She set the walker back against the wall, then stopped and looked at John for a moment before answering. “Late-stage lung cancer. What she said about dying in a month, well, she’ll be lucky to make it a week. It’s hard to believe she had the strength to get all the way up here.”
John nodded. “She seemed pretty strong to me.”
A few items from John’s bedside tray had been knocked to the floor, and now Becky stooped to pick them up. She set his book back on the tray, then noticed the blood on the sheet where the crazy woman had rested her hand. “Is that yours?”
“No.”
“I’ll get someone to come and change those. You know—” Becky had been walking toward the door, but now stopped and turned back.
“What?” John said.
“If what they’re saying about you is true, that you can heal people—” John started to say something, but Becky held up her hand. “Hey, all I mean to say is that if it’s true, and if you’ve been kept here for so long to protect you from people who want your help, it’s just…funny. That might not be the right word, but keeping you locked in a hospital, where all the really sick people are, it’s just the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.”
John laughed. “That never occurred to me. Where were you three days ago? I could have used that logic.”
Becky pulled the door open. “Minding my business, like a good little nurse. Don’t tell anyone I said that, okay. Just get out of here as soon as you can. When the news gets hold of this, it’s going to happen again.”
“Yeah,” John said. “Tomorrow. First thing. Thank you, Becky.”
John sat down in the cushioned chair near the window. Outside, the day was bright, the sky a crystalline blue, the trees below a vivid, eye-popping green. John suddenly wanted very much to be back out in the world, but now had to wonder whether it was a world that would ever allow him to be who he had been.
* * *
During the drive with Suzie from the hospital back to his apartment, John’s sense of unreality was only amplified. Though he had known Suzie for three years, he felt as though he was riding with a stranger. She was jumpy and quiet and John couldn’t really blame her. Their exit from the hospital had been a circus; the hospital’s entrance was thronged with reporters. To avoid them, Suzie picked John up in the hospital’s parking garage. Even so, there were dozens of flashes inches from the windows as they exited the multi-level deck. As they made the turn onto Hawthorne Avenue, several vans and at least two reporters on motorcycles had given chase. When Suzie stopped at traffic lights, the vans would pull up beside them, sometimes even in the lanes for oncoming traffic, and well-coifed men and women would hang out of the vehicles, tapping on John’s window with the ends of microphones. It was only a piece of swift thinking on Suzie’s part that got them free. Without signaling, she took a sharp left across traffic into the parking garage of a shopping complex that boasted signs for Target, Marshalls, and Circuit City. Never slowing to see if she had lost their pursuers, she wove in and out of rows of parked cars and then took the ramp down to the lowest level of the structure. Quickly, she backed into a space and killed the engine.
“Down,” she said to John, and they both slumped in their seats. A few moments later, a lone news van, this one with Channel 6 News tattooed in a rainbow of colors across its side, hurried by, and then nothing.
John glanced over at Suzie, hardly aware that he’d been holding his breath. “Jesus,” he whispered. “Nice driving, Dale.” They both broke into a fit of giggles and when Suzie was able, she pulled cautiously out of the parking spot and navigated her way out of the parking garage.
Soon, they were driving in total anonymity along Pecan Avenue, headed north toward John’s apartment complex.
“You okay?” Suzie said, glancing over at him.
“Sure,” John said. “I appreciate you picking me up.”
Suzie smiled. “This might be my one chance at celebrity. You never know. Maybe my photo will even be in the Observer.”
“Next to a caption that reads, ‘Barron and Mystery Woman Sneak out Back Door of Presbyterian Hospital.’ Jesus, I hope all this dies down soon.”
“It will,” Suzie said. “I give it a week more, tops. Then there’ll be some natural disaster or we’ll stick our noses into another war and it’ll be ‘goodbye, John Barron, hello new…whatever.’”
