What Comes Next
Page 46
He was bent over slightly at the waist, seemingly inspecting something directly in front of him, although the angle of his head told Jennifer he couldn’t even see the fine afternoon sunlight. His hands quivered and his lip twitched with Parkinson’s-like symptoms. His hair was completely white now, and the fitness that he’d once relied upon had faded. His arms were like sticks, his thin legs jumped nervously. He was cadaverously underweight, and he hadn’t been shaved, so gray stubble marked his sunken cheeks and chin. His eyes were cloudy.
If he recognized Jennifer there was no way for her to tell it.
She found a chair and pulled it up next to the old professor. The first thing she said was, “I’m going to get straight A’s in my major—no, our major, professor. And next year will be the same. I will keep at it however long it takes, and whatever you started I will finish, I promise.”
She had worked on this speech in her head for some days. She had not told him this before. Mostly, she had been preoccupied with simpler things to tell him about, such as how she had finished high school and getting into college and then what courses she was taking and what she thought of the teachers who had once been his colleagues. She sometimes talked about a new boyfriend or something as mundane as her mother’s new job and how she seemed to have recovered from exiting her relationship with Scott West.
But mostly she read him poetry. She had become quite good at inflections, rhythms, and language, finding the subtleties in the verses and capturing them for the old man—even if she knew he could no longer hear or understand anything she said. It was, Jennifer knew, the saying of it that was important.
Jennifer reached out and took his hand. It seemed paper-thin.
She had done her research and confirmed it with conversations with the rehabilitation center staff. Professor Thomas was simply and inexorably sliding into death. There was nothing anyone could do about the torture, except hope that as his brain functioning had evaporated he wasn’t in terrible pain.
Except she knew he was.
She smiled at the man who had saved her. “I thought maybe a little Lewis Carroll today, professor. Would you like that?”
A small stream of spittle appeared at the corner of his mouth. Jennifer took a tissue and carefully wiped it away. She thought he had been through much near-death, the disease and the wounds from the shoot-out that should have killed him, but didn’t, although they had left him crippled. It did not seem fair.
She reached down to her backpack and removed a book of poems. She took a quick glance around. A few other patients were being wheeled through the nearby garden, admiring the flowers laid out in rows, but on the patio the two of them were alone. Jennifer thought she would not have a better moment to read to the professor.
She opened the book but the first lines came from memory: “’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe . . .”
The poetry book was thick—a compilation of generations of English and American poets—and she had slid a small syringe between the pages. The syringe had been lifted during a visit to campus health services six months earlier, a bit of sleight of hand while coughing with a faked case of bronchitis.
The syringe was filled with a mixture of Fentanyl and cocaine. The cocaine had been easily obtained from one of the many students “working” their way through college. The Fentanyl was harder to acquire. It was a powerful cancer drug, a narcotic used to mask the harshness of chemotherapy. It had taken her a few months to befriend a girl who lived down the hallway from her and whose mother was suffering from breast cancer. On a weekend visit to the girl’s house in Boston, Jennifer had managed to steal half a dozen tablets from a medicine cabinet. This was more than a lethal dose. It would stop his heart within a few seconds. She had felt bad about the theft and betraying the confidence of her new friend, but it couldn’t be helped.
She kept reciting as she rolled back the professor’s shirtsleeve.
“Beware the Jabberwock, my son! The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!”
Jennifer took a final glance around to make sure no one was watching what she was doing.
“One, two! One, two! And through and through the vorpal blade went snicker-snack!”
She had no experience giving injections but she doubted this would make a difference. The professor didn’t flinch as the needle penetrated his flesh and found a vein. She plunged the concoction home.
Nothing remained of Adrian’s imagination save a dull gray. He could see diffuse light, hear some sounds, understood that words resonated inside a part of him hidden by disease. But all the sheaves that, bound together, had made him into who he was were now scattered and broken. And yet suddenly all the opaque waters within him seemed to come together like a wave, and he managed to lift his head just a little bit and see figures in the distance, beckoning to him. Illness and age dropped aside and Adrian ran forward. He was laughing.
“And has thou slain the Jabberwock? Come to my arms, my beamish boy! O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!”
Jennifer watched carefully, her hand on the old man’s pulse as it faded away. Then, when she was absolutely certain that she had set him as free as he had set her, she closed the book of poetry. She bent down, kissed him on the forehead, and quietly repeated, “O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!”
She replaced the syringe and the poetry book in her backpack and then wheeled the professor into a bright spot on the patio and left him there. She believed he looked peaceful.
On the way out, she told the nurse on duty, “Professor Thomas fell asleep in the sun. I didn’t want to disturb him.”
It was, she thought, the least she could do.