End Time (12 page)

This was absolutely no help at all. Myrmidons? And Guy Poole suddenly wished he'd studied a little harder in school. Which is when they saw the blood. Eleanor opened her bathrobe a touch and pointed down.

“You see they wanted me for the harem. They've got some red queens deep underground.” Partially dried blood between her thighs leapt at them.

Guy Poole took a deep and ragged breath—but managed all the calm in his possession and said to Lauren, “Okay, let's get her into the car. We're going to the hospital.”

To Eleanor he said, “Adam Ant wants you to come with him. He's going to take you to the Ant Hospital where they help good black ants. Okay?”

And Eleanor lifted her eyes to him, smiling a little and nodding. “All right.” Then after a moment, “Can I bring my tea?”

*   *   *

Bridgeport Hospital Emergency admitted the woman, Eleanor Singh née Whitcomb at the request of her family. The sister Lauren signed her in—without the approval of the husband, Bhakti Singh, who wasn't in the state of Connecticut at the time of admission. He had to be reached in California. After a brief twenty-minute wait, the family of Eleanor Whitcomb Singh consulted with the emergency room surgeon,
Yes! Please! Stop the bleeding!
Since it was coming from between her legs again.

The ER doc was a nice lady of about thirty who looked like a fresh-faced nineteen-year-old, with bright blond hair tied in a bun and an accent that tagged her somewhere south of the Mason-Dixon line. But she'd left the ballroom manners of southern belle coquetry along with her party gown back at Tara in Scarlett's bedroom. You could feel the ice in her veins; this was no wilting violet. She'd stopped the bleeding, and now Eleanor was stable. Sympathetic, but all business:

“Mr. and Mrs. Poole … Mrs. Poole, your sister seems to have undergone what used to be known as a back-alley abortion. Where, we don't know. But it could only have been within the last 24 hours or she would have bled out. Or succumbed to infection.”

Then became even more serious:

“Even more troubling, and I don't know how to explain this.…”

The young woman paused for a moment, but followed through, “We found some blood under her nails, her own blood—I can hardly say it, I've never heard of such a thing, but she may have tried to abort herself. We found a piece of plastic inside, looks like it once belonged to a white picnic spoon. Honestly I don't know what to tell you. Amnesia? Psychosis? You're going to want to talk to the neurologist and a psychologist. This is out of my range of expertise.”

And now two days later Guy and Lauren sat in the neurologist's comfortable waiting room along a plush bench in front of a solid wall of copper-colored slate with water sluicing down into a long narrow lily pond. The sound of the waterfall trickled across the room, the patter of drops on lily pads—a hopeful sound.

Guy pondered his surroundings, thinking how medicine had changed over a couple of centuries. Things had gone from weird to stranger.… Once upon a time a hospital might well have been Frankenstein's castle, where cadavers were laid out for vivisection by illiterate, unwashed assistants within earshot of the sick and dying.

Then as science evolved the rooms grew colder, notably the 1950s “Antiseptic” style. Porcelain-covered pans and rolling gurneys, big operating-room searchlights two feet across, faceless technicians in severe lab coats looking down. Guy contemplated a box of disposable latex gloves near a box of Kleenex and a bottle of hand sanitizer on the nurse's station.

Now they all lived in a use-once-then-toss society: shrink-wrap sealed instruments, miles of transparent glass, every surface edged by chrome and metal. As if designed by sci-fi set decorators. Until at long last it occurred to someone to make the beds, the rooms, the waiting areas in pastel colors, blue mostly; make the chairs more comfortable, creating Zen and Tao flower displays so the deep scent of growth or peaceful splashing streams filled the air instead of the acrid scent of desperation and finality.

A large flat TV screen embedded in the opposite wall showed a twenty-minute loop of Discovery Channel's
Planet Earth
series “Ocean Deep.” The segment started with the large white title T
HIS
I
S
Y
OUR
W
ORLD
over beautiful electric humming music and the vast expanse of an ocean. Two blue whales, the planet's largest animals, sliced through the water. Even from an overhead helicopter shot, you could tell how enormous and magnificent these great beasts were. Even with no perspective point to show them against a smaller object, you could tell—just the way the water slid around their bodies, like some great ships, the white bow wake splitting across their giant, wise faces.

