Taggart winced when the IV was mated to the port in his chest; the snapping sound it made unnerved him, the sharp sting it made on insertion was just icing on the cake.
He was sitting in a large room with what he guessed was a dozen or so other patients - people of all ages - all getting one kind of chemotherapy or another. Each and every one of them was laid out in brightly colored overstuffed recliners, and Taggart looked at all the others in the room feeling an underwhelmed mixture of revulsion and self-pity. Their feet up, their eyes closed, he felt a passing wave of nausea as he imagined embalming fluid passing into all those veins.
'We're dead, all of us in this goddam room. We just don't know it yet...'
The nurse hovering over him adjusted the flow-rate on his IV and disappeared. There were a couple of cheerful magazines on a cheerful little table by his cheerful recliner but one quick glance confirmed his first impression: nothing in English so nothing cheerful to read. He pushed a button and laid back, then closed his eyes.
'Just like falling off a log,' he remembered thinking...
Then he was walking down a dirt road. In a forest. Light snow falling. Wispy tendrils of snow on gray-brown leaves. Footsteps and the sounds of his breath the only music in this air. This air...? So far away, so long ago. Where...?
He searched memory, looking for this passage of time, this slice of life long gone.
Yosemite. He was seven years old, his first trip to the park. Thanksgiving vacation. Walking through the woods with his father, only now he was alone.
He turned, looked around, realized he was alone in the forest and he felt that same sudden panic every child experiences when alone and lost become the first words that come to mind.
Should I run? But where to? Who would I run to? There's no one here...
No, I'll just keep walking. Got to keep moving. Forward. Always forward.
He heard a snapping twig, turned to the noise. A fawn was circling aimlessly, the falling snow blending with the spots on his back.
Then he saw a rattlesnake. Huge. Preposterously so.
And so a careless fawn wandering in aimless circles, not a care in the world, comes face to face with death. In an instant, the snake is coiling around the fawn, then squeezing tighter and tighter until life leaves the eyes of both predator and prey. The snake takes the fawn by the head and slowly begins to devour him.
He wants to run now but can't because he has to stop and watch this happen, look at one more pointless death. But no, is that right? If death is pointless, isn't life pointless too? Aimless, wandering circles we call all our own?
He felt a presence by his side and opened an eye, watched as Dina Bauer talked to his nurse while a new bag of poison was fitted to the pump that was squeezing pure unmitigated shit into his veins. He turned away, closed his eyes - welcoming the darkness once again.
Then he felt his chair lurch, his feet lowering, then his head coming up.
And Dina was beside him now, looking into his eyes. "How do you feel?"
"Like I just swallowed a squirrel." Another Pointless Joke from The Joker.
She smiled. "This dose was a little different than the first. You will feel some nausea this time."
"I wouldn't miss it for the world."
"Oh?"
"It just wouldn't be chemo without vomiting and hair loss, ya know? It's like my very own red badge of courage."
She shook her head, smiled at his irreverence. "I wish you could experience saving just one life, Henry Taggart."
"You mean...the people in the water didn't count?"
She hesitated, looked away. "No, I meant from a medical perspective. That you could experience saving a life through medicine. Then you might understand what it is I feel."
"What makes you think I haven't, Dina."
She tossed a smug, sidelong glance his way. "Oh, truly? Well, this I've got to hear..."
"You want me to tell you? Here, now?"
"Of course. Please."
He closed his eyes, found the memory...
"I was in graduate school. Working a couple of nights a week over at Hewlett-Packard, spending time with Steve Jobs on the weekends. I was living in a dorm that year. We were having a party, there in the dorm. I'd brought some silicon blanks and a small laser..."
"What is this silicon blank?"
"Almost pure silicon, very thin and formed into a circle, three-inch diameter. More reflective than a mirror."
"Okay."
"Anyway, we took the covers off a set of hi-fi speakers and I glued a blank on the dome of a woofer..."
"A what?"
"Woofer. It's the speaker that reproduces all the bass notes in music."
"Yes, okay. The big one, correct?"
"Yes. So, once the glue set we tilted the speaker and fired the laser into the blank, then we put on some Iron Butterfly. In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida. The drum solo..."
She shrugged.
"Yeah? Okay, no biggie. So, anyway, the laser is bouncing along to the music and making all kinds of cool-looking patterns on the ceiling..."
"This is going somewhere, I trust?"
"Yeah, it is. So, we're listening to Dark Side of the Moon, and the first song, Speak to Me, starts out with this long recording of a heartbeat. So bingo, I'm gluing a blank on my roommate's chest and bouncing the laser off that - and what's on the ceiling? Well, it ain't random, Dina. It looked almost exactly like an EKG tracing. Anyway, the idea hits me...let's bounce the laser off a bunch of hearts, see if we can reproduce the results."
"Did it work?"
"Yup. So, yeah, one of the people we did this to was a girl, and yes, we glued a blank on her chest, right between two of the most glorious, uh, well, you know..."
"Indeed I do. So, what happened next?"
"Well, we get a tracing but it looks different. Really different. Like one trace on top of another. So, it hits me, right? This is a girl and girls can have, well, you know, two hearts beating in there..."
"What?"
"You know, a fetus?"
"Ah."
"So I put a blank on her belly and bounce the beam and pick up a fetal heart beat...which was really kind of cool because she didn't even know she was preggers."
"Preggers?"
"Pregnant."
"Ah."
"Still, we kept picking up subtle traces of the mother's heartbeat, even on the belly. That was a problem, I guess, that I wanted to solve. I talked with some of the guys over in the medical electronics division about what I'd found and they were all stoked because at that time you couldn't pick up a good fetal rhythm with a standard EKG. We started doing these laser bounce sessions over in the OB clinic at Stanford, and to make a long story a little less long I developed the very first working fetal ballistocardiograph. I hold the patent, too, though H-P made the rig. You guys could, with my little setup, diagnose major heart valve problems in-utero for the first time, and all because of Pink Floyd and little old me."
"Pink who?"
Taggart shook his head. "Damn, Dina! And I take it you've never heard In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida before, right?"
She shook her head.
"That figures."
"Well, I see you aren't feeling too bad. If there are no..."
"Wait a minute, doc. You mean to tell me I tell you this whole tale about how I..."
"Oh, I'm very impressed, Henry. You amaze me, really."
"Yeah. Right. So, you were saying?"
"You can make the afternoon shuttle down to Stavanger. I won't need to see you here until next week."
"So, I can make it to Oslo in a week, right?"
She seemed shocked. "You surely are not going to keep going, Henry."
"Places to go, Dina. People to see. Paris by Christmas, remember?"
"I'm sorry, but I cannot go with you now."
"I understand."
"Is Eva going to stay with you?"