Now she can only look at Dr. Jantzen, he of the untrustworthy adolescent face, with silent horror and what is not quite disbelief. In time, however, a picture will begin to form. There's enough testimony, combined with certain memories that will not stay completely buried, to show her all she needs to see.
Scott took a charter flight from Portland to Boston, then flew United from Boston to Kentucky. A stew on the United flight who got his autograph later told a reporter that Mr. Landon had been coughing "almost constantly" and his skin was flushed. "When I asked if he was all right," she told the reporter, "he said it was just a summer cold, he'd taken a couple of aspirin and would be fine."
Frederic Borent, the grad student who met his plane, also reported the cough, and said Scott had gotten him to swing into a Nite Owl to pick up a bottle of Nyquil. "I think I might be getting the flu," he told Borent. Borent said he'd really been looking forward to the reading and wondered if Scott would be able to do it. Scott said, "You might be surprised."
Borent was. And delighted. So was most of Scott's audience that night. According to the Bowling Green Daily News, he gave a reading that was "little short of mesmerizing," only stopping a few times for the politest of small coughs, which seemed easily quelled by a sip of water from the glass beside him on the podium. Speaking to Lisey hours later, Jantzen remained amazed by Scott's vitality. And it was his amazement, coupled with a message relayed by the head of the English Department during his phone call, that caused a rift in Lisey's carefully maintained curtain of repression, at least for awhile. The last thing Scott said to Meade, after the reading and just before the reception began, was "Call my wife, would you? Tell her she may have to fly out here. Tell her I may have eaten the wrong thing after sunset. It's kind of a joke between us."
6
Lisey blurts out her worst fear to young Dr. Jantzen without even thinking about it.
"Scott is going to die of this, isn't he?"
Jantzen hesitates, and all at once she can see that he may be young but he's no kid. "I want you to see him," he says after a moment that seems very long. "And I want him to see you. He's conscious, but that may not last long. Will you come with me?"
Jantzen walks very fast. He stops at the nurses' station and the male nurse on duty looks up from the journal he's been reading - Modern Geriatrics. Jantzen speaks to him. The conversation is low-pitched, but the floor is very quiet, and Lisey hears the male nurse say four words very clearly. They terrify her.
"He's waiting for her," the male nurse says.
At the far end of the corridor are two closed doors with this message written on them in bright orange:
ALTON ISOLATION UNIT SEE NURSE BEFORE ENTERING OBSERVE ALL PRECAUTIONS FOR YOUR SAKE FOR THEIR SAKE MASK AND GLOVES MAY BE REQUIRED
To the left of the door is a sink where Jantzen washes his hands and instructs Lisey to do the same. On a gurney to the right are gauze masks, latex gloves in sealed packets, stretchy yellow shoe covers in a cardboard box with FITS ALL SIZES stamped on the side, and a neat stack of surgical greengowns.
"Isolation," she says. "Oh Jesus, you think my husband's got the smucking Andromeda Strain."
Jantzen hedges. "We think he may have some exotic pneumonia, possibly even the Bird Flu, but whatever it is, we haven't been able to identify it, and it's..."
He doesn't finish, doesn't seem to know how, so Lisey helps him. "It's really doing a number on him. As the saying is."
"Just a mask should be enough, Mrs. Landon, unless you have cuts. I didn't notice while you were - "
"I don't think I have to worry about cuts and I won't need a mask." She pushes open the lefthand door before he can object. "If it was communicable, I'd already have it."
Jantzen follows her into the Alton IU, slipping one of the green cloth masks over his own mouth and nose.
7
There are only four rooms at the end of the fifth-floor hallway, and only one of the TV monitors is lit; only one of the rooms is producing the beeping sounds of hospital machinery and the soft, steady rush of flowing oxygen. The name on the monitor beneath the dreadfully fast pulse - 178 - and the dreadfully low blood-pressure - 79 over 44 - is LANDON-SCOTT.