He began to open his eyes from time to time (or thought he did) and he could actually see the owners of those voices: bright, glowing, spectral shapes with no faces at first, sometimes moving about the room, sometimes bending over him. It didn't occur to him to try speaking to them, at least not at first. It came to him that this might be some sort of afterlife, and these bright shapes the shapes of angels.
The faces, like the voices, began to come clearer with time. He saw his mother once, leaning into his field of vision and slowly thundering something totally without meaning into his upturned face. His father was there another time. Dave Pelsen from school. A nurse he came to know; he believed her name was Mary or possibly Marie. Faces, voices, coming closer, jelling together.
Something else crept in: a feeling that he had changed. He didn't like the feeling. He distrusted it. It seemed to him that whatever the change was, it was nothing good. It seemed to him that it meant sorrow and bad times. He had gone into the darkness with everything, and now it felt to him that he was coming out of it with nothing at all-except for some secret strangeness.
The dream was ending. Whatever it had been, the dream was ending. The room was very real now, very close. The voices, the faces -He was going to come into the room. And it suddenly seemed to him that what he wanted to do was turn and run-to go back down that dark hallway forever. The dark hallway was not good, but it was better than this new feeling of sadness and impending loss.
He turned and looked behind him, and yes, it was there, the place where the room's walls changed to dark chrome, a corner beside one of the chairs where, unnoticed by the bright people who came and went, the room became a passageway into what he now suspected was eternity. The place where that other voice had gone, the voice of -The cab driver.
Yes. That memory was all there now. The cab ride, the driver bemoaning his son's long hair, bemoaning the fact that his son thought Nixon was a pig. Then the headlights breasting the hill, a pair on each side of the white line. The crash. No pain, but the knowledge that his thighs had connected with the taximeter hard enough to rip it out of its frame. There had been a sensation of cold wetness and then the dark hallway and now this.
Choose, something inside whispered. Choose or they'll choose for you, they'll rip you out of this place, whatever and wherever it is, like doctors ripping a baby out of its mother's womb by cesarian section.
And then Sarah's face came to him-she had to be out there someplace, although hers had not been one of the bright faces bending over his. She had to be out there, worried and scared. She was almost his, now. He felt that. He was going to ask her to marry him.
That feeling of unease came back, stronger than ever, and this time it was all mixed up with Sarah. But wanting her was stronger, and he made his decision. He turned his back on the dark place, and when he looked back over his shoulder later on, it had disappeared; there was nothing beside the chair but the smooth white wall of the room where he lay. Not long after he began to know where the room must be-it was a hospital room, of course. The dark hallway faded to a dreamy memory, never completely forgotten. But more important, more immediate, was the fact that he was John Smith, he had a girl named Sarah Bracknell, and he had been in a terrible car accident. He suspected that he must be very lucky to be alive, and he could only hope that all his original equipment was still there and still functioning. He might be in Cleaves Mills Community Hospital, but he guessed the EMMC was more likely. From the way he felt he guessed he had been here for some time-he might have been blacked out for as long as a week or ten days. It was time to get going again.
Time to get going again. That was the thought in Johnny's mind when things finally jelled all the way back together and he opened his eyes.
It was May 17, 1975. Mr. Starret had long since gone home with standing orders to walk two miles a day and mend his high cholesterol ways. Across the room was an old man engaged in a weary” fifteenth round with that all-time heavyweight champ, carcinoma. He slept the sleep of morphia, and the room was otherwise empty. It was 3 15 P. M. The TV screen was a drawn green shade.
“Here I am,” Johnny Smith croaked to no one at all. He was shocked by the “weakness of his voice. There was no calendar in the room, and he had no way of knowing that he had been out of it four-and-a-half years.
The nurse came in some forty minutes later. She went over to the old man in the other bed, changed his IV feed, went into the bathroom, and came out with a blue plastic pitcher. She watered the old man's flowers. There were over half a dozen bouquets, and a score of get-well cards standing open on his table and windowsill. Johnny watched her perform this homey chore, feeling as yet no urge to try his voice again.
She put the pitcher back and came over to Johnny's bed. Going to turn my pillows, he thought. Their eyes met briefly, but nothing in hers changed. She doesn't know I'm awake. My eyes have been open before. It doesn't mean anything to her.
She put her hand on the back of his neck. It was cool and comforting and Johnny knew she had three children and that the youngest had lost most of the sight of one eye last Fourth of July. A firecracker accident. The boy's name was Mark.
She lifted his head, flipped his pillow over, and settled him back. She started to turn away, adjusting her nylon
uniform at the hips, and then turned back, puzzled. Belatedly thinking that there had been something new in his eyes, maybe. Something that hadn't been there before.
She glanced at him thoughtfully, started to turn away again, and he said, “Hello, Marie.”
She froze, and he could hear an ivory dick as her teeth came suddenly and violently together. Her hand pressed against her chest just above the swell of her breasts. A small gold crucifix hung there. “0-my-God,” she said. “You're awake. I thought you looked different. How did you know my name?”
“I suppose I must have heard it. “It was hard to talk, terribly hard. His tongue was a sluggish worm, seemingly unlubricated by saliva.
She nodded. “You've been coming up for some time now. I'd better go down to the nurses” station and have Dr. Brown or Dr. Weizak paged. They'll want to know you're back with us. “But she stayed a moment longer, looking at him with a frank fascination that made him uneasy.
“Did I grow a third eye?” he asked.
She laughed nervously. “No… of course not. Excuse me.
His eye caught on his own window ledge and his table pushed up against it. On the ledge was a faded African violet and a picture of Jesus Christ-it was the sort of picture of Jesus his mother favored, with Christ looking as if he was ready to bat dean-up for the New York Yankees or something of a similar clean and athletic nature. But the picture was yellow. Yellow and beginning to curl at the corners. Sudden fear dropped over him like a suffocating blanket. “Nurse! he called. “Nurse!”
In the doorway she turned back.
“Where are my get-well cards?” Suddenly it was hard for him to breathe. “That other guy's got… didn't anyone send me a card?”
She smiled, but it was forced. It was the smile of some one who is hiding something. Suddenly Johnny wanted her by his bed. He would reach out and touch her. If he could touch her, he would know what she was hiding.
“I'll have the doctor paged,” she said, and left before he could say anything else. He looked at the African violet, at the aging picture of Jesus, baffled and afraid. After a little while, he drifted off to sleep again.