“I DON’T WANT HIM HOME LIKE THIS. He’s not right yet, I’m telling you. He’s not right.”
René and Nick were back at Broadview with Marie Martinetti and her daughter, Christine. Louis was insisting on being released from the home and had called a lawyer.
“The tests say he’s improved nearly fifty percent,” Christine said.
“Yeah, but he’s worse.”
Mrs. Martinetti was in her seventies and ailing with arthritis, and Louis was still strong and more active than ever. And given his cognitive improvements, Louis had outgrown the nursing home. That fact made this a circumstance that nursing homes had never before had to confront—not since Memorine. And René could feel Nick struggle with the dilemma.
“Well, you’re free to sign a release for him if you choose to bring him home,” he explained.
“That’s what I’m saying. I can’t handle him the way he is.” Marie looked pleadingly at René. “It’s that Memorine. You gotta take him off it. It’s making him crazy.”
Christine’s face was drawn in dismay. “Mom,” she began.
“Mom, nothing. You don’t know the half of it. You got to take him off it.”
“Mrs. Martinetti, we really can’t do that,” Nick said woefully.
“What do you mean you can’t do that? Of course you can do that.”
“If we withdraw Louis from the drug the disease will come back.”
Mrs. Martinetti glared at Nick as if he had just spit something up. “What?”
“That’s the problem with this medication, I’m afraid.”
“What’s the problem? What are you saying?” She shot René a frantic look for an explanation she could accept.
But Christine cut in. “Mom, they’re saying that the plaque will grow back. That he’ll get Alzheimer’s again if he’s taken off it.”
“What?” Mrs. Martinetti looked back at Nick. “You didn’t know about this?”
“It never occurred in the early phases of the trials with lab animals. No reversal of any kind. Even in the second phase using humans we didn’t see any evidence of a reversal.”
Nick was correct. René had scanned some of the reports from GEM and outside protocol test labs, and nothing in the data had indicated that withdrawal from Memorine in any dosage caused animals or healthy non-demented humans to develop the amyloid plaque. Not until Clara Devine was returned from McLean’s.
“It was completely unforeseen,” Nick said. “I explained to Christine the other day. I’m very sorry.”
“Sorry? But they said this was a miracle cure.” Then the realization set in and her face crumbled. “Oh, my God.”
“But, Mom, he can still take it,” Christine began. “He’s still recovering.”
But Mrs. Martinetti disregarded her. “So, what does that mean? Louis will have these flashbacks the rest of his life—go back someplace in the junior high gym or in the army? Sweet Mother of God, what are you telling me?”
“Mom, please. It’s better than him just wasting away.”
Her head snapped at her daughter. “No, it
not
better! It scares me, he goes off like that, talking to dead people, getting all scared he’s got to watch them cut out Fuzzy Swenson’s eyes, that Colonel Chop Chop bastard.”
“Colonel Chop Chop?” Nick asked.
“Some North Korean commander,” Christine said. “Chop Yong Jin, or something like that. I think he was in charge when my dad was taken prisoner. That was his nickname, Colonel Chop Chop.” She explained that he was a high-ranking Korean officer who brought a Russian advisor on military campaigns—a guy they nicknamed Blackhawk, from an old military comic book character. In the book Chop Chop was his loyal sidekick. “Dad escaped, but he saw some bad stuff he never talked about.”
“No, he didn’t escape,” Marie Martinetti cried. “They still got him. He keeps reliving them. And he talks about it and he’s back again and again, but you’re not there. I am. I
am.”
“I don’t care if he has a couple of flashback things,” Christine continued. “Those were the best times of his life, when he was young and full of himself. And he’s fine in between, and he’s not hurting himself or anybody else. And maybe you can come up with something that keeps them under control.”
“But you don’t know what he’s reliving,” Marie protested. “I’ve seen him. I’m here almost every day and you’re not. It’s horrible what I seen him go through.
HORRIBLE,
pressing his hands to his eyes so he can’t see what they
did to his friend. We’d be having a nice visit, and suddenly he’s back in the Red Tent, he calls it—the torture place in the Commie camp. You don’t know what he saw. He screams and cries …” And she broke down. “It’s horrible …”
Christine put her hand on his mother’s knee. “But I don’t want him taken off it, Mom. I don’t want to see him slip away again. I don’t.”
