Thank you to the people who read the rough draft of ReWire. Your comments and suggestions were very helpful. I hope you enjoy the professionally proofed and edited version.
Chapter 4
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Jack and Dvora sat, not talking much at all, until eleven that night when another nurse walked into the room. The nurse’s nametag said Smith, Mary, RN, BSN. She was maybe forty, with worry lines around her eyes and deep laugh lines around her mouth. Mary looked bone-weary, but her big, light-green eyes were alert and caring. It was Mary’s job to tell them nothing.
“Dr. Kramer asked me to speak to you. She is the thoracic surgeon in charge of the team caring for Ms. McDonald. Doctor asked me to tell you that Ms. McDonald is finally stable. Doctor will be in to talk to you as soon as possible. There was a terrible multiple-car accident and Doctor had to rush to another operating room. I am so sorry about Ms. McDonald.”
Nurse Smith smiled and turned to leave in her sensible, white shoes. Jack asked himself what it would be like to go through life as Mary Smith. He needed to find out. He had to show Mary Smith that he cared about her. Caring was easy. Not caring was something he could be better at. Then some of the nightmares might stop.
Jack and Mary were of an age. Their worlds had been shaped by many of the same forces.
Jack slid in front of Mary, gently blocking her way to the door.
Some people called what Jack did hypnosis. His ex-wife called his skills “manipulation,” on the infrequent good days when they were in love. Most of the time, they had been in hate, and she called what he did “mind control.”
When Meghan was a very little girl, she used to say he cast spells. Sometimes, the spells worked.
Jack matched Mary’s body language and breathing, willing his heartbeat to correspond with hers. When he spoke, it was in the same pattern, using words similar to words she used, at the same decibel level, and in the same cadence.
Humans are comfortable and open with the familiar. People are startled when they hear their own voices recorded, after years hearing the same voice through the filter of cartilage, flesh and bone. Yet, they are nurtured when they hear a voice that sounds near their own.
“Nurse Smith. Mary? Please? You have a feeling about how my sister is doing. You would want to know, wouldn’t you, if it was your baby sister, the sister you raised after your parents died? Is it as bad as it sounds-worse? Please, extend me the courtesy you would want if we traded places. Will she live, do you think?”
Jack stood in relaxed confidence, willing Mary to answer his questions, trying to hear the answer before it left her mouth.
Mary looked into some distant place.
“I don’t know,” Mary said. “Meghan must be much tougher than she looks to have survived. So she has a chance. If she is lucky enough and tough enough, then there is a chance. If she wants to live badly enough, if some part of her deep inside her knows enough to want to live, then she has a chance.”
Mary stared at Jack for another few heartbeats, and then, with a start, looked around as if seeing the room for the first time. She gave herself a little shake. She drew back, straightened, broke eye contact, and said in a louder, sharper voice: “I shouldn’t have said anything. Please, I am not the doctor. I wasn’t supposed to…. I mean I… That is all.” With that Mary squared her shoulders and marched back to her world of pain.
If you wanted to know something, ask a nurse. The doctor’s union was too damn strong. That, combined with their government enforced monopoly, wasn’t giving the world good, cheap health care, but instead overpaid mechanics with God complexes.
Dvora had watched and listened intently while he did the thing. “Meghan told me you could do that. You are a reader, aren’t you?”
Jack sat to recover the energy he’d used willing Mary to tell him the truth. The process always left him drained. Not as bad as the omen dream, but still drained. He looked at Dvora, trying to judge how she was judging him-if she was judging him at all. He tried hard not to read her.
There were more stories in the news about it every day. Some people (who knew how many?) could read other people. Mostly, they read emotions, but there were rumors that a very few especially powerful talents could read actual thoughts. What wasn’t being talked about anywhere and was supposed to be “top secret” was that, on occasion, some people could also influence others thoughts and actions. Jack had also seen evidence that a very, very few could influence objects.
“I guess I am,” said Jack. “Who knows anything about this stuff anyway? I’ve always been able to read people. With me, individuals are much harder to read than groups. If it’s with an individual I have to like them, and it doesn’t work more often than it does work.” He didn’t tell Dvora that he could read people he hated, but that it made him physically ill.
