by Thomas Page
“How do you do?” she said, more or less in control of herself.
“Not so good, my soda’s flat.”
Forrester said softly, “You’re in my seat.”
Dutton scrambled to his feet, sensing the humor of the situation had evaporated under Forrester’s presence like a droplet before a blast furnace. Forrester was not merely unhappy or annoyed. Nothing so minor seemed to fit his temperament. He was in a positive rage.
“Sorry. Thought you’d left,” said Dutton.
“I answered the phone.”
Dutton shook Kate’s hand. “Well, it’s been nice. Short but nice.”
“Not short enough,” snarled Daniel Forrester.
Appalled, Kate stared at Forrester’s flushed face. The man was actually jealous. On the basis of no more than ten minutes of conversation, Forrester was acting like an orangutan protecting his mate from a chimpanzee. “Daniel . . .” she began.
Forrester said, “I didn’t realize doctors hung around places like this.”
Instantly Dutton flared. “Every night, Forrester. You never know where you can find a cadaver.”
Forrester ignored the doctor with elaborate aplomb. He seated himself across from Kate and erased Dutton with an imperious wave at the waitress. “Good-bye,” he said.
Kate swallowed her heart which was pumping itself up her body. To the doctor she said clearly, “It’s been nice talking to you. I hope to see you again.”
“You will,” Dutton answered while looking at Forrester. He steamed off into the crowd.
As the beer was set before him, Forrester turned a plastered smile toward Kate.
Kate said, “Mr. Forrester. I don’t like jealousy. It’s stupid, childish, and far too early.”
Forrester clasped his arms across his chest, his smile fixed as though carved in rock and just as phony.
Kate continued, “Also it’s ugly, and to tell the truth it scares me. I’m tired and bored and I think I’ll go to bed. Good-bye.”
“Good night, Kate.”
“Good-bye,” she repeated.
Still smiling, Forrester stood up and moved the table for her. “Same time, same table tomorrow night. Maybe?”
Kate’s weakened ski legs, rubberized by the beer, nearly gave out as she seethed her way past swarming men and dancing bodies.
Thinking that the night’s events had filled her with creativity, she slammed her room door shut and sat before the typewriter, brimming with rage and insight. She typed furiously for some moments before realizing that the night’s events did not amount to a hill of beans to anyone besides her. The fury dribbled away. She lay down on the bed, planning to rest before working on the article, but instead she fell into a sleep that lasted till morning.
In the Clayton clinic, Jameson and Jones were the two doctors on duty that night. As neurotics, they were made for each other. Jones was retiring to the point of being a recluse, Jameson had a scratchy sarcastic temper that made human contacts lasting longer than five sentences unbearable. Each man tried to avoid the other: Jameson hanging round the third floor where the only patient was a man who’d just had an appendectomy (“Time we called the appendix fairy, heh, heh,” Jameson had said to him) and Jones absorbed the spec sheets about the Stendhal Holmes Life Support capsule.
Late that evening Jameson found Jones sitting beside the capsule reading through sheets of printout. He watched Jones for five minutes before announcing his presence by clearing his throat.
Jones laboriously turned his face up to him and spoke slowly, a bass disturbed while swimming round its aquarium. “Jameson. We’re looking at death all wrong.”
“What’s that?” Jameson asked, referring to the printouts.
“This is the medical history of a woman named Mrs. Eleanor Cody. Two months ago in Phoenix, she was the first woman on this machine. She had a life-after-life experience. She died last week.”
“She’d had a stroke,” Jameson scoffed. “She was delirious.”
“That’s what Stendhal Holmes thinks. They ran down the whole history of it. Statistically, Jameson, the number of those experiences is the same for people on drugs as for people off drugs. Did you read this stuff?”
Jameson replied, “Time is gold. No.”
“That company matched her experiences with myths. Mrs. Cody felt herself propelled through a dark tunnel. In the Bible it’s called the valley of the shadow of death. She saw a being of light. Jesus. Or angels. She experienced a perfect harmony and peace. The peace that passeth all understanding.” Jones lowered the printouts and gazed at the black tubing. “How about that?”
