My senses would often cause me pain by bombarding me with more stimulus than I could handle. And when I was overwhelmed, the old screams were at their loudest. The nurses tried their best to accommodate my condition. The poor women...I was a terror to them. I would yell at them, call them fools, and even throw things at them. I was particularly nasty to one young nurse named Katherine.
A few years back, I tracked Katherine down to the Waters of Life hospital here in Mainline. Fate, I suppose, sometimes works to the benefit of man and monster. I paid her a visit as Lee Walker and she remembered me not as a terror but as a poor suffering soldier that she prayed for every night and had kept in her prayers after the war.
She laughed when I apologized for how I behaved. She said it was not me that thrashed about and threw pillows at her but my sickness and that she was glad I was functioning in civilian life.
I cried. I cried because of how much she truly believed what she said. How I wish I could have been just Lee Walker home from the war--just to keep such a noble a person from having to tell a lie!
I asked Katherine to keep praying for me and she told me she would.
Later, I had George Douglas slip a wallet full of money into her purse with a note attached saying to keep it and that it was a gift. I wanted some good to come to Katherine from my life, but all I could think of was to give her money.
What else could I have done?
I hope it brought her some good, what little I could do for her.
From:
I thought it illustrated a lot of things about the Trespasser at once--his hopeless resignation that he is a monster to his core, his pathetic helplessness when it comes to interacting with people outside his colorful pulp-world, and how he keeps normal people at arm's length because he fears his inherent violence will spread to them.