Eureka (17 page)

“Otis, it’s me—Dr. Severy. Madison Severy. Call me Mad!”

A voice. A man’s. Call me Mad? What does that mean?

I am not dead!

That’s what it means.

I am not dead!

The words leaped to and through Otis. He tried to speak them out loud. Nothing happened. There was no sound. At least he didn’t hear any. Were his lips moving? No way to tell.

He decided to open his eyes. But they wouldn’t cooperate. It was like looking through a narrow, tiny mail slot in a foggy rain. Something like that.

He thought he saw filmy, poorly lit shadows. They were people, maybe—probably. Other people who, like him, were also alive. One of them was probably Mad.

I didn’t drown!

He didn’t try to say it this time. He just thought it.

“Otis, if you can hear me, nod your head!” The voice was male. It again sounded like the man who had said he was a doctor
and should be called Mad. He was shouting. Why was he shouting?

I’m Buck, Mad
.

Otis decided not to try nodding. He was too tired to do so even if he could.

“You’re a lucky man,” said Mad, his voice’s volume turned down a bit but still very loud. “If that deputy hadn’t happened along, there’s no telling what the outcome might have been.”

Call me Buck!

Otis remembered a man in a uniform. At the river. He suddenly had the taste of tobacco smoke in his mouth. Or was he imagining that? Did the guy do CPR?

He couldn’t tell exactly where Mad was; the shouts had come from over there on the right. Mad must be screaming into Otis’s right ear.

Stop that!

Otis figured his closed eyes might cause the Mad shouter to think this lucky patient of his had gone to sleep so he would shut up. He was wrong.

“He’s reacting, he’s coming to,” said Mad in a much quieter voice. But not to Otis. Otis was the he. Mad was speaking to somebody else, probably one of those other shadows. Coming to?

I am not coming to!

“You’ve been saved, Otis,” Mad said in only a half-shout. “Your driver’s license got wet, but they could still read your name. Otis Halstead of Eureka, Kansas—you can thank God for that.”

I don’t thank God for anything!

“You’re back home in Eureka at the Ashland Clinic.”

No!

Otis tightened his closed eyes—or thought he did. That was what he wanted to do, at least. But he couldn’t tell if he had done it. He couldn’t tell if he had done—could do—anything.

“Look, look,” said the voice of Mad, again to somebody besides Otis. “There’s liquid seeping out from under his eyelids.”

“Are those tears?” a woman asked. Was that Sally? Otis couldn’t hear much better than he could see. Maybe that was why Mad was screaming into his ear. But it sounded like she really was crying. Sally always used to cry whenever Otis cried. She couldn’t help herself. It was automatic. He cried, she cried. When was the last time that had happened—that he’d really cried?

“Tears of joy, obviously,” said Mad.

“Maybe not,” said another voice, also a man’s. It sounded to Otis like it might be that idiot Tonganoxie.

Get me out of here, Idiot Tonganoxie!

Obviously, Idiot Tonganoxie couldn’t hear that. Nobody could hear anything Otis was saying, because he couldn’t talk. Right? Right, right.

Otis figured he might have had it all wrong. He wasn’t alive at all. He had drowned in the Chanute. Now he was dead. But if he was dead, why would they have brought him to the world-famous Ashland Clinic? To study his water-soaked brain? Maybe Mad was lying to him. Or maybe Mad didn’t even exist. Maybe the newly late Otis Halstead of Eureka, Kansas, aka Buck, was in some kind of anteroom on the way to hell. No question, the final destination for Otis was going to be hell. But maybe not Buck?

Different name meant different man meant different final destination?

There was only one way to find out what was really going on here.

He started with trying to move his right leg. Nothing happened. It wouldn’t budge. Neither would the left. Or either of his arms.

I’m dead!

That smoking deputy was too late
.

I’m only paralyzed?

Maybe he saved only my life. My brain’s waterlogged
—
soaked through and through. Flooded to a standstill with water from the Chanute
.

“I’m a neurotherapist, and I promise you we’re going to bring you back to full life, if you do your part, Otis.” It was Mad.

Could a neurotherapist, whatever that was, read minds—even those full of river water?

“Please try to move the big toe on your left foot. Otis, say to yourself: ‘I am now going to move my big toe on my left foot.’”

My big toe on my left foot. Yes, I can say that to myself, I am now going to move my big toe on my left foot
.

I’m alive!

“Move it, Otis. Move the toe.”

Move it, Otis, Move the toe
.

Otis tried but couldn’t move it, at least as far as he could tell.

“Maybe tomorrow,” said the male shadow called Mad to some other shadows, maybe those of Tonganoxie and Sally. “We’ll give you something to help you sleep.”

And they all went away.

OTIS TRIED
TO jiggle his head around. He wanted to see if he could hear or feel water sloshing around up there inside his skull.

He neither heard nor felt anything, of course, and it was doubtful that his head had moved. But the thought might have made him laugh, or at least smile, if he could have done either.

Goddammit!

That was the prevailing mantra.

He was back in Eureka. And at the world-famous Ashland Clinic. Goddammit! Goddammit! Goddammit!

Maybe he’d have been better off without the deputy and the taste of the man’s cigarette smoke in his mouth. Maybe he’d be better off drowned in the Chanute than alive in Eureka at the Ashland Clinic.

Yes, he was alive. He was pretty sure he knew that now. That was what he knew. That was all he knew. The last thought he’d had in the river was that he was drowning.

He didn’t know about his Cushman, his Daisy Red Ryder air rifle, his cast-iron fire engine, and his Kansas City Chiefs helmet. Did they drown?

Why hadn’t he drowned if they had? The deputy couldn’t save them? Did he even try?

What about his singing again like Johnny Mercer? Did it drown, too?