“But I can’t handle it. I can’t. I know what it does to him, how he gets so upset. Because in his head it’s real what he sees. I prefer him … forgetful.”
“
Forgetful?
You prefer him turning into a vegetable, just sitting there with dead eyes and a bag on his side? Not me! And I’m not going to let that happen to him again.”
“But you haven’t seen him suffer. That stuff’s a curse. A damn curse. I wish to God we’d never signed him up on it.” Then her voice broke into a whimper. “Oh, Sweet Mother, give me strength.”
As René listened, she uttered a silent thanksgiving that her own father had never been afflicted with such war delusions. He rarely talked about the war, so God only knows what he might have relived on Memorine.
“Mrs. Martinetti,” Nick said, “the lab is working on fine-tuning the dosages and coming up with some combination with other drugs to control these episodes. Believe me, there are a lot of very talented people working on this.”
“Well, hurry up, because I want him back the way he was.”
“In the meantime,” René said, “we’re giving him antiseizure medication that will help keep him stable.”
“But that stuff makes him dopey,” Christine said.
“I don’t care
dopey,”
said Mrs. Martinetti. “I’ll take him dopey. It’s better than being back in the Red Tent.”
“Well, he certainly can go home on a furlough,” Nick said to Christine. “It’s unusual for patients with Alzheimer’s, as you can imagine. But maybe some weekend soon.”
“That would be great,” Christine said, her eyes brightening.
“Then we’ll put something on the calendar.”
“But only if he had his antiseizure pills,” Mrs. Martinetti insisted. “Otherwise, he can stay here. I can’t take his torture. He was better off with Alzheimer’s.”
“SORRY TO BOTHER YOU, JACK.” It was Marcy.
Jack opened his eyes. He was still lying on his bed in his jeans and sneakers. After his morning walk—the forty-yard dash up and down the hall in just seven minutes—he had stretched out on his bed with the television on mute and closed caption and a copy of
U.S. News and World Report
across his chest. He had dozed off.
“This is Theo Rogers.” With Marcy was a man in a T-shirt that said “We Fix It.” “Mr. Rogers is going to repair your Venetian blinds.”
“Call me Theo.” The man held out a large rough hand that felt as if it could crush Jack’s like twigs.
“How you doing?”
My legs ache, I’m built like a tuning fork, I wake up in the middle of the night with visions of gory mayhem, there’s a six-point-two Richter scale quake rumbling between my ears.
“Just dandy.”
Theo nodded. He looked to be in his early thirties. He was maybe fiveeight and built like a gymnast. His hair was dark and held back with elastic bands in a short ponytail, and his face was smooth and open. Either he had non-Caucasian blood or spent time in the tropics or a tanning salon, because his skin was a coffee color. Around his waist hung a tool holster with a hammer, pliers, and other tools. He opened a small stepladder.
“This won’t take long.”
Outside the window deep-bellied rumbles rolled across the sky and lightning flickered, making Jack squint.
“A bit bright for you, huh?” Theo said. “We’ll take care of that,” and he began to work on the blinds, which hung at a crazy angle in the window frame.
“I’ll leave you two guys on your own,” Marcy said. Before she left, she checked Jack’s heart and pulse and took a temperature reading. While the workman inspected the blinds, Jack closed his eyes. Through the open window he could smell the ocean.
“I read about you in the papers.”
Jack opened his eyes to see the man looking down at him from the ladder.
“Waking up after almost seven months. That’s something.”
“I guess.” Jack closed his eyes again. He was tired and didn’t want to chat.
“I never heard of jellyfish attacking people before. Musta been one hell of an experience.”
“I don’t recommend it.”
“I bet. Remember it any?”
“Not much.” Jack thought about asking Theo to let him sleep but decided that the guy meant well. Besides, the sound of the tools and the shades rattling sabotaged any nap taking. Jack closed his eyes again.
“The papers said something about your memory coming back strong. That’s great. Sometimes coma patients come back with lots of blank spots, I hear.”
