by Thomas Page
“Oh, Daniel, no you don’t. You’re just playing jealous.”
“I know George Hadley,” he repeated firmly. “Your George Hadley.”
“You can’t. He’s dead, Daniel! What am I going to do with you?” Probably she was compounding whatever illness had overtaken him; maybe she was saying the wrong things, not humoring him properly, wreaking havoc with his frail stability. Another thought occurred to her. “Are you here alone? Are you staying with anyone?”
“There are many like me here, Kate.”
“What do you mean like you?”
For one brief second, the old teasing Forrester surfaced and his grin changed to one of good humor. “I won’t give it away. Not yet, Kate, it’s not time yet. But look around you. Everywhere I go I’ve seen others like myself. See if you can spot someone like me.”
Kate rarely studied crowds in detail and when she did she was always surprised to see how faceless masses splintered into very recognizable human types. Kate concentrated on men. She indicated a man on a skateboard talking to three girls. Forrester shook his head. How about that nice father giving his kid a ride on his shoulders? Again Forrester shook his head. She tried a man in a coat and tie, a boy seated on the grass eating curry from a paper plate, and a man doing situps in a bathing suit. To all three Forrester answered in the negative. Kate sighed. “I give up, Daniel. Point out somebody like yourself.”
First he indicated a grossly fat woman in a print dress and sunglasses standing by the elephant path, then an elderly man strolling down the concrete walk amid the skaters, his face showing his interest in the crowd. Forrester pointed at a child who, hands plunged in his pockets, looked around at the faces of the adults towering over him like a wonderstruck waif looking for his mother’s face. Forrester silently pointed to an attractive teenage girl by the skatewalk, arms crossed, who watched the skaters whiz by.
“You see them all the time, Kate, every place, every day, in every crowd. I never realized that till a short while ago. They’re like me.”
Kate tried to figure out what those people had in common with Daniel Forrester. All seemed completely average, the kind of strangers she saw every time she walked a street. Only one thing bound them together—they were alone. Each was separate and solitary, apart from the rest of the crowd as though absorbed in his or her own thoughts. They shared Daniel Forrester’s newly acquired air of distance. “I give up, Daniel. They look like everybody else.”
“Well, of course they do. They’re just people.”
“What makes them different?”
Later, when she looked back on that strange afternoon, Kate was certain that Daniel Forrester was gathering sufficient courage to tell her the truth. She thought this because, at that moment, she felt how much he cared for her. His emotions had always been blunt. Despite the distractions of the crowd, the noise, the animals and the heat, Kate could feel Forrester’s love for her. It was love gone berserk, love raised to the ridiculously intense, and nothing so elevated as poets make it. Forrester was crazy about her, and the craziness served to remind her that no matter how peculiarly he was behaving right now, deep down he was still a hell of a fellow. As he himself said, he was nothing but moods. He had been like that at the lodge and it was still an accurate assessment.
This fact was unpleasantly impressed upon her as Steve and Diane pushed toward her through the crowd. “There you are, Kate,” said Steve. “Just no getting rid of me, is there?” Belatedly realizing she was talking to someone, Steve turned to face Daniel Forrester.
“Daniel, this is my husband, Steve. And this is Diane
something-or-other.”
“Hull,” whispered Diane, looking at him and turning pale. Forrester’s impact on her was all but physical. She stepped back, her eyes widening behind her tinted glasses.
“How do you do,” said Steve, extending his hand.
Daniel Forrester did not shake it. He stared at Steve with loathing branded in fire across his features. His mood had flickered from joy to total hatred of Steve.
Steve withdrew his hand, trying to turn the gesture into a casual scratching of his head, and coughed mightily. Kate sensed a disaster coming. Feebly she said, “Daniel and I met in Colorado.”
Diane said, “Kind of hot for a coat and tie.”
Daniel Forrester did not answer. He continued hating Steve, who looked uncertainly from him to Kate.
“Daniel, I came here with Steve and Diane,” Kate said in a desperate singsong voice. Goddammit, grow up.
