"Well, twelve."
"Twelve?"
"Dr. Mayfair, it's only eleven-thirty, the plane doesn't leave till six." He fished in his pocket for his money clip.
She waved that away and strode across the street, dodging a taxi gracefully and then disappearing into the store.
God, the nerve of me to ask her to do this, he thought, defeated. We're off to a dreadful beginning, but that wasn't entirely true. She was being too nice to him, he hadn't destroyed it all yet. And he could taste the beer already. And his stomach wasn't going to quiet down for anything else.
The thudding music from the nearby barrooms sounded too loud suddenly, and the colors of the street too vivid. The young passersby seemed to come much too close to the car. And this is what you get for three and half months of isolation, he was thinking. You're like a guy out of a jail cell.
Why, he didn't even know what today was, except it was Friday because his plane was Saturday, six A.M. He wondered if he could smoke in this car.
As soon as she put the sack in his lap, he opened it.
"That's a fifty-dollar ticket, Mr. Curry," she said, pulling out. "Having an open can of beer in a car."
"Yeah, well, if you get one, I'll pay it." He must have drunk half the can on the first swallow. And now for a moment, he was all right.
She crossed the broad six-way intersection at Market, made an illegal left turn on Seventeenth Street, and zoomed uphill.
"And the beer blunts things, is that it?" she asked.
"No, nothing blunts it." he said. "It's coming at me from everywhere."
"Is it coming at you from me?"
"Well, no. But I want to be with you, you see." He took another drink, hand out to brace himself against the dash as she made the downhill turn towards the Haight. "I'm not a complainer by nature, Dr. Mayfair," he said. "It's just that since the accident I've been living my life without any protective skin on me. I can't concentrate. I can't even read or sleep."
"I understand, Mr. Curry. When I get you home, you can go on the boat, do what you want. But I'd really like it if you'd let me fix you some food."
"It won't do any good, Dr. Mayfair. Let me ask you something, how dead was I when you picked me up?"
"Completely clinically dead, Mr. Curry. No detectable vital signs. Without intervention, irreversible biological death would have soon set in. You didn't get my letter, did you?"
"You wrote me a letter?"
"I should have come to the hospital," she said.
She drove the car like a race driver, he thought, playing out each gear until the engine was screaming before she shifted to the next.
"But I didn't say anything to you, you told that to Dr. Morris ... "
"You said a name, a word, something, you just murmured it. I couldn't hear syllables. I heard an L sound--"
--An L sound ... A great hush drowned out the rest of her words. He was falling. He knew on the one hand that he was in the car, that she was speaking to him, and that they had crossed Lincoln Avenue and were burrowing through Golden Gate Park towards Park Presidio Drive, but he wasn't really there. He was on the edge of a dream space where the word beginning with L meant something crucial, and something extremely complex and familiar. A throng of beings surrounded him, pressing close to him and ready to speak. The doorway ...
He shook his head. Focus. But it was already disintegrating. He felt panic.
When she braked for the stop light at Geary Street, he was flung back against the leather seat.
"You don't operate on people's brains the way you drive this car, do you?" he asked. His face was hot all over.
"Yes, as a matter of fact, I do," she said. She started out from the light a little more slowly.
"I'm sorry," he said again. "I seem full of apologies, I've been apologizing to people since it happened. There's nothing wrong with your driving. It's me. I used to be ... ordinary before that accident. I mean, just one of those happy people, you know ... "
Was she nodding?
She appeared distracted when he looked at her, drawn into her own thoughts. She slowed as they approached the tollgate. The fog hung so heavily over the bridge that the traffic seemed to disappear into it.
"You want to talk to me?" she asked, eyes on the traffic vanishing ahead of them. She pulled a dollar bill out of her coat and gave it to the tollgate keeper. "You want to tell me what's been going on?"
He sighed. That seemed an impossible task. But the worst aspect of it was, if he started he wouldn't stop. "The hands, you know, I see things when I touch things, but the visions ... "
"Tell me about the visions."
"I know what you think. You're a neurologist. You're thinking it's temporal lobe difficulty, some crap like that."
"No, that's not what I think," she said.
She was driving faster. The great ugly shape of a truck appeared ahead, its taillights like beacons. She fell into place safely behind it, pushing to fifty-five, to keep up.
He downed the rest of the beer in three quick swallows, shoved the can in the sack, and then took off his glove. They were off the bridge, and magically the fog had disappeared, as so often happened. The clear bright sky astonished him. The dark hills rose like shoulders nudging them as they climbed the Waldo Grade.
He looked down at his hand. It seemed unappealingly moist and wrinkled. When he rubbed his fingers together, a sensation passed through him which was vaguely pleasant.
They were cruising now at sixty miles an hour. He reached for Dr. Mayfair's hand, which rested on the gear-shift knob, long pale fingers relaxed.
She didn't move to resist him. She glanced at him, then back at the traffic ahead as they entered the tunnel. He lifted her hand off the knob and pressed his thumb into her naked palm.
A soft whispering sound enveloped him, and his vision blurred. It was as if her body had disintegrated and then surrounded him, a whirling cloud of particles. Rowan. He was afraid for a minute that they were going off the road. But she wasn't the one feeling this, he was, he was feeling her moist warm hand, and this throbbing heartbeat coming through it and this sense of the being at the core of this great airy presence that had enveloped him and was caressing him all over, like falling snow. The erotic arousal was so intense that he
could do nothing to curb it.
Then in an obliterating flash he was in a kitchen, a dazzling modern affair with shining gadgets and appliances, and a man lay dying on the floor. Argument, screaming; but that was something that had happened moments before. These intervals of time were sliding over one another, crashing into each other. There was no up or down; no right or left. Michael was in the very middle of it. Rowan, with her stethoscope, knelt beside the dying man. Hate you. She closed her eyes, pulled the stethoscope out of her ears. Couldn't believe her luck that he was dying.
Then everything stopped. The traffic was slowing. She'd pulled her hand loose from Michael, and shifted with a hard, efficient motion.
It felt like skating on ice to him, the way they traveled along, turning right and right again, but it didn't matter. It was an illusion that they were in danger, and now the facts came, the things he always knew about these visions, the things that were simply there in his mind now, as if they'd always been, like his address, and his phone number, and the date of his birth.
It had been her adoptive father, and she had despised him, because she feared she was like him--decisive, fundamentally unkind and uncaring. And her life had been founded upon not being like him, but being like her adoptive mother, an easygoing, sentimental creature with a great sense of style, a woman loved by all and respected by no one.
"So what did you see?" she asked. Her face was wondrously smooth in the wash of the passing lights.
"Don't you know?" he said. "God, I wish this power would go away. I wish I had never felt it. I don't want to know these things about people."
"Tell me what did you see?"
"He died on the floor. You were glad. He didn't divorce her. She never knew he was planning to do it. He was six feet two inches tall, born in San Rafael, California, and this was his car." Now where did all that come from? And he could have gone on; he had known from the very first night that he could go on, if he was only willing to do it. "That's what I saw. Does it matter to you? Do you want me to talk about it? Why did you want me to see it, that's what I should be asking you. What good is it that I know it was your kitchen, and that when you got back from the hospital where they took him and coded him which was plain stupid because he was dead on arrival, that you sat down and ate the food he'd cooked before he'd died."