Obsessed

by G. H. Ephron

  Shands looked up sharply as a thud sounded overhead. The sound had come from the ceiling over the scanner. Shands spun around and looked through the window into the control room. Dr. Pullaski had disappeared.

  There was another thud. Shands froze, like an animal listening for a predator.

  “What was that?” I asked.

  “The vents.” He cleared his throat and looked up at the ceiling. “Closing, I think.”

  Now Dr. Pullaski was standing there, her eyes fixed on Shands. She raised her index finger, then reached for the desk. I remembered what was there—the control panel with emergency buttons. Philbrick had nearly jumped out of his skin when Annie had gone for them.

  “No!” Shands screamed, spreading his arms protectively over the MRI system.

  Dr. Pullaski ignored him. She pressed her hand down.

  There was a pause and, for a moment, I thought nothing was going to happen. Then there was an explosion, like a jet engine coming to life. It seemed to come from the MRI system itself. Clouds of vapor began belching from the smokestack vent atop the scanner, cascading over Shands. He gave an agonized scream and he fell back, his hands outstretched. His splayed fingers had turned pale yellow and waxy. A two-tone blaring sound began, like a foghorn.

  “Quench!” Shands screamed. Dr. Pullaski stood there, staring at him impassively. “For God’s sake, Estelle, open the vents!”

  Philbrick’s words came back to me: The system holds over a thousand liters of liquid helium. And all thousand of them were now boiling over and vaporizing. I could see my college chemistry professor, Hiram Bucholtz, lecturing to us on the dangers of working with cryogenic gases. “It cannot be overstated,” he’d intone for the umpteenth time, “compressed gases are hazardous by virtue of their temperature and their compression.” Somewhere from the recesses of my brain I recalled that helium expanded at a ratio of about nine hundred to one when it vaporized. We had to get out of there, and fast.

  My head felt as if it were about to explode. I lunged for the door, took hold of the handle, and pulled. It wouldn’t budge. I wondered if Dr. Pullaski had locked it from the outside, or if the pressure buildup in the room was already holding it shut. I tried to yell to Shands to help me, but ended up bending double with my hands over my ears. It felt like nails were being driven in.

  Then, it was as if someone suddenly turned off the sound. The foghorn turned muffled and my ears were ringing. The room seemed to be revolving around me, and I found myself sitting on the floor, breathing rapidly. A red sensor on the wall started blinking, telling me what I already knew. Oxygen levels in the room had dropped.

  It was getting colder by the second. Eyeballs freeze, I thought distractedly. I should have closed my eyes to protect myself, but I couldn’t. Now the ceiling was completely obliterated by a white cloud that was descending as vapor filled the room. Soon, all we’d need was a gondolier’s boat and candelabra and we could do Phantom of the Opera, I thought in a wave of dizziness. Only the candles wouldn’t stay lit, would they?

  Shands staggered toward me. He had his arms crossed and his hands tucked into his armpits. Blood trickled from his ear. I felt the side of my face. My right ear was bleeding, too. Ruptured eardrum.

  In elementary school we’d learned about crawling out of a smoke-filled room. Hot air rises. What does cold air do, I wondered as I lay down on the floor and stared up as the cloud of white descended to meet me. Now my eyes were burning in the cold. I could barely see into the control room.

  I felt heavy, tired. So it wasn’t going to be Lewy body dementia after all. Asphyxiation was ever so much more tidy and quick. Though not all that different, really. Diminished mental alertness. Impaired muscle coordination. Faulty judgment. And a very cold nose.

  I could barely see Dr. Pullaski, still staring through the window, her head tilted to one side as if she were watching something growing in a petri dish.

  Suddenly, it seemed like the flashing red lights were forming words. BREAK THE GLASS, BREAK THE GLASS. I hoped it wasn’t too late.

  I managed to roll over onto my knees. Painfully I made my way, crawling under the descending cloud of vapor to the legs of the nearest chair.

  Finally I got to it, reached for the plastic seat, and pulled myself up to my knees. Shands was a few feet away, already passed out. Move, I told myself, imagining that I was on the river, trying to conjure the feel of the sun on my back, the feeling of elation as I pushed past the pain that always threatens to engulf me early in a row.

