Deathgrip Read online

  Donny wiped his red-rimmed eyes. “I thought she might respond, somehow, maybe. To being back home. That she might realize she was back. And it would help her snap out of it. I guess that must seem awfully naive.” His voice was a ragged whisper, and he looked six inches shorter, in no way the same man who could mesmerize an audience of thousands. “Plus, I thought I might be able to help her. But…” Shaking his head, staring at the wasted image of his wife. Half a man.

  “But you can’t.” Paul spoke bluntly, though not harshly. Even if Donny hadn’t leveled with him about his own shortcomings, Paul could never speak harshly to someone so distressed out of love. Would that he had someone about whom he could feel that passionately.

  “It’s like I told you when we first met in St. Louis. It doesn’t always work for me.” Donny cleared his throat, smoothed his mussed hair. Drew together his composure and faced Paul straight-on. “It’s a test, Paul. The Lord’s testing me in this, my faith. My faith in bringing you on with us. I think it’s His way of saying this is where you belong. Because I have faith in you, Paul, I have faith that you can bring her out of this.”

  Paul did some quick pacing, ran a hand through his hair, oh man, oh man, what if he blew this one now that the pressure to perform was truly on. He was glad that the three of them were alone up here. Gabe was downstairs, as was some nurse who had been hired to look after Amanda. Details about this were sketchy; he wasn’t even sure he wanted to know.

  But. Whatever transpired in this room would remain a secret. Something private, never intended for the camera eye.

  “A coma,” Paul muttered, moving for the bed. “This’ll be a first.”

  Staring down at her, this latest weight to shoulder and make his own. Different this time, for while they had never truly met, it was indeed personal. He felt the expectant eyes upon his back. Time folded back by months, to the day when he had stood at the bedside of a woman-child named Stacy Donnelly, bounced off a sidewalk, through a window, and into the hospital by a lunatic with a twisted mission and a car. So easy to ruin a life.

  Why me? he wondered, not for the first time. What makes me the end of their suffering?

  It had never made sense. But if you could accept on face value, explanations often became unnecessary. And sometimes even got in the way.

  Open up and let me come in, and he took Amanda Dawson’s hands in both of his own. They felt small, cool, delicate as china.

  Within himself, Paul began falling, falling, sealed off from the outer world by an internal universe made vast by a complete lack of boundaries. There was light here, but may as well have been none, for there was nothing to see. Only sensation, a fathomless span of existence muted by the inability to act, react, interact. A huge barrier built with bricks of frustration. This was different from all the rest, no disease, no invader alien to the body. No simple injury, for which time and care and pills would suffice. No. This was all-encompassing, a way of life — or lack of it — entirely unto itself. The closest thing to death he knew he was likely to experience in advance of his own, and in a strange way, it killed some of the suspense of life, solved part of the grand mystery. He knew what death must feel like. And whenever it came riding up to claim him, he would meet it without fear.

  Amanda. Yes, she was here, and was ready to come out.

  Paul opened his eyes, released her hand, stepped backward. For better or for worse, it was done. The reaction was excruciatingly slow this time, for whatever reasons peculiar to her condition. This was no lifting of a cataract, or dissolution of a tumor, or repair of a limb. This was a deliverance from the brink, and to know that it could be done at all nearly sent him to his knees — what strange beings we are, mysteries within mysteries.

  A minute or so after Paul reopened his eyes, Amanda did likewise. Both eyelids fluttering sluggishly, a painful readjustment to the light of day. Her gaze roved about the ceiling in search of something on which to focus, and when Donny went rushing to her side, she sought him out, those eyes the first spark of animation in a face that had seemed barren of life.

  “Mandy? Hon?” Donny’s voice, barely more than a whisper. “Mandy?”

  Her mouth opened, drooping a bit to the right. She uttered a mewling croak. Fingers twitched spastically, clawing weakly at the sheet beneath her. Breath quickened, became ragged with further attempts to speak. Eyes alternating from Donny to Paul to Donny again, awareness deepening with life renewed, with frustration. Amanda’s shoulders trembled as she tried to roll onto her side, one of the fiercest struggles Paul had ever witnessed, and despite Donny’s plaintive coaching, she gave up a minute later. Sinking back in surrender, tears leaking from both eyes.