The neuropsychologist, Dr. Kramer—a soft, chubby fellow in his forties with a close-cropped beard and the good manners of a maître d'—came into the waiting area and showed them the results of his preliminary examination: reams of paper on a clipboard. A sort of checklist.

The symptoms: amnesia, disorientation, incoherence.

Date of brain injury—unknown, but within a three-week window May to June. Cause of brain injury—unknown. Initial severity of brain injury, e.g. loss of consciousness, coma—unknown. On the Head Injury Cognitive Assessment Scale, nearly all the criteria were flagged as “serious”:

• Difficulty in Group Conversations

• Difficulty Reading

• Difficulty with Recent Memory

• Difficulty with Concentration

Yep, Eleanor Singh née Whitcomb was a lady in difficulty.

And more to the point, no one could find a physical source of trauma. Magnetic Resonance Imaging negative, functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging negative, Positron Emission Tomography negative—the brain looked normal. Tox screen proved negative; no drugs in the patient's body. They even searched for hidden tumors along the spinal cord and other sensitive areas. Some anomaly that might affect a minor artery or put pressure on a nerve. Guy Poole looked at Lauren, her eyes clouded with the pressure of fear just like those desperate, forlorn families on those medical TV shows—except there wasn't a smart team of handsome diagnosticians solving the problem, just this soft man in the white coat, coming up empty.

At length Dr. Kramer forgot about his clipboard, got up from his seat by the lily pond couch, and motioned for them to follow him.

“I want to show you something.” A few steps down the hall they followed him to Eleanor's curtained bed. She was sitting up and smiled when the three came in, a juice bottle on her lap tray next to a small flowering African violet.

But they weren't alone in the room. The patient next to her, a very old withered man who'd fallen on his head, was staring with glassy eyes at the ceiling, four days of facial hair whitening his face. His whole family sat around him, in the rumpled clothes of lower middle-class Connecticut—not really talking, just sitting, or staring at the room TV that overhung the bed. On screen, a queer fellow in a top hat and tails was demonstrating some kind of product, a special nonstick pan.

The skinny man was breaking eggs with a hammer and whisking them,
shells and all
into a bowl. Guy stopped short for a moment, the advertisement's subliminal message stunningly obvious:
You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs
. That weirdo seemed to be everywhere these days … the Pied Piper Pitchman. The Next Big Thing.

The man's family stared at the TV, not really grasping what they were looking at. They seemed crushed, hopeless—marking time. Guy and Lauren found it hard to ignore them; a kind of finality hung like a bad cloud over the whole group.

Dr. Kramer brought Guy and Lauren's attention back to the woman in bed. “This is the old-fashioned way we used to diagnose—before all the fancy scans.” Eleanor appeared better now, hair brushed, clean hospital gown. “How are you feeling today, Eleanor?”

She smiled back at him and shrugged a little. Then … “An apple a day keeps the doctor away.”

The neuropsychologist grinned. “Yeah, that's what they say, and I've never found any fault with the prescription.” Now, businesslike: “Eleanor, I'd like you to repeat a phrase after me. Will you do that? I'll say it and you repeat it, okay?”

“Okay.”

“Okay, here goes…” Dr. Kramer took a breath, then said,
“One if by night and two if by train.”

Eleanor's face clouded, confused. “Want me to say it again?” Kramer offered. “
One if by night and two if by train.”

Eleanor tried to repeat the phrase, “One if by night, one if by night…” but she stumbled over the last bit. “One if by night and two if…” She halted and shook her head, dismayed. She'd failed the test. For the life of her she couldn't repeat the second part of the sentence.

“It's all right, Eleanor, this helps us understand. And you've been very helpful.” A little smile flickered over her face, but she doubted him.

“Have you walked today?” Dr. Kramer asked her.

“Oh yes,” she answered. “I used the bathroom.”

“Excellent,” he told her. “We're going to leave now, but I'm sure Guy and Lauren will be back soon to keep you company.”

