فصل دوازدهم

TWELVE

The first thing he noticed turning into the University grounds was how suddenly and spectacularly the traffic swelled. There was car traffic, bike traffic, joggers in gym shorts. He had to stop quickly to avoid two of the joggers coming from the direction of Dunn Hall toward the athletic grounds beyond the field-house. Louis braked hard enough to lock his shoulder-belt and honked. He was always annoyed at the way joggers (bicyclers had the same irritating habit) seemed to automatically assume that their responsibility lapsed completely the moment they began to run. They were, after all, exercising. One of them gave Louis the finger without even looking around. Louis sighed and drove on.

The second thing he noticed was that the ambulance was gone from its slot in the small infirmary parking lot, and that gave him a nasty start. The infirmary was equipped to treat almost any illness or accident on a short-term basis; there were three well-equipped examination-and-treatment rooms opening off the big foyer, and beyond this were two wards with fifteen beds each. But there was no operating theater, nor anything even resembling one. In case of serious accidents, there was the ambulance, which would rush an injured or seriously ill person to the Eastern Maine Medical Center. Steve Masterton, the physician’s assistant who had given Louis his first tour of the facility, had shown Louis the log from the previous two academic years with justifiable pride; there had only been thirty-eight ambulance runs in that time, not bad when you considered that the student population here was over ten thousand and the total University population was almost seventeen thousand.

And here he was, on his first real day of work, with the ambulance gone.

He parked in the slot headed with a freshly-painted sign reading RESERVED FOR DR CREED, and hurried in.

He found Charlton, a graying little woman of about fifty, in the first examining room, taking the temperature of a girl who was wearing jeans and a halter top. The girl had gotten a bad sunburn not too long ago, Louis observed; the peeling was well advanced.

‘Good morning, Joan,’ he said. ‘Where’s the ambulance?’

‘Oh, we had a real tragedy, all right,’ Charlton said, taking the thermometer out of the student’s mouth and reading it. ‘Steve Masterton came in this morning at seven and saw a great big puddle under the engine and the front wheels. Radiator let go. They hauled it away.’ ‘Great,’ Louis said, but he felt relieved nonetheless. At least it wasn’t out on a run, which was what he had first feared. ‘When do we get it back?’ Joan Charlton laughed. ‘Knowing the University Motor Pool,’ she said, ‘it’ll come back around December 15th wrapped in Christmas ribbon.’ She glanced at the student.

‘You’ve got half a degree of fever,’ she said. ‘Take two aspirins and stay out of bars and dark alleys.’ The girl got down. She gave Louis a quick appraising glance and then went out.

‘Our first customer of the new semester,’ Charlton said sourly. She began to shake the thermometer down with brisk snaps.

‘You don’t seem too pleased about it.’

‘I know the type,’ she said. ‘Oh, we get the other type too – athletes who go on playing with bone chips and tendonitis and everything else because they don’t want to be benched, they got to be macho men, not let the team down, even if they’re jeopardizing pro careers later on. Then you’ve got little Miss Half-Degree of Fever—’ She jerked her head toward the window, where Louis could see the girl with the peeling sunburn walking in the direction of the Gannett-Cumberland-Androscoggin complex of dorms. In the examining room the girl had given the impression of someone who did not feel well at all but was trying not to let on. Now she was walking briskly, her hips swinging prettily, noticing and being noticed.

‘Your basic college hypochondriac.’ Charlton dropped the thermometer into a sterilizer. ‘We’ll see her two dozen times this year. Her visits will be more frequent before each round of prelims. A week or so before finals she’ll be convinced she has either mono or pneumonia. Bronchitis is the fall-back position. She’ll get out of four or five tests – the ones where the instructors are wimps, to use the word they use – and get easier makeups. They always get sicker if they know the prelim or final is going to be an objective test rather than an essay exam.’ ‘My, aren’t we cynical this morning,’ Louis said. He was, in fact, a little nonplussed.

She tipped him a wink that made him grin. ‘I don’t take it to heart, doctor. Neither should you.’ ‘Where’s Stephen now?’

‘In your office, answering mail and trying to figure out the latest ton of updates from Blue Cross-Blue Shield,’ she said.

Louis went in. Charlton’s cynicism not withstanding, he felt comfortably in harness.

Looking back on it, Louis would think – when he could bear to think about it at all – that the nightmare really began when they brought the dying boy, Victor Pascow, into the infirmary around ten that morning.

Until then, things were very quiet. At nine, half an hour after he arrived, the two candy-stripers who would be working the nine-to-three shift came in. Louis gave them each a doughnut and cup of coffee and talked to them for about fifteen minutes, outlining their duties and, what was perhaps more important, what was beyond the scope of their duties. Then Charlton took over. As she led them out of Louis’s office, Louis heard her ask: ‘Either of you allergic to shit or puke? You’ll see a lot of both here.’ ‘Oh God,’ Louis murmured, and covered his eyes. But he was smiling. A tough old babe like Charlton was not always a liability.

