Projection (28 page)

Several seconds passed with only the random complaints of an old building breaking the silence.  I started down the corridor.  The sounds of my heels against the floor echoed off the cinder block walls.  Within seven or eight yards the light drifting from the crowd of reporters and from the street lamps around the green petered out completely, leaving me in darkness.  I stepped closer to the wall and ran a finger along a line of grout to keep myself steady as I walked toward the elevator.

I turned a corner, and saw three sets of
UP
and
DOWN
buttons glowing in the distance.  I let myself wonder fully what had happened on the locked unit since I had flown to Baltimore.  The injection I had given Lucas should have kept his remaining arm paralyzed, but it could have worn off, leaving Lucas — and everyone else on the fifth floor — at the mercy of the ferocious affliction he called Satan.  Calvin Anger might be on his way to a Pulitzer Prize written from the belly of the beast, or the beast might have destroyed him.  The hostages left on the unit, including Nurse Vawn, could be alive or they could be dead.

I stepped within reach of the buttons.  I took a deep breath.  Standing there alone, I knew I might be living the last pages of my life story.  But even if that were the case, I still had the chance — more, the responsibility — to shape my ending.  I forced myself to trade all the images of carnage and defeat racing through my mind for the image of the fire walker, who I pictured, strangely (or perhaps not strangely at all), as a lanky young Abraham Lincoln in a sober gray suit, pants rolled up past his shins.  He wore no beard, but the jutting jaw and forehead were as unmistakable as the deeply set Atlantic blue eyes.  I smiled in spite of my fear, swallowed hard and pressed the
UP
button.

The elevator doors opened with a blast of white fluorescent light that made me shield my face.  I took the few steps to the center of the car and watched the numbers climb on the stainless steel panel in front of me.  Before my vision had fully adjusted to the brightness, the doors slid open again, and I walked back into the dark, headed toward the locked unit.

Peter Zweig, the nineteen-year-old who had mad an offering of his victims’ remains at a church, moved his head to each side of the glass square in the steel door as I approached, apparently checking that I was alone.  When I reached the door, he turned and yelled something I couldn't make out.  Fifteen or twenty seconds later I saw Lucas emerge from the room at the end of the hallway — the room he called the
quiet room
.

Zweig pressed his face against the glass.  The supply of methadone on the unit obviously hadn't run dry; his pupils were pinpoints.  They flicked left and right a few times as he searched the space around me.  Then he pulled the door open just enough to grab my arm and drag me inside.  The doors slammed shut behind me.  Dead bolts slid home.

I hardly noticed Zweig running his hands over my arms and legs, stomach, chest and back, checking for weapons.  My attention was focused on Trevor Lucas as he walked the last twenty feet toward me.  His left arm wasn't moving, which gave me hope that the injection had held, but then I noticed what looked like fresh blood splattered over his hospital scrubs.  My heart sank.  A warm, sick feeling spread from my gut to my head and made me lean against the wall next to the doorjamb.

Zweig grabbed me and slammed me back against the door.

"Off," Lucas barked.

Zweig let go, but stayed flush to me.  His rancid breath made me turn my head.

"Join the others," Lucas said.  "Now."

Zweig finally stepped away.  I watched him walk into the Day Room and take his place in a double row of patients and hostages who knelt facing the windows, their heads tucked to their knees.  They were chanting what Lucas had called the Samurai warrior's prayer.

I have no life.  I have no death
.

I saw Calvin Sanger was among them.  Kathy was not.  I glanced at the nurses’ station.  Carla Vawn, the pregnant nurse who had been bound into her seat, was gone.

"You came back," Lucas said.

I turned to him.  His face glistened with sweat.  His pupils were pinpoints, just like Zweig's.  "I promised I would."  I squinted at the ruby splotches running down his surgical top.  "Where's Kathy?" I asked.

"Working in service to the Lord."  He caught his lower lip between his teeth and chewed on it.  "We're losing ground.  Satan has the upper hand."

The upper hand.  I pictured Lucas as a little child, reaching up with his hand and knocking the pot of boiling oil off the stove, scalding Michael.  "I want to help you take control again."

He shook his head.  "You should leave.  You'll become infested."  He paused.  "You'll become what I am."

