The Phantom Limb

by William Sleator

  Isaac went over to the sink and turned away from the others to wash his hands. He heard the door open again and two sets of footsteps leave the room.

  He hadn’t noticed it before, but there was no mirror above the sink.

  He barely had time for this to register before he felt someone jab him with a needle.

  HEN ISAAC FINALLY AWOKE, HE WAS groggy and bleary-eyed. He knew he was on a gurney—but where? He tried to get off, but he felt too dizzy.

  “Whoa, pal!” the orderly said as he wheeled the gurney down the dimly lit corridor.

  It was the same dark corridor where Isaac had gotten lost the night Vera was admitted. He didn’t like being there. The ceiling was low; the space seemed to close in on him.

  As the orderly pushed the gurney around a sharp curve and through a doorway, Isaac saw the sign: ENDOSCOPY. A nurse held the door open.

  Inside the small room there were more nurses, all looking cheerful and welcoming. A dark-haired man with a blue mask over his nose and mouth sat at a desk with a computer screen in front of him. The screen did not have a normal display on it, but rather squares with strangely shaped rounded objects inside of them.

  The man nodded at Isaac. “Good afternoon,” he said. “I’m Dr. Fields. Nice to meet you.”

  “What’s happening?” Isaac asked, feeling more alert. Whatever knockout drug they had given him hadn’t lasted very long. Just long enough to trap him here in this awful room.

  “You passed out in your mother’s room,” one of the nurses said. “You were bent over in pain. Thank goodness someone was there to sign the order and send you down here.”

  “But wait—I’m not a patient,” Isaac said. “Someone knocked me out. They gave me a shot with a needle.”

  “You don’t understand how serious this could be,” the nurse said. “You need to let us do our job. Doctor’s orders.”

  “But—” Isaac tried to protest.

  “Let me explain what we’re going to do here today, Isaac,” Dr. Fields said. He stood up and walked over to a large black apparatus. He picked up a snakelike object, which was also black. It was thicker at the top end and had concentric bumps on it. “We need to take some pictures of your stomach. This is an endoscope—a camera. I’m going to lower it down your throat and into your stomach, and that’s how we’ll get the pictures. Do you understand?”

  Then Isaac remembered the phantom limb smashing the black licorice. This was what it had been warning him about.

  The doctor picked up a small spray bottle. “Don’t worry. I’ll spray your throat with this anesthetic first. That will make it a lot easier.”

  The nurses were holding him down now.

  “But somebody gave me a—”

  “Please try not to scream,” Dr. Fields continued. “It makes the procedure more difficult for me. And don’t bite down on the camera. It’s expensive. Just concentrate on swallowing. That will make it easier for everybody. Open, please,” he instructed Isaac.

  Isaac pressed his lips together as hard as he could.

  “Look, son, we can do this the easy way … or the hard way. Open up.”

  Not knowing what else to do, Isaac opened his mouth. Dr. Fields shot a tiny whisk of spray into his throat and dropped the bottle back into his lab coat pocket. He picked up the endoscope. “OK, let’s get going!” he said enthusiastically.

  Isaac felt sure that the excitement he heard in the doctor’s voice was real and not just in his imagination.

  Dr. Fields wedged a hard white plastic cylinder into Isaac’s mouth, forcing it to stay open. “This is to keep you from biting down on the expensive equipment,” he explained.

  Down went the snakelike plastic knob—down past Isaac’s uvula, the gagging point. Isaac tried to scream, and then he was hacking and gagging and spluttering. He was in agony.

  “Swallow, Isaac,” ordered Dr. Fields. “Swallowing will make it easier!”

  Isaac tried to swallow, but screaming overcame it.

  Meanwhile, Dr. Fields kept pushing the tube down his throat. “Keep swallowing! Keep swallowing!” he said. “It’s almost over.”

  “Yes, yes, it’s almost over,” the nurses repeated, almost in a chant, holding him down.

  Almost over? It looked as if the cable had hardly gone down.

  Dr. Fields kept feeding it down with force. Every once in a while he glanced back at the screen and clicked a button, and a picture appeared. “Almost over,” he said, grunting.