Jack cracked open an eye. On the monitor some doctors were talking about that Alzheimer’s drug René Ballard had mentioned. “Experimental drug for Alzheimer’s disease,” read the caption.
Theo removed the hammer from his holster and banged the end of the screwdriver to pry loose a fixture. And Jack felt a small sensation jog through him.
“So you remember stuff before the accident pretty good, huh?”
“A little.”
“Well, that’s all that matters, if you ask me. As somebody said, ‘You are what you remember.’ Right? Same thing if your house caught fire.”
“Pardon me?”
“If your house caught fire. They took this poll, asked if your house was burning down and there’s only one thing you could save, besides your family members or pet, of course—what would it be?”
On the screen some doctors in white were being interviewed. Mass General Hospital, read the caption.
A slumping feeling.
Maybe because that’s where Jack was taken after the accident.
“The family photo album.” Theo gesticulated with his hammer hand. “What nine out of ten people said. And me, too. It’s the same with memory, know what I mean?”
Jack closed his eyes. “Guess I’m pretty lucky.”
A few moments passed, then Theo started up again. “Just out of curiosity, what were you doing out there on Homer’s Island? Kind of an out-of-the-way place, you ask me.”
Jack was growing tired of the interrogation. “Bird watching.”
“Bird watching,” the man repeated. There was a long silence. Then he said, “The papers said something about you swimming. And a storm.”
Why is this guy pressing me? And why the feeling that this was going beyond idle chitchat.
“It came up fast, and I hadn’t checked the weather report.”
“Got your own boat?”
“Took the water taxi.”
“So you remember stuff before the accident pretty well, huh?”
What is it with this guy? Why won’t he shut up? Why’s he playing Twenty Questions with me?
“A little.”
“That’s my point: You still got what’s most important.” And he tapped the side of his head. Another long pause. “How far back do you go?”
“Pardon me?”
“How far back can you remember—like when you were a kid?”
“Not really.”
“Uh-huh. Some people say they remember when they were babies. Sign of intelligence, they say.”
Jack did not respond.
“I can’t remember before I was ten,” Theo snorted. “Guess I must be pretty dumb. How about you?”
Jack eyed the man. “No. No. Nothing.”
Suddenly things turned strange. In a protracted moment, the man became a still life, freezing in place on the ladder with the hammer raised, his mouth moving in slow motion, pulsing out queer utterances, the syllables stretched to alien phonics. As the man’s eyes bore down on Jack for a response, Jack felt something like an eel slither through his gut.
Bad feeling.
“Don’t remember stuff from when you were small? Me, neither, but I wish I did.”
Jack couldn’t speak—as if what had slithered through him shot into his brain and bored a hole in the language centers, leaving him gasping for words and quaking with an irrational sense of dread.
“Hey, you all right?”
“Mmmm.” Which was all Jack could squeeze out.
“You looked a little …”
God, what the hell is this? What’s passing through me?
His lungs caught some air and he sucked it up to his voice box. “I’m okay,” he rasped. “Little dizzy.”
“Uh-huh.” And the guy turned back to the shade.
Jack’s head was soupy and he closed his eyes as the man tapped away. Outside, the thunder was growling out to sea, the lightning flickering through Jack’s eyelids. The man hammered away, and with each smack a small seismic crack shot through Jack.
Jack opened his eyes. Something about the image of that guy on the ladder clawed at Jack’s consciousness. Something not right. But he couldn’t grasp it. Whatever, it flitted across his mind like a bird coming in to roost, then just at the last second shot away.
Jack was positive he had never seen this Theo before because the man’s face didn’t fit any memory template. Then again, Jack had not laid eyes on a lot of faces of late. Maybe all the toxins had turned sections of his brain into Swiss cheese. A reasonable explanation, except the guy would surely have said something.
So why the dark sensation? Maybe someone from a dream. And he’d had a boatload of those of late.
“You want some water or something?”
“I’m okay.” Jack could hear fear in the breathy scrape of his voice.
The man eyed him suspiciously, then nodded and went back to banging something in place, his mouth still moving.
Jesus, what’s happening to me?
Jack asked himself.
What the hell is going on in my head?
Without expression, the man locked hard eyes on his. “I asked you a question.”
