Chapter 8
HIS FIRST SENSATION was of his own mass, the vast bulk of his body stretched out across the dark like an unsteerable barge. It took him some time to realize that he’d been awakened by the noise of someone moving about the room.
He tried to open his eyes. The light was very bright. He squinted and began to make out shapes.
A woman stood on the other side of the room, her back to him. She seemed vaguely familiar, but then again, so did everything in the room.
“Heh,” he said. He’d been trying for “hello,” but his voice had snapped off like a rotted board. His throat ached, and he was terribly thirsty.
She glanced at him, and didn’t seem surprised that he’d spoken. She was in her midthirties, a thin, pale woman with blotched cheeks and forehead, as if she’d scrubbed her face with lye soap. She wore khaki pants, a plain collared shirt. Definitely an outsider.
“Good morning, Mr. Martin.”
Mr. Martin? For a moment he was confused-the name seemed to fit and not fit at the same time.
“I can’t believe you’re at a loss for words,” the woman said.
He tried to lift his arm and discovered it was tied down. Both arms were restrained. “Wah,” he said. He swallowed painfully and made a tipping motion with his captive hand. “Water.”
“I think we can do that.”
He blacked out before she returned.
He came awake a second time with someone bending over him. At first he thought it was Aunt Rhonda, and he grunted in surprise.
The chub girl-not Aunt Rhonda, a young girl maybe only twenty years old with bright red hair-put a hand on his forehead and said, “Shush, Paxton.” Her voice was a whisper.
That’s right. His name was Paxton. And he was-where was he?
The girl slowly moved a warm washcloth across his chest, and as she leaned over him the neck of her blouse gaped to reveal a large pair of breasts straining at a white bra, threatening avalanche.
“Doreen!”
The girl jerked away from him. “Doctor F, I was just-”
“I think he’s clean enough now,” a woman said. It was the pale woman from before.
“I’ll just dry him off and-”
“Doreen.”
The red-haired girl left the room. The doctor pulled down his smock from where it was bunched around his neck and covered him with the bedclothes. “Sorry about that,” the doctor said. “She’s not herself. It won’t happen again.”
“Okay,” he said. Wondering what exactly had happened.
“I’ve brought you some lunch,” the doctor said. She pulled a sliding table up to his bed.
“Lunch,” he said. “Right. Thanks.” He thought he sounded reasonably sane. In control.
The doctor moved aside a plastic water pitcher and cup, then set out items she pulled from a white sack: a plastic-wrapped sandwich with the Bugler’s Grocery tag still on it, a fruit cup, and a chocolate chip cookie. Supplies for a sixth-grade field trip.
He wasn’t at all hungry. His throat still felt raw. It felt like hours had passed since he’d asked for water, but it could have been days.
Pax realized his arms were now untied. He started to push himself up, and Dr. Fraelich put a hand on his shoulder, then worked the bed’s remote until he was sitting upright. How long had he been in this bed? Someone, this woman or the chub girl, must have changed him, emptied his bedpan, wiped his ass.
“I’m sorry if I was…” Embarrassment made it hard to find the words. He shook his head. “You’re who?”
“I’m Dr. Fraelich,” she said. “You’re at my clinic, Mr. Martin.”
“Please, call me Pax.” A hazy memory came to him: Deke carrying him into a waiting room, setting him down in a plastic chair. At some point-the next hour? the next day?-he’d been put in a bed. Everything else was a blank.
He opened the metal lid of the fruit cup. His fingers felt clumsy. “I’m sorry if I caused you any trouble.”
“No trouble. The first twenty-four hours you did nothing but rant, with brief pauses to vomit,” the doctor said. “You eventually passed out, but then a couple hours later you went right back to the preaching and the yelling.”
Preaching? Pax thought. “So how long have I…?”
“You’ve been here three days.”
“Ouch,” he said. He tried to think of what day that made it. Thursday?
She put a hand on the door handle. “Any other questions?”
He had dozens of questions. He remembered the medical interrogations when he was a kid, the stream of men in masks who asked endless questions but never answered any. By September of that year the waves of transformations had stopped, but no one in town knew why, or if they’d stopped for good, or why some people like Paxton had been passed over. He eventually understood that the doctors weren’t hiding information-they were as clueless as he was. Their uncertainty scared him more than the Changes.
He poked at the contents of the fruit cocktail can with his plastic fork and said, “Do you-” He cleared his throat. “Excuse me. Do you know what happened to my father?”
“He’s fine. He’s at the Home, the mayor’s facility.”
“Did he come out of it? Does he know what happened?”
“Rhonda hasn’t reported back to me.”
Pax looked up. Was that sarcasm? Her tone hadn’t shifted from dry and impatient. “I guess you’ve had this, uh, kind of thing before,” Pax said. “Accidents like this.”
She raised her eyebrows. She couldn’t have been much older than thirty-five, but she made him feel like he was twelve.
“I mean, the vintage,” he said. “You know about it, right? You must have met others who… you know-”
“Took a swim in it? No.” She glanced at the watch on her wrist, a transparent doctor gesture. “Be thankful that you can sit up and talk. You ingested an enormous amount of a substance that is both psychedelic and narcotic, though mildly so for most people. You seem to be particularly susceptible to the effects. Your limbic system and frontal lobe were slammed simultaneously, and right now you’re recovering from probably the biggest dopamine hit of your life, which means you’re going to be experiencing an emotional crash for the next few days. On the plus side, if you haven’t developed schizophrenia by now you’re probably not going to this week.”
“That’s good news.”
“Enjoy your lunch.”
“Wait! When do I get out of here?” She looked back at him. He said, “Not that I’m not enjoying the service.”
“One step at a time, Mr. Martin.”
Finishing the fruit cup exhausted him. He drank a few sips of water, then pushed aside the table, leaving the rest of the food untouched. He carefully turned on his side, pulled up the covers. He remembered from this morning the sensation that his body had become massive, immovable. Now it felt like a bag of fragile parts, nominally under his control, but ready at any moment to disarticulate.
He was tired but not sleepy. He lay in the bed listening to the air-conditioning and the muffled noises coming from outside the room. He should call his father. No, see him in person. It had been a mistake to call Rhonda so quickly. Paxton would clean up the house, bring his father home, make a go of it. He’d call the restaurant, and if he hadn’t been fired yet he’d ask for more time off-family medical leave or something.
Outside the room someone laughed. He listened to the burble of voices and thought of water, his father pulling him into the baptistry, the rush of homecoming he’d felt when he looked out over the congregation.
The next time he opened his eyes he was surprised that the room was dark.
He blinked to make sure his eyes were working. Something about the silence, the coolness of the air, made it feel like the middle of the night. He didn’t know why he’d popped awake, then realized he needed to pee, that in fact he’d been dreaming of water all night: swimming with Deke and Jo in the river, his baptism when he was
