Mind Games

by Alan Brudner

  "Because I want you to come along."

  "In that case, I'm already packed." She nodded. "Too bad you can't just download me to a laptop."

  "Or to my lap. But for now, I'm afraid you'll have to sweat the cargo compartment."

  The computer wasn't too difficult to disassemble or pack up, and I shipped it on ahead so she'd be at the Riverside Hotel before I got there. I wondered whether the concierge and bellhops would think I was nuts setting up a full-size PC in my room. I doubted they'd buy the story that it had special medical applications that I planned to employ over at Tampa Bay Memorial Hospital. I also doubted they'd ask for a refund of the 30 percent discount they offered me for being there on a hospital-affiliated trip.

  Tampa was hot and humid. The Riverside Hotel was located right on the Bay, which was long and winding like a canal. It was a prime rowing location, and there were college crew teams assembling in the hotel lobby, sweaty and barely dressed. The men were tan, with biceps and pects that seemed glued on. And why did these muscular types always seem to lack moles and chest hair? The women were, well, I tried not to stare, knowing that Eliza wasn't too far away, but even she would have forgiven me. Sometimes testosterone controls involuntary muscles that guide eye movement, I learned long ago. Still, there was no need to tell Eliza. She looked better than they did anyway.

  There was no listing for Cybronics in the phone book, so I decided to visit Katie. Tampa Bay Memorial was a short ride away, on a little island over a bridge. The hotel had a shuttle bus—outpatients and their families often stayed there—and my sense of direction wasn't great anyway, so I took it.

  The only other passenger was a hospital patient scheduled to have his transplanted heart tested for rejection.

  "It's my annual 12,000 mile check-up," Harry Cardinsky announced, extending his hand as he told me his name. "Got this heart 9 or 10 years ago. Soon my extended warranty expires."

  "Really? A new heart?"

  He nodded and smiled, which made his spotted leathery skin crease up around the eyes as if it were too big a size for his facial bones.

  "I was out of it, Mister," he said. "The cardiologist in Miami told me I had played my last hand, it was time to cash in. A matter of days at most. But these doctors at Tampa Bay Memorial, they're miracle workers. This place has all the latest technology. A program that matches the ideal donor to the ideal donee. Or if you need open heart surgery, like a bypass, they can fix you up from another room using robotic hands, catheters and a monitor, without even having to open you up. They never give up around here, so you don't either. One day I'm knocking on heaven's door. Two weeks later I'm sipping a Tom Collins in Acapulco."

  "You feel good?"

  "Jog four miles a day. Only one other teenage organ I wish I had." He bent a bony forefinger so it appeared to hang limp.

  By the time we arrived, I knew all about Harry's two daughters. Cindy was married to a struggling good-for-nothing podiatrist, and Mindy almost married a good-looking lawyer but ended up with a tubby guy who owned a fried chicken franchise in a flea market near Boca. Mindy's daughter almost lost a toe in a freak accident, but they managed to sew it back on and she was doing just fine, all things considered, except that Cindy's podiatrist husband refused to examine it because she was a relative.

  I wished him luck, which he said he didn't need but would accept—the same way he'd always read the fortunes after eating Chinese food, even though he hated the cookies—and he wished me the best and expressed sympathy for my poor niece Katherine who I called Katie.

  Okay, so I wasn't quite square with him. I had just met the guy.

  Behind the area marked Reception and a receptionist who looked like George Foreman in army fatigues, there was a wall of plaques—arranged like the leaves on a tree—naming the hospital's biggest benefactors. Although all the plaques were in the same nondescript shade of copper, they were grouped into ranks of benefactors: so-called Platinum, Gold, Silver and Bronze. Like credit cards. I couldn't help staring at the biggest plaque, the one on top of the tree, although it didn't surprise me; it said, simply,

  AVERY KORD AND FAMILY

  The receptionist told me in his baritone voice that Katie Wilnot was in a private room up on the seventh floor. Turned out it was down a tiled corridor past a nurse's station and several other comatose, unconscious or seriously-ill neurological patients.

  Nobody asked any questions. I guess they figured that if you were visiting someone on that particular corridor, you probably weren't there to do any harm. In fact, you probably couldn't make anybody worse, even with a gun.

