The Face

extraordinary.”
        The physician dared to let hope tweak a little color into his face. “Extraordinary? And what would that be?”
        “I don’t know. But amazing things have happened to me in the past twenty-four hours, in some way all related to Dunny, I think. So why I wanted to speak to you this morning…”
        “Yes?”
        Searching for words, Ethan pushed back from the table. He got to his feet, his tongue stilled by a thirty-seven-year-long reliance on reason and rationality.
        He wished for a window. Gazing out at the rain would have given him an excuse not to look at O’Brien while he asked what needed to be asked.
        “Doctor, you weren’t Dunny’s primary physician…”
        Talking while gazing moodily at a vending machine full of candy bars seemed eccentric.
        “… but you were involved with his treatment.”
        O’Brien said nothing, waited.
        Having finished his coffee, Ethan scooped the paper cup off the table, crumpled it in his fist.
        “And after what happened yesterday, I’d wager that you know his file better than anyone.”
        “Backward and forward,” O’Brien confirmed.
        Taking the paper cup to the waste can, Ethan said, “Is there anything in the file that you’d consider unusual?”
        “I can’t find a single misstep in diagnosis, treatment, or in the death-certification protocols.”
        “That’s not what I mean.” He tossed the crumpled cup in the can and paced, looking at the floor. “I’m sincere when I tell you that I’m [350] convinced you and the hospital are utterly blameless. When I say ‘unusual,’ what I really mean is… strange, uncanny.”
        “Uncanny?”
        “Yeah. I don’t know how to put a finer point on it.”
        Dr. O’Brien remained silent so long that Ethan stopped pacing and looked up from the floor.
        The physician chewed on his lower lip, staring at the piles of documents.
        “There was something,” Ethan guessed. He returned to the table, sat in the orange torture device. “Something uncanny, all right.”
        “It’s here in the file. I didn’t bring it up. It’s meaningless.”
        “What?”
        “It could be misconstrued as evidence that he came out of the coma for a period, but he didn’t. Some attributed the problem to a machine malfunction. It wasn’t.”
        “Malfunction? What machine?”
        “The EEG.”
        “The machine that records his brain waves.”
        O’Brien chewed his lip.
        “Doctor?”
        The physician met Ethan’s eyes. He sighed. He pushed his chair away from the table and got up. “It’ll be better if you actually see it yourself.”

CHAPTER 51
        
        CORKY PARKED ON THE WRONG STREET AND walked two blocks through the cold rain to the home of the three-eyed freak.
        Windier than Monday’s storm, this one snapped weak fronds off queen palms, tumbled an empty plastic trash can down the center of the street, tore a window awning and loudly flapped the loose length of forest-green canvas.
        Melaleucas lashed their willowy branches as though trying to whip themselves to pieces. Stone pines were stripped of dead brown needles that bristled through the churning air and gave it the power to prick, to blind.
        As Corky walked, a dead rat bobbed past him on the racing water in the gutter. The lolling head rolled toward him, revealing one dark empty socket and one milky eye.
        The grand and lovely spectacle made him wish that he had time to join in the celebration of disorder, to spread some prankish chaos of his own. He longed to poison a few trees, stuff mailboxes with hate literature, spread nails under the tires of parked cars, set a house afire…
        This was a busy day of a different kind, however, and he had [352] numerous scheduled tasks to which he must attend. Monday he had been a devilish rascal, an amusing imp of nihilism, but this day he must be a serious soldier of anarchy.
        The neighborhood was an eclectic mix of two-story Craftsman houses with raised front porches and classic single-story California bungalows that borrowed from many styles of architecture. They were maintained with evident pride, enhanced with brick walkways, picket fences, beds of flowers.
        By contrast, the bungalow of the three-eyed freak sat behind a half-dead front lawn, skirted by masses of unkempt shrubbery, at the end of a cracked and hoved concrete