“Do you live round here, Mr. Forrester?” asked Steve.
“No,” he snapped. “Do you?”
“Actually I live in Laurel Canyon.” Steve endured Forrester’s ferocity as long as possible. “Right. I’ll see you around later. Okay, Kate? Diane, let’s go buy a dirty T-shirt.”
Grasping her by the elbow, Steve firmly steered his girl back toward the skaters’ lane. Diane watched Forrester over her shoulder as she was moved off.
“Daniel, I’m fed up with you,” Kate exploded angrily. “That’s twice you’ve pulled this stunt”
“Get rid of him,” Daniel Forrester growled.
“I’ll get rid of you first. He’s still my husband.”
“Get rid of him,” Forrester repeated like a metronome.
At that point, something so bizarre happened that Kate nearly dropped her handbag while transferring it to another shoulder. Forrester jumped backwards, hand going to his head, his fury transmuting to despair. Jumped was not the right word, sprang was more like it. He moved so fast, Kate could have sworn he seemed to vanish for just a microsecond. “Christ, Daniel, what’s wrong with you? What in the living hell is the matter with you!” she nearly screamed.
In a perfectly normal tone of voice Daniel Forrester said, “Blackout. Blackout. Blackoutblackout . . .” He slipped backwards from her outstretched hand, moving between a couple of men watching the elephant. “Kate. I’ll be back. I’ll . . .” Daniel Forrester turned and rushed behind the men.
Desperately Kate tore after him, shouldering people aside, frightened at the idea of his having a crackup right there and trying to kill someone. He was absolutely out of control.
Kate looked at the skaters. Where did he go so fast? She didn’t hear any screams or see cops rushing about, so he must not have hurt anybody. Kate walked through the crowd beside the elephant walk, along the food line, among the skaters, and partway down the skaters’ lane. Nowhere in the mass of primary colors and skin did she see a blue blazer and tie.
Nor for that matter were Steve and Diane visible anywhere. Kate was on her own for the rest of the day, thanks to Forrester’s rudeness. She decided to watch the elephant make one last circuit before heading for home.
The fat woman whom Forrester had pointed out was still at the rope watching the beast lumber by. On an impulse, Kate boldly walked right up to her and stood by the rope. The woman wore a bright yellow flower-print dress. Her plastic half-frame glasses were attached to her by a chain, and she carried a shopping bag. Kate detected only one unusual thing about her. Despite the sun, despite her sausage fingers and the massive rolls of fat around the lady’s jowls and upper arms, she showed no sign of perspiring at all. The woman watched the elephant with fixed, blank attention.
Kate cleared her throat and said, “Excuse me.”
She might just as well have fired a pistol at her. The huge head whirled round at remarkable speed, fixing Kate with a mad look of fear. The woman gasped loudly, evidently thinking Kate was going to attack her. She sidestepped away from the rope and waddled off with frequent glances over her shoulder.
Next to Kate a middle-aged bearded man in shorts with a sunburn on top of his head laughed. “Nutty as they come. She hangs out here nearly every day. Sometimes the cops have to chase her off the beach in the middle of the night.”
“Who is she?”
The man grimaced.
“Who knows? Venice is full of vagrants. She’s probably from some mental hospital or something. I think she’s harmless.”
Kate hung around for another ten minutes looking for Steve, Diane, and Forrester before heading for home. There was no doubt about Daniel Forrester, the man had gone off the deep end. His wild mood changes were a sure sign of drugs. The same emotional anarchy characterized the fat woman. The two of them were mental cases all right. Probably they had met at some local treatment center.
When Kate got home, she could not stop thinking about Forrester. He did not seem dangerous except when Steve showed up. Probably he was a borderline case, not sick enough to be committed, but not well enough to act normal either. And try as she might, Kate could not cut him off completely. She had spent a week with him. There was much in his character that was good. He needed emotional support very badly. Maybe he was curable, maybe it was biochemical, the kind of thing correctable by Lithium, the drug used to stabilize manic depressives.