  It didn't surprise me that she had a plastic ventilator tube inserted through her trachea or that she was hooked up to a heart monitor, an automatic blood pressure cuff, and several intravenous drip units hanging on a metal pole. Her throat and her arm were black and blue and crusted with blood around the insertion points of the various devices. Her head was slightly elevated, propped up on a pillow. Her jaw was clenched. Above her were monitors that graphed out her heart rate, temperature and blood pressure. I thought another one mapped out her brain waves, too; I traced its wires to electrodes bandaged onto her shaved skull. Yet even the electrodes seemed par for the course. The brain waves on that monitor were shallow, forming little more than a straight line, in stark contrast to what appeared to be the vigorous beating of her heart.

  The intravenous lines were threaded through a computerized pump hooked onto the middle of the I.V. pole, and the whole apparatus stood between Katie's bed and the window. If she could get up and open her eyes, she'd probably complain about how it blocked her view of Tampa Bay against the sunny horizon. I craned my neck a bit and watched the crew teams row past a television broadcasting station, past a Romanesque building that resembled a mosque, under a footbridge and right by the Tampa Rey cigar factory's imposing neon sign and three monstrous oval smoke rings that hovered above a tractor-trailer sized Corona.

  I pulled up a plastic chair and sat next to Katie, took her hand. It felt clammy, its fingers stiffer than I expected, not giving way as I pressed them. Her nails were polished red, and for some reason I didn't expect them to be so neatly trimmed.

  "What can you tell me, Katie?" I asked, knowing there would be no reply. "What happened?" Her breaths were regular, routine, her chest moving up and down at a pace controlled electronically by the ventilator. "What did that bastard Avery Kord do to you?"

  For a second I thought I saw her eyes twitch, maybe roll a bit under her heavy eyelids, the kind of movement I remember Sky's eyes making when I'd try to wake him for school and he wanted a few extra minutes of sleep. I quickly glanced at the brain wave monitor and thought a single wave jumped a bit higher than the rest.

  Had to be my imagination, I knew. I mentioned Kord again while staring at the monitor. The waves stayed uniform.

  I didn't hold her hand long before I started to think this was pointless. What could I learn about my son's whereabouts from a girl in a coma? I felt guilty for wasting time, for bopping around playing P.I. when I probably should have remained out in Portland. Yet I knew Eno's visitors spent a lot of time in Tampa, I knew Katie had tried to commit suicide down there, and I figured she might be the source of some clues.

  I don't know what motivated me to kiss her on the forehead, but I did. There was no recognition, no flash of consciousness. Not even a flit of the eyelids.

  I closed the door. I knew I had to be fast so I wouldn't get caught. The P.I. business wasn't really my thing. But my son's life was at stake, and maybe this young woman's, too. I opened her nightstand drawer and found a small black purse. A few quarters—perhaps the orderlies had already gotten to the dollar bills. No phone book, either. I tore past a tube of lipstick, a tampon, some keys—including a plastic card key—on a Donald Duck key ring. A compact mirror. A Cybronics business card, but the office address was the central facility in Portland. A driver's license showing her mother's address in Orlando. Another tube of lipstick, some eye liner. A folded copy of a Co
ngressional subpoena requiring her to testify about Cybronics. And an acrylic tube containing a Tampa Rey Corona cigar.

  I figured Sam Spade would have read the subpoena and pocketed the keys. So I read the subpoena and pocketed the keys. Then I quickly closed the purse and the drawer. My instincts were good. My hand was barely off the steel handle when a nurse walked in to check on Katie.

  "You are a relative?" The heavy black woman in white eyed me suspiciously, a hint of Jamaica in her speech.

  I nodded.

  "She's not gettin' better," Charlene said, her name tag making the introduction. "It's a shame."

  "Where did this happen?" I asked.

  "Don't know. She don't talk, you know."

  "But doctors and nurses do. What do people say?"

  "They hope she go to a better place soon. Although she not suffering, I don't think. But you never can give up the hope, you know."

  "Annie come here to visit?"

  "Her mother?" Charlene smiled and nodded. "Almost every day. She do her nails, wash her hair. She be here tomorrow morning sure as the sun come out. She love this girl a lot, Mister—?"

