The Resurrectionist

by Jack O'Connell

Genres: Psychological Thrillers

Synopsis

The Resurrectionist is a wild ride into a territory where nothing is as it appears. Part classic noir thriller, part fabulist fable, it is the story of Sweeney and his comatose son, Danny. Hoping for a miracle, Sweeney has brought Danny to the fortresslike Peck Clinic, whose doctors claim to have "resurrected" patients who were similarly lost in the void. but the real cure for his son's condition may lie in Limbo, a comic book world beloved by Danny before he slipped into a coma.

O'Connell has crafted a spellbinding novel about stories and what they can do for and to those who create them and those who consume them. About the nature of consciousness and the power of the unknown. And, ultimately, about forgiveness and the depth of our need to extend it and receive it.

Release date: September 22, 2009

Publisher: Algonquin Books

Print pages: 336

Sample

“To call Jack O’Connell’s novels imaginative, or even original, doesn’t begin to say it . . . There’s something both exciting and unnerving about [his] kind of hallucinatory writing.”

—The New York Times Book Review

“Brilliant writing, original concepts, emotional resonance and O’Connell’s fearlessness. I’ve read The Resurrectionist twice now, and both times it came as something of a revelation. It seems odd we should care so much about the freaks, for example, when we know they’re merely characters in a boy’s comic book. Nor should the dream-life of a coma patient be so resonant, and yet it is.”

—The Washington Post Book World

“Chronicled in more detail than any graphic novel could ever deliver . . . [O’Connell] works in the dusky borderlands between crime and fantasy fiction . . . A wild, surreal and thought-provoking ride.”

—San Francisco Chronicle

“O’Connell’s gift for building tension within a scene is equaled by his ability to create wonderfully dark and elaborate stage sets upon which to play out his dramas . . . Genre blending has become increasingly in vogue thanks in part to the rise of graphic novels and the championing of genre by influential writers such as Michael Chabon and Jonathan Lethem, but O’Connell is wilder, edgier, more far-ranging and extravagant than his fellow genre-jumpers.”

—The Boston Globe

“The Resurrectionist—a brilliantly tuned, mesmerizing labyrinth of a quasi-real world as only a master artist could draw it—will jazz you, floor you, grab you, shake you, and leave you hung out to dry. A brilliant breakthrough novel.”

— James Ellroy

“O’Connell [is a] cackling genius . . . Fans of his previous novels, the cult favorites The Skin Palace, Box Nine and Wireless, will be glad to hear that The Resurrectionist is just as demented and deeply enjoyable.”

—Los Angeles Times

“You may want to don a helmet before embarking on the open-throttle ride of The Resurrectionist. A genre-busting novel, it combines elements of pulp, noir, thriller, fantasy and graphic novel, crunched into a hallucinatory mash-up that’s always surprising . . . Strange, gripping, [and] possessed of a whole lot of vision.”

—The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

“Fantasy and reality collide in The Resurrectionist, a strange yet compelling literary thriller.”

— Parade.com

“A brilliant, wild, heartfelt novel. It seems, like all of O’Connell’s work, at once to bear tribute to its predecessors and to come out of nowhere, a stew whose various lumps, gristles, fillers, and spices have long since cooked down to a single, amazing richness. O’Connell’s books are one of a kind—again and again.”

—Fantasy and Science Fiction

“It blends the out-there mysticism of H. P. Lovecraft, the dark corridors and femme fatales of Dashiell Hammett, and the pulpy, lurid qualities of ’50s comic books.”

—Minneapolis Star Tribune

“An impressive show of narrative juggling and multitasking.”

—Rocky Mountain News

“No one does the improbable like O’Connell . . . [His] books are also a splendid and exuberant celebration of life—and plotwise, absolutely gripping.”

—The Guardian (UK)

“O’Connell has a way with setting a scene — atmospheric, hard-boiled concoctions rife with detail and mystery — and he weaves elements of classic noir and fantasy with head-tripping mastery.”

—Cincinnati Beat

“A masterpiece. O’Connell’s tour de force has a dose of the uncertainty of Kafka, the fantasy of Bradbury, the crisp prose of Greene, and the noir of Chandler.”

— Andrew Gulli, editor, The Strand Magazine

“A remarkable novel that is hilarious, baffling, terrifying, and reassuring. O’Connell adroitly blurs the not-so-clear boundaries between fiction and real life, inviting readers to re-examine the often ineffable power of myth, fantasy and stories.”

