Virtual Destruction

CHAPTER 38

Late in the evening, as the doctors and nurses and orderlies rushed around him, Duane Hopkins felt small and invisible. He wasn’t part of their concern, but he didn’t need to be.

Stevie was the one they should be paying attention to.

He had not seen his son since they had whisked him back into the examination rooms. Duane sat quietly in the blue plastic chair of the emergency room waiting area, looking at his knees. Empty sounds buzzed in his head. He wished one of the doctors would tell him something about his boy, but he didn’t want to be a bother.

The old Zenith TV in the corner of the waiting room droned at low volume, broadcasting the Home Shopping Channel. The picture showed products while the announcers discussed their amazing virtues. Duane Hopkins would never be able to afford such things, but he enjoyed watching anyway… at any time other than now.

A quiet moan of concern and fear built in Duane’s throat. The clerks at the admitting desk seemed incredibly busy, though this late in the evening nothing else seemed to be happening in the emergency room. No one else sat in the hard plastic chairs, waiting with him. Waiting.

Stevie’s day nurse and the woman from the Coalition for Family Values had been so concerned about the boy’s unrelenting cough that they had finally convinced Duane to take him to see a doctor on Monday. The physician had diagnosed Stevie’s problem as pneumonia and had given Duane some antibiotics and a strong decongestant — but Stevie seemed too weak to fight off the cough. Duane had given him the medicine and waited, expecting it to cure Stevie like magic. But it hadn’t. Stevie just got worse. The boy made bubbling, gargling sounds as he breathed.

Finally, now on Thursday night, Duane had been getting ready to go to bed when he heard Stevie choking, making loud panicked noises in his room. Duane had rushed in to find the boy blue in the face, convulsing and unable to breathe.

Duane had smacked him on the back, shaken his scarecrow body, until the boy coughed free a throatful of phlegm. Duane had bundled Stevie up in his worn maroon bathrobe and carried him out to the car. In terror, he cradled the boy’s jerky assortment of mismatched and uncooperative arms and legs, buckling him into the seatbelt.

During the drive Stevie’s eyes had looked bleary and distant, not bright and filled with the unconditional love Duane was accustomed to seeing there. This was pain and unreasoning fright, as well as a question in his eyes, wondering why his father couldn’t make things right as he had always done before.

“I’m sorry Stevie,” Duane had whispered and rushed to the hospital emergency room as fast as he could.

The doctor’s expression was grim, his voice clucking with disapproval. He wore gold wire-rimmed glasses long out of style and had a shiny pink-bald pate surrounded by a rim of mussed light brown hair. “Your boy’s lungs are filled with fluid, Mr. Hopkins. How could you have waited so long to bring him in here? This is serious.”

The doctor called a nurse and the two of them had hustled Stevie toward the swinging doors, taking the boy away from him. Duane stood up to accompany them, but the doctor motioned him back into the waiting room.

“You just give the admitting clerk all the information she needs. We’ll take care of things here.” Without another word, the gruff doctor rushed Stevie back behind gray doors that flopped back and forth on their hinges.

Duane caught a glimpse of Stevie’s head bouncing to one side, his eyes rolling toward the ceiling as if he was trying to get a glimpse of his father before these strange people took him away.

Seated on an uncomfortable stool at the front desk, Duane answered endless questions from the admitting clerk. He was distracted, confused as to why they would want so much information when all they needed to do was take care of Stevie.

Duane looked at the forms in front of him. He had no idea where the boy’s mother was. He couldn’t remember her social security number. Rhonda hadn’t sent so much as a Christmas card in seven years. He didn’t remember his insurance card number, either, though luckily he had it tucked among all sorts of other debris in his wallet, next to his membership card in the National Geographic Society and another card for the Coalition for Family Values.

He sat in front of the Home Shopping Channel, and he waited. He felt very alone. He didn’t know what he would do if anything happened to Stevie. The boy was his entire life. His heart was inextricably connected with his son.

Stevie could not live without him: Duane protected him, cared for him, loved him when no one else in the world even noticed his existence. Stevie, on the other hand, gave Duane something to live for, someone to love when Rhonda had left him and when the bullies at the Plutonium Facility made his job a daily hell.

Red-eyed, he continued to watch the assortment of jewelry and kitchen appliances. An hour passed, and still he heard nothing from the doctor, though occasionally he saw a flurry of activity in the back examination rooms.

Duane stood up, felt his knees crack, and he shuffled over toward the admitting clerk’s desk. He moved tentatively, shy — but before the woman noticed him, she stood up with a manila folder and strode purposefully back behind the counters with the file tucked between her elbow and her side.

