The Resurrectionist

9

Sweeney used the stairs rather than the elevator. He took them two at a time. It was a grand staircase that wrapped itself around the elevator’s well, and he ran the last third of it. He had no idea why he was running. Not a clue why he was heading for the third floor, taking the stairs because he didn’t want to announce his approach with elevator noise.

He found them in 306. Four nurses, Romeo the janitor, one of the EMTs who had carted Danny from the airport, and a young guy in green surgical scrubs and a John Deere cap. Each was seated on the end of a bed, back to the bed’s occupant, leaning over a tray table that was covered with playing cards and money.

They all looked up as he stepped into the room but no one spoke until Romeo said, “You got to show fifty to sit in.”

Sweeney stared at him. The vague island accent was gone and in its place was an overdone street drawl, something from an early ’70s movie.

“Who’s he?” the guy in the scrubs asked and one of the nurses said, “He’s Ernesto’s replacement.”

The male nurse said, “His son’s down on one.”

Sweeney felt like they were watching him through a one-way mirror.

“Ernesto’s such a little shithead,” said a girl who looked too young to be up this late.

“Well c’mon in, for Christ sake,” said Romeo, “now you’re up here.”

Sweeney stayed where he was.

He saw Romeo look at the guy in the scrubs. Then the EMT said, “You here to play?”

“What’s the game?” Sweeney asked.

“There’s only one game at the Clinic,” said Romeo. “You know Limbo?”

Sweeney shook his head and everyone went quiet again until the guy in the scrubs crossed the room with his hand out.

“I’m Dr. Tannenbaum,” he said. “This looks awful to you, I’m sure—”

“Man didn’t say that,” Romeo interrupted. “Did you, Sweeney?”

Tannenbaum went on. “It’s really not as bad as it looks. Honestly, the game is in keeping with the mission of the Peck.”

“Listen to this guy,” said the EMT, mimicking. “Mission of the Peck.”

Tannenbaum ignored him. “We play for the patients. When the game is on, really, we become the patient. It’s an inclusive activity. We envision them wakeful.” He gestured toward a bed behind him. “Until you walked in that door, I was Mrs. Oliphant.”

Romeo had enough and said, “Yeah, and it’s Mrs. Oliphant’s turn to deal. So we got to know, did you come to play?”

There was no mistaking the question for anything but a threat.

“Not tonight,” Sweeney said.

The young nurse let herself ask, “Are you going to tell Dr. Peck?”

Before Sweeney could answer, Romeo said, “Now that’s just a stupid question, Debbie,” the sass a little too theatrical. “’Course he’s not gonna tell.”

“Just don’t bring the game to my son’s room,” Sweeney said and waited a beat before leaving the ward.

He took the elevator down to his apartment and grabbed The Big Book of Logic Problems. He carried the book back up to the drug vault and spent the rest of the night trying to work out the puzzle of the Chinese triplets.

SOMETIME BEFORE DAWN Sweeney put his head down on the counter and dozed off. He was woken just before seven by the first-shift druggist, a pale and lanky woman named Adele. They both made bad first impressions. He was asleep his first night on the job. And she struck him as yet another person who thrived on suppressing chronic anger. He decided not to linger in the vault. But before he could get out the door, she handed him an envelope from the in-box. It was sealed and his name was written across the front.

“Someone must have dropped it off,” Adele said, “while you were napping.”

He stuffed the envelope in his back pocket and left without a word.

He bought a pecan muffin and a coffee in the cafeteria, took them down to his room, and watched the morning news while he ate his breakfast. There was something comforting about listening to the catalog of the previous night’s horrors on a black and white television.

When he’d finished the muffin, he got up and rummaged around the apartment until he found a pencil in a kitchen drawer. The only other things in the drawer were a ball of wrapping twine and a bottle opener. He moved back into the living room and rotated the TV channel. It was an odd sensation, tuning the set manually, finding only a handful of stations, and watching how the reception varied from one show to the next. When he came to Limbo, he sat back down on the couch and drained the last of his coffee.

He opened the book of logic problems and began to write a to-do list on the inside back cover. He needed to stock the apartment with some groceries, open a checking account at a local bank, buy some new sheets — his old ones were for a double bed. He needed to call Dr. Lawton and remind him to forward the rest of Danny’s files. He wanted to get to the mall and pick up some new Limbo pajamas. And he had to have the phone turned on.