—BookPage

“Have you heard of the drug Limbo? Oh, boy, are you missing out. It’ll get you higher than Amy Winehouse while simultaneously ramping up your verbal IQ.”

—Phoenix New Times

“The dueling realities of the novel, paralleled by O’Connell’s deft conveyance of Sweeney’s conflicted humanity, combine to create a book that is hinged by its plot, like any good crime novel, but also driven forward by the fullness and uniqueness of its characters.”

—Time Out Chicago

“O’Connell skillfully weaves excerpts from the comic . . . with narrative strands focused on Sweeney and the Abominations, gradually unveiling a series of connections that bind the novel together . . . [The Resurrectionist] suggest[s] the consolatory power of art and faith.”

—The Charlotte Observer

“A cleverly devised noir thriller and a walk on fantasy’s wild side.”

— The Morning News

“[An] engrossing, elaborately staged exploration of consciousness . . . This strange brew is sure to enhance O’Connell’s growing cult status.”

—Publishers Weekly

“[A] dark, wildly inventive fantasy . . . A nightmarish story that’s hallucinatory, tightly structured and ultimately redemptive.”

—Kirkus Reviews

“O’Connell’s gift for vivid characterization and inventive plot twists results in an irresistibly captivating reading experience.”

—Booklist

Alone in the doctor’s office, Sweeney’s eyes lingered on the final panel and, once again, he found himself feeling something close to sympathy for the cartoon strongman, exiled and adrift, the world torn down in a random instant and supplanted with a precarious replacement.

Closing the comic book, Sweeney tried to bring himself back to the here and now. But in seconds he found himself studying the cover, this grotesque family portrait of circus freaks that an artist had elevated into icons. Then he heard the door open and, immediately, he rolled the book and slipped it into his back pocket, covering it with the tail of his sport jacket.

“Sorry for the interruption,” Dr. Peck said, coming around the desk and sliding back into his seat.

“Not a problem,” Sweeney said.

Dr. Peck was one of those individuals whose voice, on the phone, had conveyed his appearance: entirely bald, bordering on gaunt, well groomed but with lips that were too thin and pale. He looked as if his grandfather had owned the most efficient general store on the prairie. But Sweeney knew this wasn’t the case.

“We were speaking, I believe, about the accident,” Peck said as he reopened Danny’s file, then sat back and waited.

Like everyone else, Dr. Peck wanted a recounting. One more smug little prick who had to have the story. He sat and waited, actually folded his hands across the hollow that passed for his belly and assumed a position of clinical concern. His vision seemed to focus on the knot of Sweeney’s necktie, a Christmas present festooned with chicken boys.

Sweeney cleared his throat and tried to stay calm.

“As I was saying, it’s been a difficult year. But I think this move will be a step in the right direction for us.”

“The doctor in Cleveland—”

“Lawton.”

“He will be forwarding the rest of the boy’s records?”

“Daniel.”

Peck squinted as if he didn’t understand. As if the name weren’t on the file in front of him.

“The boy’s name is Daniel,” Sweeney said and crossed his legs. “You should have received the records already. I’ll call this afternoon to remind Dr. Lawton.”

Peck nodded and opened the manila folder on his desk.

“Coma is a complex condition, Mr. Sweeney. The word itself is used incorrectly more often than not.”

Sweeney nodded back. He needed the job and he’d burned all his bridges back in Ohio. But there was still a limit to the amount of patronizing shit he’d endure.

“As you might imagine, doctor,” he said, “I’ve immersed myself in the literature since the accident.”

Peck sniffed and closed Danny’s file, pushed back just a bit from the desk and lifted the coffee mug that featured a line drawing of the Clinic.

“I’m not trying to be difficult, Mr. Sweeney,” Peck said. “I understand what you’ve been through. This is a heartbreaking situation—”

“This is my life, doctor. This is not a situation, this is my life. And I don’t mean to be disrespectful or ungrateful. But your associates offered me this position and I accepted it. I pulled my son out of the St. Joseph and moved us eight hundred miles from home. And now you’re sitting here telling me I might not have the job.”

Peck put the mug down on Danny’s file.

“That’s not what I’m saying, Mr. Sweeney. Not at all. I simply want to make sure things are clear here at the start. I’m certain we both have some natural concerns and—”

“I have one concern and that’s the well-being of my boy. You tell me what your concerns are and I’ll address them.”

Peck picked the mug up and Sweeney saw that it had left a brown circle on Danny’s folder. The doctor was quiet for a minute and then he sniffed again. His voice, when it came, was lower.

