Koontz, Dean R. - Strangers

by Strangers(Lit)

  as well as the solemn assurance that Brendan would be assigned as much

  workand as much unpleasant work-as any orderly. Therefore, during his

  first day on the job, he emptied bedpans, changed urine-soaked bed

  linens, assisted a therapist with passive exercises for bed-ridden

  patients, spoon-fed an eight-year-old boy who was partially paralyzed,

  pushed wheelchairs, encouraged despondent patients, cleaned up the vomit

  of two young cancer victims nauseous from chemotherapy. No one pampered

  him, and no one called him "Father." The nurses, doctors, orderlies,

  candy-stripers, and patients called him Brendan, and he felt

  uncomfortable, like an impostor engaged in a masquerade.

  That first day, overcome with pity and grief for St. Joseph's children,

  he twice slipped away to the staff men's room and locked himself in a

  stall, where he sat and wept. The twisted legs and swollen joints of

  those who suffered from rheumatoid arthritis, that mangler of the

  innocent young, was a sight almost too terrible to be borne. The wasted

  flesh of the muscular dystrophy victims, the suppurating wounds of the

  burn victims, the battered bodies of those whose parents had abused

  them: He wept for all of them.

  He could not imagine why Father Wycazik thought this duty would help him

  regain his lost faith. If anything, the existence of so many

  pain-racked children only reinforced his doubt. If the merciful God of

  Catholicism really existed, if there was a Jesus, why would He allow the

  innocent to endure such atrocities? Of course, Brendan knew all the

  standard theological arguments on that point. Mankind had brought all

  forms of evil upon itself by choice, the Church said, by turning away

  from the grace of God. But theological arguments were inadequate when

  he came face to face with these smallest victims of fate.

  By the second day, the staff was still calling him Brendan, but the

  children were calling him Pudge, a long-unused nickname which he

  divulged to them in the course of telling a funny story. They liked his

  stories, jokes, rhymes, and silly puns, and he found he could nearly

  always get a laugh or at least a smile out of them. That day, he went

  to the men's room and wept only once.

  By the third day, both the children and staff called him Pudge. If he

  had another metier besides the priesthood, he had found it at St.

  Joseph's. In addition to performing the usual tasks expected of an

  orderly, he entertained the patients with comic patter, teased them,

  drew them out. Wherever he went, he was greeted with cries of "Pudge!"

  that were a better reward than money. And he did not cry until he was

  back in the hotel room that he had taken for the duration of Father

  Wycazik's unconventional therapy.

  By Wednesday afternoon, the seventh day, he knew why Father Wycazik sent

  him to St. Joseph's. Understanding came while he was brushing the hair

  of a ten-year-old girl who'd been crippled by a rare bone disease.

  Her name was Emmeline, and she was rightfully proud of her hair. It was

  thick, glossy, raven-black, and its healthy luster seemed to be a

  defiant response to the sickness that had wasted her body. She liked to

  brush her hair a hundred strokes every day, but often her knuckles and

  wrist-joints were so inflamed that she could-not hold the brush.

  On Wednesday, Brendan put her in a wheelchair and took her to the X ray

  department, where they were monitoring a new drug's effects on her bone

  marrow, and when he brought her back to her room an hour later, he

  brushed her hair for her. Emmeline sat in the wheelchair, looking out a

  window, while Brendan pulled the soft bristles through her silken

  tresses, and she became enchanted with the winterscape beyond the glass.

  With a gnarled hand more suited to the body of an eightyyear-old woman,

  she pointed down to the roof of another, lower wing of the hospital.

  "See that patch of snow, Pudge?"

  Rising heat within the building had caused most of the snow to loosen

  and slide off the pitched roof. But a large patch remained, outlined by

  dark slate shingles. "It looks like a ship," Emmy said. "The shape.

  You see? A beautiful old ship with three white sails, gliding across a

  slate-colored sea."

  For a while Brendan could not see what she saw. But she continued to

  describe the imaginary vessel ' and the fourth time that he looked up

  from her hair, he suddenly was able to see that the patch of snow did,

  indeed, bear a remarkable and delightful resemblance to a sailing ship.

  To Brendan, the long icicles that hung in front of Emmy's window were

  transparent bars, the hospital a prison from which she might never be

  released. But to Emmy, those frozen stalactites were wondrous Christmas

  decorations that, she said, put her in the holiday mood.

  "God likes winter as much as He likes spring," Emmy said. "The gift of

  the seasons is one of His ways of keeping us from getting bored with the

  world. That's what Sister Katherine told us, and right away I could see

  it must be true. When the sun hits those icicles just right, they cast

  rainbows across my bed. Ever-so-pretty rainbows, Pudge. The ice and

  snow are like . . . like jewels . . . and ermine cloaks that God

  uses to dress up the world in winter to make us ooh and ah. That's why

  He never makes two snowflakes alike: it's a way of reminding us that the

  world He made for us is a wonderful, wonderful world."