  But it was no good. I just hung there, my head in the chair seat struggling for air, staring at the outline of the window. Come on, the voice in my head hectored. I pictured myself standing, lifting the chair, and aiming at the window that I could barely see.

  In slow motion, as in a dream, cracks appeared in the glass and a chair came hurtling through the window. Confused, I saw it soundlessly hit the floor beside me and slide to a stop alongside Shands. The white cloud rushed out through the opening and into the control room.

  In a moment of clarity, I screamed, “Open the control room door!” Then everything descended into darkness.

  Someone was holding my hand. The warmth was almost painful. I opened my eyes. Annie was kneeling over me. I was on the floor of the MRI lab, covered in a blanket. I wanted to smile but I couldn’t make one happen—my face felt numb. Annie’s lips moved, but if there was sound I couldn’t hear it over the persistent ringing in my ears. Her lips formed a kiss. That message I got.

  The chair beside me was lying on its back. I remembered. Someone had sent the chair through the window. Had to have been Annie. Jagged bits of glass were all that remained in the window frame. Why wasn’t there any glass on the floor? Glass must have imploded into the control room. With the increased air pressure in here, it would have done so with considerable force.

  Annie had a towel wrapped around her forearm and blood was seeping through. As numb as my face was, it must have contorted with concern because Annie mouthed, “I’m fine. Really.”

  “Dr. Pullaski?” I asked, feeling the sound in my throat but barely hearing it.

  Annie’s eyes flicked to the control room. She shook her head.

  I felt the floor vibrate as a pair of medics rolled a gurney past me. “Shands?”

  Annie put out a flat hand, fingers splayed, and tilted it side to side, as if to say, “Touch and go.”

  Annie moved aside and a pair of medics took over. One of them had a clipboard and talked to Annie. The other felt my pulse. Then he rotated my head to one side and peered into my ear.

  The scanner, the wondrous 4.5-tesla system, stood in its corner looking benign. Like a huge elephant that had just gone on a rampage and was now anesthetized. I wondered how badly its innards had been damaged by the quench and explosion.

  The medic turned my head the other way. The only hint of what had happened was the broken window and the overturned chair.

  No, there was more. A three-inch fissure had opened between the ceiling and one of the walls. Air pressure had literally blown the lid off the lab. No wonder I felt like shit.

  27

  “YOU SURE you want to do this?” I asked Emily. We were standing in the parking lot. It was a hot muggy afternoon in the middle of summer’s first heat wave, the sun glowing low and sullen in the sky.

  “Absolutely,” she said.

  Emily had been released and the charges dropped. Shands had survived, though his hands were badly damaged from direct contact with the evaporating helium. In the three weeks since her death, there had been no funeral service for Dr. Estelle Pullaski, who’d nearly been decapitated by a shard of flying glass.

  The collection of brains had been transferred to the medical examiner, evidence in a multiple homicide investigation. Every day there were new revelations in the paper, another family coming forward to question a relative’s death. The official count was up over twenty. Shands was cooperating with the investigation, and word was that his attorney had worked out a plea bargain.


  Among other things, Shands admitted that both he and Dr. Pullaski had been at the lab early on the morning Philbrick was killed. He claimed he’d been working in his private laboratory and heard nothing until later, when he found Emily trying to remove the oxygen tank from the scanner.

  Beyond that, what happened was pure speculation since Dr. Pullaski was dead. The most likely scenario was that the evening before, Dr. Pullaski had indeed asked Philbrick to call Emily and tell her she’d left her beeper at the lab. Only Emily hadn’t left it there. Dr. Pullaski had taken it from her bag. Philbrick arranged for Emily to come in at seven to pick up her beeper the next morning. Maybe he went to Dr. Pullaski’s office to tell her, and that’s when she offered him a drink. I wondered if he’d been surprised by the sudden burst of friendliness. The drink had been laced with Valium. In a semiconscious state, she’d probably gotten him to climb up on the platform where he’d passed out. That must have been around the time I was trying to call Dr. Philbrick at his home.

