Chapter Four

Karen stared at her patient in a frustration that bordered on fury. She couldn't believe she was having this fight with him again. She couldn't believe that he would be this stubborn.

Tuesday night the kitchen had served up plates of corned beef hash for supper. String had refused to touch it.

He'd also turned up his nose at the canned luncheon meat that appeared on Wednesday night.

She knew that Luisa, with her easy-going attitude that always managed to slide around trouble, wouldn't have bothered herself if he refused to eat, figuring he would when he wanted to. Elena would probably have gone out and cooked him a whole meal of his favorite foods. But on Thursday, when supper consisted of some kind of creamed ‒ something ‒ and yet again String refused to have anything to do with it, Karen's patience finally snapped.

She wheeled him back to his room and went back to the lounge for the food tray. When she returned to his room, she found him sitting with his arms folded and a grimly implacable look on his face. He didn't say a word to declare that battle was joined. He didn't have to.

She mentally reviewed her options, and decided that tackling him on her own maybe wasn't a good idea right then. She went off and found one of the orderlies, who looked as if he could probably pick String up one-handed, and between them they swiftly got the wheelchair's arm restraints on him.

The orderly left. The look String gave her was enough to make her actually back up a step, even though he could barely even move a finger.

She pulled herself together. "Not this time, Mr. String," she told him. "You're not getting away with that now."

She slapped the food tray in his lap, grabbed his nostrils and pinched them shut. With the other hand, she scooped up a spoonful of food and held it to his mouth. When he finally had to open his mouth to breathe, she rammed the spoon in. He shook his head as hard as he could. She hung on and managed to get another couple of spoonfuls in before he started to choke.

"Karen! What's going on here?"

Shit. It was Anne Marie Gatling, the senior nurse on the evening shift.

"He won't eat his supper," she said defensively. "This is the third night in a row."

"Oh, for God's sake." The nurse surveyed Karen and her patient. He was still coughing violently, and there was food all over his lap and shirtfront, on Karen, and on the floor. "It must be a full moon tonight. They're all starting to go crazy."

She bent over String and in honeyed tones said, "What's the matter, Mr. Vine? Why don't you want your supper?"

Finally String managed to stop coughing. "Go to hell," he snarled, looking her straight in the eye.

Anne Marie backed up a step, just like Karen had done earlier, then recovered herself and tried again. "Now, now, that's not very polite. You know you're causing Karen a lot of trouble, and she only wants you to eat your delicious supper." Personally, the nurse thought it smelled vile, but she wasn't the one having to eat it.

That time, he didn't even make the effort to swear at her. His look was a visual profanity.

Anne Marie sighed. "All right, Mr. Vine, you seem to want to be difficult. But Karen says that this is the third night in a row you haven't eaten, and we only want to do what's best for you."

"Then leave me alone," he snapped.

"As soon as you've eaten, Mr. Vine." She stood over him with arms folded. String stared straight ahead, a scowl on his face. Finally Anne Marie tried holding a spoonful of the food up to his mouth, but he still obviously had no intention of eating.

She sighed again. "I haven't got time for this. Believe me, Mr. Vine, this is for your own good. Karen, hold his head steady, will you?"

Between the two of them they managed to get most of the meal down him, or at least transferred it off the plate to somewhere else. The nurse looked ruefully down at the front of what had been a clean uniform and said over the sound of String's renewed coughing, "Karen, when you've got all this cleaned up, I think you'd better put him in a bed downstairs for the night. We've got enough problems around here tonight, I don't want to be worried about him doing anything to disturb the other patients. And maybe it'll make him think twice about doing this sort of thing again."

Official sanction for payback. Karen tried not to look delighted. She didn't bother telling Anne Marie that so far, nothing had stopped this man from trying to do exactly what he pleased when he felt like being a pain in the ass.

She cleaned up the worst of the mess from herself, her patient and the floor, and summoned the orderly again. Just as they were about to leave the room, String started to retch, and a moment later vomited up most of what she and the nurse had managed to shovel into him.

"Oh, for God's sake!" she yelled, barely restraining herself from giving him a good hard slap. Roughly she wiped off his face, cleaned the floor ‒ again ‒ and swiftly wheeled him down to one of the cell-like rooms in the basement. With the orderly's help she stripped off his soiled clothes, dumping everything into a laundry bin, then got him onto the bed and put a diaper on him. He still tried to fight her. He was obviously running out of the strength to do it with, but not the determination.

While she was pulling the absorbent pad into place, her hand accidentally brushed against his genitals. He grunted and tried to twist away from her.

"Felt that, did you, big boy?" she asked with a malicious grin. She touched him again, fondling him for a moment. He gasped and closed his eyes, his whole body tense. It occurred to her that it could be a lot of fun to tease him. From the look of him, it probably wouldn't take long for her to have him begging. "I'll bet you miss this, don't you? Newsflash, you can do this for yourself, y'know."

The orderly, looking bored, snapped his gum loudly. Karen sighed. Some other time. She finished with the diaper and pulled up the blanket; she and the orderly fastened the restraining straps. There. That should keep him out of trouble for the rest of the night.

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What the hell was in that stuff they made me eat?

Flat on his back and unable to move anything but his head, String threw up twice more through the night. His stomach cramped. It seemed to be harder to breathe, and he began to feel feverish. Worst of all, he'd had several bouts of diarrhea that he just hadn't been able to control.

Being dead had to be better than this.

He hoped he would pass out, but didn't. He was sodden, stinking, and more helpless than a baby, and sometime in the night he broke down and began to cry with sheer frustration.

