by Stephen King
“She and Helmut Borentz had four children,” Johnny said in that same, calm, washed-out voice. “His job took him all over the world. He was in Turkey for a while. Somewhere in the Far East, Laos. I think, maybe Cambodia. Then he came here. Virginia first, then some other places I didn’t get, finally California. He and Johanna became U.S. citizens. Helmut Borentz is dead. One of the children they had is also dead. The others are alive and fine. But she dreams about you sometimes. And in the dreams she thinks, ‘the boy is safe.’ But she doesn’t remember your name. Maybe she thinks it’s too late.”
“California?” Weizak said thoughtfully.
“Sam,” Dr. Brown said. “Really, you mustn’t encourage this.”
“Where in California, John?”
“Carmel. By the sea. But I couldn’t tell which street. It was there, but I couldn’t tell. It was in a dead zone. Like the picnic table and the rowboat. But she’s in Carmel, California. Johanna Borentz. She’s not old.”
“No, of course she would not be old,” Sam Weizak said in that same thoughtful, distant tone. “She was only twenty-four when the Germans invaded Poland.”
“Dr. Weizak, I have to insist,” Brown said harshly.
Weizak seemed to come out of a deep study. He looked around as if noticing his younger colleague for the first time. “Of course,” he said. “Of course you must. And John has had his question-and-answer period ... although I believe he has told us more than we have told him.”
“That’s nonsense,” Brown said curtly, and Johnny thought: He’s scared. Scared spitless.
Weizak smiled at Brown, and then at the nurse. She was eyeing Johnny as if he were a tiger in a poorly built cage. “Don’t talk about this, Nurse. Not to your supervisor, your mother, your brother, your lover, or your priest. Understood?”
“Yes, Doctor,” the nurse said. But she’ll talk, Johnny thought, and then glanced at Weizak. And he knows it.
2
He slept most of the afternoon. Around four P.M. he was rolled down the corridor to the elevator, taken down to neurology, and there were more tests. Johnny cried. He seemed to have very little control over the functions adults are supposed to be able to control. On his way back up, he urinated on himself and had to be changed like a baby. The first (but far from the last) wave of deep depression washed over him, carried him limply away, and he wished himself dead. Self-pity accompanied the depression and he thought how unfair this was. He had done a Rip van Winkle. He couldn’t walk. His girl had married another man and his mother was in the grip of a religious mania. He couldn’t see anything ahead that looked worth living for.
Back in his room, the nurse asked him if he would like anything. If Marie had been on duty. Johnny would have asked for ice water. But she had gone off at three.
“No,” he said, and rolled over to face the wall. After a little while, he slept.
Chapter 8
1
His father and mother came in for an hour that evening, and Vera left a bundle of tracts.
“We’re going to stay until the end of the week,” Herb said, “and then, if you’re still doing fine, we’ll be going back to Pownal for a while. But we’ll be back up every weekend.”
“I want to stay with my boy,” Vera said loudly.
“It’s best that you don’t, Mom,” Johnny said. The depression had lifted a little bit, but he remembered how black it had been. If his mother started to talk about God’s wonderful plan for him while he was in that state, he doubted if he would be able to hold back his cackles of hysterical laughter.
“You need me, John. You need me to explain ...”
“First I need to get well,” Johnny said. “You can explain after I can walk. Okay?”
She didn’t answer. There was an almost comically stubborn expression on her face—except there was nothing very funny about it. Nothing at all. Nothing but a quirk of fate, that’s all. Five minutes earlier or later on that road could have changed everything. Now look at us, all of us fucked over royally. And she believes it’s God’s plan. It’s either that or go completely crazy, I suppose.
To break the awkward silence, Johnny said: “Well, did Nixon get reelected, dad? Who ran against him?”
“He got reelected,” Herb said. “He ran against McGovern.”
“Who?”
“McGovern. George McGovern. Senator from South Dakota.”
“Not Muskie?”
“No. But Nixon’s not president anymore. He resigned.”
“What?”
