“The situation is fairly static. You could spare five minutes,” Major Clem says.
Hiro has an account with The Rest Stop. To live at the U-Stor-It, you sort of have to have an account. So he gets to bypass the front office where the attendant waits by the cash register. He shoves his membership card into a slot, and a computer screen lights up with three choices:
M
F
NURSERY (UNISEX)
Hiro slaps the “M” button. Then the screen changes to a menu of four choices:
OUR SPECIAL LIMITED FACILITIES—THRIFTY BUT SANITARY
STANDARD FACILITIES—JUST LIKE HOME—MAYBE JUST A LITTLE BETTER
PRIME FACILITIES—A GRACIOUS PLACE FOR THE DISCRIMINATING PATRON
THE LAVATORY GRANDE ROYALE
He has to override a well-worn reflex to stop himself from automatically punching SPECIAL LIMITED FACILITIES, which is what he and all the other U-Stor-It residents always use. Almost impossible to go in there and not come in contact with someone else’s bodily fluids. Not a pretty sight. Not at all gracious. Instead—what the fuck, Juanita’s going to hire him, right?—he slams the button for LAVATORY GRANDE ROYALE.
Never been here before. It’s like something on the top floor of a luxury high-rise casino in Atlantic City, where they put semi-retarded adults from South Philly after they’ve blundered into the mega-jackpot. It’s got everything that a dimwitted pathological gambler would identify with luxury: gold-plated fixtures, lots of injection-molded pseudomarble, velvet drapes, and a butler.
None of the U-Stor-It residents ever use The Lavatory Grande Royale. The only reason it’s here is that this place happens to be across the street from LAX. Singaporean CEOs who want to have a shower and take a nice, leisurely crap, with all the sound effects, without having to hear and smell other travelers doing the same, can come here and put it all on their corporate travel card.
The butler is a thirty-year-old Centroamerican whose eyes look a little funny, like they’ve been closed for the last several hours. He is just throwing some improbably thick towels over his arm as Hiro bursts in.
“Gotta get in and out in five minutes,” Hiro says.
“You want shave?” the butler says. He paws at his own cheeks suggestively, unable to peg Hiro’s ethnic group.
“Love to. No time.”
He peels off his jockey shorts, tosses his swords onto the crushed-velvet sofa, and steps into the marbleized amphitheatre of the shower stall. Hot water hits him from all directions at once. There’s a knob on the wall so you can choose your favorite temperature.
Afterward, he’d like to take a dump, read some of those glossy phone book-sized magazines next to the high-tech shitter, but he’s got to get going. He dries himself off with a fresh towel the size of a circus tent, yanks on some loose drawstring slacks and a T-shirt, throws some Kongbucks at the butler, and runs out, girding himself with the swords.
It’s a short flight, mostly because the military pilot is happy to eschew comfort in favor of speed. The chopper takes off at a shallow angle, keeping low so it won’t get sucked into any jumbo jets, and as soon as the pilot gets room to maneuver, he whips the tail around, drops the nose, and lets the rotor yank them onward and upward across the basin, toward the sparsely lit mass of the Hollywood Hills.
But they stop short of the Hills, and end up on the roof of a hospital. Part of the Mercy chain, which technically makes this Vatican airspace. So far, this has Juanita written all over it.
“Neurology ward,” Major Clem says, delivering this string of nouns like an order. “Fifth floor, east wing, room 564.”
The man in the hospital bed is Da5id.
Extremely thick, wide leather straps have been stretched across the head and foot of the bed. Leather cuffs, lined with fluffy sheepskin, are attached to the straps. These cuffs have been fastened around Da5id’s wrists and ankles. He’s wearing a hospital gown that has mostly fallen off.
The worst thing is that his eyes don’t always point in the same direction. He’s hooked up to an EKG that’s charting his heartbeat, and even though Hiro’s not a doctor, he can see it’s not a regular pattern. It beats too fast, then it doesn’t beat at all, then an alarm sounds, then it starts beating again.
He has gone completely blank. His eyes are not seeing anything. At first, Hiro thinks that his body is limp and relaxed. Getting closer, he sees that Da5id is taut and shivering, slick with perspiration.
“We put in a temporary pacemaker,” a woman says.
Hiro turns. It’s a nun who also appears to be a surgeon.
“How long has he been in convulsions?”
“His ex-wife called us in, said she was worried.”
“Juanita.”
“Yes. When the paramedics arrived, he had fallen out of his chair at home and was convulsing on the floor. You can see a bruise, here, where we think his computer fell off the table and hit him in the ribs. So to protect him from further damage, we put him in four-points. But for the last half hour he’s been like this—like his whole body is in fibrillation. If he stays this way, we’ll take the restraints off.”
“Was he wearing goggles?”
“I don’t know. I can check for you.”
“But you think this happened while he was goggled into his computer?”
“I really don’t know, sir. All I know is, he’s got such bad cardiac arrhythmia that we had to implant a temporary pacemaker right there on his office floor. We gave him some seizure medication, which didn’t work. Put him on some downers to calm him, which worked slightly. Put his head into various pieces of imaging machinery to find out what the problem was. The jury is still out on that.”
“Well, I’m going to go look at his house,” Hiro says.
The doctor shrugs.
“Let me know when he comes out of it,” Hiro says.
The doctor doesn’t say anything to this. For the first time, Hiro realizes that Da5id’s condition may not be temporary.