The Breath of Suspension (31 page)

Tessa lay down on the floor, her head on a chunk of rock dense with ancient ferns, and went to sleep.

The El Station
platform was empty, and the winter Chicago Sunday afternoon had turned into night. Stanley Paterson paused at the turnstile and rubbed his nose doubtfully. The overhead lamps cast circular pools of light on the gouged surface of the platform, but this made Stanley feel obvious, rather than safe. He hunched his shoulders inside his wool topcoat, puffed out his cheeks, and shuffled along the platform, looking down the tracks in the direction of the expected train. His mind was still full of the financial affairs of a medium-sized Des Moines metals trading company slated for acquisition. It was a big project, worth working weekends for, so aside from the inside of his condominium, the inside of his office, and the inside of various El trains, he no longer knew what anything looked like. Winter had somehow arrived without an intervening autumn. He’d been to Oak Street Beach once, near the end of the summer, he remembered. Or had that been last year?

The wind blew dried leaves past him; delicately curved, ribbed, and textured leaves. He felt himself among them, heavy and gross, and thought about going on a diet. It was tough when you worked as hard as he did, he thought, excusing himself. It was hell on your eating habits. Today he’d eaten—what? He couldn’t remember. The coat slapped his legs. The skin by his nose was oily, there was an itch under his right shoulder blade, and he was hungry. He wondered what he could put in the microwave when he got home. What did he have left in the freezer? Chinese? Chicken Kiev? Hell, he’d see when he got there. High above him floated the lighted windows of the city, rank upon rank, like cherubim.

The turnstile clattered. Stanley tried to tell himself that it was ridiculous to feel afraid, even in the dark, alone on the platform, but succeeded only in feeling afraid and ridiculous, both. He leaned forward, looking again for the train, trying to pull it into the station by the force of his gaze, but the tracks remained empty. He glanced toward the turnstile. A man stood there, a shadow. He wasn’t a big man and his race was not obvious, but he wore a hat, which looked like leather. Respectable people did not wear hats, Stanley felt. Particularly not leather ones. It looked too silly. The man turned and, with slow confident steps, walked toward Stanley.

Stanley thought about running, but didn’t. It would have made him feel like a fool. He rocked back on his heels, hands in his pockets, and ignored the other. He tried to project an air of quiet authority. The platform on the other side of the tracks was completely empty.

He never saw it, but he felt the knife press, sharp, against his side, just above the right kidney. There was no doubt whatsoever about what it was.

“Your money.”

“Excuse me? I—”

“Your money.”

The knife cut through the expensive fabric of his coat and grazed his flesh. Stanley felt a surge of annoyance at the wanton damage. Spontaneously, unthinkingly, like a tripped mousetrap, Stanley cried out and hit the man in the face with a balled fist, remembering only at the last second not to put his thumb inside his fingers. It was like striking out in sleep, but he did not awaken, as he usually did, sweat-soaked and tangled in sheets. Instead, the dark cold night remained around him, and as the man stumbled back, Stanley grappled with him and tried to get his hands around his throat. He really was a small man, much smaller than he had expected, and he couldn’t remember why he had been so frightened of him. The knife blade twisted, and Stanley felt it penetrate flesh. A scream cut the night. There was suddenly a warm glow in Stanley’s belly, which spread up through his chest. He felt dizzy, and flung his suddenly weightless assailant across the platform, seeing him whirl tiny, tiny away, joining the leaves in their dance, then vanishing back through the turnstile, which clattered again. Blackness loomed overhead like a tidal wave and blotted out the lights of the windows. The dark heaviness knocked Stanley down onto the platform, and he heard a wailing sound, like sirens, or a baby crying. He rested on the platform, which had become as soft as a woman’s breast. It was late, he was tired, and the train did not seem to want to come, so he decided to take a well-deserved nap.

❖

The scream of the nurse, who had come in to check Margaret’s pulse but found, when she pulled back the blankets, that her patient had turned into a mass of giant black bats that burst up from the rumpled sheets to fill the bedroom with the fleshy beating of their wings, became the shrill ring of the telephone. Matthew Harmon woke up with a shock, jerked the cord until the phone fell on the bed, and cradled the receiver under his ear.

“Dr. Harmon,” the voice on the phone said. A simple, flat statement, as if someone had decided to call in the middle of the night to wake him up and reassure him about his identity. Harmon felt a surge of irritation, and knew he was once again alive. He reached up and turned on the bedside lamp, which cast a pool of light over the bed. He did not look at the other half of the bed, but he could hear Margaret’s labored breathing. She muttered something like, “Phone, Matt... phone,” then choked, as if having a heart seizure. There were no bats, at least.

“Yes?” he said. “What is it?” His throat hurt again, and his voice was husky.

A pause. “I was asked to make this call. Against my better judgment... it’s information I don’t think you should have. But,” a deep sigh, “it seems that we have one of what you call... abandoned souls. That is what you call them, isn’t it?” Another pause, longer than the first. “This is stupid. I wonder why I called you.”

“That makes two of us.” The voice on the line was contemptuous, but uncomfortably so, ill at ease despite its advantage of identity and wakefulness. It was a familiar voice, from somewhere in the past, one of so many familiar voices, voices of medical students, interns, residents, nurses, fellow doctors, researchers, all ranged through over forty years of memory, some respectful, some exasperated, some angry. He ran his hand over his scalp and thought about that tone of defensive contempt. “Orphaned. Not abandoned. Though that will do just as well.” Given the subject of the call, it had to be someone at an Intensive Care Unit, probably at a city hospital. Possibly connected with a trauma center. That narrowed things... got it. “Masterman,” he said. “Eugene Colin Masterman. Johns Hopkins Medical School, class of seventy-five. You’re at Pres St. Luke’s now. I hope that you are finally clear on the difference between afferent and efferent nerves. I remember you had trouble with the distinction, back in my neuroanatomy class at Hopkins. Just remember: SAME, sensory afferent, motor efferent. It’s not hard. But, as you said, you didn’t decide to call me. Leibig, chief of your ICU, told you to. How is Karl?”

