Second Sight

by George D. Shuman

  Once she got past the macabre sensation of holding hands with the dead, Sherry found fulfillment in what she was doing. Helping murder victims find their killer. Setting straight someone’s last moments in life. Locating missing persons. Helping find artifacts that might have been lost to antiquity. She had seen images that would lead investigators to crime scenes. She had a purpose in life—perhaps even a responsibility.

  But it wasn’t always easy.

  Sherry’s mind recorded the collage of human memories that assailed her when she was touching a hand, including countless seemingly mundane events in a person’s life, not important to anyone else, but special enough for them to remember in those precious few seconds before death. Residual memory, Sherry called it. Everything that happened before the power went off and the brain recorded its last thought. They had become her memories now as well, those remnants of a life: a particularly beautiful sunrise, a smile on an old woman’s face, a child’s teddy bear, a grandfather’s cane. Memories were both God’s gift and God’s punishment, it seemed. You didn’t want to live with them and you didn’t want to live without them.

  The gurneys were pushed together. Sherry’s hand was lifted and laid next to the cadaver. She found the fingers quickly, a small hand, delicate. There wasn’t anything to be done after that. Sometimes the response was immediate; sometimes she drifted into it like a dream. It had never taken more than a few seconds and even now she saw…the lights in a child’s bedroom, no, it was a ward, some kind of a hospital ward, and it had bright colors and murals painted on the walls.

  Parents were sitting with their children on the floor. Shelves and boxes and baskets in the corners were filled with plush toys and games and books and videos. Nurses wore pink and blue and yellow scrubs with a hodgepodge of prints that included stars and moons and nursery rhyme characters. There was an ice cream cart in the hall outside the door. There was a girl in the bed next to her and her head was shaved and she was playing a video game in her lap.

  She saw a nurse leaning to pick up a Popsicle stick next to her bed and she reached out to touch her, but her arm was too short, her fingers too weak to stretch. She opened her mouth but no sound came out. She felt as if she were trapped inside her body, capable of understanding but not of getting anyone’s attention.

  She wanted that girl in the bed next to her to turn and look at her, to see that something was wrong. She moved her eyes toward the ceiling, and then the wall and the window and to the bathroom door before going back to the girl.

  Right there, just a foot away, the red button on the call harness. She only had to mash it with her thumb and nurses would come running.

  She felt odd, as if someone had hold of her arms and legs and now they were pulling her inside of herself, folding her up like a piece of luggage, and with every minute that passed she was recessing deeper and deeper within, until the clown lamp began to dim and the girl in the bed next door faded to black.

  Sherry let the hand go and sighed.

  “You had an event?”

  Sherry nodded, a tear streaking the corner of one eye.

  She hated the labels people tossed around so casually over the years. Yes, she’d had an “event.” Is everybody happy with that? Just another dead girl, yeah. Just another event.

  “Did you see anything different?” Salix asked her. “Vision, quality of vision, anything we haven’t talked about before?”

  Sherry shook her head. “What about you?” she retorted.

  Salix grunted loudly and moved to Sherry’s shoulder. “You know I won’t look at the EEGs for a few more days, Sherry. I want to compare your brain’s activity against some of your earliest base examples. This is really important.”

  Salix had been working with Sherry for years. He knew not to treat her like a patient, but then again he didn’t know what else to do but study her tests.

  “We’re looking for velocity changes, Sherry. Changes in the speed at which your cells release neurotransmitters. Perhaps even chemical changes in the hippocampus; I can’t determine much until I have it all in front of me. We’ll know more later.”

  “What if the results are different from before?”

  He laughed softly. “I can’t really say it will tell us anything new,” he said. “You know that, but be patient.” He patted her hand. “Let me do my job and be patient. We’ll do one more cadaver today and talk about where to go from here.”

