by Thomas Page
By now, Daniel Forrester’s body weighed a bare hundred pounds. It was less a body than a human skeleton overlaid with tissue-thin skin. Mercifully, the chest strap and waist monitors and helmet concealed most of it, but were anyone to view him now, they would conclude he had been buried for days and the small amount of remaining flesh was returning to the elements. The data informed Bickel that his hair was gone and his fingernails and toenails were growing. He resembled the medieval paintings of death, a hollow-eyed nightmare with bones visible through a transparent veil that had once been flesh.
The duty nurse described the intruder to Bickel. A nice-looking fellow wearing a blue coat and loafers was walking through the wards looking into the rooms. Bickel grabbed her sleeve. “What kind of a man?” he asked. “How old was he?”
“About forty, I guess, blond hair. He was on the first floor.”
Bickel grabbed a wall phone and dialed the security office. Yes, there was an intruder in the hospital, probably nothing bad, he certainly didn’t seem dangerous. They were looking for him now on the second floor. They figured he was hiding in one of the closets.
Bickel asked, “How did he get in?”
“Don’t know that, sir, he probably just walked in.”
“How did he get from the first to the second floor, did he take the elevator?”
Somewhat ticked at being grilled, the guard said, “He got up there, what’s the difference?”
“Listen to me. That fellow is looking for the LS capsule on the fourth floor, intensive care ward . . .”
“Just a minute, please, sir.” The guard spoke to someone on the other line. When he came back on the phone, his manner was subdued. “Yes, one of my men challenged him on the second floor as he was going up the stairwell. Apparently he’s checking out each room, one at a time. The stairwell door was locked, though, so I don’t understand. Hold the line a minute, sir . . .”
Bickel listened. The fourth floor was quiet but for the ticking of the nurse’s consoles and the soft pad of their feet.
“Mr. Bickel, somebody reported him on the third floor, west wing. There must be more than one, he couldn’t have gotten that far down . . .”
Separating Bickel from the nurse’s console was a heavy wooden door with a square window looking down the hall. Broken by the inset nurse’s section, the hall stretched clear to the west wing, where it took a sharp right turn. The minute the guard said west wing, Bickel leaned out from the wall to look through the window.
Down the hall, he saw Daniel Forrester come round the corner and walk toward him. Overhead the fluorescent lights flickered, cracked, and rained down showers of sparkling fragments, turning the whole corridor into a fitfully lit tunnel. Bickel gasped into the phone, “He’s here, I see him coming . . .” Static roared out of the earpiece.
Bickel pushed open the door and screamed at the nurses looking up at the failing lights, “Get out! Get downstairs now!” Behind him, a nurse was carrying a tray of needles for a blood sample. Scandalized, she allowed him to pull her back down the hall a few feet before shaking herself free and shouting “stop it” at him.
The nurse turned to the door. It bulged. A coat sleeve with a hand on the end of it, followed by a chest with coat and tie and finally Daniel Forrester’s sternly handsome face, a knee, a foot, a thigh, an entire human body emerged liquidly out of the solid wood, and came striding toward them. The nurse tossed away the needle tray and ran past Bickel.
“Bickel,” said Daniel Forrester in a flat voice.
Behind him the door flew open as nurses, guards, doctors, orderlies, and janitors piled into the hall. By then Bickel was racing into the ward with the LS capsule. Somehow Daniel Forrester appeared in the room at the same time as Bickel did.
The room strobed with the failing, surging lights. The computer indicators flashed an insane series of mad green and red streaks while graph data marched across the green screen and rolls of paper clacked out of the terminal. Bickel cowered behind the main terminal and watched a ghost examine his own body.
Daniel Forrester reached right through the glass and tore off the helmet, tossing it in a corner. The face was a skull, bald and punctured with needle marks, the eyes sunken out of sight, the scalp smooth but for the jellied substance used for the electrodes. The lips were drawn back over a black mouth empty of teeth. Daniel Forrester’s fingers felt for a pulse in the neck. Finding none, he tore the IVs out of the arms.
