Second Sight (12 page)

Dr. Canelli sat rigid in her leather chair, flipping through cards in an old metal Rolodex. She found the name Case and Kimble and dialed a number in Pennsylvania. The phone rang once and was answered with “Executive offices.”

“I need to speak with Dr. Case’s assistant, please,” she said.

“Just a moment,” the operator said, and a moment later she was transferred to a gentleman who took her message and put her on hold.

The directive lying on the desk in front of her and regarding Thomas J. Monahan had been passed from one administrator to another since 1950. It was the only standing directive at the State Hospital and it had survived more than half a century of cultural and intellectual evolution. Simply put it required the bearer to notify the Case Foundation in the event patient 108953, one Thomas J. Monahan, received out of house inquiries, visitors, public mention, or if there were any significant changes to his health or if he were to expire.

Dr. Canelli, the first administrator ever to have to act on the
directive, was now doing it for the second time in as many weeks.

She, like all her predecessors, had wondered what connection there could be between the hospital’s longest-tenured patient and the foundation of a pharmaceutical Goliath. Case’s name was all over early research at the hospital, but then all the renowned physicians of the day came there. Psychiatry was in vogue in the fifties. The public was obsessed with psychological analysis. One family in three was admitting a member to some kind of mental facility for extreme behaviors.

But Case was known less for his research of psychiatric disorders than for amassing a fortune with nuclear medicine. While MRIs and CAT scans were relegated to identifying anatomical anomalies in the body, sophisticated nuclear diagnostic machines like SPECT could show the body’s very organs at work. And nothing makes money like more money. Case was able to fund research, monopolizing advances in aspirin-free pain medications, birth control, antidepressants, and erectile dysfunction elixirs.

His critics had but one thing to say of him. It was rumored that the government, in their zeal to protect soldiers in a nuclear age, had knowingly supplied him with hundreds if not thousands of unwitting test subjects to experiment on. Who could predict the effects of radium dosages and interactions of experimental drugs when you were a decade ahead of the world in trials? It was an outrage, they charged, but it was never an outrage they could prove.

Dr. Canelli was hardly stupid. Dr. Case might have made countless contributions in the field of mental health, but he would have had quite the toy chest of lab rats in the asylum of seven thousand people. How hard would it have been with an army base next door and, what’s more, an army base that had failed to publish a single printed word of its activities in a dozen years?

“I’m connecting your call,” the voice said.

“May I help you?”

“Dr. Case?”

“Troy Weir. I am the doctor’s representative to the Case Foundation.”

“Of course, we spoke last week. Dr. Canelli from the state psychiatric hospital in New York.”

“Yes, Dr. Canelli.”

“Thomas Monahan. His name has come up again, I’m afraid.”

“In what context, Doctor?”

“He had visitors today. Not for him exactly, but two people wanted to know if he had family they could contact. One of them was Sherry Moore.”

“Sherry Moore?” Weir repeated.

“The psychic from Philadelphia. She…”

“I know who she is. The other?”

“An older gentleman. I didn’t get his name.”

“What did you tell them?”

“As I said, they already knew of Monahan’s death. Miss Moore mentioned a physician in Philadelphia, a neurosurgeon by the name of Salix. She claimed to represent him and said there were questions about his records. I told her that the hospital’s files were confidential. End of story.”

“Thank you, Dr. Canelli.”

“Do you wish me to contact Dr. Salix?”

“No. Do nothing,” Weir said, perhaps too abruptly. “You have been troubled enough. We are most grateful.”

Troy replaced the receiver, scanned his contacts directory, made himself a drink, and dialed a number at Nazareth Hospital in Philadelphia.

It rang, clicked, transferred to another number and rang again.

“General counsel,” a woman said unenthusiastically.

“Jean? It’s Troy Weir.”

“Troy,” she said, surprised. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

“Know a Dr. Salix?” he said, touching the ice in his glass with his tongue.

“William Salix?”

“He’s a neurosurgeon?”

“We only have one,” the attorney said tiredly.

“I need to know why he pulled a donor from the New York Psych Institute, a whole-body donor?”

“Is this another IOU?” Her voice was full of sarcasm, husky like a heavy smoker’s.

“You know what Case gives to Nazareth each year,” he said blandly.

“I know—don’t ask, don’t tell?” she snorted. “I’ll see what I can find out.”

“That’s my girl.”

“So when are you taking me out on that date, Troy? You said you had tricks to show me.”

“Oh, Jean.” He laughed. “I have tricks you wouldn’t believe.”

