“Denny!”
Jackie hurriedly turned Denny over. She frantically felt for a pulse on his neck. She laid him out on the table and she pumped at his chest.
“Alex!”
She opened the door and screamed again.
The ambulance pulled away with Denny. Not heading to the hospital but the morgue.
Alex, the small woman who helped run Lantern, held her arms crossed around her chest.
“What happened, Jackie?”
Jackie told her: she had been in the testing room and returned and Denny was slumped, laboring for breath. He was conscious but barely. He muttered some things that didn’t make sense.
“Like what?” Alex asked.
“I’m not sure.” That much was true. Then she stared at Alex. Where had Alex been in all of this?
Jackie couldn’t piece it together. She kept seeing these odd images, like dream moments but they were paved over with this YouTube video of this beautiful soprano voice and the thrilling opera rehearsal. Images bubbled to the surface: Alex greeting Denny and Jackie; Denny sipping tea; Jackie climbing into the experiment chamber. That was the one that stuck. Glorious images of the opera.
The machine, the Lantern machine she’d help perfect, had stunned her electrical system, effectively erasing her very short-term memory, the last six hours of her life, give or take, leaving her with the worst hangover of her life, not a headache, but a veritable blackout.
“I loved him,” Jackie said. She wiped her face, removing a tear. “What he stood for.”
“I’m not sure he told you what he stood for,” Alex said.
“He did, Alex. Everything. He was like a fathe—”
“Not now. Okay.” Alex turned to Jackie. “You’re not going to stop this.”
“Wait a second. You…” Jackie took a step backward, images spinning in her mind. “Did you… did you put me in that chamber? What did you do to me?”
“What did I do to you?”
“What did you do to Denny?” Jackie demanded. “You poisoned him.”
“You’re insane,” Alex said.
“Don’t you dare put this on me!”
“Time to put this project on hold,” Alex muttered.
Jackie looked at the woman’s face and couldn’t tell if she saw sincerity or setup. She felt herself swimming in lost time; images and sounds of the opera. She’d been Lanterned. She had her suspicions of what had happened here today, but only glimpses in a world gone dark, bits of evidence from the hours preceding her date with Google’s latest technology. What had really happened? She felt a gust of wind and ran for her car.
Present Day
Thirty-Three
The ring woke Lyle at last.
“Dr. Martin?”
“Right.”
“This is the front desk.”
“Okay, got it. What time is it?”
“Eleven fifty. We rang at ten, then knocked and then finally—”
“In the what?”
“What?”
“Morning or night?” It was completely dark in the room, the curtains pulled tight.
“Morning. Are you… are you okay, sir?”
“Yes. Thanks for the call.”
Lyle started to set the phone on the cradle. He pulled it back.
“One more question, young lady.”
“Of course. We’re here to help.”
“Where am I?”
“Steamboat. Springs. The Sheraton. Are you sure…”
Lyle, the phone now nestled between his left shoulder and his chin, had stopped listening. He ran his hands over the undershirt on his chest and down over his hips, feeling for sensation. The woman on the phone had asked something about whether he wanted coffee or orange juice delivered to the room. She sounded worried about him. “Coffee,” he said, and he reached over and set the phone in its cradle.
He closed his eyes and studied his dull headache. Was he sick? Maybe he’d just overslept. Maybe he’d dipped too deep this time into the over-the-counter sleeping medication. His kingdom for the prescription pad back.
Wasn’t he here for a conference? He swung his legs off the side of the bed and fought a wave of nausea. It was brief. He steadied himself. He felt another symptom, a sore of some kind inside his mouth, on his tongue. He ran his finger along its right side and could feel it was raw, like he’d bitten it. He lay there, exploring these odd sensations in his body, exhaustion but it felt like more than that. Less than five minutes later, there was a knock on the door. Lyle stood and pulled open the curtains, which were vertically striped with brown and gray, and immediately regretted it. It wasn’t just light but bright white, new snow white. Now he pictured arriving at the hotel, late at night, or early in the morning, in the cold. He’d gone right to bed. The small room, with quaint accents, spoke to what he figured must be precious real estate here on the edge of the ski mountain.
He opened the door to discover a woman in a smart gray pantsuit. She held a silver coffee tray in her arms but awkwardly so, and she had no name tag. At that moment, Lyle correctly deduced she wasn’t a bellhop or waiter bringing room service. She must be a manager, Lyle thought, from the way she looked past him and into the room.
“I’m fine,” he said, “much better now that I’ve got coffee.”
“On the house,” said the woman. “May I bring it inside?”
“Sure,” he said. Let her knock herself out. Over the last few years, as he’d had more to drink and taken more pills to sleep, he’d grown accustomed to friends and family occasionally peeking in. It was funny, in a way, the way they’d always walk into his studio apartment on Divis and look around as if they were somehow looking around his liver for spots.
She put the tray with the coffee decanter and newspaper on the nightstand beneath a lamp with a wide-brim opaque oval shade. Lyle watched the room through her eyes as she scanned his jeans on the floor, and the suitcase left near the foot of the bed, the bedspread strewn. The woman, trying to look nonchalant, glanced at the darkened mouth of the bathroom.
“Do you need to use it?” Lyle asked.
“No, I—”
“Just kidding. May I ask, do you know which floor the I.D. conference is on?”
“Conference?”
“Sorry, infectious disease.”
She straightened. “I don’t think…” She paused. “We had an orthopedist conference last week, y’know, the guys who help the skiers and their knees, but I don’t think we have anything this week. I could be wrong, or maybe the event is at a different hotel?” She ended it with a kind of question mark, as if she had somehow made a mistake.
Lyle thanked her and watched her go. He looked at his invite, which suggested he had the right place. Had he written down the date wrong or misunderstood it? That wouldn’t be unlike him, he realized. He’d really sunk the last few months. That’s why he’d wanted to come out here and try, at least, to restart. Maybe it just wasn’t to be. How could he have made a mistake like that?
For some reason, each time he reached for an answer, he found himself humming the words from a song. It was Bruce Springsteen’s “Nebraska,” which talks of a man losing faith and getting up and finding “a reason to believe.” In the last year, after a beer or two, Lyle would watch the video on YouTube of a concert from Germany where Springsteen had crushed it. Lyle kept the video bookmarked and now, for some reason, he couldn’t get it out of his head.
He looked down at the newspaper, Steamboat Today. The main story had to do with a prediction that El Niño would mean a glorious wet winter for the mountain town. This qualified here for front-page news. At the bottom of the page, a teaser about a shootout in Oregon caught Lyle’s attention. He turned to page 3 to read about this, yet another, tragedy: a group of separatists had killed three federal marshals before being beaten back in a massive gun exchange. Inside the group’s compound, police found a cache of weapons that one official described as “rivaling that of the Portland police force.” There were plans the group had tried to shred, but failed, that showed alliances with groups in two other states, Idaho and Minnesota, partly over grievances with the appointment of federal judges that group professed to dislike.