  When Donny turned around, his movements were thick as syrup, as if the sluggish efforts of his wife had been contagious. His eyes belonged to a shell-shocked veteran of too many battles, witness to too much carnage. But his hands, now they were strong, and clamped to Paul’s shoulders in desperate rage.

  “What have you done to her?” Donny said through clenched teeth, past a jaw that refused to budge. “What have you done to my Mandy?”

  Once the professionals were consulted, the hard truths became evident. First from the nurse downstairs, then Irv Preston, who paid a visit and verified everything the nurse had said, and at last Donny’s mind was set at ease. Such as it was.

  Nobody, nobody, awakens from a coma feeling refreshed and ready to bound out of bed. The process is gradual, the first signs subtle: small movements, blinking eyes, attempts at speech. While thinking may be clear, mind-body coordination is fractured; hence a great deal of frustration. Eventually, they could bring broader movements under control. And despite Donny’s shattered expectations, Amanda appeared to be making remarkable progress in shaking it off, for which Paul felt no small degree of vindictive pride.

  In Paul’s absence, Preston explained some hard facts to Donny. Several hours of regained consciousness were not enough to undo Mandy’s past few months. Her brain had suffered trauma; connections would be misfiring in her head, which was normal under the circumstances. She would have to relearn processes most people daily took for granted. Her body, despite the range-of-motion exercises performed upon it, had sustained prolonged inactivity. She would need physical therapy, occupational therapy, possibly speech therapy.

  Donny was absolutely crushed. He looked like an old man, rambling about his house while its rafters tumbled about his head.

  “It was different this time,” Paul tried to explain in the privacy of the first-floor library. “Please understand that.”

  “How? How? You tell me how, Paul.” Donny was declining into a self-caricature, all rumpled clothing and disheveled hair, eyes red and glazed. Pacing the hardwood floor as if it were his final stage, Paul his final audience.

  He’d had no idea the man had been treading this close to the breaking point. Obsessive love, but for whom: his wife, or himself?

  “Different? Different? She was sick. She needed help. I asked you to give it to her. Nothing more than was expected by the hundreds of people you’ve already helped. And just look at her up there! Look at the state of her!”

  Paul, feeling that stoking of temper, “She’s out of her coma, right? So fire me, why don’t you? Maybe you don’t feel like you got your money’s worth out of me on this one.” Petty bickering, this was what it had degenerated to, but he couldn’t help himself. “How about I just reimburse you for that last paycheck and we call it even?”

  Donny stalked across the floor, which might have once glowed with a mellow coat of wax, but now seemed dull with accumulated dust. He stood before the inverted, sharp-angled U formed by the window curtains. Night had fallen a couple hours earlier, and the panes of glass were blacker than a chalkboard. Erase your life and rewrite it upon the night.

  Donny’s fist clenched on the window sill. “I wanted her well. I wanted her whole!”

  “Yeah? Then why couldn’t you just do the job yourself, hotshot?” Paul was a breath from turning around, wal
king out, heading for his room. Let the night slip away, and wait for a new dawn to set him on a different path. Close, so very close, and the ingratitude of this asshole, like to stick a hand down his—

  And then he was telling himself, Whoa, back off, back down. Temper, temper. This had been so smoothly deceptive, the first time since joining the ministry that anger had become a factor. And with it the possibility of darker tendrils gaining the upper hand. He wouldn’t have it, not that.

  Above all, he would not come close to touching Donny right now.

  “If you’re looking for explanations, I’m the last guy in the world to give them.” Paul spoke with forced calm, getting better at this. Hook him to a biofeedback machine and he could tone it down to a beat a minute. “That’s why I showed up on your doorstep in the first place, remember?”

  Donny slowly turned from the window, nodded — oh yeah, right.