As the three went back down the hall toward the lily pond and the comforting TV, Dr. Kramer explained. “In the old days, before all the super scans, we'd ask that question of people with head trauma and especially after neurosurgery. The sentence doesn't actually mean anything—just a quirky string of words that sounds like something you've heard before and gives you pause. When your head gets rattled, you can't repeat the phrase
one if by night and two if by train
. You get so far and then you stop. It means there's still some trauma that hasn't healed yet. When the trauma finally goes away, anybody can repeat the line.”

Lauren tried it out herself: “One if by night and two if by train.” Easy. And somehow it stuck in her head like those songs you keep repeating. But she was brought up short when Dr. Kramer asked, “When's her husband supposed to arrive?”

And at that, they had no answer. Eleanor had been admitted as a quasi Jane Doe, with no photo ID, no insurance cards, no driver's license. The hospital admitting administrator had demanded Guy Poole's credit card number, and he gave it over with a twinge as Lauren whispered to him, “I'll call the Lattimore Company—they've got to have some kind of plan, something.”

But two days later the insurance company, Lattimore Aerospace, and the hospital were still doing their billing minuet, making Eleanor's silly question, “
Are we doing the Ant Dance?”
take on an extra meaning.

After this last battery of tests, Guy knew the bills were reaching into the 15K to 25K range, and he tried not to think about it. The numbers on his MasterCard seemed to pulse behind his eyes, the columns of figures blurring together: MRI, $3212.00; Daily Room Charge, $400.57; Neurologist Consultation, $1026.89; Physical Therapy Consultation, Consultation-consultation, State Tax, City Tax.…

A cheap, sissy thought entered his head:
How the hell do I get out of this? Where can I run?
Did Brazil have an extradition treaty; could the authorities get him there? Oh, by hook or by crook they'd get him. One if by night and two if by train.

And where the hell was Bhakti, for crying out loud? And what about their kid? Jane? No, Janet.

As Guy and Lauren found their car in the lot, he couldn't help grumbling, “Just leave another message with Bhakti, okay? How many messages is this already?”

Lauren stared out the car window at the gray slate sky; it was starting to rain again. Her phone showed Bhakti's number: a missed call, the third time this had happened, no message. They kept missing each other. “This will be the third time.”

Then her lips moved silently. Lauren had been repeating the line “One if by night” off and on like some kind of mantra. And now she said, “One if by night, and three if by cell—”

Guy almost growled at her to leave off but thought better of it. Streams of rain came down, blurring everything outside the car. The Poole's large Honda Pilot crawled along in a flooding downpour; red taillights in front of their eyes, a truck behind with flashers blinking; the whooshing of the water around the wheels, the rain pounding on the roof.…

Suddenly, Guy caught something out the passenger's window through the streams of water. A young woman, almost a child, standing at the crosswalk by a Walgreens, drenched in rain. No umbrella, no slicker—just waiting for the light by the steel silver lamp stanchion. The young lady from the night in the Keeping Room; the young lady who reminded him of
Alice in Wonderland
—same skirt, same jumper with the pockets, same puffy sleeves.

He hit the brakes, then without thinking put the car in reverse; Lauren ceased murmuring “One if by” and squawked, “Poole!” She only called him that when she was alarmed. The truck behind them screeched to a stop in the flowing water and honked its horn. Then more honks.

No girl by the lamp stanchion, no girl by the Walgreens entrance. Poole powered down Lauren's window, and rain lashed in. He leaned heavily over Lauren to get a better look. No girl.

“Jesus, Guy!” Lauren snapped at him. “What's going on with you?”

Guy wanted to tell her about that time on the stairs; that he really wasn't seeing things; that young Alice came out of their own house, but … but that sounded even crazier. So all he said was, “Nothing. I don't know. Nothing. I was just thinking about that weirdo on TV breaking eggs.”

 

8

Man About Hamelin

That's the way Mr. Piper thought about New York, especially the fortress city of Manhattan: like the medieval German town of Hamelin, back when that part of the world was called Saxony—where his most vivid memories seemed to have been born. But he was far older than Hamelin in the middle of the Middle Ages, the twelfth century—his mind went back to what they now called the “Dark” Ages. Oh yes, even further than that …