24
He was standing in the middle of the road and a black car was driving straight toward him. Its headlights were blazing right into his eyes, blinding him. He tried to close his eyes but his eyelids wouldn’t move. He struggled to turn away, but no matter how hard he wrenched his neck, his head was held fast. He couldn’t blink. He couldn’t move. Now the roar of the engine was filling his head and he couldn’t lift his hands to cover his ears and his brain was about to explode with noise and light and he wanted to scream, but he couldn’t because his mouth was gagged and his teeth seemed loose against the leather strap. And he was cold, so terribly, terribly cold…
Carver came to, his pulse racing and his throat constricted by a pervasive, unfocused panic. For a while, he could not focus his eyes, so he reached out blindly for her hand… and felt nothing.
He frowned and shook his head quickly from side to side, banishing the last bad fragments of his nightmare from his brain. Then he opened his eyes… and Alix wasn’t there.
Now he really had something to panic about. Carver told himself to calm down. There were very few things he knew for sure anymore, but one of them was that Alix came to see him every day. She had been there earlier, he was sure, and she’d be back again. It was just a matter of waiting. Maybe she was getting a meal or something to read. She did that sometimes, when she thought he was asleep. Yes, that was it. She would be back soon.
“Hello, Samuel.” There was a woman at the door of the room. She was smiling at him and her voice was friendly. But she wasn’t Alix. She was Nurse Juneau, bringing him food and medication.
She looked around as she came into the room, frowned to herself, then gave Carver another smile.
“Alix not here?” she asked perkily, then her voice took on a huskier tone: “At last, Samuel, we’re all alone.”
She looked at him over one shoulder teasingly. “After all this time-now what shall we do?”
She picked up one of his hands and stroked it.
Carver flinched at her touch. He found people confusing. He didn’t always understand what they meant by the things they said. He couldn’t work out what they were feeling when they spoke. Their intentions were unclear. He could see that Nurse Juneau was flirting with him, but he had the sense she was mocking him, too. He didn’t like that.
He decided to ignore her and concentrate on what was on his mind.
“Where’s Alix?” he croaked.
Nurse Juneau put the tray down across his bed and shrugged.
“I don’t know, Samuel.”
“Where has she gone?”
“I don’t know. Samuel,” Juneau repeated, with a little more emphasis, holding out a little paper cup in which sat three brightly colored capsules. “She’s just not here.”
She meant nothing by the remark. Nurse Juneau couldn’t see anything wrong with Alix giving herself a break. The poor girl deserved it, the amount of time she spent in this room.
But her words hit Samuel Carver like a shock from the belt that had tortured him. He gasped. His eyes widened in shock. He gripped his sheets. Then he flung his arms upward, throwing off his bed linens and sending the tray flying as plates, glasses, and cutlery clattered down onto the floor.
Nurse Juneau was used to Carver’s tantrums, his infantile fear of abandonment. But this time, she suddenly realized, his reaction to Alix’s absence had a whole new intensity.
As she screamed in alarm, Carver got out of bed, with an energy she had never seen in him before, his eyes blazing, his face twisted with a primal, unfettered rage. She backed away, but he came after her. He wrapped his fists around her upper arms, gripping them so hard she winced in pain, then he stuck his face right up close to hers and hissed, “Where is she?”
His voice had lost any trace of childlike innocence. It carried the threat of real fury, ready to tip into violence.
Nurse Juneau shook her head. “I don’t know,” she pleaded. “I promise I’m telling the truth. I don’t know where Alix has gone. But don’t get upset-you know she always comes back. Always.”
Carver threw her away from him, across the room. She crashed into the door frame, crying out with the pain of the impact.
“Alix!” shouted Carver, standing beside his bed. “Al-i-i-i-x!”
He stumbled across the room, almost tripping on the nurse’s dazed body, and headed out into the hallway.
Stabbing bolts of pain cut through Carver’s skull. His heart was palpitating. Images from his dreams were flashing before his eyes. But now, in this waking nightmare, everything was different. He knew where and when he had fought in that desert: a mission deep into Iraq in the midst of the Desert Storm campaign in 1991. He knew that he and his men had blown the cables and returned safely to base. And the woman in the dream was Alix. She’d been there, in that chalet outside Gstaad. But what else had happened there?
The memory would not come. Just another stab behind his eyes.
He made his way down the hall in his T-shirt and pajama pants, crashing into a cart laden with patients’ medications, barging past the nurse who was pushing it from one room to the next, shoving a patient out of the way as he tried to get to the stairs that led to the exit and the outside world. The dream visions had gone now and he realized he was seeing everything around him with a new clarity, born of comprehension. It was as if there had been a thick glass wall between him and the world-a wall that had suddenly been shattered. He understood his surroundings, appreciated the function and significance of things and people that had been meaningless to him for months. Above all, he understood who and what Samuel Carver really was.
From behind, he heard hurried footsteps, scurrying down the hall. He turned and saw two of the clinic’s male orderlies, men chosen as much for their physical strength as their caring natures, charging toward him. He tried to fend them off, but they ignored his flailing fists and charged right into him, knocking him over and pinning him to the ground.
A few seconds later, Dr. Geisel was kneeling beside him, holding a syringe.
“This is for your own good,” he said, sticking the needle into Carver’s upper arm.
Before the sedative hit him, Carver looked Geisel right in the eye.
“I know,” he hissed. “I know.”
Then the drugs hit his system and oblivion overcame him.
A minute later, as the orderlies were dumping Carver’s inert body back onto his bed, Nurse Juneau approached Dr. Geisel. She was rubbing the back of her head. Her eyes were red-rimmed and welling with tears.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
“I think so,” she said, wincing. “It is Samuel I am worried about. He seemed so shocked to be alone. I have never known him this bad before.”
“You think so?” Geisel replied. “It seems as though the opposite is true, in fact. One shock has reversed another. The trauma may be his catharsis. Now, at last, he has started to get better.”