Hideaway

  though the patterns of alpha and beta brain waves were those of a man in a profound sleep, they were not obviously indicative of anything as deep as a coma.

  When Jonas finally declared the patient out of immediate danger and ordered him moved to a private room on the fifth floor, Ken Nakamura and Kari Dovell elected to go home. Leaving Helga and Gina with the patient, Jonas accompanied the neurologist and the pediatrician to the scrub sinks, and eventually as far as the door to the staff parking lot. They discussed Harrison and what procedures might have to be performed on him in the morning, but for the most part they shared inconsequential small talk about hospital politics and gossip involving mutual acquaintances, as if they had not just participated in a miracle that should have made such banalities impossible.

  Beyond the glass door, the night looked cold and inhospitable. Rain had begun to fall. Puddles were filling every depression in the pavement, and in the reflected glow of the parking-lot lamps, they looked like shattered mirrors, collections of sharp silvery shards.

  Kari leaned against Jonas, kissed his cheek, clung to him for a moment. She seemed to want to say something but was unable to find the words. Then she pulled back, turned up the collar of her coat, and went out into the wind-driven rain.

  Lingering after Kari’s departure, Ken Nakamura said, “I hope you realize she’s a perfect match for you.”

  Through the rain-streaked glass door, Jonas watched the woman as she hurried toward her car. He would have been lying if he had said that he never looked at Kari as a woman. Though tall, rangy, and a formidable presence, she was also feminine. Sometimes he marveled at the delicacy of her wrists, at her swanlike neck that seemed too gracefully thin to support her head. Intellectually and emotionally she was stronger than she looked. Otherwise she couldn’t have dealt with the obstacles and challenges that surely had blocked her advance in the medical profession, which was still dominated by men for whom—in some cases—chauvinism was less a character trait than an article of faith.

  Ken said, “All you’d have to do is ask her, Jonas.”

  “I’m not free to do that,” Jonas said.

  “You can’t mourn Marion forever.”

  “It’s only been two years.”

  “Yeah, but you have to step back into life sometime.”

  “Not yet.”

  “Ever?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Outside, halfway across the parking lot, Kari Dovell had gotten into her car.

  “She won’t wait forever,” Ken said.

  “Goodnight, Ken.”

  “I can take a hint.”

  “Good,” Jonas said.

  Smiling ruefully, Ken pulled open the door, letting in a gust of wind that spat jewel-clear drops of rain on the gray tile floor. He hurried out into the night.

  Jonas turned away from the door and followed a series of hallways to the elevators. He went up to the fifth floor.

  He hadn’t needed to tell Ken and Kari that he would spend the night in the hospital. They knew he always stayed after an apparently successful reanimation. To them, resuscitation medicine was a fascinating new field, an interesting sideline to their primary work, a way to expand their professional knowledge and keep their minds flexible; every success was deeply satisfying, a reminder of why they had become physicians in the first place—to heal. But it was more than that to Jonas. Each reanimation was a battle won in an endless war with Death, not just a healing act but an act of defiance, an angry fist raised in the face of fate. Resuscitation medicine was his love, his passion, his definition of himself, his only reason for arising in the morning and getting on with life in a world that had otherwise become too colorless and purposeless to endure.

  He had submitted applications and proposals to half a dozen universities, seeking to teach in their medical schools in return for the establishment of a resuscitation-medicine research facility under his supervision, for which he felt able to raise a sizable part of the financing. He was well-known and widely respected both as a cardiovascular surgeon and a reanimation specialist, and he was confident that he would soon obtain the position he wanted. But he was impatient. He was no longer satisfied with supervising reanimations. He wanted to study the effects of short-term death on human cells, explore the mechanisms of free-radicals and free-radical scavengers, test his own theories, and find new ways to evict Death from those in whom it had already taken up tenancy.

  On the fifth floor, at the nurses’ station, he learned that Harrison had been taken to 518. It was a semi-private room, but an abundance of empty beds in the hospital insured that it would be effectively maintained as a private unit as long as Harrison was likely to need it.

  When Jonas entered 518, Helga and Gina were finishing with the patient, who was in the bed farthest from the door and nearest the rain-spotted window. They had gotten him into a hospital gown and hooked him to another electrocardiograph with a telemetry function that would reproduce his heart rhythms on a monitor at the nurses’ station. A bottle of clear fluid hung from a rack beside the bed, feeding an IV line into the patient’s left arm, which was already beginning to bruise from other intravenous injections administered by the paramedics earlier in the evening; the clear fluid was glucose enriched with an antibiotic to prevent dehydration and to guard against one of the many infections that could undo everything that had been achieved in the resuscitation room. Helga had smoothed Harrison’s hair with a comb that she was now tucking away in the nightstand drawer. Gina was delicately applying a lubricant to his eyelids to prevent them from sticking together, a danger with comatose patients who spent long periods of time without opening their eyes or even blinking and who sometimes suffered from diminished lachrymal-gland secretion.

