring.

"Listen now, honey. I know everybody in here has been saying this, but I promise I'm dead serious when I say this is very important what I'm going to say. First now, I want just one more form signed please for me." She passed the chart to the woman, proffering a pen tethered to her neck by a fraying string. The woman signed. The nurse held up each cup in demonstration.

"This one is water. This one's medicine. I need you to take them both for me."

The woman's eyes closed into slits, blocking out the white lights above.

"What is it?"

"Water, hon. Water and a little pill."

"I mean, what for?"

The nurse looked concerned. She leaned forward, crassly mothering, her face bearing the gleaming preview of a secret.

"Much better just to swallow, now, no questions asked. It's a] I a matter of time with this one, so you'll do this little thing for me now won't you?" She tipped the cup forward. The woman drew away, her lips a snarl. The nurse glanced at the closed curtain and smiled tightly.

"Just take it. For me. You don't know how many lives you're making harder this way.

The woman closed her eyes completely. She did not move under the sheet. When she spoke her eyes crinkled at the edges.

"Please, don't rape me with your medicine," she said evenly. "Tell me what all this is for. Can you do that? For me?"

The nurse tapped her chart and looked away.

"For the love of God, then! Surely you must understand -- unfortunate undesirable consequences -- of your situation. This will take care of all that for you. We're just trying to take care of you, for Christsake!"

"Take care of what? Take what of me?" the woman asked. "I beg your pardon?"

( She'd said it. I knew. She had finally said 'for you', but this time most of all she meant 'for me.' She was that kind of lady. Had my mother been there, the two would have spoken quietly and professionally outside the curtain, pretending I couldn't hear. They would have entered together. My mother would have soothingly commanded while the nurse handed me the tray. They would have worked well as a team. 'An efficient and effective whole,' my mother would assert, or rather insert, into this little diatribe. Seems I'm saying enough for both of us, though. Thinking enough, feeling enough, for two. Three, maybe. Who counts these things?

As it was, the nurse waited with a sneer slipping uncertainly from her face. She chewed gently at the cord around her neck. She was waiting for the cups to be emptied and returned. She would tuck one into the next, crumple and dispose of them, for sanitary reasons. Hospitals are very clean. For a while, that can make a person feel secure. But soon you begin searching for just one fingerprint smeared somewhere, one dusty shoeshape on the linoleum. Even hotels have the occasional hair caught in a drawer, a bible page folded at the comer. The remains of identity. But it is fruitless to scan those spartan, utilitarian cubicles. When the search is surrendered, unfulfilled, the sterilized whiteness gains an eerie supernatural quality. 'Mat is the price paid for a clean and private space.

The nurse stood over me like an impatient guardian angel, hoping the pill she was charged with would soon disappear, dissolving somewhere in my unseen guts -- and my hot, guilty throat could be cleared again.

"The sooner you take it the better the chances -- that things will work. Out. It's all or nothing with that one. We don't like risks." Her eyebrows flickered as she glanced at her watch, then my chart.

I wondered how much those pages could tell. Maybe all this telling is unnecessary, in light of that chart, so organized and accurate. But it is destined only for a careful crumpling -- how long do they keep records? To them it is all a matter of process. Passing matters, to be crushed back into the earth with the paper cups -- for which she waited with growing irritation.

I didn't like her. But the day had made me partial. From the morning, it was a rare good lonesome kind, when each brief encounter only confirms the fresh solitude you feel. I feel. I felt.

I went for a walk. Thin-boned winter over, I wanted to find something else shot with the marrow of spring. For the first half of that walk in the park I felt complete, content, all on my own.

Now. I considered the cup and its contents. I considered working out the risks. Then I considered changing the kind of day it had started out being. Started out. Each brief encounter had confirmed my solitude. This was not enough.

The nurse sighed. Not unfeelingly, just not feeling.

I picked up the cup and looked inside. The pill was thick. Almost the size of a nickel.

"Could you maybe break it in two for me? It's so big, I don't think I could get it down all at once." She descended like a mother vulture, snapping the moon-like disk in halves and offering them with a smile. I smiled back.

"Thank you," I said.

I swallowed it with the water and passed her the cups.

"Thank you," I repeated as she left, ducking noiselessly around the curtain.

I opened my palm and looked at the pale half-moon in the middle. In my throat I felt the other half, half rounded and half scraping along the flesh.

I closed my fingers and pressed until all I felt on my skin was a soft powder. I blew it away in a small white cloud. I wiped the dirty palm on the sheet, and left my arm there on the outside, where I could stare at the mottled colouring of the skin and the little hairs sticking out. A caricature, a plain floppy forearm, almost comic in its grotesque contrast with the background of those sheets. It was reassuring, so I stared at it, gratefully alone again.

I closed my eyes and pictured one of the bleached piles of bird remains I've sometimes passed at the beach, other mornings. Featherless, faceless thing with names like .scapula', like the names of the tools the doctors use. They all look so weak and hollow. Should they be stepped on, even lightly, I expect they would crumble. Out of fears, I have never touched them. Some days they seem sacred, like cairns. Some days, I realize how filthy they are despite their dry whiteness. I let them lie, for either reason.

On the springless cot, I suddenly felt such bone-deep fragility, such an emptiness after all the days under the beating of that godly sun. It really had been a very sunny spring day.

It would be good to wait a while, I thought. To sleep and wait for a different feeling inside. A filling, blood, rage, and a release.

They all came.

Now to my girl again. There can be no third person for us. Where would one fit in?

She is teething, and my face is red. At least, I know, it is our own blood.