He closed the book and dropped it on the floor. He brought his legs up and stretched out on the couch and tried to watch Danny’s favorite cartoon through a haze of snow. He’d been making an effort for the past six months to comprehend the program, but the number of characters and the complexity of their interweaving and always-changing relationships continued to elude him. The more confused he became, the harder he studied. And this morning, studying Limbo was all he wanted to do. He’d use the show to block the growing possibility that moving Danny and himself to Quinsigamond was the biggest mistake of his life. He’d use the epic cartoon to keep himself from thinking about the pervasive gloom of the Clinic. Or the nurse and her Tabasco bottle. Or the floating card games that the patients endured, unaware, every night.

Instead, he stared at the grotesque little figures on the TV screen and tried to remember all their names.

To Sweeney, everything about Limbo was complex and unsettling. The concept was created, written, and drawn by a mysterious recluse known only as Menlo. The artwork was antithetical to the classic American style of Disney or even Hanna-Barbera. And because of this, he felt that something was a little decadent about the very look of the show. It didn’t help that the main characters were all freaks and outcasts. Classic circus numbers, disfigured and unwanted. The hermaphrodite. The fat lady. The skeleton. The Siamese twins. And the protagonist, Danny’s favorite, the chicken boy.

Sweeney first became aware of Limbo on the day Danny came home from kindergarten with a chicken boy trading card in his lunch box.

“I got it from Timmy Roache,” Danny said. “He had two of them.”

And that night, instead of reading another page of Mike Mulligan before bed, Danny had asked that Sweeney read the back of the chicken boy card.

The obsession grew out of that single dog-eared bubblegum card. And in the year that followed, Sweeney had cursed Timmy Roache more than once. It became a kind of tagline around the house. Every time Danny discovered a new Limbo card deck or comic book or videotape or board game, Sweeney would say to Kerry, “Thank you, Timmy Roache,” in a kind of mock-exasperated whisper.

In fact, he didn’t mind his son’s new enthusiasm. He saw it as a positive development. That was the line he preached to Kerry anyway. At this age, he’d tell her, it’s good to see that kind of focus and concentration. And he’s picking up a lot of new words and concepts.

Sweeney actually felt the cartoon had brought him closer to Danny. Up until the discovery of the chicken boy and his world, Kerry had been their son’s favorite. But all of those Saturday mornings, driving to the comic book store for a pack of trading cards and, if it were the first Saturday of the month, the latest issue of the Limbo comic, had bonded father and son.

Before the accident, Sweeney had never made much effort to understand the dimensions of the Limbo story line. Danny’s enjoyment of the show was all that mattered. But since the onset of his son’s coma, Sweeney had begun trying to figure out who was who and what was what inside the world of the concept.

That this was not an easy task shocked him at first. It was a cartoon, for Christ sake. Designed for and marketed to little boys. And yet, the scope and complexity of the concept was daunting. Its evolution over time was ridiculously detailed. And the intricacy of the minutiae built into the story was overwhelming.

The marketing sages who disseminated Limbo into the kid culture appeared to work in tandem with Menlo — maybe even dictated to the creator — so that the overall myth expanded with each new Limbo-inspired product to hit the street. The backstory and the various side stories all grew richer and denser and more detailed with the release of the latest card game, cereal box, action figure booklet, or text message. How, Sweeney wondered, with each exposure to each permutation of Limbo, did a six-year-old master it? And with such ease and grace?

The stories of Limbo took place in a realm called Gehenna, which seemed to Sweeney a series of enormous and decaying and desperately crowded cities separated by massive tracts of desert and swamp and forest. There was a core group of characters, a traveling band of circus freaks. Sweeney thought of them as repertory players, who surged to the forefront or faded to the background, depending upon the needs of any given story.

The freaks were led by Bruno, the bald strongman with the walrus mustache and the tattoos, the unofficial patriarch. But the heart of the clan — and the point of view for most of the stories — was Chick, the boy with the grotesque mouth and the body covered by a coat of feathers.

They traveled from city to city, often pursued by a cabal of scientists and soldiers in the employ of the heroes’ nemesis, the mad Dr. Fliess. They had, of course, all manner of adventure, traversed perils, found and lost allies, dispensed assistance and experienced betrayal. Whatever the medium — comic book, TV cartoon, or the touring ice show that had cost Sweeney a bundle — the freaks of Gehenna remained true to the integrity of their world. History mattered in this open-ended narrative. Past events had consequences and repercussions that played out in future episodes. The characters endured loss and change. The nature of the relationships within the group shifted and matured. Occasionally, someone would suffer and die.

