Лоуренс Блок - Random Walk - A Novel for a New Age

And then he felt that she was gone. She still sat in the chair, but she had left him.

After an hour or so, her son Thom took over and Guthrie picked up his own pace and joined some of the others further ahead. Someone else spelled Thom after another hour, and so it went, with someone always ready to take over the solitary task of pushing Sara’s chair.

At first she was the subject of a good many conversations, the focal point of much of the group’s attention. But when nothing happened, when she continued to sit motionless in the chair as the miles rolled away, when not even the person who pushed her had any real sense of her presence, people stopped talking about her and paid less attention to her. When they made camp the first night there was some discussion as to whether she should be left in the chair overnight. Guthrie decided against moving her. Since she could not be described as awake, there was no reason to assume she would need to sleep. They stationed her chair where she was unlikely to be disturbed, and in the morning she was as they had left her, with no visible change in position or attitude.

She was breathing. Her respiration was very shallow, and at one point Guthrie borrowed a pocket mirror from Georgia Burdine to make sure that she was breathing at all. She produced just enough breath to fog the mirror. Afterward, he wondered what he would have done if the mirror hadn’t fogged. She had to be sustaining life if she was breathing, but the reverse didn’t necessarily follow; for all he knew, she could enter into a state of suspended animation in which breathing was as unnecessary as eating and drinking seemed to be. So, he decided, he probably would have done nothing if she were not breathing — but it was reassuring to know that she was.

Toward the end of the third day, with Douglas pushing the chair, her body trembled profoundly. Then she sighed. While Douglas was trying to decide whether it was appropriate for him to say anything, she spoke his name.

“Yes, it’s me, Sara,” he said. “But how did you know?”

“I looked down and saw you. On my way back.” Her voice was very faint. “Did you push me all the way, Douglas?”

“Oh, gosh, no. I took over for Bud about forty minutes ago. Just about everybody’s had a turn.”

“How long was I gone?”

“Gone?”

“How long have I been in the chair?”

“This is the third day.”

“That long,” she said. “Or that short. There was no time where I went.”

“Where did you go?”

“Far away,” she said. Her voice still sounded slightly disembodied. “I’m thirsty,” she said. “Could I have a sip of water? Thank you. Where are we? Are we still in Montana?”

“Oh, very much so. We’ll be in Montana for a good long while yet.”

“That’s nice,” she said placidly. “I think I had better rest. Thank you, Douglas.”

When they made camp that night she got up from her wheelchair and announced that she wouldn’t need it anymore. Al said he certainly didn’t have any use for it, and they decided to abandon it at roadside. “You don’t see a whole lot of abandoned wheelchairs,” Jerry told Sue Anne. “It’s not like umbrellas, with people constantly forgetting them in restaurants.”

Guthrie had come over to say a few words to her as soon as he learned she was conscious. Then he left her alone until everyone had settled in for the evening. After dinner he watched the smoke from the cookfire for a few minutes. Then he found Sara and took her by the hand. They walked off a little ways, and he studied her face and looked into her sightless gray eyes. She looked different, he thought. There was a weightlessness about her, as if she had not entirely returned to her body, and at the same time he felt an air of preoccupation, of concern with matters of great importance.

“Well,” he said. “It’s good to have you back.”

“It’s good to be back.”

“Where’d you go? Did you have a vision?”

“Did I? I don’t know if it was a vision. It seemed like rather more than that. I got what I set out for.” Her smile looked sad to him. “As for where I went, I don’t really know. I was gone from my body the whole time.”

“I could tell that. I was beginning to wonder if you were planning to come back.”

“I went to some… other place. I saw things, I was told things. I was given to understand things.”

He waited for her to say more. When she didn’t, he said, “Well, they didn’t stop the carnival just because the fortune-teller was taking a trip. We had a lot of things happen while you were out there. Douglas was pushing you when you woke up. Did you notice anything different about him?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Well, maybe it’s not the sort of thing that shows up in a person’s aura.”

“Wait a minute,” she said. “He was walking normally, wasn’t he?”

“Uh-huh. That little limp of his went away. His hip went and healed itself.”

“I guess he was ready to let go of whatever he was holding. It doesn’t matter what it was. You don’t have to sift through the garbage on the way to the dump, you know. Just so you haul it there and get rid of it.”

“So you’ve said.”

“Have I?”

“Sara, you sound tired. Want me to let you get some sleep?”

“No, I’m fine. I am tired, but I’m not ready to sleep yet. What else did I miss? I might as well have been on the other side of the world, you know, for all the sense I had of being here. What else went on? Are there many new people?”

There were a few, and he told her about them. And there had been some breakdowns and breakthroughs, and a healing or two on the physical level, and he brought her up to date.

“And you remember Bud,” he said. “Don’t you?”

“Of course I remember Bud. Richard’s father, Ellie’s husband. How could I not remember Bud?”

“I didn’t think you’d forgotten him, Sara. What I was wondering was if you remembered what he looks like. I never know exactly how much visual sense you have of people you’ve never actually seen, not with your eyes. I know you see them with another kind of vision, but does that show the same things I see? For example, when you looked at Bud did you notice he was missing a front tooth?”

“Yes,” she said. “In fact I remember thinking that he ought to replace it. It shows whenever he smiles, and he has a beautiful smile otherwise.”

“Well, he’s replacing it. Without visiting a dentist.”

“He’s growing a new tooth?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Oh, that’s wonderful, Guthrie.”

“He had this soreness in his gum, so somebody took the pain away for him, and then it came back as the tooth kept cutting through the gum, and somebody took the pain away again, and then he stuck his tongue in the gap and noticed something poking on through.”

“That is just marvelous.”

“And you know Jody’s tattoo?”

“The spider? It’s one of the last things I saw with my eyes. And I saw it when I scanned him; I saw him getting it in Seattle. What about it?”

“It’s almost gone. Jody is absolutely dumbfounded. He says evidently he doesn’t need it anymore, and he’s all right about it. But who ever heard of the spontaneous remission of a tattoo?”

“That is so exciting,” she said.

“Is it? I mean, I think it’s something you could send in to Believe It or Not, but how important is it in the overall scheme of things? Jody doesn’t mind losing the tattoo, even if he is a little wistful about it, but he didn’t mind having it, either, so—”

“No, that’s not the point,” she cut in. “It’s a miracle.”

“We’ve been turning out miracles every day, Sara. What’s different about this one?”