Page 12

12

The Busy Body

While Rebecca and Bobby prepared Ernie for relocation to some hidey-hole where no mortician could find him, Spencer went looking for a wheelchair and was soon involved in an argument about hats.

He didn’t want to engage in an argument about hats. Who would? It was just one of those things that happened when two human beings—who were strangers—came together, one fiercely opinionated and the other on an urgent mission that made him impatient with fools.

The distraction would not have occurred if County Memorial had been as thoroughly furnished with wheelchairs as Spencer expected it to be. With the halt, lame, and feeble everywhere in abundance, a hospital ought to be littered with wheelchairs. This was especially true now, during the dinner hour, when the patients were in their beds, slurping their meals through straws or choking on pieces of poorly masticated chicken or so drugged and confused that they were struggling to eat Jell-O with their fingers. Later, during visiting hours, you might expect them to be wheeling themselves out of their assigned rooms in an effort to avoid the relatives who had come to chastise them for the bad habits that had landed them here, but not now when there was pudding to eat.

Most people were of the opinion that pudding was one of the few things to enjoy about a stay in the hospital, but Spencer disliked pudding to such an extent that it might accurately be said that he despised it. He preferred thoracic surgery to pudding. The exception was crème br?lée. He loved crème br?lée. Of course, if you were in a fine French restaurant and referred to crème br?lée as “pudding,” you would deserve what you got if the chef showed up at tableside and beat you with a large spatula.

Suddenly hungry but certain that neither County Memorial nor any other hospital in the United States would offer crème br?lée, Spencer considered going to the nurse’s station to inquire about a wheelchair. He restrained himself because he wasn’t able to imagine how to proceed with the conversation if the nurse wanted to know for whom he needed it. He doubted very much that cooperation would be extended to him if he said, The dead man in room 340. He can’t eat dinner, and there’s nothing on TV he wants to watch, so I thought I’d take him for a spin to visit other patients. A better approach eluded him, suggesting that Britta Hernishen had been correct when she insisted that an artist who worked in a visual medium wasn’t likely to be gifted with words.

Consequently, he zigzagged from room to room along both sides of the third-floor main hall, seeking an unoccupied wheelchair that he could commandeer for the purpose of rescuing Ernie from impending embalmment. Just when he was beginning to think they would have to lower their not-dead amigo out of a window with a makeshift rope of bedsheets, he discovered the very conveyance he wanted in room 315.

This was a double room. The patient farther from the door was unconscious and being fed by a drip line, so his gown wasn’t soiled by food stains and he wasn’t in any condition to object even if someone stole the bed out from under him.

Judging by the available evidence, the patient nearer the door was called “Butch” by his friends. Three colorful helium-filled foil balloons were tied to the headrail of his bed. The first two said, Get Well Butch and Love You Butch . The third featured a red heart and the name Butch .

When Spencer arrived, the upper half of the bed was raised, and Butch was sitting there, staring at the contents of his dinner tray as if he had seen roadkill more appetizing than the meal before him.

Butch was no one’s idea of what a ballet teacher or a flutist in an orchestra ought to look like. His arms were more powerful than those of a bear, though somewhat less hairy. His chest appeared so immense that he could have donated half of it for transplant to a weak-chested man and still been unable to find shirts to fit him. Because his neck was as wide as his shaved skull, his head resembled a mortar round welded to his shoulders. His broad face might have been pleasant if he hadn’t been scowling and if his scowl didn’t conjure in the mind images of medieval executioners in black leather pants and vests, wielding massive axes with razor-sharp blades.

Although the wheelchair was the hospital’s—not the patient’s—property and although a nurse would bring another when requested, Spencer was sufficiently intimidated by Butch’s appearance to ask, “May I borrow this for a minute? Just two minutes, three. A quick little trip for a friend.”

Butch’s scowl of disapproval morphed into an equally intense scowl of puzzlement. Instead of responding to Spencer’s request, he posed a question of his own in a gruff voice. “What’s with the hat?”

