“Please. I’m Seventh Stone. People have been trying this on me for years.”
“Trying what on you?”
“What you’re doing.”
“But it’s true. I went up the mountain, there’s nothing there. No Telos. Nothing at the end of the rainbow.”
“You found your brother, didn’t you? You saw him. We all saw him. Are you going to deny that he ascended? Energy like that? Come on.”
“That’s different,” said Vivian. “What Jesse found is totally different.”
“Different how?”
She couldn’t answer that. Would she ever be able to answer that? She changed tack.
“I wasn’t lying before, about the bodies.”
He gave that smile again.
“I know. They went up before they were ready. It’s their own fault, The Violet Path is quite clear on what happens if you try to get into Telos without the proper training.”
“But they’re dead. Shiv’s dumping them in the lake.”
“They get to be a part of the mountain. I think that’s kind of beautiful.”
“But you’re a police officer!”
There was a moment of conflict in Gallardo’s face. He frowned and his eyes seemed to point in different directions. His radio sounded. He answered. Someone was calling him back to Mount Hookey.
“I have to go,” he said. “The scene needs securing. But I’ll come back as soon as I can.”
“You don’t have to,” said Vivian.
“I will. And I’ll bring the initiates.”
“I’d rather you didn’t.”
“I don’t really have a choice…”
“What are you going to do with the others?”
“What others?”
“The sheriff and his wife.”
“That depends on what’s happened to Shiv. He’ll decide what to do with them. If he’s… you know. Still with us.”
“Did you see what happened to him?”
He shook his head.
“Glenn?”
“I don’t know.”
“They’ve not done anything wrong. Jerome, I mean.”
“It’s out of my hands, I’m afraid.”
“Jesse would appreciate it,” she said. “Me and him, we’re the same. You must know that. Same energy. He wants what I want. You’re not going to take Shiv’s word over the word of an Ascended Master, are you?”
He thought about this.
“You are his twin, aren’t you?”
“That’s right.”
“I don’t know… I’ve got my Eighth Stone certificate coming up.”
“So. Help us out, and I’ll make sure you get a personal audience with Jesse when he wakes up. Deal?”
“You think he’d do that?”
“Sure he would.”
“I don’t know. I’ll see what I can do. Maybe I can set bail for them…”
His radio went off again.
“I’ve got to go.”
Another stretcher came rattling between the two of them, accompanied by another cluster of nurses, one of whom was holding a saline drip over his head. By the time it had passed, the police officer had turned on his heel and was plodding down the corridor to the exit.
Vivian watched him go and slumped into her chair. No one came out of the double doors for some time. She drank several tiny paper cones full of water, until the cone began to disintegrate and she crushed it and put it in her pocket. She saw a payphone down the corridor where there was a queue four or five people deep. She wanted to call home. Needed to, in fact. She wanted to hear her mother’s voice – that was an entirely new feeling. She would happily have listened to her talk about her bladder infection or the state of the guttering or the decline of terrestrial TV for days. She decided to wait, at least until there was some definitive news about Jesse.
Eventually, a doctor came and found her. His face had the colour and sheen of liver, as if both heavily sunburned and Botoxed. Sweat was beading between the very black, very sparse hair on his brow – a transplant that hadn’t quite taken root yet, she assumed.
“Vivian?” he said.
She looked up.
“Jesse’s sister? Yes. Obviously. The passportless pair. Aha. Well. We’ve had a good look at your brother. Come through and I can tell you what’s what.”
She followed him through the double doors, past half a dozen empty beds and another one that contained a man who was screaming and whose odour of high proof alcohol made Vivian’s eyes water from several feet away, and into an office.
The doctor parked himself in a chair and looked at some documents on his desk. He wheezed as if trying to pass something uncomfortably from his digestive system. He picked up two pieces of paper and looked from one to the other. Vivian surveyed the office. There were photographs of him at various body-building meets hung on the wall behind his chair.
“How is he?” said Vivian, when the doctor wasn’t forthcoming. “Now, this is the thing.” He kept looking at the papers, as though he couldn’t tell them apart. “Doctor Heben, by the way.” He squeezed the life out of her right hand and then was quiet again and frowned as best he could with his taut and swollen brow.
“Doctor?”
“Here’s the thing. Your brother. He’s been taken to surgery to get the foreign body removed.”
“Foreign body?”
“Metal fragment. You say he was shot? He wasn’t shot.”
“There was a shooter.”
“Sure, I heard. But he wasn’t shot. It was shrapnel.”
“Is he going to be okay?”
“Who?”
“My brother.”
“Well, here’s the thing,” he said again. “The guys are pretty sure they can get the critter out of there.”
The guys. The critter.
“But?”
“We put your brother through an MRI and CT scan. To see just what the damage was. Magnetic resonance imaging. Computerised tomography. Real good kit. Expensive, too. We weren’t sure whether the injury had touched the brain.”
He looked at the two bits of paper again. He seemed to be relishing the suspense. Outside, the screaming man was wheeled somewhere out of earshot.
“And had it?” said Vivian.
