Different Seasons - Stephen King [119]
A tear trickled from the corner of his ear. Outside the hospital room, a bell rang softly. A nurse squeaked by on white crepe-soled shoes. His door was ajar, and on the far wall of the corridor outside he could read the letters NSIVE CA and guessed that the whole sign must read INTENSIVE CARE.
There was movement in the room- a rustle of bedclothes.
Moving very carefully, Morris turned his head to the right, away from the door. He saw a night-table next to him with a pitcher of water on it. There were two call-buttons on the table. Beyond it was another bed, and in the bed was a man who looked even older and sicker than Morris felt. He was not hooked into a giant exercise-wheel for gerbils like Morris was, but an IV feed stood beside his bed and some sort of monitoring console stood at its foot The man's skin was sunken and yellow. Lines around his mouth and eyes had driven deep. His hair was yellowish-white, dry and lifeless. His thin eyelids had a bruised and shiny look, and in his big nose Morris saw the burst capillaries of the lifelong drinker.
Morris looked away and then looked back. As the dawn light grew stronger and the hospital began to wake up, he began to have the strangest feeling that he knew
his roommate. Could that be? The man looked to be somewhere between seventy-five and eighty, and Morris didn't believe he knew anyone quite that old-except for Lydia's mother, a horror Morris sometimes believed to be older than the Sphinx, whom the woman closely resembled.
Maybe the guy was someone he had known in the past, maybe even before he, Morris, came to America. Maybe. Maybe not. And why all of a sudden did it seem to matter? For that matter, why had all his memories of the camp, of Patin, come flooding back tonight, when he always tried to -and most times succeeded in-keeping those things buried? He broke out in a sudden rash of gooseflesh, as if he had stepped into some mental haunted house where old bodies were unquiet and old ghosts walked. Could that be, even here and now in this clean hospital, thirty years after those dark times had ended? He looked away from the old man in the other bed, and soon he had begun to feel sleepy again. It's a trick of your mind that this other man seems familiar. Only your mind, amusing you in the best way it can, amusing you the way it used to try to amuse you in-But he would not think of that. He would not allow himself to think of that.
Drifting into sleep, he thought of a boast he had made to Heather (but never to Lydia; it didn't pay to boast to Lydia; she was not like Heather, who would always smile sweetly at his harmless puffing and crowing): I never forget a face. Here was his chance to find out if that was still so. If he had really known the man in the other bed at some time or other, perhaps he could remember when and where.
Very close to sleep, drifting back and forth across its threshold, Morris thought: Perhaps I knew him in the camp. That would be ironic indeed-what they called 'a jest of God'.
What God? Morris Heisel asked himself again, and slept.
19
Todd graduated salutatorian of his class, just possibly because of his poor grade on the trig final he had been studying for the night Dussander had his heart attack. It dragged his final grade in the course down to 91, one point below A- average.
A week after graduation, the Bowdens went to visit Mr. Denker at Santa Donate General.
Todd fidgeted through fifteen minutes of banalities and thank-yous and