by Ray Garton
Adam shook his head. “That’s doctors, Brainman. Doctors have to report gunshot wounds to the police.” Adam merged into the traffic on the Hollywood Freeway, said, “ICU might be a problem. When my grandma had a stroke, they only let in family members, except kids. To get in, you talked to a nurse on a telephone, told her who you were, who you wanted to see, and she’d buzz you in. The double doors were always locked.”
“They do that in all hospitals?” Carter said. “Maybe not at this hospital.”
“If they do, we need to be ready for it.”
Carter looked at Adam in horror, pressing himself back against the door. “We?”
“Yes. We. Us. You and me.”
Carter’s mouth opened into a large O and he shook his head rapidly. “Oh, no-ho-ho way! I’m not going in there with you. I mean, I’ll help with, like, the creative end, I’ll be an idea man, I’ll give you moral support, immoral support, whatever. But I am not going into that hospital.”
“I need you, Carter.” Carter almost spoke again, but Adam held up a hand. “Just listen for a second, if they keep those doors locked, I’ll need you to call the nurse on the phone to get me in.”
Carter stared at him with a blank expression for a moment. “You can’t use a phone?”
“You know me, Carter! I’m no good at that kind of thing. I can’t lie, I can’t fake anything. I get all nervous and my voice—”
“You end up sounding like a twelve year old boy whose voice is changing, yeah, I’ve seen your act.”
“So I need you to do the phone for me. If it’s there.”
Carter looked out the side window for a while. Chewed on a fingernail. “Okay, so if the phone is there, I make the call, and that’s it, right? After that, I can just leave.”
“Leave? Couldn’t you at least...wait for me?”
“Hey. Dr. Kevorkian. I don’t think you’re understanding me. I want nothing to do with this. In fact, once I get out of this Japanese death box of yours, I may not get back in. I may take a bus home. Just to distance myself from you. You hear that? I would rather ride a city bus than be connected to this, wrap your brain around that.”
Adam eased the car down an off-ramp to the surface streets. “You’re the one who needs to do some brain-wrapping, Carter. You are connected to this. Monty could identify both of us!”
“How? I didn’t give him my last name.”
Adam’s laughter was brittle, dark. “Yeah, that’s the funny part. I didn’t tell him mine, either.”
Carter turned slowly to the backseat.
Indifferent, Rain lit a second cigarette, took her time on the first puff, and said, “Yeah, I told him who you are, who your daddies are. He was pretty fuckin’ impressed. ’Specially with you, Big Brother. Monty’s a big fan of Daddy’s movies.”
“I’m overwhelmed by a great lack of surprise,” Adam said, looking in the rearview. Behind him. Rain stared at the ceiling as she smoked. “I bet you like them, too, don’t you, Rain?”
“Fuck, yeah. Bomber was the shit. I liked Explosion, too.”
Adam nodded. “Yeah, no surprise there, either. What do I keep telling you, Carter? We need a really good plague, like in Egypt in the Bible. But this one would only kill people who like my dad’s movies.”
“Fuck you, Mr. Douglas!” Rain shouted. “You’re such a fuckin’ snob. All you movie people are alike. You all think you’re so fuckin’ important. Everybody in this cocksuckin’ town’s an executive or an artist. Even my fuckin’ mother. Makeup artist, she says. Ha!” She took a hit off the cigarette, blew smoke in an explosion of breath.
Adam said, “That’s not what I mea—”
“Even actors are fuckin’ artists,” she went on, emphatically pounding the seat with a fist. “Stupidest motherfuckin’ thing I ever heard. Memorize some lines, get in front of a camera, pretend to be somebody else for a while, say ‘fuck’ a few times, maybe show your ass, and you’re an artist! Doesn’t sound like art to me. You’re all a buncha fuckin’ overpaid snobs. You don’t know dick about real life. Or anything real. All you know is the fuckin’ movies, the center of your universe. But movies aren’t real. So what do all you fuckin’ artists have to feel so fuckin’ important about, huh?”
