Chapter 1099: I Want Out of Here
June 1997
Gunshots. People shouting his name. Arguments, conversations, crying, singing, instruments, doctors and nurses talking over his head, every kind of noise a machine can make, ambulances, airplanes.
All of it, along with the Revelation that had been pouring through him the whole time, show after show, season after season, finished and complete, turned slowly to ash, a speck at a time, until there was nothing left.
Alex felt like a dying man drowning in mud. Then, all at once, his body was shoved up out of it by a rage of full post-traumatic force directed at the three lying bastards who ran 3dfx, the chip company he owned a big piece of. He sat up in bed, breathing hard, enjoying a set of ears that suddenly seemed clean, and — the feeling of being alive.
"Mike," he called, out of old habit.
"What!"
The answer came back before the name had finished crossing the room, same as it had since 1991. A chair scraped in the dark.
In a dark room, the sound of the television and the flicker of its light hurt his ears and eyes beyond bearing, and everything else on him hurt too. The skin around his waist felt like it had torn when he sat up. And then hunger, hunger like he'd never known, hit him in the chest and within seconds had drowned out everything else.
"I'm hungry!" he yelled, and lay back down in pain. "Go get me something to eat—"
Bang! The door came open hard enough to hit the wall, and the noise rolled his eyes back and nearly put him under again.
"APLUS?" An unfamiliar accent, right beside his ear, smelling of coffee.
"Motherfucker — keep your voice down," he groaned.
"Mike! Mike!"
It was the South African on the door. He'd heard shouting from inside the room and hadn't believed it. He threw himself at the bedside to make sure, then shook the old man in the chair. "He's awake! APLUS is awake! Doctor! Nurse! Somebody!" And he was out the door yelling for help, boots going off down the corridor, and the night shift came awake behind him.
"Child—"
Old Mike thought he was dreaming. He slapped himself across the mouth, dug the orange earplugs out of his ears and half fell across the bed. The boy was lying there with the back of one hand over his eyes, both hands shaking and not stopping, and a sound coming out of his throat he wasn't making on purpose, the kind you make when you're enduring pain.
Old Mike's chest was full of too many things at once and his eyes spilled over. "I'm sorry. I didn't protect you."
"Useless old man," the boy said.
"…"
Old Mike's face went dark. Since January he'd barely changed out of his clothes, in Chicago and then here, but for the stretch in April when McGill had him thrown off the floor. He'd been sleeping in that chair with plugs in his ears, because the machine by the bed beeped every four seconds all night.
Forget it. You don't hold a patient to it. He pushed down the urge to knock this kid out again and asked, gently, "How do you feel?"
"I'm hungry."
"I don't know that you're allowed to eat yet, kid."
"I'm hungry."
"I've got to ask the doctor."
"I'm hungry — and I've got to fire those three. I'm firing them. Fire them—" Alex went on muttering.
"I know. I know. I know you could hear everything going on out here," Old Mike said, choking on it. He assumed the boy meant McGill and his crowd. "The doctor said back in March you might be hearing every word. After that I didn't let anybody argue in this room."
"Please step aside, sir."
The Black intern on night shift, fetched off another ward by the South African. He came in with the stethoscope already in his ears.
"Wow—" Alex hissed. The cold disc touched his chest and the pain of it went through him.
"Unbelievable. Unbelievable." The intern muttered it to himself as he ran one reading after another. "It's unbelievable."
"What is it? Talk slower, Doc," said Old Mike, who'd stopped sighing long enough to get his phone out and start dialing.
"Five months in a deep coma, and he came out of it on his own. No change in the medication, no stimulation, nothing we did. It's like he'd just been asleep."
"Not— months?" Alex said, startled.
"Hearing and cognitive response look about normal. Wow."
"Months?"
"Five months. Try not to dwell on it, okay? Bloods again in the morning, a swallow study before anybody puts food in front of you, and the monitor stays on overnight. What you need more than anything right now is rest, Mr. APLUS," the intern said soothingly.
"I'm not resting. I'm going to fire those three. Now," Alex said.