“I want to make sure you have a realistic picture of what we can and cannot do here. Your son, Daniel, has had minimal brain activity since the day of the accident. According to the records I’ve received, the doctors at the St. Joseph have administered all the standard and appropriate therapies. We’re a research facility and we do good work. But the last thing I would want is to give you false hope.”

“I can promise you,” Sweeney said, “I’m a realist.”

They looked at each other until Peck blinked.

“All right,” the doctor said, putting on the weary voice. “I’ll take you at your word.”

“I appreciate that,” Sweeney said.

Peck looked at his watch and then slid another file out from beneath Danny’s. Sweeney felt some relief—the interview was coming to an end.

“Your CV looks fine,” Peck said. “You studied at Ohio State?”

A nod, waiting.

“Concentration in pharmacognosy?”

Another nod.

“But you never went into research?”

“I had intended to,” Sweeney said, trying not to sound defensive, “but it didn’t work out that way.”

Peck smiled as if he understood, then asked, “What made you decide on pharmacology in the first place?”

“My father had his own shop.”

“You liked working for the big outfits?”

Sweeney shrugged. “They paid well. They moved you along. I was thinking of buying my own franchise before the accident.”

Peck let the last sentence hang for a beat or two.

“And your wife was a pharmacist as well?”

A nod, thinking, Just ask, you little hump. When the doctor refused, Sweeney said, “We met in school.”

“May I ask if you’ve pursued any counseling in the last year?”

It was not what Sweeney expected and he took a moment before saying, “May I ask how that’s pertinent to my job here at the Clinic?”

Peck maintained a bland expression but scratched his nose.

“You’ve suffered extraordinary stress and grief. You’ve lost your wife and, for all intents and purposes, your son. And I’m about to put you in charge of the Clinic’s drug room. Which is to say, I’m giving you responsibility for all of the Clinic’s patients.”

Sweeney wanted to stand up. He wanted to move around the desk and pick up the coffee mug and break the man’s stuffy nose with it. He wanted to put the fucker on the floor and kick him in the head until Dr. Peck was a patient at his own Clinic.

He did none of those things. He folded his hands on his knee and said, “You’ve got my letters of reference there, doctor. You’ve got my employment history and you’ve probably got the results of your inquiry to the Ohio board. I’ve never been cited for anything. My performance reviews have all been excellent. This position means a pay cut for me. But it seems to be the best place for my son. Now either I have the job that was promised me or I don’t. If I don’t, please let me know. Because if that’s the case, I have to phone my lawyer and make new arrangements for my boy.”

Peck let the room go quiet before he stood up.

“I apologize,” he said, “if you feel my question was inappropriate.”

He extended his hand. Sweeney stood and took it across the desk.

A smile now, as the doctor moved to the exit.

“You’ll call Cleveland and see about those missing records?”

“I’ll call,” Sweeney said.

Peck opened the door to the office.

“You’ll find human resources downstairs. They’ll have some paperwork for you to fill out and you’ll need to have your photo taken.”

Sweeney stepped into the reception area and said, “Thank you, Dr. Peck.”

Dr. Peck nodded and said, “Welcome to the Clinic.”

THE PERSONNEL MANAGER was an older woman named Nora Blake. She wore a white summer suit and a perfume that Sweeney hadn’t smelled in twenty years. She filled out his paperwork in the basement cafeteria, where she bought him coffee from an antique vending machine.

The coffee was wretched but Nora Blake was delightful and Sweeney almost sprayed their table when she called Dr. Peck a vain little bastard.

“Do you talk like this to all the new hires?” Sweeney asked.

“I’m retiring in three months,” she said. “I’ve been at the Peck for thirty years. I’ve met a lot of arrogant doctors. But Peck is just a shit.”

“I wish I could disagree.”

Nora actually patted his free hand. “Not to worry, Mr. Sweeney. You’re working nights. You won’t see much of him.”

“You can just call me Sweeney,” he said. “Everyone does.”

“All right, Sweeney,” pulling a pack of Virginia Slims from a jacket pocket and lighting up. “You want to tell me why you asked to work third shift?”

He shrugged. “I’m a night owl.”

“Okay,” mouth working around the cigarette. “You want to tell me why you left the senior pharmacist position at the largest CVS in Cleveland to come to this nightmare?”

Sweeney sat back in the chair. It moved and the legs screeched a little against the linoleum.

“You’re really the personnel manager, right?”

“For another twelve weeks.”

