Journals of Eleanor Druse, The (Digital Picture Book) (13 page)

When I looked up, the hallway out to 9D was still empty, but when I turned to see if the nurses were coming out of the report room yet, I saw an old man in a white coat waiting at the elevators in the secure waiting area. He was holding a satchel in his right hand, with a thick notebook or manual under his left arm. The same old buzzard! Only now he had a black construction-type helmet on; though he was still wearing what looked like the same white lab coat. He turned and looked at me through the chicken-wire glass. The black helmet was embossed with a stylized bug logo and the words
LuvKraft Pest Control.
A patch with the same bug logo and company name was sewn on the left breast of the white coat. The old guy carried an open tool kit with small boxes inside labeled “Rat Attack: Danger! Contains Warfarin. Extremely Toxic.”

The light over the elevator lit, the bell dinged, the doors opened. He half turned toward me and I could see the cover on the manual under his arm. It had a skull on it and a steel instrument pointing at the skull. The old one—I swear it was the same old man!—smiled at me and lifted his hat, as if to say adieu, and there was that big white ropy scar switchbacking from his left temple to behind his ear. The same raised livid thing I’d seen on the scalp of the old rawbones the night Madeline had died.

He stepped onto the elevator. “You got some big ones up here,” he said, and then the elevator doors closed on him.

Is that what he’d said? It was muffled by the glass, and I’d gotten at least half of it by reading his bloodless lips.

You got some big ones up here?

Into the station came Berta, the elderly aide. I must have sounded like I needed a room out on the floor by the time I finished telling her what I’d seen.

Berta had decades of experience making sense of confused narratives, so she patiently kept trying to organize the particulars while my panic and fear mount ed.

“You say you saw a man in a white lab coat. All right, was he a doctor? A respiratory therapist? Doctors do come out on the unit to see their patients.”

“No,” I said. “I mean, yes. When I saw him on the elevator, he looked like a doctor, yes, and when I saw him out on the ward just now, yes, he wore a doctor’s coat. When he left just now, though, he was wearing what looked like the same long white coat, but he also had a helmet and lettering on his coat with the name and logo of the pest control company trucks parked downstairs. ”

“Did he come through the nurses’ station?” asked Berta.

Apparently there was no way to get from the ward to the elevators without coming through the nurses’ station. Details, details.

By now the other nurses and psychiatric technicians had come out of the report room. Eventually I persuaded them to let me show them the door and the room the mysterious figure had entered out on ward 9D.

As we walked down the hallway I began shaking with fright. I could barely keep my stories straight, about how I was a “good friend” of Laurel Werling and a volunteer hospice worker on the Kingdom Hospital sunshine ward, because I could not get the old man’s face out of my memory. He had been there the night Madeline had died, too.
Do you wanna know what love
is? I was sure I knew him, knew him from before I’d seen him eating pills the night Madeline died. Knew him from my chüdhood?

We reached the door in the hallway.

No. No. Don’t let it be so,
I prayed.
Don’t let it be so.
Nurse Heather opened the door to what was of course Laurel Werling’s room. What we found there was predestined, as if it had happened the first day of creation and had been waiting here ever since in this room on the ninth floor of Kingdom Hospital for us to find it.

Laurel Werling was still in her hospital gown, sitting on the floor, one leg haphazardly folded under her, her neck propped up against a radiator, arms fallen away at her sides.

Every opening and orifice on her head and face streamed an eerie mixture of blood and serous fluid. Even the mucous membranes of her swollen blue tongue and the seam where her lips met the flesh of her face oozed the same pinkish fluid, as if the foul fiend had mixed her blood with water before allowing it to gush out of her in rivulets.

The rest of her body had erupted in dark bruises, where internal hemorrhaging spread outward from her joints like stains under her skin, continuing even as we watched in horror. She looked as if she’d fallen down twenty flights of stairs and then showered in blood and water.

“Code blue!” said Nurse Heather.

An old biddy with a recent head injury and a history of seizure activity doesn’t stand a chance against the medical industrial complex and the police states of rural Maine. The Lewiston police department and the head of Kingdom Hospital security investigated the death of Laurel Werling. Unlike Madeline Kruger, who was elderly and nearly dead when she was admitted to the hospital, Laurel Werling was a young woman of thirty-five years, healthy except for a recent acute psychosis.

