The Phantom Limb (11 page)

He remembered the sensation of his own room closing in on him. It had been very scary. Escaping from a room that was getting smaller and smaller made him think of something else he had seen in his collection: the Menger sponge—the cube that was made out of holes and had infinite surface area and zero volume. If you were inside it, every space you entered would be smaller than the one you had left.

His head began to nod. It was only nine thirty in the evening, but he'd had a long and eventful day. Maybe if he went to bed now he could get up early and concentrate on his homework then. He undressed, turned off the overhead light, and got into bed. He tried to read a little more, but his eyes kept slipping shut. The book dropped out of his hand. He fell asleep with the reading light on.

And then he had a dream. He was in Vera's room at the hospital. But the room had no window. A fire was burning in the wastebasket. Bright flames jumped
from the wastebasket and ran up the curtains next to the bed. Vera was lying in the bed, asleep. She was drugged again. Isaac remembered the little girl he had seen in his mirror box dream and the way she had seemed to be preparing to start a fire.

In his dream, Isaac tried the door. It was locked. Someone had started the fire and then locked them in the room.

He looked up frantically. On the blank wall he could see the Menger sponge. He pushed his hand against the wall. His arm went through it easily. He could go into the Menger sponge! The room there would be smaller, but it would not be on fire. He had to pull Vera into the Menger sponge and out of the burning room.

He lifted Vera out of the bed. She was as light as a feather. He slung her over his shoulder and moved toward the wall, one arm holding her, the other held in front of him. His arm went right through the wall. They were going to get out!

But when Vera's leg touched the wall, it wouldn't go through. Isaac had access to the Menger sponge, but Vera's inert body didn't. Vera was trapped in the room. He couldn't save her. He felt the flames against the back of his legs. Vera's hair was engulfed
in flames now. He pushed her against the wall again and again, but she couldn't fit through it. They were both going to burn to death.

At that moment, he woke up. Luckily, he managed not to scream and wake up Grandpa. He lay in his bed panting, still filled with the horror of the dream.

The nightmare had been bizarre and terrifying. But it still meant something. It was telling him, with more force than ever, what he already knew: he had no time, and he had to act now.

He was wide awake and anxious. He knew he wouldn't be able to get back to sleep. He looked at his watch. It was four thirty
A.M.
He had to make a plan for using the spiral aftereffect. He had to do it today, after what he had just seen in his dream. He had to use the spiral aftereffect on whoever had put in the amputation order—Dr. Ciano or whoever was responsible. He had to get to the hospital.

Where, he figured, more trouble would be waiting for him.

Isaac skipped breakfast and went directly to the hospital. He didn't see Candi at the nurses' station. It must still be the night shift. He went to Vera's room and found that she was sleeping. He wanted to get
out as quickly as possible, but he felt he should stay and try to learn more. He began washing his hands. He thought he heard muffled footsteps. But before he even had a chance to look, he was jabbed again, and darkness slammed down on him.

This time he woke up sooner—he was still in the elevator. This one wasn't so small. It was big enough to hold a gurney. He struggled to sit up and look. He could see that the button for the basement was lit. When the elevator doors opened, the orderly pulled the gurney into the small dark corridor he hated so much.

“What's happening?” Isaac asked, his voice rising in panic. After the endoscopy, he knew this was going to be torture.

“MRI,” the orderly said, not explaining what that meant. “Here we are.”

The door that said MRI led to a suite. In the first room the orderly, who was tall and strong, helped him off the gurney and motioned to a desk. The woman behind the desk handed Isaac a form on a clipboard.

Isaac threw the clipboard to the floor. “There's nothing wrong with me!” he said. “Someone's trying to hurt my mother and get back at me.”

The orderly thrust the clipboard back at Isaac. “I'll stand here all day until you sign this.”

Reluctantly, his hands shaking, Isaac signed the form.

The orderly did not leave—he was going to be there throughout the procedure, Isaac guessed, to keep him from escaping.

A man in a white lab coat emerged from an inner doorway. “Come with me,” he said. “First the locker room, where you change into a hospital johnny and lock up your clothes and valuables—your wallet, your watch, your keys, everything. Then across the hall to the MRI machine.”

“This is crazy!” Isaac shouted. “Who's responsible for this? I said there's nothing
wrong
with me.”

The man shrugged. “Orders from upstairs. We do what they say. This way, please.”

Isaac knew the hospital was short-staffed and that people were always rushing around and taking care of hundreds of patients. It would be easy for someone to sabotage a single patient.

Isaac wanted to run for it. He was sweating. But the orderly was right there.

The locker room was small, the lockers half-sized. The man left him alone after telling him the
instructions, but the orderly stayed. Isaac took off his clothes and stuffed them into one of the small lockers. He had a terrible sinking sensation. This was going to be bad. He knew it.

The room across the hall had a control panel and a large window looking into the adjoining room, which contained a metal cylinder big enough for a person. Isaac couldn't help thinking of a coffin. “You just go in there and the nurse will help you,” the man said. He was seated at the control panel. The orderly stood beside him, watching Isaac closely.

Isaac dragged himself into the room, his eyes focused on the metal cylinder. There was a hole in it big enough to go through, and a gurney to lie down on coming out from the hole. There was no doubt in his mind—he was going to have to go inside that cylinder.