“Why’d you stay for thirty years if it’s such a nightmare?”

“I got bored,” Nora said, contorting her lips to blow her smoke away from him, “living off the trust fund.”

“Ms. Blake,” Sweeney said, “I’ve never had a job interview quite like this.”

“This isn’t an interview. According to this,” indicating his paperwork with her cigarette, “you already got the job.”

He decided to let himself banter.

“You’re allowed to smoke in here?” he asked.

“This is the smoking section,” she said.

“I don’t see a sign, Ms. Blake.”

“When I’m sitting here,” Nora said, “it’s the smoking section. And knock off the Ms. Blake, all right? You make me feel like a stenographer.”

“Well,” Sweeney said and drained the last of the coffee, “you’ve sold me on the place so far.”

“That’s what I’m here for,” Nora said. “For another ninety days, anyway.”

She squinted at him through her smoke, shifted in her seat, and stifled a wince. Then she pointed at him with the cigarette and said, “In the beginning, I came here for the same reason you did.”

“Your son?” Sweeney asked.

She shook her head. “My husband, Ernie.” She threw out a hand and leaned toward him, an instant confidant. “He was a gorgeous man, let me tell you.”

“Your husband’s a patient?”

She smiled at him and he saw some of her lipstick had smudged across her front teeth. He wasn’t sure whether or not he should tell her.

“He was,” she said. “For almost twenty years. Industrial accident. He worked the line over at the Gordon Brothers. It was a slip and fall. We got a little settlement, but what am I going to do? Sit home and feel awful?”

“Twenty years,” Sweeney repeated.

Nora shrugged. “You know they can go that long. Don’t tell me you haven’t read all the books. That’s what the families do. We read all the books. We look for the answers. We become goddamned specialists, don’t we? Twenty years isn’t so unusual. Ernie was young and strong.”

Sweeney had nothing to say to that.

“You know, he didn’t hurt anything else. No broken bones. Just his head. The first doctor says to me It’s a fluke. If he’d hit the floor at another angle, who knows? A concussion. A week off from the mill. As if this is supposed to make me feel better. All these years later, I’m still frosted.”

Sweeney had a response to that. “Their job isn’t to make you feel better,” he said. “You find that out immediately.”

Nora saw the opening and used it. “How’d it happen to you? Your son, I mean. Do you mind me asking? I know some of the general details, but . . .”

He did mind. He hated it every time and it never got easier. But he’d found a way to tell it. He’d made it into a story. Like a joke you’ve memorized so that you use the same words. The same tone and the same pauses with each telling. He took a breath, got himself ready.

“I was working,” he began and wished he hadn’t finished the coffee. “It was about seven o’clock. I’d gotten called in. The night shift guy—Anwar—he’d phoned in sick. I couldn’t get anybody. So Kerry was home alone with Danny. This was early summer and we’d just gotten the pool going. We’d had a barbecue on Memorial Day. Invited the neighbors. We were new to the neighborhood.”

But this wasn’t how he normally told it. Why did he mention the barbecue? He looked across the table at Nora, took another breath, and started again.

“Danny had just turned six that spring. Kerry had gotten him started with swimming lessons at the Y.”

The instructor had been nineteen. He couldn’t remember her name. She wore a red lifeguard’s suit and had blond hair, chopped at the neck. He’d made it to the lessons only that one time. The lifeguard had freckles and a tattoo on her ankle.

“And he loved it. He was a real waterdog.”

He remembered Danny in the girl’s arms. Holding these colored plastic rings in each fist. Danny would scoop them off the bottom of the pool. He was so light—thirty pounds on his sixth birthday—that the lifeguard had to help him dive down to grab the rings.

“You were at work,” Nora said, nudging him along.

“I was at work,” he said. “I must’ve filled a dozen asthma inhalers that night. The air quality was terrible all week. I had all these parents hovering in front of the counter. They haven’t had dinner, you know, and the kid’s gone from a wheeze to a real gasp.”

He sees the black woman, young, her first child, terrified. She can’t find her insurance card. She dumps her purse into her lap.

“And your wife,” Nora said, “was home with your boy.”

He felt the coffee start to churn in his stomach.

“He was in his pajamas already. Kerry had gone out to the patio to turn on the grill. She was going to throw a kabob on for dinner. She left the sliders open. And she went back in and poured herself a glass of wine.”

He stopped then and stared at the old woman in her white summer suit, with lipstick on her front tooth. He swallowed and changed his voice and said, “I’m sorry. Is there a restroom around here?”

