“Heart's still steady as a metronome,” Gina said when she saw Jonas. “I have a hunch, before the end of the week, this one's going to be out playing golf, dancing, doing whatever he wants.” She brushed at her bangs, which were an inch too long and hanging in her eyes. “He's a lucky man.”
“One hour at a time,” Jonas cautioned, knowing too well how Death liked to tease them by pretending to retreat, then returning in a rush to snatch away their victory.
When Gina and Helga left for the night, Jonas turned off all the lights. Illuminated only by the faint fluorescent wash from the corridor and the green glow of the cardiac monitor, room 518 was replete with shadows.
It was silent, too. The audio signal on the EKG had been turned off, leaving only the rhythmically bouncing light endlessly making its way across the screen. The only sounds were the soft moans of the wind at the window and the occasional faint tapping of rain against the glass.
Jonas stood at the foot of the bed, looking at Harrison for a moment. Though he had saved the man's life, he knew little about him. Thirty-eight years old. Five-ten, a hundred and sixty pounds. Brown hair, brown eyes. Excellent physical condition.
But what of the inner person? Was Hatchford Benjamin Harrison a good man? Honest? Trustworthy? Faithful to his wife? Was he reasonably free of envy and greed, capable of mercy, aware of the difference between right and wrong?
Did he have a kind heart?
Did he love?
In the heat of a resuscitation procedure, when seconds counted and there was too much to be done in too short a time, Jonas never dared to think about the central ethical dilemma facing any doctor who assumed the role of reanimator, for to think of it then might have inhibited him to the patient's disadvantage. Afterward, there was time to doubt, to wonder.… Although a physician was morally committed and professionally obligated to saving lives wherever he could, were all lives worth saving? When Death took an evil man, wasn't it wiser — and more ethically correct — to let him stay dead?
If Harrison was a bad man, the evil that he committed upon resuming his life after leaving the hospital would in part be the responsibility of Jonas Nyebern. The pain Harrison caused others would to some extent stain Jonas's soul, as well.
Fortunately, this time the dilemma seemed moot. Harrison appeared to be an upstanding citizen — a respected antique dealer, they said — married to an artist of some reputation, whose name Jonas recognized. A good artist had to be sensitive, perceptive, able to see the world more clearly than most people saw it. Didn't she? If she was married to a bad man, she would know it, and she wouldn't remain married to him. This time there was every reason to believe that a life had been saved that should have been saved.
Jonas only wished his actions had always been so correct.
He turned away from the bed and took two steps to the window. Five stories below, the nearly deserted parking lot lay under hooded pole lamps. The falling rain churned the puddles, so they appeared to be boiling, as if a subterranean fire consumed the blacktop from underneath.
He could pick out the spot where Kari Dovell's car had been parked, and he stared at it for a long time. He admired Kari enormously. He also found her attractive. Sometimes he dreamed of being with her, and it was a surprisingly comforting dream. He could admit to wanting her at times, as well, and to being pleased by the thought that she might also want him. But he did not need her. He needed nothing but his work, the satisfaction of occasionally beating Death, and the—
“Something's … out … there …”
The first word interrupted Jonas's thoughts, but the voice was so thin and soft that he didn't immediately perceive the source of it. He turned around, looking toward the open door, assuming the voice had come from the corridor, and only by the third word did he realize that the speaker was Harrison.
The patient's head was turned toward Jonas, but his eyes were focused on the window.
Moving quickly to the side of the bed, Jonas glanced at the electrocardiograph and saw that Harrison's heart was beating fast but, thank God, rhythmically.
“Something's … out there,” Harrison repeated.
His eyes were not, after all, focused on the window itself, on nothing so close as that, but on some distant point in the stormy night.
“Just rain,” Jonas assured him.
“No.”
“Just a little winter rain.”
“Something bad,” Harrison whispered.
Hurried footsteps echoed in the corridor, and a young nurse burst through the open door, into the nearly dark room. Her name was Ramona Perez, and Jonas knew her to be competent and concerned.
“Oh, Doctor Nyebern, good, you're here. The telemetry unit, his heartbeat—”
“Accelerated, yes, I know. He just woke up.”
Ramona came to the bed and switched on the lamp above it, revealing the patient more clearly.
Harrison was still staring beyond the rain-spotted window, as if oblivious of Jonas and the nurse. In a voice even softer than before, heavy with weariness, he repeated: “Something's out there.” Then his eyes fluttered sleepily, and fell shut.
“Mr. Harrison, can you hear me?” Jonas asked.
The patient did not answer.
The EKG showed a quickly de-accelerating heartbeat: from one-forty to one-twenty to one hundred beats a minute.
“Mr. Harrison?”
Ninety per minute. Eighty.
“He's asleep again,” Ramona said.
“Appears to be.”
“Just sleeping, though,” she said. “No question of it being a coma now.”
“Not a coma,” Jonas agreed.
“And he was speaking. Did he make sense?”
“Sort of. But hard to tell.” Jonas said, leaning over the bed railing to study the man's eyelids, which fluttered with the rapid movement of the eyes under them. REM sleep. Harrison was dreaming again.
Outside, the rain suddenly began to fall harder than before. The wind picked up, too, and keened at the window.
Ramona said, “The words I heard were clear, not slurred.”
“No. Not slurred. And he spoke some complete sentences.”
“Then he's not aphasic,” she said, “That's terrific.”
Aphasia, the complete inability to speak or understand spoken or written language, was one of the most devastating forms of brain damage resulting from disease or injury. Thus affected, a patient was reduced to using gestures to communicate, and the inadequacy of pantomime soon cast him into deep depression, from which there was sometimes no coming back.
Harrison was evidently free of that curse. If he was also free of paralysis, and if there were not too many holes in his memory, he had a good chance of eventually getting out of bed and leading a normal life.
“Let's not jump to conclusions,” Jonas said. “Let's not build up any false hopes. He still has a long way to go. But you can enter on his record that he regained consciousness for the first time at eleven-thirty, two hours after resuscitation.”
Harrison was murmuring in his sleep.
Jonas leaned over the bed and put his ear close to the patient's lips, which were barely moving. The words were faint, carried on his shallow exhalations. It was like a spectral voice heard on an open radio channel, broadcast from a station halfway around the world, bounced off a freak inversion layer high in the atmosphere and filtered through so much space and bad weather that it sounded mysterious and prophetic in spite of being less than half-intelligible.
“What's he saying?” Ramona asked.
With the howl of the storm rising outside, Jonas was unable to catch enough of Harrison's words to be sure, but he thought the man was repeating what he'd said before: “Something's … out there. …”