Val Hall, page 22
“How do you know it won’t happen again...?”
“What’s the worst that could happen?” Andrzej questioned softly. “That I end up back here on life support? It could be worse.”
SEATTLE, 31 DECEMBER 1999
When Andrzej’s phone rang, it literally startled him out of something close to a fugue state. He had been sitting at his computer, his elbows resting on his desk and his face pillowed in his two hands as he stared at the monitor screen barely seeing what was on it, his mind working in overdrive. He reached out almost blindly, picked up the receiver, brought it to his ear.
“Yeah?”
“Dude, where are you? The party started two hours ago!”
“Party?”
“Andrzej, where are you? Please don’t tell me you’re still at work...”
“Tomorrow morning...”
“Tomorrow morning is a new day, a new year, a new century, a new millennium – there will never be another party like this in your lifetime – you’re a disgrace. Drop it and come over here, there’s still time to...”
“But it isn’t really done yet,” Andrzej said stubbornly. “There’s just something... that isn’t meshing... it isn’t going to work, and I am almost sure I know why but I can’t quite make that final connection and I think I need to...”
“Andrzej. What you do in the next hour and a half will make precisely zero difference. Stop being a party pooper. Pull the plug on the damn computer. Now.”
“It may not come back in the morning,” Andrzej said.
“Was that an actual joke? Come on. Drop it. You’ve done what you could. We all have. Drop it, Code Red. It is what it is. If we have to pick up pieces we will do it in daylight, tomorrow. Come on – Vicky is here, and she was asking about you, and it’s New Year’s Eve, you dumb Polack, stop being such a teacher’s pet and come on out here!”
“I’m not really...”
“Andrzej. Andy. Friend. Lunatic. Drop it. It’s party time. And it’s only a couple of hours until midnight.”
“All right,” Andrzej said. “Let me just finish...”
There was a deep sigh on the other side of the line. “If you aren’t here in half an hour, I swear to God I am coming to get you. If I have to march you out of there trussed up like a Christmas turkey I will. That’s a promise.”
“All right – all right – I just...”
“Dude. Promise me.”
Andrzej grinned weakly. “Okay. Okay. I promise.”
He put the phone back down mechanically, his eyes still glued to the screen. There was something... something... that he could still do but he wasn’t seeing it. He just wasn’t seeing it.
He forgot about the phone call.
His hands opened and hovered above his keyboard.
A cursor blinked at him from the screen, teasing, mocking.
His fingers moved.
He typed a sentence – just a sentence – not code, nothing at all that would change anything on the screen other than throw up a random error – but as he typed the words there was something flowing out of him, a faint light which poured out of his fingertips, over the keyboard keys, through switches and wires into his computer, and from there, through his connection to the Internet, out into the world, into the ether, into all the computers which would then pick up the signal, amplify it, send it further to other connections, until Andrzej’s words spread out around the globe like a web of light, very faint, but there. If anyone had been watching the world from the moon for one instant planet Earth glowed bright white and then faded again into its usual colors.
The words Andrzej typed knitted together disparate parts that would not quite function in unison, bridged mismatched cyber-synapses, connected all the world’s potentially doomed computers into a safety net that poured out of one man’s mind. And the words were simple. It will all be all right.
He didn’t hear someone knocking on his door, after that. He knew nothing at all. They found him slumped at his computer in the morning, his eyes open, his breathing shallow, barely alive.
The world’s computers lived to glitch another day.
A week after Andrzej’s collapse, a delegation from Val Hall arrived at the hospital where he had been taken, and removed him to Val Hall for further care. Code Red was not nearly old enough to be a ‘retired’ superhero, but Val Hall was more than just a rest home. It took care of its own.
For six long months, Andrzej Antzak lay in a coma in a special room in Val Hall, and Eddie the orderly had made it his business to spend part of his day with the young man, sometimes reading to him, sometimes just talking.
Eddie had been there when Andrzej had woken up.
Almost seven months later.
VAL HALL, NEW YEAR’S EVE 2000
Not everyone at Val Hall chose to mark New Year’s Eve by staying up until the traditional hour – a number of the more fragile or more elderly residents had given everyone their best wishes and shuffled off to bed long before that – but at ten minutes to midnight a group of people were still in the great hall. There was champagne for those who wanted it or were allowed to have it, sparkling cider for everyone else, and the party spirit was good – which made Andrzej’s presence, aloof and standing by himself in a shadowed corner nursing a glass of the cider – even more affecting to Eddie than it had been over the past handful of months during which he had been slowly recovering from his coma. Andrzej was still painfully thin, his lanky frame looking particularly delicate and breakable, his long face pallid under the shock of dark hair that hung Byronesquely over his forehead. He looked like a broken-hearted poet, too sorrowful for the world. Eddie murmured a few words to the people he had been standing with and stepped away from them, making his way over to Andrzej’s corner.
“It’s a celebration,” he said conversationally. “It’s traditional to join it. It’s only a few minutes to midnight – do you need more of that in your glass, for the toast?”
“It just seems so... anticlimactic,” Andrzej murmured.
