Part 1 (1/2)

Midnight Pa.s.s.

A Lew Fonesca Novel.

Stuart M. Kaminsky.

This one is most definitely for Polly Curry.

I did not know what to say to him. I felt so awkward and blundering. I did not know how I could reach him, where I could overtake him and go on hand in hand with him once more.

It is such a secret place, the land of tears.

-ANTOINE DE SAINT-EXUPeRY.

The Little Prince.

Author's note: There really is a Midnight Pa.s.s. There really is a controversy over whether it should be opened. However, this is a work of fiction. The issues I have created differ from those in reality, as does the history of the controversy and some of the history of the Pa.s.s itself. The motives of those who have taken sides about whether to open the Pa.s.s are very different from and far less dramatic than the motives and people in the story I have invented.

Prologue.

THROUGH THE PARTIALLY open door in a treatment room in the E.R. of Sarasota Memorial Hospital, I look out at the cluttered counter of a nursing station.

Small colored sheets of paper are skewered on an upright thin spike. Wire baskets flow over with charts and graphs. A single thin brown folder totters at the edge of the counter, threatening to fall whenever a blue-clad nurse or aide shuffles or hurries by.

On my right in the small, darkened room, the machine next to me gives out a steady, slow series of beeps and a simultaneous series of blips, black dots of sound. The fluorescent lights in the corridor beyond the open door hum. Blips, beeps, and hums. A little night music complete with vocal accompaniment.

”Ron”-a woman's voice, calm, weary-”glucose was two-five-two.”

A young man in short-sleeved whites wheels a gurney past the cubicle I'm in. Covered by a thin white blanket, an old man with eyes closed pauses just outside the room for an instant and then is pushed out of sight.

There is a low, calm chatter of voices, and then a heavy white nurse with gla.s.ses and close-cropped hair pushes a wheelchair past the door. A pretty young black woman sits in the chair, holding an infant.

”Four months old,” the young mother says. ”She's got asthma and something wrong with her heart.”

The heavy white nurse with gla.s.ses and close-cropped hair touches the young woman gently on the shoulder, and they roll by.

The pa.s.sing parade pauses.

I look around the room. In the band of cold white light that comes through the open door, I see a gray stool and an overflowing ivory-colored trash can with the fingers of a blue rubber glove dangling out, as if someone or something is trying to escape.

There is a box on the wall, a see-through rectangular box with a plastic slot. The word ”Danger” is printed in black letters on an orange square on the box and under it, also in black, ”Used Needles.”

There is a pink plastic tray to vomit in on the small, s.h.i.+ning steel table next to the bed. All the discomforts of home.

A new voice, female, beyond the curtain.

”What'd I do with my pen? I've lost two today.”

A man in hospital blues, dark haircut almost scalp short, clipboard in his hand, walks slowly by, talking to an older woman in blues with washed-out blond hair.

They glance at me through the parted curtain and walk on. I hear him say, ”Dr. Greenspan wants him in op in ten minutes.”

The woman says, ”Okay.”

”Sat.u.r.day morning,” the man's voice comes back.

”Sat.u.r.day morning,” the woman repeats.

I listen to more blips and bleeps. A man moans from somewhere; two female voices giggle. Is there going to be a third? Does Dr. Greenspan know what he is doing or looking for? Who is this Dr. Greenspan?

My back aches. I have a headache.

I wait, listening for the wheels of a gurney moving to the room I am in. I wait to look up at whoever will be pus.h.i.+ng it. I imagine a thin-haired, short, well-muscled orderly in blue, his hairy arms, and a wide-band metal wrist.w.a.tch. I wait for him to cheerfully say, ”It's time.”

The road from a cold Dairy Queen Blizzard to the hospital emergency room began five days earlier.

Three people had died in those five days. There was a good chance there would be a fourth soon, a fourth who lay in a small triage room, a fourth whose odds were not looking too good.

Sally Porovsky steps into the room and looks down at me.

”How does it look, Lew?” she asks.

I don't have a good answer. I try a smile. It doesn't work. She takes my right hand in both of hers.

It had been bright and sunny and humid and definitely Florida when I got up healthy on Monday. Time generally seems to move slowly for me, but on Monday the clock began to spin.

Here's how it went.

1.

”NO AMOUNT OF SUNSCREEN will save her,” Dave said, shaking his head.

I nodded and looked up at the jogger pa.s.sing in front of the DQ, headed downtown. She wore shorts and a tank top, a Walkman singing in her ear, a serious look on her pretty face, her sun-bleached blond hair bouncing against her back in a long ponytail.

She made a left turn and headed out of sight toward Towles Court, a collection of small shops and homes owned by painters, sculptors, jewelry makers...people who had once been successful in business or raising a family and now were retired and wanted to change the label they wore from no one in particular to Artist. Few of the community in Towles Court, mostly women, had illusions about breaking out and getting famous and wealthy. They enjoyed what they now were and what they were doing. They had peace, time, and ident.i.ty.

I cannot paint, sketch, sculpt, or draw, and I have no urge to try. Unlike the artists of Towles Court in their brightly painted houses, I have as little ident.i.ty as possible.

Dave owns the Dairy Queen franchise across the parking lot from where I live and work in a walk-up office building with peeling paint and crumbling corners of concrete. The building had begun life as a two-story, 1950s motel and had gradually gone downhill till it was ready for me. I'm not supposed to live in the back room of my office, but the landlord doesn't care as long as I pay my rent on time and don't complain. I don't complain.

Dave looks like a dark, deeply weathered mariner, which he is when he's not handing out Dilly Bars, Blizzards, and burgers. He owns a boat and is out in Sarasota Bay and the Gulf of Mexico whenever possible. The sun has leathered him. The boat has given him muscles and kept him trim.