Richard Preston - Panic in Level 4

I WENT BACK several times to visit James Elrod and Jim Murphy and began helping their staff with daily tasks. Elrod spat in my face a few times, and gave me a left jab to the jaw that made me see stars, for which he apologized afterward. Once, his Kevlar-covered fingers closed on my skin like pliers; he apologized while we both worked to get them loose. Murphy, at his thirty-first birthday party, planted his face in his birthday cake, then punched me in the groin so hard that I collapsed to the floor. Nevertheless, I came to like them a lot.

Murphy had a record of making trouble in shopping malls. Malls put him in a bad mood, especially around Christmastime. “Too many people around. They make me nervous,” he explained to me.

One time, his assistants took him to a mall to do some Christmas shopping. A man dressed as Santa Claus was sitting in a snow scene that day, with children lining up to meet him. Murphy told his assistants that he would like to have his picture taken with Santa (one of them had a camera). They didn’t see how they could refuse the client’s request. They parked Murphy’s wheelchair in the line of children, and Murphy cautioned the children to watch out for his arms and legs. (Neither Murphy nor Elrod had been known to lash out at a child.)

Murphy got to the head of the line. The Santa asked Murphy if he’d like to sit on his lap.

Murphy said yes. The assistants placed him on the Santa’s lap. The assistant with the camera, a young man named Dan Densley, got ready to take a picture.

“Ho, ho, ho! What do you want for Christmas?” Santa asked.

“A woman,” Murphy answered, and delivered a punch to Santa’s jaw. Santa’s beard seemed to explode, and his eyeglasses went flying. The assistants grabbed Murphy and rolled him out of the mall at a dead run.

JIM MURPHY had a passion for off-road driving, which he was not usually able to indulge. One day, I showed up in Santa Cruz in a rented Ford Expedition with four-wheel drive. A woman named Tracye Overby came along as Murphy’s assistant, while another assistant, Christopher Reeves, accompanied Elrod. Into the back of the vehicle we put a cooler holding a roast chicken and beer, and I drove the group to a dried-out lake bed near Watsonville called College Lake, which we’d heard was a good place for four-wheeling. On the way, I stopped to get directions from a California state trooper. “I would not advise going there with disabled people,” he said.

College Lake turned out to be a mile-wide expanse of clay covered with sand. The lake bed had a dark, wet-looking center and was surrounded by thickets of willows. I edged the Expedition out onto the sand, while Murphy and Elrod began to egg me on from the backseat. “Go faster,” Murphy said. “You’re driving like an old lady.” I gunned the engine, the Expedition leaped forward, and we raced across the sand. When I turned sharply, the men shouted with delight. I started cutting cookies and performed a figure eight, then aimed the vehicle toward the center of the lake and floored the accelerator. With the engine roaring, we passed the sunken carcass of a truck, buried up to its roof in clay. The Expedition began slowing down, even though the engine was running at full power. Then the vehicle began tipping over—which was when I realized that we were driving across quicksand. If we stopped, we would go down. I floored it again and turned back for the shore, but it was too late. We slowed to a halt with the engine making an extreme wailing sound and the wheels spinning. The Expedition settled down until its axles were buried; then the engine suddenly died. There was a moment of complete silence. Then the men erupted with profanities. “Jackass!” Elrod yelled.

The two helpers seemed unperturbed. “This is just the nature of our work,” Chris Reeves said. “Everything that you plan never goes as you planned it.”

I opened the door and tested my weight on the sand. At least the Expedition seemed to be floating on it. I got out my cell phone and started calling local towing services.

Elrod leaned over me. “Tell them you’ve got two Lesch-Nyhan guys in the car, and we’re going to cut your head off.”

After a number of calls, it became clear that the local towing companies wouldn’t touch College Lake. “I’ll just have to get somebody to tow me out,” one man said.

“We could call my lawyer,” Elrod suggested.

“Forget it!” Jim Murphy said. “Your lawyer won’t do us any good. Call the fire department. Help! Fire! Fire!”

I tried an outfit called Speed of Light Towing. A young guy answered the phone and said he couldn’t do it.

I told him it was a desperate situation. “I’ve got two disabled guys with me. They’re in wheelchairs and can’t walk. We’re in the middle of the lake,” I said.

“What?” he said. He needed to hear that again. “All right. I’ll try,” he finally said. I would have to pay him when he arrived, no results guaranteed.

“I’m nervous,” Murphy said. Blood dribbled out of his mouth—he was biting himself. Tracye Overby lifted him out of the car, carried him across the sand to the shade of some willows, and sat down, holding him in her lap. She wiped the blood from his mouth with a napkin, cradled his head in her arms, and began singing a song to him:

“I’m sorry, Tracye,” Murphy said.

“What are you apologizing for?” She patted his stomach.

Murphy looked at me. “It’s your fault, Richard. No more off-roading with you.” He began to laugh.

“What’s so funny?” Overby said to him.

“I’ve had enough, Tracye. I’m leaving. I’m getting out of here right now. Good-bye.” He thrashed around on his back, kicking and laughing. He couldn’t even sit up.

Elrod, sitting in the front seat of the Expedition, began laughing, too. Their laughter drifted through the silence of College Lake. The men were connoisseurs of what I had done: I had ignored the advice of a police officer and driven two disabled men at high speed into the mud. They saw something familiar in my behavior.

I popped a beer and handed it to Elrod. “Are you okay?”

“Just fine.”

I opened a beer for myself. “There’s chicken in the cooler. Do you want some?”

He ate pieces of chicken with his gloves on, and asked me not to hand him any pieces that had sharp bones.

It was a cloudless day in spring, without a breath of wind. The Santa Cruz Mountains stretched into the distance, blanketed with many colors of green. Canyons wandered down through the mountains, jammed with the dark spires of redwoods. A flock of coots burst from the willows and flew straight across the lake bed, heading west toward the sea. Overhead, violet-green swallows dodged and looped. The birds were behavioral phenotypes, their movements controlled by their genes. A streak of dust appeared in the east, at the edge of the lake, and extended toward us: something moving fast. Speed of Light Towing was coming for us. A battered pickup truck with fat tires stopped a good distance away. A young man got out. He walked over to us, dragging a chain and stomping his feet on the sand as he went along, testing the sand. His name, it turned out, was Robert, and he was the same person I’d spoken with. He glanced at the Lesch-Nyhan men. “Hey, how are you?” he said in friendly way.