A Small Matter (20 page)

“I hate to say it,” Dalk said, “but we’ll
have to let him eat in the car. We have no choice. The beast has
paws the size of a man’s fists--he might decide to claw us to death
if we hold him back from his breakfast.”

“He wouldn’t hurt a flea,” Vickie said. “He’s
a big foot-warmer. When we get to Westwood, stop at a music store
before we go to the hospital--there’s some stuff I need.”

Vickie felt tears stinging her eyelids, but
she fluttered them back. It wouldn’t do for Dalk to see her
disappointment in his lack of faith--his insistence on doctors. She
didn’t blame him. He was, after all, only a man, and he hadn’t had
the chance, as had she, to peek through the doorway to Heaven, to a
realm beyond the one the big Mercedes currently cruised, a world of
pizza’s and laundromats and designer boots, where men collapsed
from failing hearts and women prayed them back to the world of
light, pain and noise they called home.

She didn’t blame him.

Chapter 30

“Not to cast a shadow,” Dr. Lerner said,
“even though he’s off life-support, even with some luck, the
mathematical odds are heavily stacked against Mulroney.”

Vickie, Dalk and Dr. Lerner stood in the
hall, away from Mulroney’s bed where he lay, hooked up to
everything the techno-society in which he existed could throw at
him to measure, if possible, the degree to which it could be
positively ascertained, scientifically speaking, that he still had
a soul.

“When we decided to get married,” Vickie
said, “I promised my whole lifetime to him--I had no idea it would
be so temporary. I was going to make it as good as I could while it
lasted--but this isn’t how I’d planned it--I thought I’d be the one
who went first.”

“Mulroney beat us all to the punch,” Lerner
said. “Now, instead of being in a position to work within the known
matrix of possible outcomes, and restore him to a better life,
we’re in the unfortunate position of having to decide whether or
not to work outside the envelope in an attempt to save what we can
of him, or to simply let him go.”

“Let him go?” Vickie said. “You mean let him
die?”

“It’s my opinion,” Dr. Lerner said, “that the
risks are high he’ll die if we simply leave him as he is--that is
to say, if we don’t operate and repair the blockage in his
arteries. It’s probably only a matter of time before there’s a
change for the worse. The longer he lays there, comatose, the
faster his condition will degrade and the sooner it will be that
his starving heart will once again give out. I should also probably
warn you that if we elect to operate on him while he’s comatose,
it’s probably not something covered by your
insurance--unfortunately, it’s something you have to factor into
your decision as to what you’re going to do.”

“Mulroney isn’t disposable,” Vickie said.
“He’s not an economic issue. He’s my husband.”

“I assume then,” Dr. Lerner said, “you’re
ready to sign the consent form for us to go in and make the
necessary repairs.”

“I need to be alone with him for awhile, if
it’s all right,” she said. “It’s not a simple decision. We’ve had a
lot of setbacks lately. Yesterday I was sure my husband was dead.
Now I have to decide if I want my husband to undergo high-risk
major surgery while he’s still in a coma. It scares me. What if
he’s alive in there, imprisoned inside his brain, screaming to get
out? What if he’s hearing and feeling everything going on around
him? I know Mulroney. He’d never consent to being a brain sitting
inside a repaired, but unconscious body. If he’s in there, he
either wants to be fully alive or fully dead. If we repair his
body, but he doesn’t come back, that means he’ll wind up in a coma
ward somewhere--stored like a vegetable. Mulroney’s a Catholic, a
retired street cop. He’d never choose a life where his human nature
was so drastically compromised. It’s terrible to say this--but
whatever happened to letting people die? Where is it written that
you people have to interfere with everybody the way you do?”

“Have the desk page me when you’ve made a
decision,” Lerner said, turning on her heel and walking briskly
away, denied, for the moment, the pleasures of the knife.

“I hid the boom box and the CD in the room
like you asked me to,” Dalk said.

“Where did you hide it?”

“Under the bed--it’s cued up--all you have to
do is press the Play button.”

“I’m so nervous,” Vickie said. “This had
better work.”

“If it doesn’t, are you going to have Lerner
go in?” Dalk said.

