of dawning comprehension. His eyes were the eyes of a man who has seen something terrible moving and shifting in the shadows, something too terrible to be described or even named.
But it was a fact. It had to be named.
“Fifty-five months?” Johnny asked hoarsely. “Going on five years? No. Oh my God, no.”
“Mr. Smith,” Brown said, now totally flustered. “Please, it’s not good for you to excite ...”
Johnny raised his upper body perhaps three inches from the bed and then slumped back, his face shiny with sweat. His eyes rolled helplessly in their sockets. “I’m twenty-seven?” he muttered. “Twenty-seven? Oh my Jesus.”
Brown swallowed and heard an audible click. When Smith had grabbed his hand, he had felt a sudden onrush of bad feelings, childlike in their intensity; crude images of revulsion had assaulted him. He had found himself remembering a picnic in the country when he had been seven or eight, sitting down and putting his hand in something warm and slippery. He had looked around and had seen that he had put his hand into the maggoty remains of a woodchuck that had lain under a laurel bush all that hot August. He had screamed then, and he felt a little bit like screaming now—except that the feeling was fading, dwindling, to be replaced with a question: How did he know? He touched me and he knew.
Then twenty years of education rose up strongly in him, and he pushed the notion aside. There were cases without number of comatose patients who had awakened with a dreamlike knowledge of many things that had gone on around them while they were in coma. Like anything else, coma was a matter of degree. Johnny Smith had never been a vegetable; his EEG had never gone flatline, and if it had, Brown would not be talking with him now. Sometimes being in a coma was a little like being behind a one-way glass. To the beholding eye the patient was completely conked out, but the patient’s senses might still continue to function in some low, power-down fashion. And that was the case here, of course.
Marie Michaud came back in. “Neurology is confirmed, and Dr. Weizak is on his way.”
“I think Sam will have to wait until tomorrow to meet Mr. Smith,” Brown said. “I want him to have five milligrams of Valium.”
“I don’t want a sedative,” Johnny said. “I want to get out of here. I want to know what happened!”
“You’ll know everything in time,” Brown said. “Right now it’s important that you rest.”
“I’ve been resting for four-and-a-half years!”
“Then another twelve hours won’t make much difference,” Brown said inexorably.
A few moments later the nurse swabbed his upper arm with alcohol, and there was the sting of a needle. Johnny began to feel sleepy almost at once. Brown and the nurse began to look twelve feet tall.
“Tell me one thing, at least,” he said. His voice seemed to come from far, far away. Suddenly it seemed terribly important. “That pen. What do you call that pen?”
“This?” Brown held it out from his amazing height. Blue plastic body, fibrous tip. “It’s called a Flair. Now go to sleep, Mr. Smith.”
And Johnny did, but the word followed him down into his sleep like a mystic incantation, full of idiot meaning: Flair ... Flair ... Flair ...
5
Herb put the telephone down and looked at it. He looked at it for a long time. From the other room came the sound of the TV, turned up almost all the way. Oral Roberts was talking about football and the healing love of Jesus—there was a connection there someplace, but Herb had missed it. Because of the telephone call. Oral’s voice boomed and roared. Pretty soon the show would end and Oral would close it out by confidently telling his audience that something good was going to happen to them. Apparently Oral was right.
My boy, Herb thought. While Vera had prayed for a miracle, Herb had prayed for his boy to die. It was Vera’s prayer that had been answered. What did that mean, and where did it leave him? And what was it going to do to her?
He went into the living room. Vera was sitting on the couch. Her feet, encased in elastic pink mules, were up on a hassock. She was wearing her old gray robe. She was eating popcorn straight from the popper. Since Johnny’s accident she had put on nearly forty pounds and her blood pressure had skyrocketed. The doctor wanted to put her on