Shaking Off the Dust Read online

  “Thank you.” I stared at the angles and planes of his face. He looked like a fashion model, one of those androgynous, beautiful males who sell cologne in Cosmo ads. “You smell good. Almost as tasty as you look. Is it hard to be that attractive?”

  “Go back to sleep,” Shimodo insisted in a deep amused voice.

  He was tapping on my wrist again. My eyes started to droop shut.

  “What the hell happened?” Tom demanded. “When did Takeshi get in bed with you and why is he caressing your face like that?”

  “Hush, Tom, he’s being nice. I need to sleep now. You can too, if you want.” I never opened my eyes. My shoulder grew cold and I shivered until Shimodo pulled the cover over us both. His fingers brushed my face again. It felt wonderful. Too bad it was all a dream.

  The night passed in a haze. They moved me to a private room and Tom Mecurio was there every time I opened my eyes. My angel-in-scrubs was gone.

  Every few hours someone checked on me and found some little task they needed to do. I was exhausted by daylight. The cardiologist arrived the next morning and I begged him to let me go home. He reviewed my labs results and agreed I could come back for more tests in a few days. He put me off work until then.

  “I’m going to follow him out and see if I can get a glimpse of your lab results.” Tom glided right through the door.

  “Hey, haven’t you heard of HIPPA, the federal privacy act,” I called to the door.

  I’d have taken that opportunity to dress, but I didn’t have a change of clothes. I leaned against my pillows, wondering if I was truly schizophrenic or whether it was a side effect of the electrocution process. I considered all the electrocuted patients I’d treated in the last ten years and couldn’t recall any of them confessing to auditory or visual hallucinations. Of course, I hadn’t mentioned it to anyone either, so that didn’t mean they were not common.

  Tom came striding through the door, not the doorway. That takes some getting used to. I shook my head trying to clear it. Something was different about him today and it took me a moment to figure it out. “When did you change into scrubs?”

  “I always wear them when I’m in the hospital. Apparently whatever I think I should wear, I wear. It was disconcerting the first few times I changed clothes.” He sat on the end of the bed to stare at me like I was quite fascinating. “You have no idea how unexpected it is that you of all people are able to see and hear me. I’d given up hope of ever communicating with anyone.”

  “So, why do you suppose I’m hallucinating you? I realize your name has been in the paper a lot and everyone acts like they were your great buddies. But I never aspired to be your friend. Why would you be in my psyche?”

  He gave me an appraising look. “I am dead, so I guess I’m technically a ghost or spirit. I believe that you and I formed a bond when you inhaled my ashes and were struck by lightning.”

  “I wasn’t struck by lightning. I was an innocent bystander. I’d be very dead if it had actually hit me. Besides, I know it’s odd to say, but I can’t see you as a ghost?” Okay, so that was a stupid comment.

  He glanced at me with that raised eyebrow, as if he agreed. “Well, surprise.”

  “I mean you are one of those people who I thought left nothing to chance. Shouldn’t you have moved on to the next world? Based on every book and movie I’ve seen or read, you must have unfinished business here. I can’t see you leaving anything to chance. Very anal retentive.” I crossed my arms. Having given my unbiased and unsolicited opinion, I awaited rebuttal.

  A smile almost crossed his face. “Yes, we all know it is such a well-researched area. Despite your Netflix account, I’m not inclined to concede your expertise on the matter. Let’s pretend you are right and there is unfinished business. Only one major event would fall under that category. The plane crash was a terrorist act. What if I know something that could help find the people who got that explosive on board?”

  “What do you know?” Okay, I was having an excellent hallucination.

  “That’s just it. I don’t remember seeing anything of importance, but I have this nagging feeling that I did.” He shrugged.

  “Great, are you going to hang around until you figure it out?” I sounded bitchy, but another few hours of this was going to make me believe he was real. “Keep in mind, if you ask me to do bad things, I will be forced to confide in Vicki, and she’ll think it great fun and tell the entire ER. By the time they tell the x-ray department and lab, I’ll be forced to get counseling. I imagine a large amount of psych drugs could ruin this relationship.”

