Steven Womack: Dead Folks' blues

“Visiting hours are over, sir.” Voice clear, crisp, professional. Cold.

“I know,” I said, as warmly as I could muster. “I’m looking for Dr. Fletcher. I was told he might be up here.”

Her eyes flicked, checking for a staff I.D. badge.

“I’m a friend,” I explained. “I was in the emergency room for a bum ankle. Thought as long as I was here-”

“He’s awfully busy,” she said, even colder. Everybody got frosty when I claimed to be Fletcher’s friend.

“He won’t mind. Trust me.”

A tiny snort fled the sharply defined nose. She’d heard that line before. “He was on the floor about twenty minutes ago. Head down that hall to your right. You should catch him coming back.”

I smiled at her, not that it would cut any ice. “Thanks. I appreciate it.”

Before the words escaped my mouth, she turned and was back on the monitor. I followed her directions. A long hall was in front of me, the walls converging to a point down where the light got so dim it was only a pale yellow, with the shimmering red of an exit sign over a door to the left. I got a faint whiff of antiseptic as my heels clicked slowly on the hard floor. A door opened ahead of me, to the right, and a nurse with a clipboard and a B.P. cuff exited, made a few notes on the clipboard, then glanced past me and went into the next room.

I could hear faint television sounds coming from one of those little hospital-bed pillow speakers. The door to my right now was partially open; I glanced inside to see the flickering images of a television bouncing off the glossy wall paint, and a wrapped leg in the air at a 45 degree angle, held suspended by metal framework and a series of wires.

Still no sign of Conrad Fletcher. I was nearing the end of the hall now, a window in front of me shutting out the city’s nighttime parade. Not only was there no sign of Fletcher, there wasn’t much evidence of anything else: patients, nurses, orderlies. I gave up, turned around, and headed back down the hall toward the elevator, almost relieved that I hadn’t found the guy.

I heard a swishing noise behind me and glanced over my left shoulder. The door at the end of the hall, perhaps a dozen rooms away on the right, opened and a nurse stepped out. I thought it curious that her hands were free. No clipboard, no sphyg, no medication tray, no gear of any kind. She stepped out into the hall, stopped, and gaped at me. I got the feeling she was nervous about something. I kept walking, but tilted my head and shifted a little so I could catch her out of the corner of my eye.

She was still standing there, frozen. Then she reached up and fastened the top button of her nurse’s dress. She was smoothing down the front of her uniform when I lost sight of her for a second. She was too far away, and the light too dim, for me to get a decent look at her. I walked on a few more steps, then gave a casual glance backward to see what she was up to now.

She was gone.

I came to a full stop, turned. Yeah, she was gone. Screw it, I thought. There were a half-dozen doors she could have gone into, as well as another hallway off to my left. No big deal. I turned around. Again I heard the swishing, airy sound of a door closing behind me, all the way at the end of the hall.

What the hell?

Something wasn’t right here, so I turned and limped back down the hall, a little faster this time, headed toward that last door down the hall on my right. From way behind me at the nurse’s station, I heard the low murmur of voices and thought to myself that if I wasn’t careful, I was going to get in trouble. That’s all I needed, to get hassled by hospital security and escorted out of the building. Talk about blowing my credibility.

I was two doors away, surrounded in the hot red light of the exit sign, when I heard a sound-a rustling maybe-coming from inside the last room. And a voice saying something I couldn’t understand. A strained voice-that much I could tell-and only one person speaking. I walked farther down and I heard a rustling noise, then a squeaking like a weight being dropped on rollers.

The door was in front of me now. I reached out and grabbed the handle. Then I hesitated. What if there was a patient in there getting, like, an enema or something? My mind ran in a million different directions, thinking of all the potential medical procedures that I didn’t want to see, when suddenly I noticed-

It’s quiet.

Not a sound, not a whisper of breath, not the crunch of a disposable needle being stuffed in a Sharp’s container. No sound of hands being washed, relieved groans, drugged sighs. Nothing. Dead silence.

The handle of the door was cold in my grip. I pushed it open, just a crack. No light escaped. If there was somebody in there, they were either asleep or they liked the dark. I pushed the door open, figuring I could always act embarrassed, apologize, and get the hell out.

The light in the hall flooded the darkened room. My eyes adjusted-and I saw someone on the bed. Only his legs were dangling off the side. He was wearing street shoes and dress pants.

And a doctor’s white lab coat.

I stepped over to the bed quickly, straining to see the face across the bed. The door closed behind me, throwing the room into complete darkness. I fumbled at the head of the bed for the cord that would fire up the fluorescent light. I found the cord, but it kept dancing off my hand; it was as if I was trying to swat an insect at midnight. Finally I grabbed and pulled. The light flickered, then filled the room with a mellow blue-white light.

And there was Conrad Fletcher, sprawled out on the bed with his arms outstretched. My heart suddenly went into power stroke. I could feel the sucker pounding in my chest like a bilge pump gone wild.

I leaned over the bed, touched his face. He was cold, but shock-cold, not dead-cold. He was sweating like a wrestler, flushed. His breathing was shallow. I pulled an eyelid open, not that I knew what the hell I was doing. I’d just seen it done that way on television. His eyes were unfocused, staring ahead, pupils dilating fast. I let the eyelid snap shut and felt for a pulse in his neck. There was one, but I wouldn’t have bet the rent money on it.

“Oh, boy,” I whispered, wondering what to do next.

When out of nowhere, the sky in front of me exploded into a kagillion-bazillion sparkling lights, and I was weightless, floating high above the bed, then falling down a long dark tunnel. Just like in the movies.

The last thing I remembered was feeling myself fell forward onto Fletcher, his weight under me like an exhausted lover.

A minder squad detective once told me that most of the stuff you see in movies and read in books is complete crap.

Like this business of getting knocked out by somebody. That’s bull. It just don’t happen like that. Somebody taps you on the back of the head, you’re going to be dazed. You might stagger, maybe fell down. But this movie nonsense where somebody wallops the daylights out of you and you gently nod off, then some luscious babe waves smelling salts under your nose and you come to and go “oh, what happened”-that’s a load. Somebody hits you hard enough to do that, you’re either comatose for a month or you’re dead.

Fortunately, I hadn’t been hit that hard.

Everything went black, and I saw sparkles behind my eyelids for a few moments. I felt I was going under. But just when I lost all sense of being in the world, I came right back to it. Like diving into a black pool, then coming straight to the surface.

It was dark in the room again. Whoever decided to play thumper on my skull had yanked the pull chain on the fluorescent light. There was a rustling behind me, then a burst of hot light as the hospital door swung open. Then darkness again, and silence. I fought to turn, to get a glimpse of something, anything, as I lay there tangled and dazed on Fletcher’s body. But my brain was sending out signals my body was still ignoring.