  “I guess, at least in your wife’s case, I can’t just turn back time. I don’t know what she picked up down in Central America, but that didn’t seem to be the problem anymore. The coma was the problem. And I took care of that. But it could be I can’t make like it never happened to her. It’s not a disease I could cure, or an injury I could heal. She hasn’t been using her body, or her mind. Maybe those are things I can’t give back to her. Because she’s got to get them back for herself.”

  Donny stood on unsteady feet, swaying ever so slightly. Who knew what he was listening to inside his head? Mulling it all over as anger dwindled to dying embers. With the passion spent, all he had left was a countenance that appeared a decade older than it had this afternoon. Makeup, please.

  “Okay,” softly, all he said. He met Paul’s gaze, his own empty, cored-out. He walked past and opened the door into the hall, destination unknown. As he passed by, managing to whisper, “Sorry.”

  Yeah, so am I, then Paul was alone in the library, and glad of it. Surrounded by thousands of books, new and old, spines of paper, spines of cloth, spines of leather. Gold-leaf titles gleamed in the light, just blurs. So many questions, so few answers, these books merely educated speculation. They couldn’t even agree among themselves, so what fate for the sincere layman?

  A more immediate question surfaced, directed out the library door, the last glimpse of Donny Dawson: Are you even for real at all?

  Paul left, and carried it with him.

  He tried to settle into his room for the night, and it took no more than five minutes to realize it wasn’t going to work. Maybe he’d been too hasty leaving St. Louis in the first place. Nice going, trashing his job, the one thing in life he could always count on to help him vent a spleen full of rage.

  Which was not to say he couldn’t at least pretend at it here. So he grabbed a couple of cassette tapes and stuffed them into a jacket pocket, then headed out across the compound. They’d given him a key to the office and studio building along with his radio production assignment, and he let himself in. Well into Wednesday night, he should have the place to himself, and he affected a purposeful stride through the hallways of this subground floor. A few lights on, but no noise, nobody moving, just the way he wanted it tonight.

  The production booth was sepulchral in its silence. He hit the lights and slammed the door. The fluorescents buzzed overhead, a tiny sound, like a gnat, and Paul dropped into the chair. Hard to believe, seven hours ago in this room he’d actually liked it here, liked this place overall. He turned to the cassette player, popped in one of the tapes he had brought. Hit the master power on the mixing board, flicked a few switches to route the player through the system, and punched it to life.

  The music came through and he pushed it to the limits of endurance. The guitars were righteous and vengeful and aggressive. A crystal sledgehammer, sending a primal jolt through him, just like the old days, and he added the microphone into this therapeutic configuration.

  “This is Paul Handler, back on the air after hiatus,” he bitched into the mike, feeling like a fool only in the initial moment, and then it felt too cleansing to stop. “Sorry about the down time, we had a transmitter loss. I guess the hamster fell off its fucking wheel.” Damn the pain, he cranked the master volume higher, feel it in the bones. “It may not be KGRM, in fact I don’t know quite what to call it around here, but you may recognize our first soothing selection tonight as a tasty slice of lean and mean from Iggy Pop.” He’d never babbled this much over the music before; letting the music speak for itself had been an immutable code of ethics. Audience of self, now, though, and he was on a needed roll. “You trivia experts out there may recall Mister Pop’s shows of old. Genuine family entertainment from the godfather of punk, he used to roll shirtless in broken glass. Onstage! I shit you not! When somebody bleeds for you, you know they have your best interests at heart, which leads us to the inevitable question: Would Donny Dawson roll in broken glass for us? Why yes, I sincerely believe he would, the only issue being what would motivate him. Would he do it for love? Would he do it for money? Would he do it for Amanda? Would he do it for God? Phone lines are open and operators are standing by.” He dove for an imaginary phone receiver. “Say, we have a winner already! The correct answer is: None of the above! It was a trick question! Donny Dawson would do it only for himself! And what’s our lucky caller won? How about a year’s supply of sour milk from a sacred cow!” He seized the microphone, rocked back and forth in his seat to the primal rhythm. “You may ask, what motivates me? The truth is, I don’t fucking know, sometimes I really think I’m starting to scare myself. About all I can tell you is, it’s a dog-eat-dog world out there, and these days I’ve just been eating too many sick dogs.”