  He burst out laughing and I shook my head. He was a hallucination, because the living Tom Mecurio never manifested a sense of humor. “So glad you find my psychosis amusing.”

  Vicki burst through the door. “Hey, girl, your nurse said you could go as soon as you sign your life away. She’ll be here any minute with the papers. I heard you’ve been sleeping around again, climbing into any man’s bed. Though, in this case he climbed into yours. That was a good trick, pretending to be afraid and drugged up. I’ll give you points for originality.”

  I gasped. “That really happened? I thought I was having a weird drug dream.” I never expected to see Dr. Shimodo again, but I’d be totally embarrassed if I did. “Please tell me you have clothes for me to wear out of here?”

  “Yep, I brought scrubs and we plan to sneak you out by the employee entrance to avoid any media. You were on CNN. The footage from the memorial service went national, it’s been broadcasting all day. It’s pretty cool. You can see the electricity arc up from the ground and the urn lid sparks before it flies out of your hand. Down you go, like a stone.”

  “Lovely,” I muttered.

  Two hours later we walked out of the hospital without any problems, even with a white bandage on my hand. Vicki carried the brown paper bag that held my ash- and mud-covered black dress.

  Vicki drives like she talks, with increasing speed and odd breaking patterns; it was a recipe for carsickness. Tom sat in the backseat. I didn’t dare peek at him, but he complained about Vicki’s lack of driving skills and I had to work hard not to laugh.

  As we pulled up to my house, I turned to her. “Do you mind if I go in alone? I didn’t get much sleep last night and I just want to crawl into bed, take a pill and go to sleep.”

  She looked at me, I thought she might take it wrong, but she shook her head instead. “You really are a crotchety old hag.”

  “Yeah, I know. Love you too.” I got out of the car.

  “Seriously, are you sure you don’t need anyone to hang around in case you start feeling worse?”

  “Thanks for asking, but I’m feeling much better today.” Except for the hallucinations. “I promise to call if I need anything, even a bedtime story. I’ve had way too much attention and I’m ready to have some alone time.”

  “My cell phone is on, call when you get bored.” Vicki waited in my driveway until I got inside.

  I walked into my cool, dark living room and dropped my keys on the entranceway table. I flipped on the light and stared at my reflection in the mirror, shaking my head. I looked like shit. If the circles under my eyes got any darker, I would officially be pronounced dead. My bandaged hand hurt like a fresh knife cut. I hated it when my life got interesting.

  I glanced over to the officially dead person as he walked around checking out the other rooms. “Don’t mind me,” I yelled. “Make yourself at home.”

  Tom had the good grace to be embarrassed. “Will you be going straight to your room to sleep?” He sat on the couch.

  “I’m going to shut the light off and sit in that big lounger right over there. I’m going to close my eyes and if my psychotic break progresses as I expect it will, I shouldn’t doubt you will regale me with tales of the deceased.” I closed my eyes the second my fanny hit the lounger and put my feet up, sighing heavily.

  “How’s your head?” he inquired like a doctor during an office visit.

  “It’s only a mild throb at this
moment. I’m not sure if my heart is racing because of you or my other recent shock.”

  “Is everything a joke to you?”

  I looked over at him. It was late morning and my living room curtains were dark, but the blinds were partially open. Large patches of sunlight streaked across the couch. He sat on one, appearing solid enough to me. It seemed as if he was even causing the cushion to bend a little.

  “My life’s one big cosmic joke, Mecurio. I figured I’d at least try to be in on the gag.” I put my feet up on the footrest. “Did laughing ever make your…existence the better?”

  He shook his head. “Call me Tom. I expect we’ll see a lot of each other until we figure this out.”

  “Whether you’re a real spirit or my imagination is yet to be determined. I’ll wait until I know which one before we get all informal. I maintain a very select list of ghostly friends, but you are my first hallucination.”

