Never Rest

by Marshall Thornton

  “We’re in the boonies, though. Why would they have service?”

  “Pretty much everywhere has service now. Plus, I’ve been wandering around on my cigarette breaks. At the very edge of the property, you can get a weak signal. If you follow it, it makes a circle around the Institute. They’ve got a jammer.”

  He adjusted his position so he could lean toward me, then whispered, “It’s very illegal.”

  I almost asked why they’d do something like that. But I knew already. Dr. Harry didn’t want word of his research getting out. Didn’t want people figuring out what he was really doing and then texting about it. Putting up posts on Facebook. Twittering. @DrHarry Hey, dude. Heard you made the dead live. Totes cool.

  Just then, Ray walked into the room pushing the vitals stand in front of him. He glanced at Edmond sleeping and then came over to Goth. As he put the blood pressure cuff around Goth’s arm, I asked, “Where’s Nurse Margie?”

  “Gone.”

  “She was fired?”

  He shrugged. “Or quit. Dunno.”

  “Are you a nurse?” Goth asked. It seemed a pertinent question.

  “I’m just filling in for today. We called the agency. There will be a new nurse here tomorrow.”

  “I liked Nurse Margie,” Goth said. “She was nice.”

  Ray started Goth’s vitals. My mind struggled to grasp what this meant. Had my dream about Nurse Margie talking with Dr. Harry been real? Had I heard part of a conversation that had ended in Nurse Margie being fired?

  “What did she do?” I asked. “To get fired?”

  “I told you, I don’t know if she got fired. She might have quit. She’s got that kid who takes up a lot of her time.”

  “But then she would have given notice, wouldn’t she?”

  “Maybe. I dunno.” Ray stuck a thermometer into Goth’s mouth and tried to look like he knew what he was doing as he took Goth’s pulse.

  “So what might she have done?” I asked.

  Ray gave me an uncomfortable look. I expected him to say I was asking too many questions because I was. But then he said, “Dr. Harry asked me to fill in because Nurse Margie isn’t here anymore. Then he reminded me about the thing I signed about keeping my mouth shut. So, you know, even if I did know why she got fired, I wouldn’t tell you. Now would I?”

  “Dr. Harry was afraid she was going to say something she shouldn’t,” I said, half to myself. Except that might not be right because firing her would pretty much guarantee she’d run her mouth at every opportunity. So was it safe to fire her? It certainly wasn’t safe to keep her around. “Have you talked to Nurse Margie since it happened?”

  “Sure, we’re best buds. We don’t do much but talk on the phone all day.” When he was done being snotty, he made notations on Goth’s chart then moved around the bed and came over to me.

  I wondered if Dr. Harry had had to give Nurse Margie a lot of money. Wasn’t that the way it worked? If you wanted someone to keep quiet, you gave them a bunch of money and threatened to take it away if they said anything. Of course, we’d already signed a—

  “But everybody has to sign a non-disclosure agreement, right? Even the staff?” Goth asked, his thoughts tracking my own. Great minds, you know?

  “Yeah,” said Ray. “So we need to stop talking about that kind of shit. We’ll all get in trouble.”

  I was going to ask a question about how binding those agreements really were when Ray jammed the thermometer into my mouth.

  “So what exactly goes on upstairs?” Goth asked.

  “Testing,” Ray said.

  “What do the tests say?”

  Ray gave him a puzzled look. “They say the kind of things test say. You know whether someone’s normal.”

  “And are we? Are we normal?”

  “Of course not. If you were normal, who’d want to study you?” He had a point. He also hadn’t told us anything we didn’t already know.

  He took the thermometer out of my mouth. Frowned at it. Stuck it back in.

  I pushed it to one side with my tongue and said, “I’d like to see Dr. Harry later. Can you make that happen?”

  Maybe I’d tell him about my dreams or maybe I’d just ask questions about Nurse Margie’s sudden departure. Or both.

  “I’m sorry, he’s not available today,” Ray said, and I suddenly had a vision of Ray as a nurse. He’d be the kind who enjoyed saying no and reveled in anything that ‘might pinch a little.’