“After your last New Year’s Eve experience? I would think anything would be,” Eddie said. “They thought it would do you good to get back into society, a bit – but then you’ve only really been out of bed for decent intervals for a month or so – is all this too much?”
Andrzej gave a light toss of his head, sending his poetic forelock flying. “I’ll be fine,” he said. “I just can’t help... thinking about it. About everything they said it could be. It could have been. But instead...”
“Thanks to you – thanks to the spirit which you poured into the system – it was just one of those things that never happened,” Eddie said. “Just another end of the world. Nothing to see here. It’ll be right as rain in the morning.”
Andrzej gave him a wan smile. “It will all be all right, yes,” he said, echoing the last thing he remembered from the New Year’s Eve night of the year before. “I still don’t know why that mattered.”
“Superhero, Third Class,” Eddie said. “That’s what they do. That’s what you did. When the moment comes for an ordinary man to do something extraordinary in order to save everything from blowing up, a superhero finds a way to step up. That’s what you did; that’s why Val Hall came for you. That’s why you have a home here. And you’ve come a long way since snapping out of it back in the summer. You’re almost yourself again. The medics tell me you need to put some weight on in order for them to consider you fully healthy but you’re almost back. You gave everything you had to save the world in the only way you knew how, and you lived to tell about it...”
“I’m not telling anyone,” Andrzej said.
“We know,” Eddie said sturdily. “People know. People who need to know, know.”
“But what am I supposed to do with myself now?” Andrzej asked, his voice plaintive, almost childlike. “What did I survive that for? I’m twenty seven years old. I’m supposed to have my entire life in front of me, but I can’t see a way forward. I was a computer nerd all of my life, it’s all I knew how to do, all I wanted to do. But now – I am still too afraid to touch a keyboard. It’s fine, here, because I can indulge that – but what am I supposed to do with the rest of my days? What has it left me fit for...?”
Eddie tilted his head thoughtfully. “Well,” he said, “there’s a General Director position available here at Val Hall. If nothing else, you’d make a pretty good administrator – and you know the place from the inside, now. You might consider applying for the job. I’m pretty sure they’d jump at the chance to have you. And you wouldn’t have to do anything with computers – you could easily delegate whatever was computer-needful, and you yourself, you’d be valuable for the mind and the spirit you bring to the enterprise. A young Superhero, in charge of things.”
“I don’t want to end up...” Andrzej began, somehow managing to sound both defensive and curious at the same time.
“It doesn’t have to be the last thing you ever do,” Eddie said gently. “But it’s something for you to hold, something solid, a contribution you might make while you are still thinking things over about everything else that you need to consider moving forward from here. If something better comes up, something that calls you, something you feel you have to do – you can hand in your resignation, or just take a sabbatical, go chase your dream. Think about it.”
“I’m a patient,” Andrzej said. “An inmate. Why would they even think of letting me run the place?”
“You’d be surprised at what they might be willing – even eager – to think about,” Eddie said, with an air of a man who knew what he was talking about.
There was a stir amongst the people gathered by the fireplace, and someone began a countdown; the mantelpiece clock, on cue, began to chime midnight, and people clinked their glasses against one another’s, clamoring “Happy new Year!”
“All right,” Andrzej said slowly. He lifted his cider glass and touched it gently to Eddie’s “I’ll think about it. Happy New Year, Eddie. And thank you. For everything.”
VAL HALL 2020
“Walk with me down to the ferry,” Andrzej said, shifting his backpack’s strap on his shoulder once more.
Eddie nodded, and fell into step beside him as they crossed the lawn in front of the main house, heading to the stairs which led down to the ferry wharf.
“You’ll stay in touch?” Eddie asked. “Let us know you’re okay?”
“It’s a sabbatical, remember?” Andrzej said. “I’m still a Director. A Director-at-large. One way or another you’ll see me again.”
“Please don’t let it be like the first time,” Eddie murmured. “Take care of yourself.”
“I’ll try and make my contribution in knowledge rather than my living essence, this time,” Andrzej said dryly. “I’m not enough of a Superhero to do that again and pull myself back together. Would trying and failing mean I’m no longer a Superhero by your definition, then?”
“You don’t stop being a Superhero,” Eddie said. “That’s permanent. That’s always yours. And when you are ready to come back – Val Hall will be here for you. In whatever capacity it needs to be.”
“You sound as though you rule this place,” Andrzej said, laughing.
“Oh, I do,” Eddie said earnestly, turning guileless eyes to Andrzej. “Val Hall would fall apart without me, you know.”
“I believe it,” Andrzej said.
They stood in silence as they watched the ferry being readied to receive passengers back to the mainland, stretching out the moment, neither of them ready to be the first to speak words of farewell now that it was upon them. But it was Andrzej, in the end, who sighed and shifted his bag once again.
“Well,” he said. “Time to go.”
“Yes,” Eddie said. He understood completely – the world was calling, the world still had a place for this man. But somehow it was difficult to let go. Eddie cared for all the residents gathered in Val Hall but he had put in a lot of himself into healing this young man, and now it felt as though he was releasing a hurt bird he had nursed back into health into the wild sky once again – exhilarating, exciting, and yet with a clench of the heart because the creature he had cared for was no longer under his direct protection.
