Second Sight

by George D. Shuman

  “Did you take your meds?” she whispered, looking up at him.

  “The one that counts.” He brushed the sweat from her forehead and tucked her hair behind her ear.

  Troy Weir should have had a long jump start on life. He was handsome, athletic, and certainly gifted, but Troy lacked something fundamental inside. He was emotionally void.

  When he finally came to ask his stepfather for a job at Case and Kimble, he was aware that his life was spinning out of control. That he needed to rein in his hostilities. He considered research monotonous, but it offered solitude and a way to anchor himself for at least part of the day. He had already seen three of his West Coast friends dead by age eighteen. His classmates at Franklin University in New York were all on Wall Street now, but corporations required far too much contact with cohorts and clients. He could never pull off so much sincerity in the light of day.

  His stepfather was skeptical but assigned him to a research and development facility near Reading, Pennsylvania. Then an opening appeared in Lancaster for a clerk at Case and Kimble’s PR darling, the Global Responsibility Lab, or GRL “girl” lab, confined to research of cures for the world’s hot-list diseases, such as AIDS, E. coli, and West Nile virus.

  Terry Hopping, in charge of the lab, was typical for a GRL group leader. Beautiful, photogenic, racially diverse (part Irish, part Cherokee Indian), pedigreed (cellular pathologist from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill School of Medicine), and quirky (she appeared to be as fascinated by sex as she was by homeostasis). In other words, she was window dressing for Case and Kimble’s much touted and purely self-serving philanthropic contribution to humanity around the world.

  Hopping’s team worked on public relation cases, donating time, equipment, and manpower wherever news cameras appeared. In reality they were underfunded and overworked, and Hopping had also been demoted from the mainstream C&K career ladder for numerous complaints of sexual harassment.

  She was all but ecstatic when Troy Weir ended up in her group. It was innocent enough at first, brushing against him in the confines of the small office, lewd intimations in conversation, displaying her underwear at any opportunity that presented itself—she found plenty of reasons to sit across from him or to bend over to give him a good view of her thong.

  She had another act, which included stripping down to her bra and panties to step into her yellow protective suit that she wore in the biocontainment chamber. This she did in full view of a glass vacuum-sealed door, and Troy gave her what he considered her humiliation, the proper attention she sought.

  Then came the day they were alone and a breach alarm sounded in the chamber. Troy ran into the lab to see what was wrong and noticed that the warning patch on the breast of her suit was flashing red. Hopping was holding a glass slide smeared with blood and there was a half-inch tear in the finger of her glove.

  She looked up as he ran to the observation window. Her eyes went wide when he punched the emergency bar locking the chamber, and though it emitted a piercing shriek to alert staff there was a breach, there was no one to hear it that day but him. Hopping dropped the slide and screamed in silent rage as she ran to the window, pressed her mask against the glass, teeth bared, lips demanding, then begging Troy to unlock the door. Her demands diminished to whimpers by the time the first blotches of black and red appeared on her face, and fifteen minutes later she slipped to the floor, where she died of convulsions.

  The lab was heavily criticized for allowing a clerk into the unit, even though he was the owner’s stepson. You couldn’t blame the death of a scientist on a clerk, and you couldn’t blame the clerk for understaffing the lab. It looked like what it was, a bad management decision. Even police were unsure how to proceed until Case himself got involved.

  In the end Troy was exonerated, an internal board fired an administrator, and sixteen single-spaced pages were added to the organization’s general operating procedures. And a bronze plaque bearing a likeness of Terry Hopping was placed in an obscure hallway near the GRL lab.

  Edward Case, however, was suddenly more interested in the young man who so coldly watched a scientist die rather than open the door and put himself others at risk. It took a special kind of person to do that, a man very much like himself at that age. Even the best trained in the business had a tendency to let their hearts and emotions interfere with their minds.

  The company’s board of directors would make noise about employing Troy again, but not where Ed Case needed him most. In Ed Case’s world there were places for a man like Troy.