“He was a liar,” Vera said dourly. “He became swollen with pride and the Lord brought him low.”
“Nixon resigned?” Johnny was flabbergasted. “Him?”
“It was either quit or be fired,” Herb said. “They were getting ready to impeach him.”
Johnny suddenly realized that there had been some great and fundamental upheaval in American politics—almost surely as a result of the war in Vietnam—and he had missed it. For the first time he really felt like Rip van Winkle. How much had things changed? He was almost afraid to ask. Then a really chilling thought occurred.
“Agnew ... Agnew’s president?”
“Ford,” Vera said. “A good, honest man.”
“Henry Ford is president of the United States?”
“Not Henry,” she said. “Jerry.”
He stared from one to the other, more than half convinced that all this was a dream or a bizarre joke.
“Agnew resigned, too,” Vera said. Her lips were pressed thin and white. “He was a thief. He accepted a bribe right in his office. That’s what they say.”
“He didn’t resign over the bribe,” Herb said. “He resigned over some mess back in Maryland. He was up to his neck in it, I guess. Nixon nominated Jerry Ford to become vice president. Then Nixon resigned last August and Ford took over. He nominated Nelson Rockefeller to be vice president. And that’s where we are now.”
“A divorced man,” Vera said grimly. “God forbid he ever becomes the president.”
“What did Nixon do?” Johnny asked. “Jesus Christ. I ...” He glanced at his mother, whose brow had clouded instantly. “I mean, holy crow, if they were going to impeach him ...”
“You needn’t take the Savior’s name in vain over a bunch of crooked politicians,” Vera said. “It was Watergate.”
“Watergate? Was that an operation in Vietnam? Something like that?”
“The Watergate Hotel in Washington,” Herb said. “Some Cubans broke into the offices of the Democratic Committee there and got caught. Nixon knew about it. He tried to cover it up.”
“Are you kidding?” Johnny managed at last.
“It was the tapes,” Vera said. “And that John Dean. Nothing but a rat deserting a sinking ship, that’s what I think. A common tattletale.”
“Daddy, can you explain this to me?”
“I’ll try,” Herb said, “but I don’t think the whole story has come out, even yet. And I’ll bring you the books. There’s been about a million books written on it already, and I guess there’ll be a million more before it’s finally done. Just before the election, in the summer of 1972 ...”
2
It was ten-thirty and his parents were gone. The lights on the ward had been dimmed. Johnny couldn’t sleep. It was all dancing around in his head, a frightening jumble of new input. The world had changed more resoundingly than he would have believed possible in so short a time. He felt out of step and out of tune.
Gas prices had gone up nearly a hundred percent, his father had told him. At the time of his accident, you could buy regular gas for thirty or thirty-two cents a gallon. Now it was fifty-four cents and sometimes there were lines at the pumps. The legal speed limit all over the country was fifty-five miles an hour and the long-haul truckers had almost revolted over that.
But all of that was nothing. Vietnam was over. It had ended. The country had finally gone Communist. Herb said it had happened just as Johnny began to show signs that he might come out of his coma. After all th
ose years and all that bloodshed, the heirs of Uncle Ho had rolled up the country like a windowshade in a matter of days.
The president of the United States had been to Red China. Not Ford, but Nixon. He had gone before he resigned. Nixon, of all people. The old witch-hunter himself. If anyone but his dad had told him that, Johnny would have flatly refused to believe.
It was all too much, it was too scary. Suddenly he didn’t want to know any more, for fear it might drive him totally crazy. That pen Dr. Brown had had, that Flair—how many other things were there like that? How many hundreds of little things, all of them making the point over and over again: You lost part of your life, almost six percent, if the actuarial tables are to be believed. You’re behind the times. You missed out.
“John?” The voice was soft. “Are you asleep, John?”
He turned over. A dim silhouette stood in his doorway. A small man with rounded shoulders. It was Weizak.
“No. I’m awake.”
“I hoped so. May I come in?”
“Yes. Please do.”
