Interference

by S. L. LUCK

  “Big one,” Huxley groaned, and took a blueberry muffin from a pastry basket, then both men sauntered to a quiet table near the window. They dropped into their chairs, exhausted, and sipped their coffees as they gazed at the sun-drenched walking path near the staff parking area where coatless pedestrians and scrub-clad employees enjoyed a late autumn warm spell. After a time, Huxley said, “That was something, huh?”

  “You know, Hux, I stopped being surprised a long time ago, but this … whatever it was … makes me rethink science.”

  “Maybe we’re dreaming.”

  “That would make more sense,” Abe agreed, neither man openly willing to accept that they had just hooked up an electrified patient to a battery system and that, stranger still, the charge coming from Anabelle Cheever was almost nuclear.

  After the clamps were secured to Anabelle’s feet, the instant surge resulted in a brilliant flare of sparks, then forty-five seconds of darkness as the generators were overwhelmed. They were fumbling around for their flashlights when suddenly the lights turned back on. Their cellphones began ringing moments after with the same news: not only had Anabelle Cheever single-handedly charged three-hundred and fifty dead batteries in the space of a few minutes, but engineers calculated that she was generating enough energy to power the entirety of Garrett’s significant industrial sector, should longer-term strategies need to be considered.

  The situation was so incredible that Premier Madigan, who rushed to the city to tour the depleted river and was thus apprised of Anabelle’s condition, requested a visit with her medical team. As though he wasn’t busy enough already, Huxley convened a meeting with Adhira, Abe, Bruce, Kate, Premier Madigan, and Mayor Falconer before their press conference along the riverside. At one time, a meeting with Ontario’s political elite might have tickled the doctors, but the theater of the meeting drew them away from their work and gave them headaches. Worse, Madigan’s suggestion of provincial or federal command evoked the spectacle of a much larger circus that no doctor was prepared to endorse.

  Now, as Huxley picked disinterestedly at his muffin, he said to Abe, “What do you make of her condition?”

  Abe sighed. “On the record?”

  “Of course not.”

  “God,” Abe said simply. “There is no other explanation for an almost complete recovery as soon as that.”

  “You think?”

  Abe put his tumbler on the table and, with his forearms on his thighs, leaned toward Huxley. He removed his glasses and wiped an accumulation of crust from the corners of his eyes. “Maybe a thousand years from now we’ll know what we worked with today. A hundred and fifty years ago, we didn’t even know that viruses existed. Now we know there are thousands, hundreds of thousands, potentially millions of them. Even the value of basic handwashing was severely underestimated. Now it’s our first line of defense. My education has taught me to believe that all mysteries can eventually be solved with science, but my experience has taught me that science is the dominion of God.”

  Huxley couldn’t disagree with this. His own professional experience was a sort of clumsy union of science and religion, but it was one he was comfortable with and often leaned on. That was why he’d always prayed when he was a about to lose a patient. And a time or two, he believed it worked. When Willie Shumacher, then eighty-four, suffered his second massive heart attack and was brought into the ER during one of Huxley’s night shifts, the man’s heart had already been silent for ten minutes. Only because Willie’s distraught wife had to be dragged from the room by the hospital’s security team, Huxley had worked on the man for longer than usual. Thirty-seven minutes later, after they had exhausted attempts with the defibrillator and shots of amiodarone and epinephrine were administered too late because of a snowstorm that slowed the arrival of the ambulance, Huxley was about to declare Willie’s time of death. Outwardly, he sought the wall clock, but inwardly Huxley sought God on Willie’s behalf. He had not yet pronounced the minute of Willie’s death when Willie’s monitor beeped and a little bump bulged the otherwise flat green line. Another bump followed and another, and then Huxley and his team threw themselves back at their patient with a vigor so instinctive it was as though God Himself was working through them. That was seven years ago, and Huxley had been invited to Ivy and Willie Schumacher’s wedding anniversary dinner every April since.

