Passage (77 page)

All I need is a minute, she thought, looking in the door. There wasn’t a nurse in the room. She slipped in. All I need is to ask him whether he was on the
Titanic
, she thought, pulling the door nearly shut. Before he forgets, before—

“Hello,” a voice said from the bed. She turned and looked at the gray-haired man sitting up in the bed, wearing blue pajamas. “Who are you?” he asked.

For a long, heart-pounding minute, she thought, I’ve sneaked in the wrong room, and how am I going to explain this to Guadalupe? How am I going to explain this to Richard?

“Did they find my wife?” the man asked, and she saw, like one of those trick pictures shifting suddenly into focus, that it was Coma Carl.

It was not that he looked like a different person. It was that he looked like a person where before he had been an empty shell. His concave chest, his thin arms looked filled out, as if he had gained weight, even though that was impossible, and his face, covered with the same gray stubble, looked occupied,
like a house where the owners have suddenly come home. His gray-brown hair, which the aides had kept neatly combed back off his forehead, was parted on the side and fell almost boyishly over his forehead, and his eyes, which she had always thought were gray through the half-open slits, were dark brown.

She was gaping at him like an idiot. “I . . . ” she said, trying to remember what he had asked her.

“Are you one of my doctors?” he asked, looking at her lab coat.

“No,” she said. “I’m Joanna Lander. Do you remember me, Mr. Aspinall?”

He shook his head. “I don’t remember very much,” he said. His voice was different, too, still hoarse, but much stronger, deeper than his murmurings. “I was in a coma, you know.”

“I know,” she said, nodding. “That’s what I’d like to talk to you about. What you remember. I’d just like to ask you a few questions, if that’s all right.”

It isn’t all right, she told herself. You need a waiver. The one his wife signed was only good when he was unconscious. You need to have him sign a release form. This is completely against protocol. But there wasn’t time to write one out, to explain it to him. The doctor or his wife could arrive any minute.

Joanna pulled a chair over to the bed, glancing anxiously at the door as it banged against the IV pole, and sat down. “Can you tell me what you remember, Mr. Aspinall?”

“I remember coming to the hospital,” he said. “Alicia drove me.”

Joanna reached carefully into her cardigan pocket for her minirecorder. It wasn’t there. I left it in my office, she thought, when I took the tape down to Records.

“I had a terrible headache,” he said. “I couldn’t see to drive.”

Joanna fished in her pocket for something to write with, but she didn’t even have one of those release forms she hadn’t had him sign. At least she had a pen. She glanced surreptitiously around the room, looking for something to write on, a
menu, an envelope, anything. Guadalupe had taken the chart out with her, and there was nothing on the bedstand.

“She was going to take me to the doctor, but my headache kept getting worse—”

Joanna reached in the wastebasket and pulled out a discarded get-well card with a picture of a bluebird on the front. The bluebird had a letter in its mouth. “This get-well message is winging its way straight to you,” the card said on the inside. Joanna turned it over. There was nothing on the back.

“—so she brought me to the emergency room instead, and then . . . ” Carl’s voice trailed away and he stared straight ahead of him. “It was dark.”

Dark, Joanna thought, and her hand shook as she wrote the word.

“Alicia hates driving at night,” he said, “but she had to. It was so cold.” He reached back and touched his neck, tenderly, as if it still hurt. “I remember the doctor saying I had spinal meningitis, and then I remember them putting me in a wheelchair, and then I remember the nurse opening the curtains, and I was surprised it wasn’t dark.” He smiled across at Joanna. “And that’s pretty much it.”

It was Greg Menotti all over again. “Do you remember anything between the wheelchair and the curtains?” Joanna asked.

“No,” he said. “Not between.”

“What about dreams?” Joanna asked. “Coma patients sometimes dream.”

“Dreams,” he said thoughtfully, “no,” and there was no de-fensiveness in his voice, no avoiding of her eyes. He said it quite matter-of-factly.

And that was that. He didn’t remember. And she should thank him, tell him to get some rest, get out of here before she was caught redhanded and waiverless by Guadalupe. But she didn’t get up. “What about sounds?”

He shook his head.

“Or voices, Carl?” she said, reverting to his first name without thinking. “Do you remember hearing any voices?”

