Lost Signals (29 page)

The building at
50
th
and Bleeker stood atop a low, grassy hill overlooking a small town with a name that was easily forgotten, surrounded by open stretches of unpopulated countryside. Long ago, when the building had been brand new and the stucco façade was freshly-painted white, a large sign and cross had been mounted prominently six stories up, just below the roofline, metal and glass flashing brightly in the sun and glowing neon blue at night, a reminder to everyone of the structure’s noble purpose. Even without the sign, it was still obvious that it was a hospital. Even with its stucco turned yellow by age and its rows of windows unwashed, it couldn’t be anything else. Within its walls, countless people had been healed and countless others had died. Long ago it had housed 350 patients at full capacity. Now it housed only one–the man in room 603.

In twelve years of working at the hospital, Pamela Johnstone had repeatedly demonstrated her ability to withstand the pressures of the job. On her first day of work, the head nurse (a seasoned woman of seven years’ experience) had jumped off the roof and landed facedown in the parking lot. As a group of green-faced young men worked to peel what was left off the asphalt and hose down what couldn’t be scraped up and shoveled into a garbage bag, Pam had remained her normal, cheery self, working as if nothing had happened. In twelve years, she saw over three hundred employees come and go. Some had killed themselves, others had gone insane and been hauled away, others had spent years working without complaint only to die from some seemingly natural cause. Pam herself wasn’t worried, when she’d hit the ten-year mark she realized that she was part of the minority two percent that was completely immune to it. There was no reason to worry. She had been born to do this job.

On a sunny afternoon in May, word came down about an emergency meeting. It wasn’t the first of course. Pam had been to so many now that they almost felt routine, but it was the first time one had been held on the hospital grounds. Mr. Burgess, a short, pudgy administrator who was prone to sweating, called Pam into his office and gave her the details that the rest of the staff wasn’t privy to.

It was a funding issue. The people in Washington weren’t convinced that the program was getting results. Too much cost. Too many setbacks. They would arrive in two days and they intended to see the patient for themselves, despite the consistent warnings from the experts that only trained staff who had undergone extensive psychological evaluation should be allowed anywhere near him.

As Burgess reached inside his coat and pressed a wadded tissue into his armpit, Pamela held back a grin and wondered if Mr. Burgess would pass his next psychological evaluation.

In the two days before the meeting, Pam buckled down and went through the usual procedure. She conducted last minute staff evaluations in case layoffs were coming. Put in orders for more drugs, IV bags, saline, catheters. She gathered her notes and wrote the same report she had written many times before, with the same recommendations.

Continue to evaluate patient closely. Monitor sedation and adjust as necessary. Allocate funds to hire more staff as needed. Current staff death rate
 
: 25 per year.

On the day of the meeting, she dressed in a freshly dry-cleaned uniform, and walked through Ward C, past the nurses station, and headed to room 603 to check on the patient. The guard posted outside the door (a tall, muscular young man whom had been disqualified from joining the Marine Corps due to a minor back injury) unlocked the outer gate for her.

“Nice day,” he said, pulling it aside.

She smiled stiffly and stepped through, waited for him to lock the gate behind her, and then opened the inner gate.

“Just call if you need anything,” he said.

She wouldn’t.

The hospital room was average aside from the wire mesh lining the walls and ceiling. The experts who sometimes visited the hospital had explained that it was a safety precaution, put in place to improve their chances of blocking the signal. Many times, she had asked them what this signal was exactly, but their answers had been vague, in the same way that most answers were when it came to their theories about the patient.

“It’s sort of like radio waves,” one theoretician had offered. “Only we can’t really measure them with conventional equipment. We’re just seeing the effects they have on people.”

She moved to the bed, her shoes clicking on the aluminum floor plates. The patient was lying there in his restraints, appearing to sleep peacefully as always. She wasn’t deceived, though, not the way some of the younger nurses were–the same nurses who she sometimes found weeping in the bathroom, blubbering about “the fire.” The patient required constant monitoring, and at no moment was it safe to let down your guard. A whole team of nurses could check on him once every half-hour on a twenty-four-hour rotation and still fail to see his subtle signs of waking. The procedure had to be followed closely. Check. Double-check. Triple-check. Failure was not an option.

