A day came when a new voice cut through the babble. A woman’s voice, half-familiar, but it wasn’t until he heard his doctor arguing with her that he realized it was Jule’s wife, Emma.
“Are you fucking crazy ?” That much morphine for two weeks—”
“Six days,” the other voice protested.
“—you goddamn bastards, you’re trying to kill him, aren’t you? You fucking cannibals.”
There was a clatter and the sound of scuffling, a shriek, and feeble applause from one of the other cots.
“—sterile, you’re not sterile !” the doctor cried.
“I’ll sterilize you, you son of a bitch—”
What happened next was mostly pain, experienced at varying speeds, as Dr. Emma Isikoff shouted and waved her phone and stalked between cots, yanking up patients’ charts and scanning them. “‘Morphine.’ ‘Morphine.’ ‘Morphine! ’ ” she read, and in a rage threw the last chart onto an IV pump. “What, is this Verdun? You’re killing them! ”
Jack still hadn’t managed to do more than shake his head admiringly, when Emma commandeered a wheelchair from somewhere, lifted him, and deposited him gently on the frayed vinyl seat, thick with duct tape and newspaper padding. The trip from the hospital to Lazyland was a blur, barely glimpsed through the filthy, barbed-wire-framed windows of Emma’s Range Rover. And the next few days were horrible, more fever and convulsions from the abrupt morphine withdrawal, and a new regime of herbs and antibiotics administered by Emma.
“Remember that scene in Gone with the Wind? That’s what it was like in there.” Emma was a neurosurgeon on the staff at Northern Westchester, where (apparently) sick people were treated like gold: when the power went they operated by candlelight and never lost a patient. “Next time you have a seizure and go to the emergency room, I want you to call me, okay? Jesus.”
Jack smiled. Emma’s shift—nine days on, four days off—allowed her to stay with him. Which was lucky, since Keeley was too frail to serve as nurse, and all of Jack’s brothers were too far away or, in Dennis’s case, too burdened with their own children to help out.
The terrible illness turned out to be flu. It had not progressed into pneumonia (“No thanks to them,” Emma snarled), which almost certainly would have killed him. Paradoxically, the morphine might have helped, by forcing him to rest.
“But no more drugs, understand? Unless I give them to you. And I’m taking these,” she announced, the bottle of alprazolam clutched in her fist like the scalp of an enemy. “I mean, are you totally insane? I told you these interact with tricyclics, not to mention you could get sleep apnea. Jesus!” Emma was small and round and blond as a newborn chick; Leonard called her Doctor Duck. She shoved the alprazolam into a pocket and pulled another bottle from his nightstand. “Who gave you these? Not Dr. Kornel, tell me Ed Kornel did not prescribe these—”
Jack gestured weakly. “Leonard,” he croaked.
“Leonard! Leonard! ” Emma actually jumped up and down in fury, blond curls shaking and floppy sweater rising to give him a glimpse of her round white stomach. For an instant Jack thought she would explode, like Rumpelstiltskin. “If Leonard Thrope told you to jump off the—”
“Emma. Please.”
Emma stopped and took a deep breath. She smoothed her hair, opened her voluminous leather sack, and dropped the bottle into its maw. “Okay. Okay. Leonard wants to kill you and take pictures of your rotting corpse, that’s okay with me. Okay? But not on my watch. If you are going to pop whatever Leonard gives you, Jackie, then I am going to stop coming to save you. Because I don’t want to be the one talking to the ambulance crew. Understand?”
“Okay,” he whispered. “But,” he couldn’t resist adding, “you know, I’ve taken them before and nothing—”
Emma fixed him with a glare. “You are playing Russian roulette with your body, Jack—”
I thought it was pinball; but Jack only nodded.
“—anyway, here. I brought you these.” She placed a number of small brown glass dropper-bottles on his nightstand, each with its hand-lettered label in Emma’s miniscule penmanship. “Skullcap, that’ll help you sleep only not too much because it can cause bad dreams plus there’s a possible reverse effect of insomnia. Valerian, blessed thistle. More echinacea. Here’s some goldenseal. And garlic.” She dropped a fat papery corm in his lap.
“Jeez. Vampires now, I’m worried about vampires?”
“Jule said you were having bad dreams.”
“And indigestion will help me?”
Emma gathered her things: stained white linen jacket, Zabar’s shopping bag, leather purse. She leaned over and kissed Jack’s forehead, let her hand rest there a moment. He remembered seeing her do that to Rachel when she had chicken pox, not so much testing for fever as she seemed to be seeking to draw it out through her palm.
She hesitated. “Dreams. What did you dream, Jack?”
He shook his head. “Nothing,” he lied. “Just—you know. Some nightmare I don’t remember. Night terrors.”
Emma nodded. “Rachel used to have those,” she said. She always made a point of talking about Rachel. It made Jack uncomfortable, this false bravura; after two years he preferred Jules’ unrelenting drunken grief. “Has Julie told you about what he’s dreamed?”
Jack moved the garlic to the side table. “No,” he said, curious. “What kind of dreams?”
Emma eyed him thoughtfully. “Just—dreams,” she said finally. “I better go, sweetie. I wish I could stay—”
“Hush—” He held out his hand. She took it, and he saw tears in her eyes, a terrible weariness. “You’re my angel, Emma.”
She bent to kiss his forehead. “Lots of rest, lots of fluids—no alcohol!—and please, please, watch your meds. Okay? Okay.”
He watched her go, hearing her cheery good-byes to Grandmother and Mrs. Iverson as she descended through the house. Then he crawled back beneath the covers and fell asleep.
A week later Leonard arrived. It was eight-thirty on a Friday morning. Jack was always unnerved at the way Leonard kept these businessman’s hours; such discipline gave weight and credence to Leonard’s work, which even after all these years Jack preferred to think of as a repellent hobby, like Leonard’s penchant for S/M and body piercings.
But Leonard was a businessman, the very modern avatar of artist as financial entrepreneur—even his T-cell count was part of his portfolio. He traveled via a vast seal-gray diesel-powered limousine that belched foul smoke and was reputedly a gift from a Russian heroin overlord. And Leonard traveled with an entourage, an amorphous group which changed with current fashions—this week young and blond and trembling from amphetamines and IZE excess; next week a half dozen street people with the dull crimson eyes of birds of prey, who left the leather interior of the limo flecked with scabs and dead skin and spit.
Jack shuddered each time he heard the car entering Lazyland’s compound. He had long since forsaken going outside to greet his friend, for fear of finding himself face-to-face with lepers flown in from Bangladesh or some convicted serial murderer sprung from prison by Leonard’s army of legal counselors. Instead Jack tracked Leonard’s current cult status by means of outdated tabloids or patter overheard on TV. Leonard himself he always recognized, because in twenty years Leonard had not altered his uniform of gold and black leather. Though the gold was more subtle now, the leather was cracked and faded as old gesso, and Leonard’s flamboyant mane of curling black hair was streaked with gray and braided into a single long plait.