The Resurrectionist

28

Later, he thought he could remember being carried. He thought he could remember the sound of a doorbell, but muted, as if the chime were ringing underwater. And maybe he heard an engine throttling up as it receded into the distance. That was about it. The whole of the world was reduced to sound.

Vision didn’t return for hours. The first thing he saw was Alice Peck’s face. She was hovering over him, pulling something cool and damp across his forehead. Then he was out again for a while, until he heard pages being turned. He opened his eyes to see Alice sitting on the edge of his bed, reading the final issue of Limbo. He tried to speak but nothing came and the effort revoked his consciousness once more.

When he returned it was to the smell of chicken soup. He blinked and brought the bowl into focus. It was on the nightstand, steaming, and Alice Peck was stirring it with a spoon. She lowered herself to the mattress, brushed the backs of her fingers against his cheek.

“Do you think you can eat?” she said. “It’ll help to eat.”

He nodded, tried to sit up, and failed.

Alice lifted his head from the pillow with one hand, brought some broth to his mouth with the other. He slurped it, let it pool in his mouth and then slide down the throat. The effort was exhausting, even with Alice’s support. She sensed this and eased him back onto the pillow.

“How long?” he asked. The words came out as a croak.

“I found you on my doorstep,” she said, “about six hours ago.”

“Danny,” he said.

“Danny’s fine,” she said. “He’s up in his room and he’s fine.”

And now he thought to look around. He was in his own bed, in his room in the basement, dressed in clean sweatpants and a T-shirt.

“Lucila gave me a hand getting you down here,” Alice said. “No one else saw you. And I didn’t get a look at whoever dropped you off. They were gone by the time I got to the door.”

She reached out and pulled a bottom lid low and studied Sweeney’s eye. She said, “More soup?”

He shook his head and said, “Danny.”

Alice nodded. “I know. We’ll get you upstairs to see him as soon as possible. But he’s okay, I promise you.”

He tried to sit up and she stopped him with a hand on his chest.

“I’ve called you in sick,” she said. “Can you tell me what happened?”

He opened his mouth and managed only, “Danny.”

She fed him another spoonful of soup, spilled most of it down the chin and mopped it up with a facecloth.

“Your blood pressure’s back to normal,” Alice said. “And so are your pulse and your pupils. You had me a little worried when you first arrived.”

He said, “Danny,” one more time and then he fell back to sleep.

ALICE WAS GONE when he woke up again. Nadia had taken her place. She was seated on the edge of the bed, reading Limbo. Without taking her eyes from the comic, she said, “I didn’t think you’d ever come around.”

When he didn’t respond, she put the book down and studied him.

“First time can be overwhelming,” she said, all tender concern, which was not her strong suit. “But you’ll get used to it.”

He forced an elaborate swallow and said, “Last I checked, my door had a lock.”

She shrugged.

“I thought you’d be expecting me,” she said. “Besides, locks are for the frightened. And you’re not frightened anymore, are you, Sweeney?”

She looked a little haggard, he thought. Her eyes were dim and her hair was pulled back and limp. In a pair of jeans and a sweater, she looked more like a fatigued soccer mom than the matriarch of a biker tribe.

“Alice will be back soon,” Sweeney said, his voice still a croak but getting stronger.

“No she won’t,” Nadia said. “Alice is upstairs telling Daddy that you’re an addict and a menace to yourself and your boy and the Clinic. So let’s get your ass in gear because we don’t have a lot of time here.”

He wondered for a second if this might be true. Then, more quickly than he intended, he said, “You can’t have my son. I won’t let that happen. You’ll have to kill me first.”

“For a pharmacist,” Nadia said, “you’re a dramatic little fucker. No one wants to kill you, Sweeney. You know that now, don’t you? You’ve been there. You’ve talked to Danny. You know it’s real.”

He shook his head and felt his stomach seize up.

“I don’t know what that word means anymore,” he said and the weight of the fact made his whole body slump, as if it were about to cave in on itself.

“That’s progress,” Nadia said, nothing flippant or ironic in her voice. “But you still have to make a move here. You no longer have the luxury of being stuck, Sweeney. You need to make some choices. Right now.”

“I throw in with you—” he said.

“Or you throw in with Peck,” she finished.

“Either, or,” he said, as if repeating the lyric of a well-known ballad.

“What would Danny want you to do?” Nadia asked. “What did he tell you?”

He struggled to sit up and they stared at each other.

“The Sheep told me,” Sweeney said. “About the way things work. How you move from clinic to clinic. How you harvest from the patients till they’re all used up.”

She nodded. “I told him to tell you.”

“But why?”

“So that when the time came,” she said, “you’d be able to make the right decision. For yourself and for the boy.”

One of her eyes twitched and Sweeney sensed that the depth of her exhaustion rivaled his own. And at the heart of the exhaustion was a desperate impatience that she was straining to contain.

“And you’re telling me the time has come,” he said, pushing her.

“There’s a window,” Nadia said, “when each coma patient is viable. That’s not my fault. You can only draw for so long from any given source. We don’t know why that is, though the Sheep has some interesting theories.”

“And after that window closes?” Sweeney asked.

“The soup becomes progressively less potent. Until it expires completely. Until it just doesn’t work anymore. That’s why we have to move from clinic to clinic.”

“And what happens to the patient at this point?”

Another shrug.

“And Danny?” Sweeney asked. “Is he about finished as a source?”

“It’s hard to say. He could last another week or another year.”

“And once he’s finished—”

“He’s finished,” Nadia said. “Once you deplete the source, it’s retired. There’s no more contact. He can’t wake into this world,” indicating the bedroom with her hands, “and he can’t bring you into his world. The patient can’t commune.”

Coming from her mouth, the last word sounded like a medical term somehow. As if it were a natural function of the body, a reflex, some thoughtless response of the nervous system.

“I just want him back,” was all Sweeney could think to say.

“You can visit with your boy,” Nadia said. “We’ve shown you that.”

“But I want him back permanently,” Sweeney said. “In my world. The way he was.”

“That,” Nadia said, “you can’t have.”

“I could still give him to Peck. Let Peck perform the procedure.”

“You could,” Nadia said, unfazed. “You could let the doctor put his needle in Danny’s brain. Shoot the head full of stem cells and the rest of his shit. Might even work. But who would Danny be when he woke up?”

“He’d be my son,” Sweeney said.

“No he wouldn’t,” Nadia snapped, her impatience breaking through. “Restoring consciousness doesn’t restore Danny. It doesn’t. Danny knows that. He told you that. Look, Sweeney, I don’t know what else to do with you. We showed you the other side. You met with your son. What more do you need?”

“But Peck—”

“Peck can’t help you, Sweeney. You leave the boy with Peck and you’ll lose him. Period. You’re out of time. Listen to your boy if you can’t listen to me. They’re upstairs now, sharpening the knives.”

And he had no idea if she meant this literally.

“But I haven’t signed the release,” he said and realized, as the words came out, how foolish they sounded.

Nadia waited a few beats and then, in a low voice, she said, “C’mon, Sweeney, make the fucking leap already.”

He took a breath and held it, ran his tongue around the dry well of his mouth. He thought about Danny. He thought about his son on the last day of his old life, enraged at a story that didn’t turn out the way he wanted. He imagined his son, encased in feathers and waiting for a father who would not return.

He said, “Get me up. Then you can help me pack while you tell me what I have to do.”

Nadia stood and smiled as she pulled back the covers. Sweeney looked past her and saw that his bags were already waiting by the door.