Poe (8 page)

But something grips my leg and pulls me back down, a burning cold hand like a vise, with nails that dig into my numb flesh. I look down. Two eyes, glittering like ice, stare back at me.

My last thought:

OBITUARY WRITER DIES IN HAUNTED HOUSE
.

NO ONE MOURNS
.

CHAPTER FOUR: AWAKE

S
queak, squeak, squeak. The room is moving. No, wait—it’s
me
that’s moving. My right hand begins to shake—I feel the neurons trembling, filaments that are jumpy, nervous, like a radio with bad reception. I want to reach behind my head and see if it’s still there, but my arms won’t cooperate. In fact, I can’t feel them at all, which is strange—what was I dreaming again? I was on a slab in a morgue and there was a flayed corpse and a nurse in bloody scrubs, the stink of formaldehyde. Was that a nightmare? Some kind of hallucinogenic flashback? And then the deeper dream, the woman in the water. My leg burns where she gripped me—
impossible
.

“Is he conscious?”

Am I? My eyes flit open. Guess so. The ceiling is covered by cheap beige panels, which pass by in a blur. My head jiggles to the right. Two men in light blue scrubs; one has a cheesy seventies mustache and hobo-style stubble (did the Village People recently lose a band member?), and the other is Nordic and blond, like he just stepped out of a J. Crew catalog. They clutch the side of the gurney, faces beaded with nervous sweat, and there’s a frantic edge to the way they look at me. I want to reassure them, but my mouth won’t cooperate, so instead I just lie there. It’s comforting somehow, not being able to do anything, handing it all over.

“Mr. Petrov, can you hear me?” asks Village People doctor.

Why are they talking to my dad? Oh, that’s right, I’m Mr. Petrov these days.

A woman now comes into view, all angles and loose skin, as if she stopped eating years ago. She’s very corporate in a prim black suit with small glasses perched on her pinched nose.

“Mr. Petrov, if you can hear me, I want to let you know that Grace Memorial is going to do
everything
necessary to make sure you enjoy a speedy recovery.” Her voice is smooth and practiced.

“I’ve got you a private room on the top floor. I’m putting my personal assistant Jessica at your complete disposal, so if you need anything—and I do mean
anything
—she’ll see to it personally. If there’s anyone you want to have visit, we’ll be more than happy to fly them out and put them up in the finest nearby hotel.”

There’s a fine hotel nearby? Where, Boston?

“Do you
mind
,” J. Crew doctor says curtly. He has one of those testosterone-square jaws and is probably sleeping with a few nurses, damn him. “He’s still a patient and not a litigant yet.”

“My card,” she says, studiously ignoring him. She slips it in my pocket (apparently I have a pocket now) and pats it firmly, as if she wants to make sure it doesn’t escape.

Then,
whoosh
, she disappears as I’m pushed into an elevator. There’s a mirror on the ceiling, so I get a good look at myself.

I look like shit.

There’s no, and I mean
no
, color in my normally pale skin. I am freakishly white, blindingly arctic-tundra white—in fact an albino who’d spent his entire life in a cave would look positively tan next to me. Ditto my lips, which have a cadaver-quality blue tint, and—hold on—even the irises of my eyes have gone from a deep, earthy brown to something approaching a wintry dull gray. I’m sure I could easily terrify everyone in the confines of the elevator by holding my breath and not blinking, because damn if I don’t resemble a newly resuscitated zombie. I try a grin. Impressively creepy. In fact, the overall effect would make Stephen King fall over and have a heart attack from fright.

I glance over at Village People doctor, and his eyes nervously flick to mine. Is that a tremor in his hand? Muzak plays in the background, a symphonic version of “Dancing Queen.” Irritating. I stare at Village People doctor and bare my teeth, try a frightening hiss. Instantly his back is against the stainless steel elevator wall, and he holds up his hands defensively.

J. Crew doctor tries, and fails, to contain a laugh. “Good one.”

“Thanks,” I croak.

Hey, my voice works.