“I’ll be back,” Andrzej said.
“I know,” Eddie said. “But I know you have a lot of living to do first, out there. We’ll be here if you need us. We’ll always be here.”
Andrzej looked like he was about to say something more, but thought better of it, just gave a small tight nod, and held out his hand. Eddie grasped it, and shook it. And then he let go.
Andrzej walked onto the ferry without looking back, and they pulled up the gangplank behind him. The ferry pulled out of the dock, and began threading its way across the open water of the Sound towards the mainland. For a long time Eddie stood and watched it go, until it shrank into a hard-to-see speck on the ocean, vanishing into the light.
And then he turned and climbed the steps again, and strode across the lawn back into Val Hall. Where others needed him.
Andrzej’s words – the words that made him into a Superhero of Val Hall, echoed in Eddie’s head as he climbed the stairs to the porch of the main house.
It will all be all right.
The One About Tomorrow’s Yesterdays (2002)
VAL HALL 2012
“How is he doing?”
Eddie stepped out of the room he had just been in, balancing a tray bearing an almost untouched meal in one hand and reaching to close the door quietly behind him with the other, and glanced at the nurse who had stopped to ask the question.
“Well, this moldered in there for a while. I don’t think he ate much of it, if any. He isn’t really eating much at all these days. He’s sleeping a lot. He’s asleep again right now. He seems quiet and certainly doesn’t look like he’s in any pain or distress.”
“Well, I’ll leave him be, then, for now. I’ll check in on him in an hour or so.”
“Give me a yell if you need me,” Eddie said. “He likes me there when he wakes up.”
The nurse smiled, a little indulgently, and walked briskly away, her sensible shoes soundless on the carpet in the corridor.
Eddie glanced at the name slipped into the holder on the door. The label said simply, Johnny. There was no surname attached. None had arrived with this particular resident – neither had that name, in fact, it had been bestowed by the caregivers at Val Hall because they had to call him something and it was the first one he had responded to when they had thrown a few at him to see what would stick.
His moniker had not been made public by the authorities, as was custom – it was left up to the residents to reveal that to others, or not, as they chose. This man had never made a move to do this, but he had been admitted as The Oracle when he had first arrived at Val Hall. The Supervisors, and the Director, were only partially aware of what that actually meant, having known only a little of what he had been observed to do out in the world, the things that qualified him for Val Hall. There had been no real social records of him, certainly no birth certificates or anything of the sort; nobody was quite certain of his age, although the medical personnel who examined him had declared him to be at least 85 (but they did not care to put an upper limit on the age bracket). He had been brought in by a social worker to ask if Val Hall would take him, after it had become apparent that he needed caring for and there being nobody obvious to do this for him. Val Hall did, of course; that was what they had been created for. And the spent old superhero with no name and a moniker which could traditionally not be revealed came to live on the island, and they had called him Johnny, for want of something to address him by.
Val Hall, the Retirement Home for Superheroes, Third Class. They had brought the old man there to be cared for until such time as his more and more tenuous grip on life gave out. But nobody except Eddie knew the truth about the old man – that even lying there in his bed, peacefully asleep, he was probably the hardest working person in that building. Because he was dreaming. And what he dreamed was true vision, a bridge into tomorrow, and a vital link into the future of the very institution which now housed his old bones.
From the dreams of the Oracle, Eddie, with infinite care and devotion, built the List.
VAL HALL 2002
Eddie had thought the old man was asleep, his head lolling back against the wings of the old comfy armchair by the window, a rug tucked up to cover his legs, but when he straightened from picking up a couple of abandoned mugs from a nearby low table, careful not to slop the remnants of cold congealing tea out of them onto the floor, he looked over at the chair and met a pair of dark eyes looking at him from underneath eyelids with a hint of an epicanthic fold. The gaze held enough speculation that Eddie furrowed his brow into a slight frown, tilting his head.
“Are you okay?” he asked. “Do you need anything...?”
The old man pulled one of his hands from where they had both been neatly stowed underneath the rug, and beckoned with one long bony finger.
“Come over here. You aren’t who you seem to be, are you?”
Eddie’s eyes darted around quickly, but nobody was close enough to be in earshot. He stepped closer.
“Whatever do you mean...?” he asked carefully.
The old man tapped his temple with the same finger that had done the beckoning. “The Oracle knows,” he said. “I have Dreamed you.”
“Have you, now,” Eddie said, dropping into a nearby chair, depositing the tea mugs back down on the side table beside him. “And what is it that you have Dreamed?”
“That you need to listen,” the old man said. “That you are the one who needs to know.”
“What do I need to know?’ Eddie asked.
The black eyes – so dark as to almost merge with the black hole of the pupil – held Eddie’s in a hypnotic gaze. “Ophelia Orleans,” he said. “Fifteen, this year. Savannah. Will manifest soon.”
“What?” Eddie said, startled.
The old man folded the lids back down over those magnificent eyes, and tucked his hand back under the rug. “Look it up. And then you can come and talk to me about it. Keep a note of it. Keep her on the list.”