I was called upon to provide statements to various detectives and investigators, to whom I reiterated the facts as I knew them. I saw an old man in a white lab coat carrying a brochure about managing anticoagulant therapy with the words
warfarin
and
Coumadin
plainly printed on it. Later, I saw the same old man carrying a satchel with packages of rat poison, also emblazoned with warning labels about warfarin. Laurel Werling had indeed ingested warfarin, which as Coumadin is used as an anticoagulant or blood thinner to treat clotting disorders in humans, but is also used as a rodenticide, because in large doses it causes massive hemorrhaging and internal bleeding and deprives the blood of its ability to clot. Humans ingesting warfarin in large amounts die just the way Laurel Werling had died, by bleeding thinned blood from the lips, eyes, mucous membranes, and all orifices, and from massive bruising and internal hemorrhage.

I confess that I downplayed—well, actually, I did not even mention—the part about how the old man I’d seen first on the elevator in a doctor’s coat and later in the hallway and waiting for an elevator in an exterminator’s uniform was the same old buzzard who’d come to the nurses’ station the night Madeline Kruger died. It never came up, and I didn’t raise it. Several of the investigators asked in an indirect way about the death of Madeline, and I also refrained from describing the condition of her body or the swarming ants I’d seen that terrible night. I was trying to convince skeptical, rational men that I’d seen the man—or being—who’d murdered Laurel Werling, and part of me knew that I would only hurt myself by including even more fantastic details, real or imagined, that were off the main point. So I omitted them.

A fat lot of good it did me. Nobody believed me anyway. The hospital administrators checked with LuvKraft Pest Control. The company said it had a policy of mandatory retirement at age sixty-five and currently had no pest professionals over age fifty-five. The company had dispatched two teams of rodent control experts to Kingdom Hospital the day of Laurel Werling’s death. The oldest exterminator on the two teams was forty-two years old, and the men had worked only deep in the basement areas, near the earthquake damage, where vermin had been reported. The exterminators had at no time visited the upper floors of the hospital or the Kingdom psychiatric ward.

As for mysterious elderly skeletal physicians in white coats, the oldest doctor on staff and present that day at Kingdom Hospital was Dr. Louis Traff, a slightly overweight doctor I knew by sight. After checking with security (Otto) and the hospital operator (Karen), Dr. Massingale reported that no physician over age seventy with hospital privileges had visited the Kingdom that day, and no physician fitting the description I provided had checked in with the hospital operator at any time within Karen’s memory.

Everyone was careful not to say it, but the consensus seemed to be that I was either bat-belfry mad, or relapsing and having some kind of a complex partial seizure. Bobby told me that the “ghost” I’d seen was being referred to all over the hospital as Dr. Rattigan, making me the figure of fun du jour.

Instead of admitting that Laurel Werling’s death appeared to be at the very least an unexplained phenomenon, the investigators theorized that Ms. Werling, an experienced psychiatric nurse, had managed to obtain or had stockpiled a supply of Coumadin (warfarin), which as implausible as it may seem, she somehow accessed while being treated for psychiatric illness at Kingdom Hospital. Their working hypothesis was that she had intentionally ingested an overdose of anticoagulants for the purpose of ending her life.

As for the horrid old man, whose face I still see at night when I can’t sleep, he must have existed somewhere in my temporal lobe, where like Frankenstein’s monster, he’d been brought to life by an electrical storm—only in my case it was a synaptic lightning strike somewhere in the haunted house of my old brain.

Even Bobby sided with the enemy. He’d brought me an African violet several days after poor Laurel’s funeral—with a Tilt-a-Whirl of pretty purple blooms—and I was just thinking how dear he could be at times when he said, “Mum, I brought you the violets to get your mind off ghosts.”

“That poor woman,” I said, and I couldn’t keep the tears from spilling onto my cheeks.

“Mum, it’s not your fault. She was dotty, so she offed herself.”

“No, Bobby. Laurel Werling was not dotty. She was as sane as any other hardworking charge nurse in that hospital. What we saw the night Madeline Kruger died drove Laurel Werling insane, Bobby. If I’m not careful, it will do the same to me.”