  11

  “Remember a patient named T.J. Monahan? Thomas J. Monahan?” Sherry asked.

  Betsy nodded, sipping from her straw. She touched her lips with a napkin.

  “Absolutely,” she said. “I haven’t thought of him in years, but, yes, he came with the asylum.”

  They were just starting their second pitcher of Mississippi Muds, a concoction of ice cream, Kahlúa, and Southern Comfort. Sherry, enjoying the moment, was beginning to wonder if she hadn’t been a bore all these years. It wasn’t like her to deviate from the serious beers she favored toward candy-like drinks she’d always considered frivolous. The wonder of sight seemed to have brought about a sea change in Sherry’s approach to life.

  Sherry nodded. “Any family?”

  “None,” Betsy said. “Never had a visitor in my seventeen years.”

  “You said he came with the asylum?”

  “Nineteen fifty, as I recall. He’s probably in his late seventies now. He outlived anyone that was there when he was admitted.”

  Brigham shook his head. “He died.”

  Betsy turned abruptly. “Monahan’s dead?” she said softly. “He was like the saddest thing you ever saw. He was there in a way and yet not. We could move him around, stand him on his own two feet, but there was no one inside. He’d just stare at the walls, year after year; sometimes he’d move his lips, but never said an intelligible word. We brought him to every holiday celebration, gave him a birthday and baked him cakes; he was like our mascot.” She smiled. “We always kidded about how he was the best patient in the ward. We didn’t mean anything by it. We really loved him.”

  “Do you know how he got there?” Brigham asked.

  Betsy shook her head. “Security brought him in one day, we were told. He took a fall off the rocks on Mount Tamathy, up at the overlook where you guys went today. The road wasn’t there back then, and the guardrails, the fencing before you get to the rocks, were all open. There wasn’t much in the records, but he was with the army base that used to be up here, one of those high-security areas, secret Cold War stuff. I guess he didn’t have any family and since he was brain-dead, they just left him at the asylum. Nowadays there’s a VA hospital in Syracuse, but…” She shrugged and sipped her drink.

  “An army base?” Sherry repeated, thinking of the images she had seen in Monahan’s memories.

  “That base was the talk of the town when I was kid. When it finally closed the boys used to go up and root around the rubble they left behind. Some people came around now and then and wrote articles on it; I think it was Discovery or one of the science-fiction channels that did a documentary of it. They were supposed to have been doing some kind of top-secret research there, very sensitive stuff. Of course now, like everything else, it’s supposed to be haunted.”

  “When did the army abandon it?”

  “Early seventies. One day they just came in with trucks and hauled everything away. You remember when the CIA was in front of Congress over refusing to release old records? The old administration destroyed thousands of documents; it was”—she shook a finger—“it’s on the tip of my tongue….”

  “Richard Helms,” Brigham said. “He ordered that their secret research projects be destroyed.”

  “What about Monahan’s hospital records? Don’t they say what happened to him?” Sherry asked.

  Betsy topped off her drink and turned on her stool, knee pressed tightly against the side of Brigham�
��s thigh. Her eyes were a very dark, perhaps a Scandinavian, blue, he thought.

  “So how are you related to T.J.?” she asked.

  “We’re not,” Brigham said.

  Betsy withdrew her knee and looked at Brigham, then at Sherry.

  “I’m beginning to think you aren’t as interested in my pancakes and catfish as what goes on in that asylum. Are you two lawyers or something? You know, you could have just asked me some questions at the diner if that’s what you’re here for.”

  “Please don’t be offended. I’m really enjoying your company,” Brigham said with extraordinary sincerity. “No, we’re not lawyers and it’s certainly not what you’re thinking.”

  “It’s about me,” Sherry said. “And it’s kind of difficult to explain.”

  Brigham put up his hand. “Have you ever heard of a woman who can take the hand of a dead person and see their last memories before they died?”

