Strangers (6 page)

As a result, Cobletz was not unduly worried. After a full physical examination, he pronounced Dom exceptionally fit. He attributed the somnambulism to stress, to the upcoming publication of the novel.

“You don’t think we should do any tests?” Dom asked.

Cobletz said, “You’re a writer, so of course your imagination is running away with you. Brain tumor, you’re thinking. Am I right?”

“Well…yes.”

“Any headaches? Dizziness? Blurred vision?”

“No.”

“I’ve examined your eyes. There’s no change in your retinas, no indication of intracranial pressure. Any inexplicable vomiting?”

“No. Nothing like that.”

“Giddy spells? Giggling or periods of euphoria without apparent reason? Anything of that nature?”

“No.”

“Then I see no reason for tests at this stage.”

“Do you think I need…psychotherapy?”

“Good heavens, no! I’m sure this will pass soon.”

Finished dressing, Dom watched Cobletz close the file. He said, “I thought perhaps sleeping pills—”

“No, no,” Cobletz said. “Not yet. I don’t believe in drugs as a treatment of first resort. Here’s what you do, Dom. Get away from the writing for a few weeks. Don’t do anything cerebral. Get plenty of physical exercise. Go to bed tired every night, so tired that you can’t even bother to think about the book you’ve been working on. A few days of that, and you’ll be cured. I’m convinced of it.”

•

Saturday, Dom began the treatment Dr. Cobletz prescribed, devoting himself to physical activity, though with more single-mindedness and flagellant persistence than the doctor had suggested. Consequently, he plummeted into a deep sleep the moment he put his head upon the pillow, and in the morning he did not wake in a closet.

He did not wake in bed, either. This time, he was in the garage.

He regained consciousness in a breathless state of terror, gasping, his heart hammering so hard it seemed capable of shattering his ribs with its furious blows. His mouth was dry, his hands curled into fists. He was cramped and sore, partly from Saturday’s excess of exercise, but partly from the unnatural and uncomfortable position in which he had been sleeping. During the night he evidently had taken two folded canvas dropcloths from a shelf above the workbench, and had squirreled into a narrow service space behind the furnace. That was where he lay now, concealed beneath the tarps.

“Concealed” was the right word. He had not dragged the tarpaulins over himself merely for warmth. He had taken refuge behind the furnace and beneath the canvas because he had been hiding from something.

From what?

Even now, as Dominick pushed the tarps aside and struggled to sit up, as sleep receded and as his bleary eyes adjusted to the shadow-filled garage, the intense anxiety that had accompanied him up from sleep still clung tenaciously. His pulse pounded.

Fear of what?

Dreaming. In his nightmare he must have been running and hiding from some monster. Yes. Of course. His peril in the nightmare caused him to sleepwalk, and when, in the dream, he sought a place to hide, he also hid in reality, creeping behind the furnace.

His white Firebird loomed ghostlike in the vague light from the wall vents and the single window above the workbench. Shuffling across the garage, he felt as if he were a revenant himself.

In the house, he went directly to his office. Morning light filled the room, making him squint. He sat at the desk in his filthy pajama bottoms, switched on the word processor, and studied the documents on the diskette that he had left in the machine. The diskette was as he had left it on Thursday; it contained no new material.

Dom had hoped that, in his sleep, he might have left a message that would help him understand the source of his anxiety. That knowledge was obviously held by his subconscious but thus far denied to his conscious mind. When sleepwalking, his subconscious was in control, and possibly it would try to explain things to his conscious mind by way of the Displaywriter. But as yet, it had not.

He switched off the machine. He sat for a long time, staring out the window, toward the ocean. Wondering…

Later, in the bedroom, as he was on his way to the master bath, he found something strange. Nails were scattered across the carpet, and he had to be careful where he walked. He stooped, picked up several of them. They were all alike: 1.5-inch steel finishing nails. At the far side of the room, he saw two objects that drew him there. Beneath the window, from which the drapes had been drawn aside, a box of nails lay on the floor by the baseboard; it was only half full because part of its contents had spilled from it. Beside the box was a hammer.

He lifted the hammer, hefted it, frowned.

