I'm not happy with this, but I don't know what to change at this stage. Overall it appears top-heavy, all build-up and little delivery. It's harder than I thought packing so much into 2,000 words, so maybe the idea was too ambitious? Or some parts of it too superfluous?
Yesterday’s Man*
It began as a favour to Brenner; young doctor currently finishing his NHS stint. He’s a popular lad; works hard, keeps to himself. Bit fanciful, but a little imagination shows flexibility. The phone went and he was shouting -
shouting of all things. I’d never heard Brenner shout - an odd, strangled sound that did him no justice.
It was a good few minutes before I could make him out, but the gist was some patient he was desperate for me to visit on an unofficial basis. I grumbled, but my protests died away under his near-hysterical pitch. Something had clearly shifted his axis of reason, and out of concern for his state of mind I agreed to meet him.
He was waiting for me at the hospital car park, waving his arms as if flagging down a stranger. He began talking before I had opened the door, and our disjointed conversation followed us to the lobby. His eyes were bloodshot and I noted a lack of the usual neatness in his apparel or finesse to his movements. Once or twice he almost bumped into others, so engrossed was he on the subject of this patient of his.
Our conversation was like a film whose sound had become separated from the synchronicity of the picture; I could hear the words but there was little sense to them, and my part was to try and catch up with a man lost in his own beguiling theory. He used phrases such as ‘environment-sensory variables’ and ‘extra-mental stimuli,’ which I had never heard before, and was certain were not real, but extensions of this…let us call it, ‘sudden source of excitement.’
I have, from time to time, seen the mental ability of staff adversely affected by their charges, albeit after years of exposure. Brenner was less than a year into his post, and not of that predisposition for excitability, although that imaginative streak I mentioned was a vulnerability.
At the lifts Brenner pressed floor nine, or the ‘yesterday floor’ as it was known, on account of it holding the geriatric wards, whose dementia patients continually ask who you are, where
they are, what happened yesterday etcetera. Very wearing.
“This patient,” he said, “displays all the signs of what I’ve termed ‘super-lucidity.’”
A porter stared at Brenner.
“
Super-lucidity?” I attempted to sound light-hearted. “My dear chap, one is either lucid, semi-lucid or non-lucid. There is no such thing as ‘super-lucidity.’ How can one be more lucid than lucid?”
Sagging at my reaction, he spoke at a more reasonable pace. “Now don’t jump down my throat, but I’ve been trying to take a different approach to saying ESP.”
“Oh, no, Brenner…”
“Precisely why I was avoiding the term! Come on, Rick, I’m no crank.” He clasped his hands together like a preacher and announced: “Think of it as a degree of awareness that supersedes the norm. This patient, this man - he knows my name, Rick, and the name of every nurse and patient there, and more…he knows
more…” Conscious of the company, he trailed off, and I ruminated on his silent awe until the doors opened.
He was in ward C, Brenner’s source of fascination, propped up in bed staring at the window. Looked like the usual old duffer on his last legs; few days of beard, scrawny and sunken from lack of food and sleep, and that familiar ‘winding down’ they have when their time draws near, but Brenner positively bristled with anticipation at the sight of the still figure.
Turning quickly to me, he whispered: ‘I haven’t told him you were coming. Not even who you are. Now, watch this.’ I nodded, and together we approached the bed at the corner of the ward, Brenner edging toward it in a crabbish shuffle as he tried to watch both me and the old man at the same time.
It was early afternoon, and half-drawn shades were keeping out most of the sun’s glare. Thus were our impressions firmly outlined in the glass, so that without moving his head, the patient announced in a strangely elated tone: "Ah, doctor Brenner again, and I see you’ve brought doctor Baxter with you this time."
Brenner was obviously disappointed at my lack of surprise, but I’m not so easily taken in at my age. I studied the patient’s notes; Edward Srever, resident of Clifton House retirement home, injured having fallen while crossing the road. Time of arrival: half past three that morning. An additional scribble warned of panic attacks.
“Feeling better?” I asked without looking up.
His reflection watched me. “Hurts more than yesterday, Rick.”
“Well it would, eh?” I crooned. “Can’t say I recall your face, although you seem to know me. Have we met before?”
“Don’t forget…” A wince of pain.
“I’m sorry?”
He sighed, barely a whisper, and closed his eyes. “…yesterday…”
The ward sister who had been hovering at the edge of my vision stepped in with a sharp smile and a ‘request’ to leave him be that would have had a Rottweiler jumping to attention.
“No wonder,” Brenner muttered after we’d left. “Spent most of the morning parked in the corridor beside the receptionist. This is the first chance he’s had to sleep. Look, he knew your name, you have to admit that’s impressive.”
“You mentioned it without realising?”
He paused, then: “Didn’t you wonder why mother Hubbard was keeping an eye on us?”
“The ward sister?”
“She really is a Hubbard, bless her. Tricia Hubbard, as our friend pointed out when she started her shift at two. On her first day here.”
“From?”
“Edinburgh. Not even on the computer register yet. How do you suppose he knows her name, her brother’s name, her
cat’s name for goodness’ sake, having never seen her before?”
