The Dead Zone (16 page)

And then Sarah's face came to him—she had to be out there someplace, although hers had not been one of the bright faces bending over his. She had to be out there, worried and scared. She was almost his, now. He felt that. He was going to ask her to marry him.

That feeling of unease came back, stronger than ever, and this time it was all mixed up with Sarah. But wanting her was stronger, and he made his decision. He turned his back on the dark place, and when he looked back over his shoulder later on, it had disappeared; there was nothing beside the chair but the smooth white wall of the room where he lay. Not long after he began to know where the room must be—it was a hospital room, of course. The dark hallway faded to a dreamy memory, never completely forgotten. But more important, more immediate, was the fact that he was John Smith, he had a girl named Sarah Bracknell, and he had been in a terrible car accident. He suspected that he must be very lucky to be alive, and he could only hope that all his original equipment was still there and still functioning. He might be in Cleaves Mills Community Hospital, but he guessed the EMMC was more likely. From the way he felt he guessed he had been here for some time—he might have been blacked out for as long as a week or ten days. It was time to get going again.

Time to get going again.
That was the thought in Johnny's mind when things finally jelled all the way back together and he opened his eyes.

It was May 17, 1975. Mr. Starret had long since gone home with standing orders to walk two miles a day and mend his high-cholesterol ways. Across the room was an old man engaged in a weary fifteenth round with that all-time heavyweight champ, carcinoma. He slept the sleep of morphia, and the room was otherwise empty. It was 3:15
P.M
. The TV screen was a drawn green shade.

“Here I am,” Johnny Smith croaked to no one at all. He was shocked by the weakness of his voice. There was no calendar in the room, and he had no way of knowing that he had been out of it four-and-a-half years.

The nurse came in some forty minutes later. She went over to the old man in the other bed, changed his IV feed, went into the bathroom, and came out with a blue plastic pitcher. She watered the old man's flowers. There were over half a dozen bouquets, and a score of get-well cards standing open on his table and windowsill. Johnny watched her perform this homey chore, feeling as yet no urge to try his voice again.

She put the pitcher back and came over to Johnny's bed.
Going to turn my pillows,
he thought. Their eyes met briefly, but nothing in hers changed.
She doesn't know I'm awake. My eyes have been open before. It doesn't mean anything to her.

She put her hand on the back of his neck. It was cool and comforting and Johnny knew she had three children and that the youngest had lost most of the sight in one eye last Fourth of July. A firecracker accident. The boy's name was Mark.

She lifted his head, flipped his pillow over, and settled him back. She started to turn away, adjusting her nylon uniform at the hips, and then turned back, puzzled. Belatedly thinking that there had been something new in his eyes, maybe. Something that hadn't been there before.

She glanced at him thoughtfully, started to turn away again, and he said, “Hello, Marie.”

She froze, and he could hear an ivory click as her teeth came suddenly and violently together. Her hand pressed against her chest just above the swell of her breasts. A small gold crucifix hung there. “O-my-God,” she said. “You're awake. I
thought
you looked different. How did you know my name?”

“I suppose I must have heard it.” It was hard to talk, terribly hard. His tongue was a sluggish worm, seemingly unlubricated by saliva.

She nodded. “You've been coming up for some time now. I'd better go down to the nurses' station and have Dr. Brown or Dr. Weizak paged. They'll want to know you're back with
us.” But she stayed a moment longer, looking at him with a frank fascination that made him uneasy.

“Did I grow a third eye?” he asked.

She laughed nervously. “No . . . of course not. Excuse me.”

His eye caught on his own window ledge and his table pushed up against it. On the ledge was a faded African violet and a picture of Jesus Christ—it was the sort of picture of Jesus his mother favored, with Christ looking as if he was ready to bat clean-up for the New York Yankees or something of a similar clean and athletic nature. But the picture was—yellow.
Yellow and beginning to curl at the corners.
Sudden fear dropped over him like a suffocating blanket. “Nurse!” he called. “Nurse!”

In the doorway she turned back.