Spencer, prince of Dusterheit Galleries, dressed in the same outfit every day, much as the late author Tom Wolfe appeared always in three-piece white suits; therefore, he never gave any thought to what he was wearing. Over the years, the felt hat with the round crown and snap brim had almost become a part of his head. He often forgot it was there. He said, “Hat? Hat? What hat?”

“ What hat? ” Butch’s scowl of puzzlement tightened into a scowl of impatience. “The hat on your head. I’ve never seen a stupid hat like that except one time on a freak in a movie.”

Judging by Butch’s irritability and his demanding tone, Spencer decided the man was accustomed to having authority over others and to being obeyed.

You might expect Spencer Truedove to explain politely that he was a famous artist, that these days famous artists and writers and musicians were often encouraged to regard their wardrobe as a part of their branding strategy. But he did not choose to explain. For a moment, he forgot the wheelchair and went into defense mode.

Infrequently but usually at inconvenient moments, Spencer was annoyed far in excess of the vexation that other people might feel at being the target of a thoughtless remark. If we were to engage in the flood of Freudian babble that washes through many modern novels, we might be subjected to twenty-four pages of scenes recalling how Spencer’s mother went off in search of the free-spirited self she had lost elsewhere in life and how the more ignorant teenagers of Maple Grove tormented the boy. If we were to probe deep, deep into Spencer’s psyche, we would learn that one of the chants with which they afflicted him was this: Spencer Truedove is unique. His mommy left, his daddy, too. Hey, what a freak! What a freak! With that discovery, we would realize that Butch’s use of the word “ freak ” triggered Spencer’s response and his unfortunate delay in acquiring the wheelchair. By dispensing with Freudian babble, we have learned in one paragraph what otherwise would have taken twenty-four pages, which is reason for both the author and reader to be grateful.

“It’s not a stupid hat,” Spencer retorted. “It’s maybe the coolest hat ever. It’s cooler than a damn Stetson.”

Perhaps it was Spencer’s intensity that caused Butch to realize his own tone of voice was on the surly side and that his dismay at the inadequacy of his dinner might have motivated him to lash out in a most improper fashion. He said, “Hey, pal, it’s just a hat.”

Having been bestirred by the word “ freak ” and the associations it had for him, Spencer was driven to make his point as forcefully as he could. “It’s the hat that Walter White started wearing partway through Breaking Bad , when he realized he was a bad dude and no one better mess with him.”

“I never saw that series,” Butch admitted. “But like I said, it’s just a hat.”

“It’s not ‘just a hat.’ It’s a meaningful hat. It’s the same style hat Gene Hackman wore when he played Popeye Doyle in The French Connection .”

Being of approximately the same age, Spencer and Butch probably had similar levels of testosterone, which always explains more than Freudian analysis. When Spencer failed to acknowledge that what he was wearing was merely a hat, Butch apparently decided that he had backed off his initial criticism as far as he could without further retreat reflecting badly on his manhood. “Listen, pal, this isn’t about you, see? It isn’t about anyone who wore the hat in a movie. If Jesus Himself wore it, that would still be a stupid hat.”

Spencer stepped farther into room 315.

If Ernie Hernishen had been dead, which he wasn’t, it would nevertheless have been an offense to his dignity to have taken him from County Memorial in a backless hospital gown. Worse, when he’d been stripped of his street clothes, someone had removed even his underpants. After lowering the collapsible railing, Rebecca and Bobby conspired to roll Ernie to the side of the bed with the intention of sitting him up on the edge, which was when they discovered his ass was hanging out.

Rebecca was not offended by the sight of a bare butt; she had seen others. However, she was distressed by the thought of sweet, shy Ernie being treated so cavalierly. “Why would they have to take his underpants off to figure out why he fell into a coma?”

Bobby said, “Maybe they suspected him of doing drugs, so they were looking for injection sites.”

“Who injects drugs in his own butt? There are a lot of other places that require fewer contortions.”

