“The nurse says that the brain swelling has subsided and he’s responsive to sensory stimulation—which is good news.”
Beth nodded glumly. “His EEG is only four Herz; six to eight is for normal sleep. He’s still unconscious. How’s that good news?”
René let the jab pass. “Well, every brain injury is unique; so is the rate of recovery. He could just pop awake.”
“I don’t believe that.” Then she placed her hand on his arm. “Jack, it’s Beth. Please wake up. You’ve got a visitor. What did you say your name is?”
René told her again and studied Jack while Beth spoke to him in a flat, neutral voice. But there was no sign of response—not a twitch of an eyelid or a finger, not a hitch in his breathing.
“The doctors call it a persistent vegetative state.” She made an audible humpf. “More like he’s dead.”
Mercifully, her father had never passed into a coma, at least not technically. Toward the end he was conscious and unconscious at the same time. He could sit up in bed or in a wheelchair, move his eyes and hands. But inside he was nearly blanked out. And that’s what René could not take: the loss of recognition that animated the face, the vacant stare, the sudden spike of fright, the reduction of his mind to brain-stem reflexes, his strong voice and articulate words reduced to grunts, his bright eyes to blown fuses. A gaga thing attached to a diaper.
Thank God he had made her promise to let him die. He knew what was coming. It was his final gift to her.
“His vital signs look good,” René said, nodding at the steady beat of the monitors.
“I don’t know,” Beth said. “He’s had some kind of seizures and bad dreams that make him agitated and get that thing jumping all over the place.”
“But that means there’s activity in the frontal and occipital lobes, so his memory and vision sectors are functioning. And there’s no indication from the MRIs that he’d suffered a stroke.”
As René watched the persistent pulse on the monitors, she wondered what if anything was going on inside Jack’s mind. Was he dreaming or aware of his condition, or just suspended in a profound void? His brain had been saturated with the chemistry of Memorine. God knows what he might remember were he to even wake up.
“He never should have been out there. It’s got an undertow and all those damn poisonous fish and things. But no! And now he’s locked inside himself.” Then she looked at René in exasperation. “He could go on forever like this, right? Jesus!” she said in exasperation.
René could hear anger and resentment coiling around Beth Koryan’s words as if Jack had done this to her. The more Beth talked, the more it became clear that their marriage had not been a healthy, solid one—a suspicion that explained Beth’s chilly manner and the fact that there were no happy photographs of the two together.
“Who found him?”
“The Coast Guard. He was supposed to catch the water taxi back by seven, and when he didn’t show up by nine and didn’t answer his cell phone, the rental guy called.”
“It’s lucky they got to him in time.” The woman was not easily consoled, and this was the best René could come up with.
“Is it?”
The question squirmed between them. “Of course.”
Beth shrugged. “The thing is, he loved the sea. Look at that, I’m talking in the past tense already, like he’s dead. But he did—It’s in his blood, like his mother, which is kind of ironic, his getting himself poisoned, kind of like the ocean betrayed him. Those goddamn things show up something like three times in the last fifty years. He was in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
René noticed that the woman’s fingernails had been bitten to the quick.
“He could go on like this for years. Just lie there with these fucking tubes and wires and just shrivel up.”
“And he could still wake up any time.”
But it was as if Beth didn’t hear her, locked in some long-running narrative. “It’s all my fault. I shouldn’t have let him go alone. We had a fight, nothing new, and … now this is what we’ve got to live with.”
It seemed as if the woman had already consigned Jack to permanent unconsciousness and herself a life of bedside wife. And what René was hearing was blame and resentment.
Suddenly one of the machines made a double chirp. And on the screen the green little sawteeth made a series of ugly spikes.
“Shit! Another seizure,” Beth said, and got up. “Jack, calm down.”
He let out a high-pitched whine at the same time his eyes snapped open—so open that René half-expected his eyeballs to explode from their sockets.
“Amaaaaa!”
The sound cut through René like shrapnel. His voice must have carried, or somebody at the head desk was checking the monitors, because two nurses dashed into the room. Jack was thrashing and pulling against the lines connected to him. The nurses worked to restrain him since Jack was trying to rise from the bed to follow his cries, his eyes huge and staring at something that was terrifying him.
“Jesus, what’s happening to him?” Beth cried.
Jack continued babbling nonsense syllables.
“It doesn’t even sound like him. His voice. That isn’t his voice. It sounds like … a child.”
It did. And nobody said anything as the nurses tried to hold him down because Jack was pulling against his dressing and the tubes, his eyes bulging and focused on nothing across the room, but something awful swirling behind them.
“Ahamman maideek amaaa …,” Jack continued babbling.
“What’s he saying?” Beth asked.
“Maideek.”
“It sounds like ‘mighty’ something.”
Jack muttered more syllables. “Ammama …”
“I think he’s saying ‘Mama,’” René said.
“That’s not unusual,” one of the nurse replied. “Patients under stress even in comas call for their mothers.”
“That happens a lot,” the other nurse added. “We hear it all the time.”
“Except Jack didn’t have a mother.”
René looked at Beth. “What?”
“She died when he was a baby, and he was brought up by his aunt and uncle. He never called anyone mama.”
Jack started thrashing again, and to calm him down the smaller nurse produced a syringe of Valium and emptied it into Jack’s IV. In a minute or so, Jack gasped and deflated against his pillow, his eyes pulsing against closing lids until he slipped back to sleep with a solitary sigh rising from his lungs.
But before that happened, his eyes shot open again and he looked directly at René. And through his crusted mouth still glistening with analgesic ointment he formed the syllables: “Mama.”
“MAMA”
Jack Koryan was at the door again. He could hear the wind outside, but that was all. He was safe to go out and the knob wasn’t frozen again, so he turned until he heard the latch come free.
Instantly the door sucked open and in the flare he saw the large pointed creature standing over the big mouse, its feet twitching as the club came cracking down on it.
Then the door slammed shut and Jack was back in the cage.
And outside the night raged and flared.
Then all began to fade like distant thunder as black air mercifully closed around him.
19
Hartford, Connecticut
“SURE, I REMEMBER HOW TO GET there,” said William Zett, sitting in the passenger seat of his sister’s car.