“I'd about given up on you this morning,” Mr. Starret said, looking at his breakfast tray of orange juice, plain yoghurt, and wheat flakes with no great joy. What he really craved was two cholesterol-filled eggs, fried over easy and sweating butter, with five slices of bacon on the side, not too crisp. The sort of fare that had, in fact, landed him here in the first place. At least according to his doctor-the birdbrain.
“The going's bad outside,” Allison said shortly. Six patients had already told her they had about given up on her this morning, and the line was getting old. Allison was a pleasant girl, but this morning she was feeling harried.
“Oh, sorry,” Mr. Starret said humbly. “Pretty slippery on the roads, is it?”
“It sure is,” Allison said, thawing slightly. “If I didn't have my husband's four-wheel drive today, I never would have made it.”
Mr. Starret pushed the button that raised his bed so he could eat his breakfast comfortably. The electric motor that raised and lowered it was small but loud. The TV was still quite loud-Mr. Starret was a little deaf, and as he had told his wife, the guy in the other bed had never complained about a little extra volume. Never asked to see what was on the other channel either. He supposed a joke like that was in pretty poor taste, but when you'd had a heart attack and wound up in intensive care sharing a room with a human vegetable, you either learned a little black humor or you went crazy.
Allison raised her voice a little to be heard over the whining motor and the TV as she finished setting up Mr. Starret's tray. “There were cars off the road all up and down State Street hill.”
In the other bed Johnny Smith said softly, “The whole wad on nineteen. One way or the other. My girl's sick.”
“You know, this yogurt isn't half bad,” Mr. Starret said. He hated yogurt, but he didn't want to be left alone until absolutely necessary. When he was alone he kept taking his own pulse. “It tastes a little bit like wild hickory…
“Did you hear something?” Allison asked. She looked around doubtfully.
Mr. Starret let go of the control button on the side of the bed and the whine of the electric motor died. On the TV, Elmer Fudd took a potshot at Bugs Bunny and missed.
“Nothing but the TV,” Mr. Starret said. “What'd I miss?”
“Nothing, I guess. It must have been the wind around that window. “She could feel a stress headache coming on-too much to do and not enough people this morning to help her do it-and she rubbed at her temples, as if to drive the pain away before it could get properly seated.
On her way out she paused and looked down at the man in the other bed for a moment. Did he look different somehow? As if he had shifted position? Surely not.
Allison left the room and went on down the hall, pushing her breakfast cabinet ahead of her. It was as terrible a morning as she had feared it would be, everything out of kilter, and by noon her head was pounding. She had quite understandably forgotten all about anything she might have heard that morning in Room 619.
But in the days that followed she found herself looking more and more often at Smith, and by March Allison had become almost sure that he had straightened a bit-come out of what the doctors called his prefetal position a little. Not much just a little. She thought of mentioning it to someone, but in the end did not. After all, she was only an aide, little more than kitchen help.
It really wasn't her place.
It was a dream, he guessed.
He was in a dark, gloomy place-a hallway of some kind. The ceiling was too high to see. It was lost in the shadows. The walls were dark chromed steel. They opened out as they went upward. He was alone, but a voice floated up to where he stood, as if from a great distance. A voice he knew, words that had been spoken to him in another place, at another time. The voice frightened him. It was groaning and lost, echoing back and forth between that dark chromed steel like a trapped bird he remembered from his childhood. The bird had flown into his father's toolshed and hadn't the wit to get back out. It had panicked and had gone swooping back and forth, cheeping in desperate alarm, battering itself against the walls until it had battered itself to death. This voice had the same doomed quality as that long ago bird's cheeping. It was never going to escape this place.
“You plan all your life and you do what you can,” this spectral voice groaned. “You never want nothing but the best, and the kid comes home with hair down to his ass-hole and says the president of the United States is a pig. A pig! Sheeyit, I don't…
Look out, he wanted to say. He wanted to warn the voice, but he was mute. Look out for what? He didn't know. He didn't even know for sure who he was, although he had a suspicion that he had once been a teacher or a preacher.
“Jeeeesus!” The faraway voice screamed. Lost voice, doomed, drowned. “Jeeeee…
Silence then. Echoes dying. away. Then, in a little while, it would start again.
So after a while-he did not know how long, time seemed to have no meaning or relevance in this place-he began to grope his way down the hall, calling in return (or perhaps only calling in his mind), perhaps hoping that he and the owner of the voice could find their way out together, perhaps only hoping to give some comfort and receive some in return.
But the voice kept getting further and further away, dimmer and fainter
(far and wee)
until it was just an echo of an echo. And then it was gone. He was alone now, walking down this gloomy and deserted hall of shadows. And it began to seem to him that it wasn't an illusion or a mirage or a dream-at least not of the ordinary kind. It was as if he had entered limbo, a weird conduit between the land of the living and that of the dead. But toward which end was he moving?
Things began to come back. Disturbing things. They were like ghosts that joined him on his walk, fell in on either side of him, in front of him, behind him, until they circled him in an eldritch ring- weave a circle round him thrice and touch his eyes with holy dread, was that how it went? He could almost see them. All the whispering voices of purgatory. There was a Wheel turning and turning in the night, a Wheel of the Future, red and black, life and death, slowing. Where had he laid his bet? He couldn't remember and he should be able to, because the stakes were his existence. In and out? It had to be one or the other. His girl was sick. He had to get her home.
