Your Heart Belongs to Me

give you a few chips of ice to let melt in your mouth.”
    “All right.”
    At the nightstand, Wally removed the stopper from an insulated carafe. With a long-handled spoon, such a shiny spoon, he fished out a piece of ice, glimmering ice, and fed it to Ryan.
    After allowing his patient three chips of ice, he stoppered the carafe and put down the spoon.
    Studying his wristwatch, Wally Dunnaman timed Ryan’s pulse.
    In the yellow dream, neither the loving presence nor the hateful one had been this man. Nothing in this room, in this hospital, had inspired the dream.
    Releasing Ryan’s wrist, Wally said, “You need to sleep.”
    In some way that Ryan could not explain, the reality of the dream equaled the reality of this room, neither superior to the other. He knew the truth of that in his bones, although he did not understand it.
    “Sleep now,” Wally urged.
    If sleep was a little death, as some poet had once written, this sleep would be more of a death than any other to which Ryan had given himself. He must resist it.
    Yet he lowered his head again to the pillow, and he could not lift it.
    Helpless and at risk.
    He had made a mistake. He didn’t know the nature of the mistake, but he felt the weight of it, holding him down.
    As he strained to keep his eyes open, every surface with a sheen became a surface with a shine, every shine a glare, every glossiness a blinding brilliance.
     

     
    Bells. The bells foretold, and now the bells.
    Tolling, tolling, tolling, rolling, rolling, rolling, a solemn monody of bells shook Ryan out of sleep.
    He first thought they were dream bells, but the clamor persisted as he strove to find the strength to pull himself upright, both hands gripping the bed railing.
    Darkness still owned the world beyond the window, and the male nurse stood on this side of the glass, looking out, gazing down, into waves of rising sound.
    Huge heavy bells shook the night, as though they meant to shake it down, such melancholy menace in their tone.
    Ryan spoke more than once before Wally Dunnaman heard him and glanced toward the bed, raising his voice to say, “There’s a church across the street.”
    When first conducted to the room, Ryan had seen that house of worship in the next block. The bell tower rose above this fourth-floor window.
    “They shouldn’t be ringing at this hour,” Wally said. “And not this much. No lights in the place.”
    The strangely glossy shadows seemed to shiver with the tolling, such a moaning and a groaning, a hard insistent rolling.
    The window-rattling, wall-strumming, bone-shivering clangor frightened Ryan, rang thickly in his blood, and made his heart pound like a hammer coming down. This swollen heart was still his own, so weak and so diseased, and he feared it might be tested to destruction by these thunderous peals.
    He recalled his thought upon waking: Bells. The bells foretold, and now the bells.
    Foretold when, by whom, and with what meaning?
    If not for the sedative that fouled his blood and muddied his mind, he thought he would know the answer to at least two parts of that question.
    But the drug not only lacquered every surface in the room, not only buffed a shine on every shadow, but also afflicted him with synesthesia, so he smelled the sound as well as heard it. The reek of ferric hydroxide, ferric oxide, call it rust, washed in bitter waves across the bed.
    Interminable tolling, bells and bells and still more bells, knocked from Ryan all sense of time, and it seemed to him that soon it would knock sanity from him, as well.
    Eventually raising his voice above the clangor, Wally Dunnaman said, “A police car down below. Ah, and another!”
    Under the weight of the booming bells, Ryan fell back, his head once more upon the pillow.
    He was helpless and at risk, risk, risk.
    With a kind of fractured desperation that he could not focus to his benefit, he sorted through his broken thoughts, trying to piece them together like fragments of crockery. Something very wrong had happened that he still had time to rectify, if only he were able to understand what needed to be put right.
    The bells began to toll less aggressively, their rage subsiding to anger, anger to sullenness, and sullenness to one final protracted groan that sounded like a great heavy door moaning closed on rusted hinges.
    In the silence of the bells, as once more the sedative slowly drew over him its velvet thrall, Ryan felt tears on his cheeks and licked at the salt in the corner of his