“You’re probably right.” John rubbed his temples softly, trying to soothe the low-level headache that had never truly left since the day he woke in the hospital. Doctor Barnes had told him that the headaches probably would have abated more quickly—they had been terrible at first, real meat-grinders that turned his vision red and wreaked havoc on his equilibrium—but there was an issue with the quality of sleep he’d been getting at the hospital. When she’d told him that, John had laughed.
Barnes told him that whatever was upsetting his sleep was so powerful that none of the usual dream-inhibiting drugs had been effective in stopping it. No matter what they gave him, his brainwaves were unaltered. In fact, Barnes said, his brainwaves didn’t come anywhere close to resembling the typical pattern of a human in dream-state.
Normally, when a person is dreaming, Barnes had said, the majority of the brain enters a phase of relative inactivity—a state of rest that allowed the brain to recharge. The only part of the brain where activity would actually increase was a tiny area called the limbic system, the area also credited with controlling emotion.
Only in John’s case, this wasn’t happening. Instead, when John was asleep, his brain appeared to be fully awake, at least for long stretches of time. There was no REM that might signify entry into deep sleep, no deviation of his alpha or beta waves that would signal relaxation or excitement in disparate zones of John’s mind. Although his eyes were closed and John appeared, for all intents and purposes, to be sleeping, the routine brain-scans he had undergone while hospitalized showed him to be wide awake. More than wide awake, really. The firing in John’s brain actually intensified during the nighttime hours, as if he were being asked to process immense amounts of raw information.
And the strangest part, Barnes said, was that it had become nearly impossible to wake him up once he’d fallen into this seemingly fallacious sleep state. From dusk until dawn, John was all but unresponsive, except, of course, for his periodic attempts to sleepwalk. Those the staff had impeded with straps, confining John to the bed.
Amazing, Barnes had said. A new type of sleep disorder. If it could indeed be called a “sleep” disorder at all.
Swell.
“Hey,” Suzie said, jolting John from his thoughts. “Did it really happen like they said on the news? She just came in and locked the door? That must have been scary as hell.”
“It was,” John said, then paused. “But I understand where she was coming from. She’s dying, and she thought I could help her.”
“Could you have?” Suzie asked and sneaked a look over at him.
“Are you asking me if I’m really a ‘healer’?” John made quotes with his fingers. “If I could have touched her and made her cancer vanish? Just, poof, you’re healed, go get an ice cream cone?” John heard the edge in his voice and tried to hold it down.
“Yeah, I guess.”
“No,” John said and looked back out his window. “I don’t know exactly what happened at school that day, but it had to be some kind of mass delusion. Someone saw Kyra get hit by a car and reacted hysterically, then everyone else kept stepping it up until we were all seeing something that just wasn’t there.”
“There were those pictures.”
“Photoshop,” John said. “I bet they came in hours after the accident. Some asshole cheating a couple bucks out of some magazine. Whatever.”
“That wasn’t just some asshole,” Suzie said. “It was Jerry Soames. He’s been driving a new Jetta to school the past few days.”
John grunted. “Jerry Soames. Figures, the prick. Still, if anyone would be good with Photoshop, it would be that little perv.”
Suzie nodded and kept her eyes on the road. After a moment, she said, “When that woman came into your room yesterday, why didn’t you just touch her and prove that it was all bullshit, then?”
John could think of a dozen things to say in response—that he’d felt attacked, cornered like a wounded animal trying to protect itself; that in spite of himself, he’d been disturbed, even disgusted by the woman; that if the cop hadn’t grabbed her, he would have done what she wanted—but instead he let the silence stretch out. The truth was that, in the very first moment he had seen the crazy woman come into his room, John had known that whatever else happened, he must not allow her to touch him, that doing so would kill him, without question. Where that imperative had come from, he didn’t know, but he couldn’t deny that he had felt it. He had no answer he wanted to offer, and so he chose instead to say nothing.
They parked in front of John’s apartment building. His car was there, which meant someone had driven it here from school.
Suzie saw him looking and said, “I hope you don’t mind. We thought it would make things easier for you.”