  She nodded grimly. It was all just a crapshoot, she knew. They didn’t know what they were looking for, and even if they found something, they wouldn’t know what to do about it. And she couldn’t blame them. She was no different from the twelve thousand epileptics in Philadelphia who, for reasons beyond the ken of science, had electrical storms in their brains. It wasn’t a matter of matching up the color-coded wires and then everything was all right again. No one had an owner’s manual for the brain.

  A few minutes later, a second gurney was wheeled into the room. She heard the wheels pivot into position and then it was pushed alongside hers. There was a moment of activity as the nurses and assistants reset something on the equipment wired to Sherry’s brain. Then someone pulled back the sheet over the cadaver and she got a whiff of decay.

  She thought about that machine in New Mexico just then. How stupid those people had been to steal a radiological machine and start prying apart interior canisters. Stupid or just woefully ignorant. She could imagine that poor child, now in the morgue, eating bread from a table dusted with radioactive powder. Breathing it into her lungs as she lay in her filthy bed. She’d heard they found the mother and father inside the trailer, both dead in the living room. The son was found in the desert, miles away, behind the wheel of his pickup truck. There was an X burnt into the skin of his forearm.

  And then there were two Indians who had been at the table. They’d carried a capful of the blue powder back to the reservation and showed it to the children. Twelve more—some in the public school—came down with the flu in a week. Everyone who touched the men’s clothing was infected.

  In the end the incident claimed fourteen lives. Twenty-eight others survived with undetermined prognoses.

  Salix took her hand and quickly bridged it to the next gurney, placed it gently across the cadaver’s hand.

  It was a man’s hand, the skin was slack—did the room temperature suddenly rise? He was an older man, she thought, seventies, perhaps eighties. The fingers were long but the hand itself was narrow, infirm as if the muscles had atrophied. Whoever he was, his hands had not been active for some time.

  She closed her own hand around it and then her eyelids, aware of the wire harnesses pressing against her shoulder….

  She was in a room with white walls, a projector behind a hole in a wall was showing a grainy video of a child running naked between two thatch-covered huts; three dark-skinned women wearing cone straw hats were sitting nearby under the shade of a palm tree. One of them was stirring something in a bowl. Another’s hands appeared to be flailing in animated conversation.

  Suddenly the child stopped and pointed at the sky. A moment later there was a blinding white light. The child stood in perfect silence, as if the world had suddenly come to a halt. The women and the child turned black against the white background, as if you were looking at a negative of the image. Then a hurricane-like wind obliterated everything with sand and debris. When the wind was gone there was no village, no child, no women, no tree, nothing but flames that licked the bare earth.

  He was sitting at the end of a long wooden table. There was a gun in front of him within reach. He looked at the door and then at the dusty light coming from the projector through the hole. He turned and saw a dirt road on the wall. He was looking over the hood of an open-top jeep. There was a woman on the road in front of him, young, she was wearing a khaki-green uniform with Red Cross patches on the sleeves. Her shoes were missing. Her legs were spread wide and staked open, her arms held out from her sides as if on a cross. A hand grenade was pinched between her teeth, a
string tied to the handle and the handle to the neck of a water buffalo standing over her. The jeep stopped, the buffalo stepped away, and she could see hands waving in front of the lens, gesturing for the animal to stay still. The buffalo shook its big head and snorted, went down on its front knees as if to pray, and then sprang sideways, leaping into a gallop. The string came taut and a red mist replaced the medical corps woman’s face.

  A bead of perspiration ran down Sherry’s cheek; she could feel sweat forming on her scalp, itching under the hair. God, it’s warm.

  There was a metal box at the far end of the table, slits for air vents on top and a round white gauge at left front. There was black mesh cloth covering two cones facing him. They appeared at times to be vibrating. He turned his head to look at the door. “Can’t…on, can’t…on.” Sherry started to say it out loud, “Can’t…on, can’t…on…” Someone was looking at him through a glass observation window in the door, a man with a white hat, and there was smoke rising around his face, distorting his features. He was smoking a pipe.

  “Help me,” he called to the man behind the door.