  Betsy looked at him like he was crazy. She shook her head no and looked at her drink.

  “I have a story to tell you, then,” he said. “It’s a little long, but worth hearing, I assure you. Will you give me a few minutes?”

  Betsy nodded her head slowly, but uncertainly.

  Thirty minutes later her knee was back against Brigham’s thigh. She was on her fourth Mississippi Mud.

  “You know, I heard there was a statistic floating around about our hospital having the highest cancer rate for patients across the country.”

  “What about Monahan’s medical history when he came in?”

  “There wasn’t a single document in his file about his admission,” Betsy said. “The only thing we ever had was an authorization to continue care and send bills to the Veterans Administration in Washington, D.C. The staff tried to find family through the army for years, we called half the Monahans in the country just out of curiosity, but no one ever found a next of kin and the army refused to talk about him.”

  “Normally a vet would rate funeral arrangements,” Brigham said.

  She shook her head. “Whole body donor. It was marked in his jacket from day one. I’m really sorry to hear he’s gone.”

  “You said security brought him into the hospital, not the army?”

  Betsy nodded. “Jack McCullough was the asylum security chief back then. His widow, sweet lady, still lives here, just up the street. It was on a Thanksgiving, I remember, because she talked about how they waited for him all day. She said he got called out early in the morning for an inmate that was supposed to have escaped. When he finally got home he had blood all over his shirt and said they found one of the army boys that jumped from the rocks on Mount Tamathy. The story sticks with everyone so well, because Jack shot himself a few weeks later. December twenty-sixth. The state police did an investigation because no one that knew him believed he could do that to himself, but in the end, he was alone in his office and the door was locked.”

  “His office? You mean his office up at the asylum?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “And you know her well you said? The widow?”

  Betsy nodded. “Her name’s Corcoran now. Carla Corcoran. Her new husband owns a golf course off the Ashokan Reservoir.”

  “Do you think she’d talk with us?”

  Betsy shrugged. “She talks to everyone. She’s just a nice lady, like I said.”

  Betsy put her hand on Brigham’s arm. “Did you know there is a wine bar in Kingston that features port tastings?”

  Brigham studied the woman carefully.

  “You don’t say?” He smiled.

  12

  Dr. Canelli sat rigid in her leather chair, flipping through cards in an old metal Rolodex. She found the name Case and Kimble and dialed a number in Pennsylvania. The phone rang once and was answered with “Executive offices.”

  “I need to speak with Dr. Case’s assistant, please,” she said.

  “Just a moment,” the operator said, and a moment later she was transferred to a gentleman who took her message and put her on hold.

  The directive lying on the desk in front of her and regarding Thomas J. Monahan had been passed from one administrator to another since 1950. It was the only standing directive at the State Hospital and it had survived more than half a century of cultural and intellectual evolution. Simply put it required the bearer to notify the Case Foundation in the event patient 108953, one Thomas J. Monahan, received out of house inquiries, visitors, public mention, or if there were any significant changes to his health or if he were to expire.

  Dr. Canelli, the first administrator ever to have to act on the directive, was now doing it for the second time in as many weeks.

  She, like all her predecessors, had wondered what connection there could be between the hospital’s longest-tenured patient and the foundation of a pharmaceutical Goliath. Case’s name was all over early research at the hospital, but then all the renowned physicians of the day came there. Psychiatry was in vogue in the fifties. The public was obsessed with psychological analysis. One family in three was admitting a member to some kind of mental facility for extreme behaviors.

  But Case was known less for his research of psychiatric disorders than for amassing a fortune with nuclear medicine. While MRIs and CAT scans were relegated to identifying anatomical anomalies in the body, sophisticated nuclear diagnostic machines like SPECT could show the body’s very organs at work. And nothing makes money like more money. Case was able to fund research, monopolizing advances in aspirin-free pain medications, birth control, antidepressants, and erectile dysfunction elixirs.