They sat for a while. Jack hated hospitals. Thirty-eight percent of money spent in hospitals is spent trying to cure problems caused by being in a hospital. That little piece of knowledge gave him comfort, yes it did.
Jack wasn’t a sitter. He was a doer. He didn’t do grief well at all. Anger, yes. His ex used to say he was only comfortable with two emotions. Thinking about her pissed him off so bad he couldn’t remember what she said the second emotion was. He paced, feeling the fire in his belly grow.
Jack’s hatred for hospitals started when he was a kid. That sickening, too-clean pine scent must cover something. If they had to use a smell that strong it’s got to be real bad, he remembered thinking when he was a kid. Young Jack thought that smell covered the stink of rotting dead. The hospital types made the lights too bright, like they were trying to fill all the shadows so Mr. Death couldn’t hide. Now he didn’t have a place to hide either.
Later, he jumped as a phone he hadn’t noticed rang close by. He snatched up the receiver on the old-fashioned phone nearly hidden behind the little plant on the table in the corner.
“Mr. McDonald?”
“Yes?” he asked eagerly.
“I’m Jane Fredericks with the San Francisco Reader. Our readers…” He could picture the little weasel hiding in somebody’s office, proud of conning the switchboard operator into connecting her to the little room. He slammed the phone down. Pieces of the shattered phone flew about the room-one whizzed by his head like cut-rate shrapnel. One of the biggest pieces bounced through the door as the doctor opened it to walk in.
Dr. Andrea Kramer was tall, taller than Jack, and so thin her lab coat hung on her like a poncho on a coat rack. She’d missed a button on the lab coat they used as a shield and badge of authority. The circles under her eyes were big and dark enough to look a little like black eyes. The doctor’s quick, certain movements pulled at his tired mind. She seemed then like a member of some tougher, reptilian species.
Dr. Kramer didn’t remember Jack, but he remembered her. Jack had one more friend than he had any right to because of her skill in the OR. Dr. Kramer was the best thoracic surgeon in San Francisco. According to some, she was one of the top five in the world. Andrea introduced herself, spun a chair around to sit straddling it like a man. Despite obvious fatigue her movements seeming too fluid to be part of his clumsy race. “We have Ms. McDonald stabilized. Mary reported she gave you an inventory of Ms. McDonald’s injuries. None of them, in and of themselves, except for the head wound, would worry me. Taken in total, though, the effect of the injuries to her system nearly overwhelmed her. Her will must be extraordinary. I’ve seen professional boxers with less heart, less fight. She has considerable blunt force trauma to the left side of her head. It looks like it might have been done by a punch. If it was, it was a hell of a punch. Dr. Saroyan operated and believes he has fixed that problem.”
The doctor paused, pulling off her glasses. She held them up to the light and then brought them to her mouth. Her tongue flicked out quickly, wetting each lens. She grabbed the corner of her smock, rubbed the lenses, checked her glasses against the light again and pushed them back up her nose.
“Dr. Saroyan can explain the head injury better than I, but there is hope. Do either of you have knowledge of the Glasgow Coma Scale?”
Jack thought he should remember the Glasgow Coma Scale, having led with his head so often, but his brain felt full of mud.
Dvora said: “It’s a test of brain function. Simple tests like: Do the pupils react to light? Does the patient react to pain, or try to speak, and so on? A number is assigned to each result. These numbers are combined and the higher the number, the better the chance for full recovery.” Dvora recited it, despite her concussion, as if it were a memorized lesson from grammar school.
The doctor nodded with a look of approval, “Excellent. Meghan’s score leads us to believe there is hope Ms. McDonald can regain consciousness and full use of her faculties.” The doctor paused and made very direct eye contact with each of them in turn.
“I must make sure you both understand what I’m going to say next. There are no guarantees. Despite the confidence of my colleagues, and what you might read in journal articles, we know very little of how the mind works. So much of recovery from an injury like this seems to depend on force of will. And, some luck is involved. I want you to understand that there is hope. But there are no guarantees. Ever. I know this might seem cruel. I want you both to tell me in your own words what I have just told you.”
