Cutting Edge

by Ward Larsen

  “Wondering? What do you mean—like my commander?”

  “No, he’s been notified.”

  DeBolt’s eyes narrowed. “She.”

  “Sorry—I was only told it had been done. I was thinking more along the lines of family.”

  “It’s all in my personnel file.”

  She waited.

  “My father is dead. Mom is in Colorado Springs, but she’s got early-onset Alzheimer’s, so I doubt she’s been told anything.”

  “Brothers or sisters?”

  “None.”

  “Significant other?”

  “I’m between relationships—isn’t that what everyone says these days? I’ve been stationed on an island in the Aleutians for a year, and the guy-to-girl ratio is pretty bleak.”

  “All right.”

  “I’m taking classes, an online program. At some point my professor will wonder what became of me.”

  “What are you studying?”

  “I’m halfway to my bachelor’s degree in biology. I like the Coast Guard, but I’m not sure I’ll last twenty years.”

  She stood abruptly. “Your appetite is improving. I should go for provisions. Is there anything you’d like?”

  “Drugs.”

  She frowned.

  “Maybe an omelet. And some OJ.”

  “That I can manage.” She was out the door.

  The room fell quiet. DeBolt looked all around. He tried to remember more about what had happened in Alaska. A small engine kick to life, followed by tires crunching over gravel.

  He fell fast asleep.

  * * *

  It was sleep in only the roughest sense, troubled dreams jolting him in and out of consciousness. Shooting images, angular shapes, letters and numbers, all colliding in his battered brain as he drifted just beyond the grip of consciousness. He was rescued by a noise, a sharp wooden creak. DeBolt opened his eyes and looked around the room. He saw no one.

  “Joan?”

  No reply.

  He wondered how long he’d been out, but there was no way to tell. Not a clock anywhere. He turned his head gingerly, examining the place in detail, and found every limit of movement a new adventure in pain.

  What was it about this room?

  Then it struck him. It was completely devoid of anything electronic. No television, no computer, not even a microwave in the tiny kitchen. He had yet to see Joan use a cell phone, which in this day and age was striking. Was the place that remote, completely beyond cell coverage? Or was his nurse an antitechnology type, a back-to-basics pioneer with a vegetable garden and two chickens out back, a wind generator on the chimney?

  Whatever.

  He sat up straight, fighting a stab of pain in his skull. Never one to sit still, DeBolt began moving his arms, up and down, rotating in expanding circles. Not bad. He graduated to leg lifts, but that somehow involved the muscles in his upper back, and a bolt of lightning struck the base of his neck. He lay back down.

  A car crunched closer on gravel outside. DeBolt heard the engine die, a door open and close. Then an unfamiliar voice as Joan Chandler began conversing with someone—apparently a neighbor. Most of it he didn’t catch. But he heard enough.

  Soon she was inside with an armload of groceries, the visitor having been sent packing.

  “Who was that?” he asked.

  She busied herself unloading two paper sacks. DeBolt would have thought her a reusable-bag sort.

  “Bob Denton, lives in town. He does a bit of handiwork for me now and again. Said he was in the neighborhood, and he wondered how my weather stripping was holding up.”

  “You told him my name was Michael.”

  A lengthy pause. “I have a nephew by that name.”

  “You have a patient named Trey.”

  She slammed a can of beans on the counter, her face tightening as she fought … what? Anger?

  “Look,” said DeBolt, “I don’t mean to be ungracious. I appreciate all you’ve done for me. But this is no hospital. I’ve seen no doctors, and haven’t been allowed to contact anyone I know. What the hell is going on?”

  She came to his bed and sat down on the edge. Instead of answering, she began unwrapping the wide bandage on his head. Once done, she took the old gauze to the bathroom and returned with two hand mirrors. She held them so he could see the wounds on the back of his skull. What he saw took his breath away. Two deep scars formed a V, joining near the base of his scalp, and three smaller wounds were evident elsewhere. There had to be a hundred stitches, but it all seemed to be healing; hair was beginning to grow back where his head had been shaved, covering the damage.