Nora Blake motioned with her head.

“Turn left out of here and go to the end of the corridor.”

THE MEN’S ROOM was empty. He walked into a stall and closed the door. He put a hand across his mouth and tried to breathe through his nose. He felt his pulse hammering in his neck. He felt his bowels going loose and that instant jet of perspiration breaking under his arms and across his groin. He pulled down his tie, unbuttoned the shirt. The room tilted and he leaned against the green metal partition. He could smell something like bleach. Some old-fashioned disinfectant. Then the pain broke across his forehead and temples. His vision blurred. He bent, went down on one knee, and vomited.

Afterward, he splashed his face with cold water, washed out his mouth, and popped a peppermint candy. He bought the candies in bulk and always kept a half dozen in his pocket. He put a hand on the sink and steadied himself, then looked in the mirror. He rebuttoned the shirt and adjusted the tie.

He stood up straight, brushed at the knee of his pants, and walked back to the cafeteria. Nora Blake was still seated at their table, writing something in his employment file. She closed the file as he sat down.

“You all right?” Nora asked.

Sweeney bit into the peppermint and nodded.

“The first year after Ernie’s accident,” she said, “I lost twenty-five pounds.”

He was still breathing heavily, but the sweats and the pain in the head were gone.

Nora watched him as she tongued her front teeth. Then she added, “And I’ve never put one of them back on.”

HE SPENT THE rest of the morning getting the Nora Blake Tour. It was an amazing performance, one part architectural lecture, three parts stand-up routine. And all of it seasoned with a little social commentary and a lot of staff gossip. Nora could spiel. Nora knew her shtick. Three decades showing new recruits the inside of the nightmare had honed her travelogue. She delivered it with a dry and deadpan voice that had been refined into gravel by years of cigarette smoke and stoicism.

The Clinic was a sandstone monster on fifty acres of private land near Quinsigamond’s western border. It sat between a wildlife preserve and an abandoned quarry. The Peck family had owned it from the beginning. Generations of doctors begetting doctors, a priestly clan of cool Yankees elected by God to care for the sick and the dying. They made their money in cotton and wool, but they gave their hearts to disease and deformity. And over time, the family hospital became the model for American health care, the kind of place where charity and science could lie together in order to breed healing.

This history weighed heavily on the current Pecks. They knew their tradition and they let it guide their decisions. Especially the decision, made a little more than thirty years ago, to alter their mission, to specialize. Many felt it was a radical break with the past, but Dr. Peck has never looked back. And today, the Peck Clinic is breaking new ground once again, setting the standard as the finest long-term care and research facility for patients trapped inside coma and persistent vegetative state.

What others might call grand or stately, Sweeney saw as ominous. The Clinic was heavy and dark on the outside, a Romanesque mausoleum with a central manse and two dark wings that fanned out from each side. And the inside was even worse, a maze of cavernous rooms and bad lighting and narrow, vertigo-inducing corridors.

At full capacity, the Clinic could maintain a hundred patients. But fees were so high and Dr. Peck’s criteria for admittance so stringent that there were rarely more than fifty sleepers at any time.

That was how Nora referred to the patients. Even though she knew the term was medically inaccurate and annoyed most of the staff doctors. “Drives them crazy,” she said. “As if I was insulting someone. But for twenty years I sat next to my husband’s bed. Room 103, I’ll show you. And that’s how I did it. I sat there and I held his hand and I told myself he’d just finished a plate of stuffed cabbage and was dozing. I told myself we were in the living room and he was watching his Red Sox and he’d just drifted off. And any minute he’d start up with the snoring and I’d have to wake him and send him up to bed.”

“But isn’t it harder that way?” Sweeney asked as they rode the elevator up to the third floor.

“How so?” Nora asked.

“If you tell yourself they’re just sleeping, then aren’t you also telling yourself that one day they’re going to wake up?”

Nora got a little stiff.

She said, “Mary Rowlands.”

Sweeney said, “Pardon me?”

“Of Rockhurst, Maryland. Went through the windshield of a ’72 Camaro. Severe head trauma. Fourteen years in PVS. One morning she wakes up and says, ‘Is my husband all right?’”

“I read about that case,” Sweeney said. “She died a week later.”

“So she died a week later. The point is, she woke up. She regained consciousness and she talked to her people.”

“I don’t know,” Sweeney said. “For me it would be harder. Imagining Danny’s dreaming about some cartoon or something.”

“Maybe he is,” Nora said.

