The Dead Zone(54)

'No. It's all right, dad.'

Herb kissed Johnny's cheek. 'I have to go after her.'

'All right.'

Herb left. When they were gone, Johnny got up and tottered the three steps between his chair and the bed. Not much. But something. A start, He wished more than his father knew that he hadn't blown up at his mother like that. He wished it because an odd sort of certainty was growing in him that his mother was not going to live much longer.

2.

Vera stopped taking her medication. Herb talked to her, then cajoled, finally demanded. It did no good. She showed him the letters of her 'correspondents in Jesus', most of them scrawled and full of misspellings, all of them supporting her stand and promising to pray for her. One of them was from a lady in Rhode Island who had also been at the farm in Vermont, waiting for the end of the world (along with her pet Pomeranian, Otis). 'GOD is the best medicine,' this lady wrote, 'ask GOD and YOU WILL BE HEALED, not DRS who OSURP the POWER of GOD, it is DRS who have caused all the CANCER in this evil world with there DEVIL'S MEDDLING, anyone who has had SURGERY for instance, even MINOR like TONSILS OUT, sooner or later they will end up with CANCER, this is a proven fact, so ask GOD, pray GOD, merge YOUR WILL with HIS WILL and YOU WILL BE HEALED!!'

Herb talked to Johnny on the phone, and the next day Johnny called his mother and apologized for being so short with her. He asked her to please start taking the medicine again - for him. Vera accepted his apology, but refused to go back to the medication. If God needed her treading the earth, then he would see she continued to tread it. If God wanted to call her home, he would do that even if she took a barrel of pills a day. It was a seamless argument, and Johnny's only possible rebuttal was the one that Catholics and Protestants alike have rejected for eighteen hundred years: that God works His will through the mind of man as well as through the spirit of man.

'Momma,' he said, 'haven't you thought that God's will was for some doctor to invent that drug so you could live longer? Can't you even consider that idea?'

Long distance was no medium for theological argument. She hung up.

The next day Marie Michaud came into Johnny's room, put her head on his bed, and wept.

'Here, here,' Johnny said, startled and alarmed. 'What's this? What's wrong?'

'My boy,' she said, still crying. 'My Mark. They operated on him and it was just like you said. He's fine. He's going to see out of his bad eye again. Thank God.'

She hugged Johnny and he hugged her back as best he could. With her warm tears on his own cheek, he thought that whatever had happened to him wasn't all bad. Maybe some things should be told, or seen, or found again. It wasn't even so farfetched to think that God was working through him, although his own concept of God was fuzzy and ill-defined. He held Marie and told her how glad he was. He told her to remember that he wasn't the one who had operated on Mark, and that he barely remembered what it was that he had told her. She left shortly after that, drying her eyes as she went, leaving Johnny alone to think.

3.

Early in August, Dave Pelsen came to see Johnny. The Cleaves Mills High assistant principal was a small, neat man who wore thick glasses and Hush Puppies and a series of loud sports jackets. Of all the people who came to see Johnny during that almost endless summer of 1975, Dave had changed the least. The gray was speckled a little more fully through his hair, but that was all.

'So how are you doing? Really?' Dave asked, when they had finished the amenities.

'Not so bad,' Johnny said. 'I can walk alone now if I don't overdo it. I can swim six laps in the pool. I get headaches sometimes, real killers, but the doctors say I can expect that to go on for some time. Maybe the rest of my life.'

'Mind a personal question?'

'If you're going to ask me if I can still get it up,' Johnny said with a grin, 'that's affirmative.'

'That's good to know, but what I wanted to know about is the money. Can you pay for this?'

Johnny shook his head. 'I've been in the hospital for going on five years. No one but a Rockefeller could pay for that. My father and mother got me into some sort of state-funded program. Total Disaster, or something like that.'

Dave nodded. 'The Extraordinary Disaster program. I figured that. But how did they keep you out of the state hospital, Johnny? That place is the pits.'

'Dr. Weizak and Dr. Brown saw to that. And they're largely responsible for my having been able to come back as far as I have. I was a ... a guinea pig, Dr. Weizak says. How long can we keep this comatose man from turning into a total vegetable? The physical therapy unit was working on me the last two years I was in coma. I had megavitamin shots ... my ass still looks like a case of smallpox. Not that they expected any return on the project from me personally. I was assumed to be a terminal case almost from the time I came in. Weizak says that what he and Brown did with me is aggressive life support". He thinks it's the beginning of a response to all the criticism about sustaining life after hope of recovery is gone. Anyway, they couldn't continue to use me if I'd gone over to the state hospital, so they kept me here. Eventually, they would have finished with me and then I would have gone to the state hospital.'

'Where the most sophisticated care you would have gotten would have been a turn every six hours to prevent bedsores,' Dave said. 'And if you'd waked up in 1980, you would have been a basket case.'