Afterimage

by Roderick Geiger

  A staff intern had gone into the tent to clear Wayne’s airways. Wayne, still unconscious, choked and coughed and finally the alarm reset itself. “That will hold him for awhile,” the intern said, his mask muffling the words. It was almost noon.

  Thomas burst into the conference room, flushed, breathing hard, tears streaming down his face. “You can’t stall me any longer,” he cursed, voice cracking. “It’s time to make good on your promise.”

  Chalmais sat back, nibbling on his pencil eraser. He did not meet Thomas’ eyes; instead he looked across the table at Gill and Galtrup, who each in turn stared back, expressionless.

  Thomas fixed his gaze on Sara, fidgeting nervously with her notepad. “Sara. Wayne’s not going to last much longer. What’s going on?”

  “There’s…complications,” she said lamely. She wanted to explain it to him but she knew it would take too long. Instead, she turned to Gill and stared, the muscles in her face drawn tight.

  “Complications?” Thomas groaned. “We came here willing to give - to sacrifice our lives for this medical science thing you said was so important. Do any of you realize how hard it is to make a decision like that? Of course you don’t! How could you? But we made it and it’s given our lives some meager sense of purpose and now you want to take even that away?”

  There was silence in the room as Thomas, emotionally exhausted, fell into a chair.

  “Would you consider letting Wayne go through with another patient?” Lomax posed.

  “No. Absolutely not. It’s me or we leave. Period.”

  “And go where?” Chalmais said coldly.

  The desperate confusion in Thomas’ eyes answered the question.

  Gyttings, who had been monitoring the meeting from his ranch, now asked to speak privately with his VP.

  When Chalmais had cleared the conference room, the CEO said: “What the hell happened here, Tony. I need bodies in that machine today.”

  “He’s afraid he’ll end up in prison, just like Jack Kevorkian. Jim, if I could run the damn thing myself, I’d do it, you know that.”

  “Yeah, I know. What about Vrynos?”

  “Without Lomax? Gill won’t budge.”

  “And Sara? If we got rid of Lomax and Vrynos, could Sara run the damn thing?”

  “Maybe, but she won’t. Same with Galtrup. It all hangs on Lomax. He’s the MD. It’s his ass on the line. Not surprisingly, no one wants to volunteer their ass to replace his ass.”

  Gyttings sighed loudly. “Damn. I’ll have to come out there. Clear a couple rooms for me, Tony.”

  Day 4

  Wednesday

  Holiday Inn Hotel,

  Eugene, Oregon

  Ishue sat on the bed in her hotel room staring at her notebook computer and it stared back at her, displaying a screensaver of stupid-looking fish. She shook her head to clear the daydreams.

  “Where are you Mister One-Night-Stand,” she said aloud. It had actually been two nights, but somehow ‘Mister Two-Night-Stand’ hurt even worse.

  Warren had not returned any of her calls, had not spoken to her since Monday morning, when lover-boy had tried to get her to babysit for Tyler. Since then she’d left messages on his cell, his hotel room, and even on his home phone machine in San Francisco.

  “Some electronic age!” she said, slapping her mouse to get rid of the asinine fish. “It doesn’t matter how many tele-fucking-communications gadgets a man carries, if he wants to avoid you, he fucking avoids you.

  “Calm yourself, Ilene. This isn’t like the first time this has happened to you. Get over it.”

  She turned again to her screen, which now displayed the story slugged INFX. It was ready to go, all 26-column inches. She needed Warren’s permission to file the story. Why?

  “Because I promised the son-of-a-bitch, that’s why.” Almost all the information in the INFX story had come from Warren, from pillow talk, which he had actually volunteered. “Well, volunteered at first.” She’d used him to attribute a half-dozen direct quotes, a bunch more indirect, had three hours of secretly recorded audiotapes to back it up. She even had their lovemaking on tape, and when she played it back it made her alternately angry, then sad, then angry, then sad until the two emotions merged into one. She missed him. She even missed the kid, who provided her a vague sense of maternal fulfillment. “You’re not his mother,” she scolded herself.