  The unexpected survival of an old man wasn’t the first time Huxley had sensed a greater power working over him. No. Before Willie, there had been five-year-old Maddie Davis who had drowned in her family’s pool. Another dead-on-arrival, the girl’s lips and fingernails were ocean-blue and beyond Huxley’s help so, while he played at trying to help the helpless child, he did the only thing he really could do—he prayed. And though he knew it was futile, he worked on the girl for longer than was reasonable, much longer than was even considered sane, and got the shock of his life when she sat up and hugged him. He was no miracle worker, but he wasn’t so naïve as to believe that miracles didn’t happen. They did. Anabelle Cheever’s condition was only one such case.

  When the sparks subsided and the lights returned and they chanced to touch Anabelle the previous night, they finally found what they were hoping for. There was still a slight buzz to Anabelle’s skin, much like the prickle of a shock from dry socks when touching someone else’s skin, but it was neither painful nor unbearable. They were finally able to work on her. First they had to turn her over and check for the bedsores they knew would be there. But there weren’t any. Not a single one. Where there should have been several, maybe even a dozen, the skin on her backside was almost rosy with health. And when Huxley undressed the bandage he’d placed on Anabelle’s head, he found a stubble of previously shaved hair just beginning to grow, but only the faintest wisp of a scar underneath. The wound that he had operated on a week ago, piecing together the skull that was fractured like a windshield … was healed. He had touched the faint outline of the pink scar tissue underneath the stubble and wondered for the first time if he ever had any control at all. Now, as he looked at the craters beneath Abe’s red eyes, Huxley said of God, “He sure has a funny sense of humor, doesn’t He?”

  “At least it’s interesting.” Abe nodded.

  They were just finishing their coffees, readying for one last visit with their patient before heading home, when Adhira appeared at their table. She was wearing a dark green dress, and though she had fixed her makeup, the fresh eyeshadow and thick liner were not enough to awaken her face. The crescents of darkness under her eyes were crudely covered and gave her almost a cadaverous appearance. Still, she smiled brightly at them with newly glossed lips. “Gentlemen,” she said, “I think I’m still in shock.”

  Abe smiled affectionately at his co-worker. “You must be. Here Hux and I are ready for bed and you are ready for a ballroom. Is the Premier returning? Or maybe the Prime Minister is making an appearance?”

  Adhira shook her head. “Thankfully, no. It’s just a lunch meeting. It’s too late to cancel, otherwise I would.” She said this half-heartedly, for beyond her puffed eyes was a glimmer of anticipation.

  “I wish I were that young again,” Abe said nostalgically. “Maybe I wouldn’t need so much coffee.”

  “You did even then,” Huxley reminded him. “You just didn’t need as much sugar. Remember the surgical conference in Toronto when half our doctors got snowed away over the weekend?”

  “Ah,” Abe scratched his chin, remembering. “You’re right. Winter of ‘99. I had more caffeine than blood in my body until they got back.”

  Adhira checked her watch and set her purse on the table so she could put her jacket on. “Well, I’m off. See you two tonight?”

  “Tomorrow for me,” Abe yawned.

  “Lucky bastard,” Huxley coughed into his hand, and with droopy eyes the men watched the quick stride of Adhira’s feet against the linoleum as she left the cafeteria.

  Outside, the mid-afternoon sun had warmed to a miraculous heat, and Adhira was not more than ten steps
from the building when she had to open and remove her coat. Gone was yesterday’s snow, and the smell of barbeque was in the air. By the time she reached the restaurant where she was meeting Troy, she had broken out in a thick sweat, even with her air conditioning on. The makeup she had reapplied was now caked across her cheeks and her eyeliner had smeared onto the top of her eyelids, just beneath her eyebrows. She pulled a tissue from the box on her passenger seat, licked it, and was dabbing at her face when Troy appeared beside her door. He waved as she held a finger up for him to wait a moment. Troy nodded, stepping back while she hastily finished.

  “Didn’t mean to surprise you,” he said when she finally opened her door.

  “I’m so tired nothing could surprise me today,” Adhira admitted honestly, and followed Troy to her favorite bistro near Garrett’s only library.