The overall principle that gave a framework and a purpose to the freaks’ ceaseless wanderings was the quest to reunite Chick with his long-lost father. The gimmick that steered their travels was the trance into which Chick fell at unexpected and, usually, inopportune moments. This dream state was called “the Limbo” and, once in it, the chicken boy would experience visions and receive messages. These messages were delivered by a disembodied voice, which Chick believed to be that of his missing dad. The voice was erratically guiding Chick — and, so, the rest of the troupe — on a chaotic pursuit of sanctuary and, perhaps, healing. But unlike his compatriots, what Chick desired more than refuge or normalcy was simply to encounter and embrace the papa he had never known. It was a peril-ridden process and Chick had no control over any of it. And more than once, he’d endangered the whole troupe by trancing out at a crucial instant.

The whole trance shtick was the thing that confused Sweeney the most. Just when he’d begin to think he had a handle on the dimensions of the story, the chicken boy’s eyes would roll back and Bruno would look to Kitty, Chick’s love interest, and shake his head as if to say not again. Sweeney felt the same way. Because when Chick went into the Limbo, all the rules and logic of Gehenna were thrown out and replaced by a realm that was even more surreal and difficult to follow.

Danny had tried to explain it now and then, but grew frustrated with his father’s inability to remember key facts, to grasp what, to Danny, was an instinctive language of self-evident truths.

Now Sweeney had an opportunity to pay attention. To listen and look, closely and carefully. But the story made little sense to Sweeney and he was glad when the knock on the door gave him an excuse to get up and shut off the TV.

It was a disheveled young woman who looked as tired as Sweeney felt. She was dressed in a short denim skirt and a leather jacket and her hair was pulled into a ponytail.

“Are you Mr. Sweeney?” she asked.

He nodded and said, “Can I help you?”

She reached into the pocket of the jacket, pulled out a car key on a rubber fob and held it out in the air.

“I’ve got your Honda.”

“Oh,” Sweeney said, “you’re from the agency.”

She nodded and he took the keys, then hesitated a second, unsure of the etiquette here, if he should invite her in.

“Have you been driving all night?”

He saw her look past him into the apartment and motioned with his thumb. “I’d offer you a coffee, but I just got into town myself. Haven’t made it to the store yet.”

She ignored the explanation and fished, first in one skirt pocket and then in the other, until she pulled free a crumpled receipt. “You’re supposed to sign that,” she said.

“Right,” Sweeney said. “Of course.”

He left her standing in the doorway and went back to the couch, retrieved his pencil from the puzzle book, returned to the door, smoothed the receipt against the jamb and wrote his name on the bottom line.

“You’re supposed to keep the yellow copy,” the girl said, and Sweeney tore the backing sheet free and handed over its mate.

“This is a little awkward,” Sweeney said. “I’d like to give you something, you know.”

“You don’t have to do that,” the girl said. “I left the car in the lot out in back of this place.”

“Thanks,” Sweeney said, “but really, I’d like to, you know, tip you. For all that driving you did. And you got here ahead of schedule and all. But I haven’t gotten to a bank and I’ve only got large bills. What if you give me your address and I can mail something to you?”

She put a hand over her mouth and yawned, then said, “It’s not necessary. You saved me bus fare.”

Finally, he stepped back and asked, “Do you want to come in for a while? You really look bushed.”

“My friend’s waiting outside in her car,” she said. “I’ve got to cruise. You could call the agency though. Tell them I did a good job.”

“I’ll do that,” Sweeney said. “Are you staying in town long?”

“We’ll see,” she said, turned to leave and turned back to add, “Your Accord really burns a lot of oil. You should have it looked at.”

“I’ll do that, too,” he said. “Thanks again.”

By now she had moved across the storage area, thumbed the elevator, and was yawning again. She gave a halfhearted wave and Sweeney couldn’t decide if he should stand watching her until the lift arrived.

But the girl looked back at him and said, “I’m all set,” through a yawn and he closed the door. He started to put the receipt in his pocket and touched the envelope that Adele had given him up in the vault.

He pulled it free, tore it open, and removed a prescription sheet. Dr. Alice Peck’s name was at the top of the sheet, but the note underneath read

I’d like to talk to you about Danny.

I’m working third shift again tonight,

if you’d like to come by and visit.

Nadia Rey

He read it twice and reminded himself not to overreact. Back at the St. Joseph, every call, every note, every meeting had been a problem. Not once in the last year had a single request to talk resulted in good news.

He carried the note into the bedroom and dropped it on the bureau, then looked at himself in the mirror. No wonder the drive-away girl had refused to come into the apartment. He stripped off his clothes and took a cold shower. Then flopped back on the couch and tried, once again, to understand the world of the freaks.