A Corpse's Nightmare

by Phillip DePoy

  Which brings us back to the angel. It was very clear to me when I saw the angel that God was in everything. For months after that experience I could see His Light emanate from trees and rocks and hills and plains and water and air and most of all from the glorious, loving, all-embracing countenance of every human being around me. We were all very obviously one in God, I thought: safe, blessed, and free. It was the most beautiful vision of life that anyone ever had.

  But it passed.

  2.

  I awoke to see Lucinda’s face, bathed in clear light. No Pre-Raphaelite model, no mysterious legend of the silver screen, no medieval Madonna could have been more beatific or bright or beautiful. She was holding my hand, dressed all in white, and smiling. The windows of the room were impossibly blinding and she said my name over and over again, as if it were her only prayer.

  Then a sudden sharp noise tore that vision away—and I actually woke up. I was in a cold, dark hospital room. I did not, at that moment, remember being shot. I only wondered why I might be in the hospital. It was clear that I’d been awakened when a nurse, standing at the end of my bed, had dropped my chart.

  I blinked. She gasped.

  “Oh my God,” she whispered. “Fever?”

  I slowly recognized the woman. She was Stacey Chambers, a friend.

  “Hi,” I managed to say.

  My voice did not sound familiar to me. It was grating and garbled. And when I’d said the words, I’d felt as if I might vomit.

  “Don’t try to talk, sugar,” Stacey said excitedly. “You’ve got a small feeding tube in your throat.”

  A quick survey of my physical situation confirmed that I not only had a tube town my throat, but an intravenous needle in each arm and several electrical wires depending from my abdomen. Everything was attached to machines. My bed was the only one in the room. The blinds were drawn. There was no television, no lamp, and no food tray. Only one chair sat in the corner. It was a beige hospital chair, all metal and vinyl. It didn’t look particularly used.

  “You try to stay awake, now,” Nurse Chambers said, fussing with one of the machines to which I was connected. “I’m calling Lucinda right this minute.”

  She reached out and snatched the receiver from the phone by the bed with such force that it clattered across the small bedside table.

  “Hey, Reba,” she said breathlessly into the phone, “it’s Stacey. Get Lucinda right away. Dr. Devilin’s awake!” She listened for a second, then shouted, “I know!”

  I tried to speak again, but a feeling of desperate nausea overtook me. It must have been evident on my face.

  “Hold on, hold on,” Nurse Chambers said, hanging up the phone. She hopped around my bed for a moment and then leaned close to my face. I was suddenly aware of her perfume, her warmth. “I’m just going to get rid of this old feeding tube, Fever. Close your eyes and think of England, that’s what Winnie says.”

  With a slow but steady revulsion, I relinquished the thin tube from my esophagus.

  “What happened to me?” I croaked. “And who’s Winnie?”

  “Oh my God,” she whispered, “your memory’s gone.”

  I concentrated, realizing that my memory, though not gone, was sluggish. This woman, Nurse Chambers, had come to dinner at my house with my best friend Dr. Winton Andrews. Andrews was the Shakespeare scholar at the university from which I’d been—what would be the word? Released? At any rate, Andrews and I saw each other often. He liked having a free place to stay in the mountains when the weather got too hot in Atlanta. And the woman he had recently begun seeing, thanks to me, was this woman, Stacey. She worked under Lucinda Foxe, the head nurse at the hospital. Lucinda was my fiancée and had been for—what? Seven years?

  “You’re Stacey, I’m Fever, this is the county hospital, Lucinda is my fiancée, and I must be pretty sick.” I looked around at all the other tubes and machines. “But I don’t know what happened to me.”

  “You were shot,” she said, taking my hand. “You were shot bad.”

  “Shot? When?”

  “Um,” she said, and then drew in a large breath.

  “Go on,” I urged her.

  “You’ve been in a coma for three months. It’s nearly March.”

  Hearing that, for some reason, produced certain images from dreams and odd memories: patterns of clouds, the voice of my mother, the face of an angel. I’d been dreaming of my mother, my childhood, old stories.

  “Is Lucinda in the hospital?” I asked. “I was just now dreaming of her.”

  “It’s four o’clock in the morning, sweetheart,” Nurse Chambers cooed. “She’s at home. But she’ll be here directly. She knew you’d be all right.”

  “Three months.” I said the words, but didn’t believe them.

  “You know,” Nurse Chambers confided as she glided around my bed moving machines, turning knobs, checking one of the IV tubes, “Lucinda…” but her voice trailed off.

  “What is it?” I could tell that she wanted to say something important, but thought better of it.

  “I’ll let her tell you. Come on, sit up.” She cranked the bed somehow until my head was nearly even with hers.

  “I’m starving,” I realized.

  “You’ve lost nearly twenty pounds.” She took wrist and felt for the pulse. “But we had physical therapy in here every day to work the muscles, so you should be able to walk fairly soon.”

  “Walk?” I looked down at my legs. “Where was I shot?”

  “Oh, you were shot in the chest,” she answered quickly. “We had physical therapy come in so your muscles wouldn’t atrophy while you were unconscious.”