  “You keep saying that. Let’s assume I am not from your imagination, but I am here, in your living room.” He spoke with an undertone of coaxing.

  “Then tell me, Tom Mecurio, what are you?”

  “Just Tom, please. I’m not sure what I have become. Best guess is a ghost. I’ve been dead twenty-four days. In that time, I’ve not felt hunger or slept or used the bathroom.” He sounded like he always did. Clinical.

  “What do you do? Does time pass like it does for us?” I figured I might as well find out what my subconscious believed.

  “The time passes normally. At first it was alarming, but I’ve been exploring my…” He stopped, looking stunned.

  “Go on. Exploring what?”

  He seemed to gather his thoughts, then stared at me a long moment. “I think I’ll need to begin at the beginning, at my death. My first great discovery was that your…soul, for want of a better term, does leave your body at brain death. I was suddenly staring down at myself from the end of my own hospital bed. From what I’ve discovered since that time, I’d been in that hospital for two days. So I lived right after the plane crash.”

  “I expect that was very strange.”

  Tom nodded. “Eric, one of the partners in our neurosurgery practice, was there. He looked worse than I did. And Takeshi was there.”

  “Takeshi? You mean Dr. Shimodo?”

  “You saw him at the memorial service. Oh yeah, and in your bed last night. That was a neat trick.” He shook his head. “He’s my oldest friend. I’ve known him since we were roommates in college and med school. We still meet every few weeks for dinner and I have no family, so he’s the executor of my will and beneficiary.”

  “No brothers or sisters?”

  “No brothers, sisters or parents. I was raised since I was two in the foster system. I was in a group home until I was seven. After that I managed to average a year or so with each new foster parent. Anyway, I met Takeshi when we were assigned to the same dorm room our first semester in college. We survived each other that first year and, by the second year of college, we’d even begun to thrive in our new environment.”

  “The two of you are very different. He seems kind.”

  “Implying that I am not. We are obviously different. But we have things in common. We had both been through some life experiences before we met and were not unfamiliar with making compromises. And you are right, he is one of the kindest people I have ever met. He spent all of his breaks from teaching this last year working in earthquake-relief camps. That’s the kind of man he is, not that he’d ever tell you about it. He is a brilliant scientist and physician.”

  “I like him already,” I muttered.

  He glared at me in silence.

  “Okay, I’m sorry. Please continue?” I wasn’t usually this mean, but how do you get rid of a pest ghost or, worse, hallucination?

  “You don’t know me well enough to be so critical about my life or death.” He didn’t look mad, but his voice was tight.

  “You’re right. I don’t know you. So why haunt me?”

  “I’m not haunting you,” he declared.

  “This is my living room and here you are.” Gotcha.

  “Let me resume my tale and that will perhaps help explain what I suspect. Although it still doesn’t account for why you can see and hear me.”

  I made a continue motion with my hand, watching his face for any sign of emotion. “Okay, when last we left you were seeing yourself in the hospital bed, Eric and Dr. Shimodo at your bedside.”

  “Yes, Takeshi was signing a form for brain-wave studies. They whisked my body off for the test. I discovered that I, in this form, was anchored to my body. I have not been able to do an official measurement, but I can only go a few blocks or so in any direction, before I am either stopped or pulled towards wherever I am. Believe me I tried testing the boundaries in every way I could and in that process I found I could go instantly to wherever my body was, in whatever form.” He looked significantly at me.

  “Explain what you mean by whatever form?”

  “The brain death was secondary to shrapnel from flying debris. So there was blood and tissue covering a significant area of the plane and ground. I visit the crash site and when they moved all the wreckage to a hangar to reconstruct the plane, I was able to go there also. As they harvested my organs and transplanted them, I was able to be at many new places, but you are the only one who has been aware of me, the only one who can see and hear me. You are the only one who can help me.” He spoke as if he finished a lecture and was summing up the important points. He waited to see how I would react to his final statement.