“If I were more religious, I’d be kissing your feet.” Jameson walked into the IC ward and stood by the capsule.
“Did you ever think about death, Jameson?”
“No.” A strange answer from a doctor. Jameson surprised himself. “It’s not my business. You’re feeling awfully metaphysical tonight.”
“I once had an idea about the whole question of death. This machine brings it all back.”
“What kind of idea?”
“Jameson, suppose death actually occurs before the heart stops beating? Or before you’re brain-dead or tissue-dead or rigor mortis sets in?”
“Funny question from a doctor, Jones.”
“Oh, being a doctor is only a sideline.” Jones did not seem to realize how devastating that remark was. “You see what I’m getting at? We’ve got all these machines that can keep a body twitching forever, you never know when death occurs. Maybe we should turn the whole thing around.”
“That would put us out of business.”
“Maybe that’s good. You can always find some live jumping nerve and say it’s a sign of life. Maybe people die weeks or months or days before they actually fall over. Maybe long before you’re buried, you’re dead. Somehow.”
“You figure all this from that machine.” Jameson became resentful when confronted with brains.
“Partly. Mostly I’ve been thinking about Branch. Did you notice him this morning?”
“He looked pretty happy to me.”
“Jameson,” Jones sighed, “whenever he’s in good spirits, it means he’s feeling pain. His condition is deteriorating.”
“He looked the same to me as he did last year.”
“Not to me.”
“What’s that supposed to mean, Jones?”
“I don’t think he’ll last out the month.”
“Do you have any evidence to back up such an assertion?”
With his forefinger, Jones touched the center of his forehead. “Up here I see evidence you can’t put on a piece of paper. Evan Branch is a dead man. Right now, Jameson. His heart’s going. He has literally expired and his body just hasn’t got the message yet.”
“It’s the altitude,” said Jameson. “He should have moved into town two years ago.”
“He doesn’t want to leave his house. He’s got pictures of his wife and kids all over the place. If you moved him now, it would kill him faster than a stroke. You get my point though, don’t you? Evan Branch is dead. Death has already occurred to him.”
Even as he spoke, Jones knew it was hopeless. There were times when everyone on the staff thought Jameson lived a double life—one life as a doctor at this clinic where his gifts were for fast diagnoses and uncannily accurate drug balances, the other as a land speculator with all the ruthless singlemindedness of a barracuda. From his small cabin, Jameson bought and sold tracts of land all over the country. Some schools of thought considered such activities healthful. One should not work all the time, one should have at least two professions, hobbies, families, and different existences between profession and private life. With Jameson the separation was total.
Jones returned to reading the printouts. “Smother love,” he commented. “This device here is almost like having a spare body. What ge
ts me is the level of magnetism. Forrester’s body is recorded on the thing. Now for some reason at the exact minute he started experiencing fear, it picked up a very small magnetic level outside the capsule. We never did ask him what frightened him, you know that? I saw him. It looked like he was looking at something . . .”
Jones was interrupted by a small click from the capsule which galvanized Jameson very nearly off the floor. Jameson cried, “What’s going on?”
“It’s a cooling system, Jameson. Computers are supposed to have even temperatures.”
Jameson’s face was puffy and his eyes were streaked with red. He seemed to be lurching round tonight. He did not drink nor did he take drugs. Whatever was wrong with him was strictly emotional.
“Jameson?” Jones lowered the printout sheets. “Why did you lie to Forrester? You worked in St. Louis.”
“I never saw him before. I didn’t lie. That guy’s trouble.”
“Why?”
“He shoots his stinking mouth off, that’s why. He’s going to catch his ass in a sling someday, Jones, I mean it. He’d better watch himself.”
Jones had never seen the saturnine physician so emotional.
“What’s the matter with you?”
Jameson subsided into a chair and buried his face in his hands. “I want out of here. I want to go away someplace.”