  “Tomorrow, then.”

  “There will be a new nurse in the morning. Talk to her about it.” Removing the thermometer again, he studied it then wrote down the result. “Your temperature’s lower than it was yesterday.” He considered for a moment, then added, “That doesn’t make sense.”

  I couldn’t resist messing with him a bit. “You just said I wasn’t normal. Why would my temperature be normal?”

  He just looked at me for a moment before he put the blood pressure cuff on my arm. He pressed the button on the vitals stand, and it began to pump up.

  “That’s not going to be normal either.”

  “Quiet.”

  I was quiet.

  Looking over at Goth, I rolled my eyes. He smirked. Why was everything feeling so ordinary? After the things Dr. Harry said the day before, shouldn’t I be freaking out? I mean, being told you don’t fulfill all the requirements for life should cause a little anxiety, right? But I wasn’t that anxious. I felt alive. And I guess if you feel alive, it’s hard to think of yourself as not alive.

  Ray released the blood pressure cuff. From the look on his face, I figured it was just as scary low as my temperature. He studied the chart for a moment, and then he said, “Dr. Harry wants me to look at your ankles.”

  He pulled down the thin blanket and the sheet. His face kind of contorted. “Jesus Christ.”

  I looked down at my exposed feet. Oddly, my first thought was how much they looked like my mother’s feet. Narrow with long toes. Though much, much bigger. The skin tone wasn’t too bad, either, a little pale maybe. But the thing that got Ray swearing was that my feet were filthy, covered in dirt and bits of grass. It took a moment for me to understand what that meant, and in that moment fear crept over me.

  I hadn’t been dreaming of being out back at all. I’d really been out there. I’d really watched as those two old men, those two old, maggoty, dead men rose from their garden graves and headed toward the Institute. But what had happened? Had they made it to the building? Had something stopped them? Where were they now?

  “Looks like someone’s been sleepwalking,” Goth said.

  THIRTY-TWO

  I went to the bathroom attached to the ward to wash my feet. Ray was gone when I got back. Edmond was sitting up in bed, Ray having obviously woken him to get his vitals. Slinking back to my bed, I felt super embarrassed. It was one thing to have these weird wanderings when it was just me who knew about them, but now Goth knew. Well, he didn’t know, not really. He didn’t know what I’d seen.

  Climbing into bed, I realized Ray hadn’t changed my sheets. I’d probably have to wait for Miss Haggerty to come in. She’d be annoyed and diffident no matter how nicely I asked her, but at least she’d do it. Using the remote, I lifted the bed so I could sit up and curl my legs underneath me so I didn’t have to stick my nice, clean feet in the grime at the foot of my bed.

  “You didn’t see me, you know, getting out of bed?” I asked Goth.

  “No. Kinda weird. I don’t sleep all that well.”

  Actually, no one slept that well around him, either. He sort of hacked and coughed his way through the night.

  “Have you always been a sleepwalker?”

  “Sleepwalker?” Edmond asked. “Who’s a sleepwalker?”

  “Jake has been walking in his sleep,” Goth explained.

  “I haven’t done it in a really long time,” I said. It was a total lie. I’d never been a sleepwalker. It was just easier to let Goth and Edmond think I was one than clue them into what was really going on.
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br />   “You think the girls are awake yet?” Edmond asked, but he still had sleep in his voice. Goth shrugged, and Edmond rolled over and was snoring again two seconds later.

  “You want to watch a movie?” Goth asked me.

  “Sure. Where do you want to watch it? In the solarium?”

  “No, it’s too bright in there. Let’s just do it here.” He scooted over in his bed. There wasn’t a lot of room but there was enough. I crossed the few feet to Goth’s bed and climbed up in.

  He handed me a stack of his DVDs and told me to go ahead and pick one. I looked through them: Love Story, Brian’s Song, Terms of Endearment, Dark Victory, Pride of the Yankees. I didn’t know all of the movies, but I quickly scanned the synopses. I only read a couple before I picked up the theme.

  “You’re kidding me.”

  “Art teaches us who to be.”

