She had a moment of nervousness at the door; her stomach grew fluttery, as if crossing the threshold constituted a spiritual commitment, but she laughed at herself and pushed on in. No one was in sight. The foyer faced large cream-colored double doors and opened onto a hallway; the walls were painted pale peach, and the doorways ranging them were framed with intricate molding. Ferns splashed from squat brass urns set between them. Church quiet, with the pious, sedated air common to sickrooms and funeral homes.
‘Jocundra!’ A lazy, honeysuckle voice.
From the opposite end of the hall, a slim ash blond girl in hospital whites came toward her, giving a cutesy wave. Laura Petit. She had been an anomaly among the therapists at Tulane, constantly encouraging group activities, parties, dinners, whereas most of them had been wholly involved with the patients. Laura punctuated her sentences with breathy gasps; she batted her eyes and fluttered her hands when she laughed. The entire repertoire of her mannerisms was testimony to filmic generations of inept actresses playing Southern belles as shallow, bubbly nymphs with no head for anything other than fried chicken recipes and lace tatting. But despite this, despite the fact she considered the patients ‘gross,’ she was an excellent therapist. She seemed to be one of those people to whom emotional attachment is an alien concept, and who learn to extract a surrogate emotionality from manipulating friends and colleagues, and - in this case - her patients.
‘That must have been yours they just wheeled in,’ she said, embracing Jocundra.
‘Yes.’ Jocundra accepted a peck on the cheek and disengaged.,
‘Better watch yourself, hon! He’s not too bad lookin’ for a corpse.’ Laura flashed her Most Popular smile. ‘How you doin’?’
‘I should check in…’
‘Oh, you can see Edman when he makes his rounds. We’re real informal here. Come on, now.’ She tugged at Jocundra’s arm. ‘I’ll introduce you to Magnusson.’
Jocundra hung back. ‘Is it all right?’
‘Don’t be shy, hon! You want to see how your boy’s goin’ to turn out, don’t you?’
As they walked, Laura filled her in about Magnusson, pretending genuine interest in his work, but that was camouflage, a framework allowing her to boast of her own triumph, to explain how she had midwifed the miracle. Dr Hilmer Magnusson had been their initial success with the new strain: the body of a John Doe derelict now hosting the personality of a medical researcher who, less than a month after his injection, had casually handed them a cure for muscular dystrophy: a cure which had proved ninety-five percent effective in limited testing.
‘One day,’ said Laura, her voice rising at the end of each phrase, turning them into expressions of incredulity, ‘he asked me for his Johns Hopkins paper, the one he remembered first presentin’ the process in. Well, I didn’t know what he was talkin’ about, but I played along and told him I’d send for it. Anyway, he finally got impatient and started workin’ without it, complainin’ that his memory wasn’t what it used to be. It was incredible!’
Things, Jocundra observed, had a way of falling into place for Laura. Doors opened for her professionally, attractive men ditched their girlfriends and came in pursuit, and now Magnusson had produced a miracle cure. It was as if she were connected by fine wires to everything in her environment, and when she yanked everything toppled, permitting her passage toward some goal. The question was: were her manipulative skills intellectually founded, or had she simply been gifted with dumb luck as compensation for her lack of emotionality? It was hard to believe that anyone of intelligence could erect such a false front and not know it was transparent.
Slashes of sunlight fell from louvred shutters onto the carpet, but otherwise Magnusson’s room was dark, suffused by an odor of bay rum and urine. At first Jocundra could see nothing; then a pair of glowing eyes blinked open against the far wall. His pupils had shrunk to pinpricks; his irises flared green and were laced with striations of more brilliant green, which brightened and faded. The glow illuminated a portion of his face, seamed cheeks tattooed with broken veins and a bony beak of a nose. His wheelchair hissed on the carpet, coming close, and she saw that he was an old, old man, his facial muscles so withered that his skull looked melted and misshapen.
Laura introduced them.
‘Jocundra. Such a charming name.’ Magnusson’s voice was weak and hoarse and expressed little of his mood. Each syllable creaked in his throat like an ancient seal being pried up.
‘It’s Creole, sir.’ She sat on the bed facing him. There were food stains on his bathrobe. ‘My mother was part Creole.’
‘Was?’
‘Both my parents died several years ago. A fire. The police suspected my father had set it.’
Laura shot her a look of surprise, and Jocundra was surprised at herself. She never told anyone about the police report, and yet she had told Magnusson without the slightest hesitation.
He reached out and took her hand. His flesh was cool, dry, almost weightless, but his pulse surged. ‘I commiserate,’ he said. ‘I know what it is to be alone.’ He withdrew his hand and nodded absently. ‘Rigmor, my great-grandmother, used to tell me that America was a land where no one ever need be alone. Said she’d had that realization when she stepped off the boat from Sweden and saw the mob thronging the docks. Of course she had no idea to what ends the Twentieth Century would come, the kinds of shallow relationships that would evolve as the family was annihilated by television, automobiles, the entire technological epidemic. She had her vision of families perched on packing crates. Irish, Poles, Italians, Arabs. Plump girls with dark-eyed babies, apple-cheeked young men in short-brimmed hats carrying their heritage in a sack. Strangers mingling, becoming lovers and companions. She never noticed that it all had changed.’ Magnusson attempted an emphatic gesture, but the effect was of a palsied tremor. ‘It’s terrible! The petty alliances between people nowadays. Worse than loneliness. There’s no trust, no commitment, no love. I’m so fortunate to have Laura.’
Laura beamed and clasped her hands at her waist, a pose both virtuous and triumphant. Magnusson studied the backs of his hands, as if considering their sad plight. Several of his fingers had been broken and left unset; the nail of his right thumb was missing, exposing a contused bulge of flesh. Jocundra was suddenly ashamed of her presence in the room.
‘Perhaps it’s just my damned Swedish morbidity,’ said Magnusson out of the blue. ‘I tried to kill myself once, you know. Slit my wrists. Damned fool youngster! I was discouraged by the rain and the state of the economy. Not much reason, you might think, for self-destruction, but I found it thoroughly oppressing at the time.’
‘Well,’ said Laura after an uncomfortable silence. ‘We’ll let you rest, Hilmer.’ She laid her hand on the doorknob, but the old man spoke again.
‘He’ll find you out, Jocundra.’
‘Sir?’ She turned back to him.
‘You operate on a paler principle than he, and he will find you out. But you’re a healthy girl, even if a bit transparent. I can see it by your yellows and your blues.’ He laughed, a hideous rasp which set him choking, and as he choked, he managed to say, ‘Got your health, yes…’ When he regained control, his tone was one of amusement. ‘I wish I could offer medical advice. Stay off the fried foods, take cold showers, or some such. But as far as I can see, and that’s farther than most, you’re in the pink. Awful image! If you were in the pink, you’d be quite ill.’
‘What in the world are you talkin’ about, Hilmer?’ Laura’s voice held a note of frustration.
‘Oh, no!’ Magnusson’s bony orbits seemed to be crumbling away under the green glow of his eyes, as if they were nuggets of a rare element implanted in his skull, ravaging him. ‘You’re not going to pick my brain anymore. An old man needs his secrets, his little edge on the world as it recedes.’