Sherry Moore arrived early for her appointment. She was wearing headphones as she often did in public to avoid conversation. Today she was listening to Bon Jovi’s “Lost Highway” as an alternative to competing televisions and staff members calling out names over tinny loudspeakers.

“Beatrice Specter to billing station two.” A particularly gravelly voice repeated the name a moment later. “Dr. Mark Cairns, pick up line one…”

The waiting room was a new experience to her as an adult. She had always met Dr. Salix in his Newbury office at the end of his day, always when other patients were gone. She had to admit, guiltily, that she resented having to be here. Shuffling, one of the many, like sheep through the chutes of a registration process, sitting for hours to be seen for five minutes, waiting for the billing department to assess and release you, the cure seeming worse than the disease.

It was much like the childhood she recalled, the litany of second-rate—and sometimes lecherous—doctors who visited the
orphanage. The children were defenseless, made to strip while standing in lines and then paraded past everyone from journeymen to janitors. Who knew who owned the hands that squeezed or pinched or spread this or that—certainly not a blind girl.

She marveled constantly at how little attention they’d paid her back then. No one was interested in her health or education, not until it was evident that she was seeing things she shouldn’t be seeing and then all of a sudden the professionals were coming out of the woodwork. Everyone was throwing themselves at her feet.

She was twenty when it first happened in public. A man in the throes of a heart attack had grabbed her hand on a busy Philadelphia street corner and pulled her to the sidewalk. She remembered the moment that life slipped from his body, his hand still clamped around hers feeling somehow different, and then the din of traffic and screaming pedestrians faded into silence and she saw a vision of a man being cast off a bridge into a dark river.

She felt ridiculous sharing her story with a detective that evening, and undoubtedly he did as well. But Sherry’s description of the bridge was so specific that police divers located it and recovered the body of a teamster boss who had gone missing hours before he was to give testimony to a secret grand jury. Then a clerk in the organized crime division of the U.S. Attorney’s Office leaked to the press that it was a blind woman who led investigators to the body.

Weeks later Sherry received a request from the widow of a car rental tycoon to help locate her husband in the Canadian wilderness. When she did, the media besieged her, and then the medical community as well, wanting to know about the blind girl’s gift. They wanted to study her brain. They wanted to test her sight. To this day she received invitations from optometrists, ophthalmologists, and neurologists galore for free treatments.

It was sad, she realized, looking around the waiting room, that the people who most need help are the ones who never get it.

The minutes went by, faces staring blankly at the floor, teenagers in wheelchairs swaying to some unfathomable cadence, the weary-looking mothers and fathers with fixed smiles. Neurology departments in city hospitals were fermenting stews of suffering and sadness.

“Sherry Moore,” a voice yelled mechanically from a hole in a glass partition.

Sherry walked to the counter, smiling politely at the handsome young man in the seat by the door. What tragedy had brought such a good-looking young man to this place? she wondered. Perhaps it was a relative. Perhaps he suffered some invisible malady like epilepsy.

The clerk pushed a paper in front of Sherry and told her to sign it.

Sherry looked for the blank line she had so infrequently signed in a life without sight and scribbled an indecipherable signature she had adopted over the years, triggering a tirade from the woman who snatched the form and replaced it with another, drawing an X by the correct line and jabbing her finger at it. “There! Write it there! See where it says
patient’s
signature?”

Sherry signed it and turned for the corridor to Dr. Salix’s office, noticing that the young man by the door had left. She had to acknowledge that being blind was even more limiting than she had come to think over the years. Certainly she had missed all kinds of interesting people around her, the wonders of nature and miracles of man. Eyes were truly remarkable things, she realized, and again she was reminded of her fear of losing them.

“Sherry”—the doctor smiled—“you look awesome.”

“Thank you.” She sat. “I feel good.”

He picked up the ophthalmoscope and pulled up her eyelids as he checked both eyes. “No spots or shadows?”

“None.”

“No blurriness?”

She shook her head.

“Light sensitive?”

“Huh-uh.”

“What about the light showers?”

“Gone.”

“Completely gone?”

She shrugged. “Mostly gone.”

He laid the scope down and shook his head. “What color are the lights?”

“White,” she said. “Sparkles of white light.”

Salix took a seat behind his desk. “Sherry, do you have any, um, unusual electronic equipment around your house? High-tech alarm systems, something with an electromagnetic field?”

She shook her head no. “I have an alarm, but it’s been there for years. Why do you ask?”

“There’s a phenomenon called phosphene. It is the experience of seeing light without light entering the eye. Phosphenes can be triggered by electrical or magnetic stimulation of the visual cortex, sometimes the random firing of ocular cells.”

“Meaning?”

