His eyes were stung by hot tears, and his throat burned with refluxed stomach acid, and the balefire in his jaw would surely consume the bone and collapse his face.
The darkness spun and tilted. He could not crawl farther, but could only clutch the carpet as though gravity might be repealed and he might be whirled away, weightless, into a void.
His heart hammered faster than he could count its blows, at least two hundred a minute.
Pain spread from his throat into his left arm, radiated across his shoulder and down his back.
A prince of the Internet, richer than most kings, he lay now as prostrate as any commoner abashed in the presence of royalty, at the mercy of his body, mere clay.
The black ocean swelled under him, and he had nothing to which he could hold, neither a surfboard nor the dorsal fin of a shark. The sea was infinite, and he was as insignificant as a tracery of foam on a single wave. A great mass of water shouldered up, and he slid down its back into a trough, and the trough became an abyss, the abyss a vortex that swallowed him.
FOUR
The alarm-clock feature on the TV had been set for seven in the morning. The volume remained low, and Ryan woke slowly to murmuring voices, to music scored for drama.
The glow from the screen did not fully relieve the darkness. As the value of light changed in a scene and as figures moved, phantoms throbbed and flickered through the bedroom.
Ryan lay on the floor, in the fetal position, facing the screen. William Holden, many years after Sunset Boulevard, was in an intense conversation with a lovely young woman.
In thirty-four years, Ryan had experienced only two hangovers, but he seemed to be suffering a third. Headache. Eyes crusted shut, vision blurry. Dry, sour mouth.
Initially he could not recall the events of the previous evening or remember what possessed him to go to sleep on the floor.
Curiously, the mystery of his circumstances intrigued him less than the events on the television: the older man, the younger woman, worried talk of war….
The once-sharp edges of his mind were worn, his thoughts a shapeless stream of quicksilver. Even when his vision cleared, he couldn’t follow the movie or grasp the character relationships.
Yet he felt compelled to watch, haunted by the feeling that he had awakened to this movie not by accident but by the design of Fate. Here to be deciphered was a warning about his future that he must understand if he were to save himself.
This extraordinary conviction grew until he was impelled to rise to his knees, to his feet. He moved closer to the large TV.
As the fine hairs prickled on the nape of his neck, his heart quickened. The thudding in his breast knocked into memory the much more furious pounding to which he had awakened in the night, and abruptly he recalled every detail of the terrifying seizure.
He turned away from the TV, switched on a lamp. He stared at his trembling hands, closed them into fists, opened them once more, half expecting some degree of paralysis, but finding none.
In his bathroom, black granite, gold onyx, and stainless steel were reflected in a wilderness of mirrors. An infinite line of Ryan Perrys faced him, all of them gray and haggard and grim with dread.
As never before, he was aware of the skull beneath the skin, each curve and plane and hollow of bone, the perpetual death’s-head grin concealed behind every expression that his face assumed.
Shaved, showered, and dressed, Ryan found his estate manager, Lee Ting, in the garage.
This large subterranean space provided eighteen parking stalls. The ceiling was ten feet high, to accommodate delivery trucks and—if he should ever want one—a motor home.
Golden ceramic tile, a kind used in automobile showrooms, paved the floor. Glossy white tile covered the walls. The brightwork on the Woodie and other classic vehicles sparkled in the beams of pin spots.
Ryan had always before thought the garage was beautiful, even elegant. Now the cold tile reminded him of a mausoleum.
In the corner workshop, Lee Ting was polishing a custom-made license-plate frame for one of the cars.
He was a small man but strong. He appeared to be cast from bronze not yet patinaed, and prominent veins swelled in his hands.
At fifty, his life was defined by parenthood denied, his hope of family thwarted. Kay Ting twice conceived, but a subsequent uterine infection left her sterile.
Their first child had been a daughter. At the age of two, she died of influenza. Their second, a son, was also gone.
The sight of certain young children elicited from them the most tender smiles, even as their eyes glistened with the memory of loss.
When the power buffer clicked off, Ryan said, “Lee, do you have a staff meeting this morning or appointments with anyone?”
Surprised, Lee turned. His face brightened, his chin lifted, and a cheerful expectation came into him, as though nothing pleased him more than the opportunity to be of good service.
Ryan suspected this was in fact the case. All the strivings and the particular satisfactions of raising a family, denied to Lee, were now expressed in his job.
Putting aside the license-plate frame, Lee said, “Good morning, Mr. Perry. I have nothing scheduled that Kay can’t cover for me. What do you need?”
“I was hoping you could drive me to a doctor’s appointment.”
Concern diminished the arc of Lee’s smile. “Is something wrong, sir?”
“Nothing much. I just feel off, a little nauseous. I’d prefer not to drive myself.”
Most men of Ryan’s wealth employed a chauffeur. He loved cars too much to delegate his driving.
Lee Ting clearly knew this need for a driver was proof of more than mild nausea. He at once snared a key from the key safe and went with Ryan to the Mercedes S605.
A tenderness in Lee’s manner and a wounded expression in his eyes suggested that he regarded his boss as more than an employer. He was, after all, just old enough to have been Ryan’s father.
