by Brian Hodge
But he was suffering from obvious abdominal pain. They ran an obstructive series on him, flat and standing X-rays to look for odd fluid and air levels that might be the culprit. Again he stymied them. At least he was remaining consistent as an oddity.
The only thing of note, and it was significant, was the rebound tenderness Paul experienced when the ER doctor manually probed his abdomen. Lower left quadrant, and the educated guess was possible appendicitis, but they didn’t have enough to go on to say for sure.
Standard textbook procedure said to admit the patient for observation and let the disease or condition declare itself. Both Preston and the attending ER physician were in agreement on this. The could run more tests in the morning, when a radiologist would be on duty.
Because something in there didn’t feel at all right. Something in that lower left quadrant was displacing organs.
Irv reassured Donny that Paul would be fine, fine, they’d get to the bottom of things the next day. Let Paul sleep the night here in a private room in the care of their capable hands.
Capable hands. Now that prickled.
But as he wheeled the Cadillac home, alone, windows open to air the burning petroleum stench from the upholstery, it wasn’t all knuckle-wringing worry.
Donny felt good, in a strange way.
For a while there, earlier, he had actually taken charge.
Dreamtime, despite sedation. Jarring fragments, a new world unfurling across the mental landscape, Paul traveling it naked, and by its very air knowing it to be a much younger world. Himself but not himself, two minds in one body, looking at arms and legs and a muscular torso, deeply bronzed, and knowing them to be someone else’s. The other’s name insignificant, no names needed here in the primal desert.
Neither for himself, nor his three compatriots, burning under a red desert sun, wind scouring them with dust and grit as the baking plains stretched before them, and they were running—
With a glance behind he saw the city walls and the angry throng, Why do you hate me so?, blood streaming from where a thrown earthen brick impacted with his head, and who were they all, these screaming masses intent on driving these four from their midst? What crime had this quartet committed? I bring healing to you—
I bring restoration—
Bricks raining down and the hateful jeers lashing at their backs like a whip, the abyss opened behind his eyes, other eyes staring from the darkness, an extended hand of invitation, lord of healing and lord of—
But I bring HEALING…
NO, let it not be so, that I also bring the other—
Saturday, jerking upright in the predawn, a sudden swirling plunge of disorientation of an unfamiliar room, unfamiliar walls, unfamiliar bed. Across this dark room, a TV set hovered out from the wall like a frozen eye. Hospital, it made sense. Not the least of which was the exposed vulnerability he felt beneath the sheets, somebody’s idea of tres chic hospital wear. His rump was hanging out. Paul eased down into the bed again with a groan, the last painful traces of bodily mutiny scraping through his head and abdomen.
For the past several hours, dreams had been far more vivid than reality. Fleeing the hellfire of Alamo Gas and Oil … everything since then was gone or, at best, a half-remembered snippet. The interstate at night, blurry and resounding with the blaring horns of other cars which he had somehow avoided hitting. Staggering into Donny’s home, last-ditch effort at some sort of relief. Lying on a hard, cool table as hands probed freely and blinding lights burned from above — Am I dying? But nothing else lived in that light, it was barren and sterile. The rest? Blackout, a casualty of his own traitor senses.
This is getting weirder.
And the dreams, now what were these new confusions all about? Desert and city, panic and pain, the loss of home and the hatred of all the known world. It had been so real, he could feel the sting of each windblown grain of sand. So dimensional and total that it felt less the arcane symbolism of a dream, and more like stepping into someone else’s soul and trying his memories on for size.
Maybe there really was such a thing as genetically inherited memory, and this morning’s featurette had been some sort of random access. But with relevance. An interesting theory no one could disprove. But. Something else had been in that dream — memory? — with him, he was sure of it. Something that watched the potential for sowing seeds of pain and death through the benevolent guise of healing. And it minded not at all.
Maybe it was his own subconscious. The benign sadist, the part that thrived on Laurel’s games, was perhaps not so benign after all.
I’ll fight you, and how ludicrous it seemed. Fighting the good fight while at war with himself. Winner and loser, both in one neat package.
A house divided against itself cannot stand, Abraham Lincoln had said. Straight-to-the-point, homespun wisdom.
Yeah. Look how he’d ended up.
The nurses woke him bright and early, we’re going downstairs for some tests in a few minutes. We this, we that, why don’t we just drop the chummy bullshit and we should get along fine. He held it in. Getting awfully good at this retention routine, it seemed he could hold just about anything in. Except disaster.
Tests. Why submit to these indignities at all? The pains were nothing new, always temporary, and he was feeling better. Just needed a little sleep was all, but apparently they couldn’t rack up every possible premium charge for that. Tests it was.
The day brightened considerably when they returned him upstairs to his room. A visitor awaited, and Paul held closed the backside gap in his johnny while climbing into bed. Although Laurel had most definitely seen it and more.
“You had me worried as hell,” she said when they were alone. Her eyes weary, red and short on sleep. He could sympathize.
“I’m sorry,” smiling from his pillows. “How’d you know where to find me?”
“When you stood me up for dinner and I couldn’t find you anywhere, I called Amanda. As far as I knew, she was the last person to see you around. That was early evening. Later she called me and said her nurse took care of you for a few minutes before Donny brought you here.”