  “Heart’s still steady as a metronome,” Gina said when she saw Jonas. “I have a hunch, before the end of the week, this one’s going to be out playing golf, dancing, doing whatever he wants.” She brushed at her bangs, which were an inch too long and hanging in her eyes. “He’s a lucky man.”

  “One hour at a time,” Jonas cautioned, knowing too well how Death liked to tease them by pretending to retreat, then returning in a rush to snatch away their victory.

  When Gina and Helga left for the night, Jonas turned off all the lights. Illuminated only by the faint fluorescent wash from the corridor and the green glow of the cardiac monitor, room 518 was replete with shadows.

  It was silent, too. The audio signal on the EKG had been turned off, leaving only the rhythmically bouncing light endlessly making its way across the screen. The only sounds were the soft moans of the wind at the window and the occasional faint tapping of rain against the glass.

  Jonas stood at the foot of the bed, looking at Harrison for a moment. Though he had saved the man’s life, he knew little about him. Thirty-eight years old. Five-ten, a hundred and sixty pounds. Brown hair, brown eyes. Excellent physical condition.

  But what of the inner person? Was Hatchford Benjamin Harrison a good man? Honest? Trustworthy? Faithful to his wife? Was he reasonably free of envy and greed, capable of mercy, aware of the difference between right and wrong?

  Did he have a kind heart?

  Did he love?

  In the heat of a resuscitation procedure, when seconds counted and there was too much to be done in too short a time, Jonas never dared to think about the central ethical dilemma facing any doctor who assumed the role of reanimator, for to think of it then might have inhibited him to the patient’s disadvantage. Afterward, there was time to doubt, to wonder.... Although a physician was morally committed and professionally obligated to saving lives wherever he could, were all lives worth saving? When Death took an evil man, wasn’t it wiser—and more ethically correct—to let him stay dead?

  If Harrison was a bad man, the evil that he committed upon resuming his life after leaving the hospital would in part be the responsibility of Jonas Nyebern. The pain Harrison caused others would to some extent stain Jonas’s soul, as well.

  Fortunately,
this time the dilemma seemed moot. Harrison appeared to be an upstanding citizen—a respected antique dealer, they said—married to an artist of some reputation, whose name Jonas recognized. A good artist had to be sensitive, perceptive, able to see the world more clearly than most people saw it. Didn’t she? If she was married to a bad man, she would know it, and she wouldn’t remain married to him. This time there was every reason to believe that a life had been saved that should have been saved.

  Jonas only wished his actions had always been so correct.

  He turned away from the bed and took two steps to the window. Five stories below, the nearly deserted parking lot lay under hooded pole lamps. The falling rain churned the puddles, so they appeared to be boiling, as if a subterranean fire consumed the blacktop from underneath.

  He could pick out the spot where Kari Dovell’s car had been parked, and he stared at it for a long time. He admired Kari enormously. He also found her attractive. Sometimes he dreamed of being with her, and it was a surprisingly comforting dream. He could admit to wanting her at times, as well, and to being pleased by the thought that she might also want him. But he did not need her. He needed nothing but his work, the satisfaction of occasionally beating Death, and the—

  “Something’s... out... there ...”

  The first word interrupted Jonas’s thoughts, but the voice was so thin and soft that he didn’t immediately perceive the source of it. He turned around, looking toward the open door, assuming the voice had come from the corridor, and only by the third word did he realize that the speaker was Harrison.

  The patient’s head was turned toward Jonas, but his eyes were focused on the window.

  Moving quickly to the side of the bed, Jonas glanced at the electrocardiograph and saw that Harrison’s heart was beating fast but, thank God, rhythmically.

  “Something’s ... out there,” Harrison repeated.

  His eyes were not, after all, focused on the window itself, on nothing so close as that, but on some distant point in the stormy night.

  “Just rain,” Jonas assured him.

  “No.”

  “Just a little winter rain.”

  “Something bad,” Harrison whispered.

  Hurried footsteps echoed in the corridor, and a young nurse burst through the open door, into the nearly dark room. Her name was Ramona Perez, and Jonas knew her to be competent and concerned.

