The Omega Point

He would once have thought that this was yet another patient struggling with inappropriate thoughts, but as she was a member of the class, he wasn’t sure what was meant. He wanted to ask her more. He remembered those two glyphs on her record. There was something special about her.

“Linda, tell me what’s troubling you? Who’s coming for you?”

“I got a message.” Her fist closed on his shirtfront and she pulled him face-to-face. “I don’t think Tom can go.” Her voice dropped to a whisper. “Never tell anybody this, but he has this blackness on his back and side, and it’s growing.”

David’s mind went to the notion of judgment. Could those who had done evil be actually, physically marked? It seemed impossible, but all the rules were changing now. Perhaps bodies were becoming mirrors of souls, our flesh no longer concealing our truth. But what had Tom Dryden ever done, that innocuous little man? All he could think was that people tend to keep their evil acts secret.

Marian came up to him with the EKG tape.

“This is normal,” she said.

“Can we e-mail it to a cardiologist?”

“If the Net comes back. But we’ll get a normal report, no question.”

David looked at the tape. He had been assuming that this was an episode of sudden arrhythmia death syndrome that had been interrupted by timely action.

“No Bruguda sign,” he muttered, “no fibrillation.”

“No arrhythmias at all, in fact.”

“I think we need a deeper study on this woman. Hearts don’t just stop. And we want her under close observation until we can get her into a cardiac unit.”

“David, I’ve been exploring unexplained cardiac arrests. Bangungut and familial long QT syndrome are possibilities.”

“And Bangungut is?”

“A type of nightmare so intense that it can cause death. Common in parts of Asia.”

This staff was out of its depth. No specialist would even bother to think about something so irrelevant.

“And familial long QT syndrome? Any symptoms?”

“There’s no heart abnormality or defect. A little crud in the arteries, nothing to get excited about.”

“And how do we know this? Do we have documentation?”

She paused for a moment, then said more quietly, “She’s presented this way before.”

“So was there follow-up?”

“Of course there was follow-up! We could get out of here then. She was worked up at Raleigh County. The heart muscle was healthy.”

“So she can stop her heart at will?” He looked down at her. “Can you do that, Linda?”

“I’m afraid you won’t let me go home. I have nightmares about it.” Her eyes bored into his. “I’m not like the rest of you. It’s time for me to go home.”

“Linda, normally you’d be free to leave. It’s just that current conditions make that difficult. Nobody’s holding you against your will.”

“Doctor, when the time comes, I will have only a couple of minutes. And all these doors in this place—oh, God, how I hate the Acton Clinic!”

A voice came from the doorway. “We’ll take care of you,” Caroline Light said. She addressed David. “When she wants to go outside, let her.”

“So now the patients are the doctors. Fine.”

“Will you wake up, David!”

“I’m awake.”

Linda said, “Caroline, let him be.”

“He’s an idiot! He won’t wake up!” She strode in, got right in his face. “Wake up,” she shouted.

He looked past her to Katie. “Nurse, get this patient under control.”

Caroline slapped him so hard that he saw stars.

For an instant, there was rage and he grabbed for her wrist. But then he stopped. His mind had gone silent. Clarity came.

“What was that supposed to be,” he muttered, “a Zen slap?”

“That’s exactly what it was.” She turned and stalked out of the room.

“Confine her again tonight,” he said.

“Oh, shut up,” Marian replied.

“What?”

“Will you people stop!” Linda said.

He was appalled at himself, realizing that he was doing this in the hearing of this patient. It was grotesquely unprofessional. Katie was right, the world was falling apart, and not just the outside world. He drew an unwilling Marian Hunt out of the room.

“Hold your tongue in front of the patients, Marian.”

“Then show some competence.”

He paused, struggling not to explode in her face. “Keep her under observation for the night.”

“They’re all under observation all the time,” she muttered as she headed off the floor. “Want her really locked up now? Maybe cuffed to her bed?”

“She doesn’t like you,” Katie said after she left.

“Who does?”

Katie’s expression said every silent thing that her lips did not, and suddenly the crisp, worried professional was replaced by a warm, compelling woman.

She turned to go back to their side of the building, and he followed more slowly as she strode on ahead.

He was hardly disappointed to find her in his sitting room. She had just dropped into one of the big wing chairs that stood before the fireplace, once again tuning the radio.

“Pick up anything?”

“News from WBAL. It’s huge, what’s going on. Satellites are not coming back, power systems are down all across the world, the Internet backbone is fried. We won’t see the Internet again for years.”

As suddenly as suppressed fears will do, all the terror that he had been containing inside himself boiled to the surface and he uttered a single racking sob, then immediately stifled it, but not before she started in the chair, and looked up at him, her face registering surprise.

“Katie, I’m sorry. I’m on edge.”

“Well, yeah.” She rose out of the chair and stood before him, her eyes cast down.

They were in each other’s arms so suddenly and so naturally that David hardly registered what was happening. It was just right. But when she lifted her neat heart of a face and he saw her lips open slightly, he did think about it. What he thought was that fraternization like this never led anywhere good, and then that he was tired of being the person who had thoughts like that. Caroline Light had accomplished a true Zen slap. He recognized the need for change.

She was looking up at him, waiting, and he did not do what he had been about to do, which was to turn away. Instead, he kissed her, and as he did he felt the hunger for her change from something he could control to something he could not control, and he had never felt such a flood of gratitude and desire, not in all the kisses of his life.

“Oh, God,” she said, breaking away.

“I’m sorry.”

She shook her head, then threw her arms around him. Her throbbing life pulsed close to him. When his body responded, she laughed a little, her eyes shimmering, and pressed closer. He found himself wondering again if she had been Dr. Ullman’s lover—and threw the thought out like the rubbish that it was. What if she had, what did it matter?

Life was not about things like that. Life was about this moment, here, now.

This sensitive woman broke away. She returned to her place by the fire. “What’s that called?” she said. “Absence of affect? We see it in patients.”

“Katie, no.”