“Are you kidding me?” Vickie said. “They’d
turn him into a vegetable--or worse yet, they’d lose him on the
table and come out with a lot of sorry medicalspeak about why they
couldn’t save him.”

“Think about it,” Dalk said. “This is the
most advanced center of medicine in the world.”

“That doesn’t give them a license to banish
pain and death from the planet,” Vickie said. “It means that
they’ve been able to raise a lot of money from all the rich old
geezers up in the hills who think these doctors can give them a few
more years if they donate enough money to the research wing.”

Dalk checked his watch. “I’m meeting Mary-Jo
in the cafeteria,” he said.

“I’ll meet you there in a few minutes,”
Vickie said. “I’m going in now to see my husband.”

“Wait, Vickie,” Dalk said. “Maybe I shouldn’t
have, knowing how you feel about him, but I called Toyama. With
your permission, I’d like to have him try to bring Mulroney back.
He’s fairly certain he can work a miracle.”

“Dalk,” Vickie said, “we already discussed
how I feel about your sensei’s magic. He still thinks he can set
out a plate of roasted mice and tempt everybody’s “fox demon” to
come running out to the feast. I hardly think the hospital is going
to allow your sensei to come in here with his gold amulets and do
his “soul polishing”, or whatever it is that he calls it.”

“Vickie,” Dalk said. “Toyama's already
here--he’s been here for the past two days, sleeping in the lobby
and saying prayers for Mulroney. You know darn well you’re going to
try a little magic yourself, with your magic rosary. What can it
hurt if I have Toyama try his hand? We need a miracle here. After
all, aren’t miracles the bridge between ourselves and God?”

“I’ll be honest with you,” Vickie said.
“Toyama gives me the creeps. I’m sorry to have to say that, but he
does. The man is obsessed with rats. Everything he’s involved in
has a dead rat as part of the ceremony. Does he have his little rat
bag with him? I bet he does.”

“It’s not a rat bag, per se,” Dalk said.
“It’s got other stuff in it--and rats are highly revered in the
Orient. The Chinese named a whole year for them. For Toyama, the
rat is an important part of the nativity legend of Mahikari,
inspired by the story wherein the spirit rat bites Mahikari’s toe
after she painlessly brings forth the messiah.”

“I can’t believe you’d push for Toyama's
services at a time like this,” she said. “I know you mean well, but
I’m going to upchuck my blueberry pie if we continue this
discussion. I’ll tell you what--I’ll try the rosary first.
Everybody tells me I need more compassion in my life. Why don’t you
tell Toyama that I appreciate him coming all the way down here and
I’d be grateful if he’d stand-by to do his miracle in case I need a
backup. Fair enough?”

“Fair enough,” Dalk said.

“I’m going in,” Vickie said.

“God speed.”

Dalk headed for the elevator and Vickie,
holding herself in, daring not to waste her own freshly rebounded
energy dealing with her own fearful emotions and thoughts, entered
the room to begin the communion with her husband.

Chapter 31

She was shocked by the sight of him, and
understood at once that all they had here was a 250 pound piece of
whitish-gray meat--a lump of clay and nothing more. It was
definitely not Mulroney. What was lying in the bed was a once-human
bag of tricks waiting to be opened and played with by the fools who
believed in pathology statistics and found no reason to regard
entertaining themselves with living corpses an all-that-unusual
form of employment.

A sense of unreality hung over the room where
Mulroney was lying immobile. The big man who’d vaulted over
railings and executed jukeboxes wasn’t here--in his place was
something formed from the dust of the earth waiting for the breath
of God bring it to life. Still and all, she’d come to do a job and
had no intention of violating her sacred obligation to him--the
attempt to hail his spirit one last time, wherever it was, for the
purpose of enticing it back into the clay, towards the end that,
thusly re-animated, Mulroney would be free again to enter the game
of life as he’d once known it.

“Why me, Mulroney,” she said. “Why am I
having trouble believing that this is really happening? Why am I
numb at the sight of you? Why aren’t I sobbing and crying and
screaming for you to come back? Why does the sight of you lying
here like this make me so afraid?”

