The Mammoth Book of Nebula Awards SF

by Kevin J. Anderson

  Deep in the night the cop and I stood at the window and looked at the very late traffic flowing south on Seventh Avenue. I could tell by the car models that it was the late 1960s. The constant flow of traffic downtown was like the passage of time.

  “We can do it, you know,” he said. “Bring you back forty years to face trial.”

  “For what?” I asked. “What crimes did I ever commit that were worth that kind of attention?”

  “Look at yourself.” Again the screen came up and it was the three guys whose faces I could almost remember and myself all in boots and jeans and leather vests and kerchiefs around our necks. Like musicians on an album cover imitating desperados.

  The one farthest away from me handed a cloth bag to the next guy who handed a smaller brown paper package to the guy next to me who handed me a white packet and I turned and handed a glassine envelope to someone not in the picture: like a high school textbook illustration of a drug distribution system.

  “A kid died from something you sold,” the cop said. The screen showed a girl, maybe eighteen, sprawled on the floor of a suburban bedroom with a needle in her arm and a Jim Morrison poster on the wall.

  “None of that ever happened,” I said. “I never did anything like that.”

  “We don’t plant this stuff. It was inside you. Back in 1969 a family wants vengeance,” he replied.

  I saw myself from behind kneeling with my hands tied at my back. All around on the sand, my clothes lay in strips where they’d been cut off me. My belt and my boots were tossed aside; the kerchief I’d worn around my neck was now tied over my eyes. Behind me the three other guys all hung by their necks from the branches of a tree.

  The cop said, “You’ll wish they’d hanged you, too. What the family wants to do will make what happened to that black kid in your room a joke.”

  Then I saw myself frontally. Mutilated and bleeding to death into the sand, my mouth open in a silent scream.

  That woke me and I lay in my hospital bed in the first dawn light. But I had trouble shaking the dream.

  10.

  Greenwich Village was partly an Irish neighborhood in the days gone by and Saint Vincent’s still reflected that. My nurse that morning was Mary Collins, an old woman originally from Kerry with a round unlined face, the last of the breed. I’d established my credentials, told her about my grandparents from Aran.

  After the policeman had mentioned that initial report, I’d asked Mary Collins about the nun I’d talked to. She looked at me and said, “You saw Sister Immaculata. I haven’t thought about her in years. They said she roamed the halls and talked to the patients. Some of them she comforted, others she frightened.”

  “But she was real.”

  She shrugged. “Well, when I first worked here, they told stories about catching glimpses of her. But I never did.”

  Behind the curtains around the other bed, Nurse Yang spoke quietly to Jamine. “No matter what our health issues, we need to eat healthy food. Try this orange juice.”

  “I’m not hungry.”

  “Try it for me.” And we heard him slurp some orange juice.

  “She has the patience of Job,” murmured Mary Collins and turned to leave.

  I said, “There’s this guy I keep seeing in my dreams. He looks like a cop, shows me all kinds of things, threatens to drag me back to face punishment for crimes I never committed.”

  Nurse Collins paused. In the silence, I heard Margaret Yang say, “Would you try this cereal?”

  “His name wouldn’t be McGittrick would it?” Mary Collins asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Immaculata and McGittrick both – ah, you are a rare one! If that’s how it is, tell him to back away. While you’re a patient in this hospital, you’re ours not his.” She winked and nodded at me and I guessed she was doing for me what Nurse Yang was doing for my roommate.

  Word came that my surgery was scheduled for that night. The exact time was not set. Jamine was on his cell phone. He was due to be released from the hospital that afternoon and sent back to his halfway house. I wondered about the pain he didn’t seem to be feeling and the desperate moment that had left him partially castrated.

  Lying there, I thought of people I knew who had come out of surgery with hallucinations attached to their brain like parasites.

  A few years before, an old professor of mine was not doing well after heart surgery. He was incoherent. Things hung in the balance and then with his eyes shut and seemingly unconscious, he said quite clearly, “Surgeon Major Herzog of the Israeli Air Medical Brigade orders you to get off your asses and get me cured.”

  “Herzog straightened things out,” my professor told me a few days later when he had rallied and begun recovery. “The first time I saw him was shortly after the operation. I came to and he was standing in full uniform at the end of my bed reading the computer screen. He told me I was someone they needed to have alive and he was going to save me. Then he changed some of the instructions on the screen.”

  No one on the staff had ever heard of Surgeon Major Marvin Herzog. The doctors attributed the now rapid recovery not to a series of crisp orders and clandestine changes in the patient’s treatment but to the body’s wonderful will to live.

  A week or two later when I visited him at home, my professor told me, “Doctor Herzog said last night that usually they don’t let people like me see him. But he thinks I can handle it. He explained how his unit oversees everybody who’s under anesthesia . . .”

  As he went on, I had realized he was still talking to his imaginary Doctor and maybe always would.

  Finally I was wheeled out for more x-rays. When I came back hours later, doctors, nurses, and Jamine’s social worker were in attendance. His motorized chair, a shabby, beat-up item, had been brought into the room. When he was helped into it, he screamed with pain. A hurried conference took place out in the hall. The patient was helped back into bed.

