And how am I supposed to get that? Mr. Wojakowski’s a compulsive liar, Mr. Briarley can’t remember, Amelia Tanaka refuses to talk, Coma Carl—“Coma Carl,” she said out loud. She wasn’t the only one who had heard him. Guadalupe had, too, and his wife. If there was something in his ramblings that pointed clearly to the Titanic-
She called up his file again. He had said, “smoke” and “ohhh . . . grand,” but neither were definitive. She scrolled down the screen. “Water . . . have to . . . ” Guadalupe had written, “ . . . gone . . . ” The boats are gone?
Someone knocked on the door. Mr. Mandrake, Joanna thought, and froze. “Joanna?” Richard called. “Are you in there?”
“Just a minute,” she said. She cleared the screen, laid Mr.Wojakowski’s file on top of the transcripts, and opened the door.
“Hi,” Richard said, “I just wanted to tell you I’m going to be out of the lab for a while. I’ll be up in Dr. Jamison’s office on eighth if you need me for anything. I’m hoping she’ll be able to look at Mrs. Troudtheim’s scans and see something I can’t.”
“Cortisol wasn’t present in Mrs. Troudtheim’s other NDEs?” Joanna said, leaning against the door so he wouldn’t come in.
“No, it was there in spades.” He raked his hand through his hair. “Unfortunately, it and DABA were also present in one of Amelia Tanaka’s, two of yours, and three of Mr. Sage’s, including his record-breaking twenty-eight-minute one.”
“So you’re not going to send Mrs. Troudtheim under?” Joanna asked hopefully.
“No, I’ve still got a couple of other ideas. One’s the thetaasparcine.”
“I thought you said it wasn’t an inhibitor?”
“It’s not, but it might abort the NDE some other way. And you kicked out when I lowered the dosage. That may mean Mrs. Troudtheim’s NDE threshold is higher than normal, so I’m going to raise the dosage and see if that keeps her in. That’s why I came down. I wanted to make sure two o’clock would work for you. I’m meeting with Dr. Jamison at one, but I’ll be back in plenty of time, and I told Tish to be here at one-thirty in case Mrs. Troudtheim shows up early. So,” he said, slapping the doorjamb with the flat of his hand. “See you at two o’clock.”
“Yes,” she said, “I should be finished by then,” and some of the regret in her voice must have come through because he leaned back in and said, “You know what? We’ve both been working way too hard. What do you say, when this is all over, we go out to dinner. Not Taco Pierre’s. A real restaurant.”
When this is all over. “I’d like that,” Joanna said.
“So would I,” he said, and smiled at her. “I’ve missed you these last few days.”
“Me, too,” Joanna said.
“Oh, and I’d keep your door shut if I were you. Mandrake was just up in the lab looking for you. I told him you were in the cafeteria.”
“Thank you,” Joanna said.
“ ‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy,’ ” he intoned, grinning, and disappeared into the elevator.
Joanna shut and locked the door and went back to searching through Guadalupe’s reports. “ . . . have to . . . can’t . . . patches . . . ” Patches?
I need to look at Guadalupe’s actual notes, Joanna thought, and got out the sheaf of prescription-pad forms and scraps of paper that Guadalupe had jotted them down on. The first one, written on the back of a patient menu form, said, “Vietcong POW again. No intelligible words. Pulled IV out.” “ . . . smoke . . . ” The next one, on a sheet from a prescription pad, said, “ . . . can’t . . . two . . . ” Or “too,” as in “too far for her to come” ? Or was he trying to say “have to . . . ” again? Have to what?
Most of them were short. “Boating on the lake” or “mumbled a lot. Nothing intelligible,” or the ominous “very quiet all day.” Here was a long one, on the back of a pharmaceutical-company ad. “Nothing I could make out on my shift yesterday. Sub on the three-to-eleven and Paula forgot to tell her, so no record of that shift. I asked her today if he said anything, and she said no, just humming. She couldn’t make out the tune either, but said it sounded like a hymn.”
A hymn. Coma Carl droning, long, long, short, short, long. She flipped back to the computer and typed in “humming,” looking for her own notes. “Long, long, short, short,” she had written. “Descending scale.”
