by Stephen King
The elevator doors open on the fifth floor and there, waiting to get on, are Barbara’s parents. Tanya has her cell phone in her hand, and looks at Holly as if at an apparition. Jim Robinson says he’ll be damned.
Holly shrinks a little. “What? Why are you looking at me that way? What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” Tanya says. “It’s just that I was going to call you—”
The elevator doors start to close. Jim sticks out an arm and they bounce back. Holly gets out.
“—as soon as we got down to the lobby,” Tanya resumes, and points to a sign on the wall. It shows a cell phone with a red line drawn through it.
“Me? Why? I thought it was just a broken leg. I mean, I know a broken leg is serious, of course it is, but—”
“She’s awake and she’s fine,” Jim says, but he and Tanya exchange a glance which suggests that isn’t precisely true. “It’s a pretty clean break, actually, but they found a nasty bump on the back of her head and decided to keep her overnight just to be on the safe side. The doc who fixed her leg said he’s ninety-nine percent sure she’ll be good to go in the morning.”
“They did a tox screen,” Tanya said. “No drugs in her system. I wasn’t surprised, but it was still a relief.”
“Then what’s wrong?”
“Everything,” Tanya says simply. She looks ten years older than when Holly saw her last. “Hilda Carver’s mom drove Barb and Hilda to school, it’s her week, and she said Barbara was fine in the car—a little quieter than usual, but otherwise fine. Barbara told Hilda she had to go to the bathroom, and that was the last Hilda saw of her. She said Barb must have left by one of the side doors in the gym. The kids actually call those the skip doors.”
“What does Barbara say?”
“She won’t tell us anything.” Her voice shakes, and Jim puts an arm around her. “But she says she’ll tell you. That’s why I was going to call you. She says you’re the only one who might understand.”
22
Holly walks slowly down the corridor to Room 528, which is all the way at the end. Her head is down, and she’s thinking hard, so she almost bumps into the man wheeling the cart of well-thumbed paperback books and Kindles with PROPERTY OF KINER HOSP taped below the screens.
“Sorry,” Holly tells him. “I wasn’t looking where I was going.”
“That’s all right,” Library Al says, and goes on his way. She doesn’t see him pause and look back at her; she is summoning all her courage for the conversation to come. It’s apt to be emotional, and emotional scenes have always terrified her. It helps that she loves Barbara.
Also, she’s curious.
She taps on the door, which is ajar, and peeps around it when there’s no answer. “Barbara? It’s Holly. Can I come in?”
Barbara offers a wan smile and puts down the battered copy of Mockingjay she’s been reading. Probably got it from the man with the cart, Holly thinks. She’s cranked up in the bed, wearing pink pajamas instead of a hospital johnny. Holly guesses her mother must have packed the PJs, along with the ThinkPad she sees on Barb’s night table. The pink top lends Barbara a bit of vivacity, but she still looks dazed. There’s no bandage on her head, so the bump mustn’t have been all that bad. Holly wonders if they are keeping Barbara overnight for some other reason. She can only think of one, and she’d like to believe it’s ridiculous, but she can’t quite get there.
“Holly! How did you get here so fast?”
“I was coming to see you.” Holly enters and closes the door behind her. “When somebody’s in the hospital, you go to see them if it’s a friend, and we’re friends. I met your parents at the elevator. They said you wanted to talk to me.”
“Yes.”
“How can I help, Barbara?”
“Well … can I ask you something? It’s pretty personal.”
“Okay.” Holly sits down in the chair next to the bed. Gingerly, as if the seat might be wired for electricity.
“I know you had some bad times. You know, when you were younger. Before you worked for Bill.”
“Yes,” Holly says. The overhead light isn’t on, just the lamp on the night table. Its glow encloses them and gives them their own little place to be. “Some very bad ones.”
“Did you ever try to kill yourself?” Barbara gives a small, nervous laugh. “I told you it was personal.”
“Twice.” Holly says it without hesitation. She feels surprisingly calm. “The first time, I was just about your age. Because kids at school were mean to me, and called me mean names. I couldn’t cope. But I didn’t try very hard. I just took a handful of aspirin and decongestant tablets.”