“But they don’t dream.”

She gave a laugh that carried just a touch of pity.

“Who’ve you been talking to?”

Ordinarily he would have let it go. But two days away from Danny had him edgier than usual.

“No, I’m sorry, they do not dream,” he said. “They just don’t. There’s no activity in that area of the brain. It’s documented. If they’re dreaming, then it’s not true coma.”

The elevator came to a stop with a jerk that one of them finessed and the other did not. The doors slid open and as she unlatched the mesh gate, Nora said, “Jesus, we got to you just in time.”

They stepped out into a small foyer that led to the nurses’ station. No one was at the desk, but a tall black man in green scrubs was just beyond it, mopping the floor of the corridor.

“Hey, Romeo,” Nora called to him, and Sweeney cringed at her volume. “Where’s the princess?”

The janitor had a thick accent that Sweeney couldn’t place. “She gone to get the coffee,” he said.

Nora rolled her eyes for Sweeney’s benefit and in a mock whisper said, “We’d pay her in coffee but we couldn’t afford it.”

She led him down the hall and into the first wardroom. And though a year of daily visits to the St. Joseph should have steeled him to the sight, he had to fight the impulse to run as soon as he stepped into the room.

A shaft of sunlight pouring through the oversized windows made everything seem ethereal. Six beds were filled with six bodies. Men and women. Old and young. Dressed uniformly in hospital johnnies. White sheets covering them to the waist. Some skulls were heavily bandaged, the heads mummified. Some were intact but fully and freshly shaven. Others sported luxurious hair that looked newly washed and styled.

All of them were hooked to IVs. One young girl wore a crown of electrodes that coalesced into a fat braid that, in turn, fed into a machine at the side of her bed. Harsh respiration came from a shriveled old man, the only one turned on his side, his face bathed in sun. The noise did things to Sweeney’s stomach.

The first week that Danny was at St. Joe’s, the boy had shared a room with what the nurse called “a hard breather.” The sound never stopped, that chronic, laborious gasping and one night Sweeney caught himself in a suffocation fantasy, imagining himself holding the pillow over the roommate’s face until the lungs at last gave up and the brain, finally, shut down.

He realized Nora was watching him.

“You can see they’re well taken care of,” she said.

And it was true. The room and its patients were clean and well tended. There was nothing immediately horrific here. At least nothing particularly visceral. And he knew that this was exactly what unnerved him, this outward appearance of tidiness and normalcy. As if he’d wandered into some Victorian napping parlor and the lot of them would awake at three when the bell was rung for tea and cake.

“Third floor,” Nora said, lowering her voice again, “is for the shorttimers. Or, at least, those diagnosed as possible short-timers. They’ve indicated moments of consciousness since their incident.”

He flinched at the word incident.

“These are Dr. Peck’s prime candidates for arousal. Good brain activity. Promising response to therapies. These are the ones who have the best chance of walking out of here and suing somebody.”

Sweeney motioned to the young girl with the mane of wires.

“What happened to her?”

“Thrown from her horse,” Nora said. Then she began to point to each bed in turn. “Car crash. Car crash. Stroke. Car crash.” And turning to the last one, a woman about her own age, “And I think she was a fall down the stairs. The cellar stairs, I think. Her son found her.”

Sweeney led the way back into the corridor and started for the elevator before Nora could show him another ward.

“For a personnel manager,” he said, “you know an awful lot about the patients.”

“I spent time on all these floors,” she said. “Ernie started out on three. After a month, they downgraded his condition and moved him to two. He spent his last ten years on the first floor.”

He stopped walking and waited for her to do the same. When she turned to him, he asked, “Do you know what floor Danny will be on?”

She said, “Would you believe me if I said I didn’t?”

He shook his head.

All the wiseass gone now, she said, “He’ll be in my husband’s old room.”

THEY DIDN’T SPAR much after that. They breezed through the second floor, the patients looking paler and more fragile than their counterparts upstairs. Nora had a penchant for narrating the proximate cause of each catastrophe before them. He heard about drug overdoses and viral attacks, embolisms and encephalitis and diabetes, hepatitis and botched suicide.

He was brought to the bedside of Mr. Lawrence Belmonte, who got lost in the woods during a hunting trip in Maine last March and suffered a near fatal case of hypothermia. He lost both his feet and all trace of consciousness. Sweeney was paraded before the bed of Mrs. Honey Lieb, who’d been shipped up from Fort Myers after she failed to wake from her gallstone procedure.