The intern took that to mean himself and the other two interns on nights, and started going back over everything he'd said over this bed since January. He slowed down considerably.
"I'm hungry," Alex added.
"I'm not sure you're able to eat yet."
"I want to eat."
The intern looked at the nurse, and the nurse looked at the chart. "Okay. I'll call Dr. House. If he clears it, you get ice chips tonight and nothing else." He said something to the nurse and hurried out.
"Dr. House..."
In Alex's head, the name snapped onto a voice. He knew that voice. Seven weeks of it, over his bed, through the fog — an insufferable white man reciting medical terms, atropine, adrenaline, arguing with every doctor in the building, a cane thumping the floor, pills rattling in a bottle. The man had been standing over him since May, and every time he'd come near, the room had gotten louder.
"Agh!"
He really didn't want to faint again this time. He shouted, and the vertigo set his whole body jerking.
Through the nurses' screaming, the intern came running back.
"I don't want shots—" Something went into the line in his arm while he was still talking. Sedative, or muscle relaxant — he couldn't tell anymore. His arms went heavy first.
"I'm not sick! I want out of here, Mike." He went weak fast and sagged back into the bed, pleading with Old Mike. "Get me out of here, please."
"You're not going anywhere until I find your cause."
A man had appeared in the doorway on a cane. Three days of beard, no white coat, a pill bottle in the hand that wasn't on the cane.
So that was the face that went with the voice. It was studying him hard. He had no idea why, but that voice frightened him a little, and his body curled up as far as it could.
"Five months in a coma," House said, "and there's a blank line on the chart where the diagnosis goes. I'm not signing anybody out over a blank line. Sorry."
"Mike. Have McGill draw up the discharge papers," Alex ordered.
"Huh?" A question mark came over Old Mike's whole face.
McGill and the rest of them have made themselves hundreds of millions of dollars—
McGill! You're stealing Alex's money!
McGill, you'll regret this—
Another set of scraps started lining up in his head, and every one of them had McGill in it: Sloane's voice, Tony's voice, other voices he couldn't place. These weren't from the Revelation. These were things people had said over his bed while he lay there unconscious.
He half understood it and half didn't, and it didn't matter right now, because House had vanished from the doorway, come back a minute later without the pill bottle, and was walking straight toward the bed.
"What do you think you're doing? House!" The intern grabbed his hand out of the air. The two of them were somehow in a fight, in front of a patient, at ten to two in the morning; in the scuffle something came loose from House's hand and rolled, and Old Mike picked it up off the floor. A small syringe. Capped.
"He doesn't go anywhere until I find the cause of all of this!" House shouted.
"Are you out of your mind, man?" The intern got his lame boss under control fast and asked it right in his face.
"No lesion, no bleed, nothing on the last three scans, and people don't come out of five months on their own. Let me finish working this out. Let me see what's inside his head—" House said. "After the craniotomy—"
"Oh—" Alex, more frightened than ever, started to retch. A nurse got a basin under him.
"Don't let him near APLUS," Old Mike barked.
Whatever else happened that night, there'd be no craniotomy now. The two South Africans put themselves between the cane and the bed, and one of them apologized while he did it.
Old Mike looked up at the little red light of the camera in the corner — House had put that thing up weeks ago — and back at the intern. "Nobody moves him, and nobody touches that camera, you hear me? And nobody from this department gets past that door. Hold here while I call the dean at home." He turned away with the phone against his good ear. "And Ms. Kelly, before she gets on her plane."
Ms. Kelly was Mimi. She'd won him off Sherilyn and Susie in court that spring, and since May she'd held his medical proxy.
Over the basin, Alex stopped. "Mimi?"
A line from somewhere went off in his head in her voice. Eating! Eating is all you ever know how to do!
It would take Mariah Carey some hours to reach New Jersey. The dean got there at a quarter to three in a raincoat over his pajamas, with the hospital's lawyer behind him holding a legal pad against his chest.
They propped Alex up on two pillows, and under the eyes of the dean and half the night shift he sucked down four ounces of sour vitamin liquid through a straw.