“Hey, I’m no artist,” Carter said quickly as Adam said, “Rain, that’s not what I was talking about. I meant—”
She leaned between them. “You ever been abandoned in a big city you didn’t know? When you were a kid, I mean?”
Adam and Carter shook their heads.
“It’s about midnight,” she went on, nearly whispering. “You’re all alone, it’s fuckin’ rainin’ hard as bullets. And you know Mom’s not comin’ back, not tonight. You’re all alone in a big strange city, and you don’t know a single person.” Her head turned right to left as she looked at them both. “How fuckin’ important you think movies would be then, huh?”
When they did not reply, Rain sat back slowly, took a final puff and stabbed the cigarette into the ashtray in the back of Carter’s seat.
For a moment, Adam’s mind left the unbearable problem weighing down on him. He was impressed by what Rain had said, and to his surprise, felt guilty for making her feel the need to say it. He doubted she would ever believe that he felt the same way.
Carter asked, “Did, uh...did that happen to you?”
“When I was ten,” she said.
Adam had to remind himself that Rain was still the Antichrist because, for a moment, he felt a dull ache of sympathy in his chest for her. The rearview showed her staring out the side window, smoking her cigarette.
Was it possible Gwen had done such a thing? Abandoned her little girl in a big city in the middle of the night? What could keep her from meeting her daughter and taking her home? Why would she leave the child alone on the street in the first place? Adam wondered how much his dad knew about his wife’s past. Not that it would matter to him, of course.
He did not want to believe it, not coming from Rain. But it sounded so true. Could Rain be such a good actress? Could Gwen?
Los Angeles County/USC Medical Center was an enormous, pale, blocky building, and looked exactly like a hospital. Driving into and up the hospital’s multilevel parking garage, Adam’s nausea reminded him where he was going, what he was about to do. His legs, which had been calm for a few minutes, began to shake again.
What was he thinking? How could he be so stupid as to fall for anything Rain said? If he felt any pity or compassion for her, it was only because she wanted him to. Maybe she was softening him up for something.
Adam parked the Honda on the third level, pocketed the keys and turned to Carter. Cleared his throat and gulped before speaking. “You ready?”
Carter looked as afraid as Adam felt. “Oh, yeah. I’m ready. Sure. This won’t bother me a bit. Can’t you see how cool I am?”
Adam wanted to shout at Rain, scream at her. Instead, he said, “Try not to hotwire the car and drive to Tijuana with a street gang while we’re gone, okay?”
Adam and Carter got out of the car and headed toward the stairs that led down to the front of the hospital. Their footsteps echoed softly.
“How are you gonna do it?” Carter whispered.
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t—we’re here, Adam! This is the hospital!”
“I suppose I could just use...his pillow.” Walking was already becoming difficult, and they were not even inside yet. His legs wobbled and jerked beneath him. He clutched the rail as he went down the stairs.
“You mean...over his face?”
Adam nodded.
“But what if they’re breathing for him?”
“Huh? What do you mean?”
With the stairs behind them, they stopped and faced each other.
Carter snapped his fingers a few times. “Shit, what do they call that thing, that machine that breathes for you?”
“A respirator?”
“Yeah. What if they’ve got him hooked up to one of those?”
&
nbsp; “And? What?”
“Well, I dunno, could you still do it with a pillow? If he’s got some machine breathing for him?”
Two men in suits approached them, talking loudly, laughing. Adam and Carter started walking again. Fast, heads down. Adam swerved a couple times, stumbled. His palms were wet and beads of perspiration dribbled down his back and sides.
The voices of the suits faded behind them. Ahead, the hospital’s main entrance. Automatic sliding glass doors opened and closed, an alien mouth that ate people up and spit them out.
Adam stopped and leaned against a wall. His face glistened with sweat. He whispered, “I don’t know if I can do this.”
“Jesus Christ, Adam, you look like shit,” Carter said. “Are you sick? You’re shaking. You look like Don Knotts in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Just don’t hurl, okay?”
“I’m serious, Carter, I don’t know if I can do this. My body won’t let me.”
