Here is a man who has slept four-and-a-half years. Can we make him walk again? An interesting problem. He sees the monograph he will write on it for The New England Journal of Medicine. He looks forward to it the way a child looks forward to new toys under the Christmas tree. He does not see you, he does not see Johnny Smith in his pain, Johnny Smith who must take the bedpan and ring for the nurse to scratch if his back itches. That’s good. His hands will not shake. Smile, Johnny. This Ruopp looks like a bank clerk, but he is maybe the best surgeon in North America.”
But it was hard for Johnny to smile.
He had read his way dutifully through the tracts his mother had left him. They depressed him and left him frightened all over again for her sanity. One of them, by a man named Salem Kirban, struck him as nearly pagan in its loving contemplation of a bloody apocalypse and the yawning barbecue pits of hell. Another described the coming Anti-christ in pulp-horror terms. The others were a dark carnival of craziness: Christ was living under the South Pole, God drove flying saucers, New York was Sodom, L.A. was Gomorrah. They dealt with exorcism, with witches, with all manner of things seen and unseen. It was impossible for him to reconcile the pamphlets with the religious yet earthy woman he had known before his coma.
Three days after the incident involving Weizak’s snapshot of his mother, a slim and dark-haired reporter from the Bangor Daily News named David Bright showed up at the door of Johnny’s room and asked if he could have a short interview.
“Have you asked the doctors?” Johnny asked.
Bright grinned. “Actually, no.”
“All right,” Johnny said. “In that case, I’d be happy to talk to you.”
“You’re a man after my own heart,” Bright said. He came in and sat down.
His first questions were about the accident and about Johnny’s thoughts and feelings upon slipping out of a coma and discovering he had misplaced nearly half a decade. Johnny answered these questions honestly and straightforwardly. Then Bright told him that he had heard from “a source” that Johnny had gained some sort of sixth sense as a result of the accident.
“Are you asking me if I’m psychic?”
Bright smiled and shrugged. “That’ll do for a start.”
Johnny had thought carefully about the things Weizak had said. The more he thought, the more it seemed to him that Weizak had done exactly the right thing when he hung up the phone without saying anything. Johnny had begun to associate it in his mind with that W. W. Jacobs story, “The Monkey’s Paw.” The paw was for wishing, but the price you paid for each of your three wishes was a black one. The old couple had wished for one hundred pounds and had lost their son in a mill accident—the mill’s compensation had come to exactly one hundred pounds. Then the old woman had wished for her son back and he had come—but before she could open the door and see what a horror she had summoned out of its grave, the old man had used the last wish to send it back. As Weizak had said, maybe some things were better lost than found.
“No,” he said. “I’m no more psychic than you are.”
“According to my source, you ...”
“No, it isn’t true.”
Bright smiled a trifle cynically, seemed to debate pressing the matter further, then turned to a fresh page in his notebook. He began to ask about Johnny’s prospects for the future, his feelings about the road back, and Johnny also answered these questions as honestly as he could.
“So what are you going to do when you get out of here?” Bright asked, closing his notebook.
“I haven’t really thought about that. I’m still trying to adjust to the idea that Gerald Ford is the president.”
Bright laughed. “You’re not alone in that, my friend.”
“I suppose I’ll go back to teaching. It’s all I know. But right now that’s too far ahead to think about.”
Bright thanked him for the interview and left. The article appeared in the paper two days later, the day before his leg surgery. It was on the bottom of the front page, and the headline read: JOHN SMITH, MODERN RIP VAN WINKLE, FACES LONG ROAD BACK. There were three pictures, one of them Johnny’s picture for the Cleaves Mills High School yearbook (it had been taken barely a week before the accident), a picture of