He dozed off. He could smell food cooking, and then another fragrance, a perfume. That was his mother,s perfume. And then there were all these other smells that had to do with the hospital and its chemicals. He opened his eyes. He could smell the chemicals that had been used to bathe these walls. It was as if each fragrance had a personality, a distinct color in his mind. He felt like he was reading a code off the wall.
Distantly, the dying woman pleaded with her daughter, "Shut off the machines, I,m begging you."
"Mommy, there are no machines," said the daughter. The daughter cried.
When the nurse came in, he asked about the mother and the daughter. He had the oddest feeling - he didn,t dare tell her this - that the woman wanted something from him.
"Not on this ward, Mr. Golding," she assured him. "Maybe it,s the drugs."
"Well, just what drugs are they giving me? Last night I thought I heard two guys in a barroom fight."
Hours later, he woke to find himself standing by the window. He,d accidentally ripped the IV out of his arm. His dad was dozing in the chair. Celeste was someplace far away talking rapidly on her phone.
"How did I get here?"
He was restless. He wanted to walk, to walk fast, not just down the hall, dragging that IV pole on wheels with him every step, but out of here and along a street, or into a woods, and along a steep path. He felt such an urge to walk it was painful to be confined here. It was agony suddenly. He saw the woods surrounding Marchent,s house, my house, and he thought, We,ll never walk there together, she,ll never get to show me so many things. Those ancient redwoods, those trees that are some of the oldest living things in this world. Oldest living things.
That woods was his now. He had become the guardian of those particular trees. An indefinable energy galvanized him. He began to walk, moving swiftly down the corridor, and past the nurses, station and then down the steps. Of course he was wearing this flimsy hospital gown, tied in the back, thank God, but he certainly couldn,t go out for a stroll in the night. But it felt good to be pounding the stairs, making a circuit of another floor and another.
He stopped suddenly. Voices. He could hear them all around him, gentle whispers, too low to interpret, but there, like rippling in water, like breeze moving through trees. Somewhere far off, someone was screaming for help. He stood there, with his hands over his ears. He could still hear it. A boy screaming. Go to him! Not in this hospital, but someplace else. Where else?
He was walking through the front lobby on his way out the door when the orderlies stopped him. His feet were bare. "Whoa, I don,t know how I got here," he said. He was embarrassed, but they were kind enough as they took him back upstairs.
"Don,t call my mother," he said ominously. Celeste and Phil were waiting for him.
"You went AWOL, son?"
"Dad, I,m so restless. I don,t know what I was thinking."
The next morning, he lay half asleep listening. His mother was talking about the tests they,d run. "It makes no sense, a sudden surge of human growth hormone in a twenty-three-year-old man? And all this calcium in his blood, these enzymes. No, I know it,s not rabies, of course it,s not rabies, but I wonder if the lab didn,t simply make a mistake. I want them to run everything all over again."
He opened his eyes. The room was empty. Silence. He got up, showered, shaved, looked at the wound on his abdomen. You could hardly see the scar.
More tests. There was no evidence now that he,d ever had a concussion.
"Mom, I want to go home!"
"Not quite yet, Baby Boy." There was a very elaborate test that could find any infection in any part of the body. Took forty-five minutes. He,d have to lie perfectly still.
"May I call you Baby Boy, too?" whispered the nurse.
An hour later Grace came in with the laboratory technicians.
"Can you believe they have lost every single specimen they took?" She was "fit to be tied," as she liked to say. "Now this time they,d better get it right. And we are not giving anyone another DNA sample. If they screwed that up, it,s their problem. Once was enough."
"Screwed it up?"
"That,s what they,re telling me. We,re having a laboratorial crisis in Northern California!" She folded her arms and watched through cold narrow eyes as the techs drew his blood into vial after vial.
Toward the end of the week, Grace was almost manic over his speedy recovery. He was spending most of the day walking around, or in the chair reading the newspaper accounts of the massacre, the Nideck family, the mystery of the rabid animal. He demanded his laptop. His phone was still with the police, of course, so he asked for another.
The first person he called was his editor Billie Kale. "I don,t like being the subject of all these stories," he said. "I want to write my own."
"That,s what we,re dying to have, Reuben. You e-mail it to me. We,re on."
His mother walked in. Yes, he could be discharged if he insisted. "My heavens, just look at you," she said. "You do need a haircut, Baby Boy."
One of the other doctors, a good friend of Grace,s, had dropped by, and they stood chatting in the hall. "And can you believe they have completely screwed up the lab tests again?"
Long hair. Reuben got out of bed to look at it in the bathroom mirror. Hmm. His hair was bushier, longer, bigger, without doubt.
For the first time, Reuben thought of that mysterious Margon the Godless and his shoulder-length hair. He saw the distinguished gentleman of the photograph over Marchent,s library fireplace. Maybe Reuben would wear his long like the impressive Margon the Godless. Well, for a while.
He laughed.
As soon as he walked into the door of the house on Russian Hill, he made for his desk. He was firing up his desktop as the private-duty nurse took vitals.
It was early afternoon, eight days since the massacre, and one of those clear sunny days in San Francisco when the bay is vibrantly blue and the city is still white in spite of its many glass buildings. He went out on the balcony and let the cold wind sweep over him. He breathed it in as if he loved it, which frankly he never had.
He was so glad to be back in his own room, with his own fireplace, his own desk.
He wrote for five hours.
By the time he hit the key to send the text by e-mail to Billie, he was happy enough with the blow-by-blow account. But he knew that the drugs were still clouding his recall and his sense of the rhythm of what he,d written. "Cut where you feel you should," he had written. Billie would know what to do. Ironic that he, one of their most promising reporters, as they always put it, was the subject of headlines in other papers.