  She turned the mirrors away.

  After a long silence, he asked, “Will there be any long-term effects?”

  “Some scarring of course, but the damage to your scalp was minimal. As long as you keep your hair a certain length, your appearance will be unchanged.”

  “That’s not what I mean.”

  She met his gaze. “The trauma to your brain was significant, but so far I see no evidence of cognitive impairment. Your speech and movement seem normal, which is a very good sign. But then, I’m no expert.”

  “But I will see them at some point—the experts.”

  “Of course you will. Tell me, do you notice anything different?”

  “In what way?”

  “Mental processes, I suppose. Have you had any unusual thoughts or sensations?”

  “I’m hungry, but that’s hardly unusual.”

  She waited.

  “No,” he finally said, “although I’m really not sure what you’re asking. There is something when I sleep, I suppose. I see things—angular shapes, light on dark.”

  The nurse almost said something, but instead launched into a series of cognitive exams. She made him calculate a tip for a restaurant bill, spell a given word forward then backward, arrange historical events in chronological order. When she asked him to draw a picture of his childhood home, an increasingly irritated DeBolt said, “If I earn a passing grade, will I be allowed out of the house?”

  “You’re lucky to be alive right now, Petty Officer DeBolt.”

  “And you’re lucky I’m not well enough to get up and walk away.”

  “You will be soon. For your own sake, I hope you don’t. I hope you’ll stay a bit longer.”

  “How caring,” he said, his sarcasm falling to crassness. Realizing he’d crossed a line, he sighed and rubbed his forehead. “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s all right. When you’ve been a nurse as long as I have, you avoid taking things personally—force of habit.”

  Those last words, the tone and intonation, clicked in DeBolt’s dented brain like a light switch. Force of habit. “You…,” he said tentatively, “you were there in the hospital. You put the needle in my arm.” He shivered inwardly, remembering the glacial sensation of the drug crawling through his body.

  She didn’t answer right away. “Yes, I administered a special narcotic—it’s what saved you, Trey. There are other things that must remain unsaid for now, until your recovery is more complete. But please … please trust me when I say that I only want what’s best for you.”

  DeBolt searched her open gaze, her earnest expression. And he did trust her.

  4

  DeBolt was soon walking with confidence around the cottage and porch, and days later he set out toward the rocky beachhead. The next weeks were full of rehabilitation, the intensity increasing and pain lessening until it was something near exercise. The nurse performed rudimentary tests: an eye chart on the far wall, whispered hearing evaluations, all of which DeBolt passed, or so he guessed because they were not repeated. She brought him clothes, ill fitting and—he was sure—purchased from a secondhand store. He thanked her for all of it.

  The quandary of time was settled when she bought him a watch, a cheap Timex that promised but failed to glow in the dark. It was accurate enough, though, and DeBolt found strange exhilaration in keeping a schedule. Wake at 6:00 A.M. Soft run on the be
ach, three miles back and forth over the same quarter-mile stretch of rock-strewn sand. Breakfast at 7:10 A.M. Rest until 8:15 A.M. The running he hated—always had—and with obvious reluctance she allowed him to swim. He took to the water gratefully, but complained the cold was intolerable, and she managed to procure a used neoprene wet suit, two sizes too large, that made the daily plunge bearable. Each day brought advances and, rare setbacks aside, DeBolt progressed in but one direction. The headaches lessened, and so correspondingly did his need for pain medication. New examinations were introduced—memory games, mathematical puzzles, cognitive exercises. She assured him in every case that he performed well.

  Yet as the patient was improving, he sensed a notable decline in his caregiver. She seemed increasingly withdrawn and distant, more so each time he pressed her for an explanation of how he’d ended up in a beach house in New England after the frozen Bering Sea. Her descending mood was more apparent each day, relentless and foreboding. One morning, as she counted his push-ups on the beach, he spotted a young girl far in the distance. She was eight, perhaps ten years old, prancing barefoot through tide pools with a net and a bucket. As she neared the edge of the rock outcropping where she was gathering creatures, DeBolt recognized a shift in the sea beyond—a strong rip current funneling offshore. He said they should warn the girl to stay clear of the water. Chandler responded by immediately ushering him shoreward.