Now the elevator doors open, and I’m pushed onto a floor that I never knew existed in hospitals. The music changes to something classical, Bach maybe, and the walls have gone from industrial beige cement bricks to expensive shiny oak paneling. Swank. An extraordinarily, and I do mean
extraordinarily
, hot nurse with light blond hair, Barbie doll figure, the works, joins my gurney procession, and I decide that my speedy recovery will be as slow as I can possibly make it. In fact, I may never get better.

“This way,” she says perkily to J. Crew doctor, and suddenly I’m in a private room that has a wide expanse of tall windows overlooking the deep chasm of the Goshen River. Very pretty from this distance—you could almost forget that a quick dip in that industrial sewage trough would immediately burn all the flesh off your body. There are also a variety of machines, which I’m immediately plugged into, and while hot nurse tapes electrodes to my chest (her hands are warm, and there’s a waft of floral perfume), something sharp pricks my arm—damn!—J. Crew doctor hooks me into an IV, and then,
holy fuck
, Village People doctor is inserting a tube into my penis, which is so not right on any number of levels.

“It’s just a catheter,” says J. Crew doctor, reading my pained expression. “We’re going to be flushing your system with an intense amount of thiamine and glucose.”

I try to say “Couldn’t you give a guy some warning?” but the only thing that comes out is “Warning?”

“Sorry.” J. Crew doctor scribbles something onto a chart. Nurse Barbie is now hooking up the catheter to a clear bag that hangs from the end of the hospital bed. Embarrassingly bright yellow piss starts to gush.

I
have
died and gone to hell.

“Now Mr. Petrov—”

“Dimitri.”

“Dimitri,” replies J. Crew doctor with a tense smile. “I’m Dr. Conway. Do you have any allergies to medications, or are you currently taking any medication?”

I shake my head no.

“Now, and this is important to answer honestly—I’m not here to judge—but are you doing any drugs?”

I shake my head no again. Village People doctor raises his eyebrows.

“Nothing? Not even pot?”

At this they all look at me seriously, and I can tell that there’s more to this question than they’re able or willing to tell me. I try to raise my hand and find that my wrists are tied to the sides of the gurney with loops of hard plastic. Son of a bitch.

“Just a precaution,” says Dr. Conway. “When you regained consciousness you experienced grand mal seizures, and we need to make sure those are over, since you’re now hooked up to the IV.”

Seizures I understand, “grand mal” not so much. Sounds like an excessively large size of espresso. Which reminds me, caffeine could be considered a drug, although I like to consider it
my little friend
.

“Coffee.” My throat is on fire—why the hell has no one thought to get me some water?

Dr. Conway tilts his head. “Coffee really isn’t the best idea right now; we’re administering some sedatives.”

“No,” I croak. Thank God Nurse Barbie is on the scene, because she connects the dots and finally picks up a sippy cup with a bent straw from the hospital nightstand, settling the straw in my mouth. I take a few grateful sips.

My head clears, and I suddenly feel surprisingly lucid. I try a complete sentence. “I drink a lot of coffee.”

Success. I’ll be out of here in no time.

“Define a lot,” says Dr. Conway.

“Seriously intense Colombian coffee. Even the water I make it with is caffeinated.”

“I take it you don’t care for sleep?”

I shrug. “Overrated.” I take a moment before I ask the real question. “Was it just my imagination or did I come to in some kind of morgue?”

Dr. Conway gives Nurse Barbie and Village People doctor a meaningful glance, and they quickly exit the room. Not a good sign.

“Yes,” he says quietly. “You were pronounced DOA by the ambulance technicians.”

He gives me a minute to take this in. The sky is turning a deeper shade of gray; the sun must be setting somewhere beyond the bank of clouds. I wonder what day it is.

“You’d been underwater for at least two hours before the firefighters were able to pull you out of the well.”

“A well.” Such a small word for such a terrifying abyss.

“An improperly sealed well in the basement, yes. You fell through the plywood covering into about thirty feet of water. They tried to resuscitate you…”

Tried?

