concept of God was fuzzy and ill-defined. He held Marie and told her how glad he was. He told her to remember that he wasn’t the one who had operated on Mark, and that he barely remembered what it was that he had told her. She left shortly after that, drying her eyes as she went, leaving Johnny alone to think.
3
Early in August, Dave Pelsen came to see Johnny. The Cleaves Mills High assistant principal was a small, neat man who wore thick glasses and Hush Puppies and a series of loud sports jackets. Of all the people who came to see Johnny during that almost endless summer of 1975, Dave had changed the least. The gray was speckled a little more fully through his hair, but that was all.
“So how are you doing? Really?” Dave asked, when they had finished the amenities.
“Not so bad,” Johnny said. “I can walk alone now if I don’t overdo it. I can swim six laps in the pool. I get headaches sometimes, real killers, but the doctors say I can expect that to go on for some time. Maybe the rest of my life.”
“Mind a personal question?”
“If you’re going to ask me if I can still get it up,” Johnny said with a grin, “that’s affirmative.”
“That’s good to know, but what I wanted to know about is the money. Can you pay for this?”
Johnny shook his head. “I’ve been in the hospital for going on five years. No one but a Rockefeller could pay for that. My father and mother got me into some sort of state-funded program. Total Disaster, or something like that.”
Dave nodded. “The Extraordinary Disaster program. I figured that. But how did they keep you out of the state hospital, Johnny? That place is the pits.”
“Dr. Weizak and Dr. Brown saw to that. And they’re largely responsible for my having been able to come back as far as I have. I was a ... a guinea pig, Dr. Weizak says. How long can we keep this comatose man from turning into a total vegetable? The physical therapy unit was working on me the last two years I was in coma. I had megavitamin shots ... my ass still looks like a case of smallpox. Not that they expected any return on the project from me personally. I was assumed to be a terminal case almost from the time I came in. Weizak says that what he and Brown did with me is ‘aggressive life support.’ He thinks it’s the beginning of a response to all the criticism about sustaining life after hope of recovery is gone. Anyway, they couldn’t continue to use me if I’d gone over to the state hospital, so they kept me here. Eventually, they would have finished with me and then I would have gone to the state hospital.”
“Where the most sophisticated care you would have gotten would have been a turn every six hours to prevent bedsores,” Dave said. “And if you’d waked up in 1980, you would have been a basket case.”
“I think I would have been a basket case no matter what,” Johnny said. He shook his head slowly. “I think if someone proposes one more operation on me, I’ll go nuts. And I’m still going to have a limp and I’ll never be able to turn my head all the way to the left.”
“When are they letting you out?”
“In three weeks, God willing.”
“Then what?”
Johnny shrugged. “I’m going down home, I guess. To Pownal. My mother’s going to be in California for a while on a ... a religious thing. Dad and I can use the time to get reacquainted. I got a letter from one of the big literary agents in New York ... well, not him, exactly, but one of his assistants. They think there might be a book in what happened to me. I thought I’d try to do two or three chapters and an outline, maybe this guy or his assistant can sell it. The money would come in pretty damn handy, no kidding there.”
“Has there been any other media interest?”
“Well, the guy from the Bangor Daily News who did the original story ...”
“Bright? He’s good.”
“He’d like to come down to Pownal after I blow this joint and do a feature story. I like the guy, but right now I’m holding him off. There’s no money in it for me, and right now, frankly, that’s what I’m looking for. I’d go on To Tell the Truth’ if I thought