My throat tightened.  There are few moments that testify more eloquently to the endurance of the human spirit than when the afflicted worries for the healer.  When I was a medical student, a patient of mine named Max Sands, wasting away from lung cancer, gagging on a ventilator tube stuck down his raw throat, had scrawled out a note at 3
A.M.
saying I looked tired and ought to get a little rest.  I have not forgotten and will not forget that man.  And it matters not whether the suffering is with cancer or leprosy or murderousness.  It matters not whether the vector spreading the disease is a bacterium, a virus or the psychological dynamic called projection.  When one man's body or mind is under siege, the magnificence of his soul will occasionally make itself plain to another.  Sometimes the gift is received, sometimes refused.  Witness Karla Faye Tucker.

Trevor Lucas, maimed, gripped by psychosis, had touched me.  His humanity still whispered from behind the mask of lunacy.  "I'm not leaving until this is over," I said.

Several seconds passed.  "It won't be long," he said.  "We're nearly ready to place ourselves in the hands of God."  His gaze drifted to the wall just behind me and to my left, and something between worry and confusion showed on his face.  Then he focused on me, again, staring vacantly into my eyes.

I glanced over my shoulder at the cinder blocks in his line of vision, but noticed nothing unusual.  I wondered if he was hallucinating.  "I did what you asked," I said, hoping to anchor him in the moment.  "I went to Baltimore."

He shook his head.  "That doesn't matter anymore.  It's too late."

I could sense Lucas’ unconscious girding against the knowledge I had brought back with me.  I put as much confidence into my tone and bearing as I could.  "I found out how Satan entered you," I said.

"How he entered is irrelevant.  The cancer has spread."

"We can still cure it."

"That's why you're a psychiatrist, and I’m a surgeon."  He tried to smile, but his upper lip trembled wildly and made him look even more grotesque.  "I know when a case is inoperable.  You hold a hand until it's gone ice cold."  He turned around and started down the corridor, his arm hanging limply at his side.

Hold a hand
.  Maybe I was making more of the words than they deserved, but it seemed to me that the walls of denial Lucas had built to contain the past were already leaking bits of his truth.  I took a breath.  "I'm not the one who's in denial," I called out.  "You are."

He stopped abruptly and stood with his back to me for several seconds before turning slowly around.  His jaws worked against each other.  One eye twitched spastically.

I worried I might have pushed him too far.  But I could not back away.  Nor could I stand still.  I was already walking the hot coals.  "I met Michael," I said.

He squinted at me.  "You saw Michael?  You saw him, as you see me now?"

My skin turned to gooseflesh.  "I did."

He took a few steps toward me.  His eyes were wild with excitement.  "Did he say he would take us under his wing?  Did he say he would guide us, as he did the Jews?"

It took me a moment to understand.  In the Old Testament, Michael is the guardian angel who shepherds Moses and his followers across the desert.  I remembered having thought of the Hebrews’ flight from Egypt while admiring the statue of Jesus in the Johns Hopkins Hospital lobby.  The parallel felt like more than coincidence; I took it as a sign I was on the right path.

"Did he say he would help us?" Lucas pressed.

I needed to keep tiptoeing the line between delusion and reality, coaxing Lucas toward the truth.  "Michael said he's been with you right along," I said.  "He told me you've been wandering many years."  I made sure to look him squarely in the eyes.  "He told me the reason you left home."

Lucas’ features softened from manic excitement toward sadness for an instant, and I thought I might have reached him, but then his gaze drifted back to the cinder blocks over my shoulder.  He kept looking at them as he spoke.  I wondered whether his mind was conjuring demonic voices or visions as a last-ditch effort to keep away his real demons — the memories of what he had done to Michael and what his mother had done to him.  "My life before this day is irrelevant," he said, finally.  "All that matters is that my flock reach the promised land."  He turned and started down the corridor again, walking faster this time.

I knew I had to follow him, but I hesitated.  I dreaded the horrors that lay to either side of the hallway and I could not be certain whether Kathy, fresh from another kill, lurked four, ten or twenty feet away.

Lucas stopped in front of Laura Elmonte's room.  He looked back at me.

I caught up to him at her door.  The buzz of the fluorescent fixtures overhead suddenly filled my ears.  The sick, warm feeling started rising in me again.

Elmonte was still naked in four-point restraints, her torso bisected by the prickly line of sutures Lucas had placed from her neck to her groin.  Her breathing was shallow and erratic.  A new IV catheter had been inserted into the base of her neck, at what looked like the location of the jugular vein, just above the collarbone.  Plastic tubing carried her deep blue blood to a urine collection bag strapped to the foot of the bed.  The bag could easily hold three units and was nearly full.