“It’s great,” John said, feeling absurdly touched that he’d been thought of in such a considerate way. “Thanks.” They grabbed John’s few belongings, mostly t-shirts and underwear his mother had purchased for him at Target, and headed up to his floor.
In front of his door stood five or six reporters with their cameramen in tow. When the first saw John, he tossed aside the cigarette he’d been smoking and closed fast. “Hey, John,” he said, the others now falling in behind him. “Want to make a comment, get your side of the story out there? I work for CBS, man. You know what that means? Big money. Whaddayasay, partner?”
John pushed through the crowd, pulling Suzie along behind him. He could hear the reporters’ tones changing from quiet faux-respect to out and out irritation. John was an America and Americans loved money and being on TV. They couldn’t understand why he didn’t want those things.
John felt his irritation growing and knew that if he didn’t get away from them soon, he’d say something he might regret. Somehow, he managed to get his key into the lock and then he and Suzie were inside, the reporters just a smattering of muted voices outside the door. John leaned against the wall and exhaled.
“Well, this place has really gone to shit, hasn’t it?” Suzie said as she glanced around the stale-smelling apartment.
A thin light shone in through the drawn curtains and revealed a fine layer of dust on the coffee table in the living room and on the bookshelves along the wall. It looked like no one had lived in the apartment in months, not ten days. John tried to remember the last time he’d cleaned and couldn’t recall.
“I wasn’t expecting company,” he said. “I think you might have been the last person I had in here.”
She looked at him with an eyebrow raised. “Are you serious? All this time and you’ve never been with anyone else?”
John shook his head and dropped his bag in the living room. “Nope. Not much the ladies’ man, I guess.”
Suzie looked at him for so long he began to feel uncomfortable.
“What?” he said.
She shrugged. “Nothing. I guess I just always figured you were full of crap, you know? That you just wanted to get rid of me because something better had come along.”
“No,” John said quietly. “I meant what I told you.” Three years ago, John had broken off a six-month relationship with Suzie. He’d had two relationships in his life, two that meant anything to him, anyway, and both had ended the same way—one day, he just knew it had been too long, that he was putting someone he cared about in a bad situation, and that things had to end. The sensation wasn’t unlike the one he got while home in Pennsylvania with his parents, a tingling, nagging feeling that if he didn’t move, leave, jump, whatever, things would get ugly and people—people he genuinely loved—would get hurt.
And had he loved Suzie? In a way. She was perhaps the kindest and most selfless woman he’d ever known, always the first to offer help, a ride, anything that might make another person’s life easier. When John had arrived at Denton, he had come off a string of moves and was hoping to settle down, at least for a couple of years, in a single place. He had just been tired. His relationship with Suzie had taken shape organically, growing out of long talks in the teacher’s lounge and over lunch in his room. There had been dinners and movies and long, leisurely breakfasts eaten in bed, the crossword spread between them. Then Suzie raised the idea that they move in together. Within days, John had broken up with her, not cruelly, but firmly. He counted himself unbelievably fortunate that Suzie had chosen to stay in his life; he wouldn’t have blamed her if she’d never wanted to talk to him again, but after a brief cooling off period, she’d begun talking to him once more, understanding, perhaps, that what he had done was not his choice at all.
“Are you going to be okay here?” Suzie said. Her concern sounded sincere, and John wondered what he’d done to deserve it. Regardless, he appreciated it.
“I’ll be fine,” he said, thinking: will I? Because I don’t think so. I don’t think so at all.
“Okay, then,” Suzie said. She hugged John tightly, pecked his cheek, and then headed for the door. “I’m glad you’re okay. Call if you need anything.” She slipped out and had closed the door before he could respond.
* * *
John went around the place with a can of Pledge and a rag, dusting, straightening. Though he was tired, his legs shaky with the lack of use over the last week and a half, he even managed to vacuum before collapsing on the futon.