  It was a tight little story. It had flow. Sure, she’d fudged a few quotes, taken some liberties for the sake of continuity and smooth transitions. If she rewrote it without Warren’s quotes or with lame attributions to “unnamed sources,” the thing fell apart. Besides, Ed wouldn’t run another “unnamed sources” story from her. He’d said so. “You only get one, Ilene. Only one.”

  “What are you doing up there? This isn’t a vacation! Gimme some copy,” Ishue mimicked. Never mind there’d been absolutely nothing from Gyttings-Lindstrom since the Monday press conference. “Does the guy from Time or CNN have to put up with an editor like him?” Yeah, probably.

  So now there were a couple dozen reporters in town poking around looking for something to write, but no one had made mention of Dr. Deverson. No one had made the connection between Dr. Vrynos and Dr. Deverson. No one had written the INFX story, the Afterimage story. Not yet, anyway. It terrified her to look at competitor’s newspapers, to watch the TV news, in fear that someone would break it wide open. “They’ll beat your lard ass to the punch if you sit on this much longer,” she warned herself. These people weren’t idiots. It was only a matter of a day or two, perhaps hours.

  She went through her phone list again, deftly punching the numbers with the speed of someone who’d made a few million phone calls in her life. Warren Vardell – not available. Adel Deverson – no answer. The so-called direct line to Sara Keplar – a bitchy male operator with zero people skills. Gilbert Vrynos – not available. Anthony Chalmais – not available. On a whim she even tried James Gyttings in Austin – of course, not available.

  She read through her story one more time. Satisfied, she accessed the Enterprise website, typed in her access code and waited for the screen. She moved the mouse pointer to “send” and poised her finger above the left button.

  “Damnit, Warren. I’ll bet you’ll call me when you see your goddamn name in print.”

  She dropped her finger, clicked the button and turned her face away as the laptop sent the story to file. She felt a surge of shame, of ugliness.

  Then an odd thought hit her. What if it wasn’t Warren’s fault? What if there had been some intrigue, some cloak-and dagger stuff? What if the Gyttings-Lindstrom people had kidnapped him, or worse?

  She fumbled for his business card, dialed the San Francisco office.

  “I’m looking for someone named Al.”

  “This is a great big building, lady.”

  And you’re a great big prick. “I know, but it’s terribly important. Life and death. Al would be Warren Vardell’s boss.”

  “Vardell, huh?”

  “You know him?” she said excitedly.

  “Nah. What’s he do?”

  “He’s a specialist II,” she read from the card.

  “Ohhh. You probably want Al Cummings. The big black guy?”

  “Suuure. Him.”

  “Hold please.”

  She held.

  “This is Al Cummins…”

  “Al? Warren’s boss?

  “…of the Environmental Protection Agency. I’m not in right now or on another line…”

  Trying not to sound discouraged, she left a message. Yet another message.

  Ishue met Marla for lunch at Jalisco’s, a Mexican restaurant on 11th street. She had hoped to capitalize on the former Gyttings-Lindstrom employee’s anger toward the company with a simple plan to get inside the research facility. The reporter would pose as Marla, use her security ID badge and magnetic key.

  “I heard some new security guys from Austin came in and changed everything,” Marla said, sipping a margarita through a straw.
“They revamped the access system, changed all the card locks, added umpteen cameras. I don’t think…” She paused, thinking.

  “What?” Ishue pumped.

  “Well, there is the trash room where the dumpsters are kept. The garbage trucks get in through a power roll-up door inside the rear gates. We threw stuff away through a service door at the rear of the warehouse. I still have a key, you know, just a good old-fashioned metal key. If you could figure out how to get into the dumpster room, and they didn’t change that lock, you could get into the warehouse.”

  Ishue smiled. “And could I get into the research wings from the warehouse?”

  “I’m not so sure anymore,” the co-ed shrugged. “They did so much remodeling over there. But I could draw you a map of how it used to look. Maybe you could figure a way.”

  Ishue got back to her hotel at three and checked at the desk. There was a message from Warren’s boss, nothing else. She called Al back.

  “Who are you,” Al asked gruffly.

  “I’m his girlfriend. Ilene. I’m worried about him.”