Then Daniel Forrester stood and waited, hands in his pockets, looking down at his body. Bickel sensed numerous feelings emanating from him. He now knew how terrified he was of Forrester. It was somehow an insult that the ghost should look so solid, healthy, and alive, while he was in fact a wasted collection of desiccated flesh and bones. Forrester was a horror of an ancient type here in this room full of blinking transistors and twentieth-century technology.
Bickel stood up behind the console. “Daniel, go away. I’ll turn it off.”
Daniel Forrester smiled at Bickel. He scratched his cheek. It was a gesture so reminiscent of the living man, that Bickel’s fear abated.
“I mean it, Daniel. You know me. I’ll shut the LS off the minute you leave.”
Forrester nodded. He looked through the canopy one last time and shook his head. He smiled at Irwin Bickel and then he was gone. His departure was so casual and unexpected, neither Bickel nor the people crowding the doorway reacted immediately. One of the guards had his pistol out.
The lights burned brightly and steadily again. Bickel looked round and realized the helmet was back on the body’s head. The staff filed into the ward and looked at every corner, table, curtain, anywhere a hiding place existed.
“Where’d he go?” asked the guard.
“Home,” Bickel replied.
One of the nurses threw up on the floor. As the others helped her out, Irwin Bickel shut off the LS machine switches, one by one. The scanners hissed into their recesses, the IV and drug systems, the spinal monitors, the heart monitor, the oxygen and suction tubes, the temperature control, and finally the main power cable, all the systems were shut off.
Bickel sat at the console and precisely counted off twenty minutes, after which he started the system again. The scanners passed over the body probing for nerves, but the only activity it found was a fading arc somewhere in the right leg. The body was a mass of bacteria, stiff, cold, and without perspiration, the fluids collecting at the lowest centers of gravity. Bickel cut off a switch that scrubbed the air circulating in the capsule and informed the hospital that Forrester’s body should be removed. Daniel Forrester had died for the last time.
In the darkened bungalow of the Sidewinder, which was illuminated only by the green circle of light specked with Jones’s brain waves, the telephone jangled. Dutton heard Kate stir in the cot against the wall as he answered.
Bickel was brief. “It’s all over. We’re cleaning the machine up. I’ll bury him in Santa Eulalia tomorrow.”
“Okay. Thanks for everything, Bickel.”
Dutton hung up and lay back down on the bed. Neither of them was asleep. He said, “That’s it.”
They waited a few minutes, wide-awake, expecting the room to turn cold at any second.
Kate said, “That leaves us, doesn’t it?”
“Maybe not. Maybe we’re not so important.”
They tried to sleep, but could not. They lay on their sides, eyes stuck on the green screen, waiting for a conical green line.
Bickel closed off the whole affair with the efficiency befitting a Stendhal Holmes engineer. He observed the body as it was transferred to a zippered plastic bag. The face looked peaceful like that of a man who has come through a harrowing illness to emerge weak and thin, but otherwise in good health. It was nowhere near as cadaverous as it seemed when the ghost had torn off the helmet. Bickel now had a working knowledge of illusion.
Stendhal Holmes cleaned
up the ward and transferred the LS system to a small town called Clark Creek, Idaho, of the same size and demographics as Clayton, Colorado. Bickel accompanied the body to Santa Eulalia. He contacted an Episcopal priest who learned that Forrester’s mother was buried in a cemetery east of town. Bickel ordered a headstone engraved with Forrester’s name, birth and death dates, and the inscription life is forever. It was doggerel, but he was an engineer, not a poet.
Bickel and the priest were the only ones at the grave. When the priest finished, Bickel thanked him and gave him a check for the church from the company. Bickel then headed back to the motel.