"Hah." He let go of the straw and sighed with enormous satisfaction.
The dean had the chart open and talked to it, since the patient kept swearing at him. "We still need to observe you. Seventy-two hours at a minimum, longer if the bloods come back wrong. You've lost most of your muscle mass, and a machine has been doing your kidneys' work since February. Your body needs the rest, Mr. APLUS."
"Hmph. You'll be hearing from my lawyers."
"We cured you, sir," said the hospital's lawyer, standing beside the dean. "At a minimum we brought you out of a five-month coma. Four specialists, two transfers between units, four months of dialysis."
"You'll be hearing from my lawyers."
"Please calm down, Mr. APLUS. Dr. House is simply not very good with people. He worked your case a month straight. He came in on days he wasn't even on the schedule."
Standing in front of APLUS's anger, the hospital's lawyer thought about CBS, still in court against Cochran and losing in public every week that spring, and glanced at the syringe Old Mike was still holding, and his face went the color of shame. Seventy-two hours, the dean had said. They'd be lucky to get twelve.
Alex couldn't be bothered with any of them. Putting together what he'd heard and seen and what he could remember, that damned lunatic of a doctor was the single biggest threat to him right now. The coma itself had been nothing more than the Revelation cramming too much into him at once. Now he was awake, and he wasn't staying in this hospital one second longer than he had to. They had very nearly opened his skull.
Sloane and Yeremov had been waiting out the craniotomy at a hotel across the road, and were outside the room within half an hour.
Sloane stopped dead in the doorway when she saw the straw. Same suit she'd slept in, no earrings, and a fat folder under her arm. She put a hand over her mouth, and her eyes went red again.
"Hah. Come in, both of you."
Sloane came to the bed softly, with a thousand things to say and nowhere to start, and bent down and put her arms around him without a word.
"All right. All right. All right." She held on a long time — and why are my cheeks wet? "Crying? That's not like you, Sloane."
"You have no idea what these five months have been," Sloane said, wiping her eyes with her wrist.
Then she did what Sloane always did with feelings and got straight down to business, still sniffing. Three recording dates at the Hit Factory cancelled, twice each. The Perfect Score world tour, thirty-two dates, frozen since February, with Anschutz's lawyers asking every month whether to cancel it outright. Geffen Records asking about the album. And a claims manager from CNA, the company that had insured the tour, who called her every week to ask whether APLUS was awake yet, because if he never woke up CNA would be paying out on the whole thing.
"Seven weeks of that man. He asked me once if you could blink. I told him you could blink twice for yes and hung up on him." She opened her bag and took out his watch, the steel one, and held it flat in her palm. "It's been sitting in a property envelope since January. I had the strap fixed in March, because I'm an idiot who fixes straps for men in comas."
"Put it on me, then. Idiot."
"Your wrist's gone skinny. Look at this. I've got bigger wrists than you now." She buckled it on the last hole anyway. The face slid around to the underside of his arm, and she turned it up and left her hand there, her thumb moving over the back of his knuckles.
"You're going to make me cry again, Sloane, and I'm too weak to wipe my own face."
"Good. Then you'll have to lie there and take it." She sniffed hard and pushed her hair back. "What do you need? Tell me something to do before I start howling in front of Yeremov."
"Monday. There's a bookshop in Seattle that went public in May. Amazon. Buy it at the open, through O'Grady, in my name. Ten million."
Amazon.com had listed on the Nasdaq in the middle of May at eighteen dollars a share and raised about fifty-four million dollars. By June it had slipped to around sixteen, so ten million would buy something over six hundred thousand shares, about two and a half percent of the company. It was three years old, it was run by a former Wall Street hedge-fund man named Jeff Bezos, it lost money on almost everything it sold, and it called itself "Earth's Biggest Bookstore" without owning a single store.
"Ten million dollars? On a bookshop? You've been awake forty minutes, APLUS."
"That TV's been on in here for five months, Sloane. I've been lying here listening to people talk about that company since May. I like it. Buy it."