Twenty minutes later, he realized that he’d been staring at one point on the wall, seeing nothing.
He got up and walked outside to the mailboxes. There was nothing in his box but a handwritten note that said: Your mail is being held in the clubhouse. As he turned to head in that direction, a voice called out, “Hey, John, how ‘bout a couple of words?” He looked toward the gate separating the complex from Harris Boulevard and saw five or six reporters with cameramen in tow. He dropped his head and picked up his pace.
The woman at the desk in the clubhouse did a double-take when John walked in. He’d seen her a dozen times before and didn’t know why she’d react so strangely. He handed her the note that had been in his box. She plucked the note from his fingers, making sure her fingers never came within inches of his.
“I think you have some mail for me,” he said.
Without a word, she went into the back room of the office and returned with an orange plastic milk carton full of haphazardly jutting envelopes.
John was dumbstruck. “You’re not serious,” he said.
The woman nodded, her eyebrows raised archly. “Hold on. There’s more.” She walked once more into the back room and this time returned with an actual Postal Service sack, USPS stamped in fading letters on the side. This too she set on the desk and then sat back down and looked pointedly away from John.
“Thanks,” John said. He slung the bag’s strap over his shoulder and hefted the milk crate, then left. He could feel the woman’s eyes boring into his back as he walked out. The twinge in his belly blossomed into a full-blown ache.
Back in the apartment, John cleared off the coffee table in the living room and sat down on the futon with the mail and a Diet Coke from the fridge. He chose an envelope at random from the crate, tore it open, and pulled out the yellow legal-sized sheet.
Mr. Barron,
Only you can help my little girl. She has cystic fibrosis and will die unless you heal her. Will you help her? Please call (761) 555-4585 and ask for Bob or Ellen. God bless you.
Bob and Ellen Greenburger
John put the sheet down and opened the next envelope.
John, kill yourself before it is too late. You are a devel and need to die. Buy a gun or hang yourself from a rope. It’s the right thing to do. If I dont read about you dieing in a week, I’ll come to your house do the job myself.
There was no signature on the second
note, only a mark that John thought was a plus-sign at first. Only several minutes later did he realize, not a plus-sign, dummy. A cross. The go-to signature of the Holy Crusader, especially when the Holy Crusader in question seemed hard pressed to spell one of every two words correctly.
For the next two hours, John worked his way through the letters; they broke down into two general categories. Help-me/help-this-or-that-person, or kill yourself, with the “help me”s jumping out to a sizeable two-to-one lead.
By the time he reached the last envelope, John felt dirty and guilty, though he didn’t know why. He’d prepared himself for the eventuality that something like this could happen, but had never really believed that it would. Not like this.
He turned the final envelope over in his hands and read the front. The script was neat, the postage mark from Kennett Square. That stopped him. Then he saw the name of the person who’d sent it. Constance Pelham. His fingers felt suddenly numb, and for a long time he just sat and stared at the envelope, wondering if his mind might be playing with him.
Chapter 5
Rose woke at seven-thirty in the evening and went upstairs to shower in the bathroom of the master suite.
As she climbed the stairs, she shook her head, trying to clear it of the scene she was seeing, the one she always woke to: a small, neat apartment. Moving around in it, making dinner, pouring a glass of red wine. She shook her head again. Goddamn if these fucking hallucinations weren’t creepy. Mundane, even prosaic, but creepy, like being two people at once. But it was starting to fade now, thank God.
Like the rest of the beach house, the bathroom was garish, painted a shimmering gold, a gilded gold chandelier hanging from the vaulted ceiling, purple towels draped over the towel-bars. The shower itself was done in the Mediterranean style, open to the rest of the cavernous bathroom, no shower doors, floored with rough-hewn marble.
She turned the water on as hot as it would go and let the steam build up until the bathroom was tropical, the air nearly opaque. Then, her bare skin already beaded with perspiration, she turned the water down to a tolerable level of warmth and stepped into the shower.