Green Eyes Page 0,7

A lazy, honeysuckle voice.

From the opposite end of the hall, a slim ash blond girl in hospital whites came toward her, giving a cutesy wave. Laura Petit. She had been an anomaly among the therapists at Tulane, constantly encouraging group activities, parties, dinners, whereas most of them had been wholly involved with the patients. Laura punctuated her sentences with breathy gasps; she batted her eyes and fluttered her hands when she laughed. The entire repertoire of her mannerisms was testimony to filmic generations of inept actresses playing Southern belles as shallow, bubbly nymphs with no head for anything other than fried chicken recipes and lace tatting. But despite this, despite the fact she considered the patients 'gross,' she was an excellent therapist. She seemed to be one of those people to whom emotional attachment is an alien concept, and who learn to extract a surrogate emotionality from manipulating friends and colleagues, and - in this case - her patients.

'That must have been yours they just wheeled in,' she said, embracing Jocundra.

'Yes.' Jocundra accepted a peck on the cheek and disengaged.,

'Better watch yourself, hon! He's not too bad lookin' for a corpse.' Laura flashed her Most Popular smile. 'How you doin'?'

'I should check in...'

'Oh, you can see Edman when he makes his rounds. We're real informal here. Come on, now.' She tugged at Jocundra's arm. 'I'll introduce you to Magnusson.'

Jocundra hung back. 'Is it all right?'

'Don't be shy, hon! You want to see how your boy's goin' to turn out, don't you?'

As they walked, Laura filled her in about Magnusson, pretending genuine interest in his work, but that was camouflage, a framework allowing her to boast of her own triumph, to explain how she had midwifed the miracle. Dr Hilmer Magnusson had been their initial success with the new strain: the body of a John Doe derelict now hosting the personality of a medical researcher who, less than a month after his injection, had casually handed them a cure for muscular dystrophy: a cure which had proved ninety-five percent effective in limited testing.

'One day,' said Laura, her voice rising at the end of each phrase, turning them into expressions of incredulity, 'he asked me for his Johns Hopkins paper, the one he remembered first presentin' the process in. Well, I didn't know what he was talkin' about, but I played along and told him I'd send for it. Anyway, he finally got impatient and started workin' without it, complainin' that his memory wasn't what it used to be. It was incredible!'

Things, Jocundra observed, had a way of falling into place for Laura. Doors opened for her professionally, attractive men ditched their girlfriends and came in pursuit, and now Magnusson had produced a miracle cure. It was as if she were connected by fine wires to everything in her environment, and when she yanked everything toppled, permitting her passage toward some goal. The question was: were her manipulative skills intellectually founded, or had she simply been gifted with dumb luck as compensation for her lack of emotionality? It was hard to believe that anyone of intelligence could erect such a false front and not know it was transparent.

Slashes of sunlight fell from louvred shutters onto the carpet, but otherwise Magnusson's room was dark, suffused by an odor of bay rum and urine. At first Jocundra could see nothing; then a pair of glowing eyes blinked open against the far wall. His pupils had shrunk to pinpricks; his irises flared green and were laced with striations of more brilliant green, which brightened and faded. The glow illuminated a portion of his face, seamed cheeks tattooed with broken veins and a bony beak of a nose. His wheelchair hissed on the carpet, coming close, and she saw that he was an old, old man, his facial muscles so withered that his skull looked melted and misshapen.

Laura introduced them.

'Jocundra. Such a charming name.' Magnusson's voice was weak and hoarse and expressed little of his mood. Each syllable creaked in his throat like an ancient seal being pried up.

'It's Creole, sir.' She sat on the bed facing him. There were food stains on his bathrobe. 'My mother was part Creole.'

'Was?'

'Both my parents died several years ago. A fire. The police suspected my father had set it.'

Laura shot her a look of surprise, and Jocundra was surprised at herself. She never told anyone about the police report, and yet she had told Magnusson without the slightest hesitation.

He reached out and took her hand. His flesh was cool,