That was all the reason he gave, and it was about as much as he ever gave. A store that sold books off a computer screen and shipped them to your door was going to be very big or gone in three years, and ten million dollars was a price he could pay to find out which. The chip business was the other thing on his mind, the one he'd come up out of the coma swearing about. Nvidia was a small outfit in Sunnyvale whose first chip had flopped, trying again with a new part called the RIVA 128, and nobody in the game magazines rated it anywhere near Voodoo.
Sloane had watched him buy a chip company, a French vodka and a website in two years, and she'd stopped winning these arguments a long time ago. "Fine. Ten million on a bookshop. If it goes to zero I'm telling everybody it was the drugs."
"If it doubles you're telling everybody it was you."
"Obviously." She squeezed his hand.
He went on with his eyes shut. "Call Alicia Florrick tomorrow. I want a new lawyer, and I don't want McGill's people hearing about it first. Get Cochran over here for the discharge. Find McGill's kid brother, Jimmy, before McGill sends him somewhere. Oh, and find out where Kim Wexler's working these days. McGill's girl, the one he sat at the end of my A+CN table."
"That's five things, APLUS. You were in a coma this morning."
"And I'm out of it now, and McGill's been spending my money for five months. You want me to take it slow?"
"I want you to drink your vitamin water and let me do it." She was already on her feet with her phone. "Alicia first. Then I'm going to wake up Cochran and enjoy it."
Yeremov had a folder against his chest and didn't open it.
"Uh, boss. A+ Records needs a statement tonight. Reuters has had it an hour, MTV's called the hotel four times — same girl, very polite. I tell her there's nothing, she calls again. Nine crews on the lawn. Ten, if you count Newark, which is a man and a boy holding a light."
"Tell them tomorrow. Tell the polite girl I said hello."
"She'll cry, boss. She's been calling since January." He turned the folder over in his hands. "Ms. Kelly lands about four. She has the boy with her. Somebody should be at the car. Not me — she doesn't like my face."
"Good," Alex said.
Yeremov cleared his throat. "She is also bringing two lawyers. And a doctor from Los Angeles who hasn't seen a patient since 1994, I'm told. Don't ask me. I only know what the pilot's people tell me."
The room went quiet enough to hear the machine, four seconds apart. Alex kept his eyes shut. "Tell her not to bring the lawyers into the room. The doctor can come in. The lawyers wait downstairs, somebody gets them coffee, and nobody's rude to them."
"Boss, those are the same two who took your Bel Air house. The tall one sent me a Christmas card with the invoice in it," Yeremov said to Sloane, very quietly, because it wasn't his place to argue in a sickroom and he was arguing anyway. "Coffee. With cream, maybe? Maybe I should find some cookies?"
Alex and Mariah had settled the divorce in six weeks of lawyers and a season in the papers, and now he was ordering coffee for hers.
"Don't look at me, I just got here. Get them the coffee, Yeremov. And get me one while you're at it, I've been up since yesterday," Sloane said. "Black. Two sugars. Hh! And don't let Ms. Kelly's people see you carrying it, they'll think we're scared of them."
Old Mike came back with a paper cup in each hand and stopped, because everybody was looking at him. "What?"
Alex let his head go back on the pillow. "Nothing. Mike, I'm missing a guitar. Go and find it."
"What guitar? You were in a coma, kid, you weren't playing anything."
"And there were motorcycles. Don't forget the motorcycles."
"He's still out of it," Old Mike said to Sloane, low, and not low enough.
"I am not out of it. I want my guitar."
"Fine. Guitar. Motorcycles. I'll get right on it, kid. After you drink this." It was more of the vitamin stuff, from the nurses' station.
"Fine, fine, I'll drink it." Old Mike put the cup in his hand and held the bottom of it for him, since the hand wasn't good for much yet. He drank the whole thing and didn't complain about the taste.
Old Mike carried the empty cup the length of the corridor and stopped at the nurses' station with it. "He drank the whole cup."