“Because of Forrester?” Jones sensed there was more involved than just Forrester. Forrester was simply the trigger for some kind of torment inside Jameson.
Jameson looked up. “Did you ever feel like you’d died and come here? That your life blows to pieces just as soon as you settle down? Do you know what that feeling’s like?”
“No,” Jones answered, laying aside his printouts. “Do you?”
“Yes.”
“Why? Forrester met you in St. Louis. You’re all but eating the floor.”
“It’s more than Forrester,” Jameson said, running stiff fingers through his hair. “He’s just the latest. . . . Hell. It had to be somebody. It’s a cycle of events, you see. Hell is a merry-go-round, you can’t ever rest, you never feel safe.”
Jones decided Jameson was a hopeless neurotic and wondered how to end the conversation. “You want to go someplace, go shoot ducks in Canada or something. You’re a wreck. Go fly a plane.” Jones hoped that that would make Jameson leave.
Instead, Jameson looked at him with an altogether different expression on his face, a thoughtful look with the beginnings of a smile. “Did Forrester fly up?” he asked Jones.
“Of course he flew up. People like Forrester only fly, jog, swim, or ski.”
Jameson looked at his knees, clenching and unclenching his fists. “A grand-scale maneuver. By God, Jones, a man should take hold of his own life sometimes. Take the bull by the horns . . .”
Jones flung papers to the floor. “Kiss off, will you? You’re sounding like Branch.”
“God forbid.” Jameson left the ward, talking to himself as the door closed behind him.
Jameson was one of Nature’s hard cases. Jones would have contemplated him more had he not found the machine more interesting. The LS system worked well. Arnold Jameson did not. Jones figured the doctor was a victim of flawed design.
CHAPTER 3
“The image is universal. A tall blond man with silver sunglasses and seven thousand glittering white teeth is wearing a black ski jacket with bold yellow stripes on the sleeves. His hands grip ski poles. Dusty snow is in his hair and acres of virginal white snow cover the mountain behind him. Men like him always have mountains nearby. He’s single, affluent, doesn’t sell drugs or run guns. He’s just what you thought you needed because the name of your game is busted marriage, the business side of your thirties, no family, and you’re friends with everybody including your estranged husband. This fellow is good for one week. Not one minute more or less.”
Satisfied, Kate looked over her deathless prose. How marvelous—she had actually completed a paragraph. It looked good enough to cast in bronze. In fact it looked so good she decided to call her editor and bounce it off her.
Lorraine answered on the second ring as she always did, to show she was so hard driving she did not even have the patience to let her secretary answer the phone. “Kate! How’s it going? Boy, I wish I could get away.”
“I wanted to try an angle out on you.”
“Type her up and ship her off. I trust you.”
“I sort of thought I’d tell you what it is.”
“Kate, my love, you’ve got an angle. I’m happy you’ve got an angle. Most of my diddlyshit writers think an angle is what your foot is attached to. You’re a pro, Kate, let me have the thrill of reading it on paper and discovering it for myself. Surprise me.”
“Are you sure you don’t . . .”
“You’ll do great. How’s the weather up there?”
“Well, it’s . . .”
“Beautiful, don’t I know it. I was there two years ago. Conifers and good powder and hot fires and brandy.”
“I must say . . .”
“God decrees some lucky people to be writers who don’t have to sit in offices all day long. I envy you, Kate.”
“It’s true that . . .”
“You’re my beacon to that part of humanity that isn’t pale, pot-bellied, or in analysis. Got to run, babes, having a meeting. Talk to you next week.”
At least Lorraine was encouraging. Kate studied her article, wondering why it kept breaking to pieces in her head. Finally she understood it. It was based on Daniel Forrester who had broken to pieces last night. What bothered Kate was the fact she liked him. Not that she was swooning with passion and sleeping with his socks on her pillow, nothing that burned with a deep blue flame. She liked him and was sorry he had allowed his surface to crack open with that doctor. Kate was always surprised that these playful, trendy studs had waters that ran as deep and dark as anything Freud had studied. Something was disturbing the salesman.
