“Machine was out,” I said, striding into the room with the can of pop in my hand. “Had to go to the other side of the building for a goddamned coke.”
Both of them looked up: Sherry’s face, all pale, wet and sad; Ryan’s, scared and guilty as hell. Having reduced her to this, he couldn’t stand to look at what he’d wrought. He gave Sherry a peck on the cheek and ran out the door. Good riddance to him. I sat down on her bed and held her in my arms until she fell asleep.
* * *
Ryan came a few more times, but his devotion obviously petered out after he and his bosses assured themselves that Sherry posed no more threat to them. What a knockout! They’d managed to knock her out without really knocking her off. Instead, they must have transferred their paranoia to me. More than once, on the subway going to the nursing home, I caught a glimpse of the guy in the brown suit and glasses, turned away as if he were reading the subway map, or spying on me through the window of the adjoining car. As many times as I managed to shake him, he was there again when I turned around. Whatever. It didn’t stop me from going.
On one Thursday morning visit, Sherry was up and sitting in her chair, eating breakfast, her spoon turned sideways in her fist and oatmeal on her face. She gave me a big sad smile. “Hi,” she said.
“Hi, yourself,” I said, wiping off the oatmeal with a napkin.
“What will we do with me?” she asked after a minute.
“What do you mean?
“Will they ever let me leave?”
I didn’t know what to say. Her arms and legs weren’t what they used to be. She had trouble putting a spoon to her lips. She couldn’t really walk. How could she leave? “When you’re better,” I said.
“When will I be better?”
“You need therapy, Sherry. So you can feed yourself. Take care of yourself.”
“Can’t I come live with you?”
I remembered when all I wanted was for her to come live with me, when Sherry wouldn’t hear of it; but now our relationship seemed to have been turned on its head. How could I take care of her? I pictured her passed out in the street or face down in the tub, if she didn’t time her pills just right. “What would you do with your own apartment?” I asked.
“Do I still have that?” she asked.
“Yeah.” Her apartment was still sitting there, rent barely paid by the dwindling balance in her bank account. “What should I do with it?”
“Get rid of it,” she said.
“And what should I do with all your clothes? Your furniture?”
“Oh, those.” She sat, mulling it over. “Couldn’t we bring them to your place?” she asked.
“I don’t have the room, Sherry.” She looked disappointed. “What about your parents’ house?” I asked.
Sherry’s parents lived in California. She never talked about them much. From what I could gather, nothing she could do was ever good enough for her father. Hey, if I had invented the biggest sleep drug on the market, my parents would be busting a gut telling all the neighbors. I mean, what kind of parents aren’t proud of their kids? Anyway, I gave up trying to figure them out. Her parents had been back once to see her when she was in the hospital, once when she woke up. What can I tell you? They weren’t on good terms.
“Forget it,” Sherry said, turning away. “Forget it.”
“No, no,” I said. “I’ll take care of it.”
Just then a small lady dressed in white materialized at the doorway. “Time for your therapy,” she announced, and took over. She got Sherry up from the chair and in no time had her making her way in little baby steps across the room. I figured I was a third wheel, so I walked out of the room and down the hallway to the nurse’s station. One of the doctors was standing behind the station, making notes.
“Can I talk to you about Sherry Pollack?” I asked.
The name obviously rang bells; his eyes lit up. “Absolutely! Just a second while I finish up here.” He unlatched the swing door below the counter and motioned for me to come back and sit down on an empty stool.
“Your wife is a famous case, Mr. Pollack,” the doctor said, after he had finished typing a few things into the computer.
“Henry Jackman,” I said. “Sherry’s my girlfriend. And I need to know her prospects. Will Sherry ever be able to live on her own?”
“Slow down,” he laughed. “Your girlfriend just woke up from a persistent vegetative state. A couple of months ago, no one would have given a fig for her chances of doing that. We’re plowing new ground here.”
“Yeah, well, but can you say if she’ll get any better?”
He looked me in the eye, deciding how to pitch this. “I’m guardedly optimistic,” he said. “But it would help if we knew what’s causing Sherry’s vegetative state.”