Louis began filling out the long Blue Cross-Blue Shield forms, which amounted to a complete inventory of drug-stock and medical equipment (‘Every year,’ Steve Masterton said in an aggrieved voice. ‘Every goddam year the same thing. Why don’t you write down COMPLETE HEART TRANSPLANT FACILITY, APPROX. VALUE 8 MILLION DOLLARS, Louis? That’ll foozle ‘em!’), and he was totally engrossed, thinking only marginally that a cup of coffee would go down well, when Masterton screamed from the direction of the foyer-waiting room: ‘Louis! Hey, Louis get out here! We got a mess!’ The near-panic in Masterton’s voice got Louis going in a hurry. He bolted out of his chair almost as though he had, in some subconscious way, been expecting this. A shriek, as thin and sharp as a shard of broken glass, arose from the direction of Masterton’s shout. It was followed by a sharp slap and Charlton saying, ‘Stop that or get the hell out of here! Stop it right now!’ Louis burst into the waiting room and was first only conscious of the blood – there was a lot of blood. One of the candy-stripers was sobbing. The other, pale as cream, had put her fisted hands to the corners of her mouth, pulling her lips into a big revolted grin. Masterton was kneeling down, trying to hold the head of the boy sprawled on the floor.

Steve looked up at Louis, eyes grim and wide and frightened. He tried to speak. Nothing came out.

People were congregating at the Student Medical Center’s big glass doors, peering in, their hands cupped around their faces to butt out the glare. Louis’s mind conjured up an insanely appropriate image: sitting in the living room as a boy of no more than six with his mother in the morning before she went to work, watching the television. Watching the old Today show, with Dave Garroway. People were outside, gaping in at Dave and Frank Blair and good old J. Fred Muggs. He looked around and saw other people standing at the windows. He couldn’t do anything about the doors, but— ‘Shut the drapes,’ he snapped at the candy-striper who had screamed.

When she didn’t move immediately, Charlton slapped her can. ‘Do it, girl!’

The candy-striper got in gear. A moment later green drapes were jerked across the windows. Charlton and Steve Masterton moved instinctively between the boy on the floor and the doors, cutting off the view as best they could.

‘Hard stretcher, Doctor?’ Charlton asked.

‘If we need it, get it.’ Louis said, squatting beside Masterton. ‘I haven’t even had a chance to look at him.’ ‘Come on,’ Charlton said to the girl who had closed the drapes. She was pulling the corners of her mouth with her fists again, making that humorless, screaming grin. She looked at Charlton and moaned, ‘Oh, ag.’ ‘Yeah, oh, ag is right. Come on.’ She gave the girl a hard yank and got her moving, her red-and-white-pinstriped skirt swishing against her legs.

Louis bent over his first patient at the University of Maine in Orono.

He was a young man, age approximately twenty, and it took Louis less than three seconds to make the only diagnosis that mattered: the young man was going to die. Half of his head was crushed. His neck had been broken. One collarbone jutted from his swelled and twisted right shoulder. From his head, blood and a yellow, pussy fluid seeped sluggishly into the carpet. Louis could see the man’s brain, whitish-gray and pulsing through a shattered section of skull. It was like looking through a broken window. The incursion was perhaps five centimeters wide; if he had had a baby in his skull, he could almost have birthed it, like Zeus delivering from his forehead. That he was still alive at all was incredible. In his mind suddenly he heard Jud Crandall saying sometimes you could feel it bite your ass. And his mother: dead is dead. He felt a crazy urge to laugh. Dead was dead, all right. That’s affirmative, good buddy.

‘Holler for the ambulance,’ he snapped at Masterton. ‘We—’

‘Louis, the ambulance is—’

‘Oh Christ,’ Louis said, slapping his own forehead. He shifted his gaze to Charlton. ‘Joan, what do you do in a case like this? Call Campus Security or the EMMC?’ Joan looked flustered and upset, an extreme rarity with her, Louis guessed. But her voice was composed enough as she replied. ‘Doctor, I don’t know. We’ve never had a situation like this before in my time at the Medical Center.’ Louis thought as fast as he could. ‘Call the campus police. We can’t wait for EMMC to send out their own ambulance. If they have to, they can take him up to Bangor in one of the fire engines. At least it has a siren, flashers. Go do it, Joan.’ She went, but not before he caught her deeply sympathetic glance and interpreted it. This young man, who was deeply tanned and well-muscled – perhaps from a summer working on a roadcrew somewhere, or painting houses, or giving tennis lessons – and dressed now only in red gym shorts with white piping, was going to die no matter what they did. He would be just as dead even if their ambulance had been parked out front with the motor idling when the patient was brought in.