  Sherry’s lips continued to move; can’t…on, can’t…on, can’t…on…

  He looked down at the gun in front of him. His hand moved toward it as his eyes darted back to the white dial. “Can’t…on, can’t…on…”

  He saw a man in a fishing boat with an open cabin. There were rectangular wire cages in the stern tied to dozens of battered cork buoys. He saw the man kneel and reach into the hold and come up with a rifle and start shooting at him.

  There was a grinning soldier, American, sitting at a crude wooden table in a room. There were enemy soldiers all around him. A rifle pointed at his head. There was a gun on the table in front of him, just like the gun on the table in this room. He picked it up and put it to his head and pulled the trigger and his head jerked sideways and he fell to the floor and the soldiers were smiling at the camera and laughing.

  Five, ten, fifteen, twenty, twenty-five, thirty, twenty-five, twenty, fifteen, ten…

  There was a dirigible floating just above his head—it was massive—approaching a tall steel tower. There was lightning and the dirigible caught fire and exploded in a ball of flame. People were falling from everywhere, charred black people, and the people on the ground were catching on fire as the debris fell.

  He looked away from the wall and tried not to watch, but voices kept telling him not to turn away, voices not from the cone-shaped objects or the hole in the door but from in his head, his own head, and they would not let him look away.

  There was a young girl. She was wearing a sailor’s cap and red lipstick. She was wearing a white shirt tied above her stomach and red pedal pushers. She was smiling at him and waving and a friend, another brunette, ran up next to her and was pushing an elbow in her side.

  He forced his eyes down. Something was burning his skin on the arm of the chair. The gun on the table had a cylinder and he could see the ends of the shiny brass cartridges in the chambers. It was a six-shot revolver, double action, it had no safety, required no effort but to point the barrel and pull the trigger.

  Thirty, twenty-five, twenty, fifteen, ten…there were wet spots on the table next to the revolver, beads of perspiration that had fallen from his cheeks. He didn’t want to watch the girls on the wall, he didn’t want to know what the shadows coming up behind them were.

  There were marks on the table by the gun, grooves cut into the wood, the scars from someone’s thumbnail that had been carved into the wood. He put his thumbnail in one and rocked it back and forth. His fingers were only inches from the revolver, it was shiny and he wanted to pick it up, pick it up and end it all…ten, five, zero, thirty, twenty-five, can’t…on, can’t…on.

  It was dawn and he was awakening from sleep. He was covered with mud and lying on his side on the ground. There was an open-bed truck with the rear end facing him. It was full of corpses and next to the rear tire soldier helmets had been stacked. Next to the helmets were web belts and canteens and gas masks. A man wearing rank and chaplain corps insignia was putting his hands on each of the bodies. He rolled to look away, then he looked down, pulling a green leather-bound journal closer to his body.

  Can’t…on, can’t…on, can’t…on, can’t…on, can’t…

  “Sherry?” Dr. Salix shook her shoulders roughly. “Sherry!”

  Her eyes fluttered, but remained shut. Sherry could hear words, but they were far, far away. Suddenly she saw something pink, blue orbs floating in space, dark caverns that oddly reminded her of a nose and she felt as if she were falling through a soft warm light and the light would protect her. She was aware of the old man’s hand. She could still feel the energy coursing between them. It wasn’t over.

  There is a riddle, she thinks, something she must solve. “Can’t…on, can’t…on,” she repeated, thinking it would be dangerous to say anything else, to say the wrong thing.

  “Sherry, it’s Dr. Salix.”

  “Monahan,” she said suddenly. “Thomas J., private first class, serial number 7613779…”

  “Sherry! Sherry Moore, I want you to focus on my voice. I want you to concentrate on the date. Tell me what day it is?”

  “Can’t…on, can’t…on…”

  “Sherry,” he said sternly. “Tell me what day it is. Think about the day.”

  “Thanksgiving.” She began to falter. “Can’t…on, can’t…on…”

  “Sherry, you’re in a hospital. You are in Philadelphia. Do you remember Philadelphia? That I’m Dr. Salix?”