What had he been doing in those lonely hours of the night?

He raised his eyes to the windowsill and saw three loose nails that he had laid there. They gleamed in the sunlight.

Judging from the evidence, he’d been preparing to nail the windows shut. Jesus. Something had so frightened him that he had intended to nail the windows shut and make a fortress of his house, but before he could set himself to the task, he had been suddenly
overwhelmed
by fear and had fled to the garage, where he had hidden behind the furnace.

He dropped the hammer, stood, looked out the window. Beyond lay only bloom-laden rose bushes, a small strip of lawn, and an ivy-covered slope that led up to another house. A lovely landscape. Peaceful. He could not believe that it had been any different last night, that something more threatening had been crouching out there in the darkness.

And yet…

For a while Dom Corvaisis watched the day grow brighter, watched the bees visit the roses, then began to pick up the nails.

It was November 24.

5

Boston, Massachusetts

After the incident of the black gloves, two weeks passed without another attack.

For a few days following the embarrassing scene at Bernstein’s Delicatessen, Ginger Weiss remained on edge, expecting another seizure. She was unusually self-aware, acutely conscious of her physiological and psychological conditions, searching for subtle symptoms of serious disorder, alert for the slightest sign of another impending fugue, but she noticed nothing worrisome. She had no headaches, no attacks of nausea, no joint or muscle pain. Gradually, her confidence rose to its usual high level. She became convinced that her wild flight had been entirely stress-related, a never-to-be-repeated aberration.

Her days at Memorial were busier than ever. George Hannaby, chief of surgery—a tall burly bear of a man who talked slow, walked slow, and looked deceptively lazy—maintained a heavy schedule, and though Ginger was not the only resident working under him, she was the only one who currently worked
exclusively
with him. She assisted in many—perhaps in a majority—of his procedures: aortal grafts, amputations, popliteal bypasses, embolectomies, portocaval shunts, thoracotomies, arteriograms, the installation of temporary and permanent pacemakers, and more.

George observed her every move, was quick to note the slightest flaw in her skill and techniques. Although he looked like a friendly bear, he was a tough taskmaster and had no patience for laziness, ineptitude, or carelessness. He could be scathing in his critiques, and he made all the young doctors sweat. His scorn was not merely withering; it was dehydrating, searing, a nuclear heat.

Some residents considered George tyrannical, but Ginger enjoyed assisting him precisely because his standards were so high. She knew that his criticisms, though sometimes blisteringly delivered, were motivated solely by his concern for the patient, and she never took them personally. When she finally earned Hannaby’s unqualified blessing…well, that would be almost as good as God’s own seal of approval.

On the last Monday in November, thirteen days after her strange seizure, Ginger assisted in a triple-bypass heart operation on Johnny O’Day, a fifty-three-year-old Boston police officer who had been forced into early retirement by cardiovascular disease. Johnny was stocky, rubber-faced, tousle-haired, with merry blue eyes, unassuming, quick to laugh in spite of his troubles. Ginger was especially drawn to him because, although
he looked nothing whatsoever like the late Jacob Weiss, he nevertheless reminded her of her father.

She was afraid Johnny O’Day was going to die—and that it was going to be, in part, her fault.

She had no reason to believe that he was more vulnerable than other cardiac patients. In fact, Johnny was in comparatively little danger. He was ten years younger than the average recipient of bypass surgery, with greater resources for recuperation. His cardiac ailment was not complicated by any other debilitating condition, such as phlebitis or excessively high blood pressure. His prospects were encouraging.

But Ginger could not twist free of the dread in which she found herself increasingly tangled. On Monday afternoon, as the hour of surgery drew near, she grew tense, and her stomach turned sour. For the first time since she had sat a lonely vigil beside her father’s hospital bed and had helplessly watched him die, Ginger was filled with doubt.

Perhaps her apprehension grew from the unjustified but inescapable notion that if she somehow failed this patient she would in a sense be failing Jacob yet again. Or perhaps her fear was utterly unwarranted and would seem foolish and laughable in hindsight. Perhaps.

Nevertheless, entering the operating theater at George’s side, she wondered if her hands would shake. A surgeon’s hands must never shake.

