“No, I’m fine on my own, honestly. See?” I stood up straighter. It was an effort. “Anyway, you need to stay here, right?”
She glanced at the library. Past the peeling paint on the concrete wall, softened by ocean air, and through the grimy windows to the two people already waiting at the information desk. She was on her own, and I could sense her hesitating. “I’ll pay,” she said. “You go straight to the hospital, okay? You have insurance?”
“Yes, yes.”
She nodded and pulled the cell from her pocket.
Five minutes later I eased myself into a cab. There was a little statue of Ganesh that wobbled as we drove and a prayer in Sanskrit taped to the dash. Colored glass beads hung from the rearview mirror. Once we pulled away, I told the driver not to go to the hospital, to drop me off at home.
“You sure?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said, and he just nodded and turned up the Indian dance music on the stereo. He was a young guy with a big oversized watch on his wrist; he couldn’t care less where I went.
When he dropped me off I hauled ass upstairs and lay down on my bed. I reached for my stereo, but my iPod wasn’t docked. I didn’t know where it was. The whole time the voice was keeping up a monologue—
“You’re nothing. You’re a ***** ******. You deserve nothing. You will amount to nothing. You should just kill yourself. Your dad would be happy if you killed yourself. I don’t even hate you, you’re so pathetic. You are to be pitied. You are not worthy of …”
I fumbled with the controls. I managed to get the radio on, and loud rock filled the room, but I could still hear the voice.
“You will never be anyone. You are the ghost, not me. You have no one and nothing. You will …”
My fingers kept turning, and the radio station disappeared into crackle, a phantom retreating into nothingness, fragmenting.
Then I was in the space between stations, electromagnetic desert, blankness between the oases of music and talk.
And the voice was gone.
All that was there was white noise.
Blissful white noise.
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I floated on a sea of static. It made me think of my dad, his ears ringing after the bomb nearly killed him, the atmosphere filled with dust. I remembered he said once that the weirdest thing about it, about the explosion and then running to help Mike Osborne, was how peaceful it felt. The hiss in his ears, the stillness of the motes of dust and metal and blood hanging in the air.
Until then, I never understood what he meant—how could it be peaceful when people were shooting at you? But now I kind of got it. I closed my eyes, and let the white noise wash over me.
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Until I heard the door to my room open, and my dad came in followed by two guys in green suits with medical logos on them.
“That’s her,” my dad said. “Cass, turn that **** off.”
I turned off the radio. The voice only I could hear said: “Who are those people?”
“Who are those people?” I asked, pointing to the men in green.
“People who have come to help,” said Dad. He walked over to me, grabbed my arm, and pulled up my sleeve. He let out a fast breath when he saw marks on my skin, where the voice had made me pinch myself, or worse. He nodded to the two guys, like this confirmed something.
“Dad!” I yanked at my sleeve. “What the hell?”
He didn’t answer me, but I saw his eyes were red. Had he been crying? He turned to the paramedics or whatever they were. “She needs help,” he said.
The two guys stepped forward. The first one was big, his arms like slabs of pork. One of those arms had a tribal tattoo around it. His hair was shaved close. The other was young, with a friendly face and curly hair. He looked like a boy playing dress-up.
The muscle-builder took my finger and put a clip on it, which glowed red and had a cable running to a handheld reader. He looked at the monitor.
“One hundred thirty,” he said to the kid. “Saturation one hundred.”