Forrester had not been to breakfast this morning. Probably he was ashamed of himself and did not want to run into her again. From her window, Kate saw a lovely soft blue haze shrouding the mountains like a pleasant memory. She decided to rent a car and cruise round the mountains this afternoon. The exercise yesterday had made her so unsteady she felt her skeleton would sliver into piano keys if she so much as looked at a pair of skis.
At the main desk, she leafed through pamphlets describing the sights of Clayton. Irish beer joints. Steaks and chops. Auto repairs. On a small map a red cross marked the Clayton clinic about seven miles out of town and a thousand feet up on a forested mountain. In town, a combination gift shop and restaurant called Propinquity looked promising.
She rented a compact car and drove into town. A dozen or so people were seated in the restaurant which overlooked a river. It was a pleasant, carefully designed place which strove for an impression of gay nuttiness mainly through the use of tropical plants.
By the cashier’s desk were the telephones and restroom doors. As Kate removed her coat, she decided she was a romantic slob to be looking for Fate and maybe she did not want to meet it after all. This thought was triggered by Daniel Forrester’s stepping out of the men’s room and seeing her before she could duck out.
“Good morning, Kate.”
“It’s one in the afternoon.”
“Could I stake you to a cup of coffee?”
Kate decided she was not irritated with him anymore. “Yes, I suppose you could.”
He led her to a group of tables in a corner by the bar. Again Forrester had that pensive, distracted look. She now wondered if that, rather than the ebullience she had witnessed in the coffee shop, were his true nature. He said, “I’m sorry about last night, by the way.”
“That’s all right.”
“You can’t blame me. I guess we figured you were worth ten head of cattle and a kingdom. Y
ou liked Dutton, didn’t you?”
Kate shrugged with elaborate nonchalance.
Forrester looked moodily past the ferns out the window. “I tell you, Dutton’s the only one up at that bone-house I’d care to have as a doctor. He doesn’t fit in at all.”
“Why not?”
“Because there’s nothing wrong with him, far as I can tell. Everybody else up there is strange. Jones is a genius, he should be at Stendhal Holmes. It’s Jameson that’s got me worried.”
“What’s wrong with him?”
Forrester rolled his eyes. “If he’s who I think he is, I can embarrass a couple of universities, a few hospitals, and put that clinic right out of business, not to mention a few of our customers. I don’t want to do that. One, it’s not my problem; two, it’s not my fault; and three, maybe it’s nobody’s fault.”
Everywhere she turned Kate spotted more interesting articles than the one she was working on. “What is he, a Nazi or something?”
“Oh, no, he’s a doctor. It’s just that . . . I’m making discreet inquiries. Maybe I shouldn’t be. I’ve got this nasty feeling I ought to keep my mouth shut. It would probably have been better if I didn’t come up here. I wasn’t going to originally.”
“Why not?”
Forrester smiled up at the waitress who set two cups of coffee before them. He played with his cup, warming his hands with it. “I was supposed to leave this whole project up to Irwin Bickel. The only reason I took it was because I ski, I wanted a vacation, there happened to be a lodge near the clinic, blah, blah, blah. I haven’t had a vacation in two years. I kept thinking, ‘Daniel, hand it to Bickel.’ I’ve got this feeling I should’ve done exactly that.” Abruptly Forrester drank half his coffee and set the cup back down. “Screw it. What are you doing this afternoon, Kate?”
“Just ambling around. Why?”
“Would you like some company? I’m staying the rest of the week.”
Kate hesitated, not rudely, but she had planned to do some thinking today.
Forrester caught her uncertainty. “No sweat. Some other time.”
Kate made up her mind. She lightly touched his hand. “No. I’d rather be with you, Daniel.” Perhaps he would function as a muse for her the way beautiful women were supposed to function for male writers. Forrester clearly wanted to be useful to her.