Terminal Man (5 page)

“You look fine,” she said. “How do you feel?”

“Fine. I feel fine.”

“Any worries?”

“No. I mean, what is there to worry about? Nothing I can do. For the next few hours, I’m in your hands, and Ellis’s hands.…” He bit his lip. “Of course I’m worried.”

“What worries you?”

“Everything,” he said. He sucked on the cigarette. “Everything. I worry about how I’ll sleep. How I’ll feel tomorrow. How I’ll be when it’s all over. What if somebody makes a mistake? What if I get turned into a vegetable? What if it hurts? What if I …”

“Die?”

“Sure. That, too.”

“It’s really a minor procedure. It’s hardly more complicated than an appendectomy.”

“I bet you tell that to all your brain-surgery patients.”

“No, really. It’s a short, simple procedure. It’ll take about an hour and a half.”

He nodded vaguely. She couldn’t tell if she had reassured him. “You know,” he said, “I don’t really think it will happen. I keep thinking tomorrow morning at the last minute they’ll come in and say, ‘You’re cured, Mr. Benson, you can go home now.’ ”

“We hope you’ll be cured by the operation.” She felt a twinge of guilt saying that, but it came out smoothly enough.

“You’re so goddamned reasonable,” he said. “There are times when I can’t stand it.”

“Like now?”

He touched the towel around his head again. “I mean, for Christ’s sake, they’re going to drill holes in my head, and stick wires in—”

“You’ve known about that for a long time.”

“Sure,” he said. “Sure. But this is the night before.”

“Do you feel angry now?”

“No. Just scared.”

“It’s all right to be scared, it’s perfectly normal. But don’t let it make you angry.”

He stubbed out the cigarette, and lit another immediately. Changing the subject, he pointed to the clipboard she carried under her arm. “What’s that?”

“Another psychodex test. I want you to go through it.”

“Now?”

“Yes. It’s just for the record.”

He shrugged indifferently. He had taken the psychodex several times before. She handed him the clipboard and he arranged the question card on the board, then began to answer the questions. He read them aloud:

“Would you rather be an elephant or a baboon? Baboon. Elephants live too long.”

With the metal probe, he punched out the chosen answer on the card.

“If you were a color, would you rather be green or yellow? Yellow. I’m feeling very yellow right now.” He laughed, and punched the answer.

She waited until he had done all thirty questions and punched his answers. He handed the clipboard back to her, and his mood seemed to shift again. “Are you going to be there? Tomorrow?”

“Yes.”

“Will I be awake enough to recognize you?”

“I imagine so.”

“And when will I come out of it?”

“Tomorrow afternoon or evening.”

“That soon?”

“It’s really a minor procedure,” she said again. He nodded. She asked him if she could get him anything,
and he said some ginger ale, and she replied that he was NPO, nothing
per ora,
for twelve hours before the operation. She said he’d be getting shots to help him sleep, and shots in the morning before he went to surgery. She said she hoped he’d sleep well.

As she left, she heard a hum as the television went back on, and a metallic voice said, “Look, Lieutenant, I’ve got a murderer out there, somewhere in a city of three million people.…”

She closed the door.

Before leaving the floor, she put a brief note in the chart. She drew a red line around it, so that the nurses would be sure to see it:

“I
DON’T UNDERSTAND,” THE PUBLIC RELATIONS
man said.

Ellis sighed. McPherson smiled patiently. “This is an organic cause of violent behavior,” he said. “That’s the way to look at it.”

The three of them were sitting in the Four Kings Restaurant, adjacent to the hospital. The early dinner had been McPherson’s idea; McPherson said he wanted Ellis present, so Ellis was present. That was how Ellis thought about it.

Ellis raised his hand, beckoning the waiter for more coffee. As he did so, he thought it might keep him awake. But it didn’t matter: he wouldn’t sleep much
tonight anyway. Not on the eve of his first stage three on a human subject.