  “Oh, Doctor Nyebern, good, you’re here. The telemetry unit, his heartbeat—”

  “Accelerated, yes, I know. He just woke up.”

  Ramona came to the bed and switched on the lamp above it, revealing the patient more clearly.

  Harrison was still staring beyond the rain-spotted window, as if oblivious of Jonas and the nurse. In a voice even softer than before, heavy with weariness, he repeated: “Something’s out there.” Then his eyes fluttered sleepily, and fell shut.

  “Mr. Harrison, can you hear me?” Jonas asked.

  The patient did not answer.

  The EKG showed a quickly de-accelerating heartbeat: from one-forty to one-twenty to one hundred beats a minute.

  “Mr. Harrison?”

  Ninety per minute. Eighty.

  “He’s asleep again,” Ramona said.

  “Appears to be.”

  “Just sleeping, though,” she said. “No question of it being a coma now.”

  “Not a coma,” Jonas agreed.

  “And he was speaking. Did he make sense?”

  “Sort of. But hard to tell,” Jonas said, leaning over the bed railing to study the man’s eyelids, which fluttered with the rapid movement of the eyes under them. REM sleep. Harrison was dreaming again.

  Outside, the rain suddenly began to fall harder than before. The wind picked up, too, and keened at the window.

  Ramona said, “The words I heard were clear, not slurred.”

  “No. Not slurred. And he spoke some complete sentences.”

  “Then he’s not aphasic,” she said. “That’s terrific.”

  Aphasia, the complete inability to speak or understand spoken or written language, was one of the most devastating forms of brain damage resulting from disease or injury. Thus affected, a patient was reduced to using gestures to communicate, and the inadequacy of pantomime soon cast him into deep depression, from which there was sometimes no coming back.

  Harrison was evidently free of that curse. If he was also free of paralysis, and if there were not too many holes in his memory, he had a good chance of eventually getting out of bed and leading a normal life.

  “Let’s not jump to conclusions,” Jonas said. “Let’s not build up any false hopes. He still has a long way to go. But you can enter on his record that he regained consciousness for the first time at eleven-thirty, two hours after resuscitation.”

  Harrison was murmuring in his sleep.

  Jonas leaned over the bed and put his ear close to the patient’s lips, which were barely moving. The words were faint, carried on his shallow exhalations. It was like a spectral voice heard on an open radio channel, broadcast from a station halfway around the world, bounced off a freak inversion layer high in the atmosphere and filtered through so much space and bad weather that it sounded mysterious and prophetic in spite of being less than half intelligible.

  “What’s he saying?” Ramona asked.

  With the howl of the storm rising outside, Jonas was unable to catch enough of Harrison’s words to be sure, but he thought the man was repeating what he’d said before: “Something’s ... out there....”

  Abruptly the wind shrieked, and rain drummed against the window so hard that it seemed certain to shatter the glass.

  14

  Vassago liked the rain. The storm clouds had plated over the sky, leaving no holes through which the too-bright moon could gaze. The downpour also veiled the glow of streetlamps and the headlights of oncoming cars, moderated the dazzle of neon signs, and in general softened the Orange County night, making it possible for him to drive with more comfort than could be provided by his sunglasses alone.

  He had traveled west from his hideaway, then north along the coast, in search of a bar where the lights might be low and a woman or two available for consideration. A lot of places were closed Mondays, and others didn’t appear too active that late at night, between the half-hour and the witching hour.

  At last he found a lounge in Newport Beach, along the Pacific Coast Highway. It was a tony joint with a canopy to the street, rows of miniature white lights defining the roof line, and a sign advertising DANCING WED THRU SAT/JOHNNY WILTON’S BIG BAND. Newport was the most affluent city in the county, with the world’s largest private yacht harbor, so almost any establishment that pretended to a monied clientele most likely had one. Beginning mid-week, valet parking was probably provided, which would not have been good for his purposes, since a valet was a potential witness, but on a rainy Monday no valet was in sight.

  He parked in the lot beside the club, and as he switched off the engine, the seizure hit him. He felt as if he’d received a mild but sustained electrical shock. His eyes rolled back in his head, and for a moment he thought he was having convulsions, because he was unable to breathe or swallow. An involuntary moan escaped him. The attack lasted only ten or fifteen seconds, and ended with three words that seemed to have been spoken inside his head: Something’s... out... there... It was not just a random thought sparked by some short-circuiting synapse in his brain, for it came to him in a distinct voice, with the timbre and inflection of spoken words as distinguished from thoughts. Not his own voice, either, but that of a stranger. He had an overpowering sense of another presence in the car, as well, as if a spirit had passed through some curtain between worlds to visit with him, an alien presence that was real in spite of being invisible. Then the episode ended as abruptly as it had begun.

