The light was just right so I could see the flash of green deep within my hostess' eyes. It was the green of a long-festering wound.
Her husband was one of my casualties, too, but his clothing covered the swelling of the injured spot. The girl he was talking to was pretty, but she was one of the half-dead. Before the party was over, however, she would come to life with the shock of pain. When I hit them, they know it.
I glanced around at the party-goers, many of whom exhibited the evidences of their wounds like the medieval beggars who hoped to win sympathy and alms by thrusting their monstrous deformities under your nose.
There was the financier whose face-twisting tic was supposed to spring from worry over business. I alone knew that it wasn't business that caused it, that he looked to his wife for healing, and she wouldn't give it to him.
And there was the thin-lipped woman whose wound was the worst of all, because she couldn't feel it and would not even admit it existed. But I could see her hurt in the disapproving looks she gave to those who drank, who laughed loudly, who spilled cigarette ashes on the rug, who said anything not absolutely out of Mrs. Grundy. I could read it in the tongue she used as a file across the nerves of her husband.
I wandered around a while, drinking champagne and listening to the conversation of the wounded and the unwounded. It was the same as it was in the beginning of my profession, a feverish interest in themselves on the part of the unwounded and a feverish interest in their healers on the part of the wounded.
After a while, just as I was about to open my violin case and go to work, I saw the young woman enter—the one who had recognized me. She still had the 3-D glasses. She carried them in her hand now, but she put them on to glance around the room. It was just my luck for her to be one of the invited. I tried to evade her search but she was persistent.
She swept triumphantly towards me finally. She carried a large cardboard box in her arms. She halted in front of me and set the box at her feet. Certain she could identify me from now on, she then removed her glasses.
She was very beautiful, healthy-looking, and with no outward signs of her wounds.
If it hadn't been that her eyes were so bright I'd have thought she was one of the half-dead. But there was no mistaking the phosphorescent glow of the warm wound deep within her eyes.