“Hmmm, hmmm, hm, hm, hm, hmm,” she hummed, trying it out. “Half note, half note, quarter note . . . ”
“Nearer, My God, to Thee.”
On tape. Outside confirmation. She leaped up and grabbed the box of tapes. It was on the day she’d met Richard, when was that? January the ninth. She clattered through the pile of tapes, looking for the date. Here it was. She jammed it in the recorder and hit “play.”
“It was dark . . . ” Mrs. Davenport droned. She fast-forwarded. “And then I saw myself at my eighth birthday party. I was playing Pin the Tail on the Donkey, and . . . ” Fast-forward. “ . . . my wedding . . . ” Fast-forward. “And the angel handed me a telegram.”
She fast-forwarded again, too far, there was only silence. She rewound, and here it was. Coma Carl humming, agonizingly slowly. She played it through, making notations on a memo pad, lines for the length of the note, arrows for pitch-long, long, the pitch dropping with each note, short, long—wishing she could read music. Did the tune of “Nearer, My God, to Thee” go up or down?
She hummed the opening bars, trying to stretch the notes out to match Coma Carl’s glacial humming, but it was no good. The tune could have been anything. I need to speed it up, she thought. She rewound to the beginning and then fast-forwarded, but it was just a whir, and there was no way on her little recorder to control the speed.
I need a fancy stereo, she thought, and tried to think who might have one. Kit? If she had one, Joanna could go listen to the tape and pick up the book at the same time, but she couldn’t remember any stereo equipment in Mr. Briarley’s library, not even a record player. Kit might have one up in her room, though. She called Kit, but the line was busy.
All right, who here in the hospital? Maisie’s tape player was a pink plastic affair, probably worse than her minirecorder. Vielle? No, all they had in the lounge in the ER was an eight-track player, “because nobody’s been in here long enough to listen to any music since 1974,” Vielle had complained one hectic night.
She squinted at the minirecorder, trying to remember where she’d seen a tape recorder. In one of the offices, where they listened to music while they were working. Billing or Personnel. Records, she decided. She snapped the tape out of the minirecorder, jammed it in her pocket, and ran down to Records.
And her memory had been accurate. On the far wall, above the cubicles, was a bank of sophisticated-looking stereo equipment.But first she would have to get past the woman at the front desk, who looked solid and dedicated to following the rules. Almost before Joanna had gotten her name out, the woman had swiveled so she was facing a rack of printed papers and was holding her arm up in preparation for grabbing the appropriate form.
“I don’t think there’s a form for what I need . . . Zaneta,” Joanna said, reading the name off the sign on the woman’s desk. “I need a tape recorder that can play a tape at different speeds,” but Zaneta had already swiveled back to face her.
“This is Records,” Zaneta said. “You want Equipment next door.”
“No, I don’t want to requisition a tape recorder. I just want to borrow yours for a couple of minutes to listen to a tape,” she said, pulling the tape out of her pocket to illustrate. “My recorder doesn’t have a fast-forward that lets me control the speed, and I need—”
“Do you work here?” Zaneta said.
“Yes, my name’s Joanna Lander,” she said. “I work with Dr. Wright up in research,” and Zaneta swiveled to face her computer terminal. “All I want—”
“Lander?” Zaneta asked, typing. “L-a-n-d-e-r?”
“Yes,” Joanna said. “I need to transcribe
this tape, but a section of it needs to be listened to at a faster speed, and I wondered if I could—”
Joanna’s beeper went off. No, she thought, and reached in her pocket to turn it off, but Zaneta was already pushing the phone toward her. “You’re being paged,” she said severely.
Joanna gave up. Please don’t let it be Mr. Mandrake, she prayed, and called the operator.
“Call the fourth floor nurses’ station, stat,” the operator said. “Extension 428.”
Fourth floor. Coma Carl, she thought, and realized she had known this call was coming.
Zaneta was pushing a memo pad and pencil toward her. Joanna ignored it and punched in the extension. Guadalupe answered. “What is it, Guadalupe?” Joanna said. “Is it Coma Carl?”
“Yes, I’ve been trying to reach you. You haven’t seen Mrs. Aspinall, have you? We can’t find her anywhere,” and her stunned and shaken voice told Joanna all she needed to know.
