Soon. He thought of the dark brown bottles of whiskey so near. Soon.
The halls and rooms were designed and built in the 50s, all Arborite and chrome, with 70s upgrades like faux stained glass lamps and dark wood paneling and room dividers decorated with super-graphics.
Time had stopped at an ugly time.
Borland wondered if that happened in efficient places. They were too busy doing their jobs in its deepest and darkest rooms-the OR and labs-unable to give more than a passing thought to decor.
Borland was aware of the ever-present hum and rattle of air conditioning units-the buzz and click of old light fixtures and the starched rustle of the scrubs worn by the nurses and orderlies.
He realized that the more he tried to shut them out, the more he noticed the sounds. And then he understood an important underlying factor.
He needed a drink.
Borland had been cranked for most of the last couple decades so sobriety was close to an alien concept. And that's what was pushing in on him, causing his ears to ring, allowing him to feel his pulse in his fingertips.
He needed a drink.
So he tried to distract himself with the nurses. They went by all manner of kind: fat, thin, broad, awkward or dippy; dressed in ill-fitting floral patterned pants and jackets.
And they made annoying rustling sounds when they moved.
As he glanced at their pastel forms he realized that the majority were approaching retirement. These ones either had their men or were moving into a new phase of life.
Join the crowd…
As he moved past a recreation room with a pool table, loungers and couches, Borland ignored the mincing nods of the new boys that needed friends, the salty glances of the seasoned who had stories to tell, and the normalizing, shifting gaze of those who desperately wanted to leave their hernias and all Shomberg associations behind them.
Borland had been through too much to fear a surgical procedure-even one he had to be awake for-but he knew enough about people and Variant to keep an eye out for the wrong kind of look.
There was a look, and he knew it.
The Effect was coming back and it could be, in fact was, lurking everywhere he looked in everyone he saw. Even in the doctors and nurses.
Everywhere, so then…
Then they wanted him to take powerful painkillers, lie down and have his abdomen cut open. He was supposed to trust a stranger to take him apart and stitch him back together.
They better have some world-class painkillers.
His hernias were 98 percent discomfort, two percent pain-he was used to them. He didn't care about his looks, so he could have put the procedures off pretty simply.
Until your liver falls out?
The nurse led him down the corridor, her voice a raspy horn of menopausal know-how, telling him about what he couldn't do and what he had to do.
"Don't remove your wristband. Don't remove your nametag. Wear it at all times," she ordered and glanced at his tag as he followed her into the room. "Your number is 328-2. The '2' stands for you." She walked to the head of a very narrow single bed by the window. "This bed is number '2', so you use it. Same as the closet." She pointed at a pair of closets marked '1' and '2.' "Anything with a '2' on it is yours." She smiled through a mass of tanned wrinkles. "Your roommate is number '1.'"
Roommate.
"Who's that?" Borland managed to hide his discomfort with the question. "I have to share at 200 bucks a night?"
"We're not the Best Western, Mr.," She looked down at his nametag. " Borland. Everybody gets a roommate at the Shomberg Clinic." The nurse looked into his eyes. "Who knows, you might accidentally make a friend."
Borland grumbled, scowling around the room.
"It's a little late, but you can probably still get some lunch. There's an orientation meeting at four o'clock," the nurse said, pulling a pamphlet from where it was shoved under the pillow on bed number 2. "Bring that card. They'll answer your questions there."
She turned and in a flurry of action guided her wide hips out the door.
Borland set his bags by the foot of the bed and dropped onto the mattress with a loud THUD.
He looked through the window at a group of tall pines that grew over a walking path. They were rusty brown and green and somehow felt clean to watch.
CHAPTER 6
Lunch?
Borland knew it was late enough in the day for any meal to qualify as supper, but he was hungry from all the waiting so he followed the river of patients that flowed to and from the dining room. They were milling about bored, coming and going, up and down the stairs. It was plain that if you weren't eating, you were walking around until the next meal.
It was an endless line of white hair and loose clothing, pulling magnetically, drawing Borland down the steps; they linked him to the daisy chain of aging.
He felt very old in such company.
Nothing new, he'd felt old for years, a fact pounded home by his hernias but for some reason the resolute, unrelenting shuffle of the hernia-borne, the operation and healing day patients; the core group of smiling gramps, hot wrinkles shot with red, chipped at his ability to confidently deny the overall affect of aging upon him.
He was feeling ancient and it was their fault.
This added to the fact that the gray beards automatically started to count him among their number, involve him in their mumbling irrelevance, made him reluctant to go to the dining room at all- besides, no drinking, no point.
And he'd never been big on company. The Variant Effect just made the apprehension worse. So Borland tended to eat at home or alone, choosing isolated places to sit or stand if he did have to be around people, especially when he was called upon to fraternize or like now, join the crew for dinner.
And especially if he was sober.
He needed a drink.
Then he imagined Brass setting the whole thing up. He'd know what the Shomberg Clinic was like, one of the strings he pulled would have told him how out of place Borland would be.
Brass was laughing…
Borland made his way into the room between 15 tables and 50 strangers and found himself exposed…too exposed. But then he'd walked too far, was up against a table full of patients snacking on cookies and drinking coffee, just a wall beyond them; nowhere to even sit and shield his eyes.
But a hand reached up on his left and patted his arm, drew him down to a seat between two total strangers. There was a group of five chairs around the table, and he sat closest to a man who looked about 35, was broad shouldered in his pajamas under a tousle of dark locks. That left an empty chair on Borland's right, and then a rough-looking woman with rusty, over-conditioned hair. She had a denim vest over a stained pullover and green slacks. Her earlobes sagged from the weight of cheap brass jewelry.
Borland kept his eyes low after he sat, and then bucked up enough to nod quickly to the other guests, confirming their existence without drawing too much attention to his own. Then he started nervously arranging his utensils.
It was a mixed group in the dining room. New patients were being served lunch, and others in the repair process were cadging an extra bite or snacking, while healing day patients tried to make up for missed meals.
Borland didn't like it.
His discomfort must have thrown his instincts off too, because he got a gut feeling just then that something was wrong but he disregarded it. Too much was happening. It could have been brought on by the hockey dad, or been coming from the woman. Maybe it was the weird little Chinese guy across from him listening to loud symphony music on his ear-buds, and slurping his water, but Borland got the feeling that something was wrong.
He could also blame the fact that he was drying out-sober, worried about spooks and zombies.