The Dead Zone (20 page)

“She has a phone. I was given the number.”

“Ah,” Johnny said. He was interested because he liked Weizak, but that was all. He felt no need to have his knowledge of Johanna Borentz validated, because he knew it was valid knowledge—he knew in the same way he knew he was right-handed.

“I sat for a long time and thought about it,” Weizak said.
“I told you my mother was dead, but that was really only an assumption. My father died in the defense of Warsaw. My mother simply never turned up, nuh? It was logical to assume that she had been killed in the shelling . . . during the occupation . . . you understand. She never turned up, so it was logical to assume that. Amnesia . . . as a neurologist I can tell you that permanent, general amnesia is very, very rare. Probably rarer than true schizophrenia. I have never read of a documented case lasting thirty-five years.”

“She recovered from her amnesia long ago,” Johnny said. “I think she simply blocked everything out. When her memory did come back, she had remarried and was the mother of two children . . . possibly three. Remembering became a guilt trip, maybe. But she dreams of you. ‘The boy is safe.' Did you call her?”

“Yes,” Weizak said. “I dialed it direct. Did you know you could do that now? Yes. It is a great convenience. You dial one, the area code, the number. Eleven digits and you can be in touch with any place in the country. It is an amazing thing. In some ways a frightening thing. A boy—no, a young man—answered the telephone. I asked if Mrs. Borentz was at home. I heard him call, ‘Mom, it's for you.' Clunk went the receiver on the table or desk or whatever. I stood in Bangor, Maine, not forty miles from the Atlantic Ocean and listened to a young man put the phone down on a table in a town on the Pacific Ocean. My heart . . . it was pounding so hard it frightened me. The wait seemed long. Then she picked up the phone and said, ‘Yes? Hello?' ”

“What did you say? How did you handle it?”

“I did not, as you say, handle it,” Weizak replied, and smiled crookedly. “I hung up the telephone. And I wished for a strong drink, but I did not have one.”

“Are you satisfied it was her?”

“John, what a naive question! I was nine years old in 1939. I had not heard my mother's voice since then. She spoke only Polish when I knew her. I speak only English now . . . I have forgotten much of my native language, which is a shameful thing. How could I be satisfied one way or the other?”

“Yes, but
were
you?”

Weizak scrubbed a hand slowly across his forehead. “Yes,” he said. “It was her. It was my mother.”

“But you couldn't talk to her?”

“Why should I?” Weizak asked, sounding almost angry.
“Her life is her life, nuh? It is as you said. The boy is safe. Should I upset a woman that is just coming into her years of peace? Should I take the chance of destroying her equilibrium forever? Those feelings of guilt you mentioned . . . should I set them free? Or even run the risk of so doing?”

“I don't know,” Johnny said. They were troublesome questions, and the answers were beyond him—but he felt that Weizak was trying to say something about what he had done by articulating the questions. The questions he could not answer.

“The boy is safe, the woman is safe in Carmel. The country is between them, and we let that be. But what about you, John? What are we going to do about you?”

“I don't understand what you mean.”

“I will spell it out for you then, nuh? Dr. Brown is angry. He is angry at me, angry at you, and angry at himself, I suspect, for half-believing something he has been sure is total poppycock for his whole life. The nurse who was a witness will never keep her silence. She will tell her husband tonight in bed, and it may end there, but her husband may tell his boss, and it is very possible that the papers will have wind of this by tomorrow evening. ‘Coma Patient Re-Awakens with Second Sight.' ”

“Second sight,” Johnny said. “Is that what it is?”

“I don't know what it is, not really. Is it psychic? Seer? Handy words that describe nothing, nothing at all. You told one of the nurses that her son's optic surgery was going to be successful . . .”

“Marie,” Johnny murmured. He smiled a little. He liked Marie.

