The World of the End Read Online Free PDF Page B

eternal rest. Hanna taught her something about human kindness and, had she stayed alive, she would surely have said “hi” as she passed her on the street. Ann felt she owed her a favor in return, and asked the hospital director to be charged with caring for the patients on life support.
    Ten years passed as Ann eased the comatose into even deeper sleep. During that time, her reputation grew until, at age forty-six, after her forty-ninth departed patient, she decided that she would retire after one hundred. The director of the hospital, perhaps assuming that round numbers hint at rationality, agreed to her terms: the hundredth deceased patient would ring the freedom bells for the “Angel of Death.” He even promised her an enhanced pension package and took an interest in her post-career plans.
    She shrugged and said, “All my life I’ve cared for others; when I retire I’ll care for myself.” Beyond a vague feeling in her gut, she had no idea what that meant. But then, two years later, she came across the health club and felt her stomach twist into knots. The Spot. During that year, Ann feverishly surveyed several candidates. Each lingering glance she allowed herself made the rest of her walk home an uncomfortably wet affair. The following year, she chose her Romeo, the man whose name she didn’t know, who wreaked havoc inside her. The harder she tried to banish him from her mind, the more entrenched he became. Those five intoxicating minutes in front of the health club window so dominated her mind that only as she stared at the wall at night, a moment before disconnecting herself from the animated world, was she able to recognize her menacing addiction.
    With each new morning came fresh denial. She sailed past the window without so much as a glance in the direction of the orphaned machines, emerging empowered and inoculated against the club’s clawing gravity. But one December day, when her guard was down, just as she was contemplating how to convince the relatives of a comatose patient to authorize his inevitable transformation, the Spot emerged in her mind, sprouting into reality, spreading the dark gravitational force of physical attraction, a corrupting power that yearned to drag her headlong into the thick of a wild frenzy, pulling her face-to-face with a beautiful, sculpted body, which scrubbed her senses clean of all thoughts beyond the small drops of sweat that slid down an athletic chest, over the hard boxes of his stomach, pausing for an interlude at his belly button and thieving their way directly down the wet slopes of her desire, slipping under the elastic band of her panties, making it difficult to walk. He turned around, steel and flesh melding as his bottom rhythmically rose and fell, and Ann’s pupils were riveted to the image, refusing to believe that winter could bring such throbbing heat, as she hid under an increasingly concave umbrella, letting, at last, the cascading water wash the scum from her feverish mind. Ann ran for her life. The umbrella flew out of her slippery hand and bounded gracefully over a stretch of film-coated puddles. When the nurse’s feet came to a stop in front of her door, she knew she was sick. Out of work for four days on account of the flu, a collaboration of the pouring rain and the Spot, she vowed, on the fifth day, to shake the addiction.
    For a full grueling week, she came home from the hospital and didn’t dare raise her eyes as she passed the health club, pushing her feet past the Spot, repressing the familiar sensations of pleasure. On the eighth day, she allowed herself a glance. Once again, six months passed during which Ann succumbed to the Spot and returned to her sordid ways. Luckily, her frozen features masked her private turmoil. One time, in the eye of a sexual storm, she met a colleague from the oncology ward and was able to hold an agreeable conversation, as though her athlete’s tongue wasn’t lapping at her insides, shocking her to the core.