“Your eyes may be particularly sensitive to the electronic clutter in the air. Radio and microwave transmissions, cell phone signals; God knows what’s out there.”

“Will it hurt me?”

“No, and if you can find the source of the energy, you could actually make it go away.”

“So all is good then,” she said.

“It’s good.” He held out his open hands.

She smiled.

“Sherry, what do you know about the ECoG?”

“You’re not going to ruin this by cutting into my skull.” Sherry recalled hearing a discussion about cranially implanting a pulse generator to stimulate an electrocorticogram’s targets.

“It’s just a suggestion. Food for future thought.”

“You think this is temporary?”

“What if it is, Sherry?”

“Then it’s temporary. I know how to be blind, Dr. Salix. I can do blind just fine again.”

The doctor shook his head.

“Let’s just take it a month at a time. If anything seems out of the ordinary, call me back. If not, we’ll wait three months and do another EEG. If that’s the same we’ll go back to our annual checkups. Deal?”

Sherry nodded.

“When is your gamma ray test in Boston?”

“The thirty-first,” she said.

He wrote something down.

“Dr. Salix. The man I tested with, Thomas Monahan. I went to the hospital up in Stockton. They told me he had been there almost all his life, but there are no records about his admission. Nothing about his family.”

Salix sat and leaned forward toward her, his forearms on his knees, hands folded.

“What do you want me to do, Sherry? Whole-body donors aren’t specifically categorized. Not unless there’s a specific condition under study. The cadavers brought to Nazareth would have ended up in pathology. Nazareth is a teaching hospital.” He shrugged. “I just pulled two at random from the lineup.”

“Something about his brain, the way it worked, might have been responsible for my regaining sight. I think there was some kind of response from his memories—you said yourself I was talking out loud in the lab. I have never done that before. Whatever came back to me from him was more than just memory.”

“Sherry, that’s hardly probable.”

“Yeah, well, so are my abilities, and this guy was in a psychiatric institute.”

“I’ll say it again. What do you want me to do?”

“I want you to find his records and compare them with mine. They had to have given him an EEG in sixty years!”

“Sherry…” He sighed, holding up his outstretched hands.

She gave him a look and he nodded.

“Okay, okay, you’re right, I’m sorry. I’ll give it one more try. I’ll have my assistant call the hospital in a day or two. They’re working on month’s-end books right now, but maybe Thursday. We’ll get a doctor on the phone and we’ll see what was going on with him before he died.”

“Thanks,” Sherry said. “That’s all I want.”

L
ANCASTER
, P
ENNSYLVANIA

“Do you know of her, then?”

“What I read in the papers,” Case said impatiently. “What about her?”

“She was having tests done at Nazareth, simple electroencephalogram. Dr. Salix is her neurologist, has been for fifteen years.”

“I know the fucking miracle story if that’s what you’re getting to,” Case said.

“Salix brought in two cadavers and used them in his tests. One of them was Monahan.”

“Jesus fucking Christ.”

“I thought you’d want to know.”

“Is there a recording?”

“My source says there was.”

“Of what exactly?”

“Well, it still hasn’t been transcribed, but whatever was said
in that room during the procedure. Dr. Salix records all his procedures. It’s all on tape.”

“His notes. What did they say?”

“They haven’t been transcribed either. His staff is doing a month’s end on the books.”

“I want a fucking copy.”

“It’s done. I have people on the inside.”

“What happened to Monahan?”

“He should have been returned to the pool for the students. They use a Delaware crematory afterward.”

“Don’t tell me what should have been done. Make sure he finds his way there.”

“Yes.” Weir hesitated. “May I ask just who this cadaver is?”

“A very old acquaintance.” Case kneaded his forehead with thumb and middle finger. Then he looked up and stretched his neck. Monahan was the very tip of the iceberg, he thought. How many Monahans were out there still waiting to surface? And all it would take is one nosy bitch to get it started. One would set off another and they would tumble like dominoes…no, more like fallen tombstones in a long, winding path that would lead directly to Case and Kimble’s door.

“Just find out what you can.” Case’s voice seemed to falter.

“Is there anything else I should know?”

“He’s dead.” Case shrugged. “But listen to me, Troy. I want him to remain dead. No one can go snooping into his life. If this woman Moore so much as utters his name I want her silenced. You get those transcripts. I want to know what happened in that room.”

“Yes, Dr. Case.”

Case stood and looked down, tapping his fingers on the desk. There was nothing he hadn’t done in this dog-eat-dog world to get ahead. His work would still be unknown if it hadn’t been for the Monahans of the world. Thank God they had all given their lives.