“. . . and that is already all over the hospital. Did you see the future? Is that what second sight is? I don't know. You put a picture of my mother between your hands and were able to tell me where she lives today. Do you know where lost things and lost people may be found? Is
that
what second sight is? I don't know. Can you read thoughts? Influence objects of the physical world? Heal by the laying on of hands? These are all things that some call ‘psychic.' They are all related to the idea of 'second sight.' They are things that Dr. Brown laughs at. Laughs? No. He doesn't laugh. He scoffs.”

“And you don't?”

“I think of Edgar Cayce. And Peter Hurkos. I tried to tell
Dr. Brown about Hurkos and he scoffed. He doesn't want to talk about it; he doesn't want to know about it.”

Johnny said nothing.

“So . . . what are we going to do about you?”

“Does something need to be done?”

“I think so,” Weizak said. He stood up. “I'll leave you to think it out for yourself. But when you think, think about this: some things are better not seen, and some things are better lost than found.”

He bade Johnny good night and left quietly. Johnny was very tired now, but still sleep did not come for a long time.

Johnny's first surgery was scheduled for May 28. Both Weizak and Brown had explained the procedure carefully to him. He would be given a local anesthetic—neither of them felt a general could be risked. This first operation would be on his knees and ankles. His own ligaments, which had shortened during his long sleep, would be lengthened with a combination of plastic wonder-fibers. The plastic to be used was also employed in heart valve bypass surgery. The question was not so much one of his body's acceptance or rejection of the artificial ligaments, Brown told him, as it was a question of his legs' ability to adjust to the change. If they had good results with the knees and the ankles, three more operations were on the boards: one on the long ligaments of his thighs, one on the elbow-strap ligaments, and possibly a third on his neck, which he could barely turn at all. The surgery was to be performed by Raymond Ruopp, who had pioneered the technique. He was flying in from San Francisco.

“What does this guy Ruopp want with me, if he's such a superstar?” Johnny asked.
Superstar
was a word he had learned from Marie. She had used it in connection with a balding, bespectacled singer with the unlikely name of Elton John.

“You're underestimating your own superstar qualities,” Brown answered. “There are only a handful of people in the United States who have recovered from comas as long as yours was. And of that handful, your recovery from the accompanying brain damage has been the most radical and pleasing.”

Sam Weizak was more blunt. “You're a guinea pig, nuh?”

“What?”

“Yes. Look into the light, please.” Weizak shone a light into the pupil of Johnny's left eye. “Did you know I can look right at your optic nerve with this thing? Yes. The eyes are more than the windows of the soul. They are one of the brain's most crucial maintenance points.”

“Guinea pig,” Johnny said morosely, staring into the savage point of light.

“Yes.” The light snapped off. “Don't feel so sorry for yourself. Many of the techniques to be employed in your behalf—and some of those already employed—were perfected during the Vietnam war. No shortage of guinea pigs in the V.A. hospitals, nuh? A man like Ruopp is interested in you because you are unique. Here is a man who has slept four-and-a-half years. Can we make him walk again? An interesting problem. He sees the monograph he will write on it for
The New England Journal of Medicine.
He looks forward to it the way a child looks forward to new toys under the Christmas tree. He does not see you, he does not see Johnny Smith in his pain, Johnny Smith who must take the bedpan and ring for the nurse to scratch if his back itches. That's good. His hands will not shake. Smile, Johnny. This Ruopp looks like a bank clerk, but he is maybe the best surgeon in North America.”

But it was hard for Johnny to smile.

He had read his way dutifully through the tracts his mother had left him. They depressed him and left him frightened all over again for her sanity. One of them, by a man named Salem Kirban, struck him as nearly pagan in its loving contemplation of a bloody apocalypse and the yawning barbecue pits of hell. Another described the coming Anti-christ in pulp-horror terms. The others were a dark carnival of craziness: Christ was living under the South Pole, God drove flying saucers, New York was Sodom, L.A. was Gomorrah. They dealt with exorcism, with witches, with all manner of things seen and unseen. It was impossible for him to reconcile the
pamphlets with the religious yet earthy woman he had known before his coma.