What was Daniel Forrester doing in that house?
Kate remembered the footsteps coming down the hall, she remembered how he disappeared by walking into the kitchen and compared it to how he disappeared this afternoon. She thought about Nora Stone’s earnest face at the reception.
Kate rested her head in her hands and thought long and hard. Mr. Fudd jumped up on the table in front of her face. She said, “Fudd? You’re my earwitness. This is for the record, okay? You heard it here first. Ready?”
Fudd yawned and watched her with sleepy eyes as she rubbed his ears.
“This lady does not believe in ghosts. I don’t care what Nora Stone says, I reject all that crap as elaborate, rationalized superstition. I do not. You got that?”
Fudd didn’t care. He just liked being massaged.
CHAPTER 10
The people Evan Branch had invited to view Forrester numbered over thirty and included representatives from the state board. They descended on the clinic over a period of a day and night, summoned from New York, Atlanta, Cleveland, Houston, and parts unknown. Most were in their fifties and sixties, reminding Dutton that Branch had had quite a reputation in his day.
Bickel and his team arrived that morning to prepare the capsule for transferral. The assembled doctors studied the printouts and history of the patient and asked numerous questions about the LS system and its operation. Several were fortunate enough to witness a two-hour arrest which began just after ten-thirty in the morning and ended at twelve-forty-five.
Dutton searched the faces for some hint of awe, for something that would make him feel as if what they’d witnessed were incredible. He wanted desperately to share it, to take the burden off his back. But it was no good. When Forrester’s heart started again the only reaction was a solemn shaking of heads and an intense quizzing of Bickel about the device. There was one exception. A lady in her sixties, a doctor named Kampmeier, whose name Dutton recalled as being connected with virus research, continued watching Forrester’s body after it began breathing again, changing eyeglasses as her gaze went from the console to the capsule. She looked at Dutton with a sharp, suspicious expression. In a thick American-German-
Yiddish-Hungarian and possibly part-British accent, she grumbled to Dutton, “Rigor mortis?” She sounded like she was blaming the doctor.
“Yes. And within three hours after revival, it’s gone. How, I don’t know, but the machine does inject a lot of protein.”
She grasped his shoulder and spoke with an undertone of bafflement. “Rigor mortis means he is dead. This cannot be right.”
Bickel had approached them, sensing the woman’s state of mind. “Don’t worry,” he said with a calming ease which would have been worthy of Forrester himself. “It’s almost certainly the machine circuitry, not the patient.” Bickel had been taking compliments from the doctors all afternoon. The fact the body was in such good condition after repeated cardiac arrests was considered a tremendous technical achievement. “The only thing that can kill the patient now is machine damage or someone putting the wrong drug into the system. And even if that happens, the machine will warn us.”
“I’d like to put some arsenic in it,” whispered Bernice into Dutton’s ear while smiling at the doctors.
Dutton had been cranking himself up to a series of decisions all afternoon. Grasping Bernice by the shoulders, he led her away from the group. “Bernice, I’m going to tell Bickel what happened. I want you to back me up.”
“Yes, sir. If you think so.”
“Now listen, love, don’t you have a vacation coming up?”
Bernice’s eyes acquired that soft shine inspired by religious visions and checks in the mail. “Do you think Dr. Branch would let me?”
“I’m letting you off. Go home and come back on the twenty-ninth. I’ll cover for you. Just stay long enough to help me buttonhole Bickel.”
The general tone of the gathering was cheerful, which contributed to Dutton’s feeling of surrealism. The doctors, glad to see Branch after so many years, clustered in shifting little knots around the elderly physician to trade old school stories. Everyone knew Branch’s health was precarious. They would never see him again. Dutton remembered a phrase from the fifteenth century’s cult of death. The dead spoke to the living youth: As I am, so shall you be. Where Forrester goes, go we all. There was one difference—the medieval people let their dead lie in peace. They did not seal up the partially living in Stendhal Holmes systems. That device would cause one hell of an ethical bind. Forrester hadn’t even had the last rites yet.