Incredibly, the dying man was moving. His eyes fluttered and opened. Blue eyes, the irises ringed with blood. They stared vacantly around, seeing nothing. He tried to move his head and Louis exerted pressure to keep him from doing so, mindful of the broken neck. The terrible cranial trauma did not preclude the possibility of pain.

The hole in his head, oh Christ, the hole in his head.

‘What happened to him?’ he asked Steve, aware that it was, under the circumstances, a stupid and pointless question. The question of a bystander. But the hole in the man’s head confirmed his status; a bystander was all he was. ‘Did the police bring him?’ ‘Some students brought him in a blanket sling. I don’t know what the circumstances were.’

There was what happened next to be thought of. That was his responsibility, too. ‘Go out and find them,’ Louis said. ‘Take them around to the other door. I want them handy, but I don’t want them to see any more of this than they already have.’ Masterton, looking relieved to be away from what was happening in here, went to the door and opened it, letting in a babble of excited, curious, confused conversation. Louis could also hear the warble of a police siren. Campus Security was here, then. Louis felt a kind of miserable relief.

The dying man was making a gurgling sound in his throat. He tried to speak. Louis heard syllables – phonetics, at least – but the words themselves were slurred and unclear.

Louis leaned over him and said, ‘You’re going to be all right, fella.’ He thought of Rachel and Ellie as he said it and his stomach gave a great, unlovely lurch. He put a hand over his mouth and stifled a burp.

‘Caaa,’ the young man said. ‘Gaaaaaa—’

Louis looked around and saw he was momentarily alone with the dying man. Dimly he could hear Joan Charlton yelling at the candy-stripers that the hard stretcher was in the supply closet off Room Two. Louis doubted if they knew Room Two from a frog’s gonads; it was, after all, their first day on the job. They had gotten a hell of an introduction to the world of medicine. The green wall-to-wall carpet was now soaked a muddy purple in an expanding circle around the young man’s ruined head; the leakage of intercranial fluid had, mercifully, stopped.

‘In the Pet Sematary,’ the young man croaked … and he began to grin. This grin was remarkably like the mirthless, hysterical grin of the candy-striper who had closed the drapes.

Louis stared down at him, at first refusing to credit what he had heard. Then he thought he must have had an auditory hallucination. He made some more of those phonetic sounds and my subconscious made them into something coherent; cross-patched the sounds into my own experience, he thought. But that was not what had happened, and a moment later he was forced to know it. A swooning, mad terror struck him and his flesh began to creep avidly, seeming to actually move up and down his arms and along his belly in waves … but even then he simply refused to believe it. Yes, the syllables had been on the bloody lips of the man on the carpet as well as in Louis’s ears, but that only meant the hallucination had been visual as well as auditory.

‘What did you say?’ he whispered.

And this time, as clear as the words of a speaking parrot or a crow whose tongue had been split, the words were unmistakable: ‘It’s not the real Sematary …’ The eyes were vacant, not seeing, rimmed with blood; the mouth, grinning the large grin of a dead carp.

Horror rolled through Louis, gripping his warm heart in its cold hands, squeezing. It reduced him, made him less and less, until he felt like taking to his heels and running from this bloody, twisted, speaking head on the floor of the infirmary waiting room. He was a man with no deep religious training, no bent toward the superstitious or the occult. He was ill-prepared for this … whatever it was.

Fighting the urge to run with everything in him, he forced himself to lean even closer. ‘What did you say?’ he asked a second time.

The grin. That was bad.

‘The soil of a man’s heart is stonier, Louis,’ the dying man whispered. ‘A man grows what he can … and tends it.’ Louis, he thought, hearing nothing with his conscious mind after his own name. Oh my God he called me by my name.

‘Who are you?’ Louis asked in a trembling, papery voice. ‘Who are you?’

‘Injun bring my fish.’

‘How did you know my—’

‘Keep clear, us. Know—’

‘You—’

‘Caa,’ the young man said, and now Louis fancied he could smell death on his breath, internal injuries, lost rhythm, failure, ruin.

‘What?’ A crazy urge came to shake him.

‘Gaaaaaaaa—’

The young man in the red gym shorts began to shudder all over. Suddenly he seemed to freeze with every muscle locked. His eyes lost their vacant expression momentarily and seemed to find Louis’s eyes. Then everything let go at once. Louis thought he would, must, speak again. Then the eyes resumed their vacant expression … and began to glaze. He was dead.

Louis sat back, vaguely aware that all his clothes were sticking to him; he was drenched with sweat. Darkness bloomed, spreading a wing softly over his eyes, and the world began to swing sickeningly sideways. Recognizing what was happening, he half-turned from the dead man, thrust his head down between his knees, and pressed the nails of his left thumb and left forefinger into his gums hard enough to bring blood.

After a moment the world began to clear again.