“Hey, I’m with your body. As Winston Churchill said to Groucho Marx, this is some seriously stupid shit. Close range? A shotgun? He’s not comin’ outta that coma. You’re gonna get yourself arrested doing this. Just don’t do it and tell Rain you did.”
“She’d find out. She’d—”
The doors opened and spit out two uniformed police officers. Adam and Carter froze in place. Statues with panicked expressions.
One officer spoke while the other chuckled and nodded his head agreeably. They walked by without giving Adam and Carter a glance.
Adam coughed to find his voice. “I’ve gotta go to the bathroom,” he said.
“Me, too,” Carter said, nodding.
Flopping onto a bench outside the hospital, Adam said, “I can’t live like this. And if I don’t go in there and do this thing...this is exactly how I’m going to live. Petrified. All the time.”
Carter paced in front of Adam a moment, cursed under his breath. He stopped and said, “Okay, but let’s do it before I change my mind and get the hell out of here.”
Adam stood and they went into the hospital.
NINETEEN
The Intensive Care Unit in LAC/USC Medical Center was on the third floor. Adam stopped in front of the double doors and looked around, as Carter walked on. There was no telephone outside the doors. Each door had a small, square window in the top, which gave limited views of the corridor on the other side, part of a nurses’ station. The doors had no knobs or handles on the outside.
Carter came back and whispered, “You think if we both stand here and stare at these doors like a couple methadone patients, we’ll be less conspicuous?”
Adam crossed the corridor and leaned his back against the wall. His ears rang like church bells and his stomach burned like Hell. Legs shook visibly as he leaned against the wall, no matter how hard he willed them to stop. One question repeated itself in his head: Can I do this?
He did not think he could. Killing his dad was one thing. But taking someone’s life with his bare hands was very different. Pressing the pillow down with his hands. Holding it there until whatever life remained had left Monty’s body. It made Adam’s upper lip curl into a nauseated sneer.
“Let’s go in here,” Carter said. He stepped through an open doorway just inches to Adam’s right. The plastic rectangular sign against which Adam had been leaning his head read, WAITING ROOM.
The waiting room contained one sofa, fifteen or twenty chairs, and a few end tables scattered with magazines. A television mounted up on the wall was tuned to Court TV. A water cooler and large chrome coffee percolator stood in the corner. Posters of kittens and puppies and sunsets offered pearls of treacle. Some plants by the windows, two shelves of magazines and paperbacks. A phone on the wall with no keypad or dial. Everything smelled of pine scented cleaner.
Adam and Carter looked from the phone to each other.
“Maybe that’s it,” Adam whispered.
Carter nodded. “I want some coffee.”
They went to the corner and each grabbed a Styrofoam cup from a stack beside the percolator.
A young man and woman sat on the sofa. He was thin and fragile-looking, with mocha skin, a narrow, angular face, close-cropped hair. Puffy eyes, moist cheeks. He had been crying. The young woman looked like she had been sleeping, or had not gotten enough sleep. She was black, too, but much darker. Her hair went in all directions, and her heavy-lidded eyes stared blankly at nothing.
Adam tried not to stare, but she was familiar. It was a gnawing, worrisome familiarity. He took his black coffee to a chair, sat down and tried to get comfortable.
An old woman sat in a chair reading a book, oblivious to everyone else in the room.
Two middle-aged women sat together, crocheting and talking. One of them was talking, anyway. A morbidly obese woman with glasses, large brown hair, and too much lipstick. Probably in her mid-fifties. She wore a muumuu that swirled with muted earth tones. Her voice was a pulsing hum of background noise about her sister-in-law’s gall bladder and her cousin’s arthritis.
A man in his forties, balding, chunky, in jeans and a blue short-sleeved shirt, fidgeted in a chair. As Carter took a seat, the man got up and walked to the window, where he stood and stared at the swirl of earth tones in the air.
The room was filled with tension. Adam wondered if it was just his own, or came with the territory.
“You okay?” Carter said.
“No. I’ll never be okay again.”
“Oh, cut it out. I’m not exactly enjoying this, you know.”
“You don’t have to do it.”