“Did you try harder the second time?”
It’s a tough question, and Holly thinks it over carefully. “Yes and no. It was after I had some trouble with my boss, what they call sexual harassment now. Back then they didn’t call it much of anything. I was in my twenties. I took stronger pills, but still not enough to do the job and part of me knew that. I was very unstable back then, but I wasn’t stupid, and the part that wasn’t stupid wanted to live. Partly because I knew Martin Scorsese would make some more movies, and I wanted to see them. Martin Scorsese is the best director alive. He makes long movies like novels. Most movies are only like short stories.”
“Did your boss, like, attack you?”
“I don’t want to talk about it, and it doesn’t matter.” Holly doesn’t want to look up, either, but reminds herself that this is Barbara and forces herself to. Because Barbara has been her friend in spite of all of Holly’s ticks and tocks, all of Holly’s bells and whistles. And is now in trouble herself. “The reasons never matter, because suicide goes against every human instinct, and that makes it insane.”
Except maybe in certain cases, she thinks. Certain terminal cases. But Bill isn’t terminal.
I won’t let him be terminal.
“I know what you mean,” Barbara says. She turns her head from side to side on her pillow. In the lamplight, tear-tracks gleam on her cheeks. “I know.”
“Is that why you were in Lowtown? To kill yourself?”
Barbara closes her eyes, but tears squeeze through the lashes. “I don’t think so. At least not at first. I went there because the voice told me to. My friend.” She pauses, thinks. “But he wasn’t my friend, after all. A friend wouldn’t want me to kill myself, would he?”
Holly takes Barbara’s hand. Touching is ordinarily hard for her, but not tonight. Maybe it’s because she feels they are enclosed in their own secret place. Maybe it’s because this is Barbara. Maybe both. “What friend is this?”
Barbara says, “The one with the fish. The one inside the game.”
23
It’s Al Brooks who wheels the library cart through the hospital’s main lobby (passing Mr. and Mrs. Robinson, who are waiting for Holly), and it’s Al who takes another elevator up to the skyway that connects the main hospital to the Traumatic Brain Injury Clinic. It’s Al who says hello to Nurse Rainier at the duty desk, a longtimer who hellos him back without looking up from her computer screen. It’s still Al rolling his cart down the corridor, but when he leaves it in the hall and steps into Room 217, Al Brooks disappears and Z-Boy takes his place.
Brady is in his chair with his Zappit in his lap. He doesn’t look up from the screen. Z-Boy takes his own Zappit from the left pocket of his loose gray tunic and turns it on. He taps the Fishin’ Hole icon and on the starter screen the fish begin to swim: red ones, yellow ones, gold ones, every now and then a fast-moving pink one. The tune tinkles. And every now and then the console gives off a bright flash that paints his cheeks and turns his eyes into blue blanks.
They remain that way for almost five minutes, one sitting and one standing, both staring at the swimming fish and listening to the tinkling melody. The blinds over Brady’s window rattle restlessly. The coverlet on his bed snaps down, then back up again. Once or twice Z-Boy nods his understanding. Then Brady’s hands loosen and let go of the game console. It slides down his wasted legs
, then between them, and clatters to the floor. His mouth falls open. His eyelids drop to half-mast. The rise and fall of his chest inside his checked shirt becomes imperceptible.
Z-Boy’s shoulders straighten. He gives himself a little shake, clicks off his Zappit, and drops it back into the pocket from which it came. From his right pocket he takes an iPhone. A person with considerable computer skills has modified it with several state-of-the-art security devices, and the built-in GPS has been turned off. There are no names in the Contacts folder, only a few initials. Z-Boy taps FL.
The phone rings twice and FL answers in a fake Russian accent. “Ziss iss Agent Zippity-Doo-Dah, comrade. I avait your commands.”
“You haven’t been paid to make bad jokes.”
Silence. Then: “All right. No jokes.”
“We’re moving ahead.”
“We’ll move ahead when I get the rest of my money.”
