Dreams - 4/49

Dr. Nichols shifted his stare to the body. "The smelling salts…" he murmured. They were still open. He knew he should stopper the vial, at least, but he was tired. He should do something, but it seemed the most important thing was to just remain standing.

Lazarus' body rested on a lime-green chair. The upholstery was split, and yellow foam showed through on the sides where patients slid--where patients used to slide on and off. Dr. Nichols' face twitched and he shrugged. For more than a year now it had just been Lazarus. And before that, a slow but steady trickle of "test subjects"--certainly not patients. He wouldn't give himself the comfort of thinking in those terms. He wouldn't deceive himself with obedience.

The dusty light bothered his eyes.

He was alone in a room with a dying man. He needed to take stock. He needed control. He saw himself succumbing to exhaustion, his mind spinning and spinning. A cog whose teeth gripped nothing. He was alone. His wife, Evelyn, left him eighteen months ago. His hand curled into a fist as his eyes glazed.

Evelyn loved horror novels, and he couldn’t talk about his work in the lab without being called Frankenstein. But whatever her objections, she stayed with him. They followed grant money, sate-hopping across the United States. They even moved to Daedeok for three years while he worked with the South Koreans. They lived with enough North Korean rocketry aimed at their city to send it into orbit. She never criticized him for pursuing his work rather than a family, or for messing with things she felt best left to God.

He remembered coming home one night, long before she had any reason to leave. He had been exhausted and drained. Limited resources and a lack of funding had forced decisions. Some potentially fruitful studies had to be dropped. Some savable patients had to be risked with procedures that weren't ready, or almost were, it was just--