  “Shot in the chest.” I blinked. “Who shot me?”

  She shrugged. “Nobody knows. Sheriff Needle’s been working on it most every day since it happened, and Melissa Mathews, you know, his deputy? But there’s just no evidence. None. Near as they can tell, sometime right around midnight on December third last year, somebody came into your house and shot you in your bed. You were asleep. They might have stolen things from your house, too. It was a little disorganized downstairs, they said, but nobody could tell if it was because you’re messy or the killer was looking for something.”

  “The killer?” I was beginning to feel the stiffness in my body, my joints, my muscles. “This person killed someone?”

  Nurse Chambers stopped moving. “Oh. Well. Let’s just get Lucinda to tell you all that.” She wouldn’t look me in the eye.

  I was concerned that Sheriff Skidmore Needle, my oldest friend in Blue Mountain, had puzzled over a crime for three months without result, especially since it was a crime that so directly concerned me. I decided to concentrate on the immediate. The larger picture was too disconcerting.

  “All right.” I was slowly adjusting to my surroundings. “Is there any chance I can get something to eat? Something solid?”

  “Not a good idea yet,” she answered, “but I was going to call down for some soup.”

  Just then I realized that several other people were standing at the door to my room. They were all hospital personnel, two of them very young. One appeared to be something of a candy striper, eyes and mouth both wide open, her pink chewing gum quite visible. The other was a tall, thin, sullen looking twenty-ish boy, crew cut, eyes dull as a butter knife.

  “Why are they staring at me?” I asked Nurse Chambers.

  She turned around and saw everyone. “You’uns scat, please,” she told them good-naturedly. They disbanded immediately.

  “Soup,” I reminded her.

  “Albert,” she called out, “you bring Dr. Devilin some soup broth quick as you can.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” the crew cut answered from down the hall in an unusually Midwestern accent.

  “Winnie,” I realized, “is your abbreviation for Winton. You were talking about Andrews.”

  “And now you’re awake for real.” She patted my arm. “We’ve gotten kind of serious since you went into your coma, me and Dr. Andrews.”

  “He’
s not here, is he?” I asked.

  “He will be soon as I call him,” she confirmed. “He’s come up from Atlanta every weekend since this happened to you. He kids around with you like you were awake. Tells you his old corny jokes. Talks about his students. Reads Shakespeare out loud.”

  “Really.” I couldn’t imagine Andrews reading to an unconscious body.

  “And poetry, sometimes. He said this one about a hundred times: ‘Of the two dreams, night and day, what lover, what dreamer, would choose the one obscured by sleep?’”

  “Wallace Stevens.” I smiled. “I dreamed about that. You understand that he was trying to convince me to wake up.”

  The phone rang then. She picked it up instantly.

  “Yes?” she said, and then listened. “Okay.”

  She held out the phone for me.

  I took it, knowing who was on the other end.

  “Lucinda,” I said, my voice still gravelly, “It would appear that I’ve missed a few dinners with you.”

  “God you have no idea how good it is to hear your voice,” she said softly.

  “I was just dreaming about you,” I answered, “in a very flattering way. Then Nurse Chambers, here, woke me up.”

  “How did she do that?” Lucinda whispered.

  “I think she dropped my chart on the floor,” I answered, “and it was very rude. You were standing over me and whispering my name, dressed all in white. Like an angel.”

  “You sound like Louis Armstrong.”

  “And I feel like the wreck of the Hesperus,” I agreed, “but apparently I’m much better than I was yesterday this time. Are you coming to see me or not?”

  “I’m getting dressed while I’m talking with you,” she said. Suddenly I could hear the rustle of her clothes.

  “No need to fuss on my account,” I told her. “Come as you are. You do still sleep with nothing on, don’t you?”

  “I’d have to say that I admire a man,” she said, her voice a little stronger than it had been, “who can come out of a coma pitching woo.”

  “Pitching woo?” I smiled. “Did I go back in time while I was out? What kind of a phrase is that?”

  “I’ll be there in twenty minutes.” She hung up the phone.

  Nurse Chambers was beaming at me. “You two act like teenagers.”

  “If I promise never to talk that way ever again in your presence,” I said, shifting uncomfortably in bed, “will you promise never to call Andrews ‘Winnie’ when I’m around?”

  “I think we can work something out,” she said, adjusting the pillow at the back of my head. “You know, we were all really worried about you.”

  “I feel strange,” I confessed. “Last night I went to sleep in my bed, and tonight I woke up in the hospital three months later.”

  “You don’t know the half of it,” she whispered softly.

  3.

  Lucinda arrived just before five that morning. The moon was full and low. Its light was neatly cut into stripes by the blades of the window blinds. When Lucinda appeared in the doorway, she seemed to have floated there. She already had her coat off. She was wearing a blue sweater, black jeans, and some sort of boots.

  In seconds she stood over me, holding my hand. I had known her long enough to read her face. She was hiding something. I thought it might be that she was trying to control her emotions under the circumstances. I squeezed her hand.

  “Why don’t you pull up that chair,” I rasped, glancing at the only empty piece of furniture in the room, “and tell me all about it?”