  “You don’t need to learn how to die young. It sort of happens whether you want it to or not.”

  “But I do need to know how.” He had a kind of smirk on his face, so I wasn’t sure he was all that serious.

  “I don’t think I’ve seen any of these movies, but my guess is that the dying person dies nobly and with dignity.”

  “Exactly. I want to learn how to do that. Left to my own devices, I might just sit in the corner and cry.”

  “But you’re here. Trying to live.”

  “I’ve got my fingers crossed. Hopefully the DVDs are more plan B than they used to be.”

  I decided to go with Love Story, assuming at least part of it would be romantic. Sitting together in Goth’s bed, we got a couple of sidelong glances from Ray as he came in and out, but he didn’t say anything. Edmond woke up long enough to get Goth to promise to walk him over to the girl’s ward in the afternoon. Goth munched on Lorna Doones. When he offered me one, he gave the name a cheesy Irish accent.

  Shaking my head, I asked him, “Where do you get them?”

  “I just ask for them. You can ask for whatever you want. Nurse Margie will get it for you. Or whoever it who replaces her. Hopefully.” That made us somber for a moment. If we got another Ray or Miss Haggerty, it wasn’t likely Goth would ever see a cookie again.

  “What’s your favorite cookie?” he asked.

  “I dunno.”

  “You don’t know what your favorite cookie is?”

  “I used to like anything with mint. But right now it sounds terrible.”

  “Ask the new nurse for some tomorrow. Experiment. If you still don’t want them, I’ll eat them.”

  We went back to watching the movie. Ali McGraw was calling Ryan O’Neal preppy like it was his name. I fell asleep with my head on Goth’s shoulder around the time she announced that, “Love means never having to say you’re sorry.”

  Even in my virginal state, I knew that was a crock. In fact, being in love probably meant you had to say you’re sorry a lot more than normal people. Apologizing might have gone a long way to fixing my parents’ marriage.

  I did actually sleep through Ali’s getting sick and dying, which honestly wasn’t such a disappointment.

  I woke up in the middle of a relatively normal dream in which I was chased up a staircase that went nowhere. It was the kind of dream that used to scare the crap out of me, but was now reassuringly mundane. And vague. And in no way, shape or form possible.

  But then I realized something. The fact that my feet were dirty didn’t mean the old men had been buried in the back. It just meant I went outside in my sleep. I could have been dreaming about the old men while I was sleepwalking. Right? And as soon as I thought that, I felt a lot better. It made sense.

  The old men weren’t real.

  They couldn’t be real. They’d disappeared a while ago. If they had been buried in the backyard, why would it take so long for them to dig their way out? I guess they could have been buried really deep. Or maybe they weren’t buried right away. I stopped myself. This was really stupid shit to think about. I dreamed the old men. They were in some nursing home somewhere. Just like Nurse Margie said they were.

  “Do you want me to go back to the part where you fell asleep?” Goth asked, reaching for his closed DVD player.

  “No, that’s okay,” I said. “What did she die of?”

  “Old movie disease.”

  “What is that?”

  “It’s where they never say what you have, but you never look bad and the lighting’s always great.”

  “Oh. That sounds nice.” I should have gone back to my bed, but I was comfortable. Very comfortable. Then I asked him the question I’d been asking myself: “So if the treatment works on you, what do you want to do with your life?”

  “I just want to get old. Preferably not alone. I want to live long enough for my hair to turn gray and fall out. I want to get fat and misshapen. I want to grunt when I stand up and fart too much and complain about the pain in my joints. I want my skin to get thin and papery and my eyes hazy. And I want to live the kind of life that earns you those things. A long one.”

  “Me too.”

  I wondered if I was lying. I didn’t know much about what would happen to me. I didn’t know for sure if I could get old. Once Dr. Harry got my organ systems balanced and functioning correctly, would I age? I had no idea. Did I want to be nineteen forever? Oh God, probably not. But was there anything I could do about it? There was so much I needed to ask. And so much I was afraid to ask.