  Late that night, he was still there, talking quietly into his cell phone. It had been arranged that he was to be sent, not to his halfway house, but to a rehab facility. He seemed pleased. Was it for this that he or someone else had used the knife?

  McGittrick had noticed him. Was that a first sighting, like Immaculata observing me all those years ago?

  11.

  That night I waited at the window feeling very small and lonely and watched the taillights of the cars as they rushed into the past.

  A woman I know underwent a long and intense operation for cancer. During the hospitalization that followed she was well taken care of by the hospital nurses and orderlies and seemed to love them.

  She walked with help immediately after the operation as you’re supposed to. Everyone was amazed at how quickly she moved, looking around impatiently, fascinated by the other rooms on the floor – the vacant ones with their empty beds, the locked doors that led to conference rooms and doctors’ hideaways.

  Later, when reminded of this, she remembered nothing of her treatment. All she could recall was a movie being made night after night in which her body was used to portray a corpse. The ones making the film were criminals, threatening and intimidating her. The hospital workers were helping them. This went on all during her time in recovery.

  She wanted to walk as quickly as possible, she said, so she could escape. Her fascination with the rest of the floor was because those were places that figured in the dreams. She pretended to love the staff because she was terrified of them.

  By daylight she found them drab and ordinary, devoid of the desperate drama they held during her nights.

  Then someone calling my name interrupted me. Word had come that the surgical team was ready and the gurney was on its way.

  I went back to my room and the gurney was there. As I was loaded aboard and my IV pole was strapped to its side like a flag, I saw my godchild Antonia, twenty years old, but tiny as a child, come down the hall. Somehow she had gotten into the hospital at that late hour.

  In that wonderful place, it wa
s quite alright with everyone that she accompany me down to surgery. “You’ll have to leave before they begin the procedure,” one of the nurses told her.

  Off we went and the attendant sang as we rolled along and told me that I was going to be fine. Then deep in the hospital, far into the night, we were in the surgical anteroom. One of the young doctors who had operated on Jamine was part of the team.

  He and the others seemed like college students as they joked with Antonia and me while we awaited the surgeon who was late. Then she was there in her red jacket and dress and greeted us all.

  I thanked Antonia for being with me as they hooked me up. I held onto the image of her, as everyone smiled at me and I was gone while wondering if I was ever coming back.

  12.

  When I awoke a young man with a shaved head said, “Good morning, Richard, you’re in surgical recovery. My name is Scott Horton and I’m a nurse. How do you feel?”

  “Like I’ve just been hit by a truck but haven’t felt the pain yet,” I said and he grinned, nodded with approval, pleased I was coherent enough to attempt a joke.

  Just before I had awakened, in the moment between darkness and light, I had been in the vast space with only the light of the hospital patients’ computer screens revolving around me like suns in galaxies.

  In the way it happens in dreams, I knew these were all the unconscious patients in all the hospitals in the world. Together we formed an anima, an intelligence. Most of us were part of this for a few hours, for a day sometimes. For a few it was for months and even years.

  The policeman looked up from the computer with his white crewcut, his battered nose, his cigarette.

  “Someone told me your name is McGittrick,” I said.

  “If that name pleases you . . .” he shrugged.

  “In other words I’m making you up as I go along.”

  “Somewhere inside you knew someone oversaw the intersection of one world and the next. First you put a face on that one. Now you’ve found a name for me. Mostly I don’t deal personally with people in your situation. I don’t have to because they aren’t aware of me.

  “We could keep you in a coma for as long as you live. Instead we are sending you back a changed man,” he told me. “You’ll never be able to forget what you’ve seen and you’ll never again accept the waking world as the real one.”

  I had been going to ask him what he wanted. Instead, I had awakened to find Nurse Horton.

  In the bright early morning in the hospital, he showed me a new button on my IV stand. “You press that when you feel any discomfort and the painkiller is injected directly into your bloodstream,” he told me. You can do that at five-minute intervals whenever you feel you need to. I’ll be back to see you very shortly.”

  I held his arm and said, “Please don’t go away. I saw this guy just before I came to. The nurse upstairs called him McGittrick. He said they were using my mind while I was unconscious, that he could keep me in a coma for as long as I lived.”

  He smiled. “Well you tell McGittrick to back off. You’re my patient. We have you now and we’re not letting go. We’re going to get you cleaned up and I’d like you to walk a little some time today.”

  An orderly came in and took my temperature. One of the young doctors who had assisted in the surgery came by. “Things went very well. We’re confident we removed the obstruction. We opened you up along the old cancer surgery scar. We didn’t find any cancer this time.”

  Another orderly took blood. Scott returned and the two of them helped me sit up and put my feet over the edge of the bed. “You’re doing great,” he said and the orderly agreed. I slid off the bed and my feet found the floor.

  The orderly pushed the IV stand. Scott held me. I walked around the room. The sun was shining outside.

  “I think I can do this by myself,” I said. They made me take hold of the handle bar. I pushed it out the door and into the hallway and back again.

  “Very good,” they told me, and I lay down on the bed. I was sitting propped up when my sister and brother-in-law came in. My surgeon dropped by in her red suit and talked with us. Everyone seemed very pleased.