“Where are my get-well cards?” Suddenly it was hard for him to breathe. “That other guy's got . . . didn't anyone send me a card?”

She smiled, but it was forced. It was the smile of someone who is hiding something. Suddenly Johnny wanted her by his bed. He would reach out and touch her. If he could touch her, he would know what she was hiding.

“I'll have the doctor paged,” she said, and left before he could say anything else. He looked at the African violet, at the aging picture of Jesus, baffled and afraid. After a little while, he drifted off to sleep again.

“He
was
awake,” Marie Michaud said. “He was completely coherent.”

“Okay,” Dr. Brown answered. “I'm not doubting you. If he woke up once, he'll wake up again. Probably. It's just a matter of . . .”

Johnny moaned. His eyes opened. They were blank, half rolled up. Then he seemed to see Marie, and his eyes came into focus. He smiled a little. But his face was still slack, as if only his eyes were awake and the rest of him still slept. She had a sudden feeling that he was not looking at her but
into
her.

“I think he'll be okay,” Johnny said. “Once they clean that impacted cornea, the eye'll be as good as new. Should be.”

Marie gasped harshly, and Brown glanced at her. “What is it?”

“He's talking about my boy,” she whispered. “My Mark.”

“No,” Brown said. “He's talking in his sleep, that's all. Don't make a picture out of an inkblot, Nurse.”

“Yes. Okay. But he's not asleep now, is he?”

“Marie?” Johnny asked. He smiled tentatively. “I dozed off, didn't I?”

“Yes,” Brown said. “You were talking in your sleep. Gave Marie here a turn. Were you dreaming?”

“No-oo . . . not that I remember. What did I say? And who are you?”

“I'm Dr. James Brown. Just like the soul singer. Only I'm a neurologist. You said, ‘I think he'll be okay once they clean that impacted cornea.' I think that was it, wasn't it, Nurse?”

“My boy's going to have that operation,” Marie said. “My boy Mark.”

“I don't remember anything,” Johnny said. “I guess I was sleeping.” He looked at Brown. His eyes were clear now, and scared. “I can't lift my arms. Am I paralyzed?”

“Nope. Try your fingers.”

Johnny did. They all wiggled. He smiled.

“Superfine,” Brown said. “Tell me your name.”

“John Smith.”

“Good, and your middle name?”

“I don't have one.”

“That's fine, who needs one? Nurse, go down to your station and find out who's in neurology tomorrow. I'd like to start a whole series of tests on Mr. Smith.”

“Yes, Doctor.”

“And you might call Sam Weizak. You'll get him at home or at the golf course.”

“Yes, Doctor.”

“And no reporters, please . . . for your life!” Brown was smiling but serious.

“No, of course not.” She left, white shoes squeaking faintly. Her little boy's going to be just fine, Johnny thought. I'll be sure to tell her.

“Dr. Brown,” he said, “where are my get-well cards? Didn't anybody send me a card?”

“Just a few more questions,” Dr. Brown said smoothly. “Do you recall your mother's name?”

“Of course I do. Vera.”

“Her maiden name?”

“Nason.”

“Your father's name?”

“Herbert. Herb. And why did you tell her no reporters?”

“Your mailing address?”

“RFD #1, Pownal,” Johnny said promptly, and then stopped. An expression of comic surprise passed across his face. “I mean . . . well, I live in Cleaves Mills now, at 110 North Main Street. Why the hell did I give you my parents' address? I haven't lived there since I was eighteen.”

“And how old are you now?”

“Look it up on my driver's license,” Johnny said. “I want to know why I don't have any get-well cards. How long have I been in the hospital, anyway? And which hospital is this?”

“It's the Eastern Maine Medical Center. And we'll get to all the rest of your questions if you'll just let me . . .”

Brown was sitting by the bed in a chair he had drawn over from the corner—the same corner where Johnny had once seen the passage leading away. He was making notes on a clipboard with a type of pen Johnny couldn't remember ever having seen before. It had a thick blue plastic barrel and a fibrous tip. It looked like the strange hybrid offspring of a fountain pen and a ballpoint.

