Marty was the first to break the comfortable silence between them. “When Vera Conner had the stroke and we spent so much time that week in the lounge outside the intensive care unit, there were a lot of other people, came and went, waiting to learn whether their friends and relatives would live or die.”
“Hard to believe it’s almost two years Vera’s been gone.”
Vera Conner had been a professor of psychology at UCLA, a mentor to Paige when she had been a student, and then an exemplary friend in the years that followed. She still missed Vera. She always would.
Marty said, “Some of the people waiting in that lounge just sat and stared. Some paced, looked out windows, fidgeted. Listened to a Walkman with headphones. Played a Game Boy. They passed the time all kinds of ways. But—did you notice?—those who seemed to deal best with their fear or grief, the people most at peace, were the ones reading novels.”
Except for Marty, and in spite of a forty-year age difference, Vera had been Paige’s dearest friend and the first person who ever cared about her. The week Vera was hospitalized—first disoriented and suffering, then comatose—had been the worst week of Paige’s life; nearly two years later, her vision still blurred when she recalled the last day, the final hour, as she’d stood beside Vera’s bed, holding her friend’s warm but unresponsive hand. Sensing the end was near, Paige had said things she hoped God allowed the dying woman to hear: I love you, I’ll miss you forever, you’re the mother to me that my own mother never could be.
The long hours of that week were engraved indelibly in Paige’s memory, in more excruciating detail than she would have liked, for tragedy was the sharpest engraving instrument of all. She not only remembered the layout and furnishings of the ICU visitors’ lounge in dreary specificity, but could still recall the faces of many of the strangers who, for a time, shared that room with her and Marty.
He said, “You and I were passing the time with novels, so were some other people, not just to escape but because ... because, at its best, fiction is medicine.”
“Medicine?”
“Life is so damned disorderly, things just happen, and there doesn’t seem any point to so much of what we go through. Sometimes it seems the world’s a madhouse. Storytelling condenses life, gives it order. Stories have beginnings, middles, ends. And when a story’s over, it meant something, by God, maybe not something complex, maybe what it had to say was simple, even naive, but there was meaning. And that gives us hope, it’s a medicine.”
“The medicine of hope,” she said thoughtfully.
“Or maybe I’m just full of shit.”
“No, you’re not.”
“Well, I am, yes, probably at least half full of shit—but maybe not about this.”
She smiled and gently squeezed his hand.
“I don’t know,” he said, “but I think if some university did a long-term study, they’d discover that people who read fiction don’t suffer from depression as much, don’t commit suicide as often, are just happier with their lives. Not all fiction, for sure. Not the human-beings-are -garbage-life-stinks-there-is-no-God novels filled with fashionable despair.”
“Dr. Marty Stillwater, dispensing the medicine of hope.”
“You do think I’m full of shit.”
“No, baby, no,” she said. “I think you’re wonderful.”
“I’m not, though. You’re wonderful. I’m just a neurotic writer. By nature, writers are too smug, selfish, insecure and at the same time too full of themselves ever to be wonderful.”
“You’re not neurotic, smug, selfish, insecure, or conceited. ”
“That just proves you haven’t been listening to me all these years.”
“Okay, I’ll give you the neurotic part.”
“Thank you, dear,” he said. “It’s nice to know you’ve been listening at least some of the time.”
“But you’re also wonderful. A wonderfully neurotic writer. I wish I was a wonderfully neurotic writer, too, dispensing medicine.”
“Bite your tongue.”
She said, “I mean it.”
“Maybe you can live with a writer, but I don’t think I’d have the stomach for it.”
She rolled onto her right side to face him, and he turned onto his left side, so they could kiss. Tender kisses. Gentle. For a while they just held each other, listening to the surf.
Without resorting to words, they had agreed not to discuss any further their worries or what might need to be done in the morning. Sometimes a touch, a kiss, or an embrace said more than all the words a writer could marshal, more than all the carefully reasoned advice and therapy that a counselor could provide.
In the body of the night, the great heart of the ocean beat slowly, reliably. From a human perspective, the tide was an eternal force; but from a divine view, transitory.
On the downslope of consciousness, Paige was surprised to realize that she was sliding into sleep. Like the sudden agitation of a blackbird’s wings, alarm fluttered through her at the prospect of lying unaware—therefore vulnerable—in a strange place. But her weariness was greater than her fear, and the solace of the sea wrapped her and carried her, on tides of dreams, into childhood, where she rested her head against her mother’s breast and listened with one ear for the special, secret whisper of love somewhere in the reverberant heartbeats.
3
Still wearing a set of headphones, Drew Oslett woke to gunfire, explosions, screams, and music loud enough and strident enough to be God’s background theme for doomsday. On the TV screen, Glover and Gibson were running, jumping, punching, shooting, dodging, spinning, leaping through burning buildings in a thrilling ballet of violence.
Smiling and yawning, Oslett checked his wristwatch and saw that he had been asleep for over two and a half hours. Evidently, after the movie had played once, the stewardess, seeing how like a lullaby it was to him, had rewound and rerun it.
They must be close to their destination, surely much less than an hour out of John Wayne Airport in Orange County. He took off the headset, got up, and went forward in the cabin to tell Clocker what he had learned earlier in his telephone conversation with New York.
Clocker was asleep in his seat. He had taken off the tweed jacket with the leather patches and lapels, but he was still wearing the brown porkpie hat with the small brown and black duck feather in the band. He wasn’t snoring, but his lips were parted, and a thread of drool escaped the corner of his mouth; half his chin glistened disgustingly.
Sometimes Oslett was half convinced that the Network was playing a colossal joke on him by pairing him with Karl Clocker.
His own father was a mover and shaker in the organization, and Oslett wondered if the old man would hitch him to a ludicrous figure like Clocker as a way of humiliating him. He loathed his father and knew the feeling was mutual. Finally, however, he could not believe that the old man, in spite of deep and seething antagonism, would play such games—largely because, by doing so, he would be exposing an Oslett to ridicule. Protecting the honor and integrity of the family name always took precedence over personal feelings and the settling of grudges between family members.