  When I was alone, Scott brought me some paper and a pen that I asked for. He sat with me for a little while, told me that he was thirty-three years old, that he came from a town outside Boston and lived now in Chelsea within walking distance of the hospital. I wondered who he lived with but didn’t ask.

  I wrote Scott a rambling thank you note/love letter and added at the end of it, “People who have hallucinations after operations sometimes don’t seem to come all the way back. Part of them gets lost. The hallucination can be at least as good, as powerful and compelling and meaningful, as real life. Especially since real life is as a patient, the victim of a disease. The hallucination is so engrossing that they don’t want to leave it behind. I’m afraid that will happen with me.”

  Scott had gone off duty by the time I finished writing. I spent a very bad night in the recovery ward. People were waxing the floor, cleaning the walls. The nurses were slow to respond. Being awake was a nightmare.

  Then McGittrick was with me. “You’re not supposed to talk about what I’ve told you, asshole,” he said. “That other time, you wrote that book about the world where people dying of cancer could become gods. But you made it science fiction and anyway nobody read it so that was okay.

  “That young nurse who thinks he’s so tough? ‘We have you now and we’re not letting go,’ he says. When his time comes he will be ours and he won’t even know it’s happened.”

  “What’s the point of all this?” I asked.

  “You know how people when dying feel themselves drawn toward some kind of glowing light? They find it comforting. Well those globes floating in the flickering brain, the warm light of death and the promise of peace is you and all the other assholes hooked up to machines, each contributing his or her little bit. Last night you were part of the light dying souls were drawn toward. That’s one of the things we do.”

  “Why an old cop, why not an angel with a fiery sword?”

  “You don’t believe in angels. You have a thing for the law. Your kind usually shows that by being bad and getting caught. The cuffs go on and you swoon. You were too bright to get a criminal record. Our reports say you have promise.”

  “Before the operation you were threatening me with mutilation. Now . . .”

  “I’m going to offer you my job.”

  “Right,” I said. “But you don’t exist. You told me so.”

  He seemed a bit amused. “That’s not as big a deal as you make it seem.”

  “And the phony charges?”

  “Could also not be a big deal. That depends on you.”

  13.

  Then he was gone and it was morning. The door of my room was open, the cleaning crew had departed, and the hospital was waking up. Pain had begun to gnaw at my guts. I hit the button, waited a few minutes, and then hit it again.

  Scott walked by and I called him. He had just come on duty. He had other patients but he stopped for me. “How are you?”

  “Bad night.” I wanted to tell him about the men endlessly cleaning the floor and the smell of ammonia but I didn’t.

  “Did McGittrick talk to you again?”

  “Sorry I bothered you about that. I feel stupid.” What I was sorry about was having brought him to McGittrick’s attention.

  “It’s why I’m here. We’re going to get you ready to return to your ward. I want you to walk before then.”

  Later when he was watching me push my IV stand around Recovery, I asked him, “Does everybody in this hospital know about McGittrick?”

  He grinned. “If they worked with Mary Collins they do. I started out with her.”

  When they came to take me back upstairs Scott said good-bye and I knew it was unlikely I’d ever see him again. Unless, of course, I took McGittrick up on his offer.

  When I returned to the twelfth floor, I was in a new room all by myself. Jamine was gone.
Even Nurse Yang, busy with her current patients, barely remembered him. That’s how it would be with me.

  I hit the painkiller button, got up, and walked. I needed the pole to lean on a little. Nurses and orderlies nodded their approval. I was a model patient, a teacher’s pet.

  When my phone rang it was my godchild Chris planning to come in from Ohio and stay with me after I got out of the hospital. Friends came by. Flowers got delivered. I fell asleep, exhausted.

  It was getting dark when I awoke and there was commotion and a gigantic man was wheeled in. “Purple,” he said. “Don’t go far from me, girl.” My new roommate had a private healthcare worker. He called her Purple which wasn’t her name and which made her quite angry.

  He sang Prince songs. He called people by names he’d given them. He told me he was an architect who had stepped through a door in a half-finished building he’d designed and fallen two floors because there was no floor on the other side. All the bones in his feet had been shattered. It took the healthcare worker and all the orderlies on the floor to help him change his position in the bed.

  At one point I dozed off but awoke to hear a Jamaican orderly whom he called Tangerine, saying, “I do not have to take this. I will be treated with respect. My name to you is Mrs. Jackson.”

  “Oh Tangerine!” he cried in a despairing voice.

  I hit the pain button, got up, and walked to the window overlooking Seventh Avenue. In the night, the streetlights turned from red to green.

  McGittrick’s face danced on the window in front of me. A computer screen on a nearby station counter faced the window and was reflected on the dark glass.

  When I turned to look the computer screen was blank. I turned back and the face was there. It might have been the drugs or I may have been asleep on my feet. But as hard as I looked McGittrick remained.

  Then Jamine’s face appeared on the screen. McGittrick said, “He stands out kind of the way you did, flirting with death but afraid of it. Bear in mind that if you don’t work for us someone else will – maybe him.”

  “What exactly would I do?”