He turned one of the sheets of paper around. She’d seen these kinds of pictures before. A scan of the brain, divided into layers like so many slices of ham. She only had time to look at it briefly but saw nothing alarming.
“See now, this,” said Doctor Heben, “this is a normal brain. I know what you’re going to say – no such thing! Right? But seriously. This is a brain functioning what we’d call normally.” He pointed at a few of the thumbnail images. “This bit lights up, this bit lights up, depending on what job it’s doing. This is a brain just going about its business.”
He now turned to the second piece of paper. Vivian found she was shuddering in anticipation. Something was wrong. She knew it. How would she tell her mum?
“This is your brother’s brain,” said Doctor Heben.
She looked at the scans. At first it seemed there had simply been something wrong with the machine, or wrong with the printer. There was no detail there. It was just a series of slightly misshapen ovals, white on black, like the phases of the moon.
“What is it?” she said.
“Well, look at it. The whole thing’s lit up like Broadway! We’ve not got different parts talking to each other in there. Every single neuron is on full blast. Constantly. It’s like he’s thinking everything at the same time. Or nothing. Depending on how you look at it. I have never seen anything like this. And I’ve seen a lot of brains!”
Vivian didn’t say anything.
“We’re pretty confident we can get that object out of there,” he said. “But looking at this…”
“What?”
“Well, I’m sorry, Vivian, but the damage might already have been done.”
He mopped his brow. Vivian looked again at the blazing circles on the page. No, she thou
ght, that brain wasn’t damaged. Far from it. He’d just figured it out, that was all.
“Now, here’s the thing,” Doctor Heben started up again. “A little bird tells me you haven’t got any insurance?”
27
VIVIAN SPENT the night in the emergency room, horizontal on three plastic chairs, but not actually sleeping. Even if she had managed to drop off, Doctor Heben was in and out of theatre every half hour to keep her abreast of developments. He didn’t actually seem to be performing the operation himself. Vivian never worked out whether he was a surgeon or a consultant or a radiographer or what. She considered the possibility that he was just a secretary with ideas above his station. He went back and forth like an errand boy, occasionally looming over her, his clipboard trapped under one massive bicep, and reassuring her that Jesse was stable, and that “the guys” were doing a fantastic job.
Once, in the early hours of the morning, he came out and said, “Settle something for us, would you: does the Queen actually live in Buckingham Palace, or is it just for show?”
Vivian said she didn’t know. He made a clicking noise with the side of his mouth and went back into theatre.
The sun came up and any hope of getting to sleep evaporated. Vivian knuckled the grit from her eyes and went to the bathroom to throw some cold water in her face. She hardly felt it. The kind of fatigue that rendered the whole world grey and lukewarm. She’d approached at least ten different people in various waiting rooms before someone relented and changed one of the Carters’ fifty-dollar bills so she could get a coffee. She drank it black and unsweetened and thought about calling home again.
The gears of the hospital began to grind. More seats got filled, phones began ringing. Vivian sat with her coffee and watched the waiting room’s tiny television.
She was about to hunt for sugar when the woman who had given her change suddenly piped up, “Well would you look at that. Seems somebody finally had enough.” And she laughed a short, vindictive laugh.
The TV was showing a local news channel. The reporter was standing in front of a barn shot full of holes. There had been an incident in Mount Hookey. Two men were dead, including the shooter. There was Gallardo, palm to the camera, trying to usher the reporters away.
Poor Mr Blucas. She thought of him and his estranged brother, and suddenly the idea of losing Jesse became more real, and more unbearable.
Two dead. Who was the other one? Shiv? Glenn? A police officer? Or were they referring to Jesse? Perhaps Gallardo had reported him dead so no one would come looking for him. But then, the fact that the shooting was getting reported at all suggested that Telos Inc. did not have control of the situation, so maybe Shiv had been killed after all.
“Should’ve let the shooter keep going,” said the woman who was sitting next to her. “That whole place needs cleaning out. Send in the pest control.” She did her unpleasant laugh again.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“No-good beatniks. Thought we’d seen the last of them in the seventies. This generation’s worse than the last one!”
She blew on her own coffee and slurped it loudly. Vivian resisted the urge to slap it from her hands and turned back to the TV, feeling suddenly protective of Jesse. Of the others, too: Shelley, Forrest, Eenoo. Maybe even Glenn? No, not Glenn.
“They’re just lost,” she said.
“They’re just lazy, is what they are. Too much money and too little sense. They need to go out and get themselves proper jobs.”
Vivian was suddenly aware that Doctor Heben was standing behind her shoulder, also watching the TV. It had been a couple of hours since his last visit.
“Have they mentioned your brother?” he said.
“Not by name.”
“Someone should let them know. Get a reporter down here.”
“I’d rather keep things quiet.”
“The guys would love to do an interview.”
“I don’t think Jesse would want that.”
The coffee woman was scowling at her, now. Vivian got the impression that if she wasn’t going to tell the reporters about Jesse, then this woman would. She got up and took Doctor Heben to one side.
“How is he?” she asked.
“Oh, right,” he said, and he gave two thumbs up. “Mission accomplished.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I’m telling you now, aren’t I?”