“He said all this?”
“Came right out with it. She was white as a ghost.”
“Ah, but can you be sure he didn’t have some explainable way of knowing?”
“He’s spent longer in a nursing home than she’s been alive, and on the other side of the country at that. Habits - his, not hers - include bingo, puzzle books, armchair aerobics and feeding the birds. Hardly goes out-”
“He told you this?”
“Well, yes…”
“But how reliable a source of information is he?”
“Well, Rick, look…I spoke to the home, too.”
“About his
habits?”
“Just a quick chat, call it a double-check. Don’t look so worried, it’s no different from the questions hospitals usually ask.”
“When it’s
necessary, yes.”
“Point is, Rick, he’s watertight. There’s just no way he can know the things he does, so it
has to be some form of telepathy. How else? You wont bawl me out for this, will you?”
It was certainly an interesting puzzle, although I wasn’t so set on Brenner’s ESP. There was no escaping the peculiarity of the matter however, and that evening I prepared, to the best of my ability, an impromptu series of questions until I was satisfied that I had enough to fill my own ‘watertight’ proviso.
*
The next day’s routine was that bit more grating to me, by way of Srever. Each patient, each conversation, took place against a backdrop of mental activity I was unused to. Whether I wanted to or not, some part of me kept working and re-working the variables involved to explain why an old man, hospitalised and weak, could convince a young doctor of some supernatural ability.
It was almost seven by the time I managed to get away. There had been something of a drizzle on and off during the day, darkening the road, and I realised that this was the first evening I had voluntarily given up in years. In my pocket was a list, a collection of obscure and unrelated questions, the answers to all of which I felt sure nobody could provide without investigation except myself.
When I reached the hospital Brenner wasn’t available, so I journeyed to the ninth floor alone. Srever looked brighter. He was sat in a chair beside the bed, filling in a crossword with a faint smile. He gave a half-wave, half-salute on seeing me, and again greeted me by name.
He was more animated today, and I found myself facing a barrage of information, seemingly random, which he assaulted me with in a friendly, chatty, manner. It was an odd, disjointed affair that, like Brenner’s babbling the day previous, always left me trying to catch up, but never quite on par. Several times he apologised for not recognising me yesterday, emphasising the word with a silence or a wink.
Tomorrow and
yesterday were for whatever reasons amusing to him.
More often than not, my role was to listen, to show appreciation, and to reply to things of the utmost triviality: the date, the weather, the forecast, etcetera. He appeared intent on ‘grounding’ himself, for want of a better word, in the reality of the present, and although there is, of course, no other reality for us than this, I was of the opinion that to him perhaps there was.
I had not been able to think of a reason for introducing my questions to him, but this seemed not to matter. After an hour had passed, he had answered most of those by way of bringing them up in his strange monologue, despite my never having removed the slip of paper or even mentioning it. An example:
“…but mothers are wonderful, aren’t they? They can tell you to take psychology - maiden name Walker - despite father’s uncertainty…”
Two of my questions had been: ‘What is my mother’s maiden name,’ and ‘Which of my parents had set me on my career path?’
“How is it,” I asked him when a significant pause had arrived in the form of medication, “that you know so much about me, when I myself cannot ever remember meeting
you before.”
“The last time…” He creased his brow.
“The last time?”
“We spoke.”
“Yesterday?”
His eyes closed, and narrowed at the stretch of a wry smile, but they did not open again.
*
Brenner called at lunch the next day. “We’ve lost him.” He said dully. “He had a CT scan this morning. He’d been fine going in, apparently…”
He wasn’t dead, Brenner explained, but ‘different.’ I rushed down there and met them both on the yesterday ward. Srever was sat in bed nursing congealed soup. I greeted him, but received no response beyond a slow mumble that spat flecks of carrot onto a matted dressing gown.
Brenner looked at me miserably. “He’s just an old man now, same as the rest of them in here. The scan showed massive deterioration, had it for years.”
“Nonsense! He was bright as a spark, yesterday - brighter, in fact. You were right, he knew things he couldn’t possibly have known. We need to-”
“Rick, it’s
gone!” Brenner wailed. “Whatever gift he had, the CT destroyed it.”
“You sound very sure of yourself.”
“I’m telling you! Wiped it like, I don’t know, like a magnet wipes data from a computer. Don’t you see? However it works, this ESP, it must be so delicate, some small charge of activity somewhere in his mind….it couldn’t stand up to the magnetic forces of the CT. They’ve
crushed it. This…” He pointed at Srever, who seemed oblivious to us, “…this is what he really is, what he’s been for
years according to that scan. Only his gift compensated, didn’t it? It reached out, like plants to the sun, for better minds than his. He’s been in the stages of advanced dementia for at least five years I‘d say, getting by because he could leach the coherence of others. That might explain the panic attacks he was said to have - reverting to his own personality when he stopped using his ability to recharge it, or sleep, however it works.”
“Worked.”
Brenner nodded slowly. “Worked. And now we’ll never know. And he certainly can’t tell us. He’s yesterday’s man, now.”
*(C) David Wyatt
Yesterday's Man
- basic thru an' thru!
