CHAPTER 16. HARRY DID NOT DIE QUICKLY AND HE DID NOT DIE easily

HARRY DID NOT DIE QUICKLY AND HE DID NOT DIE easily. He took his own terrible long time, the first and last selfish thing he had ever done in his life. Harry died for a year and a half, in little stages, slipping for a few weeks, fighting back to almost full strength again, keeping us all dizzy with trying to guess. Would he go now, this time, or had he beaten it altogether? We never knew, but because it was Harry it seemed foolish for us to give up. Harry would do what was right, no matter how hard, but what did that mean in dying? Was it right to fight and hang on and make the rest of us suffer through an endless death, when death was coming no matter what Harry did? Or was it right to slip away gracefully and without fuss?

At nineteen, I certainly didn't know the answer, although I already knew more about death than most of the other pimple-ridden puddingheads in my sophomore class at the University of Miami.

And one fine autumn afternoon after a chemistry class, as I walked across the campus toward the student union, Deborah appeared beside me. “Deborah,” I called to her, sounding very collegiate, I thought, “come have a Coke.” Harry had told me to hang out at the union and have Cokes. He'd said it would help me pass for human, and learn how other humans behaved. And of course, he was right. In spite of the damage to my teeth, I was learning a great deal about the unpleasant species.

Deborah, at seventeen, already far too serious, shook her head. “It's Dad,” she said. And very shortly we were driving across town to the hospice where they had taken Harry. Hospice was not good news. That meant the doctors were saying that Harry was ready to die, and suggesting that he cooperate.

Harry did not look good when we got there. He looked so green and still against the sheets that I thought we were too late. He was spindly and gaunt from his long fight, looking for all the world as though something inside him was eating its way out. The respirator beside him hissed, a Darth Vader sound from a living grave. Harry was alive, strictly speaking. “Dad,” Deborah said, taking his hand. “I brought Dexter.”

Harry opened his eyes and his head rolled toward us, almost as if some invisible hand had pushed it from the far side of the pillow. But they were not Harry's eyes. They were murky blue pits, dull and empty, uninhabited. Harry's body might be alive, but he was not home.

“It isn't good,” the nurse told us. “We're just trying to make him comfortable now.” And she busied herself with a large hypodermic needle from a tray, filling it and holding it up to squirt out the air bubble.

“Wait . . .” It was so faint I thought at first it might be the respirator. I looked around the room and my eyes finally fell on what was left of Harry. Behind the dull emptiness of his eyes a small spark was shining. “Wait . . . ,” he said again, nodding toward the nurse.

She either didn't hear him or had decided to ignore him. She stepped to his side and gently lifted his stick arm. She began to swab it with a cotton ball.

“No . . . ,” Harry gasped gently, almost inaudibly.

I looked at Deborah. She seemed to be standing at attention in a perfect posture of formal uncertainty. I looked back at Harry. His eyes locked onto mine.

“No . . . ,” he said, and there was something very close to horror in his eyes now. “No . . . shot . . .”

I stepped forward and put a restraining hand on the nurse, just before she plunged the needle into Harry's vein. “Wait,” I said. She looked up at me, and for the tiniest fraction of a second there was something in her eyes. I almost fell backward in surprise. It was a cold rage, an inhuman, lizard-brain sense of I-Want, a belief that the world was her very own game preserve. Just that one flash, but I was sure. She wanted to ram the needle into my eye for interrupting her. She wanted to shove it into my chest and twist until my ribs popped and my heart burst through into her hands and she could squeeze, twist, rip my life out of me. This was a monster, a hunter, a killer. This was a predator, a soulless and evil thing.

Just like me.

But her granola smile returned very quickly. “What is it, honey?” she said, ever so sweetly, so perfectly Last Nurse.

My tongue felt much too large for my mouth and it seemed like it took me several minutes to answer, but I finally managed to say, “He doesn't want the shot.”

She smiled again, a beautiful thing that sat on her face like the blessing of an all-wise god. “Your dad is very sick,” she said. “He's in a lot of pain.” She held the needle up and a melodramatic shaft of light from the window hit it. The needle sparkled like her very own Holy Grail. “He needs a shot,” she said.

“He doesn't want it,” I said.

“He's in pain,” she said.

Harry said something I could not hear. My eyes were locked on the nurse, and hers on mine, two monsters standing over the same meat. Without looking away from her I leaned down next to him.

“I—WANT . . . pain . . . ,” Harry said.

It jerked my gaze down to him. Behind the emerging skeleton, nestled snugly under the crew cut that seemed suddenly too big for his head, Harry had returned and was fighting his way up through the fog. He nodded at me, reached very slowly for my hand and squeezed.

I looked back at Last Nurse. “He wants the pain,” I told her, and somewhere in her small frown, the petulant shake of her head, I heard the roar of a savage beast watching its prey scuttle down a hole.

“I'll have to tell the doctor,” she said.

“All right,” I told her. “We'll wait here.”

I watched her sail out into the hallway like some large and deadly bird. I felt a pressure on my hand. Harry watched me watching Last Nurse.

“You . . . can tell . . . ,” Harry said.

“About the nurse?” I asked him. He closed his eyes and nodded lightly, just once. “Yes,” I said. “I can tell.”

“Like . . . you . . . ,” Harry said.

“What?” Deborah demanded. “What are you talking about? Daddy, are you all right? What does that mean, like you?”

“She likes me,” I said. “He thinks the nurse may have a crush on me, Deb,” I told her, and turned back to Harry.

“Oh, right,” Deborah muttered, but I was already concentrating on Harry.

“What has she done?” I asked him.

He tried to shake his head and managed only a slight wobble. He winced. It was clear to me that the pain was coming back, just liked he'd wanted. “Too much,” he said. “She . . . gives too much—” he gasped now, and closed his eyes.