One day back in her third year at the hospital, she had watched a young nurse misadjust the flow of sedation from the IV drip. The patient’s vitals had dropped down to almost nothing and a special team of doctors had to be called in to resuscitate. They had worked on him for a nerve-racking half-hour, doing everything they could to bring him back without actually waking him, the phone down at the nurses station ringing the whole time. Generals in Washington were demanding updates, wanting to know if the patient was going to die, if they needed to go to Def Con One. Pam assured them that the doctors were doing everything they could, and later (when the patient was finally stable) she told them it would never happen again.

And it hadn’t. The procedure had been adjusted, the levels of sedation leaning toward conservative, so conservative that the risk of killing him had been replaced by the increased risk of waking him up. It had almost happened two years after the patient’s near death. Pam was in the room at the time, checking his vital signs (which appeared to be completely stable), when he opened his eyes and tried to sit up. In all her years on staff, this was the one and only time she had actually been afraid.

His eyes were red, and even under the bright fluorescents, they had seemed to glow. He looked at her for a moment, slowly opening his mouth as if to speak, as her hand crept over to the IV drip. She increased the dosage slightly and he sank back onto the mattress without a sound. In her daily report, she only noted that his vital signs had fluctuated enough to suggest that he had been close to waking up, but she had never mentioned (for fear of losing her job) that the patient had actually opened his eyes.

Pam, now head nurse and hardened by her years of experience, checked the patient’s vitals, made a minute adjustment, which she marked on the chart along with the date and time, and walked out of the room. The guard made brief small talk as he locked up, his eyes occasionally dropping to the place where the loose fabric of her uniform tightened over her breasts. He’d told her once (trying hard to sound casual) that she looked good for her age, as if he had thought it over carefully and decided her looks were good enough for him to forgive the fact that she was at least 10 years older than him and he’d make an exception if it meant having a little fun together after work.

During the next round of employee evaluations, she would most likely recommend his employment be terminated. Although, part of her took pleasure in knowing that if she allowed him to work here for another two or three years, there was a good chance he would wake up one day and decide to put a gun in his mouth.

On her ride down in the elevator, she listened to one of the nurses go on and on about some TV show that had something to do with washed-up celebrities dancing. Pam humored her for five floors, forcing a smile until she noticed the girl had a nosebleed.

“Put some ice on it and stay on the first floor for the rest of the day,” she said handing her a tissue.

She stepped off the elevator and walked into what had once been the emergency room. A bearded orderly looked up at her from behind the desk and held up his hands in an overly-theatrical gesture of frustration.

“Wi-fi keeps going out. You hear anything from upstairs
 
?”

She shrugged. “Call them and ask.”

The orderly frowned and picked up the phone. She stepped out into the parking lot and squinted in the bright sun. Most of the parking spaces were full. Limousines and black town cars with government plates lined the rows, along with several luxury vehicles belonging to doctors and board members. Everyone who had some say over the patient’s care had been called out.

As she walked, she pulled out her phone and checked her messages. Nothing important. Her father wanted to know if she was taking time off for Christmas. An old friend from college (one of the few she still made time for) had sent a couple pictures of her kids. Two elementary school-aged boys smiled with crooked teeth. One of the photos didn’t load properly and came out mostly distorted with multi-colored pixels, the only thing recognizable being a crisp line slashed through the middle of her screen where a crooked-toothed mouth loomed large.

At the far end of the parking lot, a group of soldiers dressed in camouflage formed a perimeter, failing to blend in with the plain white stucco maintenance building behind them. Men in suits lined up at an improvised checkpoint to have their ID badges inspected and scrutinized. Pam skirted the line entirely and walked along the side of the building, passing by boarded windows and faded notices that stated the premises had been condemned by authority of the US Department of Health–all trespassers would be prosecuted. At the rear entrance, a soldier leaned against a railing, smoking a cigarette. He quickly snapped to attention, dropping the cigarette to the pavement.