“Or maybe they suspected foul play.”

“What—there’s a psychotic butt-injector on the loose?”

“I’m just trying to explain the missing underpants. Maybe someone took them as a souvenir.”

“Who would want his underwear as a souvenir, a souvenir of what?”

“Some fan of the songs he’s written. You know, Rebecca, you’re not the only one who’s had strange experiences with kooky fans.”

“I find it hard to believe that you, the author of The Blind Man’s Lantern , can’t imagine an explanation better than souvenir underpants.”

“Remember, I woke up in Baltimore and flew commercial. It’s been a long day. Let’s get on with this. They’re going to embalm him whether he has underpants or not.”

“Have a look in the closet over there. Maybe his underpants are with the rest of the clothes he was wearing.”

Rebecca hoped that was the case. They were already swimming in a sea of mysteries. The experiences that had been washed from their memories by an unknown power. The shared sense that a lot of people adrift in comas were a part of their past. The mutual conviction that Ernie wasn’t on the far shore of Death, as he seemed to be, but was still alive even without vital signs. Missing underpants might be a small thing, but right now she felt that one new mystery would be one too many.

The closet was small because people don’t check into a hospital with two suitcases full of leisurewear. Bobby opened the door and after only a moment said, “Everything’s here.”

“The underpants, too?”

“Yeah.”

“Good. Great. Thank God. Go figure. You put them on him, and then I’ll help finish dressing him.”

“We’re in a hurry, the mortician coming and all. This is no time for modesty. We’re all amigos here.”

“Technically, I’m an amiga. I don’t want to see Ernie’s junk. He’s like my brother. No one wants to see her brother’s junk. Maybe one day I’ll have to play a nun in a movie, and how am I going to play a nun convincingly if I’ve seen my brother’s junk?”

Not all artists are affable and benign people, as witness the great painter Caravaggio, who wounded a police officer when he was nineteen and fled from Milan to live in Rome. There, he was arrested on a dozen occasions, often for violent incidents, and in 1606 he killed a man named Tomassoni over a dispute about a tennis game.

Spencer Truedove was no Caravaggio. He knew his art was not as great as Caravaggio’s—he didn’t even know what he painted or why he painted it—and as far as he was able to remember, he’d never killed anyone. He didn’t even play tennis. If rude people sometimes vexed him more than should have been the case, he never assaulted them, though sometimes he did confront them. And so he stepped farther into room 315 to speak his mind to the hulking, hairy individual sitting up in bed, with helium-filled foil balloons bobbing in a draft over his mortar-shell head.

“This hat,” said Spencer, “happens to be the style of hat that Sylvester Stallone wore in Rocky . There’s nothing stupid about this hat. And your reference to Jesus wearing one is ignorant, not least because the porkpie hat wasn’t invented until seventeen hundred years after Jesus was crucified.”

Even as we disapprove of Spencer’s excessive and possibly even misplaced anger, we can sympathize with his response to Butch’s criticism and use of the word “ freak. ” There have been in excess of fourteen thousand young-adult novels and TV-series episodes about the evils of schoolchildren bullying other schoolchildren, so we well know that the effects of it endure throughout the lives of the victims. We must respect Spencer’s enduring anguish.

Whether or not Butch had read any of those books or seen any of those TV shows, he evidently possessed enough insight and compassion to reach an approximate understanding of the psychology of the man who had burst into his hospital room with an unusual attachment to his hat. He said, “I forgot about Rocky Balboa wearing a hat like that. Now that I think about it, a lot of real tough guys in the movies have worn a hat like yours. You go ahead and take the wheelchair.”

Nonplussed, Spencer said, “What?”

“The wheelchair. You said you needed it. It’s yours. Even after I gag down this dinner, I’m not going anywhere. Not with this toe.”

Spencer regarded the wheelchair, glanced at Butch, looked at the open door behind him, felt his face flush, and said, “Thanks.”

