Dragonfly
Page 33
"Yes, I think she died, soon after she left me in Arizona, I think she was killed for some small transgression in New Orleans, or for maybe nothing at all except that she got on the wrong side of a psychopath who was fixated on adjusting a grievance that wouldn't mean a thing to a normal mind. She was so damned young; twenty-four, twenty-five. She'd had a marriage that turned into living hell for both of them, and a couple of years of hard knocks in a tough town filled with human debris, and she thought she knew what made the world go around. Now I can feel sorry for her."
"And forgiving?"
"I don't know yet. The tattoo lady told me I was like a house in flames."
"Joe, do you know when I was born? September, nineteen sixty-three."
"And?"
"If we're soulmates, like the tattoo lady said—"
"Abby, for God's sake—"
"No, wait, this is very interesting."
"Not to me."
"Don't close your mind, Joe. If you believe life is eternal—and I do; forget the bodies we clunk around in for the time we're on earth—life isn't just random or accidental, there's much more to it than one round-trip to earth, then blackness evermore. When the preachers say God has a plan for all of us, maybe they aren't just mouthing ignorant platitudes. Joe, you got through thirty-five years or so without having pictures drawn on your good-looking hide, safe to say you weren't interested. Yet today you didn't hesitate when I suggested the tattoo parlor. What were you doing, humoring me? You can't wash it off in the shower. We're linked until our mortal flesh turns to dust."
"I was definitely humoring you."
"Oh, bull. And don't try to humor me now, this is serious. Maybe I was your mother—"
"I think the sun's too hot for you today, Abby."
"—or maybe now I'm just a little blip of her soul, one drop of rain from a cloudburst, nevertheless she's living again in me for a reason." Abby paused and touched her lips, as if she felt them growing numb, or was afraid she had spoken beyond the pale.
"I know I'm making you uncomfortable. That's a heck of a big hole you're kicking in the sand, there. Just think about it, Joe. Otherwise there's no rhyme or reason to us. You said it yourself: a debt was canceled today. What made you say that?"
"I don't know." But he felt a twinge of pain, as if a piece of glass from an old accident was working its way through his flesh. "I can't buy into this, Abby. Reincarnation is fantasy. A sick faith, the last refuge of a chaotic personality."
She smiled gamely. "I'm neurotic, not chaotic. I'm a disciplined neurotic, goddammit."
"I didn't mean—"
"I'm not sore at you. Liten, you're stuck with a bad concept, that's all. Reincarnation as something to haunt you, an intrusion in this life, the only life you know. Try thinking of reincarnation as a language you're learning, a fresh page of a journal you've been keeping for half of Eternity. Bodies don't matter so much, then. We have bodies to make other bodies."
Abby looked down at her motionless legs. "Or we have them as punishment," she said. "One more debt waiting to be canceled."
The fading blue sky looked hung with hot cobwebs when they returned to the Barony, after a day that had been too hard on Abby. He saw her upstairs to her room. She was too exhausted to say much more than "Come back later."
Lizzie came in to help Abby with her bath and a shampoo she needed after the afternoon they had spent on the beach. Joe and Abby kissed while Lizzie was laying out towels in the bathroom.
On the stairs Joe encountered Lucas Thomason, who was on his way to Abby's room with a small tray containing packaged syringes, two ampules, a blood-pressure collar and two glasses of red wine. He had a stethoscope around his neck, over a plaid flannel shirt.
They paused one step apart. The tension filling the space between them was like a large, unnamable animal.
"Did the Solumedrol come?" Joe asked politely.
"No. I'm expecting it by Fed Ex tomorrow from Zurich." Thomason glanced down at the tray. "I give Abby B-twelve shots once a week." He didn't explain the contents of the other ampule. "If you'd like to eat, Doctor, they'll fix something for you in the kitchen. The wine is a Stag's Leap cabernet, the best California has to offer, in my opinion. Help yourself."
"Thank you. Is there anything new about the—about Frosty?"
"Well, her neck was broken. She was stripped but not raped."
"That's unusual."
"That she wasn't sexually molested?"