I must have been rather stupid that day, because I didn't get what he meant right away. “Too much what?” I said.

Harry opened one pain-blearied eye. “Morphine,” he whispered.

I felt like a great shaft of light had hit me. “Overdose,” I said. “She kills by overdose. And in a place like this, where it's actually almost her job, nobody would question it—why, that's—”

Harry squeezed my hand again and I stopped babbling. “Don't let her,” he said in a hoarse voice with surprising strength. “Don't let her—dope me again.”

“Please,” Deborah said in a voice that hung on the ragged edge, “what are you guys talking about?” I looked at Harry, but Harry closed his eyes as a sudden stab of pain tore at him.

“He thinks, um . . . ,” I started and then trailed off. Deborah had no idea what I was, of course, and Harry had told me quite firmly to keep her in the dark. So how I could tell her about this without revealing anything was something of a problem. “He thinks the nurse is giving him too much morphine,” I finally said. “On purpose.”

“That's crazy,” Deb said. “She's a nurse.”

Harry looked at her but didn't say anything. And to be truthful, I couldn't think of anything to say to Deb's incredible naïveté either.

“What should I do?” I asked Harry.

Harry looked at me for a very long time. At first I thought his mind might have wandered away with the pain, but as I looked back at him I saw that Harry was very much present. His jaw was set so hard that I thought the bones might snap through his tender pale skin and his eyes were as clear and sharp as I had ever seen them, as much as when he had first given me his Harry solution to getting me squared away. “Stop her,” he said at last.

A very large thrill ran through me. Stop her? Was it possible? Could he mean—stop her? Until now Harry had helped me control my Dark Passenger, feeding him stray pets, hunting deer; one glorious time I had gone with him to catch a feral monkey that had been terrorizing a South Miami neighborhood. It had been so close, so almost human—but still not right, of course. And we had gone through all the theoretical steps of stalking, disposing of evidence, and so on. Harry knew that someday It would happen and he wanted me to be ready to do It right. He had always held me back from actually Doing It. But now—stop her? Could he mean it?

“I'll go talk to the doctor,” Deborah said. “He'll tell her to adjust your medicine.”

I opened my mouth to speak, but Harry squeezed my hand and nodded once, painfully. “Go,” he said, and Deborah looked at him for a moment before she turned away and went to find the doctor. When she was gone the room filled with a wild silence. I could think of nothing but what Harry had said: “Stop her.” And I couldn't think of any other way to interpret it, except that he was finally turning me loose, giving me permission to do the Real Thing at last. But I didn't dare ask him if that's what he had said for fear he would tell me he meant something else. And so I just stood there for the longest time, staring out the small window into a garden outside, where a splatter of red flowers surrounded a fountain. Time passed. My mouth got dry. “Dexter—” Harry said at last.

I didn't answer. Nothing I could think of seemed adequate. “It's like this,” Harry said, slowly and painfully, and my eyes jerked down to his. He gave me a strained half smile when he saw that I was with him at last. “I'll be gone soon,” Harry said. “I can't stop you from . . . being who you are.”

“Being what I am, Dad,” I said.

He waved it away with a feeble, brittle hand. “Sooner or later . . . you will—need—to do it to a person,” he said, and I felt my blood sing at the thought. “Somebody who . . . needs it . . .”

“Like the nurse,” I said with a thick tongue.

“Yes,” he says, closing his eyes for a long moment, and when he went on his voice had grown hazy with the pain. “She needs it, Dexter. That's—” He took a ragged breath. I could hear his tongue clacking as if his mouth was overdry. “She's deliberately—overdosing patients . . . killing them . . . killing them . . . on purpose . . . She's a killer, Dexter . . . A killer . . .”

I cleared my throat. I felt a little clumsy and light-headed, but after all this was a very important moment in a young man's life. “Do you want—” I said and stopped as my voice broke. “Is it all right if I . . . stop her, Dad?”

“Yes,” said Harry. “Stop her.”

For some reason I felt like I had to be absolutely certain. “You mean, you know. Like I've been doing? With, you know, the monkey?”

Harry's eyes were closed and he was clearly floating away on a rising tide of pain. He took a soft and uneven breath. “Stop . . . the nurse,” he said. “Like . . . the monkey . . .” His head arched back slightly, and he began to breathe faster but still very roughly.

Well.

There it was.

“Stop the nurse like the monkey.” It had a certain wild ring to it. But in my madly buzzing brain, everything was music. Harry was turning me loose. I had permission. We had talked about one day doing this, but he had held me back. Until now.

Now.

“We talked . . . about this,” Harry said, eyes still closed. “You know what to do . . .”

“I talked to the doctor,” Deborah said, hurrying into the room. “He'll come down and adjust the meds on the chart.”

“Good,” I said, feeling something rise up in me, from the base of my spine and out over the top of my head, an electric surge that jolted through me and covered me like a dark hood. “I'll go talk to the nurse.”

Deborah looked startled, perhaps at my tone. “Dexter—” she said.

I paused, fighting to control the savage glee I felt towering up inside me. “I don't want any misunderstanding,” I said. My voice sounded strange even to me. I pushed past Deborah before she could register my expression.

And in the hallway of that hospice, threading my way between stacks of clean, crisp, white linen, I felt the Dark Passenger become the new driver for the first time. Dexter became understated, almost invisible, the light-colored stripes on a sharp and transparent tiger. I blended in, almost impossible to see, but I was there and I was stalking, circling in the wind to find my prey. In that tremendous flash of freedom, on my way to do the Thing for the first time, sanctioned by almighty Harry, I receded, faded back into the scenery of my own dark self, while the other me crouched and growled. I would do It at last, do what I had been created to do.

And I did.