  As if on cue, snowflakes spiraled down from the gray December sky.

  In spite of her nearly useless legs and twisted hands, in spite of the

  pain she had endured, Emmy believed in God's goodness, and in the

  inspiring rightness of the world that He had created.

  Strong faith was, in fact, a trait of nearly all the children in St.

  Joseph's Hospital. They remained convinced that a caring Father watched

  over them from His kingdom in the sky, and they were encouraged.

  In his mind he could hear Father Wycazik saying: If these innocents can

  suffer so much and not lose their faith, what sorry excuse do you have,

  Brendan? Perhaps, in their very innocence and naivetd, they know

  something that you have forgotten while chasing your sophisticated

  education in Rome. Perhaps there is something to be learned from this,

  Brendan. Do you think so? Just maybe? Something to be learned?

  But the lesson was not powerful enough to restore Brendan's faith. He

  continued to be deeply moved, not by the possibility that a caring and

  compassionate God might actually exist, but by the children's amazing

  courage in the face of such adversity.

  He gave Emmy's hair a hundred strokes, then ten more, which pleased her,

  and then he lifted her from the wheelchair and put her into bed. As he

  pulled the covers over her pathetic bent-stick legs, he felt a surge of

  that same rage that had filled him during Mass at St. Bette's two

  Sundays ago, and if a sacred chalice had been close at hand, he would

  not have hesitated to hurl it at the wall once more.

  Emmy gasped, and Brendan had the odd notion that she had read his

  blasphemous thoughts. But she said, "Oh, Pudge, did you hurt yourself?"


  He blinked at her. "What do you mean?"

  "Did you burn yourself? Your hands. When'd you hurt your hands?"

  Bewildered by her question, he looked down at the backs of his hands,

  turned them over, and was surprised by the marks on his palms. In the

  center of each palm was a red ring of inflamed and swollen flesh. Each

  ring was two inches in diameter and sharply defined along all its edges.

  The circular band of irritated tissue which formed the ring was no more

  than half an inch wide, inscribing a perfect circle; the skin around and

  within the circle was quite normal. It almost looked as if the marks

  had been painted on his hands, but when he touched one of the rings with

  a fingertip, he could feel the bump it made in his palm.

  "That's strange," he said.

  Dr. Stan Heeton was the resident physician on duty in St. Joseph's

  emergency room. Standing at the examining table on which Brendan sat,

  peering with interest at the odd rings on Brendan's hands, he said, "Do

  they hurt?"

  "No. Not at all."

  "Itching? A burning sensation?"

  "No. Neither."

  "Do they at least tingle? No? You've never had these before?"

  "Never.

  "Do you have any allergies that you're aware of? No?

  Hmmmm. At first glance, it looks like a mild burn, but you'd have

  remembered leaning against something hot enough to cause this. There'd

  be pain. So we can rule that out. Same for acid contact. Did you say

  you'd taken a little girl to radiology?"

  "Yes, but I didn't stay in the room while the X rays were taken."

  "Doesn't really look like a radiation burn. Maybe dermatomycosis, a

  fungal infection, perhaps in the ringworm family, though the symptoms

  aren't sufficiently indicative of ringworm. No scaling, no itching. And

  the ring is much too clearly defined, not like the inflammation patterns

  you get with a Microsporum or Trichophyton infection."

  "So what does all this boil down to?"

  Heeton hesitated, then said, "I don't think it's anything serious. The

  best guess is a rash related to an unidentified allergy. If the problem

  persists, you'll have to take the standard patch tests and find the

  source of your problem." He let go of Brendan's hands, went to a chair

  at a corner desk, and began to fill out a prescription form.

  Puzzled, Brendan stared at his hands a moment longer, then folded them

  in his lap.

  At the corner desk, still writing, Heeton said, "I'll start with the

  simplest treatment, a cortisone lotion. If the rash doesn't disappear

  in a couple of days, come see me again."

  He returned to the examining table, holding out the prescription form.

  Brendan took the paper from him. "Listen, is there any chance I might

  pass on an infection to the kids or anything like that?"

  "Oh, no. If I thought there was the slightest chance, I'd have told

  you," Heeton said. "Now, let me have one last look."

  Brendan turned his hands palms-up for examination.

  "What the devil?" Dr. Heeton said, surprised.

  The rings were gone.

  That night, in his room at the Holiday Inn, Brendan again endured the

  by-now familiar nightmare about which he had spoken with Father Wycazik.

  It had disturbed his sleep twice before in the past week.