  We knew how she’d kept him unconscious—the coroner had overlooked a tiny puncture wound in Philbrick’s foot where an IV had been used to administer more of the alcohol-and-Valium cocktail during the night while Dr. Pullaski went home.

  She and Dr. Shands returned early the next morning. Just before seven, when Emily was supposed to arrive, Dr. Pullaski got rid of the IV setup, started the scanner, and finally brought in the oxygen tank. The only thing she hadn’t counted on was Kyle Ronan waiting in the garage, watching Emily’s back. He never saw Shands and Pullaski arrive because they were already at the lab when Emily got there. Later, it must have been Pullaski who called Emily, pretending to be an administrator from outpatient services. The nonexistent new patient had been a ruse to keep Emily out of the way so Pullaski could deal with Kyle.

  Maybe Shands would be able to convince the prosecutors that he knew nothing about what was going on. People did things for him, he’d say, things he never even asked them to do. He’d certainly never asked Dr. Pullaski to kill patients.

  After he’d dug himself out from under criminal charges, there would be an inevitable avalanche of civil suits. University Medical Imaging was shuttered, and I wondered if it would be indefinitely.

  Emily had taken two weeks off. When she’d returned her mood had been subdued and somber. Her car was still in police custody and she’d had to rent one to get around. “It doesn’t matter,” she’d said. “They can keep it forever as far as I’m concerned. I’ll never be able drive it again, much less look at it.”

  Made sense. After all, it had been used to kill a man she’d cared for and who’d cared deeply for her. Too bad, I couldn’t help thinking, it was a very nifty car—something that my Subaru was so not.

  In a fit of self-serving selflessness, I found myself offering to swap cars. I didn’t mind waiting until the Miata was un-impounded. I’d get the fender fixed and the body painted silver. Emily had jumped at the offer.

  “Thank God,” Gloria had said to me when she heard the plan. “I can’t stand another minute of you whining about that stupid car of yours.”

  In the summer heat, I gazed about at the underbrush surrounding the asphalt. No menace lurked there today.

  “Peter?” Emily said.

  “Sorry, did you say something?” I asked. My hearing was coming back, but it wasn’t a hundred percent yet.

  “Ready?”

  I put the title certificate on the hood and with a flourish, signed it over to Emily. Then I gouged the keys out of my pocket.

  “The sunroof leaks,” I said.

  “I know. You told me that already.” She took the keys and title from me. “Believe me, this will be much better. Discreet, serviceable. Just what the doctor ordered.” She opened the driver-side door. Then she set her briefcase on the seat and opened it. “I brought you something.” She pulled out a small plastic CD case and handed it to me.

  “What’s this?” I asked, turning it over.

  “Your brain scan.”

  I had to squeeze my fingers around the case to keep from dropping it.

  “It’s just a video file. It’ll run on any PC.”

  How reassuring. It was the kind of gift I’d have expected from Shands, not Emily. I looked up at her slowly as a realization took hold.

  “How did you get this? I thought the lab was closed.”

  She looked away. “I’ve been in, helping with the cleanup. I need to give you this, too.” She reached into her briefcase, drew out an envelope, and handed it to me. “I’m quitting the clinical fellowship here. I’ve decided to devote my life to research.”

  “You know, there’s a lot of research going on at the Pearce.”

  She nodded, looking at the ground. “I’ve lined someone up to take over my patients. At least I helped get Mr. Black back on the path.”

  “You have another position, don’t you?” She didn’t answer. “University Medical Imaging?”

  “He’s selling that lab. Already sold it in fact. It’s going to be renovated, renamed.”

  “Who’s the buyer?”

  Emily colored slightly. “It hasn’t been formally announced.”

  It didn’t take much to figure out the likely buyer. My guess was Cimgen Pharmaceuticals, the company behind Cimvicor.

  “They’ve offered me the position of clinical director, and I’ve accepted. We’re going to refocus on our core mission. In the meanwhile—”

  We? “You can’t be serious. Emily, this is the man who stalked you. Even if he doesn’t go to jail, he’s probably going to lose his license to practice medicine. The lab will lose its accreditation.”