“When did he die?” she said, thinking of him, all alone out there in a lifeboat, humming.
“Die?” Guadalupe said in that same stunned voice. “He didn’t. He’s awake.”
“ . . . Morse . . . Indian . . . ”
—THE ONLY TWO DISTINCT WORDS IN THE LAST SENTENCE HENRY DAVID THOREAU SPOKE
GUADALUPE WAS AT THE NURSES’ STATION, talking on the phone, when Joanna arrived. “Is he really awake?” Joanna asked, leaning over the counter.
Guadalupe put a hand up, signaling her to wait. “Yes. I’m trying to reach Dr. Cherikov,” she said into the receiver. “Well, can I speak to his nurse? It’s important.” She cupped her hand over the mouthpiece. “Yes, he’s really awake,” she said to Joanna, “and wouldn’t you know it, we can’t find his doctor. Or his wife. You didn’t happen to see Mrs. Aspinall on your way up here, did you?”
“No,” Joanna said. “Have you tried the cafeteria?”
“I’ve got an aide checking,” Guadalupe said. “Mrs. Aspinall’s been here day and night for two weeks, and she always tells us when she’s leaving. Except today. How long does it take to call his nurse to the phone?” she said impatiently.
“Has Carl said anything?” Joanna asked.
“He asked to see his wife,” Guadalupe said. “And he said he was hungry, but we can’t give him anything to eat because we don’t have any orders, and we can’t find his doctor. He isn’t answering his page.”
“Has he said anything about the coma?”
She shook her head. “Most coma patients—yes,” she said into the phone. “This is Guadalupe Santos over at Mercy General. I need to talk to Dr. Cherikov. It’s urgent. It’s about his patient Carl Aspinall.” There was a pause. “No,” Guadalupe said, and her tone made Joanna think the nurse had asked if he’d died, like she had. “He’s conscious.”
She cupped her hand over the receiver again and said to Joanna, “Paula went in to check his vitals about half an hour ago. She opened the curtains, and he said, ‘It isn’t dark.’Scared her half to death—I’ve been trying his pager,” she said into the phone. “Do you know where he went?”
She turned back to Joanna. “Most patients have very fuzzy memories of the time they spent in a semicomatose state, if that.”
And those memories will only get fuzzier with every moment that passes, Joanna thought, glancing in the direction of his room. I need to get in there now. “Can he have visitors?” she asked.
Guadalupe frowned. “I don’t know who’s in with—yes,” she said into the phone. “Harvest?” She grabbed a pen and jotted something down on a prescription pad. “Please have him call me as soon as he gets back.”
She hung up. “Dr. Cherikov is at lunch,” she said disgustedly, reaching for a phone book. “At the Harvest or Sfuzzi’s. He has them both written down on his calendar.” She began searching through the phone book. “Carl’s wife probably went to lunch, too. Harvest, Harvest.”
Joanna glanced toward his room again. She had to get in there and talk to him before his wife and Dr. Cherikov descended, but if they had somebody in there with him, and surely they did, a patient who’d just regained consciousness would hardly be left alone—
The elevator dinged, and Guadalupe and Joanna both looked down at where a nurse’s aide was emerging from the open doors. “Did you find her?” Guadalupe asked.
The aide walked toward them, shaking her head. “She wasn’t in the cafeteria. What about paging her?”
Guadalupe shook her head. “We don’t want to scare her half to death. We just want to get her up here.” She picked up the phone.
“What about the chapel?” Joanna asked.
“Corinne’s checking it,” Guadalupe said. She punched in a phone number, looking back and forth from it to the phone book. “Did you check the gift shop?” she asked the aide.
The aide nodded. “And the vending machines.”
“Did you check—This is Nurse Santos at Mercy General. I’m trying to locate Dr. Anton Cherikov. He’s having lunch there.” Pause. “No, I can’t page him.” Pause. “Well, would you please look? It’s an emergency.” She cupped her hand over the receiver again. “Did you check the solarium?” she said to the aide.
Neither of them was paying any attention to Joanna. She stepped away from the nurses’ station and, when Guadalupe glanced up, pointed to her watch and waved slightly. “I’ve checked everywhere,” the aide said. “I’ll bet she went home.”