  I decided I’d sidestep it for the time being. “You can be at the plane-wreck site. Over one hundred and forty people died on that plane. Can you see and talk to those people, or their ghost or spirits, whatever you are?”

  “I haven’t tried to talk to them. I can see some of them. I believe many did not linger here.” He put his arms up as he said “here”. “The people I saw seemed to be concerned with their own predicament. Many were crying or angry. I didn’t try to talk to them.”

  The first thing I would have done is try to talk to the other dead. To commiserate my fate with others who shared it. How could he not have offered comfort or sympathy to those crying and confused? Of course, I wasn’t dead, so I didn’t really know how I’d deal with it. That stopped me from commenting.

  “You’re disappointed by something I’ve told you.” Tom looked angry.

  I blinked, shrugging. “I’ve no reason or right to be disappointed with anything you have done or, more to the point, endured. I’m sorry if I’ve made you mad.”

  His expression fell blank again.

  “So will you help me figure this out?” he finally asked.

  “Figure out what, exactly?”

  “Why I’m still here. Why you’re seeing and talking to me. How I can move on to wherever it is I need to.”

  “See, I don’t know what that requires of me. First off, I haven’t heard anything from you that I couldn’t have created from my own imagination. I suspect that helping you find the answers to these questions will put me in the position of enduring an extensive psych evaluation, drugs and group therapy.” I stood up. “I’m going to lie down and say a little prayer that you’re gone when I wake up, like a good hallucination should be.”

  He started to follow me but I held up my hand and pleaded, “Please go, I need sleep and sanity right now.”

  He blinked away. One moment he was there and the next he was gone. I stood there surprised, but not relieved.

  * * *

  I woke up and wandered through my empty house, not bothering to pick up when the phone rang. My sister’s voice came through the answering machine, telling me she’d left some chicken gumbo in my fridge this morning for dinner. She also told me she couldn’t get through the media at the hospital to reach my room and she was sorry. I listened to my other messages, deleting the calls from the press for an interview. My parents sounded tired but happy that they’d arrived at their destination.

  “I s
ee you’re up. Are you feeling better?” Tom appeared in the living room, sitting on the couch.

  I sat in my lounger. “You’re back, which doesn’t bode well for my sanity.”

  “I’ve come up with a solution. A way to prove I’m not part of your imagination. A means to get the help we’ll need.” He almost smiled. “Trust me, it should be painless.”

  “Please, enlighten me.” His calm attitude reminded me of one of our social workers in the emergency department talking to the psychotic patients.

  “You’ve met Takeshi, Dr. Shimodo. He can ask me questions that only he and I would know the answers to. I can prove my existence to both of you.” He looked pleased with himself.

  “So, I’m supposed to contact a renowned neurologist. Tell him I’m conversing with the ghost of his dead friend and expect that he’ll just invite me in for dinner?” I shook my head.

  “He’s staying at my home, going through my papers and estate business. We can drop by. Once you’re inside, it would be difficult for him to turn you away.” Tom crossed his arms.

  “How do you know where he is?”

  “It’s my home. My hairs are in the combs and brushes. There are skin cells in the bathrooms and in the carpet fibers. Takeshi says my name often as he sorts through my things. It’s like I can hear it in my head and I go to whoever says it.” He pointed to the door. “Shall we go?”

  “Not on your life, oops…death. I’m eating some chicken gumbo, taking a long, hot shower and changing out of scrubs. I don’t want to talk to Dr. Shimodo. It will be a huge embarrassment after being so needy last night. He’ll think I’m chasing him around.” I turned on the television before I left the room.

  “So, is that a yes or a no?” he demanded.

  “It’s a maybe,” I yelled back to him.

  My long, hot shower became a short, cool one. For some reason my skin was very sensitive to hot and cold. The water droplets stung like the heat of a sparkler. I switched off the water and realized my heart was racing, my pulse running in the one-sixties. I tried a vagal maneuver, bearing down for a good twenty seconds before it fell to normal. One more thing to tell my doctor in the morning.