Just looking at it made that formless dread come back, and without thinking about it, Johnny suddenly seized Dr. Brown's left hand in one of his own. His arm moved creakily, as if there were invisible sixty-pound weights tied to it—a couple below the elbow and a couple above. He captured the doctor's hand in a weak grip and pulled. The funny pen left a thick blue line across the paper.

Brown looked at him, at first only curious. Then his face drained of color. The sharp expression of interest left his eyes and was replaced with a muddy look of fear. He snatched his hand away—Johnny had no power to hold it—and for an instant a look of revulsion crossed the doctor's face, as if he had been touched by a leper.

Then it was gone, and he only looked surprised and disconcerted. “What did you do that for? Mr. Smith . . .”

His voice faltered. Johnny's face had frozen in an expression of dawning comprehension. His eyes were the eyes of a man who has seen something terrible moving and shifting in the shadows, something too terrible to be described or even named.

But it was a fact. It had to be named.

“Fifty-five
months?”
Johnny asked hoarsely. “Going on five
years? No.
Oh my God,
no.”

“Mr. Smith,” Brown said, now totally flustered. “Please, it's not good for you to excite . . .”

Johnny raised his upper body perhaps three inches from the bed and then slumped back, his face shiny with sweat. His eyes rolled helplessly in their sockets. “I'm twenty-seven?” he muttered. “Twenty-
seven
? Oh my
Jesus.”

Brown swallowed and heard an audible click. When Smith had grabbed his hand, he had felt a sudden onrush of bad feelings, childlike in their intensity; crude images of revulsion had assaulted him. He had found himself remembering a picnic in the country when he had been seven or eight, sitting down and putting his hand in something warm and slippery. He had looked around and had seen that he had put his hand into the maggoty remains of a woodchuck that had lain under a laurel bush all that hot August. He had screamed then, and he felt a little bit like screaming now—except that the feeling was fading, dwindling, to be replaced with a question:
How did he know? He touched me and he knew.

Then twenty years of education rose up strongly in him, and he pushed the notion aside. There were cases without number of comatose patients who had awakened with a dreamlike knowledge of many things that had gone on around them while they were in coma. Like anything else, coma was a matter of degree. Johnny Smith had never been a vegetable; his EEG had never gone flatline, and if it had, Brown would not be talking with him now. Sometimes being in a coma was a little like being behind a one-way glass. To the beholding eye the patient was completely conked out, but the patient's senses might still continue to function in some low, power-down fashion. And that was the case here, of course.

Marie Michaud came back in. “Neurology is confirmed, and Dr. Weizak is on his way.”

“I think Sam will have to wait until tomorrow to meet Mr. Smith,” Brown said. “I want him to have five milligrams of Valium.”

“I don't want a sedative,” Johnny said. “I want to get
out
of here. I want to know what happened!”

“You'll know everything in time,” Brown said. “Right now it's important that you rest.”

“I've been resting for four-and-a-half years!”

“Then another twelve hours won't make much difference,” Brown said inexorably.

A few moments later the nurse swabbed his upper arm with alcohol, and there was the sting of a needle. Johnny began to feel sleepy almost at once. Brown and the nurse began to look twelve feet tall.

“Tell me one thing, at least,” he said. His voice seemed to come from far, far away. Suddenly it seemed terribly important. “That pen. What do you call that pen?”

“This?” Brown held it out from his amazing height. Blue plastic body, fibrous tip. “It's called a Flair. Now go to sleep, Mr. Smith.”

And Johnny did, but the word followed him down into his sleep like a mystic incantation, full of idiot meaning:
Flair . . . Flair . . . Flair . . .

Herb put the telephone down and looked at it. He looked at it for a long time. From the other room came the sound of the TV, turned up almost all the way. Oral Roberts was talking about football and the healing love of Jesus—there was a connection there someplace, but Herb had missed it. Because of the telephone call. Oral's voice boomed and roared. Pretty soon the show would end and Oral would close it out by confidently telling his audience that something
good
was going to happen to
them.
Apparently Oral was right.