The nurse was halfway through the two o'clock charts and had heard about the guitar already from the South Africans. "That's good, sir. That's exactly what we want."
"And he didn't complain about the taste. You don't know that kid. He complains about orange juice."
"...All right."
He was still holding the cup out where she could see into it. She took it off him and threw it in the trash, and Old Mike went off down the stairs to ask the South Africans whether anybody had seen a guitar.
Sloane sat on the edge of the bed, found his hand under the sheet and laced her fingers through his without asking. "You look like you're a million miles away. Come back. I just got you back."
Grey's Anatomy, a hospital drama out of Seattle, season after season of it, surgical interns sleeping with each other in the on-call rooms. The Sopranos, six seasons of a fat New Jersey mob boss in a therapist's office — and here he was, lying in New Jersey. American Idol, year after year of a singing contest on network television, kids from nowhere lined up around the block and a British guy with a sneer telling them they were dreadful. The Bear, a fine-dining chef named Carmy Berzatto who came home to Chicago to run his dead brother's Italian beef shop, a cousin who yelled, a young cook named Sydney who wanted to do it right, half-hour episodes, eight or ten a season, every one of them loud. The Office, a half-hour comedy with no laugh track, shot like a documentary in a paper company's branch office in Scranton, Pennsylvania, where a regional manager named Michael Scott thought he was the funniest man in the building and a salesman named Jim kept looking at the camera. Game of Thrones, dragons and noble houses and a winter that never came, every season. Daredevil, a blind lawyer from Hell's Kitchen who put on a black mask at night and fought his way down hallways, thirteen episodes a season, one Marvel character on a small budget, and it had been made for a streaming service nobody had built yet. The Five, cable news with five people around a table arguing and no host in charge of them. Valley of the Boom, six episodes about Netscape and the internet money of the next few years, who got rich and who went to jail.
And on top of all of it, a whole movie, finished, start to finish: The Wolf of Wall Street. Leo, three hours of him, cut and scored, a Long Island stock boiler room going out of its mind. The Revelation had finished handing it over sometime while he lay here.
And one hour of public television, a Frontline called The Crash, finished and narrated, with the PBS card at the front. Thailand letting go of the baht on the second of July. The rupiah in Jakarta going from twenty-four hundred to the dollar to more than ten thousand. Moscow in August of the next year, the government stopping payment on its own bonds and people outside banks that didn't open. Men from Washington at the end explaining why nobody had seen it coming. It didn't have Korea in it at all.
[Revelation scene: Frontline, The Crash — the Bank of Thailand lets the baht go]
And two films besides. Something the Lord Made, a television picture about a Black lab man at Johns Hopkins, and the rest of Requiem for a Dream, whose music had been coming at him the moment he was shot.
No wonder they'd nearly had to open his skull. It was more television than a man could watch in a year of doing nothing else.
Under all of it were the older ones, from before the shooting, the ones he'd never gotten around to making. A teen comedy called The Girl Next Door that had hit him on a live talk show in Mexico City. A picture with a locked red room in it that had come a piece at a time, most of the pieces around Charlize. A World Cup song for Brazil, a song for Mariah about the Grammys, a couple of records he'd been saving for an album he never got to cut, and a Swahili choir piece he'd conducted once and never put on a record.
And the drummer picture. Whiplash. The last of it had come down on him on New Year's night at Orchestra Hall, on the podium, as the applause started for "Baba Yetu" and he turned to take his bow, and he'd had to grab the stand with one hand. Three days later, somebody had shot him.
He'd sort it out later. There'd be time. Right now there was McGill, and the money, and a doctor with a syringe down the hall.
Twenty past three. He looked at the clock, and at the little camera under it, and then at the clock again. "Sloane. Help me sit up."
"The dean said—"
"I know what the dean said." He got an elbow underneath himself. It shook, and it held.
"I want to be sitting up when she walks through that door."
"Five months in a coma and it's vanity. Unbelievable." Sloane got a second pillow behind his back anyway and fixed his hair with her fingers. "There. Handsome. Skinny, but handsome."