He closed his laptop, slid it into his bag, stood up, and followed a debris trail of medical wrappers to the elevator lobby, which he reached just in time to glimpse Richard’s gray face and wired-up torso as a pair of doors glided shut on it. He punched the “down” button and waited for the next lift in a very odd state of mind. Nothing was certain yet. Word had not yet gone out on what Dodge referred to as the Miasma. Corporation 9592’s stock had not begun to slide. Standing there alone in that lobby, he could convince himself that he had just imagined it, suffered a kind of waking nightmare. If Dodge was about to die, should the world not have been crumbling all about him? Should the streets not have been full of wailing gamers? And yet the elevator lobby was just an elevator lobby, changeless as the stars.
When he reached the ground floor he was able to follow a trail of shocked bystanders—security guards, incoming patients, scrub-wearing medics waiting in line for their lattes—to an exit of the building just in time to see an ambulance peel out. A moment later it turned on its lights and its siren.
Corvallis broke into a run. He was able to keep pace with the ambulance for about a block as it negotiated some turns, slowing to honk in righteous fury at a dim-witted motorist, then cutting across six lanes of traffic. Presently it went around a corner and disappeared from view behind a vast hospital, but Corvallis was able to track it by sound, and compare those findings with red signs pointing the way to EMERGENCY. Dodge’s ambulance ride had been all of about three blocks long. They could almost have rolled him there on the gurney.
Corvallis resisted an urge to just run out into traffic, the way characters did in movies. He whacked buttons and waited in law-abiding fashion for pedestrian signals, then ran when he could. He reached the emergency room perhaps sixty seconds after the ambulance had pulled in. Dodge had already been wheeled in past the reception barrier. Here the receptionists were shielded behind thick walls of glass, like inner-city liquor store clerks, and watched over by ceiling-mounted cameras in black glass bubbles, as well as an actual human security guard who seemed a little distracted by what had just blown by him. Corvallis found himself on the outside of the glass barricade, sharing a waiting room with a Hispanic construction worker who had damaged his left hand and a stocky black woman who was texting. The nurse behind the glass wall asked Corvallis whether she could help him. He sensed that she was sizing him up, putting her training to use as she evaluated him for signs of trauma or mental illness. He was wearing khaki trousers and an old T-shirt with a black raincoat. He approached the glass wall and explained that he was with the man who had just been wheeled in from the ambulance.
He didn’t make it past the barrier. It was some kind of policy issue regarding Corvallis’s actual relationship to the patient. He and Richard had not come in together. Richard had not formally designated Corvallis as his wingman. Corvallis could have been anyone. For all they knew, he was a mentally ill person who had just followed the ambulance in. Or perhaps Richard and Corvallis were lovers, and it was a domestic violence situation. The nurse at the front desk had no way of knowing. She had made some remark about “next of kin.” This shut him up and sent him to the nearest waiting room chair. Partly because it was a disturbing turn of phrase and partly because, yes, of course, that was his highest responsibility at this moment: to get in touch with Zula Forthrast and let her know that she needed to come to the hospital.
She was there twenty minutes later, breathing hard. She had simply run from her condo, which was less than a mile away in the adjoining hilltop neighborhood. She worked part-time now, mostly from home, which was within walking distance of Sophia’s preschool. The Forthrast family had adopted her, at the age of seven, from an orphanage in Eritrea, and raised her in a farm town in Iowa. Her adoptive mother had died in an accident and she had become a ward of the whole extended family. Corvallis wasn’t certain who her parents were according to the letter of the law, but she’d become very close to her uncle Richard. Corvallis saw her running down the sidewalk, puffs of steam coming from her mouth. To have come here on foot was an unusual choice, but just the sort of calculation that Zula would make; the distance was such that she could cover it this way faster than it would take to summon an Uber. She slowed to a fast walk as she approached the building. The glass doors opened for her automatically. She was wearing a sweater and jeans and toting the knapsack she often used in lieu of a purse; she hadn’t bothered with a hat or a raincoat. Her uncontained hair had drawn humidity from the air and was a bedewed, corkscrewy glory. As she came in she recognized Corvallis, who had stood up. She took a step in his direction before correcting her course to the nurses’ station. “Zula Forthrast,” she announced, reaching for her wallet. “Here to see my uncle Richard Forthrast.” She slid her driver’s license across the counter. “I was told he was here.” And only then did she look up and meet Corvallis’s eye. She looked alert and interested. After some of the things she had lived through, nothing much could make her distraught. Not that she didn’t have feelings, but she’d learned how to wall them off. The events of a few years ago had thrust her into the public spotlight for a while, forced her to develop the knack that all famous people had of maintaining a certain persona while exposed to the gaze of strangers. It was serving her well now. She had a kind of distracted air about her, and Corvallis couldn’t tell whether she was dazed by the news or being wry. How many things could go wrong in her life?
“Nothing is simple with my uncle, huh?” she said.
“Nope” was the best Corvallis could come up with.
“How bad is it?” she asked.
He didn’t know what to say.
“It’s pretty bad, huh?” she said. Giving him permission.
“I kinda got the sense that it was super bad,” he admitted.
She nodded and blinked.
The nurse informed them that Richard had already been transferred to the ICU and gave them an idea of how to find it.
Corvallis and Zula went down the suggested hallway, found some elevators, and began to navigate the three-dimensional labyrinth of the hospital. Other patients or medical staff were always getting in between them, and so they didn’t try to talk. Zula sent a couple of text messages, then tilted her head back to trap some tears in the pouches of her eyes.
Finally they got to the entrance of the intensive care unit. “Here we go,” Zula said.
“Is there anything—” Corvallis began, but she strode ahead of him and approached the nurse at the front desk. “Zula Forthrast,” she said. “Next of kin of Richard Forthrast, who I think was just brought up here. Is there anyone who can give us the rundown? We have no information whatsoever yet about his condition.”
They found themselves sitting in a small office that, Corvallis guessed, had been placed here specifically for conversations of this type. Modern sofas formed a right-angled U around a coffee table with flowers in a vase. Kleenex boxes competed for space with Purell dispensers. Takeout menus for local restaurants were neatly arranged in a binder; the Wi-Fi password was handwritten on the inevitable Post-it note. A big window afforded a rain-spotted view down the hill to the central business district, white sky above it and gray sea below.
A perfunctory knock on the door preceded the entrance of a scrub-wearing man in his forties. Asian-American, heavy-framed eyeglasses chosen to fit a square face. He introduced himself as Dr. Trinh and invited everyone to make themselves comfortable on the available seating.