Interface (11 page)

The chopper made an annoyingly gradual soft descent on to the ho
spital roof. Mary Catherine had a nice view of the capitol dome out
her window, but tonight it just looked malevolent, like a sin
ister antenna rising out of the prairie to pick up emanations from dist
ant sources of power. It was a tall capitol but not a big one. Its small
ness always emphasized, to Mary Catherine, its unnatural con
centration of influence.

Springfield liked to bill itself as "The City Lincoln Loved." Mel always referred to it as "The City Lincoln Left."
Mel and Mary Catherine had to sit inside for a moment and let th
e momentum of the rotor spin down a little. When she got the th
umbs-up from the pilot, Mary Catherine put her hand on her h
air and rolled out on to the white cross in her running shoes. She had thrown a trench coat on over her sweatshirt and jeans, and the b
uckle whipped back and forth on the end of its belt; the wintry a
ir, traveling at hurricane speed under the rotor blades, had a wind
chill factor somewhere down around absolute zero. She didn't stop run
ning until she had passed through the wide automatic glass doors and into the quiet warmth of the corridor that led to the c
entral elevator shafts.

Mel was right behind her. An elevator was already up and w
aiting for them, doors open. It was a wide-mouth, industrial-s
trength lift big enough to take a gurney and a whole posse of
medical personnel. A man was waiting inside, middle-aged, dressed
in a white coat thrown over a BEARS sweatshirt. This implied that
he had been called into the hospital on short notice. It was Dr.
Sipes, the neurologist.

She was used to being in hospitals. But suddenly the reality hit
her. "Oh, God," she said, and slumped against the elevator's pitiless
stainless steel wall.

"What's
 
going
 
on?"
 
Mel
 
said,
 
watching Mary
 
Catherine's
reaction, looking at Dr. Sipes through slitted eyes.

"Dr. Sipes," Sipes said.

"Mel Meyer. What's going on?"

"I'm a neurologist," Sipes explained.

Mel looked searchingly at Mary Catherine's face for a moment
and figured it out. "Oh. Gotcha."

Sipes's key chain was dangling from a key switch on the control panel. Sipes reached for it.

"Hang on a sec," Mel said. Since he had emerged from the
chopper his head had been swinging back and forth like that of a
Secret Service agent, checking out the surroundings. "Let's just
have a chat before we go down to some lower floor where I assume
that things will be in a state of hysteria."

Sipes blinked and smiled thinly, more out of surprise than
amusement, he wasn't expecting folksy humor at this stage in the
proceedings. "Fair enough. The Governor said that I should be
expecting you."

"Oh. So he is talking?"

This was a simple enough question, and the fact that Sipes
hesitated before answering told Mary Catherine as much as a CAT
scan.

"He's not aphasic, is he?" she asked.

"He is aphasic," Sipes said.

"And in English this means?" Mel said.

"He has some problems speaking."

Mary Catherine put one hand over her face, as if she had a
terrible headache, which she didn't. This kept getting worse. Dad
really had suffered a stroke. A bad one.

Mel just processed the information unemotionally. "Are these
problems things that would be obviously noticeable to a layman?"

"I would say so, yes. He has trouble finding the right words, and
sometimes makes words up that don't exist."

"A common phenomenon among politicians," Mel said, "but
not for Willy. So he's not going to be doing any interviews anytime so
on."
"He's intellectually coherent. He just has trouble putting ideas
into words."

"But he told you to expect me."
"He said that a back would be coming."
"A back?"

"Word substitution. Common among aphasics." Sipes looked at Mary
  
Catherine.
  
"I
  
assume
  
that
  
he
  
doesn't
  
have
  
a
  
living gra
ndmother?"

"His grandmothers are dead. Why?"

"He said that his grandmother would be coming too, and that she
was a scooter from Daley. Which means Chicago."
"So 'grandmother' means 'daughter' and 'scooter-'"
"He refers to me and all the other physicians as scooters," Sipes
said.

"Oy, fuck me," Mel said. "This is gonna be a problem."
Mary Catherine had a certain skill for putting bad things out of her
mind so that they would not cloud her judgement. She had be
en trained that way by her father and had gotten a brutal refresher co
urse during high school, when her mother had fallen ill and died of
leukemia. She stood up straight, squared her shoulders, blinked her
eyes. "I want to know everything," she said. "This Chinese wat
er torture stuff is going to kill me."

"Very well," Sipes said, and reached for his key chain. The ele
vator fell.

All that Mary Catherine was doing, really, was coming to the ho
spital to visit a sick relative. The chairman of the neurology de
partment did not have to guide her personally through the ho
spital. She was getting this treatment, she knew, because she was
the Governor's daughter. I
t was one of those weird things that happened to you all the tim
e when you were the daughter of William A. Cozzano. The im
portant thing was not to get used to this kind of treatment, not to
expect it. To remember that it could be taken away at any time.

If she could make it all the way through her father's political career
without ever forgetting this, she'd be okay.

Dad had a private room, on a quiet floor full of private rooms,
with an Illinois State Patrolman stationed outside it.

"Frank," Mel said, "how's the knee?"

"Hey, Mel," the trooper said, reached around his body, and
shoved the door open.

"Change into civvies, will ya?" Mel said.

