Lisey's Story(146)

6

Lisey blurts out her worst fear to young Dr. Jantzen without even thinking about it.

"Scott is going to die of this, isn't he?"

Jantzen hesitates, and all at once she can see that he may be young but he's no kid. "I want you to see him," he says after a moment that seems very long. "And I want him to see you. He's conscious, but that may not last long. Will you come with me?"

Jantzen walks very fast. He stops at the nurses' station and the male nurse on duty looks up from the journal he's been reading -  Modern Geriatrics. Jantzen speaks to him. The conversation is low-pitched, but the floor is very quiet, and Lisey hears the male nurse say four words very clearly. They terrify her.

"He's waiting for her," the male nurse says.

At the far end of the corridor are two closed doors with this message written on them in bright orange:

ALTON ISOLATION UNIT SEE NURSE BEFORE ENTERING OBSERVE ALL PRECAUTIONS FOR YOUR SAKE FOR THEIR SAKE MASK AND GLOVES MAY BE REQUIRED

To the left of the door is a sink where Jantzen washes his hands and instructs Lisey to do the same. On a gurney to the right are gauze masks, latex gloves in sealed packets, stretchy yellow shoe covers in a cardboard box with FITS ALL SIZES stamped on the side, and a neat stack of surgical greengowns.

"Isolation," she says. "Oh Jesus, you think my husband's got the smucking Andromeda Strain."

Jantzen hedges. "We think he may have some exotic pneumonia, possibly even the Bird Flu, but whatever it is, we haven't been able to identify it, and it's..."

He doesn't finish, doesn't seem to know how, so Lisey helps him. "It's really doing a number on him. As the saying is."

"Just a mask should be enough, Mrs. Landon, unless you have cuts. I didn't notice while you were - "

"I don't think I have to worry about cuts and I won't need a mask." She pushes open the lefthand door before he can object. "If it was communicable, I'd already have it."

Jantzen follows her into the Alton IU, slipping one of the green cloth masks over his own mouth and nose.

7

There are only four rooms at the end of the fifth-floor hallway, and only one of the TV monitors is lit; only one of the rooms is producing the beeping sounds of hospital machinery and the soft, steady rush of flowing oxygen. The name on the monitor beneath the dreadfully fast pulse - 178 - and the dreadfully low blood-pressure - 79 over 44 - is LANDON-SCOTT.

The door stands half-open. On it is a sign that shows an orange flame-shape with an X drawn across it. Below, in bright red letters, is this message: NO LIGHT, NO SPARK. She's no writer, certainly no poet, but in those words she reads all she needs to know about how things end; it is the line drawn under her marriage the way you draw a line under numbers that need adding up. No light, no spark.

Scott, who left her with his usual impudent cry of "Seeya later, Lisey-gator!" and a blast of Flamin' Groovies retro-rock from the CD player of his old Ford, now lies looking at her from a face as pale as milk-water. Only his eyes are fully alive, and they're too hot. They burn like the eyes of an owl trapped in a chimney. He's on his side. The ventilator has been pushed away from the bed, but she can see the slime of phlegm on its tube and knows ( hush little Lisey) that there are germs or microbes or both in that green crap that no one will ever be able to identify, not even with the world's best electron microscope and every database under the eye of heaven.

"Hey, Lisey..."

There's almost nothing to that whisper -  No more'n a puff of wind under the door, old Dandy might have said - but she hears him and goes to him. A plastic oxygen mask hangs around his neck, hissing air. Two plastic tubes sprout from his chest, where a couple of freshly stapled incisions look like a child's drawing of a bird. The tubes jutting from his back seem almost grotesquely large in comparison to the ones in front. To Lisey's dismayed eye they look as big as radiator hoses. They're transparent, and she can see cloudy fluid and bloody bits of tissue coursing down them to some sort of suitcasething that stands on the bed behind him. This isn't Nashville; this is no .22 bullet; although her heart clamors against it, one look is enough to convince her mind that Scott will be dead by the time the sun comes up.

"Scott," she says, going onto her knees beside the bed and taking his hot hand in her cold ones. "What the smuck have you done to yourself now?"

"Lisey." He manages to squeeze her hand a little. His breathing is a loose and screamy wheeze that she remembers all too well from the parking lot that day. She knows exactly what he will say next, and Scott doesn't disappoint. "I'm so hot, Lisey. Ice?...Please?"

She glances at his table but there's nothing on it. She looks over her shoulder at the doctor who's brought her up here, now the Masked Redhaired Avenger. "Doctor..." she begins, and realizes she's drawing a complete blank. "I'm sorry, I've forgotten your name."

"Jantzen, Mrs. Landon. And that's perfectly all right."

"Can my husband have some ice? He says he's - "

"Yes, of course. I'll get it myself." He's gone at once. Lisey realizes he's only wanted a reason to leave them alone.

Scott squeezes her hand again. "Going," he says in that same barely there whisper.

"Sorry. Love you."