Hmm. No recollection there. The blackout must have been deep.
“I think Amanda was as worried as I was.”
Paul nodded. “I like her. She seems very level.”
Laurel, leaning toward him, no levity, “Paul? Where were you?”
“I went down to the refinery fire.” His voice sounded flat and worn to his ears. No tread left. “I thought I could help.”
Laurel shut her eyes. She was sitting uncharacteristically prim in fashion. Knees drawn together, stiff-backed, arms crossed before her while each hand cupped the opposite elbow.
“How’d things end up there?” he asked. “I don’t even know, I didn’t even feel like asking anybody here.”
“The fire’s out. They got it put out around dawn.” Laurel didn’t seem to appreciate question-and-answer reversal at this stage. “What could you have done there? You could have been killed. Paul, I don’t even know what happened to you, why you’re here, you could have been half burned up for all I knew.”
He felt an easy smile crack open and pointed toward her stomach. “Gluttons for our doom. Didn’t somebody say that once?”
“This isn’t the same.” Frowning, hell, he knew that look all too intimately. He’d seen it on more than one face those final days at KGRM, people with too many unanswered questions they didn’t even know how to ask. Better get used to it, it would follow him wherever he went.
“It’s close enough,” he said.
Deep breaths, fidgeting in her chair. “Is there anyone I should call for you? Family? What about your mother, shouldn’t I let her know something?”
Shaking his head, a little more energy cooked up now. “No, don’t. Don’t. Don’t worry her for nothing. I don’t know what you could tell her that’d make much sense.”
Had to bring up Mom, didn’t she? Though it could hardly be construed as a deliberate act of c
ruelty. Quite thoughtful, actually, on the surface.
Chew on this awhile, though: Mom. It was October now, and he hadn’t seen her since Christmas. Contact had been limited to the infrequent phone call, the even more infrequent letter. Communiqués of convenience, really, obligations sparked as much by guilt as desire. He hadn’t even informed her of his radical career departure and change of address until two weeks into Donny’s tour. She’d sounded mystified, had said little, whatever you think best, dear.
It hadn’t been intentional, this gulf of mutual negligence. But he could pinpoint its origins, right down to month, date, and year. All corresponding with the day of his father’s death. Funny. Losing Dad those many years ago should’ve driven them closer to each other, but it seemed to have had the opposite effect. Withdrawal as self-defense, as if the effects of future mortality and loss could be lessened by beating them to the punch.
As sons went, Paul figured he was pretty much bargain-basement material. Cheap and ill-fitting.
Laurel gripped the low railing of his bed, uncertain worry clouding those gray eyes. The heavy eyebrows, how he liked them; they were very natural. She’d told him plucking was too tiresome and had seemed pointlessly vain. But that she still shaved her pits and legs. More hypocrisy; they had laughed at the time.
“Talk to me, you,” she said. “There’s too much here that doesn’t make sense. Like, why did Amanda want to meet you yesterday? The only reason I know her is because we’ve sung duets together. She just doesn’t up and invite the ushers and audio techs over. And Donny and Gabe seem to give you a lot more deference than anybody else outside their own little circle of directors. And why are you in the hospital? You’ve got more sense than to go to an oilfield fire thinking you can just show up and they’ll put you to work.”
“How’s the ulcer feel this morning?”
Her face cracked with exasperation and nerves. “What?”
“Your ulcer. How is it?”
“How do you think it is? I’ve been worried about you, and that hasn’t helped it.” She sighed, then made a visible effort at backing down from the offensive; humor the daffy patient. “I ate oatmeal for breakfast and drank milk and didn’t drink coffee. So it’s not bothering me as much. Now what—”
“Give me your hand.” He uncurled his own, waiting. “Come on, just give me your hand.”
Flesh on flesh, a reluctant surrender, and he held tight.
“Can you keep a secret?” He really did feel sorry for her at the moment. She was looking at him as if he were insane, and she were doubting her own mental wrappings for going along with him. A nod. “You don’t need that ulcer. Let’s get rid of it.”
Calm focus, letting his eyes drift shut. It only took a moment. Sending a portion of himself arrowing up her arm, detouring through her body and into her abdomen, the smooth muscle walls of her stomach. He pictured the hole shrinking closed the way her pupil would contract under a spotlight. Into nonexistence. It was a trifle, didn’t even cause a ripple in the empathy that grew so weighty at times.
But she had felt it, yes, something new and different and furlongs distant from any point of reference. Her eyes went wide and blank, her lips parted as if she’d been about to say something and forgot her mother tongue entirely. At last her hand slid from his, and she lay it flat over her belly’s left side.
“What did you just do?”
“Feel better?”
“Paul?” Warring disbelief was all across her face, conflicts and incongruities aplenty. A lottery winner thinking, No, no, there’s got to be a catch here somewhere.
He took her hand again and found that he was still primed to bare his soul. He’d been on the verge yesterday when Gabe had shown up, confession interruptus, and despite all that had happened since then, the tale still wanted to be told. Without restraint, without shame, without censure. The experience was cathartic, and he felt as if he were shedding unwanted pounds. Let somebody who cares help shoulder this, if only for an hour. A minute.
