The next sequence followed: NAP, SLUMBER, PILLOW, DROWSY, REST, WAKE, DOZE, BED.
And the next: DOG, FUR, BARK, FLUFFY, TAIL, LICK, JUMP, PAWS, LEASH.
And the next: BEACH, SAND, OCEAN, CRAB, WAVES, SHELLS, SUN, SALT, BOAT, FISH.
Jack answered, but the humming in his head was making his teeth ache.
KNIFE, CUT, POINT, HAMMER, STEEL.
The doctor stopped. “Jack, are you all right?”
He shook his head.
“Maybe we can finish later.”
Dissociated images were swimming in his head like litter in a muddy whirlpool. And the buzz had produced a material pressure. “Sorry,” he whispered.
“Nothing to be sorry about. Are you feeling faint or dizzy? Or disoriented?”
He rocked his head slightly. “Tired.”
“Fine. We can continue tomorrow, but you should know that you did amazingly well, Jack. The average adult letter span is seven, with a deviation of plus or minus two. You did a span recall of eleven. I don’t know what to say, but your short-term recall is off the charts.”
The beetles had bored their way out of the sac inside his forehead and were making their way toward the rear of his brainpan. He wanted the doctor to leave. He wanted to be left alone. He wanted to close his eyes and fall into a long, deep sleep.
“I’ll let you rest,” Dr. Heller said. She got up and began to pack her papers into her briefcase. “If you don’t mind, I have one more thing I’d like to ask you. No, it’s not a test.”
Jack looked up at her through pulsing slits. “Sure, but how about some Tylenol when I’m done?”
“We can do that right now,” she said, and produced a two-pack from her smock pocket and placed them in his mouth and held up a cup of water. “If you don’t mind me asking, what’s the ethnicity of Koryan?”
“Armenian.”
Another test question. He was certain that during the course of his convalescence the staff would be tossing him offhand little bio queries to be certain his hard drive hadn’t crashed.
“Do you speak it?”
“No.”
“Did you ever?”
His aunt and uncle had spoken only English with him, even though on occasion they conversed with each ether in Armenian. “No.”
“Well, would you recognize it if you heard it?”
“Yeah, I guess.” The only place he had heard it spoken was in grocery stores in Watertown, the Little Armenia of the East Coast.
She gave him a strange look, then she pulled out of her briefcase a small tape recorder. “I’d like you to hear this,” she said, and she moved it close to his head and flicked it on.
There was electronic hush like the open line of a telephone, some indistinct background noise, the muffle of people talking softly in the background, the distant sound of a jet plane. The sound of breathing. The soft beeps from the monitors. Then a voice that for a split instant registered in the warm core of his soul.
The next moment Jack felt a jolt of recognition. It was his own voice.
The tape continued as he looked helplessly at Dr. Heller, whose face seemed to dislodge itself from her white smock and dissolve in the soupy sensations in his brain. The margins of his vision became dark as everything began to fracture and sparkle—like viewing the room through a shattered windshield.
Suddenly the beetles hit a trip wire, setting off a wild gyroscope that set Jack into a spin as if his wheelchair had turned into the Tilt-a-Whirl at Canobie Lake Park, whipping him around into a centrifugal blur, sounds muffling and breaking up … his name … someone calling his name … a female voice, the doctor … Dr. Heller, but he couldn’t locate her.
“Room three nineteen … having a seizure … Diazepam and Dilantin … hurry …”
He felt his body shake as if he were being prodded with an electric rod, cold, wincing ripples shooting across his brainpan.
“Get him flat before he hurts himself.”
Lifted. He was being lifted.
And from someplace outside of his body, someplace above the ceiling, he watched them lay him on the slick sheets, the tendons of his legs stretching painfully flat on the bed like a long, bent child. He heard himself making gasping sounds. His eyes snapped open, and for a second he froze, his eyes huge and gaping at Marcy in nameless horror. Then his body spasmed and a scream rose out of his chest.
“Jack. Calm down. Everything’s okay. Just relax.”
He heard himself whimpering as awareness closed in on itself and warm hands cupped his little fist, rubbing open the tight ball of sad, small fingers.
And the moment before the world pulled itself into a pinpoint and blew itself out, Jack felt a small flutter in his throat.
44
“HE HAD ANOTHER FLASHBACK.”
Rene had arrived at Broadview a little before noon when Nick met her in the lobby. As he led her to the locked unit, he explained how it had happened during a visit Louis had with his wife and daughter. “They were having a nice time when Louis began flipping out about the Red Tent and Fuzzy somebody. I guess it was pretty bad, especially for the wife.”
“What did the nurses do?”
“Gave him a shot of Diazepam.”
They almost never had to resort to needle sedatives in the homes.
“Except for the bad one,” Nick continued, “his daughter says she prefers the hallucinations to his fading away. A few flashback seizures she could live with.”
“What about Mrs. Martinetti?”
“I suppose she’ll have to adjust. It’s better than losing him completely.”
“Except he’s resisting taking the other meds that have helped reduce the number and intensity of flashbacks.”
They arrived at the locked unit, where Nick tapped them in.
“What bothers me,” Rene said, “is what happens if Louis gets stuck in a flashback and can’t come out, or doesn’t want to.”
Nick nodded grimly. “That would be a problem. But that’s not why I called you. Have you seen the recent patient census?”
“No.”
Nick walked her to a small sitting room down the hall from the Activities Center. “It’s another thing the president didn’t see the other day.” He opened the door.
There were three residents sitting in wheelchairs before a television set playing on low volume. Two of them Rene knew—women in their eighties who were in advanced stages of dementia. The third woman Rene did not at first recognize. She moved closer, and for a protracted moment fixed herself on the woman’s face. Then recognition hit Rene like a fist.
Clara Devine.
Over the six months at McLean’s Hospital her body had atrophied to the point where she was bound to a wheelchair. She did not look up when Rene and Nick entered, as did the other women. Instead, she stared blankly at the television, her eyes clotted with fog.
“They brought her back two days ago,” Nick explained. “McLean’s decided that she was no longer a danger to