"Why take off her' clothes if you don't have rape in mind?"
Thomason's lips crimped together. "I don't know." He looked past Joe at the second-floor gallery, chockablock with the work of American Bucolic painters and nineteenth-century portraitists. "I suppose Abby is taking Frosty's death very hard. How was she today?"
"It was a severe shock. But she's tough."
"I meant—did she say anything more about the symptoms you mentioned at breakfast?"
"The symptoms you dismissed?" Thomason's eyes tightened slightly, as if the reminder implied serious disrespect. "She complained a couple of times about her lips feeling numb."
Thomason took that in, nodded, shared nothing of his thoughts, then, with another nod and a slight smile walked past Joe up the steps.
"Good night, Dr. Bryce. It will be good night, won't it?"
"I'm driving into Charleston for the evening."
"I see. Well, it's not hard to have a good time in Charleston. Enjoy yourself."
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Dr. Nick Portuguese occupied the third floor of a post-Revolutionary brick house on Legare Street. Three piazzas, added long after the original house was built, faced southwest and the Ashley River a short distance away. There was, as in many Charleston homesites, a walled garden. This garden was behind a high iron gate studded with thorns, a style called chevaux-defrise. Inside the garden there were palm trees. Nick was at the top of an extension ladder rescuing a neighborhood cat that had gone in a flash straight up the trunk of one of the palms and couldn't get down.
When he was back on the ground he handed the young tabby to a tearstained teenage neighbor.
"I need a shower and a change of clothes," he said. "Come on upstairs."
They reached the third floor by way of an outside stairway at one end of the triple stack of piazzas. Nick's roommate was a replica of Aphrodite but with bigger breasts and a snaggletoothed grin. She was vacuuming vigorously in the front parlor, wearing running shorts and a halter top, listening to classical music on headphones. She took a much better tan than did most redheads. She was about half a foot taller than Nick.
"NAME'S SHUGGIE," Nick said, over the noise of the vacuum cleaner; Shuggie smiled and nodded to Joe. Nick turned on his way to his bedroom to appraise her from a different angle. "Have you ever seen an ass sit that high on a female human being? She moved in four weeks ago. Psychiatric nurse from Hamburg. Nothing's happening yet, but I think I've got a shot. Or else I'll have to resume a long-standing dependency relationship on Elevil and airplane glue. Help yourself to beer in the pantry, or there's hard stuff if you want it. Piazza has a nice breeze this time of the day."
Joe took a cold Dos Equis outside and watched the wide river turn from lava red to twinkling gold.
Nick reappeared in clean safari shorts and a tank top and some of his gold chains. You could have lost a ballpoint pen anywhere in the wilds of his reddish black body pelt. He clutched three more bottles of Dos Equis in one hand.
"Like the house? Three of us pooled our resources and bought it last year as an investment. Charleston is a tight little peninsula, and the really good old houses seldom come on the market." He seated himself on a cushioned patio chair and looked at Joe across a low glass-topped table with a hurricane lamp on it. "I guess this visit means you got what you wanted."
From a pocket of his blazer Joe retrieved the ampule that Reggie the blues man had turned over to him at the Lost Sea Turtle Café. Reggie had made no fuss. He had been glad to be rid of the unlabeled ampule, which was ne
arly filled with a chalky liquid. The question had been clear in his eyes, but he hadn't asked. Does this have something to do with Frosty's murder? A question Joe had been trying to block from his own mind during the hourlong drive to Charleston: but it was like holding a finger in a crumbling dike.
The neuropathologist drank half of his first bottle of beer, looking at the ampule, turning it around and around in his fingers.
"This could be difficult to identify. Without some idea of what it is."
Joe stared at the western sky, now ashes and sulfur.
"If you had a patient," he asked Nick, "who went into convulsions, then later complained of forgetting how to breathe—"
"She did what?"
"That's exactly how she described it. She forgot how to breathe. Her lips were tingling and blue. Today they felt numb, she said. Knowing that she's partially paralyzed, if you heard those symptoms, what would you think?"