“You don’t know?” I shot back.
He sighed. “It’s a high wire act - consciousness. When a dog barks, we see its jaws open at the same time as we hear the bark. We take it for granted, but the brain has to do some fancy processing just to achieve the effect of that barking dog.”
“I guess,” I said. All I wanted to know was if she’d get better, not how to deconstruct a barking dog.
“How the brain does it,” the doctor went on, “is by connecting all the neurons that fire on the same beat. Whatever happens at a single instant makes up one pulse of consciousness. Clearly, if the neurons are out of sync, that moment will never come together.”
“You’re saying Sherry’s outta sync?”
“Without a doubt, Mr. Jackman. Normally, when a person is awake, a small group of nerve cells in the thalamus triggers a gamma wave in the cortex, which travels back to the thalamus, locking all the neurons to the same beat. Now, without the wave...”
“But will she recover?” I asked, impatient with all this theory.
“If the trigger neurons recover, so does the patient.”
“So, when will Sherry’s neurons recover?” I wanted to know.
He stared at me as if he were figuring all the angles on how best to handle a dumb and postal boyfriend. Then, I figure he must have decided; because he suddenly smiled and turned back to the computer. “Let me show you the two sets of MRI’s we gave your girlfriend. Before and after Somnolux,” he said, typing a few keystrokes. The screen changed from a blinking screen saver to something else. I could hardly make out what: a couple of small clouds of light in a pitch-black sky. The doctor waved at the dark expanse on the screen. “Notice that the before brain scans are black: no activity in large areas, including the thalamus.”
I shivered. “Is it dead?”
“Ah, that’s the thing,” the doctor said, typing some more. The image changed a few more times, till he found what he was looking for. The screen refreshed itself, splashes of orange, yellow, blue painting over the black.
A low whistle escaped my lips.
“After Somnolux,” he said, looking up. “The same areas begin to light up with activity. Instead of putting vegetative patients to sleep, Somnolux opens up large dormant areas of the brain and makes them function again.”
“But how?”
The doctor smiled. “I’d say that it’s somehow triggering the gamma rhythm, which synchronizes the parts which were on but disconnected. Synchronizing those parts is enough to bootstrap the whole thing, and the whole brain reconnects. The dormant parts turn on. Consciousness comes forth.”
In my mind I couldn’t help hearing: Oh, the leg bone’s connected to the ankle bone, and the ankle bone’s connected to the foot bone.... “Is that what really happens?” I asked. It all seemed too neat, somehow.
“You got a better explanation?” the doctor asked, and laughed.
I laughed, too, I didn’t know why. Science didn’t know a damn thing.
DONNA
I got the unexpected news from Henry Jackman that Sherry Pollack has just woken up. Ironically, a dose of her own drug had done the trick, something for which Henry claimed credit, along with reminding me that he always knew it would happen, e
ven when I said it wasn’t gonna. Resisting the urge to tell him what a big dope he was, I said I was very happy for them both, and didn’t mind in the least that she proved me wrong.
The next day, full of curiosity, I signed out one of the Crown Victorias and drove myself to Sherry’s nursing home in the Bronx. The Henry Hudson Parkway was as bad as ever with a long backup on the 96th Street access, but the Cross Bronx was worse: six lanes of misery crammed bumper-to-bumper, with each and every car inching forward to within an inch of the vehicle in front of it, everyone in the grips of some mass paranoia that the enemy in the adjoining lane was ready to cut in and deprive him of his rightful place. Times like this I miss the subway. The fifteen mile trip that should have taken twenty minutes took me an hour and a half, but I got there.
Parkhill Nursing Home sits on a little green hill overlooking a very urban neighborhood of boarded-up buildings and littered sidewalks, kids shooting baskets into netless hoops set in crumbling patches of asphalt, where the only greenery in sight is the scrappy weeds that push their way through the cracks in the pavement. A couple of generations ago it used to be a nice place to live: unpretentious but clean, black and immigrant mostly, your usual working class neighborhood with a lot of local color and a polyglot of different languages; kids playing stick ball in the street and young parents pushing baby buggies to the park. Now, not so much. But who knows? What with Manhattan’s prices, Bronx might just be the next hot neighborhood. After all, Brooklyn did it.