He knew he would toss and turn in bed, going over the operative procedure. Over and over again, reviewing the pattern he already knew so well. He’d done a lot of monkeys as stage-three procedures. One hundred and fifty-four monkeys, to be exact. Monkeys were difficult. They pulled out their stitches, they tugged at the wires, they screeched and fought you and bit you—

“Cognac?” McPherson asked.

“Fine,” the PR man said.

McPherson glanced questioningly at Ellis. Ellis shook his head. He put cream in his coffee, and sat back suppressing a yawn. Actually, the PR man looked a little like a monkey. A juvenile rhesus: he had the same blocky lower jaw and the same bright-eyed alertness.

The PR man’s name was Ralph. Ellis didn’t know the last name. No PR man ever gave his last name. Of course, at the hospital he wasn’t referred to as a PR man; he was the Hospital Information Officer or News Officer or some damned thing.

He did look like a monkey. Ellis found himself staring at the area of the skull behind the ear, where the electrodes would be implanted.

“We don’t know much about the causes of violence,” McPherson said. “And there’s a lot of bad theory floating around, written by sociologists and paid for by good taxpayer money. But we do know that one particular brain disease, called ADL syndrome, may lead to violence.”

“ADL syndrome,” Ralph repeated.

“Yes. Acute Disinhibitory Lesion syndrome is caused
by an injury or lesion to the brain. At the NPS, we think these lesions may be extremely common among those people who engage in repetitive violent acts—like certain policemen, gangsters, rioters, Hell’s Angels. Nobody ever thinks of these people as
physically
ill. We just accept the idea that there are a lot of men in the world with bad tempers. We think that’s normal. Perhaps it isn’t.”

“I see,” Ralph said. And he did, indeed, seem to be seeing. McPherson should have been a grade school teacher, Ellis thought. His great gift was teaching. Certainly he’d never been much of a researcher.

“So far,” McPherson said, brushing his hand through his white hair, “we have no idea exactly how common ADL syndrome is. But our guess is that as much as one or two percent of the population may suffer from it. That’s two to four million Americans.”

“Gosh,” Ralph said.

Ellis sipped his coffee. Gosh, he thought. Good Christ. Gosh …

“For some reason,” McPherson said, nodding to the waiter as the cognacs were brought, “ADL patients are predisposed to violent, aggressive behavior during their attacks. We don’t know why, but it’s true. The other things that go along with the syndrome are hypersexuality and pathological intoxication.”

Ralph began to look unusually interested.

“We had the case of one woman with this disease,” McPherson said, “who during a seizure state would have intercourse with twelve men a night and still be unsatisfied.”

Ralph swallowed his cognac. Ellis noticed that Ralph wore a wide tie in a fashionable psychedelic pattern. A
hip forty-year-old public-relations man gulping cognac at the thought of this woman.

“Pathological intoxication refers to the phenomenon of excessive, violent drunkenness brought on by minuscule amounts of liquor—just a sip or two. That much liquor will unleash a seizure.”

Ellis thought of his first stage three. Benson: pudgy little Benson, the mild-mannered computer programmer who got drunk and beat up people—men, women, whoever happened to be present. The very idea of curing that with wires stuck in the brain seemed absurd.

Ralph seemed to think so, too. “And this operation will cure the violence?”

“Yes,” McPherson said. “We believe so. But the operation has never been done before on a human subject. It will be done at the hospital tomorrow morning.”

“I
see,
” Ralph said, as if he suddenly understood the reason for the dinner.

“It’s very sensitive, in terms of the press,” McPherson said.

“Oh, yes, I can see that.…”

There was a short pause. Finally, Ralph said, “Who’s going to do the operation?”

“I am,” Ellis said.

“Well,” Ralph said, “I’ll have to check our files. I want to make sure I have a recent picture of you, and a good bio for the releases.” He frowned, thinking of the work ahead of him.

