The Thousand - Kevin Guilfoile [138]
Jameson finished his omelette and wiped his face. “Shall we get started?”
Elizabeth: “And now I’m not so sure.”
Russo stood up. He pulled a syringe from underneath the table. “This will wake her up first.” He walked to Nada’s side and stuck the needle in her arm. She didn’t pull away and it didn’t hurt, although she felt heat radiating out from her elbow, crossing her body in a wave.
Nada woke up in her bed, in the room of light and nothing else. They were standing around her, Jameson and Myra and Russo and her mother. There was a clear plastic line from a bandage in her arm to a bag above her head. Russo was still holding the syringe with which he had injected a substance through the IV.
“What the hell?” She tried to sit up, but it felt like bags of cement had been piled on her chest. “Mom?” She had no idea how long she’d been asleep. An hour? A day? A week? The scene at the breakfast table had been a dream, but she wondered how much of the conversation might have been real.
“Hello. You collapsed again, dear,” her mother said.
“It appears you’ve had the equivalent of a stroke, Canada.”
“That horrible thing in your head.” Her mother again. “It’s damaged and your seizures have returned. It has to come out.”
“Who found me? How did I get here?”
“I followed you from the apartment, of course. You seemed disoriented. You wouldn’t answer when I called you. I watched you collapse from not ten yards away. Of course I called 911.”
“Why aren’t I at a hospital?”
“The hospitals that are still functioning are completely overflowing,” her mother said. “Gary has generously volunteered to let the operation take place here.”
“You said you called 911. If I had a stroke, they would have taken me to a hospital.”
“The city is in a state of emergency,” Jameson said. “Right now a hospital is a dangerous place for someone in your condition. Since you were incapacitated, your mother directed the paramedics to put you in the care of Dr. Russo.”
Nada tried not to slur her words, but it was difficult. “They wouldn’t do that. What the hell?”
Her mother: “You’re not thinking clearly, dear.”
“Wait. What operation? What are you going to do?”
“Your neurostimulator has to come out. The procedure is long overdue, actually. Marlena wanted to remove it years ago.”
“Not a chance.”
“We’re protecting you, dear,” she said. “We’re not the ones who will hurt you.”
Russo produced a small black plastic gizmo. A remote. She hadn’t seen anything like it since she was a teenager and a nurse had shown one to her in the hospital.
Just before her father died.
Just after they put the spider inside her.
The phrase repeated itself in her head, as if parts of her brain were whispering to each other: thespiderinsideherthespiderinsideher.
“Don’t touch me,” Nada said.
“Canada,” her mother said.
In a shriek this time: “Don’t you fucking touch me!”
“Don’t worry, dear,” the nurse had said then. “It’s not like the average Joe can just walk into RadioShack and buy one.”
Russo checked the face of the remote. “We don’t need to,” he said, and then he pointed it at Nada’s chest and squeezed it between his fingers.
The light slipped away, past her and behind her and gone. She felt her guts drop to her knees and her head braced against the spinning effects of sudden vertigo. She screamed as if in pain, but she didn’t feel pain anymore, exactly.
Her mother, distant: “Do we have to do it this way?”
Russo: “We’ll never get her all the way under unless we deactivate the device first. Don’t worry. We’re controlling the pain.”
For Nada, it was as if she had been cleaved in two, as if she were falling away from herself. The other part of her, the part with her spider, was disappearing like a shiny satellite into the blackness—into the night and nothing else—becoming smaller and smaller, reaching out to her with the same desperate shrieking sadness with which she, in turn, called out to it.
51
TEN YEARS AGO, news cameras had tracked every step Reggie Vallentine took in this place. Kate had made certain, always alerting the media an hour before Reggie