When Sipes led Mel and Mary Catherine inside, Dad was asleep. He looked normal, if somewhat deflated. Sipes had already warned them that the left side of his face was paralyzed, but it did not show
any visible sagging, yet.

"Oh, Dad," she said quietly, and her face scrunched up and tears
started pouring down her face. Mel turned toward her, as if he'd
been expecting this, and opened his arms wide. He was two inches
shorter than Mary Catherine. She put her face down into the
epaulet of his trench coat and cried.
 
Sipes stood uncertainly,
awkwardly, checking his wristwatch once or twice.

She let it go on for a couple of minutes. Then she made it stop.
"So much for getting that out of the way," she said, trying to make
it into a joke. Mel was gentlemanly enough to grin and chuckle
halfheartedly. Sipes kept his face turned away from her.

Mary Catherine was one of those people that everyone naturally
liked. People who knew her in med school had tended to assume that she would go into a more touchy-feely speciality like family
practice or pediatrics.
 
She had surprised them all by picking
neurology instead. Mary Catherine liked to surprise people, it was another habit she had picked up congenitally.

Neurology was a funny speciality. Unlike neurosurgery, which
was all drills and saws and bloody knives, neurology was pure
detective work. Neurologists learned to observe funny little tics in
patients' behavior - things that laymen might never notice - and
mentally trace the faulty connections back to the brain. They were
good at figuring out what was wrong with people. But usually it
was little more than a theoretical exercise, because there was no cure for most neurological problems. Consequently, neurologists
tended to be cynical, sardonic, remote, with a penchant for dark
humor. Sipes was a classic example, except that he appeared to have n
o sense of humor at all.

Mary Catherine was trying to make a personal crusade of bringing
more humanity to the profession. But standing by her stricken fa
ther's bedside crying her eyes out was not what she'd had in mind.
"Why is he so out of it?" Mel said.

''Stroke is a major shock to the system. His body isn't used to th
is. Plus, we put him on a number of medications that, taken tog
ether, slow him down, make him drowsy. It's good for him to sl
eep right now."

"Mary Catherine told me that guys of his age, in good shape,
shouldn't have strokes."
"That's correct," Sipes said.
"So why did he have one?"

"Usually stroke happens when you are old and the arteries to yo
ur brain are narrowed by deposits. This patient's arteries are in go
od shape. But a big blood clot got loose in his system."
"Damn," Mary Catherine said, "it was the mitral valve prolapse,
wasn't it?"

"Probably," Sipes said.

"Whoa, whoa!" Mel said, "what is this? I never heard about th
is."

"You never heard about it because it's a trivial problem. Most people don't know they have it and don't care."
"What is it?"

Mary Catherine said, "It's a defect in the valve between the atri
um and the ventricle on the left side of your heart. Makes a w
hooshing noise. But it has no effect on performance, which is w
hy Dad was able to join the Marines and play football."
"Okay," Mel said.

"The reason it makes a whooshing noise is that it creates a pa
ttern of turbulent flow inside the heart," Sipes said. "In some cases
,
this turbulent flow can develop into a sort of stagnant back-w
ater. It's possible for blood clots to form there. That's probably w
hat happened. A clot formed inside the heart, eventually got large
enough to be caught up in the normal flow of blood, and shot up
his carotid artery into his brain."

"Jesus," Mel said. He sounded almost disgusted that something
so prosaic could fell the Governor. "Why didn't this happen to him
twenty years ago?"

"Could have," Sipes said. "It's purely a chance thing. A bolt
from the blue."

"Could it happen again?"

"Sure. But we're keeping him on blood thinners at the moment,
so it can't happen right now."

Mel stood there nodding at Sipes while he said this. Then Mel
kept nodding for a minute or so, just staring off into space.

"I have eight hundred million phone calls to make," Mel said.
"Let's get down to business. List for me all of the other human
beings in the world who know the information that you just gave me. And I don't want him being wheeled around this hospital for everyone to look at. He stays in this room until we make further
arrangements. Okay?"

"Okay, I'll pass that along to the others-"

"Don't bother, I'll do it," Mel said.

It was like the old days in Tuscola, when a hot, portentous
afternoon would suddenly turn dark and purple and the air would
be torn by tornado sirens and the police cars would cruise up and
down the streets warning everyone to take cover. Dad was always
there, guiding the kids and the dogs down into the tornado cellar,
checking to see that the barbecue and lawn chairs and garbage can
lids were stowed away, telling them funny stories while the cellar door above their heads pocked from the impacts of baseball-sized
hailstones. Now, something even worse was happening. And Dad
was sleeping through it.

And Mom wasn't around anymore. And there was her brother
James. But he was just her brother. James wasn't any stronger than
she was. Probably less so. Mary Catherine was in charge of the
Cozzano family.

Sipes and Mary Catherine ended up in a dark, quiet room in front
of a high-powered Calyx computer system with two huge
monitors, one color and one black-and-white. It was a system for
viewing medical imagery of all kinds - X-rays, CAT scans, and
everything else. This hospital had had them for several years
already. The hospital where Mary Catherine worked probably
wouldn't get one until sometime in the next decade. Mary
Catherine had used them before, so as soon as Dr. Sipes set her up
with access privileges, she was able to get started.