“What is it?”

“He's talking about my boy,” she whispered. “My Mark.”

“No,” Brown said. “He's talking in his sleep, that's all Don't make a picture out of an inkblot, Nurse.”

“Yes. Okay. But he's not asleep now, is he?”

“Marie?” Johnny asked. He smiled tentatively. “I dozed off, didn't I?”

“Yes,” Brown said. “You were talking in your sleep. Gave Marie here a turn. Were you dreaming?”

“No-oo… not that I remember. What did I say? And who are you?”

“I'm Dr. James Brown. Just like the soul singer. Only I'm a neurologist. You said, “I think he'll be okay once they clean that impacted cornea.” I think that was it, wasn't it, Nurse?”

“My boy's going to have that operation,” Marie said. “My boy Mark.”

“I don't remember anything,” Johnny said. “I guess I was sleeping. “He looked at Brown. His eyes were clear now, and scared. “I can't lift my arms. Am I paralyzed?”

“Nope. Try your fingers.”

Johnny did. They all wiggled. He smiled.

“Superfine,” Brown said. “Tell me your name.”

“John Smith.”

“Good, and your middle name?”

“I don't have one.”

“That's fine, who needs one? Nurse, go down to your station and find out who's in neurology tomorrow. I'd like to start a whole series of tests on Mr. Smith.”

“Yes, Doctor.”

“And you might call Sam Weizak. You'll get him at home or at the golf course.”

“Yes, Doctor.”

“And no reporters, please… for your life!” Brown was smiling but serious.

“No, of course not. “She left, white shoes squeaking faintly. Her little boy's going to be just fine, Johnny thought. I'll be sure to tell her.

“Dr. Brown,” he said, “where are my get-well cards? Didn't anybody send me a card?”

“Just a few more questions,” Dr. Brown said smoothly. “Do you recall your mother's name?”

“Of course I do. Vera.”

“Her maiden name?”

“Nason.”

“Your father's name?”

“Herbert. Herb. And why did you tell her no reporters?”

“Your mailing address?”

“RFD #1, Pownal,” Johnny said promptly, and then stopped. An expression of comic surprise passed across his face. “I mean… well, I live in Cleaves Mills now, at 110 North Main Street. Why the hell did I give you my parents” address? I haven't lived there since I was eighteen.”

“And how old are you now?”

“Look it up on my driver's license,” Johnny said. “I want to know why I don't have any get-well cards. How long have I been in the hospital, anyway? And which hospital is this?”

“It's the Eastern Maine Medical Center. And we'll get to all the rest of your questions if you'll just let me…

Brown was sitting by the bed in a chair he had drawn over from the corner-the same corner where Johnny had once seen the passage leading away. He was making notes on a clipboard with a type of pen Johnny couldn't remember ever having seen before. It had a thick blue plastic barrel and a fibrous tip. It looked like the strange hybrid offspring of a fountain pen and. a ballpoint.

Just looking at it made that formless dread come back, and without thinking about it, Johnny suddenly seized Dr. Brown's left hand in one of his own. His arm moved creakily, as if there were invisible sixty-pound weights tied to it-a couple below the elbow and a couple above. He captured the doctor's hand in a weak grip and pulled. The funny pen left a thick blue line across the paper.

Brown looked at him, at first only curious. Then his face drained of color. The sharp expression of interest left his eyes and was replaced with a muddy look of fear. He snatched his hand away-Johnny had no power to hold it-and for an instant a look of revulsion crossed the doctor's face, as if he had been touched by a leper.

Then it was gone, and he only looked surprised and disconcerted. “What did you do that for? Mr. Smith…”

His voice faltered. Johnny's face had frozen in an expression of dawning comprehension. His eyes were the eyes of a man who has seen something terrible moving and shifting in the shadows, something too terrible to be described or even named.

But it was a fact. It had to be named.

“Fifty-five months?” Johnny asked hoarsely. “Going on five years? No. Oh my God, no.”

“Mr. Smith,” Brown said, now totally flustered. “Please, it's not good for you to excite…

Johnny raised his upper body perhaps three inches from the bed and then slumped back, his face shiny with sweat. His eyes rolled helplessly in their sockets. “I'm twenty-seven?” he muttered. “Twenty-seven? Oh my Jesus.”

Brown swallowed and heard an audible dick. When Smith had grabbed his hand, he had felt a sudden on-rush of bad feelings, childlike in their intensity; crude images of revulsion had assaulted him. He had found himself remembering a picnic in the country when he had been seven or eight, sitting down and putting his hand in something warm and slippery. He had looked around and had seen that he had put his hand into the maggoty remains of a woodchuck that had lain under a laurel bush all that hot August. He had screamed then, and he felt a little bit like screaming now-except that the feeling was fading, dwindling, to be replaced with a question: How did he know? He touched me and he knew.

Then twenty years of education rose up strongly in him, and he pushed the notion aside. There were cases without number of comatose patients who had awakened with a dreamlike knowledge of many of the things that had gone on around them while they were in coma. Like anything else, coma was a matter of degree. Johnny Smith had never been a vegetable; his EEG had never gone flat-line, and if it had, Brown would not be talking with him now. Sometimes being in a coma was a little like being behind a one-way glass. To the beholding eye the patient was completely conked out, but the patient's senses might still continue to function in some low, power-down fashion. And that was the case here, of course.

Marie Michaud came back in. “Neurology is confirmed, and Dr. Weizak is on his way.”

“I think Sam will have to wait until tomorrow to meet Mr. Smith,” Brown said. “I want him to have five milligrams of Valium.”

“I don't want a sedative,” Johnny said. “I want to get out of here. I want to know what happened!”

“You'll know everything in time,” Brown said. “Right now it's important that you rest.”

“I've been resting for four-and-a-half years!”

“Then another twelve hours won't make much difference,” Brown said inexorably.

A few moments later the nurse swabbed his upper arm with alcohol, and there was the sting of a needle. Johnny began to feel sleepy almost at once. Brown and the nurse began to look twelve feet tall.

“Tell me one thing, at least,” he said. His voice seemed to come from far, far away. Suddenly it seemed terribly important. “That pen. What do you call that pen?”

“This?” Brown held it out from his amazing height. Blue plastic body, fibrous tip. “It's called a Flair. Now go to sleep, Mr. Smith.”

And Johnny did, but the word followed him down into his sleep like a mystic incantation, full of idiot meaning:

Flair… Flair…

Herb put the telephone down and looked at it. He looked at it for a long time. From the other room came the sound of the TV, turned up almost all the way. Oral Roberts was talking about football and the healing love of Jesus there was a connection there someplace, but Herb had missed it. Because of the telephone call. Oral's voice boomed and roared. Pretty soon the show would end and Oral would dose it out by confidently telling his audience that something good was going to happen to them. Apparently Oral was right.

My boy, Herb thought. While Vera had prayed for a miracle, Herb had prayed for his boy to die. It was Vera's prayer that had been answered… What did that mean, and where did it leave him? And what was it going to do to her?