  A lot of things that normally happened didn’t happen that day. Ray only did some of the things Nurse Margie would have done. Goth didn’t get his back-slapping treatment. I did get my afternoon stem cell treatment but no blood was taken in the morning. Edmond was basically ignored.

  When the afternoon rolled around, I lay drowsily back in my own bed, taking in my treated blood. Goth decided to walk Edmond over to the girl’s ward. They could have waited so I could have gone to meet the girls, too, but…I don’t know, I wasn’t especially into making new friends.

  Having secrets will do that, I guess.

  Left alone in the silence, I let my mind drift. I could hear Goth and Edmond as they walked, even after they left the ward. I heard Edmond ask, “So, are you guys like fags or something?”

  “Yeah, we are,” Goth replied.

  “Oh. Okay. That’s cool.” It took him all of five seconds to realize, “Holy shit, that means I have the girls all to myself.”

  “It sure does.”

  “Awesome.”

  I had to chuckle. Edmond was kind of a jerk and kind of not a jerk. I guess he was just like the rest of us. Trying to be the person he thought he was supposed to be whether that was really who he wanted to be or not.

  I guess I did that, too. My mom wanted me to get better, so I played the good patient figuring that was how to get better. But was that who I really was? Maybe it all would have been easier if I’d screamed and yelled every time I wanted to give up. Or maybe it would have been a lot harder. I wasn’t sure.

  “What you’re saying is that you’ve halted the study until you’re certain this one subject is going to, what was the word you used? Thrive?” The man speaking was on a computer screen. Skype? Facetime? Google-whatever. One of those apps.

  “I don’t know why you’re having trouble understanding this. I spoke clearly enough.” That was Dr. Harry. He sat at his desk staring at the computer. His arms crossed his chest. He was obviously annoyed with the man on the screen, who was younger than Dr. Harry and better groomed.

  “I’m having trouble understanding why you think you can make that decision unilaterally. I thought we had a partnership.”

  “We do have a partnership, Dr. Callabray, but the study is my purview.”

  “That’s not how this is supposed to work. Your purview is Property Five. You’ve done it. You’ve perfected the treatment, and it extends life, just as you’d hoped. Now it’s our turn to develop the protocols that will guarantee quality of life. But we can’t do that with just one test subject.”

  “You’re going to have to.” />
  Dr. Harry sat back in his chair and seemed to consider for a moment. Then, slowly, he said, “I cannot play Russian roulette with people’s lives.”

  “But isn’t that what you’re doing? Keeping subjects out of your study could be equally disastrous. In this situation, the only way you can truly know the ethical choice would be to see the future. Can you see the future, Dr. Harry?”

  “No. I can’t.”

  “Then you should proceed with other subjects.”

  “No. I won’t. I took an oath. First do no—”

  “Oh, don’t be ridiculous. If you took that seriously, you wouldn’t have come this far.”

  “I don’t know that I’ve done the right thing. I’ve taken risks. Risks I perhaps should not have taken. I won’t risk making things worse for my subjects.”

  “You’ve chosen subjects who are going to die very soon. How much worse can it get?”

  “It could get worse. It could get much worse.”

  “I’m going to have to discuss this with my investors.”

  “Yes. I was expecting that.”

  Goth came back into the ward, which woke me. I sat up in bed in time to see him looking at me funny, reading my face.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing. I fell asleep again. I was dreaming.”

  Was I dreaming? It all felt so real. But then it felt real in the way a TV show feels real, which wasn’t real at all.

  Then Goth said, “Edmond put two and two together and figured out we’re gay.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “What do you mean, you know?”

  I wasn’t sure what to say for a moment. I couldn’t tell him I’d overheard a conversation that should have been impossible for me to overhear. Finally, I said, “I meant that it’s logical he’d figure it out, that’s all.”

  Then I realized, if I did actually overhear their conversation, maybe the dreams weren’t dreams at all. And I wasn’t dreaming about the conversation I’d dreamed Dr. Harry having. It was real. And it was me they were talking about. I was the subject who wasn’t thriving. The study wasn’t going well. I wasn’t getting better. And if I wasn’t getting better, that meant that I was decomposing. And if I was decomposing…