He glanced at her ID. “Go ahead, ma’am.”

“Thank you.”

She descended a narrow flight of steps that led down to the basement. Inside, a military liaison waited for her, dressed in a suit instead of a uniform. He flashed a sycophantic smile and handed her a nametag, reciting the same basic rules she had heard a dozen times before as they walked down the long, dimly-lit corridor.

They stopped at a set of double doors, the liaison pushing one open. Before she could step inside, he leaned in close and asked in a quiet voice
 
: “Do you really think he’s, you know, evil
 
?”

Pam smiled. “Go up to room 603 and decide for yourself.”

The man’s smile faded into a flat line. She stepped past him, letting out a small laugh. Deep down, she knew that most “tough” government men were really just scared little boys. For all their displays of strength and macho posturing, they knew they were powerless.

Inside the meeting room, men sat crowded around long narrow tables arranged in semi-circles that repeated into smaller and smaller semi-circles around an open space where a long table and podium had been set up. The chairman of the hospital’s board of directors stood at the microphone, making his opening statements, the American flag hanging behind him. Board members and committee delegates sat in the shadows at the main table, waiting patiently for the floor to be opened up for statements.

Pam found an empty seat beside an elderly, white-haired man dressed in a suit that looked to be two sizes too large. He glanced up at her with a nervous expression, then turned back to the jumble of notes scrawled on a yellow legal pad in front of him. His phone sat beside it, the screen glitching repeatedly.

She folded her hands and waited, her eyes moving around the room, taking in the ducts and pipes that lined the ceiling fifteen-feet above her. She found them far more interesting than what was being said. She’d heard it all before, from the various experts who had come to visit the hospital over the years, from a three-star general who had once harassed her over the phone for nearly an hour, spouting his theories on everything from secret Chinese plots to Biblical prophecies, and she’d heard it from the group of old men who had called her to testify behind closed doors in Washington six years earlier, asking her to repeat what she’d been saying in her weekly progress reports for years.

The fact that most of them had decided to come all the way to the hospital amused her. The fact that they had paid someone to convert this room, which had probably held boilers or generators at one time, into a pathetic imitation of a Senate chamber amused her. It amused her that they wanted to come and see the patient for themselves because they believed it would help them understand him better. They
didn’t
understand. And they never would. They only understood funding allocation and secret meetings and defense readiness conditions.

The lights were turned down and the first speaker began a powerpoint presentation, talking monotonously about the history of the patient, regurgitating almost word-for-word what had been written in the official briefing documents every hospital employee had read dozens of times. Chances were that once she was called on to speak, she would probably do the same thing, repeat the same basic information from her reports, adding nothing new. They always wanted her professional opinion, and yet she wasn’t sure she had one. Despite what everyone said about him, she wasn’t particularly afraid. In some ways she actually liked him. He was quiet and dependable in an odd kind of way, unlike most of the other men she dealt with on a regular basis, present company included.

When the first speaker finished, the overhead lights came up, revealing the somber expressions of the men and women in the room. She recognized most of them. Some had come by the hospital once or twice to talk to doctors and try to push their own agenda. A lot of the senators and businessmen had asked her the same question the young man out in the hall had asked her. She always told them she didn’t know and she was just doing her job like everyone else.

Keep the patient asleep. Keep the patient alive
.

One of the generals sitting near the front had come into room 603 half-a-dozen years ago and told her she was wasting her time keeping him doped up. Then he’d pulled out a pistol, pointed it directly at the patient’s head and said
 
: “One shot, that’s all it’d take.” She had rushed down to the nurses station and called security, then hit the speed dial button for Washington. The general had been escorted off the premises and not been allowed back, but he still showed up at the meetings, eager to suggest the same solution to his colleagues.