in English, most of them novels. She’d probably like one, but it posed a dilemma: if a book was well-known enough for me to recognize the title, then she probably already had it, or at least had read it.
I killed about an hour deciding, reading the first few pages of every book there I hadn’t heard of. I finally returned to The Long Good-bye, by Raymond Chandler, which was good reading and also had a leather binding, embossed “Midnite Mystery Club.”
I sat by a fountain and read for awhile. An engrossing book, a time trip not only for what it was about and the way it was written, but also the physicality of it—the heavy yellowed paper, the feel and musty smell of the leather. The skin of an animal dead more than a century, if it was real leather.
The marble steps weren’t all that comfortable, though—my legs fell asleep from butt to knees—so I wandered awhile more. There were more expensive shops on the second floor down, but they included a set of jack booths that cost almost nothing, sponsored by travel agencies and various countries. For twenty pesos, I spent thirty minutes in France.
That was a strange experience. The spoken cues were all in rapid Mexican Spanish, hard for me to follow, but of course the unspoken ones were the same as ever. I walked around Montmartre for awhile, then lounged on a slow barge drifting through the Bordeau region, and finally sat at an inn in Burgundy, feasting on rich cheeses and complex wines. When it was over, I was starving again.
Of course there was a French restaurant right across from the booth, but I didn’t even have to look at the menu to know it was beyond me. I retreated back upstairs and found a place with lots of small tables and music that wasn’t too loud, and wolfed down a plate of taquitos varios. Then I washed up and finished reading the book there, nursing a beer and a cup of coffee.
When I finished the book it was only eight, still two hours before I could check on Amelia. I didn’t want to go hang around the clinic, but the mall was getting oppressively loud as it moved from evening into night-time mode. A half-dozen mariachi bands competing for attention along with the blare and rumble of modern music from the night clubs. Some very alluring women sitting in the windows of an escort service, three of them wearing PM buttons, which meant they were jacked. That would be a great way to spend the next two hours—jacksex and guilt.
I wound up wandering through the residential neighborhood, reasonably confident because of the puttyknife, even though the area was rundown and a bit menacing.
I picked up a bouquet of flowers at the hospital store, half price because they were closing, and went up to the waiting room to wait. Marty was there, jacked into a portable work terminal. He glanced up when I came in, subvocalized something into a throat pickup, and unjacked.
“It looks pretty good,” he said, “better than I would have expected. Of course we won’t know for sure until she’s awake, but her multiphase EEGs look good, look normal for her.”
His tone was anxious. I set the flowers and book down on a low plastic table scattered with paper magazines. “How long till she comes out of it?”
He looked at his watch. “Half an hour. Twelve.”
“Doctor around?”
“Spencer? No, he went home right after the procedure. I’ve got his number if . . . just in case.”
I sat down too close to him. “Marty. What aren’t you telling me?”
“What do you want to know?” His gaze was steady but there was still something in his voice. “You want to see a tape of the disconnection? I can promise you’ll puke.”
“I just want to know what you’re not telling me.”
He shrugged and looked away. “I’m not sure how much you know. From the most basic, up . . . she won’t die. She will walk and talk. Will she be the woman you loved? I don’t know. The EEGs don’t tell us whether she can do arithmetic, let alone algebra, calculus, whatever it is you people do.”
“Jesus.”
“But look. Yesterday at this time she was on the edge of dying. If she’d been in a little worse shape, the phone call you got would’ve been whether or not to turn off the respirator.”
I nodded; a nurse at Reception had used the same words. “She might not