Bobby well knew the torment that Spencer had gone through even before he’d been widely identified as a geek and sought community with the other amigos. Spencer’s life had been rich with humiliation before his parents divorced, before his mom, Angelina, took the name Constanina because that’s who she’d been in a previous incarnation, before his father married that sweaty stripper, Venus Porifera, who appeared nightly at the men’s club out on the state highway, beyond the town limits, where there was no shame or laws against obscene performances. Nevertheless, in spite of all Bobby’s understanding and regardless of the deep sympathy he felt for Spencer, impatience drove him to say, “Why the hell is it taking so long for Rembrandt to find a wheelchair in a hospital? Is he in a fugue state, painting a wall mural of terminal medical conditions outside the ICU?”

From her perch on the side of the bed, where Ernie lay on his back in his street clothes, Rebecca said, “Chill, Shamrock. He’ll show up in a second.”

Pacing agitatedly, Bobby said, “So might some orderly, going to take Ernie to a cooler in the basement to stash him for a mortician. Or, hey, maybe the law requires an autopsy in a case like this, and the coroner is on his way even now. Whether maybe it’s a mortician who pumps him full of preservatives or a coroner who slices off the top of his head to look for a brain aneurysm, that’s the end of our boy. We need to be out of here .”

“We’ll have him out of here in plenty of time,” Rebecca said. “In a hospital, they have their hands full trying to keep the living alive. They deal with corpses, too, but it’s not the primary item on their agenda.”

“How can you be so sure? If I was a hospital administrator and there were dead people scattered all around, I’d want to get them the hell out to preserve the reputation of the institution.”

“Did you forget? My character in Shriek was a nurse.”

“Yeah, you’re right. I forgot. In the final sequence, when Judyface cut off that cop’s arm with a chain saw, that’s why you knew how to save his life.”

“So listen to me and relax.”

Bobby continued to pace like a nervous gerbil exploring the confines of its cage. “Listen, I’m not being critical. It stretched the imagination that you could stop his bleeding the way you did and that he didn’t go into shock, but I was still with you, still buying it. However, after you killed Judyface—or thought you killed him—when you walked out through the cornfield to the highway with a two-hundred-pound cop leaning on you for support—”

Rebecca said, “Oh, how I loved the end music. It was just so inspiring.”

“Yeah, okay, it was. And I totally believed you wouldn’t leave the guy and you could find the strength to do your part, but I was never sold that, with one arm cut off and all the blood he lost, he could stay on his feet and make it through all that corn.”

“Well, the credit crawl was long, and the director didn’t want to go to a black screen. He wanted the audience to think there was one more jump coming, maybe Judyface’s mom would erupt screaming through the corn for revenge, a setup for a sequel. What always bothered me was how we left the severed arm behind. My character being a nurse, I think she would have brought the arm with the hope it could be sewn back on the cop.”

“You’re right,” Bobby said.

“I know I’m right.”

“You should direct.”

“Maybe one day.”

Spencer crashed through the door and rolled a wheelchair across the room to the bed. He said, “Don’t ask.”

An orderly coming to move the corpse, a mortician and assistant speeding toward the hospital in a hearse, perhaps a coroner en route to argue with the mortician for dibs on the deceased, and nurses bustling from room to room—all those people would complicate the task of spiriting Ernie Hernishen to the ground floor and out of the hospital.

Having played a nurse in three films, Rebecca was reasonably confident that she could talk her way through most encounters with medical staff. However, she had never played a hospital security guard or janitor; on their way out, if they drew the attention of such a person who was a suspicious type and who had an exaggerated sense of his authority, unpleasantness could ensue.

Once Ernie was propped in the wheelchair in his clothes, he still looked dead even to the amigos, who intuitively knew that he was alive. Rebecca resorted to the contents of her purse. She swiped a light coat of lipstick across Ernie’s bloodless lips and applied wisps of rouge to his cheeks. With his disarranged hair forming a spiky halo, those ministrations made him appear to be a clown who had succumbed to a cardiac infarction before completing his makeup. Rebecca used her hands to smooth down her amigo’s hair as best she could, and Spencer contributed his hat to the cause, and Bobby supplied a pair of sunglasses. At last, Ernie no longer looked entirely dead.