She thought perhaps he’d wag his head
suddenly at her words, as though his presence in the room was an
elaborate joke he’d cruelly staged, and grown tired of enough to
quit pretending. When nothing happened, she made the decision to
let it all out, for better or worse--it would be her last time to
see him like this--of that she was certain.

“I killed you,” she said. “I can only ask you
to forgive me for pushing you the way I did. I shouldn’t have
insisted that we get married right away. I put too much stress on
you. If I’d had a brain in my head, we would have waited. I would
have stayed with you that afternoon at the hospital. I should have
realized how scared you must have been, being in the hospital
alone, undergoing all those tests, receiving your last rites from
Father Larry. I should have stayed with you. It’s my fault that
you’re not here with me now.”

“What hurts the most is, I need to talk to
you about how I feel, and you’re not here to talk with me. Who’s
going to take care of me the next time I fall apart over
something?”

She felt unsure about herself at the moment,
haunted by a feeling of being unprepared, of not having a clue as
to how to truly cope with the situation. The enormity of the
problem made it too big to grasp, too emotionally expensive to
fully come to grips with in its entirety. Death, or the imminent
probability of it was almost something, she felt, no human being
should ever have to come to grips with. She was troubled by the
feeling that there wasn’t enough time to fix the problem, time
being, for the moment, a commodity which was doled out in amounts
entirely too stingy for the job at hand. Gamely, she kept going,
understanding that whatever it was she had come to do could not
wait for the next visit--a visit which would probably never take
place.

“When you checked out on me at the altar,”
she said, “it produced a few side-effects. One of them was, I went
home and tried to kill myself with the pills you gave me. I was
angry at you for leaving me--I wanted to hurt you by taking my own
life. I hope you won’t condemn me. I’m really hoping you’ll
sympathize with me. I tried to kill myself because I wanted freedom
from the pain. I think that maybe I intended to fail in my
attempt--after all, I could have put a twenty-two caliber bullet in
my brain, the way you once said you feared you might do yourself
one day. But I didn’t kill myself, and I don’t really know why.
Maybe I wanted more time to think about it. Perhaps I wanted more
time to think about you, you big lug. Or maybe I wanted more time,
period.”

She’d have been naive to think Mulroney heard
her. Of course, she’d heard all the stories about coma victims
hovering overhead in out-of-body experiences, watching everything
around them. Something told her there was none of that going on
here--but could she be sure? What did she, or the powers that be,
really know about it? She’d have to have more faith--to continue to
act “as if” he were with her, could hear her, could feel for her
enough to do something about it and return to her.

“I’ll tell you what I didn’t want--I didn’t
want to be deprived of your love and companionship for the rest of
my days. I didn’t want to be left alone. You shouldn’t have left
me, Mulroney. You shouldn’t have. One thing good came of it, I must
admit. I learned from your death how deep my passion was for
you.

“I have a sense of strangeness about myself
now. I believe myself to be healed of my cancer. I feel better than
I have in months. I don’t know if you were able to see what
happened to me from where you are now. But I have changed. I don’t
feel helpless anymore, but I feel very lonely now that you’re gone.
I suppose it will be awhile before I can start my life up, you
know--attempt to find something to do with myself--get a new job,
travel, visit with friends, go out to dinner, all the little things
we do to keep ourselves occupied. I suppose it will be awhile.”

Mulroney, kept alive by the high-impact
innovations of the best minds in the country, his body flat and
immobile inside his windowless chamber in the temple of healing,
his vital functions monitored by the array of synchronized
machinery, lay passionless and unmoved by her speech, preoccupied,
no doubt, by the conflict within his breast, to wit--to beat the
odds against his chances of freeing himself from the tangle of
confused and downwardly spiraling chemistries his body had fallen
prey to and thereby escape his deadly conundrum and return to the
land of the living before it was too late.

Vickie, reflecting that if anything was going
to happen, it was going to be because of a miracle, kissed the
rosary, touching it to his forehead before placing it over his
heart, crucifix down, so the tear of the Lady could contact his
flesh. She retrieved the boom box purchased earlier from the music
store from where Dalk had hidden it under the bed.