He didn’t want to be here as Otis. He was running away from here as Buck. He was going the other way. He was Buck who was going west on a motor scooter. Too bad they could read his driver’s license. Maybe he’d be at some other hospital on the other side of the river if they hadn’t figured out he was Otis Halstead of Eureka, Kansas.

Did they bring him back on the interstate? Buck didn’t like interstates.

Goddammit!

Mad? Call me Mad? Is that nickname part of what passes for humor here at the world-famous Ashland Clinic?

Was Otis Halstead still fifty-nine? Or had Buck turned sixty?

Maybe the shadow people would tell him everything when they came back tomorrow.

Meanwhile, he would work on jiggling his right big toe. Or
was it the left one the shadow named Mad had wanted him to move?

Tears coming out of his eyes? That didn’t make sense. He hadn’t felt like crying. Only screaming. Maybe that was sweat Mad saw oozing from between the lids.

Or water left over from the Chanute.

THEN THERE WAS
Mad again, talking.

“Good morning, Otis,” he said. “I trust you slept well?”

Otis didn’t attempt to respond, not with a nod or a wink, much less a word. He didn’t know if he’d slept well or not or for how long.

What day was it? How much longer until his sixtieth birthday? Or had it already come and gone?

Mad was still talking.

“There’s a young man out here who says he knows you as somebody named Buck. He says he saw your picture and read about your accident in the newspaper and decided to find you and come see you. He says his name is Tom but you know him as T Injured people are often victimized by unscrupulous con men and women who read about somebody’s misfortune. He seems terribly clean-cut, but one can never tell. He wants to come in and see you. Can you give us some indication of what we should do with him—what we should tell him?”

Some indication?

Otis wanted to move everything in his body, but not even his eyelids would budge. He couldn’t get them to open any farther than the slit.

Let the boy in here!

Mad said to someone, “Well, I think in the interest of caution,
we’re going to have to turn the young man away. Sally said Otis had no friends like this kid—none his age anywhere. And his name certainly isn’t Buck. This is Otis, of course.”

Otis wanted to say to someone: Let him in. He
is
my friend. Buck’s friend. Not Otis’s. His mother is Iola, and she’s dying.

Let the boy in here!

He could not say that or give any signal—any indication— that would say it.

It made him wish that he were still in the river drowning— drowned, actually, by now. He hated the tobacco taste in his mouth.

“DO YOU FEEL
this, Otis?”

Is it already another tomorrow? Otis recognized the voice and saw the shadow. It was a little clearer this time. The man—Mad again—was wearing a white coat and had a beard.

“I’m sticking a needle into the bottom of your right foot, Otis. Do you feel it?”

Otis felt it. Slightly. More like a small nick than a prick. Not enough pain to cause a grimace. Otis was in the slow process of deciding whether and how to acknowledge the feeling—assuming he could—when Mad said, “Obviously not.”

Yes, obviously not. That, suddenly, was just fine with Otis. Obviously not.

Mad, plus whatever other human shadows were with him, disappeared again.

Fine
, thought Otis.
Let them think I’m not feeling needle pricks or anything else. Let them think I’m not making progress. Let them think anything they want while I figure out what I’m going to do about being trapped in the world-famous Ashland Clinic
.

Trapped! I am trapped!

Now that they were gone, his mind wouldn’t go to what he might do about his awful situation—alive but worse off than being drowned.

He moved on to trying to think of something that had happened during the sixth year of his life. Wasn’t that where he was when he was falling into the river? Hadn’t he thought of something from the fifth year? Or was he still on four?

Five was easy. That was the Christmas he didn’t get the toy fire engine. So, six was he where he was now. He was six when he learned to swim underwater.

No. He broke his right arm when he was six. The break was just below the elbow. He wore a cast for several weeks. Everybody wrote their names on it. How did he break his arm? Did he fall from a tree or a truck or a tractor? He couldn’t remember.

Seven. What happened when he was seven? Second grade. Oh, yes. Miss Sterling. Miss Sylvia Sterling. She was homeroom teacher and most every other kind of teacher. And he loved her. He really loved her. Most nights, the whole year he was seven, he imagined what it would be like to be with Miss Sylvia Sterling all his life.

His eighth year. He thought and thought. Nothing came. Nothing happened that he could remember. Not one thing!

Ninth? Wasn’t he nine when he wrote the cornflakes ditties? No, no. That was the ninth
grade.
When he was thirteen or fourteen. Or something else.

What was the great one about Connecticut? Got it.

OTIS WASN’T ABLE
to count, but it was several—ten, twenty?—visits later that Mad said, “Otis, I’m going to assume that you can hear me and comprehend what I’m saying. We’ve run some tests, and that seems to be the case, even though you’re not showing us the way we would have hoped.”

Otis had to fight off a smile. He knew he could smile. That was one of many little movements he had made—only in private.

Mad, with an unfriendly edge in his voice for the first time, kept talking. Because Otis never talked, that left Mad to do it all. Mad seemed to do little else but talk.

“Let me tell you about what happened to you. We assume you know the first part. You fell through a break in the bridge into the water. A deputy sheriff happened by just after you fell. He went in the river after you and pulled you to shore. You were unconscious, and he did some CPR and brought you to. He was quite a hero, Otis.”

Otis remembered the deputy sheriff. Not the name or the face but the brown uniform and the Cushman. He rode a Cushman. Was it his Cushman or Otis’s Cushman? Was that him who yelled just before the scooter fell through the bridge? What had he found out about Otis on his computer? Quite a hero? CPR. Otis never learned how to do that. Some of the people at KCF&C learned. Some firemen came to the office and gave classes. Who wants to blow into a stranger’s mouth? Not Otis. But that deputy blew his cigarette breath into Otis’s. Quite a hero.