The twelve-cylinder Mercedes seemed to float on a cushion of air, and little road noise reached them. Although the sedan rode like a dream, Ryan knew that it carried him toward a nightmare.
FIVE
Ryan’s internist had a concierge practice limited to three hundred patients. He guaranteed an appointment within one day of a request, but he saw Ryan only three hours after receiving his call.
From an examination room on the fourteenth floor, Ryan could see Newport Harbor, the Pacific Ocean, distant ships bound for unknown shores.
His doctor, Forest Stafford, had already examined him, and a med tech had administered an electrocardiogram. Then Ryan had gone down to a medical imaging company on the third floor, where they had conducted an echocardiogram.
At the fourteenth-floor window, he waited now for Dr. Stafford to return with an interpretation of the tests.
An armada of large white clouds sailed slowly north, but their shadows were iron-black upon the sea, pressing the surf flat.
The door opened behind Ryan. Feeling as weightless as a cloud, and half afraid that in an angled light he would cast no shadow, he turned away from the window.
Forest Stafford’s powerful square body was in contrast to his rectangular countenance, in which his features were elongated, as if affected by a face-specific gravity that had not distorted the rest of him. Because he was a sensitive man, the deforming force, at work for years, might have been the pain of his patients.
Leaning against the counter that contained the hand sink, the physician said, “I imagine you want me to cut to the chase.”
Ryan made no move to a chair, but stood with his back to the window and to the sea that he loved. “You know me, Forry.”
“It wasn’t a heart attack.”
“Nothing that simple,” Ryan guessed.
“Your heart is hypertrophic. Enlarged.”
Ryan at once argued his case, as if Forry were a judge who, properly persuaded, could declare him healthy. “But…I’ve always kept fit, eaten right.”
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��A vitamin B1> deficiency can sometimes be involved, but in your case I doubt this is related to diet or exercise.”
“Then what?”
“Could be a congenital condition only now expressing itself. Or excessive alcohol consumption, but that’s not you.”
The room had not suddenly gone cold, nor had the temperature plunged in the day beyond the window. Nevertheless, a set of chills rose at the back of Ryan’s neck and broke along the shoals of his spine.
The physician counted off possible causes: “Scarring of the endocardium, amyloidosis, poisoning, abnormal cell metabolism—”
“Poisoning? Who would want to poison me?”
“No one. It’s not poisoning. But to get an accurate diagnosis, I want you to have a myocardial biopsy.”
“That doesn’t sound like fun.”
“It’s uncomfortable but not painful. I’ve spoken with Samar Gupta, an excellent cardiologist. He can see you for a preliminary exam this afternoon—and perform the biopsy in the morning.”
“That doesn’t give me much time to think,” Ryan said.
“What is there to think about?”
“Life…death…I don’t know.”
“We can’t decide on treatment without a definitive diagnosis.”
Ryan hesitated. Then: “Is it treatable?”
“It may be,” said Forry.
“I wish you’d just said yes.”
“Believe me, Dotcom, I wish I could just say it.”
Before Forest Stafford was Ryan’s internist, they had met at a classic-car rally and had struck up a friendship. Jane Stafford, Forry’s wife, bonded to Samantha as if she were a daughter; and Dotcom had since been more widely used.
“Samantha,” Ryan whispered.
Only upon speaking her name did he realize that the preliminary diagnosis had pinned his thoughts entirely on the pivot point of this twist of fate, on just the sharp fact of his mortality.
Now his mind slipped loose of the pin. His thoughts raced.
The prospect of impending death had at first been an abstraction that inspired an icy anxiety. But when he thought of what he would lose with his life, when he considered the specific losses—Samantha, the sea, the blush of dawn, the purple twilight—anxiety quickened into dread.
Ryan said, “Don’t tell Sam.”
“Of course not.”
“Or even Jane. I know she wouldn’t mean to tell Sam. But Sam would sense something wrong, and get it out of her.”
Like wax retreating from a flame, the mournful lines of Forry Stafford’s face softened into sorrow. “When will you tell her?”
“After the biopsy. When I have all the facts.”
With a sigh, Forry said, “Some days I wish I’d gone into dentistry.”
“Tooth decay is seldom fatal.”
“Or even gingivitis.”
Forry sat down on the wheeled stool, where he usually perched to listen to a patient’s complaints and to make notes in his files.
Ryan settled into the only chair. After a while he said, “You made a decision on the ’40 Mercury convertible?”
“Yeah. Just now. I’m gonna buy it.”
“Edelbrock two-carb manifold? That right?”
“Yeah. You should hear it.”
“What’s it stand on?” Ryan asked.
“Nineteen-sixty Imperials. Fifteen-inch.”
“Chopped?”
“Four inches.”
“That must give it a cool windshield profile.”
“Very cool,” Forry confirmed.
“You gonna work on it?”
“I’ve got some ideas.”
“I think I’d like to have a ’32 deuce coupe,” Ryan said.
“Five-window?”
“Maybe a three-window highboy.”
“I’ll help you find it. We’ll scout some shows.”
“I’d like that.”
“Me too.”
They sat in silence for a moment.
The examination room had a white acoustic-tile ceiling, pale-blue walls, a gray vinyl-tile floor.
