Eyes of Prey

consciousness go somewhere after death? Was there a pit? The children he’d seen die, that change of gaze at the last instant . . . was that ecstasy? Did they see something beyond?
    Bekker had studied the films taken by the Nazis at the death camps, stared into the filmed faces of dying medical experiments, films considered collectible by certain influential Germans . . . . Was there something beyond?
    Bekker’s rational scientist mind said no: We are no more than animated mud, a conscious piece of dirt, the consciousness no more than a chemical artifact. Remember thou that thou art dust and to dust thou shalt return. Isn’t that what the Catholics professed? Odd candor, for a Church Political. Whatever his rational mind said, the other parts, the instinctive parts, couldn’t imagine a world without Beauty. He couldn’t simply vanish  . . . could he?
    He glanced at his watch. He had time. With the propermedication . . . He looked out of the bathroom at the brass box on the bureau.
     
    Michael Bekker, very smooth, a little of the cocaine, just a lick of the phencyclidine, slipped through the halls of University Hospital.
    “Dr. Bekker . . .” A nurse, passing, calling him “Doctor.” The word flushed him with power; or the lick of PCP did. Sometimes it was hard to tell.
    The hallway lights were dimmed, for night. Three women in white sat under the brighter lights of the nursing station, thumbing through papers, checking medication requirements. Overhead, a half-dozen monitors, flickering like the components of a rich man’s stereo system, tracked the condition of the ICU patients.
    Bekker checked his clipboard. Hart, Sybil. Room 565. He headed that way, taking his time, past a private room where a patient was snoring loudly. He looked around quickly: nobody watching. Stepped inside. The patient was sound asleep, her head back, her mouth hanging open. Sounded like a chainsaw, Bekker thought. He went to the bedside table, opened the drawer. Three brown vials of pills. He took them out, half turned to the dim light coming in from the hall. The first was penicillamine, used to prevent kidney stones. No need for that. He put it back. Paramethasone. More kidney stuff. The third vial said “Chlordiazepoxide hydrochloride 25mg.” He opened it, looked inside at the green-and-white caps. Ah. Librium. He could always use some Librium. He took half of the tablets, screwed the top back on the vial and put the vial in the drawer. The Librium caps he dropped into his pocket.
    At the door, he stopped to listen. You had to be careful in this: nurses wore running shoes, and were silent as ghosts. But if you knew what to listen for, you could pick up the almostimperceptible squawk-squawk-squawk of the shoes on polished tile . . . .
    The hall was silent and he stepped out, squinting at his clipboard, ready to look confused if a nurse was in the hall. There were none, and he went on toward Sybil Hart’s room.
    Sybil Hart had raven hair and dark liquid eyes. She lay silently watching the screen of the television bolted into a corner of her room. An earplug was fitted in one ear, and although the inanities of late-night television sometimes made her want to scream . . . she didn’t.
    Couldn’t.
    Sybil Hart lay unmoving, propped semi-erect on her bed. She was not in the ICU proper, but was accessible, where the nurses could check her every half-hour or so. She’d be dead in three weeks, a month, killed by amyotrophic lateral sclerosis—ALS, Lou Gehrig’s disease.
    The disease had started with a numbness in the legs, a tendency to stumble. She’d fought it, but it had taken her legs, her bowel control, her arms and, finally, her voice. Now, and most cruelly, it had taken her facial muscles, including her eyelids and eyebrows.
    As the ALS had progressed and her voice had gone, she’d learned to communicate through an Apple computer equipped with special hardware and a custom word-processing program. When the disease had taken her voice, she’d still had some control of her fingers, and using two fingers and a special switch, she could write notes almost as effortlessly as if she were typing.
    When her fingers had gone, the therapist had fitted her with a mouth switch, and still she could talk. When her mouth control had gone, another special switch had been fitted to her eyebrow. Now that was going, was almost gone. Sybil Hart began to sink into the final silence, waiting for the disease to take her