“We’ve already called,” Guadalupe said. “She’s not there. I left a message.”
“Won’t that scare her, too?” the aide asked.
Joanna walked rapidly down the hall, on past Carl’s room, till she was out of sight of the nurses’ station. She stopped, waited. “You’re sure he’s not there?” Guadalupe said, and there was the sound of a phone being hung up, and a brief silence. “How do you spell Sfuzzi’s?”
“Sfuzzi’s? I don’t know. What is it?”
“A restaurant.”
More silence. Joanna came quietly back up the hall till she could see the nurses’ station. Guadalupe and the aide were both bent over the counter, looking at the open phone book. Joanna ducked quickly, silently across the hall to Carl’s room.
All I need is a minute, she thought, looking in the door. There wasn’t a nurse in the room. She slipped in. All I need is to ask him whether he was on the Titanic, she thought, pulling the door nearly shut. Before he forgets, before—
“Hello,” a voice said from the bed. She turned and looked at the gray-haired man sitting up in the bed, wearing blue pajamas. “Who are you?” he asked.
For a long, heart-pounding minute, she thought, I’ve sneaked in the wrong room, and how am I going to explain this to Guadalupe? How am I going to explain this to Richard?
“Did they find my wife?” the man asked, and she saw, like one of those trick pictures shifting suddenly into focus, that it was Coma Carl.
It was not that he looked like a different person. It was that he looked like a person where before he had been an empty shell. His concave chest, his thin arms looked filled out, as if he had gained weight, even though that was impossible, and his face, covered with the same gray stubble, looked occupied,like a house where the owners have suddenly come home. His gray-brown hair, which the aides had kept neatly combed back off his forehead, was parted on the side and fell almost boyishly over his forehead, and his eyes, which she had always thought were gray through the half-open slits, were dark brown.
She was gaping at him like an idiot. “I . . . ” she said, trying to remember what he had asked her.
“Are you one of my doctors?” he asked, looking at her lab coat.
“No,” she said. “I’m Joanna Lander. Do you remember me, Mr. Aspinall?”
He shook his head. “I don’t remember very much,” he said. His voice was different, too, still hoarse, but much stronger, deeper than his murmurings. “I was in a coma, you know.”
“I know,” she said, nodding. “That’s what I’d like to talk to you about. What you remember. I’d just like to ask
you a few questions, if that’s all right.”
It isn’t all right, she told herself. You need a waiver. The one his wife signed was only good when he was unconscious. You need to have him sign a release form. This is completely against protocol. But there wasn’t time to write one out, to explain it to him. The doctor or his wife could arrive any minute.
Joanna pulled a chair over to the bed, glancing anxiously at the door as it banged against the IV pole, and sat down. “Can you tell me what you remember, Mr. Aspinall?”
“I remember coming to the hospital,” he said. “Alicia drove me.”
Joanna reached carefully into her cardigan pocket for her minirecorder. It wasn’t there. I left it in my office, she thought, when I took the tape down to Records.
“I had a terrible headache,” he said. “I couldn’t see to drive.”
Joanna fished in her pocket for something to write with, but she didn’t even have one of those release forms she hadn’t had him sign. At least she had a pen. She glanced surreptitiously around the room, looking for something to write on, a menu, an envelope, anything. Guadalupe had taken the chart out with her, and there was nothing on the bedstand.
“She was going to take me to the doctor, but my headache kept getting worse—”
Joanna reached in the wastebasket and pulled out a discarded get-well card with a picture of a bluebird on the front. The bluebird had a letter in its mouth. “This get-well message is winging its way straight to you,” the card said on the inside. Joanna turned it over. There was nothing on the back.
“—so she brought me to the emergency room instead, and then . . . ” Carl’s voice trailed away and he stared straight ahead of him. “It was dark.”
Dark, Joanna thought, and her hand shook as she wrote the word.
“Alicia hates driving at night,” he said, “but she had to. It was so cold.” He reached back and touched his neck, tenderly, as if it still hurt. “I remember the doctor saying I had spinal meningitis, and then I remember them putting me in a wheelchair, and then I remember the nurse opening the curtains, and I was surprised it wasn’t dark.” He smiled across at Joanna. “And that’s pretty much it.”