Andrew Klavan - Nightmare City

Sitting in the armchair, Tom flinched with pain. He bent forward and grabbed his chest. It was as if he could actually feel them cutting him open, could feel them tearing his flesh apart to get at the bullet lodged inside him. The scene on the television set—the television set itself—the basement family room—everything—seemed to tumble and spin around him. Reality seemed to retreat into murky darkness. Tom felt himself fading away until his consciousness became a dwindling point of light surrounded by a vaster and vaster emptiness—an emptiness like space itself.

He blinked and shook his head fiercely, fighting his way back to full awareness. He forced himself to stare through the murk of his mind, to see the TV clearly again. Even if it meant he had to watch himself being cut open, he had to know what had happened. He had to know the truth.

But now—thankfully!—he saw that the scene had changed. The operating room was gone. Tom saw himself lying in a bed now. A number of tubes ran out of his body, out of his arm and out from under the blankets. Fluid dripped into him from a bag of some sort. A monitor was beeping by his head. A respirator was pumping air into him. He was lying in a hospital room now. Unconscious. Still.

The camera slowly drew back so that Tom could see more of the room. He saw a small wooden chair beside his bed. He saw a woman sitting there.

As he watched, Tom let out a soft groan of surprise and pain and longing.

The woman in the chair was his mom.

The sight of his mother sitting in the hospital room beside him made Tom’s heart feel tight and small. She was sitting bent forward, her head bowed, her elbows on her knees, her hands clasped in front of her as if she was in prayer. She was rocking herself back and forth, back and forth at the edge of the mattress on which Tom lay motionless. She wasn’t crying, but when she raised her eyes to look at her unconscious son, the expression on her face was awful to see. It was a look of such wasted grief that Tom wanted to jam his hand through the television screen so he could touch her, comfort her. He hadn’t seen his mom look so bad since… well, since the army officers had come to tell her that Burt had been killed in action. He wanted to call out to her, to say, I’m here, Mom. I’m not that figure on the bed. I’m right here .

But he didn’t. He knew she wouldn’t hear him. She was there, in that reality. And he was here, in this one.

So he just sat there, watching helplessly—which was so painful to him that he felt a powerful urge to close his eyes and turn away. But he understood that if he did that, the television would turn itself off. That’s what had happened before. The scenes on TV were just projections from his own mind. The set had gone dark before because he hadn’t been ready to face the whole truth. If he refused to face it now, there would be darkness again and he didn’t know if the TV would ever come back on.

He had to force himself to go on watching. It was like forcing himself to ask a source difficult questions during an interview. It could be awkward, even painful, but sometimes he had to do it. The only difference now was that he was the source—the source as well as the reporter. Watching the TV was like interviewing his own brain. He had to force himself to want the truth more than he wanted to escape the pain of knowing.

Whatever happens , he thought, whatever the truth turns out to be, it’s better to know than not to know. There’s no other way to live .

So he leaned forward in his chair and concentrated as hard as he could. He suffered through the pain of watching his mother as she wrung her hands and rocked herself, as she stared at him where he lay on the bed motionless as a corpse.

Now a new figure entered the scene. It was a man in blue scrubs—those pajama-like outfits doctors wear. He was a man in his thirties with black hair. He had bland features and pale, almost pasty skin. He wore glasses with heavy frames and blinked rapidly behind them, which made him look very young and sort of helpless. Tom knew somehow that this was the surgeon who had cut him open: Dr. Leonard.

Tom’s mother got quickly to her feet. Tom’s throat grew tight as he saw the look of terror deep in her eyes. She searched the doctor’s face for news, trying to guess what he was going to say before he said it.

“Mrs. Harding?” the doctor said.

“Yes,” Mom answered. Her voice was hoarse, almost a whisper. “What’s happening to my son? Is he going to be all right? Is he going to… ?”

She couldn’t say the word—the word die . But Tom knew that’s what she was asking. She went on searching the doctor’s face for the answer. And Tom stared at the scene on the television, waiting for the answer, too. Was he going to die? Was that what was happening to him? Was that why nothing made sense around him? Was he dying—or already dead and in some limbo waiting for God to decide whether he should go to heaven or hell? Marie had told him no, he wasn’t dead, but maybe she had gotten it wrong. Maybe…

“Your son is alive, but…,” Dr. Leonard said. He hesitated, and Tom’s mother reached out convulsively and gripped his arm.

“But what? Tell me.”

“He’s lost a lot of blood,” the doctor went on, “and I’m afraid he’s fallen into a coma.”

For a second, Tom’s mother seemed unable to understand. She slowly shook her head, narrowing her eyes.

“A coma? I don’t… For how long? Will he come back? Will he wake up?”

“I don’t know,” said Dr. Leonard. “Mrs. Harding, please sit down.”

He gestured toward her chair. Mrs. Harding sank back into it. The doctor pulled up another chair and sat down beside her. Her eyes never left his face. She went on staring at him, openmouthed.

“Mrs. Harding,” Dr. Leonard went on gently. “Your son was wounded very badly. The bullet nicked his superior vena cava—one of his major blood vessels—and punctured his lung…”

Tom’s mother made an awful noise and covered her mouth with both hands.

“While he was on the operating table,” Dr. Leonard said, “his heart stopped…”

Tom’s mother lowered her hands and said, “You mean he died?”

“Well,” said the doctor, “I suppose you could put it like that, yes. Yes, he did. We were able to revive him, but… well, until he regains consciousness, we won’t know very much about how he is or how much damage he suffered.”

“Damage?” Tom’s mother said. “You mean…”

“Brain damage.”

Sitting in the chair, watching the scene on the television, Tom groaned aloud. His mother began to cry.

The doctor tried to reassure her, touching her shoulder. “We just don’t know. We can’t tell yet. He may come out of this in an hour. And he may be totally fine. Or…”

“Or he may never come out of it,” Mom said through her tears. “He may die.”

Dr. Leonard nodded. “We can’t promise you anything. We just don’t know. Unless or until he comes around, there’s not that much I can tell you.”

Tom’s mother couldn’t take any more. She turned away from the doctor. She reached out and took Tom’s hand where it lay limp atop the bedcover. She brought the hand to her lips and kissed it and she began to weep. “My boys,” she said, her voice muffled by tears. “Both my boys!”

The doctor stood up silently and walked out. As he did, Tom saw for the first time that there was another bed in the room. Another man was lying in the second bed, hooked up to a bunch of tubes like Tom, unconscious like Tom. As his mother sobbed beside him, Tom stared at this other man in the other bed.

“What?” he said aloud.

Shocked, he realized he recognized the man in the bed. It was the lanky young man with dirty blond hair, the man he had seen in the heavenly garden looking lost and afraid. Tom saw that both the man’s wrists were bandaged.