  He sat for a while, waiting for a recurrence.

  Rain hammered on the roof.

  The car ticked and pinged as the engine cooled down.

  Whatever had happened,
it was over now.

  He tried to understand the experience. Had those words—Something’s out there—been a warning, a psychic premonition? A threat? To what did it refer?

  Beyond the car, there seemed to be nothing special about the night. Just rain. Blessed darkness. The distorted reflections of electric lights and signs shimmered on the wet pavement, in puddles, and in the torrents pouring along the overflowing gutters. Sparse traffic passed on Pacific Coast Highway, but as far as he could see, no one was on foot—and he could see as well as any cat.

  After a while he decided that he would understand the episode when he was meant to understand it. Nothing was to be gained by brooding over it. If it was a threat, from whatever source, it did not trouble him. He was incapable of fear. That was the best thing about having left the world of the living, even if he was temporarily stuck in the borderland this side of death: nothing in existence held any terror for him.

  Nevertheless, that inner voice had been one of the strangest things he had ever experienced. And he was not exactly without a store of strange experiences with which to compare it.

  He got out of his silver Camaro, slammed the door, and walked to the club entrance. The rain was cold. In the blustering wind, the fronds of the palm trees rattled like old bones.

  15

  Lindsey Harrison was also on the fifth floor, at the far end of the main corridor from her husband. Little of the room was revealed when Jonas entered and approached the side of the bed, for there was not even the green light from a cardiac monitor. The woman was barely visible.

  He wondered if he should try to wake her, and was surprised when she spoke:

  “Who’re you?”

  He said, “I thought you were asleep.”

  “Can’t sleep.”

  “Didn’t they give you something?”

  “It didn’t help.”

  As in her husband’s room, the rain drove against the window with sullen fury. Jonas could hear torrents cascading through the confines of a nearby aluminum downspout.

  “How do you feel?” he asked.

  “How the hell do you think I feel?” She tried to infuse the words with anger, but she was too exhausted and too depressed to manage it.

  He put down the bed railing, sat on the edge of the mattress, and held out one hand, assuming that her eyes were better adapted to the gloom than his were. “Give me your hand.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m Jonas Nyebern. I’m a doctor. I want to tell you about your husband, and somehow I think it’ll be better if you’ll just let me hold your hand.”

  She was silent.

  “Humor me,” he said.

  Although the woman believed her husband to be dead, Jonas did not mean to torment her by withholding his report of the resuscitation. From experience, he knew that good news of this sort could be as shocking to the recipient as bad news; it had to be delivered with care and sensitivity. She had been mildly delirious upon admission to the hospital, largely as a result of exposure and shock, but that condition had been swiftly remedied with the administration of heat and medication. She had been in possession of all her faculties for a few hours now, long enough to absorb her husband’s death and to begin to find her way toward a tentative accommodation of her loss. Though deep in grief and far from adjusted to her widowhood, she had by now found a ledge on the emotional cliff down which she had plunged, a narrow perch, a precarious stability—from which he was about to knock her loose.

  Still, he might have been more direct with her if he’d been able to bring her unalloyed good news. Unfortunately, he could not promise that her husband was going to be entirely his former self, unmarked by his experience, able to reenter his old life without a hitch. They would need hours, perhaps days, in which to examine and evaluate Harrison before they could hazard a prediction as to the likelihood of a full recovery. Thereafter, weeks or months of physical and occupational therapy might lie ahead for him, with no guarantee of effectiveness.

  Jonas was still waiting for her hand. At last she offered it diffidently.

  In his best bedside manner, he quickly outlined the basics of resuscitation medicine. When she began to realize why he thought she needed to know about such an esoteric subject, her grip on his hand suddenly grew tight.

  16

  In room 518, Hatch foundered in a sea of bad dreams that were nothing but disassociated images melding into one another without even the illogical narrative flow that usually shaped nightmares. Wind-whipped snow. A huge Ferris wheel sometimes bedecked with festive lights, sometimes dark and broken and ominous in a night seething with rain. Groves of scarecrow trees, gnarled and coaly, stripped leafless by winter. A beer truck angled across a snowswept highway. A tunnel with a concrete floor that sloped down into perfect blackness, into something unknown that filled him with heart-bursting dread. His lost son, Jimmy, lying sallow-skinned against hospital sheets, dying of cancer. Water, cold and deep, impenetrable as ink, stretching to all horizons, with no possible