  She swallowed. “He needs me. It’s what I wanted from the beginning. To be a part of something really important. The work has to go on, even if we have to start over to do it.”

  She seemed to search my face for some indication that I understood. She didn’t find any.

  “I once had a friend who kept getting into relationships with the same kind of guy,” Annie said. We were standing on the Weeks footbridge looking over the Charles. It was late in the afternoon and the sun was at our backs. The week before, I’d helped her get Uncle Jack settled in a long-term care facility. An eight shot out from under the bridge and skimmed up the river, the rowers pulling hard. “Over and over, she’d start going out with these attractive, egotistical, self-centered jerks. And over and over again, she kept getting dumped.”

  “You think that’s what Emily’s doing?” Shands seemed to me nothing like Kyle.

  “I don’t mean Emily. I’m talking about Shands.”

  As different as Emily Ryan and Estelle Pullaski were, there was an essential similarity. Both were looking for that other half to make her feel complete, someone in whose reflected glory she could bask.

  “He needs an Emily,” I said. “But she needs him, too.”

  “You’re right. It’s hard to tell who was seducing whom,” Annie observed. “I know it’s not politically correct of me to suggest this, but isn’t it just possible that Emily’s the one who made sure Dr. Shands saw that Playboy spread at around the same time that he saw her resume? His reputation wasn’t exactly a closely guarded secret. It wouldn’t have taken a rocket scientist to recognize his vulnerability. Who knows, maybe her goal all along was to replace Dr. Pullaski. Become the great man’s partner.”

  As Annie said, it wasn’t PC, but it was plausible. Emily had as much as admitted to me that becoming his partner had been her fantasy.

  “Gal sure knows how to go after what she wants,” Annie said. “I’m glad she wasn’t able to sink her little teeth into you. Though God knows she tried.”

  I felt my face grow warm as I remembered the kiss that I shouldn’t have enjoyed nearly as much as I did. Annie just looked at me and laughed.

  “I wonder who he had before Dr. Pullaski. Lucrezia Borgia?” Annie said.

  “You know the charges against her are trumped up.”

  “Dr. Pullaski?”

  “Lucrezia Borgia.” I put my arm
around Annie and she leaned back against me. I nuzzled her neck. “I wonder. Is that what scares you about me? Making a mistake you’ve made before?”

  Annie twisted around to face me. “Actually, I don’t think I’ve ever made this particular mistake before.”

  She kissed her fingertips and placed them first on my right eye, then the left, then on my mouth.

  “You’re not like anyone else,” she said. “You’re solid, dependable.” I groaned. Was I also boring and predictable? “Men I’ve been with in the past have been fine as long as things are uncomplicated.”

  “Life seldom is.”

  “Not for long, anyway. Having to depend on another person? Makes my teeth itch.” Annie squinted into the sun. “So what are you afraid of?”

  I took a breath. Mortality? Illness? Losing my mind?

  “Who knows. But I do know that you don’t scare me one bit.”

  “No? I didn’t think so. But it sounds like you’re still chewing on whatever it is that Dr. Shands saw in your brain scan. Or should I say it’s chewing on you?”

  I had the CD that Emily had given me in my pocket. I took it out.

  “It’s on here. Emily gave me a copy.”

  “It would make a good coaster.”

  “Not really. It’s got a hole in the middle.”

  “You know what I think?” Annie said.

  “That Shands is full of shit?”

  “That. And that even if you have the inherited form of this blasted disease, so what?”

  If I’d been my own therapist, this is exactly what I’d have been thinking. What was the point of knowing, if it was going to make you live each day dreading something which may or may not happen, and over which you had no control?

  “I wish I’d never had that scan,” I admitted.

  “Ah. But how to close Pandora’s box?” Annie said, leaning on the bridge railing.

  I leaned over, too, and held the CD case over the water. Our elongated shadows stretched out in front of us. Knowledge or ignorance? Acceptance or denial? In both cases, I’d normally opt for the former. But this was different.