For years prior, I had been seeing Dr. Lona Massingale, a wonderful person and a no-nonsense neurologist who had treated me for tinnitus and occasional tingling in my extremities. I’d also endured that rite of passage now intimately bound up with the grand climacteric of modern American life—a memory test to detect early Alzheimer’s disease. Aced it. At the time, I recall that Dr. Massingale asked me if I’d be interested in trading memories with her.

Dr. Massingale always took time to explain everything and to incorporate my own alternative medicine therapies into any treatment regimen. But after the Dr. Rattigan episode, her careful teaching didn’t take the sting out of her diagnosis and prescription. She recommended that I go back on Scyllazine, 100 milligrams twice daily, for apparent continuing seizure activity. To combat what she called apraxia and dysphoria—the unpleasant side effects that made me want to do and be nothing—she also prescribed 100 milligrams twice daily of Charybdisol, essentially the same drug mix Dr. Metzger had recommended in Boston.

If I didn’t know better, I would suspect that these physicians all belonged to a single fraternal secret society and granfalloon, financed by Big Pharma, which allowed them to collude in their practices, diagnoses, and prescriptions. In this global medical conspiracy, second opinions were an illusion on the order of those Wall Street investment firms who issue “research” recommending—what do you know!—the same stocks their investment bankers are selling. One might as well ask another Maoist for a second opinion about the Little Red Book.

I continued seeing Dr. Massingale at the Kingdom Hospital clinic for the next few months. My official diagnosis after my stay in Boston was concussion with contusion and mild hemorrhage in the right temporal lobe, with some nonclinical seizure activity detected by EEG. She had some good news: namely, that I probably wouldn’t have to travel to Boston for any follow-up scanning, because Kingdom Hospital had almost finished aggressively expanding its neurology, neurosurgery, and neurosciences departments. New MRI scanning facilities were part ofthat expansion, and a well-funded recruiting effort was under way to entice a few choice neurospecialists from all over the country to administer and staff the new neurosciences division.

Dr. Massingale warned me that lingering neurological symptoms were the norm for someone my age suffering the aftereffects of head traruma, but she predicted the sequelae would resolve themselves over time. I hadn’t by any stretch given in to the medical worldview of my condition, nor had I given up my own investigations into the unexplained (at least to me) deaths of Madeline Kruger and Laurel Werling. But the meds robbed me of my usual energy, and I often found it easy to procrastinate, and even easier to wonder if Writing my notes or doing more research were worth the effort.

I assumed that the Krugers had caller ID, because no one ever picked up the phone when I called. I thought about calling from a phone booth at the hospital, but then what would I say when they answered? Aha! Gotcha! According to Bobby, all three of Madeline’s children were back in Lewiston to divvy up the spoils of her modest estate, dispose of the house, and split up the proceeds. I wrote two letters—one expressing my condolences and the other asking if Mrs. Kruger had left any papers or memorabilia pertaining to our childhood friendship. The letters went unanswered. Bobby told me that Hilda, the eldest and the executor of Madeline’s estate, operated according to the golden rule: Them with the gold makes the rules. And Hilda didn’t want Ray or his little sister, Peggy, talking to me about their mother’s death or giving me any of their mother’s papers.

Whether I had post-concussion symptoms or medication side effects, I saw Dr. Massingale once a month or so for intermittent vertigo, nausea, and difficulty concentrating. I blamed it on the medications, but she said that only time would tell and I had to be patient.

Another bout of vertigo put me on the floor in the kitchen holding on to the refrigerator for dear life and calling for my boy (“Yes, Bobby, dear, it’s just like the TV ad, I’ve fallen and I can’t get up!”), the room whirling around me. Back to the doctor I went.

Dr. Massingale and I agreed that vertigo called for bed rest and more tests, or else I might not be so lucky recuperating from the next fall. She admitted me to Kingdom Hospital for a series of scans and more tests. So it was that I was one of the first patients admitted to the newly renovated neurology treatment floor, which was staffed by some of the finest neurologists and neurosurgeons in New England—at least that’s what the front-page article in the
Sun Journal
had said.