Maureen Johnson - The Madness Underneath

That’s when I thought I was really going to lose it. That’s when the bile came up the back of my throat and there was a roaring in my ears and I wanted to be anywhere but in this terrible room. I wanted to erase the last few months and run back to Louisiana and be back in my bed at home.

“What happens?” Thorpe asked the doctor. “When the machine is off?”

The doctor had positioned himself discreetly in the corner of the room, his arms folded in gentle, professional resignation.

“The body takes over. Things take their course. It can be minutes or hours.”

Thorpe nodded and sniffed once, then looked at the rest of us.

“We’ll need a few moments to talk,” he said to the doctor.

The doctor excused himself again. Thorpe came to the foot of the bed and looked long and hard at Stephen.

“You’ve talked?” he asked us quietly. “I think we all know what he would say.”

Our silence confirmed this.

“This should never have happened,” Thorpe said. “I should never have allowed it to happen. It all went too fast. There should have been more time, more training…”

He trailed off, and shook his head once.

“I can speak to the doctor,” he said. “I can…”

I missed the rest of what he said, though I got the gist that it was something about dealing with actually giving the order and saying he was Stephen’s uncle. I was distracted by what I remembered. I remembered being on the floor of the bathroom, after the knife had gone in. I remembered the curious feeling of the wound. My body, unable to make tactile sense of the slash, told me it was an itch with a faint tingle. The blood was coming out so quickly—it couldn’t possibly be mine. And through the roaring in my ears, I heard Newman explain to me what he was going to do. He gave me the terminus and he told me that he had a theory—a little theory—that people with the sight who died with a terminus might come back.

“I can fix this,” I said. It was sudden. It just popped out of my mouth, and it got everyone’s attention.

“What?” Thorpe said.

“I can fix this,” I said again. “Newman…he had a theory…about people who had the sight. If they died in contact with a terminus they might…”

Callum stood, and the look on his face was like thunder.

“No,” he said. “No.”

Boo leapt up right after, but there was a very different expression on her face. Her face said yes.

“What are you saying?” Thorpe said. “You can keep him from dying? You can…”

“She’s saying she wants to keep him here by making him some thing that isn’t alive or dead,” Callum replied. “And she’s not doing it.”

“You need to get over your prejudices, yeah?” Boo snapped.

Callum moved past Thorpe and came around to my side of the bed, and the way he was moving, I got the distinct impression that he would not hesitate to use force on me. I gripped the bedrail.

“You won’t do this to him,” he said to me. No one had ever quite spoken to me in this tone before, not even Newman. It was a clear threat, and the message was that I was the enemy. I would be stopped.

“Callum,” Boo said. “Callum, she can save him.”

“You don’t do this!” Callum’s voice was a roar, and he yelled right into my face. “You don’t do this to my friend. You don’t touch him.”

He shoved the adjustable bed table, hard. He didn’t shove it at me, but at the wall, as a warning. I became stone. I didn’t care. As far as I was concerned, my hand was now welded to the bed.

“Callum.” Thorpe’s voice didn’t have the anger, but the threat was no less serious. “Step away from her and leave the room.”

“I’m not leaving.” He was over me, looking down into my face.

“You’re leaving now or you’ll be removed.”

“So remove me.”

“Is that what Stephen would want? Now?” There was enough emotion in Thorpe’s voice to make Callum turn and look at him. “Would he want you to be fighting over him?”

“He wouldn’t want to come back like that,” Callum said. “Maybe you want it, to study him or something. Maybe you want it”—this was to Boo—“because you think that would help. And you …”

He had nothing for me. “But he would want to just be allowed to go.”

“You don’t know that,” Boo said. “You don’t. You’ve always been angry at them. You think they’re evil, that they don’t belong. They’re ghosts, not monsters, and they can be happy. They can be productive. You can’t decide what he would want based on how you feel.”

I took Stephen’s hand. It was very cool. Not cold, but it was definitely not the hand of someone full of life. And already, I felt a kind of strange feeling. It wasn’t like the times I would touch a ghost and feel myself being drawn in. This was a light sensation that started in the fingers and spread along the back of the hand, up the side of my arm, resting a moment at the pulse point inside of my elbow. It was a gentle numbness, like pins and needles, but without any discomfort. And my hand and arm grew warm as they touched his cold skin. In fact, I was starting to feel warm all over.

I looked at the machine that told me Stephen was still alive. The fight continued around me, but I was no longer part of it. I wasn’t in this room at all. I was somewhere with Stephen that was entirely separate from the hospital or anything else I had known. It wasn’t that I was certain of my decision. I wasn’t really thinking anymore. I wasn’t blind or deaf. I mean, I saw security come. I saw Callum deciding to leave rather than be pulled out. I saw Boo crying, and Thorpe shutting the door and putting a hand on her shoulder. I saw friendships being ripped apart and hearts broken, and it wasn’t that I didn’t care…it was just all happening behind some kind of pane of glass that kept me and Stephen separate.

It surprised me how clinical the next part was—how calm. The smoothness of it. I just watched and held on, and I thought about how there are systems for things, about how all things have happened before. People die every day, and there are systems for it. The doctor heard the decision and nodded and told us it was the right one. A few people came in, and we gathered around, and things were shut off. I hadn’t noticed just how noisy the machine was until it was off.

The monitors were still plugged in, and they still beeped away, but slowly. And we were left in privacy.

• • •

It happened at nine forty-six in the morning.

Right before that, things had gotten very slow—the beeps and wiggles. People started to come in more often. I held his hand harder. The beeps became a flat, droning noise. I closed my eyes. Then something was pulling on me. Not something muscular, not something I could see, but something gentle yet unyielding. It reminded me of a science lesson in grade school when they gave us a box of magnets and let us play with them, and I made one tiny magnet pull another across a small distance and lock together.

You are not going anywhere, I said to him, in my mind. You are not going anywhere. You are staying here. You are staying with me.

I could still feel the activity around me. I was profoundly aware of Boo at my left side.

DO YOU HEAR ME? YOU ARE NOT…

It almost knocked me down. I was pulling on something, or it was pulling on me. And the space behind my eyes went white. The world went away entirely. Even the white went away, and everything was a bright nothing. Unlike the other times, it wasn’t just a flash. I was calm and still and the world was gone, but that was fine. I had become something else, I had joined something larger. Maybe I was water. Maybe I was a drop of water in the ocean. Maybe I was a particle of light. I was the same as everything around me, and everything around me was peaceful.