Internecine (40 page)

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: the gag where I turn out to be in a lunatic asylum, having made all this up; a benign, nondescript life, thrust headlong into adventure and danger. As Andrew Collier would say,
what, all violence and no sex? You just lost half your audience. Put the girl back in.

Strictly speaking, from a sales standpoint, I understand the option. If this was my movie, I’d be screaming about studio interference. But it was never mine, I’m not even the protagonist of my own first-person narrative.

When the biggest lies are laid down, the liar usually says,
may God strike me dead if I lie,
or
I swear to God,
and the biggest liars are all atheists, anyway. Remember that when somebody swears fealty to you based on their dear departed mother’s soul, or the lives of his or her dent-headed, mutant children, “God” is merely a useful expletive. It conforms nicely with “dammit” to put enough consonants in your mouth to indicate how piqued you are.

Dandine had never sworn he was telling the truth. He didn’t care. Whether the walking dead believed him or not was inconsequential.

“Mr. Maddox? Conrad? I see you’re back with us.”

Someone was using my name, trying to goad me into some kind of revelatory flashback. No, thank you.

“Conrad? Come on, open your eyes just a little bit. I’ve pulled the blinds so the light won’t hurt your eyes.”

Steady beeping. The dial tone in my skull had subsided to a vacancy, an absence of sound in my right ear.

A woman’s voice, “Don’t be like that. The machines say you just woke up.”

My eyes slitted. Sterile white linens. TV set. Vital signs monitors. A
food tray. Hoses and IV tubes. Good. I could skip the part where I asked
where am I?

“Who are you?” The cold engine block of my voice stalled out.

“My name is Vanessa.” The ID tag on her nurse’s uniform read
Strock.
I was flatbacking it in a semiprivate ward with my privacy curtain drawn. I was wearing a hospital johnnie and my feet were cold. The television burbled faintly, aimed at whoever shared the room with me, on the far side of my curtain. Some old black-and-white show, regularly interrupted by color commercials at a substantially higher volume. Right before we fell into the twenty-first century, the Federal Communications Commission had shattered the so-called “15-minute ceiling” by sanctioning a total of 15 minutes, 44 seconds of advertising per broadcast hour. More than a quarter of each hour now equaled ads. Good for me, not so good for you.

“Vanessa Strock,” I said. “Nice.”

“Good, you can understand me.”

“What happened?”

“I’m here to fill you in,” she said. She was willowy and long, that is, tall. Thick brunette hair pinned up. An appealing shape, for her length. She smelled wonderful. “You’ve had a rather gnarly concussion, and it’s not the first in the past few days, is it?”

“I hit my head.” Not a lie, exactly, nor the full-disclosure truth.

“Mm. A lot of shattered capillaries in your forehead.”

“I hit my head.” My mouth was extremely dry. She had a paper cup of water all ready.

“Just sip,” she said. “Don’t gulp. Now let me do the flashlight thing, okay?” Penlight beams knifed into each of my eyes as she checked my pupils. “We might be able to risk giving you a painkiller. You hurting?”

“Head feels bad.” Another partial lie. My body felt fresh off the torture rack. My neck muscles had turned to molten lead. I was wearing a foam collar. I was glad they hadn’t locked me in one of those radar-dishes vets put on animals, to keep me from licking myself or gnawing at stitches.

“You’re going to be a bit disoriented for a while,” Nurse Vanessa told me.

“What else?”

“You have two cracked ribs. Good for you for wearing your seat belt, otherwise the steering wheel would have caved in your chest.”

So far, so dire: The anvil weight on my chest, crushing my breath to a rasp, was a stabilizing wrap of tape. “I was in an accident.” It wasn’t a question; it was a summation of my past few days. “How long?”

“Yesterday,” she said. “We were afraid for a moment that you might not wake up and talk to us.”

Demon thoughts of coma and vegetation jabbed my mind. “What happened to the man I was . . . driving?”

“I don’t know about that. I do know they brought you in, solo.”

“Who brought me in?”

“Fire department paramedics. Don’t try to move that left arm too much, because your wrist is fractured. I’m more concerned about that one-two blow to the head. We’re going to take it very easy at first. A light Demerol drip, just so everything doesn’t ache so much. The plastic shield on your front teeth is just to stabilize them. You’re lucky; you didn’t lose any.”

“Where are we?”

“Cedars-Sinai.”

Terrific; I could order a cheeseburger from the Hard Rock Cafe.

“Mind if I ask you a question?” she asked. “You were wearing a shoulder holster. Are you a detective or something?”

“I keep my cigarettes in it,” I said. How embarrassing: I’d been collected while wearing an empty shoulder holster.
Somebody playing tough guy.

“Who sent me flowers?” There were several carded bouquets on the bureau against the wall.

“Well, let’s see . . . Kroeger Concepts . . . this one is from someone named Katy [she pronounced it “Katie”] . . . lady friend?”

Katy. My dream solution, my much-missed potential soul mate. Far in the background but never far from my thoughts. And, if Jenks was to be believed, some kind of player in the whole
NORCO
fantasy. I had shared cock tails with her, obsessing about the briefcase. If she was in on the whole deal it would cause me to seriously revamp my definition of irony. If she was not innocent, then about a hundred reasons for her to keep her distance lined up in an orderly fashion. It was a paranoid’s worst wet dream.

“My head is cold.”

“We have an ice strip up there for the swelling.”

“Oh. Got a mirror?”