Then he tried to distract himself by thinking about that place with the lake and the pine trees and the mountains. Concentrate. Hold on and don't let go. What color is the water in the sunlight?

Blue-green. With the reflection of the trees in it. If it's been a dry summer and the water level is low, you can see the rocks on the bottom in places. You can see right down to where the fish hide.

What else is there?

An eagle, swooping down over the lake. She casts a huge winged shadow on the water's surface. She flies away, a shining fish clutched in sharp talons. Her cry echoes off the mountainside.

A large dock. The wooden rail is warm when bare arms lean on it. Splintery, too, in places. Should fix that.

Shallow steps lead away from the water, up through the pines to a cabin. Built of logs, with a stone chimney, a wide shady porch across the front.

Open the door.

But he couldn't go any further than that. The vision shivered, like the surface of the lake when a stone was dropped in, and broke up. He could only see the dimness of his prison, lit by the light from the hallway coming through the square of wire mesh-reinforced glass in the heavy door.

At least he was still in the real world, not lost in the foggy limbo where he couldn't think or feel and nothing mattered. It was as if present misery was keeping him pinned to reality.

The voice on the telephone. The man who'd said "Santini Air". Who was it? What was "Santini Air"? He knew the man who'd spoken. Something about the voice felt reassuring, comforting, even though the tone of voice had been anything but.

An older man, a good thirty pounds or more overweight, wearing a red satin ball cap over thinning gray hair. I know that man, know him well. What is his name?

Under the blanket, his fists clenched in frustration.

He forced them to relax. This was far further than he'd ever travelled before along that road that led back to sanity.

It was a place where they didn't want him to be, but he was going there anyway. In spite of the mess of shit and vomit he was lying in, in spite of the straps holding him down, in spite of his legs that didn't work, he felt a small glow of triumph.

A while later, he fell asleep through sheer exhaustion.

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Even the easy-going Luisa was shocked when she found him in the morning. She'd arrived late for work, then was waylaid by demands for help by the rest of the day staff, who were trying to cope with several cases of what seemed like mild food poisoning, probably brought on by the suspect supper from the night before. Nobody had thought to check on String during the night, to see if he too might have been unwell. By the time she opened the door to the basement room, it was only a few minutes before String was due for his weekly therapy session with Dr. Fairling.

She was wiping his face clean with a damp towel when the doctor arrived, carrying a medical bag and String's chart. She placed a small chair next to the bed and told Luisa to go. For once Luisa protested. Her patient was a mess, and didn't look well. The doctor overruled her.

Luisa left reluctantly, and Dr. Fairling looked down at String, noting the red-rimmed eyes, flushed face, and evident breathing difficulties. She took his temperature, measured his pulse, and listened to his chest with a stethoscope. She suspected that he'd inhaled some of his own vomit through the night and was suffering from a degree of aspiration pneumonia, as well as the aftereffects of the food poisoning. "Well, Mr. Vine, you certainly seem to have gotten yourself into difficulties."

"Name's not Vine," he snarled, still managing some defiance in spite of how wretched he had to be feeling.

Her reply came back, quick and harsh as a whiplash. "Your name is what I decide it is."

He shrank back, but still managed to roll his head back and forth against the thin pillow in a gesture of denial.

"You have no name except the one I gave you. You will only walk if I tell you that you can walk. You have nothing left of your own life."

"You're wrong! I can remember ‒ " He shut up, knowing he'd just said too much.

She bent over him, eyes boring into his. "What can you remember, Tommy? Tell me."

This time he kept his mouth shut. He closed his eyes so he wouldn't have to look at her.

She cupped his chin in one hand and gave his head a shake. "Tell me what you remember."

He stayed silent, teeth gritted. He wanted to swear at her, but didn't dare open his mouth in case the words she wanted to hear came out in spite of him.

"Very well." She searched briefly in her bag and pulled out a syringe and needle and a small plastic pack containing a single unlabelled vial. She drew the contents of the vial up into the syringe and tugged the blanket away from his right arm.

"Don't," he whispered. "Not more."

Without replying she cleaned off an area of skin with an alcohol swab and briskly administered the injection, then replaced everything in her bag and sat back to study his chart while she waited for the drug to take effect. Some of what was noted there made her frown. This whole procedure was extremely risky and over-complicated in her view, but it was the way her employer wanted the matter handled. Not surprisingly, given his past history, Tommy Vine was proving to be resistant. With the treatment he'd already received, his brain should have been little more than mush by now. She only hoped that it didn't end up that way permanently. If so, all this work would have been for nothing, and her employer would be extremely unhappy.

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An hour later, she said softly, coaxingly, "Tell me your name."

"Ss-String . . . "

She picked up his right hand and gave the fold of skin between his thumb and forefinger a sharp pinch. She didn't exert very much pressure, but his nerve endings had been sensitized by the drug and the sensation was amplified to an almost excruciating pain. He gave a harsh cry.

"No. Try again."

She waited patiently for a moment, and finally he whispered, "T-tommy . . . "

"Tommy what?"

". . . Tommy . . . Vine . . . "

"That's better, Tommy. Well done. Now tell me what it is you can remember from before you came here."

A beautiful place. A lake, trees, a cabin by the shore . . .

The waters of the lake closed over his head.

He drowned.

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A few minutes later, Dr. Fairling picked up her bag and left the room. On her way out of the clinic she stopped at the nurses' station and wrote orders for her patient to be given oxygen to help ease the effects of the aspiration pneumonia and IV saline for the dehydration caused by the food poisoning; she also spoke sternly to the nurse in charge about the necessity for being more vigilant about patient welfare. Then she told Luisa she could go and attend to Mr. Vine.