The nursing home was mobbed, not so much with residents and their families as with journalists, doctors, and curiosity seekers.
“When can we see her?” shouted one man with a Channel 5 logo on his sports jacket.
“I heard the parents were in town. Are they here yet?” asked some woman in front of me.
“This is intolerable,” said one distinguished-looking doctor. “How many times do I have to tell you that I was invited to examine Ms. Pollack?”
I shoved my way through a sea of white coats and TV cameras, mostly on the strength of my badge, making my way to the front desk. The single nurse in back was already harried, talking to several people at once. Once again, the badge got her attention. She pushed several layers of insistent people away in her effort to point the way for me to Sherry’s room. “Not yet,” I heard her tell the others.
I followed the carpeted hallway to Room 128 and looked in. Surprisingly, there was almost no one inside. Over by the bed stood Sherry’s parents. Rhonda dressed and jeweled as if to go to the theater, had pulled up a chair, Phillip in a navy blazer with a crest, was standing back a few paces, staring at his daughter as if she were the creature of the blue lagoon.
“So how are you, honey?” Rhonda was saying as she wet a tissue with her tongue and wiped something off Sherry’s chin.
Sherry was answering in monosyllables. “Okay,” she said.
Her father said, “So you still can’t wake up by yourself?”
“No,” Sherry said after a pause.
“And you can’t stop yourself from falling back asleep?”
Another pause. “No.”
“Do you try?” Phillip asked.
“Honestly, Phil,” Rhonda scolded, but Sherry was already answering, albeit very slowly.
“Daddy,” she asked. “You think…I’m doing this on…on…pur…pose?”
They stood for a minute just looking at each other, Sherry very earnest, tears in her eyes, her father unreadable. “The doctors here are clueless,” Phillip responded at last. “I’ve called in a few top specialists. If anyone can get to the bottom of this, they can.”
“Thank you, Daddy,” Sherry said.
I coughed. All three heads snapped around, with Sherry’s by far the slowest of the bunch. She might be awake, I thought, but she’s not the way she was. “I’m Detective Donna Sirken of the NYPD,” I said, moving toward the bed with my hand out.
Sherry turned white. “What did I do?” she asked her mother.
“It’s all right, honey,” Rhonda said, stepping quickly between the bed and the big, bad cop.
“Nothing, Sherry,” I replied. “You were the victim of a vicious attack. The NYPD has assigned me to your case.”
“They told me,” Sherry said, her color coming back to her face. “But I don’t remember anything.”
“You don’t?” her father asked, some fleeting expression crossing his handsome features: sympathy, distress, or relief. It was hard to tell.
Sherry shook her head. “Nothing,” she said.
I reintroduced myself to her parents and we all chitchatted, if you can call it that, for the next fifteen minutes until all of a sudden, Sherry’s head fell backwards against the pillow, and her body went limp. Rhonda gasped, and her husband took a step backwards. But Sherry had simply timed out.
The three of us went out into the hallway to ask a nurse whether she could be given another pill, but the crowd at the front desk had swollen to a mob, and the sight of us coming out of Sherry’s room seemed to incite them.
“The parents!” shouted someone carrying a spiral bound notebook, and in a moment the crowd had surged past the front desk and halfway down the hall, suddenly beyond the pale of the nurse who stood in back, protesting.
The moment Phillip saw them coming toward him, he turned frantic, eyes darting everywhere. I urged the Pollacks back into Sherry’s room, and closed the door. Rhonda walked slowly to Sherry’s bedside, put her hand on the railing, seemingly content to watch her sleep, but Phillip was madly scanning the room with his eyes like a claustrophobe searching for a way out of a sealed box.