“Neither do you.”
“Now you cut it out.”
On the sofa, the young man turned to his dull-eyed companion and said in a trembling voice, “I don’t know how much longer I can wait. What time did she go in there?”
“I dunno,” the young woman said in a low monotone.
“I can’t believe they wouldn’t let me in to see her.”
“Family only”
“I know, but, Jesus!” He began to cry again, until his gaze fell on Adam and Carter, who watched him carefully. “What’re you staring at?” he snapped.
Adam and Carter shrank in their chairs. They had not meant to be rude. Their stares had been absent-minded.
Adam blurted, “Bluuhhh, nothing!”
“Sorry, really,” Carter said.
Adam’s eyes moved to the black girl. Why did she look so familiar?
“What do you want to do?” Carter whispered.
“Go home.”
“Fine with me.”
Adam leaned forward, put an elbow on his thighs and held his head in one hand. Thought awhile. He sat up suddenly, put his coffee on a nearby table and whispered, “Okay, we need to find out if that’s the phone we’re supposed to use.”
Carter put on a smile and said, “’Scuse me, um...ma’am?”
The chattering woman in the muumuu turned to Carter. “Yes, hon?”
“Sorry to interrupt, but my friend and I were wondering—” He pointed at the telephone. “—do we have to call ahead on that phone before they’ll let us in?”
“No, you can just walk right in, who you here to see?” Her bright red lips continued to smile as she let her crocheting rest in her ample lap.
“Uuuhhh—”
“A friend,” Adam said.
The woman waved a hand, waggled her fingers. “Oh, they won’t let you in, then, you gotta be family, friends don’t count, not in I.C.U., you want I can call and see how your friend is, they know me in there, what’s your friend’s name?” The woman set her crocheting in the chair beside her with her purse. She was about to heave herself to her feet when Adam and Carter said loudly and at the exact same instant, “No!”
They startled her, and she dropped back into her seat. It startled everyone in the room, and all eyes were on them. Even the empty stare of the strangely familiar black girl.
The woman said, “Okay, you don’t have to shout, I just thought I could help, ’cause I been here almost two weeks an
d all the nurses know me, so, you know...”
“Thank you,” Carter said with a Boy Scout grin. “I really appreciate it. See, it’s my friend, his brother.” He pointed a thumb at Adam. “So he’ll be going in to see him.”
She resumed her crocheting, thick fingers moving delicately. “Oh, well, that’s nice, what’s wrong with your brother, honey? You know, my husband had an embolism in his head and had to have a brain operation, and he’s been in there ever since—” A nod toward the door. “—and it happened the day we were supposed to leave for Florida, gonna go see all them amusement parks, you know, but soon as we got to the airport, boom, he hit the floor, out like a light, and from what the doctor says, we probably won’t be getting any vacation, not this year, anyway, dammit all to heck and back, we planned that vacation for years, now that the kids are all gone, the honeymoon we never had, you know, but nope, not to be, not to be, just like the new refrigerator, not to be.” She shook her head and sighed.
Adam found the sigh to be the most amazing part of her monologue. Amazing because she had enough breath left to give life to a sigh.
“With my luck, I’ll end up taking care of him for the rest of our lives, not that I haven’t been doing that already for thirty-two years, but this would be everything, the doctor said he may be a vegetable, and I just don’t know what I’d do if that was the case, but I know one thing, Peggy, honey, you’d have to be my regular date—”
Peggy laughed a high, girlish laugh.
“—’cause I know I’d have to keep bowling, sweetie, you know I couldn’t live without my nights at the lanes—”
She went on. Adam took sneaky looks at the black girl whenever he had the chance. He had seen her before. She sat slumped low on the sofa.
Holy shit! Adam thought when he recognized her. He turned to Carter and whispered, “We’ve gotta get out of here.”
“Why?”
“Never mind, let’s go.” Adam stood and pulled on Carter’s arm until he stood, too, and put down his coffee. As they made their way to the door, Adam tried not to hurry but was unable to walk at a normal pace. He got through the door first. Carter was not so lucky.
