Everything's Eventual

   The face moves back, the tie stops tickling, and all that white light streams through my helpless-to-look-away eyes and into my brain. It's a hellish feeling, a kind of rape. I'll go blind if I have to stare into it for long, I think, and blindness will be a relief.

   WHOCK! The sound of the driver hitting the ball, but a little flat this time, and the feeling in the hands is bad. The ball's up . . . but veering . . . veering off . . . veering toward . . .

   Shit.

   I'm in the rough.

   Now another face bends into my field of vision. A white tunic instead of a green one below it, a great untidy mop of orange hair above it. Distress-sale IQ is my first impression. It can only be Rusty. He's wearing a big dumb grin that I think of as a high-school grin, the grin of a kid who should have a tattoo reading BORN TO SNAP BRASTRAPS on one wasted bicep.

   'Michael!' Rusty exclaims. 'Jeez, ya lookin gooood! This'z an honor! Sing for us, big boy! Sing your dead ass off!'

   From somewhere behind me comes the doc's voice, cool, no longer even pretending to be amused by these antics. 'Quit it, Rusty.' Then, in a slightly new direction: 'What's the story, Mike?'

   Mike's voice is the first voice—Rusty's partner. He sounds slightly embarrassed to be working with a guy who wants to be Andrew Dice Clay when he grows up. 'Found him on the fourteenth hole at Derry Muni. Off the course, actually, in the rough. If he hadn't just played through the foursome behind him, and if they hadn't seen one of his legs stickin out of the puckerbrush, he'd be an ant-farm by now.'

   I hear that sound in my head again—WHOCK!—only this time it is followed by another, far less pleasant sound: the rustle of underbrush as I sweep it with the head of my driver. It would have to be fourteen, where there is reputedly poison ivy. Poison ivy and . . .

   Rusty is still peering down at me, stupid and avid. It's not death that interests him; it's my resemblance to Michael Bolton. Oh yes, I know about it, have not been above using it with certain female clients. Otherwise, it gets old in a hurry. And in these circumstances . . . God.

   'Attending physician?' the lady doc asks. 'Was it Kazalian?'

   'No,' Mike says, and for just a moment he looks down at me. Older than Rusty by at least ten years. Black hair with flecks of gray in it. Spectacles. How come none of these people can see that I am not dead? 'There was a doc in the foursome that found him, actually. That's his signature on page one . . . see?'

   Riffle of paper, then: 'Christ, Jennings. I know him. He gave Noah his physical after the ark grounded on Mount Ararat.'

   Rusty doesn't look as if he gets the joke, but he brays laughter into my face anyway. I can smell onions on his breath, a little leftover lunchstink, and if I can smell onions, I must be breathing. I must be, right? If only—

   Before I can finish this thought, Rusty leans even closer and I feel a blast of hope. He's seen something! He's seen something and means to give me mouth-to-mouth. God bless you, Rusty! God bless you and your onion breath!

   But the stupid grin doesn't change, and instead of putting his mouth on mine, his hand slips around my jaw. Now he's grasping one side with his thumb and the other side with his fingers.

   'He's alive!' Rusty cries. 'He's alive, and he's gonna sing for the Room Four Michael Bolton Fan Club!'

   His fingers pinch tighter—it hurts in a distant coming-out-of the Novocain way—and begin to move my jaw up and down, clicking my teeth together. 'If she's ba-aaad, he can't see it,' Rusty sings in a hideous, atonal voice that would probably make Percy Sledge's head explode. 'She can do no rrr- ongggg . . .' My teeth open and close at the rough urging of his hand; my tongue rises and falls like a dead dog riding the surface of an uneasy waterbed.

   'Stop it!' the lady doc snaps at him. She sounds genuinely shocked. Rusty, perhaps sensing this, does not stop but goes glee fully on. His fingers are pinching into my cheeks now. My frozen eyes stare blindly upward.

   'Turn his back on his best friend if she put him d—'

   Then she's there, a woman in a green-gown with her cap tied around her throat and hanging down her back like the Cisco Kid's sombrero, short brown hair swept back from her brow, good-looking but severe—more handsome than pretty. She grabs Rusty with one short-nailed hand and pulls him back from me.

   'Hey!' Rusty says, indignant. 'Get your hands off me!'

   'Then you keep your hands off him,' she says, and there is no mistaking the anger in her voice. 'I'm tired of your Sophomore Class wit, Rusty, and the next time you start in, I'm going to report you.'

   'Hey, let's all calm down,' says the Baywatch hunk—doc's assistant. He sounds alarmed, as if he expects Rusty and his boss to start duking it out right here. 'Let's just put a lid on it.'

   'Why's she bein such a bitch to me?' Rusty says. He's still trying to sound indignant, but he's actually whining now. Then, in a slightly different direction: 'Why you being such a bitch? You on your period, is that it?'

   Doc, sounding disgusted: 'Get him out of here.'

   Mike: 'Come on, Rusty. Let's go sign the log.'

   Rusty: 'Yeah. And get some fresh air.'

   Me, listening to all this like it was on the radio.

   Their feet, squeaking toward the door. Rusty now all huffy and offended, asking her why she doesn't just wear a mood-ring or something so people will know. Soft shoes squeaking on tile, and suddenly that sound is replaced by the sound of my driver, beating the bush for my goddam ball, where is it, it didn't go too far in, I'm sure of it, so where is it, Jesus, I hate fourteen, supposedly there's poison ivy, and with all this underbrush, there could easily be—

   And then something bit me, didn't it? Yes, I'm almost sure it did. On the left calf, just above the top of my white athletic sock. A redhot darning needle of pain, perfectly concentrated at first, then spreading . . .

   . . . then darkness. Until the gurney, zipped up snug inside a bodybag and listening to Mike ('Which one did they say?') and Rusty ('Four, I think. Yeah, four').

   I want to think it was some kind of snake, but maybe that's only because I was thinking about them while I hunted for my ball. It could have been an insect, I only recall the single line of pain, and after all, what does it matter? What matters here is that I'm alive and they don't know it. It's incredible, but they don't know it. Of course I had bad luck—I know Dr. Jennings, remember speaking to him as I played through his foursome on the eleventh hole. A nice enough guy, but vague, an antique. The antique had pronounced me dead. Then Rusty, with his dopey green eyes and his detention-hall grin, had pronounced me dead. The lady doc, Ms. Cisco Kid, hadn't even looked at me yet, not really. When she did, maybe—

   'I hate that jerk,' she says when the door is closed. Now it's just the three of us, only of course Ms. Cisco Kid thinks it's just the two of them. 'Why do I always get the jerks, Peter?'

   'I don't know,' Mr. Melrose Place says, 'but Rusty's a special case, even in the annals of famous jerks. Walking brain death.'

   She laughs, and something clanks. The clank is followed by a sound that scares me badly: steel instruments clicking together. They are off to the left of me, and although I can't see them, I know what they're getting ready to do: the autopsy. They are getting ready to cut into me. They intend to remove Howard Cottrell's heart and see if it blew a piston or threw a rod.