  DeBolt complied at first, but then stopped halfway to the cottage, fixed and immovable—his first resistance to any of her instructions.

  “Tell me one thing,” he said. “Besides you, does anyone know where I am?”

  “No.”

  “I’m in the service. A soldier who doesn’t report his whereabouts is considered AWOL. That’s a crime under military law.”

  “I understand. Soon I’ll explain everything … I promise.”

  After considering it for some time, he turned and went inside.

  * * *

  That night she sat on the porch with a glass and a full bottle. She emptied both in silence, and sometime near midnight went unsteadily to her room. He heard her bed creak once, then nothing.

  The weather was taking its first turn to winter. Before sunset, DeBolt had watched banks of slate-gray cloud whipping in fast and low, and he noticed that the ubiquitous flocks of seagulls had disappeared. The forest began to groan under a pulsating wind, and waves thundered ashore in a continuous pronouncement, absent the punctuating gaps of receding stillness.

  Unable to sleep, DeBolt pulled a dog-eared novel from a bookshelf and went to the trundle bed, more inviting now that the monitors and IV pole had been pushed aside. As he crossed the room he looked through the open bedroom door and saw Chandler splayed awkwardly across her bed. He paused, studied her for a moment, then entered the room hesitantly. Her hair was stiff and matted, folded to one side, and her nightdress crumpled—completely still, she looked like a long-forgotten doll on a child’s closet shelf. He doubted she had moved since passing out. DeBolt guessed she might be attractive if she wanted to be, yet her focus on his recovery was so absolute, so single-minded, it seemed to preclude even her own upkeep. Not for the first time, he wondered what was driving her.

  Her blanket had slipped to the floor, and he retrieved it and covered her. Other than a slight tremor in one hand, she didn’t move. He turned back to the main room, and near the doorway his eye was caught by a file folder on the highboy dresser. It was plain manila stock, and on the title tag DeBolt saw his own name written in pencil, sloppy block letters that were unsettlingly familiar. It was his copy of his Coast Guard medical records—a folder that should have been in his apartment in Alaska.

  How the hell did that get here?

  It occurred to DeBolt then that for all the diagnostic tests Chandler had performed, she’d never once taken a note. When he’d last seen the folder it had held perhaps fifty pages of military-grade paperwork. Now it looked exceedingly thin, and one page edged out from a corner. The positioning of the file on the dresser could not have been more obvious. He also noted that beneath his name someone had added in black ink, META PROJECT, and below that, OPTION BRAVO.

  His eyes went to Chandler, then back to the folder. He picked it up and found but two sheets of paper inside. He had never seen either. On top was a printout of a news article from the Alaska Dispatch News, a four-paragraph summary of the crash of a Coast Guard MH-60 in the Bering Sea six weeks earlier. Again he saw META PROJECT and OPTION BRAVO scrawled in a hurried hand that was not his own. He read the article once, took a deep breath, then read it again. His eyes settled on one sentence in the second paragraph.

  Confirmed to be killed in the accident were aircraft commander Lt. Anthony Morgan, copilot LTJG Thomas Adams, AN Michael Schull, and rescue swimmer PO2 Trey DeBolt.

  He stared at it for a full minute. Confirmed to be killed …

  With gauged caution, he lifted the printed page to see what was beneath. The second paper was of thicker bond, and carried a stamp and signatures, everything about it implying official weight. It was a death certificate issued by the state of Alaska. There were a few lines of legalese, and in the center two fields of information that finalized the shock:

  Name of Deceased: Trey Adam DeBolt

  Cause of death: blunt trauma to head/aircraft accident

  5

  DeBolt did not sleep like the dead man he supposedly was. In recent nights he’d stirred frequently as bolts of light and dark, post-traumatic he was sure, coursed through his beaten head. Now he lay awake trying only for control, some logic to replace the encroaching madness. The accident, the severe injuries, a hospital stay he barely remembered. Chandler bringing him here, caring for him, isolating him. Her self-destructive behavior. There was simply no solution—every way DeBolt painted the facts, something seemed wrong, a wayward stroke of color that clashed with the rest. In the end, he drew but one conclusion. His time here was drawing to an end.

