The Horses of the Night by Michael Cadnum Page A

I’ve always felt that to be loved by children is a very valuable sort of trust, and an honor.”
    â€œI like it when you look into my eyes.” This was, it struck me, an unusually frank and even romantic confession for a hospital lunchroom. But having said as much, I added, “Although I wonder, sometimes, what you see there.”
    She opened my hand. I had never realized what a sensitive instrument fingers could be, or how erogenous the human palm actually was. She gazed at me with such warmth—and such gentle amusement—that I nearly blushed. “I see a man who should have more faith in himself.”
    We made the rounds, visiting her patients. We stayed close to each other, mutually enlivened by the touch and feel of our bodies.
    They were all children that medicine had decreed incurable. She counseled them, listened to their dreams. She reassured them, but more than anything she understood them, and gave them a sense of companionship. She did it because, no matter what she might say, she loved the children more than anything in the world.
    Before they had wanted me to draw pictures. Now everyone wanted a puppet, “like Stuart’s.”
    Some of the rooms were like the private rooms of a home for the very old, for human beings aged beyond the expectations of nature. But in the bed, beneath the Porky Pig poster, there would be a child, withered as though with a century’s hardship, meager head on a huge white pillow.
    Stuart had the nearly bald head of a radiation victim. He had, Nona had told me, a disease very much like leukemia but hard to classify, a flaw in his bone marrow, a critical disease of the blood. He had been enduring for months, and at times seemed to be recovering and then on other days was faded to a figure that was almost translucent. His smile was corroded, his lips broken. He held out his hand for one of my better efforts of the day, a horse made out of cotton bond.
    â€œWhy is that you like horses so much?” I asked him, helping him fit the steed over his fingers.
    He spoke, and I couldn’t quite make out his words.
    â€œBecause they’re so strong,” said Nona, realizing that I had not understood Stuart.
    â€œLions are strong, too,” I said, really just making conversation to keep the sympathy in me from making it impossible to say anything at all. “And so are bulls.” But then I saw the look in Stuart’s eye. “But I can’t think of any animal that is stronger and faster than a horse.”
    His cheek wrinkled with a smile.
    Later, over coffee, I leaned forward and asked, “Stuart has time left, don’t you think?”
    She stirred her coffee, looked up, and then looked down at the plastic stirring stick.
    â€œI mean—a few months,” I said. “Maybe even a little longer.”
    â€œSome very strange things can happen. What they call miracles,” she said. “You never know.”
    â€œChildren have all kinds of reserves of energy.”
    â€œOf course they do,” she said.
    That night, once again, I gazed upward into the dark, unable to sleep. I didn’t want the prize. I did not want anything but Nona, and she was gone by then, in Seattle to do a radio show and tour the university there.
    Innocent .
    I was innocent, and that’s all there was to say or think. How could I have had anything at all to do with the death of two people, miles from me. Two people I liked.
    There was no question about it in my mind.

14
    GQ had once listed me as one of the “Ten Men Who Look Best in a Tux.” It was not the sort of honor I sought. It was my opinion that Tutankhamen’s mummy would look pretty good in a tuxedo.
    Even when the audience that filled Davies Hall was hushed there was that wash of sounds that makes the presence of a thousand people known. But then, as the envelope turned in the fingers of the master of ceremonies, and the thick, soft paper began to tear, the