Incomplete without his trademark hat, like a less than gifted Spencer Truedove impersonator, the artist left the room to call an elevator and hold it with the hope that, against all odds, Ernie could be whisked away without incident.

Giving Spencer time to perform his assigned task, Bobby was poised behind the wheelchair, hands on the handgrips, and Rebecca stood with one hand on the door to room 340. The third-floor hall—the stage—waited beyond.

She said, “Wheel him along casually. Don’t hurry. We don’t want to appear as if we’re fleeing. I’ll talk to him as we go. He’s our uncle Ralph from Salt Lake City.”

“He doesn’t look like a Ralph,” Bobby objected.

“My actor’s instinct says no one will look twice at a Ralph.”

“Salt Lake City?”

“People think Mormons when they hear Salt Lake City. People trust Mormons. You never hear of a Mormon bank robber or rioting Mormons or a Mormon shooting up a shopping mall. Okay, let’s go.”

Rebecca pulled open the door, and Bobby rolled Ernie into the corridor. Rebecca followed and proceeded at the left side of the wheelchair. So far, so good.

When a nurse exited room 335 and came toward them, Rebecca put a hand on Ernie’s left shoulder and patted him affectionately and said, “Come Monday, you’ll be well enough to go back to Salt Lake City, Uncle Ralph.”

The nurse smiled at Bobby as though she wanted to wink but was determined to hold fast to the standards of her profession. When she heard “Salt Lake City,” she glanced at Rebecca. “Nutrisystem works. Marie Osmond is as cute as a button. I lost thirty pounds because of her.”

“Who hasn’t?” Rebecca said.

As the nurse continued north and they continued south, Bobby picked up the pace. When Rebecca warned him to stay casual, he began to move even faster. Bobby turned right into the elevator alcove at such speed that she half expected Ernie to shift violently, slide out of the wheelchair, and sprawl across the floor. But as if Ernie were in fact a Mormon loath to make a spectacle of himself, he rode out the turn with his dignity intact.

Four cabs occupied the alcove. Spencer stood in number three, index finger on the hold door button.

Bobby wheeled amigo Ernie into the cab, and Rebecca followed, and Spencer pressed the close door button.

“We’re not in a wheelchair race,” Rebecca reminded Bobby.

“You know me,” he said. “I’ve got to move. I feel safe when I’m moving. The faster and farther I move, the safer I feel.”

“So you go to Bosnia and Borneo to write about Vermont.”

“I didn’t go to Borneo. I went to Tonga. The Kingdom of Tonga.”

“Why isn’t the door closing?” she asked.

Spencer said, “There’s a safety delay.”

The door closed. As the cab descended, Rebecca was so relieved that she sighed.

When the cab stopped at the second floor and the doors slid open, a uniformed hospital security guard stood there, waiting to come aboard, which is the kind of development necessary to maintain tension in any scene of escape. He was perhaps six feet two, maybe two hundred pounds, with a blunt face and marble-hard blue eyes that radiated suspicion and conveyed the impression he’d endured military service in a far land so dangerous that even poisonous snakes and sharp-toothed predators had fled the country in fear of the humans who ran the place. He entered the elevator cab with no possibility whatsoever that he would provide comic relief, and after a safety delay, the doors closed.

The guard carried a pistol in a holster on his right hip.

