Flow (6)

….

Hospital activity came in predictable – if frenzied – waves. Orderlies and nurses streamed past patients wheeling their IV poles doggedly up and down the corridors. Families and friends wandered in, wandered out. There was a sense of waiting – for recovery or for something else. Voices rose and fell; sometimes the afflicted called out or moaned in their beds. Poor bastard, someone would say, not knowing what was wrong but knowing it must be bad.

She'd spent enough time waiting to know the cycles. Commotion at meal times, the heavy aromas of overcooked food that always brought memories of her high school cafeteria. The calming period afterward, when empty carts were pushed away. The evening hush after visitors left, lights in the patient rooms went out and the staff breathed, drifted.

Mike had called his parents to take the boys for a sleepover. Now he was asleep himself, neck crooked unnaturally, Dina curled under his arm. Jordan had drifted off, phone clutched to his chest. Gunter was awake, quietly leafing through a National Geographic.

Kay yawned and rolled her shoulders, letting her eyes wander down to the vending machines near the elevator bank.

"You've had too much coffee as it is."

She jumped at the voice and turned to find Gunter focused on her, the magazine discarded.

"I wasn't going to," she said, then sighed. "Yeah, I was going to." She leaned forward, bracing her elbows on her knees, and cast another glance at the sleeping group.

"It's no one's fault," Gunter said quietly. "I've been trying to pin the blame on Stein, but of course this wasn't him. So I want to blame us instead. Or even Cam. But it's no one's fault."

"Really? Because he's been bleeding for a month now and we've…" Kay threw up her hands but lowered her voice to keep from waking the others. "We've done nothing, Gunter. I told him to take off work if his headache got bad. Sure, Cameron, your brain is being compressed by a massive pool of blood, so go home and have some tea. Right."

Gunter tilted his head. "It's like the doc said – even professionals miss these things. Cam is a get-up type, always has been. He can work through pain, dizziness, just about anything. He once did half a show on a broken ankle. That's good in a magician – it keeps the illusions coming. But it's not so good tooling through Manhattan with extra fluid sloshing around in his skull."

"Gunter," Kay complained weakly, "that doesn't even make sense."

Flashing a quick smile, Gunter reached for the National Geographic again. "Get some sleep," he said. "It'll make more sense when you wake up."

….

Waking up was usually easier. He had a vague sense of that, like a memory of literally bounding from sleep. There was excitement in it, possibility.

But right now it was…jumbly. Things came to him and fleeted away before he could grasp them. Other things came and went – faces, feelings, slips of information that probably mattered somewhere. And he felt a strange, rising sense of urgency as he sifted through it all. Something was off. Something was wrong.

"Mr. Black," the voice said again, and he realized it had spoken before. The thing to do…the thing to do….

He opened his eyes, blinked groggily a few times and was looking at a woman. She was smiling. Her dark eyes seemed kind.

She was…standing beside him. He was in a bed, half sitting up, and she was standing beside the bed reading what looked like a file. Memories of a dozen other beds started coalescing, building context. He was in a hospital. The kind looking woman was a doctor, blue scrubs creased as if from a long day, the headset of a stethoscope hanging out of one pocket.

What's…uh….

"You're in a hospital, Mr. Black," the doctor said, as if he'd asked the question out loud. She moved to the foot of his bed and made a brief notation on what had to be his chart. "I'm Dr. Gina Singh, and I'm a neurologist. You've had a head injury."

Ah. A trick gone wrong, rehearsal or a show—no. A case, an FBI case. And at once it was back. Harold Cantor garrotted and crammed into a packing crate. Creepy Jacobus Stein, carny and occultist and lover of the macabre. The car, stalking him silently…. Cameron tried to lift his head and winced.

"No," the doctor cautioned, putting a hand on his chest. "You are not going to move around. You've just come through surgery." She looked over the monitors and then smiled at him again. "You did just fine," she said, reaching down to take his hands in each of hers. "Now can you squeeze my hands?"

He thought for a moment and did it, feeling the muscles move obediently. It was good; she looked almost proud.

"What did I just have you do?" she asked.

He blinked. "Squeeze your hands." The words scraped over his throat but came out clear enough.

"That's right," she said. "Look at me." She shone a penlight briefly in his eyes, had him follow its beam. He remembered the headlights of the car behind him, but it seemed vague and dreamlike. "Good," the doctor said. "Very good. Now you will rest. I'll have a nurse bring some pain medication in case you need it. And I'll let your friends know that you're awake. The five of them have been here all day." And she was gone.

Cameron blinked again and took a deep breath, assessing. His limbs felt heavy and he was tired, wrung out. Memories swirled in his mind, some banal and others senseless, disconnected. Whatever had happened to put him in the hospital was a hazy mystery. But the doctor had said he'd done just fine. The doctor had said his team was close by. The creeping fear receded. Things couldn't be that bad.

….

Her voice didn't cut through his sleep so much as sweep it aside, like wind dissipating gauzy cloud. He opened his eyes and saw the neurologist conferring quietly with Gunter. The older man was nodding, looking pleased. Mike yawned and gently extricated himself from Dina's side, stretching as he stood.

"Mike," Gunter whispered, smiling. "Guess who's ready for visitors?"

"Ready for a short visit," Dr. Singh interjected, raising her hand. "Mr. Black has just had surgery. He needs his rest and he shall have it. Are we understood?"

"Yes, Ma'am," Mike replied automatically. Gunter nodded soberly.

The doctor raised an eyebrow and a finger for emphasis. "A few minutes only." She looked from one to the other. "And then you go and get some rest yourselves. He's going to be sleepy for a while yet." Excusing herself with a nod, she headed for the nurses' station.

"Hey," Kay said hoarsely, uncurling and pushing herself up from the chair as Mike and Gunter turned to her. She cleared her throat and ran a hand through her hair. "What's happened?"

"Cameron's awake," Mike said. "They drained the blood and closed up the burr holes."

"No temporary drain?"

"Didn't need it. Dr. Singh said once they finished irrigating the area they were pretty confident the bleeding had stopped on its own, so Cameron just has to rest for a few days and then ease back into his normal life."

"Except for the part where he gets repeatedly clunked in the head," Gunter put in. Turning toward the waiting area, he snapped his fingers. "Jordan!" he hissed, grinning when the young man jumped and dropped his phone. On the longer sofa Dina stirred and blinked, then managed a frown at Gunter's chuckle.

"Is he okay?" Jordan asked, stifling a yawn.

"Gonna be right as rain," Gunter promised.

Dina moved to Mike's side. "Can we see him? It's…oh, it's past midnight."

"We can see him for a few minutes, if he's still awake," Mike said.

But Kay had already drifted to the open door of Cameron's room and was lingering there, studying him. They joined her and peered in, and she smiled softly. "He's out like a light."

….

To be continued

Note - thanks for reading! Hopefully it's still ticking along well enough. We are getting pretty close to the conclusion, so that's something.

Re the campaign, which appears to have become something of a life's work for me, it's still going. I'm still hounding ABC through their feedback page. I may start providing comments in perfect haiku. That might get them interested! I've also emailed Amazon a couple of times, and have heard from others who've done the same. We've received personalized replies from actual humans who sign their names to the emails and don't just send a form response. One of them mentioned watching Deception herself. I guess she could have been blowing smoke, but why? I was impressed and encouraged by their responses. It's possible that Deception is actually on their radar and they're just waiting to see if enough interest is shown by the audience. Who knows?