‘Mr Kennedy?’ she asked. ‘Are you all right?’
The postman’s eyes were a pale blue. They gave no sign that he had heard her. Something about them was strange, but it would not be until much later, telling her story to the health authorities, that she would put it into words by saying that his eyes were as though hypnotized from within.
She called to him several more times, and dared to touch his sleeve. But he was like a statue, completely oblivious of her.
She saw a couple of neighbor children coming toward her.
‘Stay back, children,’ she called. ‘Mr Kennedy may be sick.’
The children moved reluctantly away. The mother hurried inside, told Chase and Annie to stay in the playroom, and then called 911. The operator got the street wrong, and it was not until about twenty-five minutes later that a police car rolled to a stop alongside the immobile mailman. By now some more children had emerged from the surrounding houses and were gawking from their front lawns.
One of the policemen approached the mailman. He noticed a wet area on the man’s cheek. Looking down, he saw the remnants of a snowball on the ground at the mailman’s feet.
‘Children, I want you all to go inside your houses now,’ he said, motioning to his partner, who herded the children away.
The policeman tried to help the mailman into the cruiser, but the mailman seemed to resist, clinging to the spot where he stood. His jaws were clenched tightly, and he had a look of empty, meaningless stubbornness on his face.
After another few minutes of indecisive parley, an ambulance was called. When it arrived two paramedics discussed the situation with the police and finally lifted the mailman onto their gurney and slid him into the back of the ambulance.
‘All right, children,’ said one of the mothers who had ventured onto her frozen stoop. ‘It’s all over now. Let’s all get inside before we freeze our noses off.’
The children, bored now that the police car and ambulance were gone, went back into their houses.
The emergency room physician who examined Wayne Kennedy that afternoon found all his vital signs essentially normal. Heart rate, blood pressure, even reflexes were well within normal limits. But the patient could not speak or perform simple commands. (‘Wayne, can you lift your little finger for me?’) His eyes were seen to notice a flashlight beam as it was moved across his field of vision, but when asked to follow the light on command, he could not or would not obey.
By evening Kennedy had been moved to a semiprivate room adjacent to the intensive care ward. The doctors did not understand his condition, so they did not know what to expect. Emergency life support might become necessary if some unknown toxic or infectious agent was behind his illness. On the other hand, the silence and the stubborn immobility suggested a mental disturbance, and Kennedy would have to be watched for this as well.
By nine o’clock that night, most of the physicians and interns on duty had had a look at the patient, and none could offer a constructive thought.
The nurses were told to keep a close watch on him, and he was put to bed for the night.
In all this time Wayne Kennedy, a fifteen-year veteran of the postal service with a large family of his own, had not uttered a single sound.
Alexandria, VirginiaNovember 167 A.M.
Karen Embry was dreaming.
The fringes of a troubled sleep procured by nearly half a bottle of bourbon made her dream intense and disturbing.
She was applying for a job in a very tall building. The elevator thrust her upward with such force that the wind was knocked out of her. She thought she was going to wet her pants.
The personnel director greeted her when the elevator opened. Looking down at herself, she noticed with a shock that she had nothing on below the waist. Just the suit jacket and foulard she had worn for the job application, the large purse and the red leather shoes.
She opened the purse, which seemed inordinately huge, to search for the missing skirt and underwear. The purse was completely empty.
I’ve got to get to the ladies’ room. She saw the door marked ‘Ladies’ and went through it. The personnel director smiled indulgently, as though to say, ‘Yes, go ahead, I’ll wait for you.’ But at the last second he darted into the ladies’ room behind her.
There was something magical about that entry, for when they got inside he was no longer a man, he was a little girl. Karen looked at herself in the mirror and saw that she, too, had regressed through time and was small again, as she had been back home in Boston. She was still naked below the waist. So was the other girl.
‘Let’s touch each other,’ the girl said. Karen thought she recognized her as a childhood friend, Elise perhaps. The girls stretched out their hands to fondle each other.
A tremor shook the building. It’s an earthquake. The building tilted suddenly to one side. The doors to the toilet stalls swung open with a bang.
Karen tried to escape, but the little girl had hold of both her hands. The building was falling over with an enormous roar. Karen was tumbling through space, about to be buried by tons of concrete and steel.
Help! Help me!
With a scream in her throat, Karen woke up.
The alarm was ringing. She reached sleepily to turn it off, realizing with a smile that the roar of the crumbling building in her nightmare had actually been the buzz of the alarm clock.
The headache hit just as she was fumbling for the button. The empty glass beside the bed reminded her of how much bourbon it had taken to leave her in this shape. A throb in her bladder told her she had to pee. No wonder the dream had been about a bathroom, she thought.
With a groan she got out of the bed and stood up.
‘Jesus,’ she said. The headache was much worse. She staggered to the bathroom, flung open the medicine cabinet, and found the Advil bottle. She shook three of the brown tablets into her trembling hand and filled the dirty water glass from the tap. She moved to the kitchen. Mercifully, the coffeemaker was full and ready to perk. She had remembered last night, despite the booze, to fill it.
She turned the machine on and padded back to the bedroom. The churning sound of the coffeemaker was like a fist squeezing repeatedly at her throat.
‘Jesus Christ,’ she moaned. ‘Hurry.’
It took seven long minutes for the coffee to perk. The Advil still had not taken effect when she brought her first cup back to the bed. With her eyes half closed she turned on the little bedroom TV.
Washington Today, one of the most-watched political talk shows, was on. Dan Everhardt, the vice president, was being assailed by two right-wing senators who challenged him to defend the administration’s policy on terrorism.
‘Just tell me how you can defend a policy that simply doesn’t work,’ one of them demanded.
‘The fact is that our policy on terrorism does work,’ Everhardt said. ‘In cooperation with other governments around the world we have prevented countless terrorist attacks over the years.’
‘Not as many as you could have prevented.’
‘That’s not quite fair.’
‘Not the World Trade. Not the Crescent Queen.’
Karen