Three days after the incident involving Weizak's snapshot of his mother, a slim and dark-haired reporter from the Bangor
Daily News
named David Bright showed up at the door of Johnny's room and asked if he could have a short interview.

“Have you asked the doctors?” Johnny asked.

Bright grinned. “Actually, no.”

“All right,” Johnny said. “In that case, I'd be happy to talk to you.”

“You're a man after my own heart,” Bright said. He came in and sat down.

His first questions were about the accident and about Johnny's thoughts and feelings upon slipping out of a coma and discovering he had misplaced nearly half a decade. Johnny answered these questions honestly and straightforwardly. Then Bright told him that he had heard from “a source” that Johnny had gained some sort of sixth sense as a result of the accident.

“Are you asking me if I'm psychic?”

Bright smiled and shrugged. “That'll do for a start.”

Johnny had thought carefully about the things Weizak had said. The more he thought, the more it seemed to him that Weizak had done exactly the right thing when he hung up the phone without saying anything. Johnny had begun to associate it in his mind with that W. W. Jacobs story. “The Monkey's Paw.” The paw was for wishing, but the price you paid for each of your three wishes was a black one. The old couple had wished for one hundred pounds and had lost their son in a mill accident—the mill's compensation had come to exactly one hundred pounds. Then the old woman had wished for her son back and he had come—but before she could open the door and see what a horror she had summoned out of its grave, the old man had used the last wish to send it back. As Weizak had said, maybe some things were better lost than found.

“No,” he said. “I'm no more psychic than you are.”

“According to my source, you . . .”

“No, it isn't true.”

Bright smiled a trifle cynically, seemed to debate pressing the matter further, then turned to a fresh page in his notebook. He began to ask about Johnny's prospects for the
future, his feelings about the road back, and Johnny also answered these questions as honestly as he could.

“So what are you going to do when you get out of here?” Bright asked, closing his notebook.

“I haven't really thought about that. I'm still trying to adjust to the idea that Gerald Ford is the president.”

Bright laughed. “You're not alone in that, my friend.”

“I suppose I'll go back to teaching. It's all I know. But right now that's too far ahead to think about.”

Bright thanked him for the interview and left. The article appeared in the paper two days later, the day before his leg surgery. It was on the bottom of the front page, and the headline read: JOHN SMITH, MODERN RIP VAN WINKLE, FACES LONG ROAD BACK. There were three pictures, one of them Johnny's picture for the Cleaves Mills High School yearbook (it had been taken barely a week before the accident), a picture of Johnny in his hospital bed, looking thin and twisted with his arms and legs in their bent positions. Between these two was a picture of the almost totally demolished taxi, lying on its side like a dead dog. There was no mention in Bright's article of sixth senses, precognitive powers, or wild talents.

“How did you turn him off the ESP angle?” Weizak asked him that evening.

Johnny shrugged. “He seemed like a nice guy. Maybe he didn't want to stick me with it.”

“Maybe not,” Weizak said. “But he won't forget it. Not if he's a good reporter, and I understand that he is.”

“You understand?”

“I asked around.”

“Looking out for my best interests?”

“We all do what we can, nuh? Are you nervous about tomorrow, Johnny?”

“Not nervous, no. Scared is a more accurate word.”

“Yes, of course you are. I would be.”

“Will you be there?”

“Yes, in the observation section of the operating theater. Above. You won't be able to tell me from the others in my greens, but I will be there.”

“Wear something,” Johnny said. “Wear something so I'll know it's you.”

Weizak looked at him, and smiled. “All right. I'll pin my watch to my tunic.”

“Good,” Johnny said. “What about Dr. Brown? Will he be there?”

“Dr. Brown is in Washington. Tomorrow he will present you to the American Society of Neurologists. I have read his paper. It is quite good. Perhaps overstated.”

“You weren't invited?”

Weizak shrugged. “I don't like to fly. That is something that scares me.”

“And maybe you wanted to stay here?”

Weizak smiled crookedly, spread his hands, and said nothing.