  And it was good, oh, so very very good, ranting to the left, raving to the right, a stream-of-consciousness tirade to purge his soul of every hypocritical ill it had suffered. Iggy Pop would approve. At last, a discernible ebb in the tide of bile, and he pushed back in exultation to whirl in the chair, feet drawn up off the floor with arms jammed aloft.

  One complete revolution, a sweeping glance of the window, oh great, this just could not be, did his eyes deceive? He’d dropped his arms by the time he made a second pass, and dragged his feet as brakes. Stop. Wobbling in the chair, staring out the window overlooking the narrow hall.

  He’d thought he was alone?

  Not exactly.

  He was quite sure his face displayed never-before-seen shades of red. For several moments, he didn’t even register the music. He recognized her at once, though he’d never seen her this close up before. He grinned sheepishly, caught with his pants down.

  Laurel Pryce was smiling uncertainly at him through the window, as if she had just heard a joke she was only half convinced she’d understood. Arms folded across herself, she looked at the booth door and pointed, arching her thick eyebrows, can I come in? He waved her onward, slumped with his head lowered to one waiting hand, man with a migraine. Why couldn’t the earth open up and swallow him this instant?

  She leaned against the doorjamb. “You do that very well. The Wolfman Jack thing, I mean.”

  His shoulders quivered, mirth in spite of himself. He potted the music down to background level.

  “When I was thirteen, my mom walked into my bedroom and caught me playing air guitar to a Kiss record. I’d forgotten what that felt like. So thank you, you’ve just given me back fifteen years of my life.” He straightened up and groaned. “I suppose this is the part where I tell you I’m not really as stupid as I must appear.”

  She flipped her head with a shrug. “Don’t go to any trouble on my account.” Touché, but it was a pleasant sort of sting.

  Introductions came next, Laurel Pryce, glad to meet you, Paul Handler, oh sure, you’re the new guy that joined on in Topeka. He was flattered; their entourage wasn’t small, and with her vocal solo spot, she maintained a much higher profile than did he. And of all the moments he would liked to have met her, this was not it.

  “How much of that did you, um … hear? Actually.”

  “Enough to get the ge
neral idea.” Laurel had a coffee mug with her, a vat of a mug, and drank from it. She smiled at him over the rim. “I knew you were a rebel. And just look at you, masquerading like such a conformist. How come you cut your hair after those first couple of weeks?”

  Paul shrugged it off. He could see a faint reflection in the booth window, his own transparent image, I can see through myself. He was hating it more and more, but time was on his side. Ah, but if only his hands were, always a catch.

  “If you really want the truth…?” And why was he so eager to surrender it, at least in part? Easy: She had asked. “I think I just wanted to disappear into somebody else for a while.”

  Laurel nodded sagely. “A lot of people here are disappearing from one thing or another.” Speaking from experience? Believe Gabe — why should he not? — and she probably was. Though he dared not ask so bluntly; he was already one up in the idiot-of-the-month sweepstakes. Two in one night would not advance the cause.

  The cause? Oh yes. Self-honesty could be brutal. He was more than intrigued, and had been for two weeks. The months of celibacy had taken their toll, though he took inane pride in, one, the fact that he still regarded his intentions as honorable, and two, his standards hadn’t slipped. Laurel Pryce had a discernable edge, yet his mom would like her. And here he was, seven hundred miles and years from home, still trying to play both ends against the middle. Pleasing all of the people all of the time.

  From his chair, Paul studied her, to see how proximity compared with the video image. Not surprising, he liked live better. Conservative dresses were fine, but there was something inherently more sensual about her faded jeans with the knees worn out and the peach sweater. She wore them more easily on a body that was tall, slender, hinting of athletic grace. Her dark blonde hair was loose, pooled past her shoulders in exquisite disarray. Smoke gray eyes, very smart, in an oval face. Low cheekbones, no exotica here, but they worked just fine.