closet for clothes, and came up with the white shirt and jeans he had worn to the news conference.
“John, I absolutely forbid this. As your doctor and your friend. I tell you, it is madness.”
“Forbid all you want, I’m going,” Johnny said. He began to dress. His face wore that expression of distant preoccupation that Sam associated with his trances. The nurse gawped.
“Nurse, you might as well go back to your station,” Sam said.
She backed to the door, stood there for a moment, and then left. Reluctantly.
“Johnny,” Sam said. He got up, went to him, and put a hand on his shoulder. “You didn’t do it.”
Johnny shook the hand off. “I did it, all right,” he said. “She was watching me when it happened.” He began to button the shirt.
“You urged her to take her medicine and she stopped.”
Johnny looked at Weizak for a moment and then went back to buttoning his shirt.
“If it hadn’t happened tonight, it would have happened tomorrow, next week, next month ...”
“Or next year. Or in ten years.”
“No. It would not have been ten years, or even one. And you know it. Why are you so anxious to pin this tail on yourself? Because of that smug reporter? Is it maybe an inverted kind of self-pity? An urge to believe that you have been cursed?”
Johnny’s face twisted. “She was watching me when it happened. Don’t you get that? Are you so fucking soft you don’t get that?”
“She was planning a strenuous trip, all the way to California and back, you told me that yourself. A symposium of some kind. A highly emotional sort of thing, from what you have said. Yes? Yes. It would almost certainly have happened then. A stroke is not lightning from a blue sky, Johnny.”
Johnny buttoned the jeans and then sat down as if the act of dressing had tired him out too much to do more. His feet were still bare. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, you may be right.”
“Sense! He sees sense! Thank the Lord!”
“But I still have to go, Sam.”
Weizak threw up his hands. “And do what? She is in the hands of her doctors and her God. That is the situation. Better than anyone else, you must understand.”
“My dad will need me,” Johnny said softly. “I understand that, too.”
“How will you go? It’s nearly midnight.”
“By bus. I’ll grab a cab over to Peter’s Candlelighter. The Greyhounds still stop there, don’t they?”
“You don’t have to do that,” Sam said.
Johnny was groping under the chair for his shoes and not finding them. Sam got them from under the bed and handed them to him.
“I’ll drive you down.”
Johnny looked up at him. “You’d do that?”
“If you’ll take a mild tranquilizer, yes.”
“But your wife ...” He realized in a confused sort of way that the only concrete thing he knew about Weizak’s personal life was that his mother was living in California.
“I am divorced,” Weizak said. “A doctor has to be out all hours of the night ... unless he is a podiatrist or a dermatologist, nuh? My wife saw the bed as half-empty rather than half-full. So she filled it with a variety of men.”
“I’m sorry,” Johnny said, embarrassed.
“You spend far too much time being sorry, John.” Sam’s face was gentle, but his eyes were stern. “Put on your shoes.”
Chapter 12
1
Hospital to hospital, Johnny thought dreamily, flying gently along on the small blue pill he had taken just before he and Sam left the EMMC and climbed into Sam’s ’75 El Dorado. Hospital to hospital, person to person, station to station.
In a queer, secret way, he enjoyed the trip—it was his first time out of the hospital in almost five years. The night was clear, the Milky Way sprawled across the sky in an unwinding clockspring of light, a half-moon followed them over the dark tree line as they fled south through Palmyra, Newport, Pittsfield, Benton, Clinton. The car whispered along in near total silence. Low music, Haydn, issued from the four speakers of the stereo tape player.
Came to one hospital in the Cleaves Mills Rescue Squad ambulance, went to another in a Cadillac, he thought. He didn’t let it bother him. It was just enough to ride, to float along on the track, to let the problem of his mother, his new ability, and the people who wanted to pry into his soul (He asked for it ... just don’t touch me, huh?) rest in a temporary limbo. Weizak didn’t talk. Occasionally he hummed snatches of the music.