Ellis was astonished at the man’s reaction. Was that all he thought? That he might need a recent photo? But McPherson took it smoothly in stride. “We’ll get you
whatever you need,” he said, and the meeting broke up.

R
OBERT
M
ORRIS WAS SITTING IN THE HOSPITAL
cafeteria finishing some stale apple pie when his pagemaster went off. It produced a high electronic squeal, which persisted until he reached down to his belt and turned it off. He returned to his pie. After a few moments, the squeal came again. He swore, put down his fork, and went to the wall phone to answer his page.

There had been a time when he regarded the little gray box clipped to his belt as a wonderful thing. He relished those moments when he would be having lunch or dinner with a girl and his pagemaster would go off, requiring him to call in. That sound demonstrated that he was a busy, responsible person involved in life-and-death matters. When the pagemaster went off, he would excuse himself abruptly and answer the call, radiating a sense of duty before pleasure. The girls loved it.

But after several years it was no longer wonderful. The box was inhuman and implacable, and it had come to symbolize for him the fact that he was not his own man. He was perpetually on call to some higher authority, however whimsical—a nurse who wanted to
confirm a medication order at 2 a.m.; a relative who was acting up, making trouble about Mama’s postoperative treatment; a call to tell him a conference was being held when he was already there attending the damned conference.

Now the finest moments in his life were those when he went home and put the box away for a few hours. He became unreachable and free. And he liked that very much.

He stared across the cafeteria at the remainder of his apple pie as he dialed the switchboard. “Dr. Morris.”

“Dr. Morris, two-four-seven-one.”

“Thank you.” That was the extension for the seventh floor nurses’ station. He had long ago learned all the principal extensions of the University Hospital system. He dialed the floor. “Dr. Morris.”

“Oh, yes,” a female voice said. “We have a woman with an overnight bag for patient Harold Benson. She says it’s personal things. Is it all right to give it to him?”

“I’ll come up,” he said.

“Thank you, Doctor.”

He went back to his tray, picked it up, and carried it to the disposal area. As he did so, his beeper went off again. He went to answer it.

“Dr. Morris.”

“Dr. Morris, one-three-five-seven.”

That was the metabolic unit. He dialed. “Dr. Morris.”

“This is Dr. Hanley,” an unfamiliar voice said. “We wondered if you could take a look at a lady we think may have steroid psychosis. She’s a hemolytic anemic up for splenectomy.”

“I can’t see her today,” Morris said, “and tomorrow is tight.” That, he thought, was the understatement of the year. “Have you tried Peters?”

“No …”

“Peters has a lot of experience with steroid mentation. Try him.”

“All right. Thanks.”

Morris hung up. He got onto the elevator and pressed the button for the seventh floor. His beeper went off a third time. He checked his watch; it was 6:30 and he was supposedly off-duty by now. But he answered it anyway. It was Kelso, the pediatric resident.

“Want your ass whipped?” Kelso said.

“Okay. What time?”

“Say, about half an hour?”

“If you’ve got the balls.”

“I’ve got them. They’re in my car.”

“See you on the court,” Morris said. Then he added, “I may be a little late.”

“Don’t be too late,” Kelso said. “It’ll be dark soon.”

Morris said he would hurry, and hung up.

The seventh floor was quiet. Most of the other hospital floors were noisy, jammed with relatives and visitors at this hour, but the seventh floor was always quiet. It had a sedate, calm quality that the nurses were careful to preserve.

The nurse at the station said, “There she is, Doctor,” and nodded to a girl sitting on a couch. Morris went over to her. She was young and very pretty in a flashy, show-business sort of way. She had long legs.

“I’m Dr. Morris.”

“Angela Black.” She stood up and shook hands, very formally. “I brought this for Harry.” She lifted a small blue overnight bag. “He asked me to bring it.”

“All right.” He took the bag from her. “I’ll see that he gets it.”

She hesitated, then said, “Can I see him?”