  He dreamed he was lying in a strange place, with his arms and legs

  restrained by straps or braces. From out of a haze, a pair of hands

  reached for him. Hands encased in shiny black gloves.

  He woke in knots of sweat-soaked sheets, sat up in bed, and leaned back

  against the headboard, letting the dream evaporate as sweat dried on his

  forehead. In the dark he brought his hands to his face to blot it-and

  went rigid when his palms touched his cheeks. He switched on the lamp.

  The swollen, inflamed rings had returned to his palms. But as he

  watched, they faded.

  It was Thursday, December 12.

  9.

  Laguna Beach, California

  Dom Corvaisis thought he had slept Wednesday night straight through in

  peace. He woke in bed, in precisely the same position in which he had

  gone to sleep, as if he had not moved an inch during the night.

  But when he went to work at his Displaywriter, he was dismayed to find

  proof of his somnambulistic wandering on the current work diskette. As

  on a few other occasions, he apparently had gone to the Displaywriter in

  his night trance and had repeatedly typed two words. Previously, he had

  typed, "I'm scared," but this time there were two different words:

  The moon. The moon. The moon. The moon.

  The moon. The moon. The moon. The moon.

  There were hundreds of repetitions of those sev&n letters, and he was at

  once reminded that he had heard himself murmuring the same words in a

  state of drowsy disorientation, just as he had fallen asleep last

  Sunday. Dominick stared at the screen for a long time, chilled, but he

  had no idea what special meaning "the moon" held for him, if any.

  The Valium and Dalmane therapy was working well. Until now, there had

  been no new episodes of sleepwalking and no dreams since last weekend,

  when he'd had that nasty nightmare about being forced face-down into a

  sink. He had seen Dr. Cobletz again, and the physician had been

  pleased by his swift progress.

  Coblei-z had said, "I'm going to extend your prescriptions, but be sure

  not to take the Valium more than once-or at most, twice-a day."

  "I never do," Dom had lied.

  "And only one Dalmane a night. I don't want you becoming

  drug-dependent. I'm sure we'll beat this thing by the first of the

  year."

  Dom believed Cobletz was correct, which was why he did not want to worry

  the doctor by confessing that there were days when he only made it

  through with the aid of Valium and nights when he took two or even three

  Dalmane tablets, washing some of them down with beer or Scotch. But in

  a couple of weeks he could stop taking them without fear that the

  somnambulism would get a new grip on him. The treatment was working.

  That was the important thing. The treatment was, thank God, working.

  Until now.

  The moon.

  Frustrated and angry, he deleted the words from the diskette, a hundred

  lines of them, four repetitions to the line.

  He stared at the screen a long time, growing increasingly nervous.

  Finally he took a Valium.

  That morning Dom got no work done, and at eleven-thirty he and Parker

  Faine picked up Denny Ulmes and Nyugen Kao Tran, the two boys assigned

  to them by the Orange County chapter of Big Brothers of America. They

  had planned a lazy afternoon at the beach, dinner at Hamburger Hamlet,

  and a movie, and Dominick had been looking forward to the outing.

  He had become involved in the Big Brothers program years earlier in

  Portland, Oregon. It had been his only community involvement, the only

  thing that had been able to bring him out of his rabbit hole.

  He had spent his own childhood in a series of foster homes, lonely and

  increasingly withdrawn. Some day, when he finally got married, he hoped

  to adopt kids. In the meantime, when he spent time with these kids, he


  was not only helping them but was also comforting the lonely child

  within himself.

  Nyugen Kao Tran preferred to be called "Duke," in imitation of John

  Wayne, whose movies he loved. Duke was thirteen, the youngest son of

  boat people who had fled the horrors of "peacetime" Vietnam. He was

  bright, quick-witted, as startlingly agile as he was thin. His

  father-after surviving a brutal war, a concentration camp, and two weeks

  in a flimsy boat on the open sea-had been killed three years ago in a

  holdup while working at his second job as a nightshift clerk at a

  Seven-Eleven store in sunny southern California.

  Denny Ulmes, the twelve-year-old who was Parker's little brother, lost

  his father to cancer. He was more reticent than Duke, but the two got

  along famously, so Dom and Parker frequently combined their outings.

  Parker became a Big Brother at Dom's insistence, with curmudgeonly

  reluctance. "Me? Me? I'm not father material-or surrogate father

  material," Parker had said. "Never was and never will be. I drink too

  much, womanize too much. It'd be downright criminal for any kid to ttirn

  to me for advice.

  I'm a procrastinator, a dreamer, and a self-centered egomaniac. And I

  like me that way! What in God's name would I have to offer a kid? I

  don't even like dogs. Kids like dogs, but I hate 'em. Damn dirty

  flea-bitten things. Me, a Big Brother? Friend, you have lost your

  marbles for sure."