Bickel told his technicians to unhook the LS for transferral to Denver. It was an intricate process involving switching from the clinic current to a perfectly matched current from a generator truck and thence to a helicopter waiting at the airfield.
Bernice and Dutton managed to get Bickel out of the ward and down to a clinic room alone. They sat him on the bed. Trying to keep his words as precise and detached as possible, Dutton described the events of Forrester’s death—the freezing cold, the hand that touched Branch and himself, all culminating in the night his face looked out the window and he picked up the machine. And, Dutton told Bickel, Jones was this minute headed for Santa Eulalia to confirm reports of a haunted house.
When Dutton finished, Bickel tapped his foot on the floor and pulled at his ear. He snorted, smiled in embarrassment, and avoided their eyes. Under the circumstances, no other reaction was appropriate. “Sorry, I’m not laughing at you. Well, well. You’re sure it wasn’t someone else who . . .”
“Quite sure,” Dutton answered, pushing on before Bickel could gather his thoughts together. “Is there some kind of fibrillator on that machine that’s operated manually? Some way you can bypass the system and start the heart directly?”
“In case the monitor can’t get it going? Sure, it’s just a plain old shocker. Why?”
“It would yank him back into his body before he could do more damage. It might not be good to wait for the computer to start the heart.”
“Nothing personal, Dr. Dutton, but you realize I have to think you’re both full of crap.”
“No offense,” Dutton answered, jovially patting his shoulder. “Your head’s on right. I’d be worried if you bought it right off. I’d like to know if you plan to babysit the machine in Denver for any length of time.”
“May I ask why?”
“In case I need you.”
Bickel got off the bed and walked to the window to look out at the mountains. His hands were plunged deep in his pockets and he jingled his keys. He was silent for a long time, then he sighed, recalling Forrester’s remark about the clinic’s weird staff. “Where was he during this last arrest?”
“Back at his home, more than likely.”
“If he’s so all fired anxious to have the plug pulled, why didn’t he show up today?”
“He’ll show up. He takes things one at a time.
Jones says he doesn’t have any sense of time. He also says he’s kind of a somnambulist. Rather stupid. He doesn’t behave according to logic, he goes strictly by instinct. We do know he wants off the machine.”
“You’re really serious, aren’t you?”
“I just want to know how long you’ll stay with the LS in Denver.”
Bickel looked back at them with a long, calculating gaze. “Okay. Tonight and tomorrow at least, to make sure it’s operating properly. I’ll stay longer if I really have a reason. A good reason, Dutton.”
By four o’clock the LS electrical system had been switched completely over to the generator truck. The doctors watched the crew slide the capsule onto a dolly and trundle it down the hall, then lift it onto the truck. The consoles from the main desk as well as the ward were packed in next to it.
Bereft of the equipment, the isolation ward looked barren. A large stained indentation was visible on the floor where the LS had rested. Lacking any other reason to stay, the assembled doctors began filing out to their rented cars. They would converge on Evan Branch’s home that evening for a final dinner.
Bernice embraced Dutton briefly before getting in her car and driving off. A police escort led the generator truck down the road toward the airfield.
Branch stood beside Dutton watching the cavalcade leave. “What do you suppose is the meaning of all this, Dutton? Do you think anyone’s learned anything here?”
“Forrester’s an interesting case.”
“He’s not a case. He’s a circuit on that machine, an extra wire, he’s switched on and off like a lightbulb.” Branch glanced round the clinic building. “I say, Dutton, we’re the only ones here.”
“Right now, sir. I’ll stay around till seven-thirty. There’s a registered nurse coming in an hour. Bernice lined her up for us.”
“I’d say we’re understaffed. And that’s an understatement.”
“We only have two patients, Mrs. Cheever and Mrs. Holloway. Don’t worry about it, sir, enjoy the party. I’ll be up this evening.”