  She shook her head no, distrustful.

  “Sherry!” he said, turning and pointing toward the ceiling. “Somebody, give me some light!” he yelled and one of the technicians turned on the overhead surgical lights.

  He thumbed open one of Sherry’s eyelids and she let out a bloodcurdling scream.

  6

  Garland Brigham sat in his favorite rocking chair in front of Sherry’s gas fireplace. His work boots lay by the door with his old U.S. Navy peacoat. He had propped his wool socks on the hearth to warm. Sherry reposed on a couch.

  He sipped coffee and watched her reaction to the front page of the newspaper he’d brought. He had been working in his yard most of the morning, organizing the woodpile and raking last winter’s leaves from beneath the rhododendrons.

  “The fire feels good,” she said, turning toward Brigham. She tried to dry her cheeks with the fingers of both hands.

  It was June, but the unseasonably cold nights held a chill within the heavy stone walls of Sherry’s house on the Delaware.

  He stood and leaned toward the coffee table, pushing the tissue box a few inches closer. She pulled one out and dabbed her face.

  “Hurt?”

  “Still tearing a lot. The light hurts.”

  “So don’t overdo it, Sherry. Put your glasses back on.”

  She made a face and did, feeling remotely silly. The glasses were as big as ski goggles and wrapped around the sides of her face.

  “Better?”

  She nodded.

  Sherry turned to face him. The room was blurred and smoky gray. She knew now that the small mark on the breast pocket of Brigham’s plaid shirt was a polo pony. He had also explained the anchor carved on the buttons of his peacoat and the tiny scar that split one of his eyebrows. She couldn’t see things clearly for any length of time, but Dr. Salix warned that her eyes were still weak and would take time to gain strength.

  She closed her eyes and waited for the headache to recede. Then she squinted to watch the flames, more shadow than light as they danced beyond the lenses, never the same way twice, and she found them mesmerizing. How amazing, she thought, to put an image to the sounds and sensations around her.

  “I can go outside.” She studied Brigham for his reaction.

  He nodded. “I know.”

  “Will you show me your house soon?”

  Brigham shrugged. “Sure. When are you going to answer Brian Metcalf’s calls?”

 
; “You have photo albums, wedding pictures. I want to see what you looked like when you were young.”

  He made a face. She kept steering away from the subject.

  “Mr. Brigham,” she said sternly. “Let me worry about Brian and you show me the photographs.”

  “If you insist.” He yawned and reached to test the toes of his socks and found them dry. “But not today. Maybe this weekend.”

  “You don’t seem very happy about it.”

  “I’m never happy when you strong-arm me. What did you think of your picture in the paper?”

  Sherry reached for the coffee table and picked up the Inquirer, tossing it irritably next to the tissues.

  “It doesn’t look like me.”

  “Pictures never do. Get used to it.”

  Sherry scratched a fingernail across the fabric of the sofa, watching the lighter image of her hand as it moved beneath the dark glasses on her face. “I’m sorry, Mr. Brigham, but I have to find out who he was. I want to meet his family.”

  “They don’t give out that kind of information, Sherry.”

  “They certainly could. I don’t want his Social Security number, for crying out loud. I want to call his wife, his children, anyone.”

  “You know what you saw on that table wasn’t all that pleasant. You said it yourself. Something was very wrong about the man before he died.”

  “And yet it changed me, Mr. Brigham. I let go of his hand and I opened my eyes to see for the first time in thirty-two years! What in the heck do you do with that? How do you move on without acknowledging the miracle?”

  “The man was preoccupied with death and still thinking about it fifty years after the fact. That’s a little nuts, Sherry.”

  She shook her head firmly. “We don’t know that. He was in a vegetative state. Maybe it’s all he ever remembered about anything.”

  “All right, we’ll ask Dr. Salix on Tuesday—will that satisfy you?”

  “His nurse called to change the appointment. It’s Monday at four, but don’t change your plans. I want to go there myself.”