Sobel shook his head. “We had drinks a few times. But he didn’t play tennis and I know he worked a lot.” Sobel was doing a good job of making Jake feel at ease. “I own one of your father’s paintings. Bought it at a silent auction at the club in ’67 or ’68. Best investment I ever made.” He realized that he was running out of time and turned back to the chart. “How was your father living?”
Jake thought about the chunk of grass in the fridge. About the eyes sliced out of the giant Chuck Close. The barricaded bedroom door. The knives. “A little obsessive.”
“Any signs of paranoia?”
Not if he was worried about a boatload of Vikings landing on the beach. “What are you not telling me, Dr. Sobel?”
Sobel closed the metal clipboard. “I had to give your father four hundred milligrams—that’s nearly half a gram—of Chlorpromazine and it hasn’t slowed him down at all. And that’s on top of the morphine. I can’t use any more on a man his age. Hell, a man your age couldn’t take that kind of dose.”
For an instant Jake thought about arguing with Sobel.
“Your father has a tolerance for narcotics that I’ve only seen one other time in thirty years of practice. He has the metabolism of a racehorse. That, coupled with his agitation, is a formula for disaster. I am afraid that he is going to hurt himself or, God forbid, someone else. I think he needs to be restrained.”
“Are you looking for permission or absolution?”
Sobel shook his head. “Neither, Jake. I just like to speak to a man before I strap his father into bed.”
Jake opened his mouth to speak but was cut off by a white-hot howl that shattered the silence. He recognized the voice and bounced up off the table just as another scream rattled the molecules of the third floor. He raced out of the room.
The end of the hallway was sewn up with a throng of people, clad in muted hospital pastels, craning their necks to get a view into Jacob Coleridge’s room.
Jake hit the wall of flannel-and-cotton-clad flesh and forced himself into their mass, birthing into a wide semicircle of awestruck faces, held back from Jacob Coleridge’s door by some invisible force.
Inside, kneeling before the broad wall that the shadow of his chair swung across each day, Jacob Coleridge was on his knees, his bandages chewed away, the pulpy stalks of his hands contorted and cracked, oozing pus and blood and the spider legs of torn-out sutures. His legs were splayed out on either side, like a child, and he stared up at a painting he had rendered in blobs and drips and splatters of red already drying to black.
Jake froze in the doorway, his eyes nailed to the bloody painting on the wall.
Jacob Coleridge had used his fried bone and scab-encrusted fingers to render depth and hardness to his finger-strokes, thickening or thinning a line as he applied more or less pressure, and the visage he had bled was frightening, without the slightest hint of elegance about it. It was a finger painting of madness. A three-quarter-length portrait of a man.
Jacob used forced perspective to give the figure depth and it looked like it stood in front of the wall, rather than being laid flat on it. It was the bloody image of a man, head cocked to one side as if he were examining something. But he had no expression because he had no face—just a black smear of red where his features should have been.
Jacob Coleridge had chewed off his bandages and gnawed through the gauze and tape and stitches to get at the exposed bone and flesh beneath. He had smeared blood from his sutured and cauterized veins and arteries, plunking, dabbing, stroking with the fierceness that had always marked his work. Where shadow was needed, the blood was thicker. For just a hint, a thin glaze.
Jake moved slowly forward, his eyes locked on the blood-drawn man. As he moved, it shifted with his line of sight—a masterful trick of forced perspective—and for a second Jake thought he had seen it move, twitch. It smelled like the Farmers’ house last night.
Him, the voice said, and Jake felt his heart stutter in his chest.
Jake slid by his father to get closer to the painting, to take in the details. As he moved forward, the thick metallic smell of blood grew fiercer. It was something he had experienced on the job in degrees much worse—many, many times before—but he had never been bothered by it. In fact, if pressed, he would admit to having rarely noticed it—it was something he automatically blocked out. But now, staring into the black faceless portrait scribbled onto the wall, the smell brought him back to the night his mother had been taken apart.
Jake’s arm came up, his fingers splayed, like a man about to push on a glass door. His hand contacted the sheetrock wall, fingers and palm pressed to the portrait, and he felt heat coming off of it. A thick, humid wave that moistened his palm. He pulled his hand away and it left no marks at all and it was only then, when he examined his skin and saw the pale white crosshatch that made up his own flesh, that he was brought back to the now.
Dr. Sobel stood frozen in the doorway.
“Close that fucking door,” Jake barked.
Sobel stepped in, closed the door, and bolted it.
With the sound of the lock being driven home, Jacob looked up and the distant animal fear in his eyes softened.
“He needs help.” Jake picked up the phone and held it out. “Call people. Help him. Now.”
Sobel punched in an extension and barked orders. “Get Dr. Sloviak to 312, immediately! Operating room, now. Page Dr. Ramirez and tell him it’s urgent.”
And for no reason other than he thought that was what a son should do, Jake put a hand on his father’s shoulder. His father rocked back and forth, his mouth bent into a low sad howl. Blood and spit and bandages splattered his face, chest, and neck. Blood from his hands dripped onto the floor. He was looking up, his face pointed at the wall. But his eyes no longer saw the portrait he had scraped with his splintered damaged bones or the room he was in. What he was staring at was beyond the wall, beyond the blood and the faceless image, beyond everything that was around him. He was staring at an image flickering madly against his gray matter, pulsing and beating and shrieking and pounding at his skull, trying to get out.
“He’s coming,” Jacob’s voice echoed up from a metal room a thousand feet into the earth. “And I can’t even barricade the door.” Then he closed his eyes, buried his face into his son’s chest, and for the first time Jake could remember, wept.
21
The weather had reached a neutral stasis that would be the last stretch of calm before Mother Nature let loose with her big German opera. The surf lapped calmly at the shore and the clear sky had not yet scudded over with clouds. Even off to the east, out at the edge of the horizon that framed the Atlantic, there was no cover to be seen. But the air felt different, as if it were charged by electrical particles, and Jake could feel the low voltage on his teeth. He drove with the windows open, the heavy salt air and the faint buzz of the atmosphere adding background color to the white noise fluttering through his head.
He pulled into the drive and saw a cello case tucked into the bushes beside the garage, the black fiberglass covered with Fragile stickers and airport luggage tags. Beside it was an old suit bag, Kay’s case, and a little yellow plastic suitcase, molded into the shape of a school bus. He hadn’t expected her this early and wished he had left a key. Then he thought about the mess inside and decided that it was better he hadn’t. He headed around the house to find them.
Kay’s motorcycle boots were on the top of the old staircase that led to the beach, its ancient rail the same color as a fossilized dinosaur bone. Beside them, like a novelty you hung from a car mirror, were Jeremy’s shoes, little sneakers with wide Velcro tongues. He spotted them a hundred yards west, Jeremy holding Kay’s hand and bouncing along with his little white bucket hat—the one they had bought for him in Florida last winter.