Weizak looked older tonight. He sat by Johnny’s bed.
“I was on the phone earlier,” he said. “I called directory assistance for Carmel, California. I asked for a Mrs. Johanna Borentz. Do you think there was such a number?”
“Unless it’s unlisted or she doesn’t have a phone at all,” Johnny said.
“She has a phone. I was given the number.”
“Ah,” Johnny said. He was interested because he liked Weizak, but that was all. He felt no need to have his knowledge of Johanna Borentz validated, because he knew it was valid knowledge—he knew in the same way he knew he was right-handed.
“I sat for a long time and thought about it,” Weizak said. “I told you my mother was dead, but that was really only an assumption. My father died in the defense of Warsaw. My mother simply never turned up, nuh? It was logical to assume that she had been killed in the shelling ... during the occupation ... you understand. She never turned up, so it was logical to assume that. Amnesia ... as a neurologist I can tell you that permanent, general amnesia is very, very rare. Probably rarer than true schizophrenia. I have never read of a documented case lasting thirty-five years.”
“She recovered from her amnesia long ago,” Johnny said. “I think she simply blocked everything out. When her memory did come back, she had remarried and was the mother of two children ... possibly three. Remembering became a guilt trip, maybe. But she dreams of you. ‘The boy is safe.’ Did you call her?”
“Yes,” Weizak said. “I dialed it direct. Did you know you could do that now? Yes. It is a great convenience. You dial one, the area code, the number. Eleven digits and you can be in touch with any place in the country. It is an amazing thing. In some ways a frightening thing. A boy—no, a young man—answered the telephone. I asked if Mrs. Borentz was at home. I heard him call, ‘Mom, it’s for you.’ Clunk went the receiver on the table or desk or whatever. I stood in Bangor, Maine, not forty miles from the Atlantic Ocean and listened to a young man put the phone down on a table in a town on the Pacific Ocean. My heart ... it was pounding so hard it frightened me. The wait seemed long. Then she picked up the phone and said, ‘Yes? Hello?’ ”
“What did you say? How did you handle it?”
“I did not, as you say, handle it,” Weizak replied, and smiled crookedly. “I hung up the telephone. And I wished for a strong drink, but I did not have one.”
“Are you satisfied it was her?”
“John, what a naive question! I was nine years old in 1939. I had not heard my mother’s voice since then. She spoke only Polish when I knew her. I speak only English now ... I have forgotten much of my native language, which is a shameful thing. How could I be satisfied one way or the other?”
“Yes, but were you?”
Weizak scrubbed a hand slowly across his forehead. “Yes,” he said. “It was her. It was my mother.”
“But you couldn’t talk to her?”
“Why should I?” Weizak asked, sounding almost angry. “Her life is her life, nuh? It is as you said. The boy is safe. Should I upset a woman that is just coming into her years of peace? Should I take the chance of destroying her equilibrium forever? Those feelings of guilt you mentioned ... should I set them free? Or even run the risk of so doing?”
“I don’t know,” Johnny said. They were troublesome questions, and the answers were beyond him—but he felt that Weizak was trying to say something about what he had done by articulating the questions. The questions he could not answer.
“The boy is safe, the woman is safe in Carmel. The country is between them, and we let that be. But what about you, John? What are we going to do about you?”
“I don’t understand what you mean.”
“I will spell it out for you then, nuh? Dr. Brown is angry. He is angry at me, angry at you, and angry at himself, I suspect, for half-believing something he has been sure is total poppycock for his whole life. The nurse who was a witness will never keep her silence. She will tell her husband tonight in bed, and it may end there, but her husband may tell his boss, and it is very possible that the papers will have wind of this by tomorrow evening. ‘Coma Patient Re-Awakens with Second Sight.’ ”
“Second sight,” Johnny said. “Is that what it is?”
“I don’t know what it is, not really. Is it psychic? Seer? Handy words that describe nothing, nothing at all. You told one of the nurses that her son’s optic surgery was going to be successful ...”
