Bekker sighed. His tongue slipped out, tasted salt. He looked down and found himself covered with a dark crust. Crust? He touched his chest with a fingertip. Blood. Drying blood…
He got to his feet, stiff, climbed the stairs, hunched over, touching each riser with his hands as he went up, and then went down the hall to the bathroom. He turned the tap handles, started the water running, ducked his head toward the sink, splashed cold water on his face, stood, looked into the mirror.
His face was pink, his chest still liver-red with the blood crust. He looked like the devil, he thought. The thought came naturally. Bekker knew all about the devil. His parents, immersed in the severities of their Christian faith, had hammered the devil into him, hammered in the old, dead words of Jonathan Edwards…
There are in the souls of wicked men those hellish principles reigning, that would presently kindle and flame out into hell fire, were it not for God's restraints.
He'd never seen God's restraints, Bekker had told the preacher one Sunday night. For that he had gotten a beating that at the time he thought would kill him. Had, in fact, not been able to go to school for a week, and had seen not a gram of pity in his parents' eyes.
Bekker, sopping up the blood, looked into the mirror and spoke the old words, still remembered: "God holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked. Bullshit."
But was it? Did the consciousness go somewhere after death? Was there a pit? The children he'd seen die, that change of gaze at the last instant… was that ecstasy? Did they see something beyond?
Bekker had studied the films taken by the Nazis at the death camps, stared into the filmed faces of dying medical experiments, films considered collectible by certain influential Germans… Was there something beyond?
Bekker's rational scientist mind said no: We are no more than animated mud, a conscious piece of dirt, the consciousness no more than a chemical artifact. Remember thou that thou art dust and to dust thou shalt return. Isn't that what the Catholics professed? Odd candor, for a Church Political. Whatever his rational mind said, the other parts, the instinctive parts, couldn't imagine a world without Beauty. He couldn't simply vanish… could he?
He glanced at his watch. He had time. With the proper medication… He looked out of the bathroom at the brass box on the bureau.
Michael Bekker, very smooth, a little of the cocaine, just a lick of the phencyclidine, slipped through the halls of University Hospital.
"Dr. Bekker…" A nurse, passing, calling him "Doctor." The word flushed him with power; or the lick of PCP did. Sometimes it was hard to tell.
The hallway lights were dimmed, for night. Three women in white sat under the brighter lights of the nursing station, thumbing through papers, checking medication requirements. Overhead, a half-dozen monitors, flickering like the components of a rich man's stereo system, tracked the condition of the ICU patients.
Bekker checked his clipboard. Hart, Sybil. Room 565. He headed that way, taking his time, past a private room where a patient was snoring loudly. He looked around quickly: nobody watching. Stepped inside. The patient was sound asleep, her head back, her mouth hanging open. Sounded like a chainsaw, Bekker thought. He went to the bedside table, opened the drawer. Three brown vials of pills. He took them out, half turned to the dim light coming in from the hall. The first was penicillamine, used to prevent kidney stones. No need for that. He put it back. Paramethasone. More kidney stuff. The third vial said "Chlordiazepoxide hydrochloride 25mg." He opened it, looked inside at the green-and-white caps. Ah. Librium. He could always use some Librium. He took half of the tablets, screwed the top back on the vial and put the vial in the drawer. The Librium caps he dropped into his pocket.
At the door, he stopped to listen. You had to be careful in this: nurses wore running shoes, and were silent as ghosts. But if you knew what to listen for, you could pick up the almost imperceptible squawk-squawk-squawk of the shoes on polished tile…
The hall was silent and he stepped out, squinting at his clipboard, ready to look confused if a nurse was in the hall. There were none, and he went on toward Sybil Hart's room.
Sybil Hart had raven hair and dark liquid eyes. She lay silently watching the screen of the television bolted into a corner of her room. An earplug was fitted in one ear, and although the inanities of late-night television sometimes made her want to scream… she didn't.
Couldn't.
Sybil Hart lay unmoving, propped semi-erect on her bed. She was not in the ICU proper, but was accessible, where the nurses could check her every half-hour or so. She'd be dead in three weeks, a month, killed by amyotrophic lateral sclerosis-ALS, Lou Gehrig's disease.
The disease had started with a numbness in the legs, a tendency to stumble. She'd fought it, but it had taken her legs, her bowel control, her arms and, finally, her voice. Now, and most cruelly, it had taken her facial muscles, including her eyelids and eyebrows.
As the ALS had progressed and her voice had gone, she'd learned to communicate through an Apple computer equipped with special hardware and a custom word-processing program. When the disease had taken her voice, she'd still had some control of her fingers, and using two fingers and a special switch, she could write notes almost as effortlessly as if she were typing.
When her fingers had gone, the therapist had fitted her with a mouth switch, and still she could talk. When her mouth control had gone, another special switch had been fitted to her eyebrow. Now that was going, was almost gone. Sybil Hart began to sink into the final silence, waiting for the disease to take her diaphragm. When it did, she would smother… in another two or three weeks…
In the meantime, there was nothing wrong with her brain and she could still move her eyes. The CNN commentator was babbling about a DEA raid on a drug laboratory at UCLA.
Bekker stepped inside her room and Sybil's eyes shifted to him.
"Sybil," he said, his voice quiet but pleasant. "How are you?"
He had visited her three times before, interested in the disease that incapacitated the body but left the brain alive. With each visit he'd seen further deterioration. The last time she had barely been able to respond with the word processor. A nurse had told him several days before that now even that was gone.
"Can we talk?" Bekker asked in the stillness. "Can you shift to your processor?"
He looked at the television in the corner of the room, but the screen stayed with CNN.
"Can you change it?" Bekker stepped closer to her bed, saw her eyes tracking him. He moved closer, peering into them. "If you can change it, make your eyes go up and down, like you're nodding. If you can't, make them go back and forth, like you're shaking your head."
Her eyes moved slowly back and forth.
"You're telling me you can't change it?"
Her eyes moved up and down.
"Excellent. We're communicating. Now… just a moment." Bekker stepped away from Sybil's bed and looked down the corridor. He could see just the corner of the nurses' station, a hundred feet away, and the cap on the head of a nurse, bowed over the desk, busy. Nobody else. He went back to the bed, pulled a chair up and sat where Sybil could see him. "I would like to explain my studies to you," he said. "I'm studying death, and you're going to be a wonderful participant."
Sybil's eyes were fixed on him as he began to talk.
And when he left, fifteen minutes later, she looked up at the CNN commentator and began to strain. If only… if only. It took twenty minutes, exhausting her, but suddenly there was a click and the word processor was up. Now. She needed a B.
When the nurse came by a half-hour later, Sybil was staring at the word processor. On the screen was a single B.
"Oh, what happened?" the nurse asked.
They all knew Sybil Hart could no longer operate the equipment. They'd left the switch attached because her husband had insisted. For morale. "You must've had a little twitch, there," the nurse said, patting Sybil's unfeeling leg. "Let me get the TV back for you."