  “Girlfriend, huh? Yeah, well I’ve been playing phone tag with him since yesterday. He’s in Portland at…Legacy Community Hospital.”

  “Portland?”

  “His kid got hurt. I have no idea why he went all the way up there.”

  Ishue’s mind was racing. “Thanks,” she said. “Do you have a number?”

  “Yeah. When you talk to him, tell him he better call me right away.”

  She went limp. “Tyler got hurt? He’s still at the hospital? Oh shit! “What have I done!”

  Day 4

  Wednesday

  Gyttings-Lindstrom Research Unit,

  Eugene, Oregon

  When Dr. Harold Evans’ ambulance pulled up to the back gates of Gyttings-Lindstrom, he was exactly one week away from his 76th birthday, a feat, which meant he’d survived several months longer than his doctors’ most optimistic predictions. He suffered from an alphabet soup of ailments, acute sclerosis topping the list.

  On average, the aging founder of the Ruptura Society was reduced to only about two hours of consciousness a day, but during those sporadic periods he was alert, his mind and memory sharp.

  The journey from Ione had been taxing on the old detective’s health, but by the time the ambulance had parked he was wide-awake, demanding an audience with the research team. He was accompanied to the conference room by Dr. David Baker, the Society’s staff MD, and by Josh Cochran, a young MRI tech and close confidant of the Founder. The full INFX team was assembled when Cochran wheeled the old man into the conference room.

  “At last we meet,” Gyttings said, sitting forward.

  “In the nick of time,” Evan’s responded, looking around the room thorough the yellow-cast sclera of his eyes, which color-matched the old man’s skin. He wore a breathing tube beneath his nostrils connected to a box behind his wheelchair, He was on an IV, the bag hanging from a drip hook beside his head.

  Infected by the urgency in Evans’ voice, the introductions went quickly.

  After which, Sara asked: “What do you have your doctorate in?”

  “Divinity,” Evans said. “And it’s honorary to boot. But I like the sound of it. Davie here is my brainiac scientist.”

  Cochran stepped forward and dropped a single CD on the desk. “This is box 3 of 3 you folks have been asking after. Our work, eight years worth, is based on this information, which we believed was the most recent of Deverson’s research. An assumption, which was, most unfortunately, incorrect.”

  “Adel has been a wonderful friend, very helpful, very spiritual, but I always felt she was holding something back,” Evans said. He turned to her. “Now I know you were.”

  “I’m sorry Harold,” She said in a grandmotherly voice, as if Evans were decades younger than she. “But Mark knew - “ she smiled in the direction of Gill, Sara and Galtrup - “his students would eventually come to continue his work. “She smiled solemnly. “It’s what he wanted.”

  Evans laughed. “Forgive me, Adel honey. I know you think he’s here in the room with us, but even after all I’ve seen I’m still a skeptical old fart.” He struggled to turn his chair slightly by yanking on the spokes of his left wheel.

  “I’m guessing you’d all like to hear about our procedures…” he paused for a moment, seeming to be lost… “Through trial and error we reached a point where they became quite predictable. We’d roll our client and a rat into the tube and…ka-blam!”

  “We ended up replacing most of the cowls, the tunnel inner liner, the RF coils every time,” Cochran said. “Sometimes the gradient coils too. Couple times there was nothing salvageable at all.”

  “Did you ever try it without the rat?” Gill asked.

  “Whoa! Just once,” Evans said. “Blew the concrete building apart.”

  “How did you handle the scan alignment?” Galtrup asked.

  “We paralyzed the rat, strapped it to the client’s face,” Cochran said. “Then we lined up the lobes with a Cat scan before we rolled them in the MRI.”

  Claire looked aghast. “You strapped a rat to the patient’s face?”

  Evans sighed deeply, his eyelids drooping. “Give me something,” he said to Baker.

  “You need sleep,” Baker protested.

  “Now,” Evans demanded. The doctor shot the contents of a tiny syringe into Evan’s line and in a moment the old detective perked up. “It wasn’t a patient, exactly. It was more like a dead client.” Evans could read the others’ confused expressions. “Unlike yourselves, we didn’t have the luxury of controlling the time of death. We housed clients at our facility, usually one or two at a time, on life support, let the family members pull the plug, or whatever the hell kind of deal the lawyers worked out, then we waited. When the patient’s heart stopped we hustled them into our unit.”

