“What?”
“Fuck you.”
Chapter 55
I sprint down the stairs. Trying to purge rage. Outside, I pick up a blue plastic recycling bin left on the corner and slam it against the apartment building.
I use Chuck’s father’s phone to place a round of calls to local hospitals. I find what I’m looking for at California Pacific Medical Center. Pete Laramer is in the intensive care unit.
The ICU was the place in medical school I felt the most conflicted. From the standpoint of providing actual medical care, it was the service where I felt most like an auto mechanic. The job was to follow the book to the letter and keep the patient intact. Get precisely the right level of motor oil into the engine and hope it kept whirring.
But the ICU also was an opportunity to connect with the family members in the waiting room, anxious for any morsel of information. It was my first experience with service journalism; as a doctor-to-be, I understood the esoteric vernacular of anatomy and triage and could communicate it to the distraught families. I felt more powerful with my words than hitching up the bag of oil.
In the hallway, I see Kristina, Pete’s wife and my old flame. She sits in a chair, shoulders back, looking as elegant as I remember and, at least at a distance, less distraught than I’d expect.
When I get close, her chin lifts with surprise and the muscles tense in her neck. But her eyebrows don’t arch. The frozen, wrinkleless visage of Botox.
“Nathaniel?”
“Hi, Kristina.”
“Are you here visiting someone too?”
“I’m here for Pete. I heard he was here.”
“You did? That’s odd.”
“He’s my grandmother’s neurologist.”
“But…” She can’t make sense of how I’ve come to the ICU to see her husband, with whom she understands me to have only a passing relationship.
“How is he?” I ask.
She shakes her head. “Fighting.”
“Conscious?”
“Sometimes.”
“What happened?”
“Intruder. Thief, random Halloween attack. I don’t know. Pete’s sketchy on the details. He was stabbed in our library. He’s lost blood, punctured a lung, but, miraculously, his heart and other organs are intact. The girls and I were out of town. It was almost prescient on Pete’s part.”
“How do you mean?”
“He gave us a weekend away. Said he had to work and surprised me and the girls with a retreat. A place with horses on the coast.”
In her thin hands, she holds a magazine. Her fingers tremble.
She stands.
“I think he was sharing his time with someone else.”
I hug her. Her arms are limp at her sides.
“I was happy to be away from him. That’s so terrible,” she whispers, her voice thin and distant. “You never wish for anything like this.”
She says it like she has, at one time or another, wished for some easy way out of her marriage. Not this way.
“Did they catch the guy?”
“You think he was cheating on me with a man?” She emits a pained laugh.
I step back and look at her. “No. The intruder. Did they catch him?”
“The guy got away,” she says. “But he left some hair and blood samples.”
I try to hide my wince. Some of that DNA is probably mine.
“May I see him?”
“If they’ll let you.”
The nursing station is attended by a hulking man who wears a net around a bouffant of big blond hair.
I ask to see Pete.
“Visiting hours just ended.”
“Are you susceptible to bribery?”
“Not funny.”
“What if the bribe were comedic, like with a Dave Chappelle DVD, or one of those fake arrows that goes through your head? Would that be funny?”
“Mildly.”
“Pete’s a good friend from medical school. I’d be much obliged if I could poke my head in to see him for five minutes so I can translate his condition for his wife.”
“He’s intubated, so he can’t talk, but he may be awake. Gowns and gloves are outside the door. Five minutes or I use my big muscles to hurt you.”
Pete’s eyelids flutter when I enter the room. The beep of the heart monitor reminds me of the sleep deprivation and horrible instant coffee from a med student’s life.
I walk to the bed, shuffling my feet to see if the noise might stir him. He opens his eyes, shuts them, then seems to realize it’s me, and opens them to half mast. He’s heavily sedated or the intubation tube would be freaking him out. He looks down at his torso. He’s trying to tell me something.
I pull back the covers. He’s mummy-wrapped.
That’s not what he’s showing me. He wriggles his arm and pulls it free. He motions in the air with his fingers, like he’s writing.
“I don’t understand.”
He looks at the table by the side of his bed. There’s a notepad. On it is scrawled the word “water.”
“You want water?”
He shakes his head.
He makes a motion again with his hand.
I hand him the pen and hold the pad in front of him. He scrawls.
“Let it go,” he writes.
Let it go.
“Pete, you told me to get them, to stop them.”
The shake of his head is barely perceptible.
He writes: “My girls.”
“What about my grandmother? What about all the other people you tested who lost their memories?”
His hand drops. He’s finished.
From my back pocket, I pull the piece of paper he gave me at the library.
“What is this?”
He blinks. I’m not sure if he’s trying to send me a message that way.
“Is this a key of some kind? Is this a code? A computer program?”
He reaches for the pen.
He struggles to write: “What day?”
“What day is it? Monday?”