“You’ll have it tonight, and you’ll go to work immediately.”
“Roger-dodger,” FL says. “Give me something hard next time.”
There’s not going to be a next time, Z-Boy thinks.
“Don’t screw this up.”
“I won’t. But I don’t work until I see the green.”
“You’ll see it.”
Z-Boy breaks the connection, drops the phone into his pocket, and leaves Brady’s room. He heads back past the duty desk and Nurse Rainier, who is still absorbed in her computer. He leaves the cart in the snack alcove and crosses the skyway. He walks with a spring in his step, like a much younger man.
In an hour or two, Rainier or one of the other nurses will find Brady Hartsfield either slumped in his chair or sprawled on the floor on top of his Zappit. There won’t be much concern; he has slipped into total unconsciousness many times before, and always comes out of it.
Dr. Babineau says it’s part of the rebooting process, that each time Hartsfield returns, he’s slightly improved. Our boy is getting well, Babineau says. You might not believe it to look at him, but our boy is really getting well.
You don’t know the half of it, thinks the mind now occupying Library Al’s body. You don’t know the fucking half of it. But you’re starting to, Dr. B. Aren’t you?
Better late than never.
24
“That man who yelled at me on the street was wrong,” Barbara says. “I believed him because the voice told me to believe him, but he was wrong.”
Holly wants to know about the voice from the game, but Barbara may not be ready to talk about that yet. So she asks who the man was, and what he yelled.
“He called me blackish, like on that TV show. The show is funny, but on the street it’s a put-down. It’s—”
“I know the show, and I know how some people use it.”
“But I’m not blackish. Nobody with a dark skin is, not really. Not even if they live in a nice house on a nice street like Teaberry Lane. We’re all black, all the time. Don’t you think I know how I get looked at and talked about at school?”
“Of course you do,” says Holly, who has been looked at and talked about plenty in her own time; her high school nickname was Jibba-Jibba.
“The teachers talk about gender equality, and racial equality. They have a zero tolerance policy, and they mean it—at least most of them do, I guess—but anyone can walk through the halls when the classes are changing and pick out the black kids and the Chinese transfer students and the Muslim girl, because there’s only two dozen of us and we’re like a few grains of pepper that somehow got into the salt shaker.”
She’s picking up steam now, her voice outraged and indignant but also weary.
“I get invited to parties, but there are a lot of parties I don’t get invited to, and I’ve only been asked out on dates twice. One of the boys who asked me was white, and everyone looked at us when we went into the movies, and someone threw popcorn at the back of our heads. I guess at the AMC 12, racial equality stops when the lights go down. And one time when I was playing soccer? Here I go, dribbling the ball up the sideline, got a clear shot, and this white dad in a golf shirt tells his daughter, ‘Guard that jig!’ I pretended I didn’t hear it. The girl kind of smirked. I wanted to knock her over, right there where he could see it, but I didn’t. I swallowed it. And once, when I was a freshman, I left my English book on the bleachers at lunch, and when I went back to get it, someone had put a note in it that said BUCKWHEAT’S GIRLFRIEND. I swallowed that, too. For days it can be good, weeks, even, and then there’s something to swallow. It’s the same with Mom and Dad, I know it is. Maybe it’s different for Jerome at Harvard, but I bet sometimes even he has to swallow it.”
Holly squeezes her hand, but says nothing.
“I’m not blackish, but the voice said I was, just because I didn’t grow up in a tenement with an abusive dad and a drug addict mom. Because I never ate a collard green, or even knew exactly what it was. Because I say pork chop instead of poke chop. Because they’re poor down there in the Low and we’re doing just fine on Teaberry Lane. I have my cash card, and my nice school, and Jere goes to Harvard, but … but, don’t you see … Holly, don’t you see that I never—”
“You never had a choice about those things,” Holly says. “You were born where you were and what you were, the same as me. The same as all of us, really. And at sixteen, you’ve never been asked to change anything but your clothes.”