Finally, his eyes lit on the back door, which led out to the garden. Before I could stop him, he had thrown it open and was halfway out. An alarm sounded. Sherry moaned slightly, as if in response. Rhonda seemed conflicted. Should she minister to her daughter or follow her husband out the door? I wasn’t surprised when, after one last look of longing aimed at the bedside she sped out the door in Phillip’s direction. I could hear a crowd at the door and the voice of a cranky nurse ordering them to wait where they were. And then I was out, too. I had waited four months to question the Pollacks again and I wasn’t going to let a little thing like alarms and mob hysteria stop me now.
Dr. Pollack was way up ahead, making his way past the wooden benches with their little bronze plaques in memory of Fanny Bernbaum and Vincento DeLorenzo; winding through an obstacle course of wrought iron tables with their jaunty, striped umbrellas; skirting the carefully manicured flower beds, up through the shrubbery, toward the parking lot. Rhonda was running to catch up, and I was bringing up the rear. I caught up with Phillip at last in the vast parking lot, his eyes scanning the horizon, looking for taxis.
“My car is over there,” I said, pointing to the Crown Victoria parked three rows away. He scurried over to where my finger pointed, Rhonda following his every move. I clicked my key fob to let them in, and both of them crowded into the back seat, Phillip with his head down. It was a weirdest manifestation of sociophobia – a fear of people - I had ever seen. This guy wanted to be out of sight and fast.
“Where to?” I asked, thinking I’d lighten the situation.
“The Ramada,” he replied with a look of a man in pain. I wasn’t sure if his expression was the consequence of escaping the madding crowd or whether it was a comment on being forced to stay at such a plebian establishment. “Go south on this street, then loop around to come back going north and it’ll be on your right.”
I did as I was told. The Ramada Bronx Hotel loomed up on our right, a large, square brick behemoth of a building with a red roof.
“It was close,” Rhonda explained, with that same look of pain, as we entered the vast, generic-looking lobby. That clinched it. The Ritz Carlton or the Pierre would have been far more their style, but this was simply the sacrifice one sometimes has to make for one’s children.
The elevator took us to the top floor. Down in the corner was their suite. Phillip slid his key card into the door. There was a
large HDTV in a living room decorated in tones of antique gold, a small kitchen and a Jacuzzi down the hall. Phillip was already raiding the mini bar: three little gins and a miniature Vermouth. He carried them over to the kitchen counter and poured everything into a Rubbermaid pitcher, along with the scant contents of an ice tray he’d just found in the freezer. It was eleven o’clock in the morning. “Martini?” he asked me. I demurred: I was on duty. He poured the mixture, ice cubes and all, into two wine glasses, handed one to his wife, and dropped down onto an antique gold upholstered chair.
I let him sip his drink in silence for a few minutes. The man had just had a traumatic experience. For the life of me, I couldn’t guess why, but clearly that was the case. Rhonda had taken her martini glass into the powder room, and was gone so long I thought she might already be splashing in the Jacuzzi. By the time she came back, her glass was empty, and it was almost eleven-thirty. By now Phillip seemed much more relaxed. In the meantime, he’d called down for another four little bottles of gin and one of Vermouth, a plate of mixed sandwiches and a side of onion rings; and a young man in a bellboy uniform had brought them up and arranged it all as pleasantly as possible on the coffee table. It was now or never, I thought.
“Dr. Pollack,” I said, “I have evidence that you and your wife did not come in on the morning of May 3 as you claimed, but flew into New York three days earlier to take your daughter out to a birthday dinner.”
“I’ve already told you about that,” Rhonda said. “And I already told you why. My husband is a very private man. He cannot abide his name in the news. He doesn’t react at all well to crowds or publicity, a circumstance that you just saw for yourself.”
“Let me handle this, Rhonda,” Phillip told her, pouring the last of the mixture into his glass and holding out the pitcher for Rhonda to dispose of. Rhonda took it, and brought it over to the sink. Meanwhile, her husband took a sip of his refreshed martini. “Mea culpa, Detective,” he said. “I did not tell you to whole truth. We were already in town. We were there, as we try to be every year, to celebrate Sherry’s birthday. This time, however, Sherry was in a depressive funk.”
Come Out Tonight Page 16