On one wall hung a print of a painting by Childe Hassam. Titled The White Dory, Gloucester, it was dated 1895.
On pale water, in a white boat sat a fair woman. She wore a long white skirt, a pleated and ruffled pink blouse, and a straw boater.
Delicate, desirable, she would have been a handsome wife in those days when marriages lasted a lifetime. Ryan was overcome with a strange yearning to have known her, to have heard her voice, to have tasted her kiss, but she was lost somewhere in time, as he might soon be, as well.
“Shit,” he said.
Forry said, “Ditto.”
SIX
Dr. Samar Gupta had a round brown face and eyes the color of molasses. His voice was lilting, his diction precise, his slender hands impeccably manicured.
After reviewing the echocardiogram and examining Ryan, Gupta explained how a myocardial biopsy was performed. He made use of a large poster of the cardiovascular system.
Confronted with a colorful depiction of the interior of the human heart, Ryan found his mind escaping to the painting of the woman in the white dory, in Forry Stafford’s examination room.
Dr. Gupta seemed unnaturally calm, every movement efficient, every gesture economical. His resting pulse was probably a measured fifty beats per minute. Ryan envied the physician’s serenity and his health.
“Please be at the hospital admissions desk at six o’clock tomorrow morning,” the cardiologist said. “Do not eat or drink anything after midnight.”
Ryan said, “I don’t like sedation, the loss of control.”
“You’ll be given a mild sedative to relax you, but you’ll remain awake to follow instructions during the procedure.”
“The risks…”
“Are as I explained. But none of my biopsies has ever involved…complications.”
Ryan was surprised to hear himself say, “I trust your skill, Dr. Gupta, but I’m still afraid.”
In business, Ryan had never expressed uncertainty, let alone fear. He allowed no one to see any weakness in him.
“From the day we’re born, Ryan, we should all be afraid, but not of dying.”
In the plush backseat of the Mercedes S608, on the way home, Ryan realized that he did not understand the cardiologist’s last comment.
From the day we’re born, Ryan, we should all be afraid, but not of dying.
In the office, in the moment, the words had seemed wise and appropriate. But Ryan’s fear and his desire to quell it had led him to hear that statement as a reassurance, when in fact it was not.
Now the physician’s words seemed mysterious, even cryptic, and disturbing.
Behind the wheel of the sedan, Lee Ting glanced repeatedly at the rearview mirror. Ryan pretended not to notice his houseman’s concern.
Lee could not know which of the many physicians Ryan had visited in Dr. Gupta’s building, and he remained too discreet to ask. Yet he was an acutely perceptive man who sensed his employer’s solemnity.
In the west, the phoenix palms and the rooftops were gilded with sunlight. The attenuated shadows of those trees and buildings, of lampposts and pedestrians, reached eastward, as if the entire coast yearned for nightfall.
On those rare occasions when Lee previously served as chauffeur, he had driven sedately, as if he were decades older than his years and part of some royal procession. This time, he exceeded speed limits with the rest of the traffic and crossed intersections on the yellow light.
He seemed to know that his employer needed the comfort of home, refuge.
SEVEN
En route from Dr. Gupta’s office, Ryan called Kay Ting and placed an order for dinner that would require her to go to his favorite restaurant to get takeout.
Later, using the elevator, the Tings brought a dining-service cart to the third-floor sitting room that was part of the master suite. They put up the leaves to expand the cart into a table and smoothed out the white tablecloth.
Presented for Ryan’s pleasure were three dishes of homemade ice cream—dark chocolate, black cherry, and limoncello—each nestled in a larger bowl of cracked ice. There were also servings of flourless chocolate cake, a lemon tart, a peanut-butter tart, strawberries in sour cream with a pot of brown sugar, a selection of exotic cookies, and bottles of root beer in an ice bucket.
Because Ryan allowed himself dessert only once or twice a week, the Tings were curious about this uncharacteristic indulgence.
He pretended to be celebrating the conclusion of a particularly rewarding business deal, but he knew they did not believe him. The arrayed sweets suggested the last meal of a condemned man who, though thirty-four, had never finished growing up.
Eating alone, sitting at the wheeled table, Ryan sampled a series of old movies on the big-screen plasma TV. He sought comedies, but none of them struck him as funny.
Calories no longer mattered, or cholesterol, and at first this indulgence without guilt was so novel that he enjoyed himself. Soon, however, the adolescent smorgasbord grew cloying, too rich.
To thumb his nose at Death, he ate more than he wanted. The root beer began to seem like syrup.
He wheeled the cart out of the master suite, left it in the hall, and used the intercom to tell Kay that he had finished.
Earlier, the Tings turned down the bed and plumped the pillows.
When Ryan put on pajamas and slipped between the sheets, insomnia tormented him. If fear of death had not kept him awake, the tides of sugar in his blood would have made him restless.
Barefoot, hoping to walk off his anxiety, he went roaming through the house.
Beyond the large windows lay the luminous panorama of Orange County’s many cities on the vast flats below. The ambient glow was sufficient to allow him to navigate the house without switching on a lamp.
Dean Koontz Page 3
