John Saul - Black Lightning

Starting back toward the bed where Glen was still thrashing, Anne felt a sensation of helplessness such as she’d never experienced before in her life. She wanted to do something, to take some action that would help her husband. But she hadn’t the slightest idea of what was happening to him, or how to help him. Instinctively, she reached out to him, but then stopped short, suddenly terrified that anything she did might make his condition worse than it already was. The split second of indecision stretched into an eternity of terror, then the door crashed open and the room filled with people. As the nurse and two orderlies brushed by her, Anne came back to life.

“He was sleeping,” she began. “Everything seemed to be fine, and then …” Her voice trailed off as she realized nobody was listening to her. She moved closer to the foot of the bed.

The orderlies were holding Glen down now, and the nurse was struggling to cap the needle in his arm that was still oozing blood. Glen, though, was struggling harder than ever, and now she could see that he was awake. His jaw was working as grunts of either terror or anger — Anne couldn’t be sure which — formed in his throat. He seemed to be trying to jerk his arms away from the two orderlies.

Suddenly Anne could stand it no more. “Glen!” she shouted. “For God’s sake, Glen, they’re trying to help you!” As the words exploded from Anne’s lips, Glen froze, then collapsed back onto the bed. His breath came in great ragged gasps. Now that the orderlies no longer had to struggle with him, the nurse began issuing a series of orders. Almost as quickly as it had begun, the crisis was over.

“What was it?” Anne asked as the nurse reattached the last of the monitoring leads and began checking Glen’s vital signs. The nurse said nothing until she was satisfied that her patient’s pulse, respiration, and blood pressure were within acceptable parameters, then took his temperature. As she at last turned her attention to Anne, Glen himself spoke.

“Hey,” he said, his voice weak but recognizable. The sound of his voice reassuring her far more than anything the nurse could have said, Anne suddenly felt shaky. Perching on the edge of the bed, she took his hand.

“Honey? What happened?”

Glen said nothing for several long seconds. The dream was still vivid in his mind, and even as he summoned up the memory, the terror of the nightmare threatened to close in on him once again. Shuddering slightly, he squeezed Anne’s hand. “Just a dream,” he told her. “And not a very nice one.”

“A nightmare?” Anne asked. “You never have nightmares—”

“He never had a heart attack, either,” the nurse interjected. “And from what his records say, he never had anywhere near the medication he has in him now.”

Anne’s attention shifted from Glen to the nurse. “You mean what he just went through was caused by the medication?”

“Maybe you should talk to the doctor about this,” the nurse replied, wishing she hadn’t said anything at all.

“Maybe I should,” Anne said.

Now Glen, too, began to wish he hadn’t mentioned the dream. Once Anne got hold of something, she wouldn’t easily let it go. “Hey, take it easy, hon. It was just a dream, and it’s over now.” He glanced at the clock on his bed stand. “Aren’t you going to be late to work?”

“If you had a reaction to one of the drugs—” Anne began, but this time Glen put his finger to her lips to stop her words. The effort of lifting his hand took much more energy than he would have thought possible just twenty-four hours ago.

“It was nothing,” he lied. “Just a dream, and I can’t even remember what it was about.” His hand dropped back onto the bed, and now his eyelids began to feel heavy. “Just go on to work, okay? I’ll be fine.”

As his eyes began to close, Anne glanced worriedly at the nurse. “Is he all right?”

“I gave him a sedative,” the nurse replied. “I know it looked pretty frightening, Mrs. Jeffers, but believe me, he’s doing just fine. If you’d like, I can call the doctor.…”

Feeling as if she’d foolishly overreacted, Anne shook her head. “It’s all right. I guess — well, I guess I’m just not used to seeing him like this.” She got up from the bed and leaned over to kiss her husband. For a moment she got no response at all. Then Glen’s fingers closed on her wrist and she felt his lips brush her cheek. His grip eased, and by the time she had straightened up, she was sure he’d fallen back into sleep. His eyes were closed and his breathing had quieted. Relieved, she moved quietly toward the door. His voice stopped her.

“Anne?”

She turned around to find him looking at her, his eyes barely open.

“What is it, honey?”

“Did you jog this morning?”

Anne blinked. Did she jog this morning? Why on earth would he be asking about that? “Of course I did,” she replied. Then she added playfully, “Can’t get out of shape, can I? Who’d take care of you when you come home?”

Glen smiled, but it was a smile that quickly faded away. “Just be careful, okay?”

“Careful?” Anne echoed. What was he talking about? “Careful of what?”

Glen was silent, and for a second she thought he’d finally fallen asleep. But just as she was passing through the door, she heard his voice once more.

“There’re a lot of creeps out there.”

She spun around to look at him once again, but this time his eyes were closed and his chest was rising and falling with the easy rhythm of sleep. She silently pulled the door to his room closed, nodded a good-bye to the nurse at the station and left the CCU, taking the elevator to the ground floor. As she left the hospital through the main doors on Sixteenth East and started toward her car, she turned, looking up at the window to Glen’s room.

His last words still echoed in her mind.

“There’re a lot of creeps out there.”

Coming to her car, she happened to glance up at the shabby-looking brick building across the street. Someone was looking out one of its windows, and for just a second their eyes met. He was a man, perhaps sixty, perhaps much less. He was wearing an undershirt, his face unshaven and his hair uncombed, but none of those details stayed in Anne’s mind. It was the look in his eyes. He looked beaten, as if the world had challenged him and he had lost. But it wasn’t just defeat Anne saw in his eyes.

There was anger, too.

The man turned away from the window, but Anne stayed where she was for a moment, her eyes fixed on the building. It struck her that the man looked very much like the apartment house he lived in: worn-out, uncared for. Sad. Was the whole building filled with people like that, people for whom life had become one desperate day after another?

Probably it was.

Anne turned and looked back toward the hospital, where the window to Glen’s room was clearly visible. Perhaps this was what he had meant. Perhaps he had awakened early and seen someone — maybe even the same man she herself had just seen — slipping back into the structure’s unwelcoming shelter as dawn washed away the protective shadows of night.

Shivering in the chill of the morning, Anne hurried to her car and drove quickly away.

The rain began as Anne turned into the parking lot of the building Glen had always called Seattle’s ugliest. It wasn’t a point Anne was about to argue, for the building that housed the Herald had been constructed in 1955, smack in the middle of one of the dullest periods in modern architectural history. Utterly devoid of any interesting features, it was a perfectly rectilinear, five-story aluminum-and-glass box, its main facade punctured only by a pair of glass doors. As if understanding that his building was architecturally unsalvageable, the designer had made no attempt to soften the structure with lawns or gardens, and the concept of “one percent for art” had still been years in the future. Anne, like the majority of the Herald’s staff, had long stopped noticing the building at all, and most people who passed it on the street weren’t even aware that it housed one of the city’s major newspapers. If and when the park that would be known as the Commons finally metamorphosed from endless talk into a reality of trees, lawns, and pathways linking Lake Union to the downtown area, the Herald Building would be razed. No one — least of all the newspaper’s employees — would miss it.