The Sudden Appearance of Hope

Chapter 73

An ambulance on the left, the police car on the right.

Meredith screamed for a very, very long time when they dragged her off the boy she was trying to kill. She screamed until they sedated her, and lay, handcuffed, in the seat of the ambulance, its gurney already occupied with the man whose brains now showed visible and pink between the broken bones of his cranium. I stood in the crowd of onlookers, some silent, some crying, more attempting to take photos, until a furious anthropology professor roared, “If I see a single photograph of that poor boy anywhere, anywhere at all, I will bounce you! I will bounce you so hard you’ll wish you were a fucking tennis ball!!”

The professor was fifty-five at a pinch, diminutive, bespectacled and an expert in the meaning of meaning, whatever that meant. She had the lungs of an opera singer and the fury of a pitbull, and the crowd dispersed before her wrath, and so did I.

At night, I returned to the labs where Meredith had been treated, and found them empty, gone; just the smell of bleach.

I went back to the house of Agustin Carrazza, and he too was vanished, departed in a hurry, lights off, no one home.

I locked myself in a motel room, piled cushions around the doors and walls, and listened once again to the sound of Byron’s voice, turned up full, as she proclaimed, “For the sword outwears its sheath, and the soul wears out the breast, and the heart must pause to breathe, and love itself have a rest…”

Hey Macarena!

This time, the urge to vomit came entirely from me, from the experiences I, myself, had found, and not from any implant in my mind.

Then I put on recordings of every Wordsworth and Lord Byron poem I could find, and lay back on the bed to listen to them all, and had no adverse response to either, and kept the clock in my line of sight to ensure I lost no time.

After six hours of poetical digestion, I put my running shoes on, and went to visit Meredith in the hospital.

They had her in a private room, handcuffed to the bed. A sleepy man in a blue cap sat watch outside, empty paper coffee cups crushed on the chair beside him, a packet of tortilla chips nearly finished, a nicotine stain around his fingers. I stole a nurse’s badge from a woman in oncology, scrubs from a surgical ante-theatre, and a clipboard off the end of a bed. I tied my hair back, smiled at the policeman by the door, who didn’t bother to check my badge as he let me in.

Meredith was dozing the fitful sleep of a woman unlikely to sleep well again. I sat down beside her, woke her gently, my hand on hers, and at her start said, soft, East-Coast American, “It’s all right. I wanted to check on how you were doing.”

“Is he dead?” she asked. “Did I kill him?”

“No.”

“Christ! Christ oh God Christ…”

Relief, I thought, in her face, but there was too much anxiety to let the relief last long. “Meredith,” I said, “the doctor needs to know if you’re on any other medical protocols. Have you been having any sort of treatment for other conditions?”

“Treatments? No.”

“There are needle marks in your arm.”

“Oh… yeah, sure… I gave blood, or something.”

“There’s more needle marks than that.”

“I… I’m not having any treatments.”

Either a damn good liar, or she can’t remember. “Do you remember an industrial estate out towards Walnut Creek? People in overalls, a reclining chair?”

“No. I don’t. Why, is there… did I do something? I mean… did I… is there…”

Words trail off. She has no idea.

The girl has no idea at all.

“No,” I breathed, pushing the dishevelled hair back from her blotched face. “It wasn’t you — not you at all.”

I let myself out, and didn’t smile at the cop on my way to the exit.