  "You can just call me—" I extended my hand and paused a bit. "Clay. Clay Wilnot. I'm a distant uncle."

  "Uncle back home mean mother's brother," Charlene said. "How distant can you be?"

  "I haven't seen this part of my family in many years. But when I heard about Katie—"

  "Blood be thicker than rum. You'll be back tomorrow, I'm sure."

  "I plan to be."

  "Well, maybe her uncle be the miracle she need. She need to be remind of her childhood. That how she gonna wake up." Charlene smiled. "I seen that happen before, although nobody believe me." She took Katie's pulse at the wrist, glancing at her watch even though a monitor was checking it continuously and automatically.

  She perceived my curiosity.

  "Sometime the fancy machine read wrong," she explained. "The American doctors, they love the machine. They think because it's a machine, it's gotta be right. They think she just the living dead anyway. But me, I try to be a real nurse. Even though I just arrive, not too long ago."

  "Thanks for trying." I smiled and walked out.

  "That be your uncle Clay," I heard her telling Katie after I had gone through the doorway. "He love you and come a long way to see you after all these many years. He love you and he love your mother. Now you gonna come out of it and give him a big hug, like I know you can?"

  There was no response, and I swallowed hard as I walked down the corridor toward the exit.

  I grabbed a tall coffee at Starbucks and sat on a wooden bench to gather my thoughts. A few of the crew teams rowed around in the bay, some over by the cigar factory. It had been years since I had a drag of a stogie, and I thought about getting one. Something about the earthy taste of the coffee fed my craving. I figured it was because coffee and tobacco grow in the same part of the world. I wished I had taken the Corona from Katie's bag. She wouldn't have missed it, that seemed certain.

  Chapter 26

  "I lied a little, Lize," I said, pouring a pre-mixed margarita from the mini-bar into a glass full of ice I had gotten from a machine down the hall. Something about the humid Tampa climate changed my liquor preference.

  She smiled but her brow furrowed.

  "I told a nurse I was Katie's uncle Clay," I said. "Just trying to be careful."

  "Seems harmless enough."

  "So what next? We sure aren't going to learn anything from Katie Wilnot."

  "You never know, Cliff."

  "This time, I know. Her brain waves are flat as a pancake."

  "But as long as she's still alive, Cliff—" Her words hung in the air and I noticed a tear in her eye. My next sip of the margarita went down hard. As I placed the glass on a side table, my hand trembled and the ice made a tinkling sound against the glass.

  "I never thought I'd lose you, Eliza. You don't know how guilty—"

  "Fuh-gedd-aboudit," she said, dropping her voice into a deep impersonation of someone like Sammy the Bull or Vinny the Chin.

  "But I can't, Lize. That night—if I had stopped you—"

  It had been brewing inside me ever since. I rarely shared my continued feelings of guilt with anyone. Sometimes I hid them from myself, made believe the therapy had worked, tried to be a model for Schuyler. But when she was alive, there was nothing I would have held back, and now I desperately needed Eliza to talk to. I didn't want to become a Harry Cardinsky, spilling my guts to any stranger who sits next to me on a shuttle bus and isn't deaf.

  "Cliff, nothing could have stopped me. Get it through your head. I gave birth to that kid, nursed him. Raised him. I was going up to Yale and that was that."

  The margarita glass looked frosty and felt icier when I picked it back up. I guzzled the second half of the drink. The lime sourness made my lips tighten. I went back into the mini-bar and took out a chocolate bar.

  "So now what, Eliza? I have Katie's keys, but they're nondescript. A Segal, a Standard. A Honda key. A plastic key card. On a ring with a Donald Duck ornament."

  Eliza shot me a questioning look.

  "I stole them from her purse, Lize."

  "Katie won't miss them. What else was in there?"

  "A subpoena. She was supposed to testify in Congress two days after—"

  "There's part of the explanation," she nodded. "Anything else?"

  "The usual. Lipstick, a tampon, a compact. Loose change."

  I suddenly felt choked for air, as if I had gone on an expensive vacation to Paris and just realized I had neglected to visit the Eiffel Tower.