  “We only had about 15 minutes to make it work,” Cochran added.

  “So then what?” Sara said, throwing her arms in the air.

  “Ka-blam,” Evans chuckled. “We’d scrape the residue off the barrel shields, put it in a box and give it to the family.”

  “How about timing,” Galtrup put in. “How did you read core failure?”

  “We didn’t,” Baker said. “We used a fast machine and we just kept running the scan over and over. Sometimes it didn’t work. Usually did.”

  “People paid you to do this?” Sara asked.

  “A hundred-seventy-five grand a pop,” Evans said.

  “Why?” Sara asked. “In god’s name why?”

  Evans grinned a sly, whiskery grin. “Well, the family would take their little boxes home, and for the next, what…” he looked up at Cochran… “two, three days, they would have some rather intense hallucinations about the deceased. I mean, ghosts, angels, ascension, sky opening, all that kind of shit. You wouldn’t believe some of the stories we heard, the letters we got back.”

  “All our clients were word-of-mouth,” Cochran added, raising his hand with fingers outstretched. “Toward the end we had five times as many applicants as we could ever hope to process.”

  “I think it was a lovely thing you were doing for those families,” Adel beamed.

  “How many times did you do it?” Gill asked.

  “Forty-seven,” Cochran answered.

  Evans looked from face to face for a moment. “Hey, I may sound skeptical, but I’m a believer. That’s why I’m here. The feds confiscated all my equipment so I’m counting on you to make good on your word.” He paused. “I’m ready, people. Where do I sign.”

  Day 3

  Thursday

  Gyttings-Lindstrom Research Unit,

  Eugene, Oregon

  Just before dawn a thoroughly exhausted vice president was awoken by aggressive pounding on the door of his suite. It was Gyttings, newly arrived by private jet from Austin, Texas.

  Gyttings zipped his card key through the lock and let himself in

  “Whoa,” Chalmais shrieked, squinting against the hallway
light.

  “Read this,” the CEO commanded, shoving a newspaper into the room.

  Still groggy, Chalmais staggered into to an overstuffed chair. The newspaper story was accompanied by two pictures: one, a candid shot of Warren Vardell entering the Gyttings-Lindstrom research building, the other, an old headshot of Dr. M. Deverson. Above these, a 72-point banner headline blared:

  Federal Officials Forewarned of MRI Dangers

  AP - Eugene, Oregon by Ilene Ishue, Manzanita Enterprise

  Three U.S. government agencies may have known for more than a decade that MRIs could explode, a federal official said this week.

  “The Manzanita hospital explosion was not the first MRI accident,” said Warren Vardell, an analyst for the Environmental Protection Agency. Vardell is currently monitoring the controversial MRI research in this central Oregon city. “We now know that another MRI exploded near Davis, California 12 years ago,” Vardell said.

  MRI research attracted the attention of the U.S. Department of Defense two years earlier, when the DOD set out to determine if the explosions had any military application, Vardell said.

  That research was conducted at the University of California, Davis and led by Dr. Markland Deverson, a biology professor who disappeared mysteriously in the Davis accident under circumstances similar to the recent disappearance of the patient in the Manzanita, California accident.

  Two years before his disappearance, Deverson, looking for grant money to fund his research, made contact with several federal agencies, Vardell said.

  “The classified DOD report concluded Deverson’s research had no potential for weapons use,” Vardell said. Copies of the DOD field report were then forwarded to the U.S. Department of Energy and the Environmental Protection Agency as standard procedure, he said.

  “Apparently no one who read the report made the connection there might be a danger in medical MRI,” said Maurice Gladstone, a spokesman for the DOE in Washington DC. “This is definitely not a case of negligence. It’s a huge jump to go from this (DOD) weapon report to the assumption that there might be an explosion in some hospital a dozen years later. But if someone had made the connection, the correct procedure would have been to contact (Food and Drug Administration) for further study, and there’s no record that ever happened,” Gladstone said yesterday.