"'Forgetting how to breathe' might indicate a brain-stem glioma, or a neural tumor compressing the cervical spine. But the other symptoms suggest toxicity of some kind. And this is the culprit?"
"I don't know yet."
Nick held the ampule up to the light from one of the fixtures on the ceiling of the piazza. A bug zapper mounted near the double plantation doors methodically fried mosquitoes and other night-dwelling insects, its blue light shooting through the contents of the ampule.
"Fibrillation? Elevated blood pressure? Tachycardia?"
"I don't know about fibrillation; yes to the other symptoms."
Nick gave a nod. "Similar to the reaction I had when a timber rattler nailed me at the Philmont Scout Ranch in New Mexico. I was fourteen. It was my first Jamboree. They thought I was going to lose my left leg below the knee."
"But her symptoms come and go."
"You believe she's been getting regular injections of this stuff?"
"I don't know how often. She has a reservoir implant."
Shuggie came barefoot out to the piazza and sat casually in the doctor's lap, draping an arm around his shoulders and picking up a beer with the other hand. Nick tried to conceal the fact that he was ecstatic about the attention. She smiled at Joe. The uneven teeth gave her the look of a voracious street urchin. Her cheekbones were so large they all but pushed her bright blue eyes deep into her head.
"Mazel tov," she said. She tilted her head back and drank most of the beer in three big gulps.
"Reservoir implant," Nick ruminated, watching Shuggie's throat muscles as she drank. "It may be leaking. That could account for the irregularity of her symptoms, again depending on what we've got here. But the possibility of toxic shock—it's a start."
"Maybe we can narrow it down further," Joe said. He rubbed the back of his head in agitation, then got up and leaned against the railing of the piazza, looking down at the gaslit garden. "I think that stuff will prove to be a powerful muscle relaxant—the kind they use for protracted spinal surgery."
"Tetrodotoxin," Nick said immediately.
"What is that?" Shuggie asked, stretching upward in Nick's lap until her breasts looked ready to explode from the tension. She was as playful as a chimp with a bellyful of fermented termites. Joe wondered how the doctor had failed to get her into bed thirty minutes after she unpacked in the spare bedroom. Probably he was one of those lovelorn men who had a tendency to overevaluate every opportunity, instead of simply seizing it.
"Tetrodotoxin," Nick explained, "is a neural poison, extracted from Japanese blowfish. Fugu. Very, very little of it is always deadly. You may have heard about those Japanese gourmands who liked to flirt with death at the dinner table. The great chefs leave a trace amount of poison in the fillet they prepare, enough so the customer's lips get that telltale tingle, and they know just how close they are to the ancestral home in the sky. It's supposed to be better than sex."
"Would anesthesiologists use Tetrodotoxin?" Joe said.
"Probably an analogue. In the synthetic state the drug can be made to act on specific receptors, reducing side effects, and rendering the patient paralyzed at preplanned levels."
"How long would the effect last?"
"Three to four weeks before the paralysis wears off."
"Better than sex?" Shuggie said. "How?"
"Never mind," Nick muttered.
"Does anyone want this beer?" Shuggie asked, looking at the last bottle of Dos Equis on the table. For once, neither of the men was paying attention to her. "What's the matter?" she said, frowning. "What is this talk of poison fish?"
She seemed to be lagging a few sentences behind in translation and comprehension. Nick joggled her on his knee. "Close your ears. This conversation never happened." To Joe he said, "The son of a bitch. How long?"
"It may be several years," Joe said in shock.
Nick nodded, slowly.
"She was in an accident and the spinal cord, let's assume, was damaged in the lumbar region. Severely compressed, but not cut. Resulting in paralysis that could continue the rest of her life, or disappear in a few months with treatment and decompression. It's a medical fact that every patient who has been given a spinal anesthetic feels that he has been cut in half somehow, and his lower half is gone, never to return. The psychological effect is abject terror. The absence of proprioception doesn't mean that the legs are neutrally or functionally dead. But there's an existential breakdown. The patient 'loses' his legs as internal objects, what neuropsychologists call the 'imago.' There's a severe perceptual deficit that could be cultivated and encouraged by someone who doesn't want that patient ever to walk again."