  A genius and a beauty and a health nut, Katie's mother had called her.

  "There was also a cigar, Lize," I blurted out. "A fat thing George Burns would have loved. And so would some guys from Cybronics who spent a lot of time up at Eno's winery."

  Eliza smiled. "Maybe Katie told you something after all."

  Chapter 27

  There was a slot for a card key by a door on a small side street away from the bay. I tried Katie's flat plastic card key. I wasn't surprised when the lock popped crisply open. I walked through the entrance.

  Most of the place looked like—well, not like a cigar factory. I hadn't ever seen one before, but I expected dirty floors and dark old Cuban men with stained fingers sitting around rolling tobacco. I wasn't quite prepared for clean white porcelain and stainless steel machines. They tidily measured out each cigar's filler, weighed the tobacco on a scale and lined it up in short parallel lines that moved down a conveyor belt until each was wrapped by mechanical hands into a brown leaf. Then they were rolled, banded and dropped into a counter for boxing. It was a less noisy process than I'd guess, full of smooth whooshes and whirs and hums rather than harsh claps and thumps, soothing in its repetitive, uniform quality. And the smell of unsmoked tobacco was sweet, pleasant, nothing like its burning second-hand pungency.

  But the cigar manufacturing process wasn't nearly as much of a surprise as the scene in the little office a few yards to my left. The door was open and I could see in.

  Harry Cardinsky sat in a chair opposite the desk, wearing one of those white nylon Cybronics jackets, fingering an unlit cigar and occasionally chomping on it. When it wasn't in his mouth, I could see that he smiled as he spoke, although even the calm electronic whir of the machines was enough sound to prevent me from hearing him.

  Whatever he was saying, though, seemed less important than his audience. Behind the desk, leaning back in a high leather chair with his feet up, wearing brown Topsiders without socks, was none other than Avery Kord. His tortoise shell rims were just a shade lighter than Harry's cigar. He, too, had a smile on his face as Harry talked. An old Apple Mac sat on the shelf behind him. It had apparently been gutted and made into a tropical aquarium filled with swordtails and mollies, neons and a small eel.

  My heart pounded like a piston and my toes curled up in my shoes, but I decided to take a gamble. I walked toward the office.

  Two unifo
rmed guards appeared, seemingly out of nowhere, and blocked the door, arms folded on their chests. I didn't notice much about them other than their size, which was not small; their uniforms, which were cherry red rather than the ubiquitous law enforcement blue we all come to expect; and the big black automatic weapons that dangled from their belts and distinguished them, along with their lack of white beards, from Salvation Army Santas at Christmas.

  "That's far enough, Mister," one of them said, his gun swinging. He was the one I started to think of as Tweedledum.

  "Hey, he's okay," a loud voice said from inside the office. "He's a friend of mine visiting his niece."

  "You have a good memory, Harry," I said, my pulse quieting down in my ears. The Red Sea parted and I walked in.

  "It's the gingko pills." Harry didn't lose his crinkle-eyed smile. The other man stood and extended his hand for me to shake. I was surprised by its warmth; I had expected dry ice.

  "Avery Kord," he said.

  "I know."

  "Have a seat, Mister—"

  I paused, thinking: Bond, James Bond. "Lightman. Clifford Lightman." I looked for a hint of discomfort, recognition, recollection. But I got nothing. Warm hand, cool personality.

  "Hey," Harry said to me. "I didn't even know your name."

  "But Mister Kord does," I said, turning to the man behind the desk and swallowing the golf ball that had formed in my throat. "Don't you, sir?"

  He pursed his lips. "Not really, Mister Lightman."

  "What about my son, Schuyler? You know him? Sky Lightman?"

  Kord smiled widely, a plastic smile I recognized as phony. Same toothy smile he wore on television.

  He shifted in his seat and I knew I had landed a solid jab. I wondered how he'd cover.

  "Of course I know Shuyler, Mister Lightman."

  "You two want to be alone?" Harry asked. "I can take a tour."

  "Nah, that's okay, Dad," Kord said.

  I could barely comprehend what I just heard. I struggled to control the quavering of my voice.

  "Dad? You mean—" I pointed at Harry, then Kord, then Harry again. "You two?"