فصل سیزدهم

THIRTEEN

Then the room filled up with people, as if they were all only actors, waiting for their cue. This only added to Louis’s feeling of unreality and disorientation – the strength of these feelings, which he had studied in psychology classes but never actually experienced, frightened him badly. It was, he supposed, the way a person would feel shortly after someone had slipped a powerful dose of LSD into his drink.

Like a play staged only for my benefit, he thought. The room is first conveniently cleared so the dying Sybil can speak a few lines of oblique prophecy to me and me alone, and as soon as he’s dead, everyone comes back.

The candy-stripers bungled in, one on each end of the hard stretcher, the one they used for people with spinal or neck injuries. Joan Charlton followed them, saying that the campus police were on their way. The young man had been struck by a car while jogging. Louis thought of the joggers who had run in front of his car that morning and his guts rolled.

Behind Charlton came Steve Masterton with two Campus Security cops. ‘Louis, the people who brought Pascow in are …’ He broke off and said sharply, ‘Louis, are you all right?’ ‘I’m okay,’ he said, and got up. Faintness washed over him again and then withdrew. He groped. ‘Pascow is his name?’ One of the campus cops said, ‘Victor Pascow, according to the girl he was jogging with.’ Louis glanced at his watch and subtracted two minutes. From the room where Masterton had sequestered the people who had brought Pascow in, he could hear a girl sobbing wildly. Welcome back to school, little lady, he thought. Have a nice semester. ‘Mr Pascow died at 10:09 a.m.,’ he said.

One of the cops wiped the back of his hand across his mouth.

Masterton said again, ‘Louis, are you really okay? You look terrible.’

Louis opened his mouth to answer, and one of the candy-stripers abruptly dropped her end of the hard stretcher and ran out, vomiting down the front of her pinafore. A phone began to ring. The girl who had been sobbing now began to scream the dead man’s name – ‘Vic! Vic! Vic!’ – over and over. Bedlam. Confusion. One of the cops was asking Charlton if they could have a blanket to cover him up and Charlton was saying she didn’t know if she had the authority to requisition one and Louis found himself thinking of a line from Maurice Sendak: ‘Let the wild rumpus start!’ Those rotten giggles rose in his throat again, and somehow he managed to bottle them up. Had this Pascow really said the words Pet Sematary? Had this Pascow really spoken his name? Those were the things that were knocking him off-kilter, the things that had sent him wobbling out of orbit. But already his mind seemed to be wrapping those few moments in a protective film – sculpting, changing, disconnecting. Surely he had said something else (if he had indeed spoken at all), and in the shock and unhappy passion of the moment, Louis had misinterpreted it. More likely, Pascow had only mouthed sounds, as he had at first thought.

Louis groped for himself, for that part of himself that had caused the administration to give him this job over the other fifty-three applicants for the position. There was no one in command here, no forward motion; the room was full of milling people.

‘Steve, go give that girl a trank,’ he said, and just saying the words made him feel better. It was as if he were in a rocket-ship under power now, pulling away from a tiny moonlet. Said moonlet being, of course, that irrational moment when Pascow had spoken. He had been hired to take charge; he was going to do it.

‘Joan. Give the cop a blanket.’

‘Doctor, we haven’t inventoried—’

‘Give it to him anyway. Then check on that candy-striper.’ He looked at the other girl, who still held her end of the hard stretcher. She was staring at Pascow’s remains with a kind of hypnotized fascination. ‘Candy-striper!’ Louis said harshly, and her eyes jerked away from the body.

‘W-W-Wh—’

‘What’s the other girl’s name?’

‘W-Who?’

‘The one who puked,’ he said with deliberate harshness.

‘Juh-Juh-Judy. Judy DeLessio.’

‘Your name?’

‘Carla.’ Now the girl sounded a little more steady.

‘Carla, you go check on Judy. And get that blanket. You’ll find a pile of them in the little utility closet off Examining Room One. Go, all of you. Let’s look a little professional here.’ They got moving. Very shortly the screaming in the other room quieted. The phone, which had stopped ringing, now began again. Louis pushed the HOLD button without picking the receiver up off its cradle.

The older campus cop looked more together, and Louis spoke to him: ‘Who do we notify? Can you give me a list?’ The cop nodded and said, ‘We haven’t had one of these in six years. It’s a bad way to start the semester.’ Louis punched one of the unlighted buttons on the phone and started making his calls without bothering to check who he had on hold.