Jack was pleased with what the doctor said. Making sure that the message was understood would lead to fewer dashed hopes and feelings of promises broken. And, Meghan’s will was astonishing.
Jack said, “You just told us that there are elements of luck and you don’t really know anything. You believe that force of will is important. And, that we are not without hope that Meghan will recover, but no guarantees.”
Dvora looked relieved when she said, “You have given me hope. You said that so much depends on her will. I have never met a person stronger-willed than Meghan. I know successful entrepreneurs, world-class athletes, and prima ballerinas. None of them are as tough as my beautiful Meghan.” Then her mouth turned down and she said, “And there is real danger. You make no guarantees. None.”
The doctor’s beeper went off and she stood quickly, swaying. He reached out to steady her.
“When can we see her?” Jack asked.
Dr. Kramer rested her cool, dry hand on his for a few seconds. The doctor looked as if she were surprised by his question. “You can see her now.” Her mouth turned down. “Make yourselves ready. You won’t like what you see.” She turned and jogged through the door.
Jack helped Dvora back into the wheelchair and pushed her down the hall, around two corners to the left and back to the right, following the signs to the SICU. A tiny nurse with multicolored hair extensions visible through her head cover, met them, checked their IDs against the approved visitors list, gave them instructions and had them don masks.
“They did her real bad,” she said. “Prepare yourselves.”
Dvora’s nails bit into the leathered skin on the back of Jack’s hand. Later, he would be surprised to see scabs where blood dried.
The blue of Meghan’s veins showed through the skin on the back of the hand that wasn’t swathed in bandages. A machine breathed for her through a tube in her throat. All her beautiful red hair appeared to be gone, her skull wrapped in bandages. Another tube ran out from under the dressings over her belly. Her left leg and right arm were encased in those clear plastic inflatable things they use before they put on casts. Meghan’s chest rose and fell along with the too-perfect metronomic sigh of the breathing machine. The room was so still over Dvora’s silent tears that Jack could hear the steady hum of electrical devices. That death-defying too-clean scent filled his senses.
Standing over Meghan, looking down at her, Jack remembered a deal he’d made with God while he was in the Gulf. If he could make a deal with God. If he ever believed in a God. He promised that if he made it back he’d never kill again. It was an easy deal to make. He never thought he’d have any reason to go back on the deal.
Taking another human’s life was the hardest thing Jack had ever done. They say the first life is the hardest to take. Bullshit. The first one’s easiest. He still remembered how the man looked, lying on his back, trying to push his intestines back into his belly. Jack couldn’t stand the man’s screams. When he cut the man’s throat to stop his screams, the silence was deafening.
The next time Jack needed to kill, he couldn’t pull the trigger. Dying was easier than seeing another face in his nightmares. He stood, waiting to die, making his peace, when the enemy’s weapon jammed. As the enemy tried to clear the jam, he watched his own weapon come up and felt it dance in his hands like a black snake. His textbook-perfect three round bursts cut the enemy to the ground.
The enemy was small and easy to roll over — like a doll. Jack looked to see if he had anything useful like 5.56 rounds or RDX in his pouches. He was careful. Some of them were wired to blow. One of the rounds, maybe the one that shredded the enemy’s intestines, had ripped away most of the enemy’s leggings. The dead man had the penis and testicles of a child, bare of pubic hair. He couldn’t have been more than ten or eleven. One of Jack’s rounds had made a hole precisely in the middle of the child’s forehead. He knelt next to the body of the boy, looking at that hole in the boy’s head. He stayed there, staring at that hole until the cramps in his legs were fire and it was too dark to see that hole in the middle of the boy’s forehead. Strange how now, years later, most times when he tried to close his eyes to sleep he could see that hole perfectly.
Jack remembered the first man he killed, the boy, and all the others, and would until the day he died. According to some, he would remember after that. He didn’t think so, but who knew? In the small hours of the morning when his soul is sick and the narcotic of sleep won’t come, he talks to the dead. He tells them he didn’t want to kill them. He tells them he had to. He thought it might have been true before. He knew that when he caught the men who did this to his sister he would look into their eyes and not hesitate as he snapped their rotten necks.