Paul felt hollowed out when finished. Good thing the windows were shut. One stiff breeze would sweep him from the bed and send him kiting along hallways. He wept, and while Laurel did not, she was there in all the other right ways. Holding him with quiet strength, keeping silent of judgment and questions, and above all, he supposed, simply believing.
Hollow wasn’t so bad. It at least left room for growth.
Chapter 32
It took an exceptionally powerful reason to bring Irv Preston into his office to log desk time late on a Saturday afternoon. Saturdays were his own. Morning hospital rounds only, quick and breezy, always done by eleven. At his private offices and examining rooms, let the younger associates handle the caseload. Textbook medicine only on a Saturday, banal and routine. Mostly the marginally ill scheduling health time around their careers, waiting for the weekend. Fine. They deserved younger doctors with less experience and more idealism.
Saturdays were routine.
Which made the test results strewn across his desk all the more stunning.
In physiological terms alone, these were the most freakish he had ever seen. If they were correct, then Paul Handler was the most unique human being on the face of God’s green earth.
When Preston checked up on Paul this morning at the hospital, the abdominal pain had diminished; scratch suspected appendicitis from the list, and this kid was getting to be one bugger of a conundrum indeed. Paul had been lucid by then, alert enough to tell Preston that he’d also endured — and still was, though it was waning — a cluster bomb of a headache. Upon further probing, Preston had discovered that this episode hadn’t been the first of its kind. Two or three others dated back to midsummer, lasting for several hours, then tapering off until he felt fine.
Since Paul had hurdled last night’s preliminary tests, it was time to advance to the next round. A radiologist was now on duty, so they ran a CAT scan and took fourteen shots of his brain, serving it up into individual slices. They did an MRI — magnetic resonance imaging — during which an extremely powerful electromagnet was slowly passed over his body; healthy tissue cells would line up in a north-south pole in the magnetic field, their images transmitted to a TV screen for a painless peek at all the organs. Another series of fifteen shots was taken of the results.
When Preston first saw them, he’d hit the proverbial roof.
“These can’t be right!” he had roared. Imbeciles. Either the machine had screwed up, or the tech, or some combination of both. He’d ordered them redone and the results had come back identical. Before they could run a third series, two other patients were tested in the interim and checked out as expected. Human and machine error looked less likely, then the third take on Paul yielded the same screwy results.
“Keep your mouth buttoned on this,” Preston had told the radiologist. “For now, this is strictly between you and me, do you understand?”
The radiologist had said she did. It would be an effort. Ordinarily, word of such anomalies would have spread throughout the hospital like a brushfire.
Paul Handler was growing additional organs in his body. Not duplicates of existing organs, which was, while unusual, not unknown. Preston recalled one example, a few years ago: A South African guitarist who’d ruptured his spleen in a swimming pool accident while on tour. The subsequent operation had revealed three additional spleens. Tame, though, in comparison with the Handler case.
These organs were brand new. Never before seen, without precedents.
The MRI showed a mass that had grown among his intestines in the lower left quadrant. Approximately ten centimeters wide by seven tall, and eighteen millimeters thick. It looked as if he’d tucked a wallet inside his belly. What looked to be a bundle of nerve fibers branched from its posterior wall and ran toward his spine. Linking somehow with the spinal cord? Preston could have understood tumor, easily. Hell, would have preferred it. But had this been cancerous or otherwise diseased, it would have shown up fuzzy and indistinct, because the magnetic polarity
of sick cells was ruined.
But no. By all indications, this was healthy tissue.
And the surprises kept coming. In Paul’s brain, a spike-shaped growth was extending toward his forehead from the corpus callosum, the bridge of nerve fibers connecting the left and right hemispheres and allowing them to communicate. Good lord, no wonder the kid was in pain. Preston surmised that these tumors — for lack of a better label — would experience periodic bursts of growth, then plateau into quietude until a later flare-up.
A subsequent EEG showed that Paul was putting out an extra pattern of brainwaves. Had they been charted mechanically instead of on an oscilloscope screen, they might have blown the stylus off the paper. Whereas fully alert people exhibited a pattern of eight to thirteen waves, Paul was pumping out no fewer than eighteen. The extras, with such an intense amplitude, did not remotely resemble alpha, beta, or delta waves.
In letting his prognostication run uncharacteristically wild, Preston ventured that the new cranial organ looked like some sort of tiny antenna. And that Paul was…
Transmitting.
Despite it all, an unaware Paul had said he felt fine by late afternoon and wanted to leave. That girlfriend of his, no little incentive there. Preston had performed a verbal softshoe over and around the request, hoping to distract them from the gravity of the situation. Until they could figure out just where the hell to proceed from here.
First off, his family should be notified, but since he had none here, then those who had taken responsibility for him. And had brought him in for treatment in the first place.
With the fading Saturday sunshine waning at his window, Preston’s desktop lamp pooled a small oasis of light across the papers. He took one last weary look over them, flipped through his Rolodex, and reached for the phone to peck out Donny Dawson’s private home number.