  But what would take its place? Return to Alaska and the Coast Guard? A cheery hello to friends and coworkers who’d already attended his funeral? He wondered if he could walk into his station and claim amnesia. He had the head wounds to back it up. I have no idea what happened, but here I am …

  The full truth, he decided, was not an option, because he saw no way to present it without harming Joan Chandler. She had brought him here, put him into hiding. Anyone taking those actions on face value could accuse her of endangering a gravely ill patient by keeping him outside a proper hospital environment. Yet DeBolt knew otherwise. He was convinced she’d saved his life, and put herself at professional risk by doing so. So he would protect Chandler, in turn, by taking the most difficult path—that of patience.

  He was sure there was more to the story, circumstances his nurse had not yet explained. Details that would cause everything to make sense. A file, perhaps, he had not yet seen.

  * * *

  He rose at his customary hour of 6:00 A.M., and dressed quietly so as not to disturb Chandler—even though she hadn’t moved since last night. DeBolt was on the beach before the sun lifted, ready for his morning run. The storm was building, and in the predawn darkness he stood at the water’s edge and watched a rising sea. An intemperate wind whipped his hair, which was growing fast and increasingly out of regulation. Rain appeared imminent, and he briefly weighed it as an excuse to postpone his run. DeBolt looked up and down the beach. He’d seen no one since the young girl at the tide pools, and today was no different, only brown rock and sea and walls of evergreen forest. Staring at the desolate scene, he was reminded that Joan Chandler was the only person on earth who knew he was still alive. It seemed simultaneously comforting and troubling.

  The sun cracked the horizon, a brilliant arc of red, and DeBolt realized he had not put on his Timex. Without actually speaking, and for no particular reason, he formed a very deliberate mental question: What time does the sun rise today?

  He was debating whether to go back for his watch—in order to time his run, and t
he swim he would also not forego—when an odd sensation swept over him. It came like a strobe in his head, a tiny flash amid darkness. DeBolt blinked and closed his eyes, fearing he was suffering some manifestation of the injuries to his brain. An omen of complications.

  Then, suddenly, he acquired a strange manner of focus. Ghosting behind tightly closed eyes he saw a perfectly clear set of numbers.

  6:37 A.M.

  DeBolt snapped his eyes open.

  The sea and the rocks were there, steady and ever present. The sky was unerring, coming alive in subtle colors. The apparition disappeared as abruptly as it had come. With a thumb and forefinger he rubbed the orbits of his eyes, pressing and massaging until the last glimmer was gone. Christ, he thought, now I’m seeing things.

  He took a single step back, turned, and struck out east on a determined sprint.

  * * *

  “I got a hit,” said a young man from his basement workstation.

  The woman at the computer next to him said, “What?”

  They were located sixteen miles outside Washington, D.C., in a remote outpost run by DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. The building in which they worked was as new as it was unremarkable. Indeed, should the word “nondescript” ever be translated into an architectural style, the place could be held as a masterpiece. It was rectangular in shape, although not perfectly so, one gentle portico at the front entrance, and a slightly larger blister behind at the supply dock. What lay inside, however, was anything but ordinary. The first floor was dedicated to electronics and cooling, and twin diesel generators allowed independence from the local power grid. The second floor consisted of a few offices and conference rooms, all rarely occupied, and three banks of supercomputers that churned without rest. The roof was banded by a high concrete wall, inside of which lay over a dozen antennae, all sealed in radomes to give protection from the elements and, more to the point, from unwanted prying eyes. There was a road and a parking lot, both new, and enough surrounding acreage to put the nearest neighbor a comfortable two miles away. There had been one man, old and cantankerous, who’d lived less than a mile to the east, and who had held out for a ridiculous price during construction. In the end, he got it.