  “Almost over!” the nurses chirped in their sweet little voices, like a chorus from an operetta.

  “Almost over!” sang Dr. Fields above the sounds of Isaac’s agony.

  “Almost over!” twittered the nurses.

  “Just need a couple more snaps now to make sure we got everything. You don’t want me to have to do this to you again, do you, son?” Dr. Fields smiled.

  He looked back and took another picture.

  “Done!” he said.

  Finally, Isaac felt him start to pull out the cable. Tears welled up in his eyes.

  TILL SHAKEN AND CONFUSED BY WHAT HE’D just experienced, Isaac ran out of the hospital as quickly as possible.

  On his way out, he passed the woman who had accidentally come into his mother’s room just before he’d passed out. She gave him a long look and smiled faintly at him. Then he made the connection. She reminded him of the woman in his dream.

  Once outside, he checked the messages on his cell phone. He heard a voice he didn’t recognize. “You are asking too many questions,” said the voice. Then even more ominously: “Three strikes and you’re out.”

  This sounded nothing like the twins’ voices. This was clearly an adult’s.

  Isaac thought back to his sabotaged bike ride. He wondered if the person who had tampered with his bike could have also jabbed him with the needle.

  He looked back at the hospital. He was terrified of ever entering it again, but he knew he had no choice. His mother was still there, possibly in danger, with that growing bruise on her arm.

  And now Isaac knew that he was in danger too.

  He had no one to turn to except for the only “person” who was actually communicating with him: the phantom limb. Only the phantom limb could help him now.

  As soon as he got home, he went upstairs to the mirror box. He wasn’t scared of it anymore. Joey Haynes had ripped apart the smiley face … and then everybody at the hospital had smiled at him in a strange way. The ripped smiley face had been a warning, he now realized. The licorice stick had been a warning about the endoscopy. So if anyone had any idea of what would happen next, it would be Joey. He was dead, but he was still somewhere. And wherever he was, he obviously had access to information.

  Isaac held the mirror box for a moment, then put it on his desk and placed both of his arms into it. Immediately, he felt sleepy.

  This time he found himself in a different bathroom mirror. A young teenage girl was reflected in the mirror. Somehow Isaac knew that it was the same person he had seen before. Her face was still blurred, but in his gut, he was sure she was the one Joey showed him earlier.

  She was fussing with some rags and a pitcher of some kind of hot liquid, which she held by the handle with one of the rags, like a pot holder. She was muttering to herself, and as her voice grew louder, Isaac could make out what she was saying.

  “Those stupid, ugly girls! Why did they put me in the same cabin as them? They’ll get what they deserve for making fun of me. It’s not my fault I have a little … problem. How can I help it when I’m asleep, anyway?”

  She was pouring the hot liquid over the rags.

  “The crafts shop won’t miss this paraffin for their stupid candle making. The hot water will keep the drain from getting clogged, but so what if it does?” She giggled. “Nobody will even notice after what happens to this cabin and those stupid girls.”

  Isaac knew that paraffin was very flammable. Did she actually want to burn down the cabin?

  He could tell her expression was gle
eful, but not in a childlike way. There was something about her smile that made him cringe.

  Joey must have sensed how much watching this was bothering Isaac, because when Isaac blinked, the girl and the bathroom were gone.

  The hand appeared again, holding an instrument that looked like a combination of a saw and a drill. The saw had jagged teeth. When the instrument turned on, the saw blade moved back and forth.

  Isaac took his arms out of the mirror box, went over to his computer, and Googled the name that was on the label of the saw. A chill overcame him when he found out what this instrument was for: amputation.

  Isaac looked back into the mirror box. The phantom limb dropped the saw and made a fist again. It held the fist there for a minute, shaking it for emphasis.

  Isaac was in the way. Dr. Ciano made him feel like an interloper at the hospital. Could she be the one who tampered with the brakes on his bike? If she was, then the endoscopy was only the beginning. Was this newest vision a warning of what could happen to Vera?