He had started to shake his head again, but he stopped and
stared at her. “I remember your voice,” he said. “You said you were sorry.”

“I’m sorry,” she had said, apologizing for her beeper going off, for having to leave.

“There were voices calling my name,” he said, “saying I was in a coma, saying my fever was up.”

That was us, Joanna thought, whispering about his condition, calling him Coma Carl. Guadalupe was right, he
could
hear us, and felt ashamed of herself.

“Were you here?” he said, looking slowly around the hospital room.

“Yes,” she said. “I used to come and sit with you.”

“I could hear your voice,” he said, as if there were something about that that he couldn’t understand. “So it must have been a dream. I was really here, the whole time.” He looked up at her. “It didn’t feel like a dream.”

“What didn’t?”

He didn’t answer. “Could you hear me?” he asked.

“Sometimes,” she said carefully. “Sometimes you hummed, and once you said, ‘Oh, grand.’ ”

He nodded. “If you heard me, it must have just been a dream.”

It took all her willpower not to blurt out, “Was ‘grand’ the Grand Staircase? What were you humming?” Not to say, “You were on the
Titanic
, weren’t you? Weren’t you?”

“If you heard me, I couldn’t really have been there,” he said eagerly.

“Why not?” she asked.

“Because it was too far—” He stopped and looked at the door.

Too far for her to come. She said urgently, “Too far for what?” and the door opened.

“Hi,” a lab technician said, coming in with a metal basket of tubes and needles. “No, don’t get up,” he said to Joanna, who’d jerked guiltily to her feet. “I can do it from this side.” He set the basket on the table over the bed. “Don’t let me interrupt you two,” he said, putting on gloves. “I just need to take some blood.” He tied a strip of rubber around Carl’s arm.

Joanna knew she should say, “Oh, that’s okay,” and chat
with him while he drew the blood, but she was afraid if she did, Carl would lose the tenuous thread of memory.

“Too far for what?” she asked, but Carl wasn’t listening. He was looking fearfully at the needle the technician had pulled out.

“This will just be a little sting,” the technician said reassuringly, but Carl’s face had already lost its frightened look.

“It’s a needle,” he said, in the same wondering tone as when he’d asked her if she’d been here in the room, and extended his arm so the technician could insert the needle, attach it to the glass tube. Carl’s dark blood flowed into the tube.

The technician deftly filled the tube, pulled the needle out, pressed cotton to it. “There,” he said, putting a strip of tape over it. “That wasn’t so bad, was it?”

“No.” Carl turned to look at the IV in his other arm.

“Okay, you’re all set. See you later,” the technician said, the glass basket clanking as he went out.

He hadn’t shut the door all the way. Joanna got up and started over to close it. “It was just the IV,” Carl said, looking curiously at the clear narrow tubing dangling from the IV bag. “I thought it was a rattler.”

Joanna stopped. “Rattler?”

“In the canyon,” Carl said, and Joanna sat down again, greeting card and pen in hand.

“I was hiding from them,” Carl said. “I knew they were out there, waiting to ambush me. I’d caught a glimpse of one of them at the end of the canyon.” He squinted as he said it, bringing his hand up as if to shade his eyes. “I tried climbing up the rocks, but they were crawling with rattlers. They were all around,” his voice rose in fear, “rattling. I wonder what that was,” he said in a totally different tone of voice. “The rattling.” He looked around the hospital room. “The heater, maybe? When you were in here, did it make a rattling sound?”

“You were in a canyon?” she said, trying to take in what he was telling her.

“In Arizona,” he said. “In a long, narrow canyon.”

Joanna listened, still trying to take it in, taking notes almost automatically. In Arizona. In a canyon.

“It had had a stream in it,” Carl said, “but it was all dried
up. Because of the fever. It was dark, because the walls were so high and steep, and I couldn’t see them, but I knew they were out there, waiting.”

The rattlers? “Who was up there waiting?”

“They were,” he said fearfully. “A whole band of them, arrows and knives and tomahawks! I tried to outride them, but they shot me in the arm,” he said, grabbing at his arm as if he were trying to pull an arrow out. “They—” His shoulders jerked, and his face contorted. The arm connected to the IV came up, as if fending off an attack. “They killed Cody. I found his body in the desert. They’d scalped him. His head was all red,” Carl said. “Like the canyon. Like the mesas.” His fists clenched and unclenched compulsively. “All red.”