After a while, the hallway began to seem brighter. At first he thought it was imagination, a sort of dream within a dream if that were possible, but after an unknown length of time the brightness became too marked to be an illusion. The whole experience of the corridor seemed to become less dreamlike. The walls drew back until he could barely see them, and the dull dark color changed to a sad and misty gray, the color of twilight on a warm and overcast March afternoon. It began to seem that he was not in a hallway at all anymore, but in a room -almost in a room, separated from it by the thinnest of membranes, a sort of placental sac, like a baby waiting to be born. Now he heard other voices, not echoey but dull and thudding, like the voices of nameless gods speaking in forgotten tongues. Little by little these voices came clearer, until he could nearly make out what they were saying.
He began to open his eyes from time to time (or thought he did) and he could actually see the owners of those voices: bright, glowing, spectral shapes with no faces at first, sometimes moving about the room, sometimes bending over him. It didn't occur to him to try speaking to them, at least not at first. It came to him that this might be some sort of afterlife, and these bright shapes the shapes of angels.
The faces, like the voices, began to come clearer with time. He saw his mother once, leaning into his field of vision and slowly thundering something totally without meaning into his upturned face. His father was there another time. Dave Pelsen from school. A nurse he came to know; he believed her name was Mary or possibly Marie. Faces, voices, coming closer, jelling together.
Something else crept in: a feeling that he had changed. He didn't like the feeling. He distrusted it. It seemed to him that whatever the change was, it was nothing good. It seemed to him that it meant sorrow and bad times. He had gone into the darkness with everything, and now it felt to him that he was coming out of it with nothing at all-except for some secret strangeness.
The dream was ending. Whatever it had been, the dream was ending. The room was very real now, very close. The voices, the faces -He was going to come into the room. And it suddenly seemed to him that what he wanted to do was turn and run-to go back down that dark hallway forever. The dark hallway was not good, but it was better than this new feeling of sadness and impending loss.
He turned and looked behind him, and yes, it was there, the place where the room's walls changed to dark chrome, a corner beside one of the chairs where, unnoticed by the bright people who came and went, the room became a passageway into what he now suspected was eternity. The place where that other voice had gone, the voice of -The cab driver.
Yes. That memory was all there now. The cab ride, the driver bemoaning his son's long hair, bemoaning the fact that his son thought Nixon was a pig. Then the headlights breasting the hill, a pair on each side of the white line. The crash. No pain, but the knowledge that his thighs had connected with the taximeter hard enough to rip it out of its frame. There had been a sensation of cold wetness and then the dark hallway and now this.
Choose, something inside whispered. Choose or they'll choose for you, they'll rip you out of this place, whatever and wherever it is, like doctors ripping a baby out of its mother's womb by cesarian section.
And then Sarah's face came to him-she had to be out there someplace, although hers had not been one of the bright faces bending over his. She had to be out there, worried and scared. She was almost his, now. He felt that. He was going to ask her to marry him.
That feeling of unease came back, stronger than ever, and this time it was all mixed up with Sarah. But wanting her was stronger, and he made his decision. He turned his back on the dark place, and when he looked back over his shoulder later on, it had disappeared; there was nothing beside the chair but the smooth white wall of the room where he lay. Not long after he began to know where the room must be-it was a hospital room, of course. The dark hallway faded to a dreamy memory, never completely forgotten. But more important, more immediate, was the fact that he was John Smith, he had a girl named Sarah Bracknell, and he had been in a terrible car accident. He suspected that he must be very lucky to be alive, and he could only hope that all his original equipment was still there and still functioning. He might be in Cleaves Mills Community Hospital, but he guessed the EMMC was more likely. From the way he felt he guessed he had been here for some time-he might have been blacked out for as long as a week or ten days. It was time to get going again.
Time to get going again. That was the thought in Johnny's mind when things finally jelled all the way back together and he opened his eyes.
It was May 17, 1975. Mr. Starret had long since gone home with standing orders to walk two miles a day and mend his high cholesterol ways. Across the room was an old man engaged in a weary” fifteenth round with that all-time heavyweight champ, carcinoma. He slept the sleep of morphia, and the room was otherwise empty. It was 3 15 P. M. The TV screen was a drawn green shade.
“Here I am,” Johnny Smith croaked to no one at all. He was shocked by the “weakness of his voice. There was no calendar in the room, and he had no way of knowing that he had been out of it four-and-a-half years.
The nurse came in some forty minutes later. She went over to the old man in the other bed, changed his IV feed, went into the bathroom, and came out with a blue plastic pitcher. She watered the old man's flowers. There were over half a dozen bouquets, and a score of get-well cards standing open on his table and windowsill. Johnny watched her perform this homey chore, feeling as yet no urge to try his voice again.
She put the pitcher back and came over to Johnny's bed. Going to turn my pillows, he thought. Their eyes met briefly, but nothing in hers changed. She doesn't know I'm awake. My eyes have been open before. It doesn't mean anything to her.
She put her hand on the back of his neck. It was cool and comforting and Johnny knew she had three children and that the youngest had lost most of the sight of one eye last Fourth of July. A firecracker accident. The boy's name was Mark.
She lifted his head, flipped his pillow over, and settled him back. She started to turn away, adjusting her nylon
uniform at the hips, and then turned back, puzzled. Belatedly thinking that there had been something new in his eyes, maybe. Something that hadn't been there before.
She glanced at him thoughtfully, started to turn away again, and he said, “Hello, Marie.”
She froze, and he could hear an ivory dick as her teeth came suddenly and violently together. Her hand pressed against her chest just above the swell of her breasts. A small gold crucifix hung there. “0-my-God,” she said. “You're awake. I thought you looked different. How did you know my name?”