“But you didn’t have a pulse; you weren’t breathing and your body was stiff. So you were brought to the morgue. Prematurely, I guess we can say.”

Understatement of the century. “That’s what you meant by litigant. The hospital is afraid I’m going to sue.”

“Well, yes.” Dr. Conway slips his pen in his pocket and grabs a small metal stool on wheels. He sits on it, looking at the polished linoleum floor for a few moments, obviously thinking through what to say next.

“To be honest, we don’t know for sure what happened. There are cases of hypothermia where children who’ve been underwater in extremely cold temperatures have been revived after an hour. But never an adult. And never after such an extended period of time. You didn’t regain consciousness for almost twenty-four hours. It’s a good thing that the coroner called in sick…”

I’m not sure I want to know the reason why, but I can guess. For a moment neither one of us says anything. I listen to the
blip, blip, blip
of the heart monitor.

“Is there anyone you want us to call?”

Is there? Aunt Lucy, who I don’t know very well outside of our lovely time together preparing for my parents’ funeral, or my neighbor Doug, who could at least tell my landlord to not throw my stuff out just yet. Nate’s probably busy getting my obituary prepped for the next day’s paper (Mac got his headline, the little fucker). But no, I have no one really in my life, which makes an entirely depressing situation even worse, so that it’s hard to appreciate the fact that I did wake up before two inexperienced residents dissected my still living body.

“There was a girl in the ambulance,” says Dr. Conway, who is starting to sound distant, but in a pleasant way.

“Lisa,” I manage to say as my eyelids begin to droop. I struggle but can’t manage to remember her last name. The darkness is softly edging into my consciousness again, and I feel like my body is slowly stretching out, like I’m as long as the hospital room—no, make that as long as the New Goshen River. Me like these drugs.

“Crosslands,” I say, wanting to add more, but then I drift to a place where I can’t say or do anything else, and I listen as the door quietly clicks shut behind the doctor. I am left partly awake, partly asleep and completely prey to the cold, dark thoughts that creep in through the windowsill, past the door.

My parents’ obituary gnaws at me. If I’m honest with myself—an act I try to avoid as much as possible—the painful truth is I wouldn’t have been able to add much more.

My mother had a near-obsessive dedication to the domestic arts, which in the age of feminism are not arts at all—they’re conceptual chains of bondage imposed by a patriarchal society that serves to demean women. This translates in my generation to pulling out one’s laundry from the dryer, giving it a good shake, and assigning a kind of retro-chic factor to wrinkled and worn clothes. But if you had entered our ranch house on any given day during my childhood, you would have had to admit that there was an artist at work, or maybe even a domestic dominatrix. For one thing, every article of cloth, including washrags, dinner linens, and my underwear, was steamed, pressed and ironed into submission with a lavender scent. Then there was the food. If it wasn’t rich, decadent, and with a calorific load that should have caused us all to die of heart failure from congested arteries, then it wasn’t fit to be served at our house.

But while every dust-free and lemon-scented corner of the house was imbued with my mother’s passion, my father’s passion was—and remains—a mystery. In fact, the more I try to pin down his “thing,” the further I feel from knowing him, unless you count knowing something by its absence—like making a mold of a footprint to determine the curve of the heel that created it. Here’s what I can say for sure about my father. Every day he left in the morning at eight o’clock sharp, coming home a little before or after six thirty. Sometimes he’d go on trips for weeks at a time, returning weary, worn, and pale. He did not work, my mother explained once, because our income had been kindly provided by a deceased and wealthy aunt on my father’s side of the family in Russia. But when I asked where he was during the day or why, if we were loaded, he had to travel, my mother quickly changed the subject and asked if I wanted to taste the cake batter to make sure there wasn’t too much vanilla. Her tone let me
know that there was no point in asking again. Some things were just not to be spoken of—like the burn scars that twisted around the entire length of her right arm and up to the base of her long and lovely neck. I asked only once why she wore long-sleeved shirts on even the hottest days of summer and was offered an impromptu trip to Farrell’s Ice Cream Parlor.