Duane hesitated, then realized that he didn’t have the nerve to pester the doctors after all. They would come out when they had some information for him. He tried calling Gary Lesserec, who had wanted all that information about Stevie and his condition, so maybe he could help. But no one was home. Reluctantly, Duane went back to his chair.

After a few minutes he looked at his watch again. He pulled out his wallet, removing the card from the Coalition for Family Values. He was distraught. He needed to talk to someone, but he had no friends, no one he could open up his heart to.

The Coalition people had always been helpful and understanding. He rubbed the card between his thumb and forefinger to straighten the damp wrinkles pressed into it during its years of being buried in his wallet. He went to the pay phone by the wall of the waiting room and dialed the number. He squinted at the small printed words: Any time of the day or night, we're there for you with our hopes and prayers.

He thought he recognized the voice of the woman on the phone, and he wondered how many people worked for the Livermore office of the Coalition.

The group had expanded greatly over the last five years, joining other local organizations and becoming a nationally recognized religious community-service organization; but it was always the same people who brought meals and printed literature to Duane’s home. He kept the pamphlets, though he never found time to read them. He didn’t go to church either, because it was too difficult to keep Stevie quiet for an hour, so Duane did his duty by watching televised services on Sunday mornings.

As soon as he identified himself to the woman on the phone, her manner changed abruptly. Duane wondered for a dizzy instant if they’d somehow had a premonition about Stevie’s poor health — but then the Coalition woman spoke rapidly.

“Mr. Hopkins! We’ve been trying to call you this evening. I don’t know how it managed to slip our minds because we know you work at the Lawrence Livermore Lab, in the Plutonium Building? Well, we wanted to let you know that we’re bringing a tour through in the morning just as we did with the Virtual Reality chamber. You recall that?”

Duane wanted to interrupt, wanted to say something, but her words came so quickly they washed over him like an ocean wave. “We wondered if we might stop and say hello, see you hard at work. The children will be very interested in watching just what goes on at our local scientific lab. We wondered if—“

Finally, with a broken sob, Duane cut her off. “I’m at the hospital,” he said. “Stevie’s sick. He’s in the emergency room. I don’t know what’s going to happen.”

The raw plea in his voice kept the woman silent for a full five seconds. “Oh, Mr. Hopkins, I’m so sorry,” she finally said. “When did you take him to the hospital? Is there anything we can do?”

When she asked the question, Duane suddenly realized that he didn’t know what he wanted. He wanted someone to make Stevie better, to take care of his problems — but he knew that would never happen.

“I don’t—“ and then his throat clogged, constricting a sob. Just telling someone about Stevie’s condition suddenly made it more real to him, more terrifying. And he knew he couldn’t face it.

“There, there, Mr. Hopkins,” the woman said. “I’ll have someone come right over to pray with you. We’ll all pray for you. Y ou’ve got the best doctors in the area and Stevie’s fate is in God’s hands now.

“Oh, and we’ll send a message directly to our director, Mr. Unteling. You know he’s originally from Livermore, and he always takes a special interest in problems from his hometown. We’ll do what we can, I promise. We’ll have someone over at Valley Memorial to be with you soon. Everything will turn out right, if that’s the way God intends.”

“Thanks,” Duane said as he hung up.

The doctor came out a half an hour later, five minutes after a quiet young man from the Coalition for Family Values showed up. The doctor’s face wore a shadowed scowl. He marched directly over to Duane like a quarterback heading for the goal posts.

“It’s not good, Mr. Hopkins,” the doctor said without preamble, without an attempt at a kind bedside manner. His pink bald head glistened with perspiration, and he squinted through his gold wire-rimmed glasses.

“Your boy is very weak and not responding well. We’ve already drained his lungs, but I’m afraid there’s been a lot of damage. We have him on a respirator right now. It’s as if he’s not even fighting, though. He’s very frightened.”

Duane had an image in his mind of what exactly had been going on behind those gray swinging doors: Stevie hooked up to bleeping machines and gasping tubes… the doctors plunging long needles like silver spears between the ridges of Stevie’s ribs, drawing out pinkish yellow fluid from his lung tissue.

“I’m scared, too,” Duane said in a small voice.

The doctor’s expression softened just a little. “Why don’t you go in and sit with him? Maybe that’ll help.”

“I’ll wait for you,” said the quiet young man from the Coalition for Family Values.

Duane hurried in the wake of the emergency room doctor as they passed through the swinging doors. The doors made a hollow, final thump behind them.

Hours later, the life-support machines made squealing, alarming sounds that seemed to scare the spirit out of Stevie’s frail body. Duane shouted for the doctors, for the nurses, but they did not arrive until it was already too late.

He held Stevie’s scrawny, bony body as it shuddered in its last convulsions, jerking in time with Duane’s own sobs.

Stevie died at 2:48 AM.