  Inside they sat at a booth near a ceiling-high bookshelf tucked into the back wall. The dimly lit space smelled of fish and hot tomatoes and, even at this early hour, many varieties of wine. Adhira declined wine and took coffee instead, then ordered a smoked cheese salad while Troy ordered a tapas sampler with olives and skewered meats and pâté-topped crostini. The waiter was arriving with her coffee when she asked, “I was wondering, how is Sylvia settling in?”

  “Snug like the last piece of a puzzle,” Troy said with a half-hearted grin. “She doesn’t like it, as you probably know but it’s what’s best for her, so I’m the bad son for a while.” He shrugged, resting his arm against the back of his booth.

  He hadn’t shaved since she last seen him and as he sat across from her, Adhira admired the shadow on his jawline. She sipped her coffee and said, “I’ve yet to meet a patient who didn’t think the same of their children when they have to make the hard choices. After a medical episode—whatever it is—patients always want to go home to what they know. I can’t blame them. I’d probably be the same if it were me.”

  “Do you have children?” Troy asked.

  Adhira shook her head. “Unfortunately, no. I haven’t got anyone to put me in a home yet.” No sooner were the words out of her mouth, Adhira cringed. “That was a terrible joke. I’m sorry. I’m so tired I don’t know how to think straight anymore.”

  “No need to apologize. But if you’re that tired, we can do this another time.”

  On cue their food arrived, and Adhira found herself with a mouthful before the waiter had even left the table. She swallowed this down with coffee and said, “My life is half exhaustion, half too busy to eat, and a smidge of sleep. I take what I can get when I can get it. You’ve got the best of me at the moment, I’m afraid.” Looking at the man in front of her, something perhaps chiseled from giant hunk of testosterone, Adhira realized too late that she should have canceled their meeting. He smelled good, looked incredible, and said nothing offensive. She smelled like bedpans and looked and spoke like what was often found inside them. “You must get as busy as I do with your line of work, no?” she asked.

  “I do,” he said. “But only during trial. At least now, that is. Back when I was articling, I don’t think I saw my own pillow for the first year. I slept on a chair in the file room so often that I got used to it; told myself that I preferred it to my own bed. It took my chiropractor four years to put me straight again, and even though I know I’d do it all over again if I had to, I’d like to think the students we have now are smarter than I was. There’s only so long a person can live like that, or they start to go crazy. For me, that was when chugging a Red Bull had the same effect as a cup of camomile tea,” Troy reminisced. “Your line of work is not as forgiving as mine, though. Losing a case is not the same as losing a patient, as much as some arrogant people out there believe. Speaking of which, I hear your patient had an interesting night last night."

  “So much for privacy,” Adhira groaned.

  “Mostly the small-town telephone game.” He shrugged. “It’s always been like that here. It’s part of the reason I was glad we didn’t move here until my last year of high school, and even that was bad enough. Coming from Toronto, I was an alien to them. So I hit university as fast as I could and never looked back. That was normal teenager stuff, but a case like Anabelle’s in a city that wants to know what you’re eating for breakfast and what time you go to bed because there’s nothing else to be excited about … it’s just too big of a story to hide. Maybe in Toronto it could have been kept private—in a city like that there is always something strange happening. Strangeness is the fabric of the city. But here, a patient with”—he leaned over the table and whispered— “power … it will kill a person trying to keep a secret like that.”

  His eyes rose to the top of his sockets and he stared at her intently. For a moment, Adhira felt uneasy. She knew that Anabelle’s secret couldn’t be kept. As a whole, the city was incapable of it. But there was an innuendo not so much to what Troy was saying, but the way he was saying it that made her pull back from the table. She had never warmed to lawyers, even the long timers who defended the hospital against the fortunately rare cases of litigation. There was an aggression in their blood that Adhira didn’t think could be nurtured out, so she had removed their type from her dating pool early on. Maybe it was her exhaustion that had made her consider Troy different from the others, and as she looked at him now she wondered if he were really that different at all. She said, “You say that as though it’s on a billboard somewhere.”

  He bit an olive from a bamboo skewer, looking at her as he chewed. “Forgive me if I sound pessimistic, but it’s what I’m paid to do. I just want you to be aware that situations like that tend to snowball before you even know the snow has been packed. As your legal team will tell you, it’s in your best interest to keep a tight lid on her care and her recovery, even if the city needs a champion right now.”