  His critics had but one thing to say of him. It was rumored that the government, in their zeal to protect soldiers in a nuclear age, had knowingly supplied him with hundreds if not thousands of unwitting test subjects to experiment on. Who could predict the effects of radium dosages and interactions of experimental drugs when you were a decade ahead of the world in trials? It was an outrage, they charged, but it was never an outrage they could prove.

  Dr. Canelli was hardly stupid. Dr. Case might have made countless contributions in the field of mental health, but he would have had quite the toy chest of lab rats in the asylum of seven thousand people. How hard would it have been with an army base next door and, what’s more, an army base that had failed to publish a single printed word of its activities in a dozen years?

  “I’m connecting your call,” the voice said.

  “May I help you?”

  “Dr. Case?”

  “Troy Weir. I am the doctor’s representative to the Case Foundation.”

  “Of course, we spoke last week. Dr. Canelli from the state psychiatric hospital in New York.”

  “Yes, Dr. Canelli.”

  “Thomas Monahan. His name has come up again, I’m afraid.”

  “In what context, Doctor?”

  “He had visitors today. Not for him exactly, but two people wanted to know if he had family they could contact. One of them was Sherry Moore.”

  “Sherry Moore?” Weir repeated.

  “The psychic from Philadelphia. She…”

  “I know who she is. The other?”

  “An older gentleman. I didn’t get his name.”

  “What did you tell them?”

  “As I said, they already knew of Monahan’s death. Miss Moore mentioned a physician in Philadelphia, a neurosurgeon by the name of Salix. She claimed to represent him and said there were questions about his records. I told her that the hospital’s files were confidential. End of story.”

  “Thank you, Dr. Canelli.”

  “Do you wish me to contact Dr. Salix?”

  “No. Do nothing,” Weir said, perhaps too abruptly. “You have been troubled enough. We are most grateful.”

  Troy replaced the receiver, scanned his contacts directory, made himself a drink, and dialed a number at Nazareth Hospital in Philadelphia.

  It rang, clicked, transferred to another number and rang again.

  “General counsel,” a woman said unenthusiastically.

  “
Jean? It’s Troy Weir.”

  “Troy,” she said, surprised. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

  “Know a Dr. Salix?” he said, touching the ice in his glass with his tongue.

  “William Salix?”

  “He’s a neurosurgeon?”

  “We only have one,” the attorney said tiredly.

  “I need to know why he pulled a donor from the New York Psych Institute, a whole-body donor?”

  “Is this another IOU?” Her voice was full of sarcasm, husky like a heavy smoker’s.

  “You know what Case gives to Nazareth each year,” he said blandly.

  “I know—don’t ask, don’t tell?” she snorted. “I’ll see what I can find out.”

  “That’s my girl.”

  “So when are you taking me out on that date, Troy? You said you had tricks to show me.”

  “Oh, Jean.” He laughed. “I have tricks you wouldn’t believe.”

  13

  Sherry Moore arrived early for her appointment. She was wearing headphones as she often did in public to avoid conversation. Today she was listening to Bon Jovi’s “Lost Highway” as an alternative to competing televisions and staff members calling out names over tinny loudspeakers.

  “Beatrice Specter to billing station two.” A particularly gravelly voice repeated the name a moment later. “Dr. Mark Cairns, pick up line one…”

  The waiting room was a new experience to her as an adult. She had always met Dr. Salix in his Newbury office at the end of his day, always when other patients were gone. She had to admit, guiltily, that she resented having to be here. Shuffling, one of the many, like sheep through the chutes of a registration process, sitting for hours to be seen for five minutes, waiting for the billing department to assess and release you, the cure seeming worse than the disease.

  It was much like the childhood she recalled, the litany of second-rate—and sometimes lecherous—doctors who visited the orphanage. The children were defenseless, made to strip while standing in lines and then paraded past everyone from journeymen to janitors. Who knew who owned the hands that squeezed or pinched or spread this or that—certainly not a blind girl.