The operating room was all white and aqua tile, filled with gleaming chrome-plated and stainless-steel equipment. Nurses and an anesthesiologist were preparing the patient.

Johnny O’Day lay on the cruciform operating table, arms extended, palms up and wrists exposed for the intravenous spikes.

Agatha Tandy, a private surgical technician who was employed by George rather than by the hospital, stretched thin latex gloves over her boss’s freshly scrubbed hands, then over Ginger’s hands as well.

The patient had been anesthetized. He was orange with iodine from the neck to the wrist, swathed in neatly tucked and folded layers of green cloth from the hips down. His eyes were taped shut to keep them from drying out. His breathing was slow but regular.

A portable tape deck with stereo speakers was on a stool in one corner. George preferred to cut to the accompaniment of Bach, and that calming music now filled the room.

It may have calmed the others, but today it did not calm Ginger. A secret scurrying something spun a web of ice in her stomach.

Hannaby positioned himself at the table. Agatha stood at his right side with an elaborately ordered tray of instruments. The circulating nurse waited to fetch whatever might be required from the cabinets along one wall. An assisting nurse with large gray eyes noticed an errant flap
of green sheeting and quickly tucked it into place around the patient’s body. The anesthesiologist and his nurse were at the head of the table, monitoring the IV and the EKG. Ginger moved into position. The team was ready.

Ginger looked at her hands. They were not shaking.

Inside, though, she was all aquiver.

In spite of her sense of impending disaster, the surgery went smoothly. George Hannaby operated with quickness, sureness, dexterity, and skill that were even more impressive than usual. Twice, he stepped aside and requested that Ginger complete a part of the procedure.

Ginger surprised herself by functioning with her customary sureness and speed, her fear and tension revealed only by a tendency to perspire more than usual. However, the nurse was always there to blot her brow.

Afterward, at the scrub sink, George said, “Like clockwork.”

Soaping her hands under the hot water, she said, “You always seem so relaxed, as if…as if you weren’t a surgeon at all…as if you were just a tailor altering a suit of clothes.”

“I may seem that way,” he said, “but I’m always tense. That’s why I play Bach.” He finished washing up. “You were very tense today.”

“Yes,” she admitted.

“Exceptionally tense. It happens.” Big as he was, he sometimes seemed to have the eyes of a sweet, gentle child. “The important thing is that it didn’t affect your skill. You were as smooth as ever. First rate. That’s the key. You’ve got to use tension to your advantage.”

“I guess I’m learning.”

He grinned. “As usual, you’re being too hard on yourself. I’m proud of you, kid. For a while there, I thought maybe you’d have to give up medicine and earn your living as a meat cutter in a supermarket, but now I know you’ll make it.”

She grinned back at him, but the grin was counterfeit. She had been more than tense. She had been seized by a cold, black fear that might easily have overwhelmed her, and that was much different from a healthy tension. That fear was something she had never felt before, something that she knew George Hannaby had never felt in his life, not in an operating room. If it continued, if the fear became a constant companion during surgery and would not be dispelled…what then?

•

At ten-thirty that evening, when she was reading in bed, the phone rang. It was George Hannaby. If the call had come earlier, she’d have panicked and assumed that Johnny O’Day had taken a serious turn for the worse,
but now she had regained her perspective. “So sorry. Missy Weiss not home. I no speak the English. Call back next April, please.”

“If that’s supposed to be a Spanish accent,” George said, “it’s atrocious. If it’s supposed to be Oriental, it’s merely terrible. Be thankful you chose medicine as a career instead of acting.”

“You, on the other hand, would’ve done well as a drama critic.”

“I do have the refined and sensitive perspective, the cool judgment and unerring insight of a first-rate critic, don’t I? Now shut up and listen: I’ve got good news. I think you’re ready, smart-ass.”

“Ready? For what?”

“The big time. An aortal graft,” he said.

“You mean…I wouldn’t just assist you? Do it entirely myself?”

“Chief surgeon for the entire procedure.”

“Aortal graft?”

“Sure. You didn’t specialize in cardiovascular surgery just to perform appendectomies for the rest of your life.”