“Dr. Leibig is well,” Masterman said sulkily. “Aside from the inevitable effects of age. He has a renal dysfunction, and seems to have developed a vestibular disorder which keeps him off his feet. He will be retiring next year.”

“A pity,” Harmon said. “A good man. And three years younger than I am, as I’m sure I don’t have to remind you. Well, Eugene, why don’t you tell me the story?” Masterman, he recalled, hated being called Eugene.

Masterman gave it to him, chapter and verse, in offensively superfluous detail. Patient’s name: Paterson, Stanley Andrew. Patient’s social security number. Patient’s place of employment, a management consulting firm in the Loop. Locations of stab wounds, fractures, lacerations. Patient’s blood type and rejection spectrum. Units of blood transfused, in the ambulance, in the Emergency Room, in the ICU, divided into whole blood and plasma. Names of the ambulance crew. Name of admitting doctor. Name of duty nurse. All surname first, then first name and middle initial.

“Who was his first-grade teacher?” Harmon said.

“What—Dr. Harmon, I did not want to make this call, understand that. I did so at the specific request of Dr. Leibig.”

“Who also wonders if I am crazy. But he did it for old time’s sake, bless him. Eugene, if, as it seems, you are not enjoying this call, perhaps you should make an effort to be more... pithy.”

“Paterson suffered a cardiac arrest at, let’s see, one-oh-eight a.m. We attempted to restart several times with a defibrillator, but were finally forced to open the chest and apply a pacemaker. We have also attached a ventilator. His condition is now stable.”

“Life is not stable,” Harmon said, but thought, “the stupid bastards.” Would they never learn? Didn’t they understand the consequences?
Doctors.
Clever technicians who thought themselves scientists. “Brain waves?”

“Well... minimal.”

“Minimal, Eugene? Where did he die?”

“He isn’t dead. We have him on life support.”

“Don’t play games with me! Where was he murdered?”

“At the Adams Street El station, at Adams and Wabash. The northbound platform.” He paused, then the words spilled out. “Listen, Harmon, you can’t go on doing this, talking about ghosts and goblins and all sorts of idiocy about the spirits of the unburied dead. This isn’t the Middle Ages, for crissakes. We’re doctors, we know better, we’ve learned. We
know
how things work now. Have you forgotten everything? You can’t just let people under your care die to protect their souls. That’s crazy, absolute lunacy. I don’t know how I let Leibig talk me into this, he knows you’re crazy too, and the patient’s
not
dead, he’s alive, and if I have anything to say about it he’ll stay that way, and I won’t pull the plug because of some idiotic theory you have about ghosts. And I do so know the difference between afferent and efferent. Afferent nerves—”

“Never mind, Dr. Masterman,” Harmon said wearily. “At this hour, I’m not sure I remember myself. Get back to your patients. Thank you for your call.” He hung the receiver up gently.

After a moment to gather his strength, he pulled his legs out from under the comforter and forced them down to the cold floor. As they had grown thinner, the hair on them, now white, seemed to have grown thicker. He pulled the silk pajamas down so that he could not see his shins. The virtues of youth, he thought, too often become the sins of age. He had once been slim, and was now skinny. His nose, once aquiline, was a beak, and his high noble forehead had extended itself clear over the top of his head.

These late-night phone calls always made him think of Margaret, as she had been. He remembered her, before their marriage, as a young redhead in a no-nonsense gray suit with a ridiculous floppy bow tie, and later, in one of his shirts, much too long for her and tight in the chest, as she raised her arms in mock dismay at the number of his books she was expected to fit into their tiny apartment, and finally, as a prematurely old woman gasping her life out in the bed next to him. None of it had been her fault, but it had been she who had suffered.

He dialed the phone. It was answered on the first ring. “Sphinx and Eye of Truth Bookstore, Dexter Warhoff, Owner and Sole Proprietor. We’re closed now, really, but we open at—”

“Dexter,” Harmon said. “Sorry to bother you. It looks like we have another one.”

“Professor!” Dexter said with delight. “No bother at all. I was just playing with some stuff out of the Kabbalah. Kind of fun, but nothing that won’t wait. Where is this one? Oh, never mind, let it be a surprise. Usual place, in an hour? I’ll call him and get him ready. Oh, boy.”

Harmon restrained a sigh. He could picture Dexter, plump and bulging in a shirt of plum or burgundy, with his bright blue eyes and greasy hair, behind the front desk at the Sphinx and Eye of Truth Bookstore, where he spent most of his waking hours, of which he apparently had many, scribbling in a paperback copy of
The Prophecies of Nostradamus
with a pencil stub or, as tonight, rearranging Hebrew letters to make anagrams of the Name of God.

The store itself was a neat little place on the Near North Side, with colorful throw pillows on the floor and the scent of jasmine incense in the air. It carried books on every imaginable topic relating to the occult and the supernatural, from Madame Blavatsky to Ancient Astronauts, from Edgar Cayce to the Loch Ness Monster, from Tarot cards to ESP. It had been almost impossible for Harmon to go there, but go there he did, finally, after exhausting every other resource, to accept a cup of camomile tea from Dexter’s dirty-fingernailed hands and learn what he reluctantly came to understand to be the truth.