“Marie,” Johnny murmured. He smiled a little. He liked Marie.
“... and that is already all over the hospital. Did you see the future? Is that what second sight is? I don’t know. You put a picture of my mother between your hands and were able to tell me where she lives today. Do you know where lost things and lost people may be found? Is that what second sight is? I don’t know. Can you read thoughts? Influence objects of the physical world? Heal by the laying on of hands? These are all things that some call ‘psychic.’ They are all related to the idea of ‘second sight.’ They are things that Dr. Brown laughs at. Laughs? No. He doesn’t laugh. He scoffs.”
“And you don’t?”
“I think of Edgar Cayce. And Peter Hurkos. I tried to tell Dr. Brown about Hurkos and he scoffed. He doesn’t want to talk about it; he doesn’t want to know about it.”
Johnny said nothing.
“So ... what are we going to do about you?”
“Does something need to be done?”
“I think so,” Weizak said. He stood up. “I’ll leave you to think it out for yourself. But when you think, think about this: some things are better not seen, and some things are better lost than found.”
He bade Johnny good night and left quietly. Johnny was very tired now, but still sleep did not come for a long time.
Chapter 9
1
Johnny’s first surgery was scheduled for May 28. Both Weizak and Brown had explained the procedure carefully to him. He would be given a local anesthetic—neither of them felt a general could be risked. This first operation would be on his knees and ankles. His own ligaments, which had shortened during his long sleep, would be lengthened with a combination of plastic wonder-fibers. The plastic to be used was also employed in heart valve bypass surgery. The question was not so much one of his body’s acceptance or rejection of the artificial ligaments, Brown told him, as it was a question of his legs’ ability to adjust to the change. If they had good results with the knees and the ankles, three more operations were on the boards: one on the long ligaments of his thighs, one on the elbow-strap ligaments, and possibly a third on his neck, which he could barely turn at all. The surgery was to be performed by Raymond Ruopp, who had pioneered the technique. He was flying in from San Francisco.
“What does this guy Ruopp want with me, if he’s such a superstar?” Johnny asked. Superstar was a word he had learned from Marie. She had used it in connection with a balding, bespectacled singer with the unlikely name of Elton John.
Sam Weizak was more blunt. “You’re a guinea pig, nuh?”
“What?”
“Yes. Look into the light, please.” Weizak shone a light into the pupil of Johnny’s left eye. “Did you know I can look right at your optic nerve with this thing? Yes. The eyes are more than the windows of the soul. They are one of the brain’s most crucial maintenance points.”
“Guinea pig,” Johnny said morosely, staring into the savage point of light.
“Yes.” The light snapped off. “Don’t feel so sorry for yourself. Many of the techniques to be employed in your behalf—and some of those already employed—were perfected during the Vietnam war. No shortage of guinea pigs in the V.A. hospitals, nuh? A man like Ruopp is interested in you because you are unique. Here is a man who has slept four-and-a-half years. Can we make him walk again? An interesting problem. He sees the monograph he will write on it for The New England Journal of Medicine. He looks forward to it the way a child looks forward to new toys under the Christmas tree. He does not see you, he does not see Johnny Smith in his pain, Johnny Smith who must take the bedpan and ring for the nurse to scratch if his back itches. That’s good. His hands will not shake. Smile, Johnny. This Ruopp looks like a bank clerk, but he is maybe the best surgeon in North America.”
But it was hard for Johnny to smile.
He had read his way dutifully through the tracts his mother had left him. They depressed him and left him frightened all over again for her sanity. One of them, by a man named Salem Kirban, struck him as nearly pagan in its loving contemplation of a bloody apocalypse and the yawning barbecue pits of hell. Another described the coming Anti-christ in pulp-horror terms. The others were a dark carnival of craziness: Christ was living under the South Pole, God drove flying saucers, New York was Sodom, L.A. was Gomorrah. They dealt with exorcism, with witches, with all manner of things seen and unseen. It was impossible for him to reconcile the pamphlets with the religious yet earthy woman he had known before his coma.