Jack didn’t remember the question. Maybe he’d nodded off for a moment and just dreamed he had. He looked up at Theo to reply, but the sensation was back, and worse—leaving him thinking that he had lived these moments before. Some wicked déjà vu.
In an instant an inexplicable anxiety set Jack’s diaphragm in spasms. His throat constricted as if a snake were coiling around it. His forehead was a cold aspic of sweat, and his chest and neck were a flash of prickers.
Heart attack. I’m having a heart attack.
“Hey, you want me to call the nurse?”
Jack could not answer.
Shit. Worked yourself into cardiac arrest. A killer surge of self-inflicted anxiety, and you won yourself a permanent flat line.
But another thought cut across that one:
No. Not a heart attack
. His heart was strong, they had said, and at the moment was pounding so hard that his
shirt was pulsing. No, something else. What had passed through him was a bolt of black horror.
Something about this repairman.
He wants to hurt you.
The guy glared down at him. And in Jack’s mind, he jumped off the ladder and smashed his head with that shiny ball-peen hammer.
“You having a seizure?”
A skim of panic formed over Jack like ice.
Seizure. How did this repairman know about seizures?
But the other voice was back:
You’re being an asshole. The guy’s perfectly friendly in his Mr. Fixit overalls and body shirt, up there on his ladder being chatty and doing his business with the blinds. And just because he’s a repairman doesn’t mean a limited vocabulary. You’ve got the problem, pal, not him.
The repairman continued to stare at Jack, the individual slats making razor-edged slashes of light and shade across his features. He look demonic, his mouth a black gash in his brown face, his features jagged. And hot black auger eyes boring through him.
Suddenly the guy climbed down, the hammer in his fist.
Oh, Jesus! God, no. No!
his brain screamed. A faint squeal pressed out of a clenched larynx.
The man took no notice and came up to the bed, the hammer still in his hand. Jack let out a gasp and in a flash he saw the hammer come down on the crown of his head with a sickening crack, blood and brain matter splattering all over the bed.
Under his pillow Jack’s hand scrabbled for the nurse-call button.
“This will take care of you,” the guy said.
Jack pressed the button and closed his eyes against the blow.
Nothing.
“Here you go,” and Theo handed Jack a glass of water.
“Everything okay?” Marcy said.
Jack opened his eyes. Theo was standing over him with a glass of water, Marcy by his side. “You okay, Jack?”
Jack grunted. “Can’t sleep.” Theo went back to the blinds.
“No problem.” And she produced a pack of pills. “Theo looks about done, right?”
“Just about.” And he slipped the hammer into his holster and popped the blinds in place and pulled the strings. They were fixed. He dropped them closed to darken the room.
“Great.” Marcy gave the lorazepam to Jack.
Theo gathered his things. “You hang in there, buddy.” And he walked out of the room.
In a matter of moments, the horror had flushed from Jack’s mind.
There, asshole. There’s your crazed psychopath in farmer johns.
Jack sipped more water and closed his eyes, concentrating on the liquid flowing down his parched throat.
Damn lucky the proverbial cat had your tongue, or you’d have some fancy explaining to do.
So just what was that?
Jack asked himself as he lay there.
Just your hot imagination
—
like those dreams of misshapen creatures killing people.
But that didn’t satisfy. There was something he couldn’t put his finger on. Maybe the guy looked like somebody else. Maybe someone in a movie. Maybe someone in a dream.
A dream. His mind kept on coming back to that.
Like the dream about someone sneaking in here one night and trying to squirt some bad juice into your tubes.
But the other voice was back:
The guy’s just some friendly innocent you’re hanging your loonies on. Period. The meds. It’s all the crap they’re giving you, playing crazy dreams when you sleep, giving you the ooga-boogas when awake. That, or you’re losing your mind. Spent six months in the Twilight Zone and came out with half your luggage. Could be worse. Could be sleeping with the jellies.
Nothing made sense, but the incident had left him weary and yearning for oblivion. Marcy dimmed the lights, and Jack closed his eyes. He wanted to sleep for a week and wake up whole and ready to get out of here.
“You sleep tight,” she said.
Besides, Bunky, who the hell would want to kill someone who’s been in a coma for half a year?