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“Mommy?” he said.

“Yes, honey.”

“I-I-I-I had a dream last night,” he muttered.

“What did you dream?” Linda asked.

“I dreamed that you were my twin, and I came out first and you smothered.” His voice was weighty, gluelike, his pauses interminable. “You let me be born. But in the process, you died saving me.”

A chill ran over her. She tried to tell him that he’d had a problem breathing, and she’d had Dr. Nick come in and give him a shot. But no, no, he didn’t want to talk about that. She was his twin. She’d saved his life.

“Well, it was just a dream, honey,” she said. And then he fell back asleep.

Dr. Nick says he had not realized that Elvis was a hard addict until the Demerol incident. He got on the phone to the doctor in California who administered it and angrily told him Elvis was a very sick man, that he was filled with fluid and that his condition was grave. His patient had an extreme reaction to the Demerol, Dr. Nick said, and asked if the California practitioner was also giving him steroids, as Elvis was now cushingoid. Well, yes, crackled the voice from the West Coast, he’d mixed some cortisone with the Novocain to help with the healing. That might have aggravated Elvis’s glaucoma, Dr. Nick thought.

Now the physician consulted with Drs. David Knott and Robert Fink, addiction specialists who worked with alcohol and drug rehab patients. They recommended Dr. Nick immediately put Elvis on phenobarbital to help with withdrawal symptoms, and then after dropping by the hospital to evaluate Elvis themselves, they suggested Dr. Nick start him on methadone, a treatment normally associated with heroin addiction.

The next step was to call in Dr. Larry Wruble, a gastroenterologist, who ordered X-rays and found that Elvis had a bowel ileus, or enlargement of the intestine, and that it was packed full of fecal material, a common side effect of long-term opiate abuse. “He would be so distended,” says Dr. Nick, “that a lot of his potbelly was just his enlarged colon and his inability to get it to function.”

Elvis also had degenerative arthritis in his neck and lower back, so Dr. Nick asked him to cut certain songs and gyrations out of his show. A larger problem was what his liver biopsy showed. Testing found damage consistent with toxicity, and the organ contained a great many fatty cells, a condition likely brought on by both his eating habits and medication abuse. He had a diabetic tendency, but his diabetes was not so advanced that he needed to be treated with insulin.

Linda slept on a cot beside him for the first few nights, and Elvis would lower his bed so they could be as close as possible. Then the staff brought in a hospital bed just for her. Since Elvis had to wear a gown, he wanted Linda to wear one, too, so they’d look like patients together.

They watched a lot of television, especially game shows, and at night, after the Memphis television stations signed off, Linda remembers, “We used to just sit and watch the little Indian head, you know, ‘Bzzzzzzz,’ just because there was a picture on television.” And they’d listen to “High Flight,” the pilot’s creed that came on about 1 A.M. and served as another end-of-programming signal. Then they found they could see the closed-circuit images from the nursery, and look at babies all night long. They came to recognize a few of them as time went on—one baby seemed to be waving at them, and Linda later sent him shoes—and the nurses would tape signs that said, HI, ELVIS! to the cribs and incubators, or come up to the cameras and smile. They got excited when they saw a newborn.

“Elvis just loved babies and children, and he would become very tender and like a little baby himself and regress back into that infantile state, and I’d have to baby him a little. Sometimes we were like two little babies together. Occasionally, he’d be the baby, and I’d want to be the baby, too, so it would be like, ‘Wait a minute. I want to be the baby, and I want you to be the adult. We can’t both be babies right now!’ We’d get into a silly thing. But