Lassitude seeped through Bickel’s bones, the urge to motionlessness that succeeds great mental and physical effort. Bickel had planned to return to the office that day. Instead he phoned in to say he would be back to work in the morning. He splashed around the motel pool that afternoon, lay in the sun, took a two-hour walk through the little town—nothing to see except trailer parks on the outskirts and unused railroad tracks—and generally tried to work up an appetite. Later in the afternoon, he got the feeling that someone was looking for him.
It was not an ominous feeling at all; in fact, it was so natural that Bickel did not think about it. He felt as though he were in danger of missing an appointment and he loathed doing that; his precise, prompt mind recoiled at the very concept of tardiness and imprecision.
At a liquor store, Bickel picked up a bottle of scotch and some paper cups. At the motel he bought a bucket of ice from the machine by the pool. He poured out a big shot of straight scotch, popped a couple of cubes in the cup, and drank it down. He poured out a second shot, freshened the ice, and waited. He waited for the phone to ring, a knock at the door, a telegram, a voice . . . Bickel did not know who he was waiting for and only after the scotch made him slightly whacked did he slowly realize something momentous was about to happen, that this was not a normal feeling of expectancy.
He killed the cup of scotch and poured some more. Now he was thinking about a black engineer whom the company let go and who promptly committed suicide, leaving a widow. Bickel decisively lowered the cup onto the table and spoke to a crack in the wall. “I do not want to get married. And you know what? I don’t even want to get laid! If a girl walked in here and tore off her clothes, I would tell her to take a walk. That’s a true fact, Daniel. Daniel, boy, did you get girls! Drove me crazy. That’s why I didn’t want to go pub crawling with you anymore. Did I ever tell you that? I got so damned depressed that night . . .”
Bickel scraped the chair around and faced the bathroom.
Sitting in the other chair across the desk was Daniel Forrester, head cocked in polite rapt attention, one hand resting on the table, his legs folded carefully so as not to disturb the crease.
“. . . so miserable when you took off with that brunette, I swore I’d never ever do that again.” Bickel grasped the cup in both hands and looked into the amber surface of the scotch. He raised his incredulous eyes to the chair.
Daniel Forrester was still there.
Daniel Forrester moved the empty cup toward himself. He unscrewed the scotch bottle and poured a shot into his cup. Then he held it up to Bickel in a toast. Bickel touched his drink to Forrester’s and both killed the scotch at once. Forrester smacked his lips and set the cup down.
Bickel’s hands shook with drunken tics as he refilled his own cup. He said, “Daniel, did I ever tell you the trauma of my life?”
Forrester clasped his hands on his lap and listened.
“When I was eleven years old, my father took me to Brazil. There was this biological station there that bred things like tarantulas and black mamba snakes and poison frogs and poison plants and Gila monsters . . . all for research. Venom into heart medicine, curare and stuff like that. There was this little bird’s nest and in this nest was a little bird’s egg about to hatch. The mother was off somewhere. Baby chick struggling to get out. Got the picture?”
Forrester nodded sagely.
“The other thing that watched this egg was a big fat bird spider. You ever seen one of those goddamned, filthy, stinking, rotten, pissy things? He just sat there watching the egg shake, just waiting for the chick. They do that, you know, it’s Nature’s way. This little chick finally got the egg open, half-open. A chick. Doesn’t even know what the world looks like. First bit of sunlight he sees . . . just one little flake of egg falls . . . and that goddamned, stinking, rotten . . .” Bickel never could finish that story. He made a sweeping, rejecting movement with his arm, splattering scotch all over the room. “Forrester, why did God make bird spiders? Isn’t there a better way?”
Pity and sympathy for Irwin Bickel emanated from Daniel Forrester. He looked sadly at his colleague.
“Nature,” bubbled Bickel. “Nature sucks, man. Personally, I like machines. Screw Nature. I mean, for God’s sake, what’s the point?”
Daniel Forrester shrugged and spread his hands. That was a tremendous revelation to Bickel. Why, this guy even in his present state didn’t know the answer any more than he did.