“All you’ll see is bandages.” Vanessa seemed mildly perturbed that I wouldn’t just take her word for everything. She retrieved a hand mirror from the bureau.

I had a clear plastic tube feeding into my left nostril; a bite wing, making my speech mushy. Big, gauzed, Frankensteinian forehead. Whiplash collar. Two black eyes, from the drainage. I looked like a fearful Cretaceous mammal peering out of a cave. More hoses, for waste, and a saline drip. I was catheterized. Left forearm encased in a fresh plaster cast. Visible contusions on my chest, above the tape mummifying my rib cage. I coughed and felt an ice axe drive into my sternum.

“Try not to do that,” she admonished.

“Okay. Good idea.”

“Are you hungry?”

“No, not a bit.”

“Maybe later. We’ll try again later, how’s that? Now, I’m here to keep an eye on you until eight
A.M.
The call button is on the rail next to your right hand if you need anything, or feel any distress. Otherwise it’s bed-rest for you, mister. You’re not going anywhere for a while. You should feel that Demerol sneaking up on the back of your head about now.”

I tried to grab her arm with my good hand and the motion sent hot coals cascading down my back. Nerve pain, muscle spasms. “Eight o’clock?”

“No sudden movements. It probably hurts, right?”

I slumped back to neutral; that hurt just as much. “Yeah. You’re here till eight in the morning? What time is it now?”

She didn’t wear a wristwatch. She consulted a vintage railroad watch, tucked into her smock on the end of a fob chain. It was deeply charming. “Ten at night. Ten-oh-six, precisely.”

God, the limousine with me and Dandine inside had been rammed
yesterday afternoon.

“Nobody else came in with me, or at the same time?” She’d already answered this, I knew, but I was hoping I had been delirious, and misheard.

She shook her head. Nope. “But it’s nice to have
you
back with us.”

“Nobody named Dandine?”
That
was hopeless, but I ventured it, regardless.

Another negative. She had to go do other stuff. “Remember—call button’s next to your right hand.”

On the television, two mad scientists were apparently exchanging brains, through the intermediary of a tarted-up lab full of blinking lights.
Remember,
she’d said. As I floated into a rather luxurious, chemically enhanced doze, I tried to remember.

“Ever notice that?” Zetts had said. “In movies, like when there’s a lot of action and chasing around? Like nobody ever stops to eat. They just keep, y’know, actioning.”

Ever notice, in thrillers, how the hero can be on the run for days without a snack, and how they’re so cool they can get hit in the face with a shovel, and keep right on chasing the bad guy?

I mean, have you ever been hit in the face with a shovel? It would flush your whole day, minimum. You’ve got trauma, bleeding, fractures, concussion, maybe a busted nose. Boxers shrug off busted noses, sure, but that doesn’t mean they don’t
feel
them. You’d think taking a home-run swing in the face with a large metal garden implement would at least give you a heartbeat of pause. You’ve got to be an alien (or have a shitload of animal tranquilizer in your system) not to feel that. Hell, if I stub my toe in the morning, I
think
about that all day. You walk funny, your shoes hurt, you’re leery of stubbing it again. Even a fellow the likes of Dandine could only Zen away so much of that inconvenience. I’ve never met anyone totally inured to physical pain, and if I have, they’re probably dead now.

Essentially, I had stubbed my
whole body . . .

And I was alone in this hospital, insofar as fellow casualties were concerned. No Dandine. Maybe he was under another name. But no one had come in the same time as I had. I already knew in my gut that he wasn’t here, and my brain was too fatigued to worry about proof.

My wife, Sophie, was the most important thing that ever happened to me. Don’t laugh. I know I said “thing.” Life, I found out, was something that happened to other people, while I was busy selling them . . . things. Facts and figures are things—quantifiable data that can be formed into
lists. What the lists of things cannot encompass (and indeed, what dossiers kept by the minions of
NORCO
could never assess) is the emotional
tone
of those statistics. The coloring, the shading, the important stuff, which cannot cohere to the militaristic dominion of ones and zeros. So, while certain nefarious conglomerates might have bunches of numbers about me, they didn’t have a hope in hell of
knowing
anything that was truly vital. I suddenly felt cushioned, remarkably safe.

I didn’t wake up until lunchtime.

The older you get, the more you know, and the less you’re sure of. Selected shoot-outs and vehicular entanglements never make it onto the news—ever notice that? You come home to find your neighborhood cordoned off by police, and after they withdraw there’s no update. Nothing really happened. Terribly unlikely, but no one ever says anything.

I needed to fill my blanks with bigger and better blanks, and once Katy Burgess visited me, I wound up knowing considerably less than I had scant days ago.

“Burt would have come, but . . . you know Burt,” Katy said, finding a chair and dragging it close enough to hold my good hand. My god, she looked spectacular; my ingrained boy-coding made me watch her sit, watch her skirt ride up over silk hosiery. It made a heartbreaking sound. “My god, Connie, what the
hell
is going on in your life?”

“Thanks for making that call when I was . . . you know.”

“In the slammer?” She grinned and her blue-gray eyes sparkled. “Your message was so cute. You acted like I was the last person in the world who would know the number of a bail bondsman.”

“I couldn’t think of anyone else to call.”

“Should I take that as a compliment, or a sad assessment of your personal character?”

“Talk about something else,” I said, my spine and legs throbbing from so much horizontal time. “Anything else. Talk about work.”

“Maggie’s baby is due. Burt gave her French time off, practically.”