He panicked. He felt as if he was going crazy.

“I … I don't have to go
inside
that thing, do I?” he asked the nurse, trying to keep his voice from shaking.

And then he recognized her. She was the odd woman who had “accidentally” come into Vera's room, the same one who had smiled strangely at him after the endoscopy. What was she doing here? Was
she part of what Isaac was beginning to feel was a conspiracy against him? Maybe the mystery woman and Dr. Ciano were in this together. And could there possibly be another person involved … making it a “triad”?

She smiled and touched his arm, as if she had known him for a long time. “It's only for twenty minutes. Most people have no trouble at all. Just try not to move a single muscle so we can get some good pictures … or else we'll have to do it again. Now, just lie down here.” She patted the gurney attached to the machine. The pillow for his head was right at the opening in the machine.

“I have to go in
head first
?” Isaac said, trembling.

The nurse smiled. “Just lie down here and get comfortable.”

Isaac could barely stifle a groan. He lay down on the gurney with his head on the pillow, his heart thumping so loudly it seemed to fill the room.

The nurse took some little rubber things and inserted them into his ears. “Earplugs. The machine gets a little noisy. Ready now?”

1saac wanted to answer, “Not on your life,” but how could he get away now? He could see the orderly, still guarding him, through the large window over
the control panel in the next room. It was the only way out.

The nurse pressed a button somewhere. The gurney began sliding slowly into the cylinder. Every second Isaac felt his panic rising. He wanted to kick and scream, but if he moved, they'd have to do it all over again. He had no idea how much time was going by and how soon it would be over.

He'd been inside the thing for only a few seconds and already sweat was sliding down his forehead into his eyes, making them sting. But he couldn't move his arm to wipe it away. He tried not to hyperventilate, so his chest wouldn't move. He felt that at any second he was going to have a seizure, like Vera, or scream, or throw up.

Why hadn't they offered to give him something to knock him out? It felt exactly the same as when they hadn't given him a sedative for the endoscopy.

Then there were noises all around him, weird, unearthly noises unlike anything he had ever heard before. Deep rumbling, like thunder, turning into a high-pitched screeching that penetrated painfully through the plugs in his ears. He held his body as tightly as possible, feeling the sweat oozing down his sides now. Soon his hospital gown was soaking wet
and his eyes were stinging more than ever. It felt as if he'd been in here for hours.

“Only fifteen minutes left,” a voice said through a loudspeaker inside the machine.

Fifteen more minutes? How could he stand this? He squeezed his eyes shut, so he wouldn't see how close the top of the cylinder was. He desperately needed to stifle the painful stinging. He did everything he could to imagine he was somewhere else. But all that came into his mind was the Menger sponge, the strange fractal object in which every chamber was smaller than the one before. And that only made it worse.

He tried to think of riding his bike, of trees and the sky. But the Menger sponge kept swimming back into his mind. His muscles were aching now from holding them so rigidly. It felt like hours were going by in this hell. How could he take this? How
could
he? How—

The noises stopped. And finally,
finally,
the gurney began sliding out of the cylinder.

Isaac was a wreck. He was so limp, the nurse had to help him climb down off the gurney. The man in the white lab coat told the orderly to get a wheelchair and then took Isaac into the locker room, where, with shaky hands, Isaac slowly got into his clothes.

As the orderly wheeled him to the elevator, Isaac gradually began to recover. He knew that the more he hung around the hospital, trying to figure out what was really going on, the more they would find ways to torture him.

He and Vera had to escape tomorrow.

 

SAAC GOT TO THE HOSPITAL EARLIER THAN ever the next day, at six. He felt shaky about going there at all, afraid of what they might do to him this time, but he knew he had to force himself to go. He was getting more and more worried about Vera.

He brought the spiral aftereffect with him, carefully wrapped and taped in its box, the box itself wrapped in a towel. He fitted it snugly into his bicycle basket. His schoolbooks and unfinished homework weighed down his backpack as he rode.

Nurse Vicky was at the station. “Is the doctor here yet?” Isaac asked her.

Vicky checked a chart on the wall behind her. “The doctor doesn't get here this early.”

“Is Candi here?” Isaac asked.

“Candi changed shifts today. She's in the ER and won't be up on this floor at all,” she said, smiling pleasantly.

Did Vicky know what was happening to Vera? Could Isaac trust her? He wasn't sure, so he continued on to room 638 without saying anything more.

Isaac found Vera awake, staring at the ceiling. She was looking worried and vulnerable. She seemed more alert than she had been in the last few days. Was it because Dr. Ciano wasn't there to dope her into submission? When she saw Isaac in the doorway, her pale, shrunken face broke into a big smile. “Ize! Where've you been?”

“I've been here. But you've just been asleep—drugged out,” he said as he washed his hands.

“I want to go home, Ize.”

“I'm working on it, Mom. We'll get you home. Grandpa's even been helping me around the house, can you believe it?”

He walked over to the bed. He felt a chill when he saw that there was a bigger, thicker bandage on her arm where the bruise was. Was the bruise larger and
deeper now? His mind flashed back to the little girl and her doll. Was someone purposefully enlarging the bruise while Vera was knocked out?