“Yes! And I know I shouldn’t be ashamed, but the voice made me ashamed, it made me feel like a useless parasite, and it’s still not all gone. It’s like it left a trail of slime inside my head. Because I never had been in Lowtown before, and it’s horrible down there, and compared to them I really am blackish, and I’m afraid that voice may never go away and my life will be spoiled.”
“You have to strangle it.” Holly speaks with dry, detached certainty.
Barbara looks at her in surprise.
Holly nods. “Yes. You have to choke that voice until it’s dead. It’s the first job. If you don’t take care of yourself, you can’t get better. And if you can’t get better, you can’t make anything else better.”
Barbara says, “I can’t just go back to school and pretend Lowtown doesn’t exist. If I’m going to live, I have to do something. Young or not, I have to do something.”
“Are you thinking about some kind of volunteer work?”
“I don’t know what I’m thinking about. I don’t know what there is for a kid like me. But I’m going to find out. If it means going back down there, my parents won’t like it. You have to help me with them, Holly. I know it’s hard for you, but please. You have to tell them that I need to shut that voice up. Even if I can’t choke it to death right away, maybe I can at least quiet it down.”
“All right,” Holly says, although she dreads it. “I will.” An idea occurs to her and she brightens. “You should talk to the boy who pushed you out of the way of the truck.”
“I don’t know how to find him.”
“Bill will help you,” Holly says. “Now tell me about the game.”
“It broke. The truck ran over it, I saw the pieces, and I’m glad. Every time I close my eyes I can see those fish, especially the pink number-fish, and hear the little song.” She hums it, but it rings no bells with Holly.
A nurse comes in wheeling a meds cart. She asks Barbara what her pain level is. Holly is ashamed she didn’t think to ask herself, and first thing. In some ways she is a very bad and thoughtless person.
“I don’t know,” Barbara says. “A five, maybe?”
The nurse opens a plastic pill tray and hands Barbara a little paper cup. There are two white pills in it. “These are custom-tailored Five pills. You’ll sleep like a baby. At least until I come in to check your pupils.”
Barbara swallows the pills with a sip of water. The nurse tells Holly she should leave soon and let “our girl” get some rest.
“Very soon,” Holly says, and when the nurse is gone, she leans forward, face intent, eyes bright. “The game. How did you get it,
Barb?”
“A man gave it to me. I was at the Birch Street Mall with Hilda Carver.”
“When was this?”
“Before Christmas, but not much before. I remember, because I still hadn’t found anything for Jerome, and I was starting to get worried. I saw a nice sport coat in Banana Republic, but it was way expensive, and besides, he’s going to be building houses until May. You don’t have much reason to wear a sport coat when you’re doing that, do you?”
“I guess not.”
“Anyway, this man came up to us while Hilda and I were having lunch. We’re not supposed to talk to strangers, but it’s not like we’re little kids anymore, and besides, it was in the food court with people all around. Also, he looked nice.”
The worst ones usually do, Holly thinks.
“He was wearing a terrific suit that must have cost mucho megabucks and carrying a briefcase. He said his name was Myron Zakim and he worked for a company called Sunrise Solutions. He gave us his card. He showed us a couple of Zappits—his briefcase was full of them—and said we could each have one free if we’d fill out a questionnaire and send it back. The address was on the questionnaire. It was on the card, too.”
“Do you happen to remember the address?”
“No, and I threw his card away. Besides, it was only a box number.”
“In New York?”
Barbara thinks it over. “No. Here in the city.”
“So you took the Zappits.”
“Yes. I didn’t tell Mom, because she would have given me a big lecture about talking to that guy. I filled out the questionnaire, too, and sent it in. Hilda didn’t, because her Zappit didn’t work. It just gave out a single blue flash and went dead. So she threw it away. I remember her saying that’s all you could expect when someone said something was free.” Barbara giggles. “She sounded just like her mother.”
“But yours did work.”
“Yes. It was old-fashioned but kind of … you know, kind of fun, in a silly way. At first. I wish mine had been broken, then I wouldn’t have the voice.” Her eyes slip closed, then slowly reopen. She smiles. “Whoa! Feel like I might be floating away.”