  “All about what?” She didn’t move.

  “All about what happened to me. As far as you know. I can tell you’ve got something on your mind. Don’t make me drag it out of you. I’m too weak. I’ve been shot. And then I was in a coma.”

  She smiled. “I know. But you’re awake now, God help us all.”

  “Well, then.”

  She hesitated, but let go of my hand, dragged the chair close to the bed and sat, obviously trying to collect her thoughts.

  “The best way,” I encouraged her, “is to just let it all come out at once. Don’t think about it too much. I can see that you have a lot to say, but don’t try to organize it into anything coherent. It’ll take too long and I’ve got other things to do today.”

  “Oh, you do?” She shook her head.

  “Well, there’s broth coming, and later I’ll be trying to sit up on my own. Then I’d like to convince Nurse Chambers to give me a sponge bath. It’s a pretty full day.”

  “I see,” she said. “Then I’ll get right to the point. Somebody shot you.”

  “That much I know. There’s more to the story.”

  “There is,” she confirmed. “The man who shot you called 911 after he did it. If he hadn’t, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”

  “He called … how do you know?” I tried to sit up. I failed.

  “There’s a tape recording of his voice. You can hear it as soon as you want to. Skidmore’s listened to it about a thousand times. He didn’t call to save you. He called to let someone know that you were dead.”

  “Why would he do a thing like that?”

  “Sounded a little like he was bragging,” she answered.

  “What did he say?”

  She opened her mouth to answer, then obviously thought better of it. “I’ll let you listen to it.”

  “Okay,” I said slowly. “What else?”

  “The ambulance had a hard time getting to your place. There was a lot of snow.” She folded her arms. “I don’t know if you remember that. It had snowed for three days before this thing happened. I’d been working overtime and we hadn’t seen each other for a few days before that. Anyway, they ran off the road, the ambulance. They didn’t get to you for almost an hour. They called in to the hospital. I was waiting in the emergency room. I was nearly out of my mind.”

  “I’m so sorry,” I told her softly.

  “I got in my Jeep and plowed on up there. Don’t quite know how I did it, but I got to your house maybe five minutes behind the EMTs. I came up to your bedroom. You were—they had already started packing up. Everything was very still. No one was talking. They—see, they…”

  Her voice trailed off. She swallowed. A single tear appeared in the corner of one eye.

  “What?” I asked very softly. It only took me a moment to realize what had happened.

  “They had pronounced you dead,” she whispered.

  “I see.” I sat back a little. “But I’m not dead. You did something, I’m guessing.”

  She nodded again.

  “Tell me.”

  “There’s a lot of new work—articles about trauma victims and freezing.” She fumbled absently with her watch. “I made them haul you outside and bury you in the snow. We stood around until you turned blue, and then put you on a stretcher, packed the snow around you—in your body bag. And brought you here.”

  “So I wasn’t really dead,” I managed to say.

  “No. You were dead all right. But the freezing did the trick. With a little bit of electricity and slow warming, blood transfusion, and a breathing apparatus, you were alive again. Barely. You had three surgeries right away and two more a month later. Plus, you lost the littlest toe on your left foot, a patch of your backside, and the tips of both elbows.”

  “Lost?”

  “Frostbite. You were lucky it wasn’t worse. See, some moron packed you in freezing snow.”

  “Thank God she did.” I smiled. “I don’t know what to say.”

  “I don’t guess there’s much to say about that.” She sniffed. “It worked. Here you are.”

  “After three months in a coma.”

  “Well, you lost some of that extra weight you put on from my cooking,” she said, sitting forward. “And I got to concentrate on my work for a change. So it all worked out.”

  “Lucinda?”

  “Yes?”

  I didn’t hesitate over a single syllable. “Let’s go ahead and get married.”
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br />   Her whole face relaxed. She stood up laughing. “Oh for God’s sake. I was worried there might be some brain damage to come out of this.”

  “Look, I’m serious,” I began.

  “You come out of a coma talking about what I wear to bed,” she interrupted, moving around the bed, “and getting a sponge bath from Stacey, and then you want to get married. Lord, what’s next?”

  Before I could go on, convince her that I was in dead earnest, the Sheriff of Blue Mountain walked into my room. He only took a few steps before he stopped.

  “Fever?” He just stood there. “They said you were—are you awake?”

  “Skidmore,” I answered. “Are you coming in?”

  He looked at Lucinda. “How is he?”

  “He just told me we should get married.” She raised her eyebrows.

  “Jesus,” Skid said, shaking his head. “You said there might be brain damage.”

  “I know you both think you’re funny,” I announced loudly, squirming in bed, “but it looks to me as if things have may have gone to hell while I’ve been out. Skid can’t find a murderer even though he’s got a tape recording of the man. Lucinda doesn’t seem to want to get married anymore. And Andrews has taken Nurse Chambers way too seriously. Are we sure this is still Blue Mountain?”

  Nurse Chambers strolled into my room then, on cue. She was completely naked except for her nurse’s cap. When she smiled, her teeth were entirely transparent. She leaned over my bed and whispered, “Are you sure this isn’t some sort of nightmare?”