“Daniel,” said Bickel. “You leave Dutton and that girl alone. You go away from here, you’re free now and you leave us alone. It’s finished. You’re dead.”
Daniel Forrester’s face was expressionless. His intentions were not for Irwin Bickel to know.
“Will you answer me one question before you go?”
Daniel Forrester raised his eyebrows.
“What’s it like, where you are? Being dead, I mean?”
Daniel Forrester thought the questions over. Then his lips moved and one single word came out in deafening tones. “Crowded.”
Bickel burst out laughing. Good old Daniel, that dry sarcasm under the brainless good humor, that was exactly how he remembered him from Stendhal Holmes. Bickel whooped and stomped his feet on the floor and generally made a cackling fool of himself. When he wiped his cheeks and regained control, Daniel Forrester was gone.
“Before God, there were numbers.”
Pythagoras
CHAPTER 15
Dutton and Kate became people groupies. They searched every face on the streets of Vegas, fearing Daniel Forrester would be one of them. Dutton bought a veritable carton of cadmium batteries to keep the oscilloscope going day in and day out. He played roulette at night and watched his winnings swell to over twenty-five hundred dollars. They went off to the floor shows. One had thirty-seven nude dancers on a full-scale replica of a sailing ship complete with firing cannons, lashing waves, and a hurricane that sank the ship and disgorged the women a second time as mermaids. As stagecraft it was awe-inspiring but neither could concentrate on it. Instead they watched the audience, fearing to see a blond man in a blue blazer.
For a man and a woman staying together in a cramped room in the midst of the roaring, explosive vulgarity of Vegas, they were remarkably chaste. Even lacking fiery love, Dutton thought from time to time, they should be able to get a little heat going. It was Daniel Forrester’s fault. They felt they were being constantly watched. Nothing kills passion faster than the constant presence of death. Dutton thought the opposite would be true, that awareness of oblivion would galvanize people to sex as a kind of hedge against mortality. But it did not seem true for them.
Once Kate asked him, “Were you trying to pick me up that night?”
Somewhat miffed, Dutton answered, “What the hell did you think I was trying to do?” Either she was more naive than he realized or he was more of a stumblebum than he could have imagined.
“That’s not what made him mad at you.”
“What did?”
“The fact you came so close.”
With that exchange, Dutton felt a small door open between them. He should have grabbed the initiative and done something—made a pass, brought her flowers, composed poetry—to get the ball rolling because she sure wasn’t doing anything about it. But he was busy changing batteries in
the oscilloscope. He always tried to do that quickly, for fear Daniel Forrester might creep into the room while the power was off.
Later in the afternoon, he spoke to Jordan. “Lawrence,” the old man expostulated, his libido coming out of the telephone like a frog tongue shooting at a juicy June bug. “Is that a girl you have with you? Are you in a Vegas motel room with a live, breathing girl?”
“Yes, sir, it is a girl.”
“My God. Good for you, my boy. I am seventy-eight years old and under this decrepit, rusty wreck is a roué who has always wanted to spend a weekend in Las Vegas with a female. My academic career weighs on me like a keg of saltpeter, I was always too serious. Is she a blond?”
“No. She has long, fine brown hair,” Dutton replied looking Kate over while she put her face on at the desk mirror.
“Wonderful, blonds are fool’s gold, I always say. How much does she weigh?”
“About a hundred twenty, I guess.” Dutton replied, looking at her again.
“A hundred fifteen,” Kate snapped.
“I bet she’s a barber pole,” Jordan groaned. “All bones and cheek, that’s the style now. When I was young, women were round, round smiles, round pink cheeks, round eyes, round ankles . . . women were more then. Look at old paintings, Lawrence, nobody appreciates flesh anymore, nobody even knows what it looks like. Bah, you’re spending a weekend in a Vegas motel room with a sapling.”
“Ours is an elevated affair,” Dutton said sarcastically. “We’re too refined for carnality.”
“Bah. You’re depressing me,” Jordan replied, hanging up.