  He continued to watch the phantom limb. It held up three fingers. Then it slid away but immediately returned with an old green paperback book, A Collection of Essays by George Orwell. The author’s last name, Orwell, was circled with a very wiggly, scraggly red line. What on earth did that mean? What was Joey trying to tell him? It had to have something to do with Vera, but what? Isaac was stumped, though the word “Orwell” sounded vaguely familiar.

  “What exactly did you say to DCynthia and Destiny?” Matt Kravetz asked him at lunch the next day. He didn’t sit down, but he was less belligerent than the day before.

  “They were ragging on me and bragging about their father’s car, so I said he’s only rich because he cheats people.”

  “You actually said that to them?” A small smile hovered around Kravetz’s mouth.

  Isaac nodded. He was pleased that Kravetz seemed impressed, and he savored the moment. But it was interrupted when he suddenly made the connection: “Orwell” was the word that DCynthia had whispered when she logged on to the computer at the hospital. Then Joey had told him the same word. It must be a password.

  He wondered how he could get his hands on one of the nursing station’s computers. Was it possible that there was patient information on the public computers, if you knew the right secret password? He doubted it.

  Kravetz noticed that Isaac was preoccupied. “See you later, man,” he said, and went over to his friends.

  Isaac rode to the hospital directly after school. There were computers at the hospital for visitors to use, for a price. But they offered only the normal Internet. And using them was expensive. He tried one briefly, and then went upstairs to the nurses’ station.

  Candi was nowhere in sight, and she was not in his mother’s room. Vera seemed to be sleeping peacefully, breathing regularly. The bruise on her arm was no bigger than the last time Isaac had seen it. She seemed to be safe for the moment.

  The nurses’ station was empty, as the other nurses were occupied with taking care of patients in their rooms. The twins were busy running back and forth and didn’t seem to notice him. One of the computers faced away from the counter, giving him a chance to use it quickly. Did he dare? When would he have another opportunity?

  He typed in “Verdi, Vera.” The computer asked for a user name. He tried to type in the name of the hospital, but he was so nervous that he kept making typos. When he finally got the name right, the computer rejected it. He looked over his shoulder to make sure no one was coming. Then he typed in “Ciano.” It asked for a password. He typed in “Orwell.” A page appeared! He skimmed it rapidly, afraid that at any second a nurse would see what he was doing.

  He found the diagnosis quickly. “Patient’s biopsy positive for osteosarcoma, bone cancer. Recommendation: amputation.”

  The same diagnosis that Joey Haynes was given, Isaac thought. This was too much of a coincidence. Dr. Ciano could very well work at more than one hospital and have been Joey’s doctor. But then he remembered that the last time he saw Dr. Ciano, she had said they didn’t know what was wrong with his mother’s arm. So who had recommended the amputation?

  He turned off the computer and stepped away from it just in time to see Dr. Ciano herself emerge from a patient’s room. Had she seen him at the computer? It was impossible to tell.

  She approached the nurses’ station. She wasn’t smiling now. “Please understand, Isaac,” she said. “We care about your mother. She is in good hands. So, really, you don’t need to keep coming here all the time.”

  Isaac left the hospital confused. Obviously, Dr. Ciano didn’t want him around. He knew that he had to act fast. Everything that Joey showed him so far had happened, which must mean that something was going to happen with the drill saw too. How soon?

  When Isaac got home Grandpa was sitting in the living room reading the newspaper. “How is she?” Grandpa asked him with unexpected clarity.

  “The bruise on her arm looks really bad,” Isaac replied. Hoping Grandpa would understand, he went on. “Grandpa, do you think … you could help me? I think somebody is hurting Mom. Her doctor never wants me around. And yesterday somebody gave me a shot and knocked me out, and I ended up having an endoscopy. They stuck a camera down my throat to my stomach without any sedative—as a warning. It was horrible.”

  Grandpa looked directly into Isaac’s eyes. Then he lifted his head with a look of anger and determination. “We need to get Vera out of there—fast!”