"Black bile," Lucas said.  "It just keeps coming."  He glanced up at he corner of her room.  "It's starting to seep through the walls."

That vision must have been what distracted Lucas at the door to the unit.  I chose my words carefully.  "Maybe it's better," I said, "to let Satan show... his whole hand."  I paused.  "Maybe it's better to let the bile through."

"Insanity," he crackled.  "We would all drown."

"No, you wouldn't.  You've escaped catastrophe before.  Michael told me.  You can do it again."

Lucas didn't respond.  He stood silently, watching Elmonte.  Then he looked back up at the corner of her room.  "We're running out of time."

"Tapping the jugular is no cakewalk," I said, hoping to help him focus.  "How did you get the catheter into her without the use of your arm?"

"I have no arm," he said, without emotion.  "Satan took my arms."

"How, then?"

"Calvin."

"He's a reporter," I said, as much to myself as to Lucas.

"He came here for glory.  He ended up a soldier for the Lord," Lucas said.  "The young man turns out to be a Harvard Medical School dropout.  Failed biochemistry during the first semester, as if that matters.  Harvard cocksuckers.  He's a surgeon if I've ever seen one.  He has the gift."  He closed his eyes.  "What thou need shall be provided."  He took a deep breath, then looked straight at me.  "Now that Kathy has arrived, the last of our work can proceed."  He turned abruptly and continued down the hall.

I stayed right with him.  We walked past the medication room where he had stored his harvest of body parts.  We stopped again two doors down, outside his ‘O.R.’  Fresh blood covered the floor between the older, congealed mounds of ruby-black jelly.

He saw me looking at the puddles.  "I'm afraid Mr. Kaminsky became infested, like the others.  Like me.  We had to remove the spleen.  Calvin and I."  His expression reminded me of the one doctors reserve for relatives of terminal patients.  "I don't know that he'll pull through," he said.

"Have their been any other surgeries since I left?"

"Of course.  Would you expect us to sit, locked up like animals, waiting to be consumed?"  He seemed to expect an answer.

I said nothing.  But the reference took me right back to the basement of Lucas’ childhood home on Jasper Street.  Back to the cage.  To the Harpy.

"I have one more procedure to complete before we escape this hell," Lucas went on.  "I want to salvage every soul we can.  If you really mean to stay with us to the end, I'll rely on you to help."  He headed down the hall.

I thought of Richard Tisdale, the man who had killed his son.  But Tisdale's room, the next to the last on the right, was empty, save for his blood-soaked gurney.  Partially dried blood was splattered over the far wall.  The floor was covered with it — a field of red dots, shoe prints, streaks from a mop.  My eyes drifted to the spot where the streaks converged.  A pile of bone fragments, hair and what looked like gray-white pieces of rubber sat just beyond the gurney, near the far wall.  I knew that gray-white tissue was brain, but couldn't quite admit it to myself.

Lucas was standing at the door to the quiet room.  "I know you felt for him," he said, looking back at me.  "I did, too.  Trust that we did everything to save him.  Heroic measures were taken."

"What measures were those?" I asked weakly.

"You understand we were working in something less than an army field hospital here.  No X-rays, no CAT scans, no MRI, no halo devices, no needle biopsies.  Even so, with Calvin's help I reached the necrotic tissue.  The amygdala.  We managed to excise a good deal of it.  I'd venture a pathologist would have told us we had nearly clean margins."  He pressed his lips together.  "I can't state the exact cause of death.  I know he was still alive when we closed."

My forehead pounded.  I couldn't begin to fathom the suffering Tisdale must have endured before succumbing.  Violent thoughts raced through my mind — thoughts I had had before.  Maybe the thing to do was to take Lucas out while I had the chance.  Maybe I was colluding with Satan by letting Lucas live and breathe.  The surgeon's strategy, not the psychiatrist's, might indeed be the humane one.  Cut the cancer out.  Limit its spread.  Would it not have been moral to murder Charles Manson or Andrew Black or Jim Jones before they murdered?  Can anyone prove that so doing would infect us with their evil?  Can anyone prove the teachings of Ghandi, or Saint Thomas Aquinas, or of Christ?  No.  No such data exists.  Yet with everything that had happened on the locked unit, with everything I had seen of the world and its darkness, with pieces of a man's skull and brain as evidence of Lucas’ pathology, my heart still protested the kill.  And I had learned through many and painful lessons to let my heart's voice be data enough for me.