“Where is he? Is he awake?”
“Oh, no, no. They’re moving him to another wing. He’s good and sedated. Won’t be awake for a day or so. And he’ll be kept in here for at least a week. You want to see what they did?”
“I want to see Jesse.”
“That’s what I mean.”
She followed him for what seemed like miles through the corridors of the hospital. It was like changing terminals at an airport. They needed a monorail or something. The going was slower still because Doctor Heben had a poised and unnatural way of walking that seemed designed to show off the muscles of his torso. It was clear that he had also chosen a doctor’s coat that was slightly too small for him, for this same purpose.
Every part of the hospital seemed to be in a state of low-level panic, and she was glad when they reached Jesse’s cubicle and Doctor Heben pulled the curtain around them.
Almost the entire top half of her brother’s head was bound in clean bandages. Only his right eye was visible, and this was closed. Its lid looked yellowish and swollen. Something about his eyelashes, matted with some kind of gunk and trembling almost imperceptibly, brought her to the brink of violent tears. His glow was gone. His face was the familiar mixture of grease and sweat and dead skin cells, just like everybody else’s. She didn’t know whether this was a good or bad thing.
She felt a sob coming, ambushed it, swallowed it deep down into the pit of her stomach.
“What happened with the brain damage?” she asked.
“Won’t know for sure for a couple of days,” said Doctor Heben. “We’ll do a scan when he’s awake and the swelling’s down.”
“You say he’ll be in for a week?” She was only half thinking of the cost.
“At least. We’ll look after him. He’ll be comfortable here, don’t worry. This is a good hospital. The Lewiston Hilton – that’s what the guys call it. Ha ha!”
She looked at Jesse again. He was swaddled like a baby. Tubes in his nose, tubes coming from under his blanket.
“Do you have somewhere to stay?” asked Doctor Heben.
“I’ll figure something out,” she said.
“You know your way around the town?”
“I think so.”
“You want a good gym? I can recommend somewhere.”
He kept talking until he realised she wasn’t going to reply. She perched on the edge of Jesse’s bed and squeezed his foot. There was no response. At some point Doctor Heben slunk away from the cubicle, and Vivian was finally alone with her brother, listening to the machine that was doing his breathing for him, and she stayed there until it was completely dark outside.
* * *
She booked herself into a hotel across from the hospital where the sheets were clean and everything worked and the staff were charmless and forgettable. The other guests were a mixture of travelling executives and relatives of patients who were being treated across the road. She didn’t speak to any of them. She sat in her room on the edge of her bed, alone again, and watched the reports of the shooting in Mr Blucas’s barn. Initiates fretted around the police cordon. Officers left the scene of the crime carrying little see-through bags of evidence.
What if the thing was in one of those bags? What if, right now, it was in the process of being filed away in the Lewiston police force’s evidence room, barely even glanced at by some weary desk clerk, cigarette in hand, on the tenth hour of his shift? Just any old paper coaster, curling at the edges, showing – well, what exactly? Would Jesse be able to remember it, when he came around? Or figure it out all over again? Would he even want to?
She went back to see him early the next morning, but his eyes weren’t open, and the tubes were all still in him, and the machine was still beeping interminably. She sat with him for most of the day. Doctor Heben came by a few times, making notes, and seeming happy enough with Jesse’s progress. He affectionately thumped Jesse’s shoulder and said things like, “Attaboy!” and, “Come on, champ!” and then smiled at Vivian and went on his rounds.
In the afternoon Vivian thought of something.
“Jesse,” she said, and squeezed his hand under the bedclothes. “I’ve got to go out for a while.”
There was no response.
“I’ll be back soon,” she said. She got up and left. She went to the main entrance of the hospital and asked for directions to the courthouse and the police station.
Lewiston was not a big town and crossing from one side to the other only took twenty minutes. She passed the bus station and the xeroxing place where she’d copied the posters of Jesse. That seemed a long, long time ago. There wasn’t the slightest whiff of Telos about the town and this unsettled her. It just made the ruse feel more elaborate, as if all the streets were a sophisticated film set designed to conceal the Telurian reality of the place. She looked for crystals around the necks of passers-by, for robes poking out of sleeves and collars. A woman came towards her in a lavender-coloured blouse and Vivian crossed the road to avoid her.
The courthouse was a large colonial-type building that seemed on the flimsy side. Another piece of set, looked like. Vivian went in and spoke to the clerk and found that Jerome and Minnie – full name Minerva, it turned out – had been granted bail. It wasn’t an extortionate amount, either. Whether it was Officer Gallardo’s doing or not, they’d only been charged with DUI and bail was set at a thousand dollars each. Vivian still had twice that amount in the wad of cash that the Carters had given her in the first place.
She paid the clerk and three hours later she was standing with them on the steps of the police station. They’d aged ten years overnight. Minnie still held onto her Tupperware of leftovers, which she had somehow been able to keep with her in her cell.
“You’re a dear, sweet thing to think of us,” she said, and clutched Vivian’s arm with both her hands. “What on earth happened? Where is your brother? Is he still at Mount Hookey?”
The Follower Page 23