  Isaac felt immediate relief at Grandpa’s reaction. “Yes, we have to,” he agreed. “There’s an order to amputate Mom’s arm. No one told me, but I saw it on the hospital computer.”

  “How did you get into the hospital computer?” Grandpa said, actually sounding proud of Isaac.

  “The phantom limb in the mirror box told me the password, and it was right. Maybe now you’ll believe me about that box.”

  “Amazing,” Grandpa said.

  It was also amazing to be having a normal conversation with him. Could Grandpa possibly help him? He had been a scientist, after all. “I think the dead boy didn’t show you his hand because he doesn’t want to communicate with anyone but me,” Isaac said. “He’s also … vague. He can’t communicate directly. Everything he says is a sign, a puzzle.”

  He told Grandpa about the Fitzpatrick twins and how they did volunteer work at the hospital. “If I could get them on my side somehow, maybe they could help me.”

  “You can’t control who people like and who they don’t like,” Grandpa said. “But you can persuade them.”

  Isaac knew he was grasping at straws when it came to the twins—they were just too mean, especially Destiny. But maybe there was hope with DCynthia.

  “Well, one of them did help me by finding out who lived in this house before us, which is how I found out who the mirror box originally belonged to. And maybe he had the same doctor as Mom, but at a different hospital.”

  “What about that collection of optical illusions I helped you start a few years ago?” Grandpa asked him. “When was the last time you looked at them? I can’t even remember if … you moved them here or not.” Grandpa seemed embarrassed to admit that.

  “I look at them all the time,” Isaac said. “Especially the Menger sponge.”

  “I seem to remember … Well, there might be something in that collection that you could use to help you.”

  Was that really true? Could he trust Grandpa’s memory?

  If he could, it would be a huge help.

  But it was too late to check his collection tonight. He went to sleep instead.

  T LUNCH THE NEXT DAY, MATT KRAVETZ actually sat with Isaac instead of with his usual group of friends. It was pretty amazing.

  “I can’t believe you said that to the twins,” he whispered, grinning at Isaac. He was still impressed with what Isaac had said. Clearly, the twins were wrong to think he liked them so much. “Where did you go to school before you came here?” he asked Isaac.

  “We used to live in Centerville
. Then we moved here.” He didn’t say that his mother was in the hospital; he didn’t want it to sound as if he was asking for sympathy. Instead, he said, “And I found this real cool thing in our new house: a mirror box.”

  “What’s that?” Kravetz asked.

  Isaac described the box to him and what you could do with it.

  “Hey, man, I’d like to see that sometime,” Kravetz said.

  “Sure,” Isaac said. He didn’t say anything about the phantom limb—that would be too unbelievable at this point. But he could tell that Kravetz was fascinated by the idea of the mirror box itself. Isaac decided to work at getting him on his side, so that maybe he could help him get the twins on his side too.

  And now Isaac felt that he really needed a friend. Not just to help him, but for the companionship.

  After school let out, Isaac checked his brakes, just to be sure, and then rode his bike directly home instead of going to the hospital. He knew something strange was going on, but Vera had seemed OK yesterday. And he had to look at his collection of optical illusions again, in case Grandpa was right and there really was something he might be able to use to stop whoever it was from hurting Vera—and him.

  Grandpa was asleep on the couch when he got home. Isaac wondered if he was tired or if he was slipping back into his disoriented state. Yesterday he had hoped that Grandpa was getting better, that the situation with Vera might be bringing him out of the deep depression he had been in. Because that’s what it had been, Isaac suspected now: depression, not dementia.

  Isaac went upstairs to look at his collection of illusions. In general, he was most fascinated with the Menger sponge, the cube with the smaller and smaller holes. After toying with it for a minute, he looked up and saw the spiral aftereffect. Why hadn’t he noticed it the other day? It was a long rod with a wheel on the end of it. The wheel was white with a black line on it that spiraled into the center. When the wheel turned, it looked as if the spiral was zooming down into the center, pulling you along with it. Then, when you looked away, whatever you saw seemed to be zooming toward you. The effect was dizzying. It was a simple but powerful optical illusion.