"She did walk," Joe said. "Last night. I'm convinced of it." He explained what had happened at the beach house, and told Nick about finding Abby's footprints in the sand.
"Most paraplegics have dreams of walking. In her dream state she was able to actually accomplish it because her mind revoked the condition of jamais vu; tricked the body into 'repossessing' her absent legs. I'dsay also that her last shot of anesthetic has begun to wear off, allowing for proprioception on a nearly conscious level. We tend to forget that the organism is aunitary system: there's a continual interaction of body and mind. That's probably why your needle doc has been using the paralytic for years, just to reinforce herperceptual deficit. But it also has left his patient open to some potentially fatal consequences—stroke, total paralysis, you name it. He's not an anesthesiologist, so he probably doesn't know what the hell he's doing with that stuff. A miracle he hasn't accidentally killed her off before this. You'd better get her out of there."
"I'll need the proof."
"I should be able to get you a certified lab report by tomorrow afternoon."
"Proof of what?" Shuggie inquired.
"Put this conversation out of your mind, Shuggie." To Joe he said, "One of our anesthesiologists may know where your needle doc is getting his supply. Ultimately it should be traceable to him. An ordinary GP has no business ordering quantities of a paralytic, but it's not against the law."
"I know that."
"So—"
"I don't know how much of thëdrug is left in her reservoir. But we'd only need to withdraw a tiny amount to demonstrate that he's been deceiving Ab—deceiving and jeopardizing the life of his patient by enhancing whatever paralysis remains with something as dangerous as Tetrodotoxin."
"I had some bad fish once, in the Caribbean."
"That's nice, Shuggie," Nick said, gazing into space.
"It wasn't so nice. I was sick for three weeks."
"I'm bringing her in," Joe said.
"When?"
"Tonight."
"Okay. Here's the way I think it should be handled. Sid Petersen will tap that reservoir, with two other doctors witnessing. The sample will be labeled and initialed by everybody, and I'll see it through the lab. If the drug is what you think it is, legal action can be initiated, at the state level, whether your patient requests it or not. That'll keep her out of his clutches from now on."
"Good."
"Why don't you give
me a call when you're on your way?"
"I will."
"Oh, you're leaving?" Shuggie said. She got up from Nick's lap and shook Joe's hand with Germanic firmness. "Auf wiedersehen. Come back to see us."
"I'll walk out with you," Nick said.
On the sidewalk outside the garden gates Joe thanked the pathologist for his help.
'"No problem. Recoveries, or even minimal improvements, are so rare in neurology I welcome the opportunity to help someone who may make it back all the way. So what about Shuggie?' Do you think I have a chance with her?"
Joe suppressed a smile. "Bring her a little present. Fix her breakfast. Tell her you see depths of sadness in her. She'll cry. Then she'll fall on you like a dynamited chimney."
"She will?" Nick shook his head in awe. "Women have always been reflections on water to me. Verses in Sanskrit. Mysterious white birds in the sky—"
"Nick, I'm beginning to think you're hopeless. Sex is the court jester in the temple of the body. So lighten up and have a few laughs."
Chapter Forty
Joe heard it first on the car radio during his drive back to the Barony, but the shoreward movement of high clouds delineated by a full moon and more frequent gusts of wind that buffeted the Jeep Laredo had already told him Hurricane Honey had changed course and was bearing down on the Carolinas. The hurricane's speed had increased along with the velocity of her winds, now reported by the hurricane hunters to be one hundred twenty miles an hour at the center, which was two hundred fifty miles southeast of Charleston. The eye of the storm, asymmetrical but roughly forty miles across at its widest point, was plotted to reach the vicinity of Pandora's Bay in less than seventeen hours, at about four o'clock the next afternoon. Honey's arrival would coincide with the high tides for the month of October. An ocean surge of up to eight feet above the normal tide of ten feet could be expected: high enough to wash over the porch of the beach house where he was staying. Evacuation of vulnerable Low Country beaches and islands had been recommended.