Fifteen years earlier, no security guard in a hospital would have been issued a firearm. In those days, people went to such noble institutions to be cured of an ailment or repaired after an injury or saved from imminent death. In those olden days, security guards were present largely to assist in the gentle restraint of druggies and drunks whose injuries were not serious enough to dissuade them from causing mayhem. Now that a lot of drugs were legal in numerous jurisdictions and were ravenously consumed, now that once self-aware and venerable professionals such as physicians and educators were as likely as anyone to indulge in furious political rants on those social media platforms that encouraged idiocy, now that even young nurses with strong feminist inclinations posted nude photos to suggest that their passion for caregiving extended beyond tending to the lame and the sick, you never knew who might show up at a hospital, what their purpose might be, or what weapons they might be carrying. In another fifteen years, all infirmaries would probably be encircled by high walls crowned with razor wire and constantly patrolled by circling drones with laser weapons.

A name tag clipped to the pocket of the guard’s uniform shirt identified him as Michael Z.

As the lift descended once more, Michael Z habitually patted the gun in his holster as he made eye contact with Spencer, then with Bobby, then with Rebecca. He ignored Ernie, evidently because he could not imagine that anyone in a wheelchair might be a threat—a misjudgment that was likely to get him killed one day.

Many officers like this one, whether badge-carrying police or private security agents, were skilled at using silence to intimidate nervous suspects into self-incrimination. Rebecca doubted Michael Z meant to intimidate them. He just didn’t have anything to say.

Although Bobby was a fine novelist with an impressive command of the English language, his gift was limited to the written word; he possessed no acting talent. However, as a consequence of being fostered by the eccentric, often uncommunicative Adam and Evelyn Pinchbeck, Bobby was unsettled by prolonged silences among people. Although the descent from the second floor to the lobby at ground level required thirty seconds at most, he evidently found the trip interminable and unsettling. As if reading from a script with a gun to his head in front of an audience of thousands, he said, “Come Monday, you’ll be well enough to go back to Salt Lake City, Uncle Osmond.”

Perhaps Michael Z had an ear for dialogue and recognized the anxiety revealed by Bobby’s strained and halting delivery of those fifteen words. Or it might have been the case that he found it odd or even suspicious that “ Osmond ” would be a first rather than last name. He studied Bobby with a squint-eyed stare sharp enough to peel a potato. That is hyperbole, of course, an obvious and intentional exaggeration; besides, there was no potato in the elevator on which to confirm or disprove that contention. Bobby clearly felt as if he were being peeled, however, and his ghastly expression only honed the security guard’s interest in him.

The fingers of Michael Z’s right hand, with which he habitually patted his pistol, curled around and tightened on the weapon’s grip, which caused Rebecca to hold her breath in dread. Actually, there was little chance that the security guard would shoot Bobby the Sham. Although it is standard practice in these violent times for authors to kill major characters early in—as well as all the way through—a novel, merely for the shock value, this is not that kind of story, nor is the storyteller in this case cavalier about the value of human life. Of course, the storyteller reserves the right to kill off characters much later in the book, if the logic of the plot and the emotional payoff for readers justify it, or if the storyteller finds one or more characters annoying.

Whether or not additional missteps on Bobby’s part might have ensured a confrontation with the security guard is moot. Sometimes fate intervenes in a dire situation to grant you a reprieve from being charged with stealing a dead body, which is what happened in this instance. As the elevator arrived at the ground floor and the doors opened, a voice issued from the walkie-talkie clipped to the guard’s utility belt: “ Michael, report to the gift shop. A situation is unfolding at the gift shop. ”

Whatever Michael Z experienced during a previous career in the military or another perilous occupation, those events encouraged in him a Spartan attitude toward danger. His facial expression remained deadpan even when receiving this summons to what could be a mortal encounter. Some miscreant in the hospital gift shop might merely be shoplifting candy bars, or a drug-addled psychopath might he holding a knife to the cashier’s throat. Nevertheless, Michael Z hurried out of the elevator and rushed off with a stirring display of duty.

The lobby was small. People were coming to and leaving from visits with patients. Some looked worried, and others appeared put-upon, and a few were smiling as though thinking about an impending inheritance. No one showed any interest in the amigos. The exterior pneumatic doors whisked open as if the hospital were eager to be rid of them.