“Who did that?” Joanna asked. “Who killed Cody?” and he looked at her as if the answer were obvious.

“The Apaches.”

Apaches. Not patches. Apaches. He hadn’t been on the
Titanic.
He’d been in Arizona. She’d been wrong about the
Titanic
being universal. But he had said, “Oh, grand.” He had made rowing motions with his hands. And just now he had said, “It was too far—”

“You were in Arizona,” she began, intending to ask, “Do you remember being anywhere else?”

“No!”
he shouted, shaking his head vehemently. “It
wasn’t
Arizona. I thought it was, because of the red sandstone. But it wasn’t.”

“Where was it?” Joanna asked.

“Someplace else. I was really here, though, the whole time,” he said as if to reassure himself. “It was just a dream.”

“Did you have other dreams?” she asked. “Were you other places besides Arizona?”

“There wasn’t any other place,” he said simply.

“You said, ‘Oh, grand.’ ”

He nodded. “I could see telegraph poles off in the distance. I thought they must be next to a railroad line. I thought if I could reach it before the train came through—” he said, as if that were an explanation.

“I don’t understand.”

“I thought I could catch the Rio Grande. But there weren’t
any tracks. Just the telegraph wires. But I could still send a message. I could climb one of the poles and send a message.”

She was only half-listening. Rio Grande. Not Grand Staircase. Rio Grande.

“ . . . and it was too far to ride on horseback,” Carl was saying, staring straight ahead, “but I had to get it through.” As he spoke, he jogged gently up and down, his arms bent as if he were holding on to reins.

This is what Guadalupe thought was rowing, Joanna thought, even though it didn’t look like rowing. It looked like what it was, Carl riding a horse. He wasn’t humming, “Nearer, My God, to Thee,” she thought. It was probably “Home on the Range.”

And Mrs. Woollam had been in a garden. Mrs. Davenport had seen an angel. But she had wanted it to be a woman in a nightdress. She had wanted it to be the Verandah Café and the Grand Staircase. To fit her theory. So she had twisted the evidence to fit, ignored the discrepancies, led the witnesses, and believed what she wanted to. Just like Mr. Mandrake.

She had been so set on her idea she’d refused to accept the truth-that Carl had gotten his desert, his Apaches, from the Westerns his wife read to him, incorporating them into the red expanse of his coma the way she’d incorporated Mr. Briarley’s
Titanic
stories into hers. Because they happened to be there in long-term memory.

And the imagery meant nothing. It wasn’t universal. It was as random, as pointless, as Mr. Bendix’s seeing Elvis. And the feeling of something significant, something important, came from an overstimulated temporal lobe. And meanwhile, she had bullied Amelia Tanaka, she had harassed a man just out of a coma and possibly endangered his health, breaking rules right and left. Acting like a nutcase.

“ . . . before it got dark,” Carl was saying, “but when I got closer, I saw the Apaches were already there.”

Joanna put the bluebird greeting card and the pen in her pocket and stood up. “I should go,” she said. Before Guadalupe catches me in here. Before the review board finds out you didn’t sign a waiver. Before anyone finds out how I’ve acted. She patted the covers. “You need to get some sleep.”

“Are you leaving?” he said, and his hand lunged for her wrist like a striking snake. “Don’t leave.” He gripped it tightly. “I’m afraid I’ll go back there, and it’s getting dark back there. It’s getting redder.”

“It’s all right, Carl,” Joanna said soothingly. “It was just a dream.”

“No. It was a real place. Arizona. I knew it was, because of the mesas. But it wasn’t. And it was. I can’t explain it.”

“You knew Arizona was a symbol for something else.”

“Yes,”
he said, and she thought, It
does
mean something. The NDE isn’t just random synapses firing, random associations. “What was it a symbol for, Carl?” she asked, and waited, breath held, for his answer.

“They scalped Cody. Took the top of his skull right off, and I could see his brain. It was all red,” he said. “I had to get out, before it got dark. I had to get the mail through.”

The mail. The letters floating in the ankle-deep water of the mail room, the names on their envelopes blurred and unreadable, and the mail clerk putting them onto higher and higher racks, dragging them up the carpeted stairs.

“The mail?” Joanna asked, her chest tight.