  Adhira pushed her plate aside, feeling like a scolded child, though she had done nothing wrong. “Thanks for the advice.”

  “Take it,” he said, and it was then that Adhira realized that whatever affinity that previously existed between them had grown cold. He rubbed his chin as though debating how to proceed, then said, “You took good care of my mother, so I’m here as a courtesy. Anabelle’s parents have retained my firm for potential action against your hospital. We haven’t filed the paperwork yet, but I thought you should know.”

  18

  The air had grown from warm to hot by the time Troy left Adhira, open-mouthed, back at the bistro. After he’d made known the purpose of their meeting, she’d withered before him—and it was not without a hint of satisfaction that he watched her recoil as though she had been slapped. She had perfect cheeks for slapping, big and round, but to do to her what he had done to so many others would bring attention where he most needed privacy. Instead, he took her with his other skills; first slathering up her insecurities by fake admiration and coquettish banter, then slicing into the most tender part of Adhira: her profession. Of course, he pretended it pained him, but, really, the pain was more from unfulfillment—much like the kind he’d suffered as a teenager when the girls were too frigid to give him anything more than a dry rub. Now, having been in Garrett for almost two weeks, Troy felt that dark urge creeping up on him again, and it made him irritable.

  He wasn’t a rapist. No, that sort of thing was below him. The parting of already open flesh posed no challenge to him at all. His parents, or whatever deity commanded them, had bestowed upon him the kind of stature women, and even many men, gravitated toward. Troy was tall and lean but muscular. That he was unnaturally attractive became clear every time a woman accepted a ride for which she never reached her destination. As he’d said to Adhira, secrets in Toronto were much easier to keep. In Garrett, however, there was no getting out of the spotlight, no matter how far in the shadows one hid. Its reach required all residents, even former residents, to act according to social norms, or be subjected to scrutiny. Troy knew that even small-town scrutiny could be dangerous, so here he was in a city that he didn’t like, caring for a mother he didn’t care for. Her
stroke had come at the worst possible time. Not only was his office in the middle of acquiring Toronto’s second-largest malpractice firm—Troy’s own Baker & Chessington being the first—but he hadn’t satisfied his dark urge in many months. It had begun to claw at him so that he couldn’t concentrate on anything but. He felt he’d already shown the appropriate amount of assistance to his mother and was preparing his return to Toronto when he heard about the girl.

  Anabelle.

  It had come from the nurses at the hospital. Even when Troy had filled her vulnerable heart with the potential of passion, Adhira wasn’t forthcoming about Anabelle’s condition. Most doctors held their work in confidence, as Adhira had, but during one of his more burdensome visits to his mother, news of Anabelle’s situation rumbled across the ward like an avalanche after a heavy snowfall. What most interested Troy was that the uniqueness of her condition suggested some kind of supernatural interference. Troy himself was not immune to belief in metaphysical power. The darkness that came to him when he was ten could only have been of another world, for it was definitely not acceptable in this one. It encouraged and empowered him to do things that he did not want to suppress, and he’d felt a kinship with his Dark Friend ever since he killed his first cat. Good boy, his Dark Friend purred to him. Now do it again. He did. And by the time Troy was thirteen, in the junky neighborhood where he and his mother lived, there was not a single stray animal.

  His teens were another story. During the time when weirdness could be passed off as the vagaries of adolescence, Troy had the shock of his young life when, deliriously excited in the back seat of his mother’s car with Misty Alvarez one hot August night, he accidentally rolled up the window with his elbow and her hair got caught. Neither of them noticed that Misty’s hair was trapped until she bent her head to kiss him. Moaning but not wanting to wreck the moment, Misty tapped Troy’s shoulder and gently explained that her hair was stuck. By now, however, Troy was deep in his own mind, oblivious to reason. He held her wrists and pulled her closer to him, yanking her hair tight, tighter, so tight that a song might play if a violin bow was slid upon it. Then Misty’s cries of ecstasy became cries of pain when his Dark Friend took over.