The woman in white came back in, carrying a very large, tall glassful of milkshake. Mark thanked her and reached for it, but she insisted on putting it down on the table, taking the straw out of its paper wrapper, and putting the straw in the milkshake herself. She reminded Mark of a waiter in a very, very, very pretentious restaurant who had been trained to believe that diners were incapable of putting their own napkins in their own laps. Mark took a long drink of milkshake. The woman in white nodded appreciatively and walked back out of the room again.
Mark put the milkshake back on the side table. “Listen,” he said, “that’s why I asked Gregor Demarkian up here. Because nobody would believe me. Nobody would believe me about anything. If it’s going to get like that again, I don’t know what I’m going to do. I didn’t take any caffeine tablets, not one. If they found them in my stomach, then somebody slipped them to me when I wasn’t looking. And if you can’t take my word for it, then to hell with you.”
“If somebody slipped them to you when you weren’t looking,” Jimmy said, “then that somebody was trying to killyou. Unless you’re suggesting it was a joke. Do you really think somebody is trying to kill you?”
“No,” Mark said, “why would they? But I didn’t take them, and that’s final. And I told everybody I wasn’t taking drugs, and they didn’t believe that either, and now you’ve got the proof that I wasn’t lying after all. God, I don’t know what’s happened to my life. I really don’t. People didn’t used to think I was lying practically anytime I opened my mouth. What’s the deal here? Have I suddenly grown horns and a tail I can’t see in the mirror?”
“Of course not,” Jimmy said. “Calm down. You’re yelling at the wrong person. I’m an innocent bystander. Did you really get Gregor Demarkian all the way up here just because people wouldn’t believe you when you said you weren’t on drugs?”
“Of course not.” Mark had more milkshake. He’d drunk nearly the whole thing, and he wanted more. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been this hungry. He thought he might never have been this hungry. He was ready to eat the mud beige, wholly inadequate blanket that covered his bed. He pulled his legs up under him, crossed in a not-quite lotus position. “Hey, Jimmy,” he said, “you got your car up here? Driver and everything?”
“Of course I have the driver and everything. Why?”
“Because I’m starving,” Mark said, “and all the food in Windsor sucks dead rats, and you know the hospital food won’t be any better. What I want is three crispy chicken sandwiches from McDonald’s and a supersized fries and, I don’t know. Another milkshake. Like that. The thing is, the only way you can get that that I know of is if you go out to exit 30 on 1-95 north in, I think it’s Lexington. It may be Concord. But you have to get off exit 30 going north, because the McDonald’s is on the exit. It’s a weird sort of arrangement. It’s not off the exit in town, it’s on this long access ramp. Oh, and I want ketchup. That doesn’t have caffeine in it, does it?”
“I don’t think so. I used to be able to eat like that without getting sick. It was a long time ago.”
“Will you do it?”
“I suppose,” Jimmy said, “but I still want to know. If you didn’t get Gregor up here because nobody would believe you weren’t taking drugs, why did you get him up here?”
Mark shrugged. “Because of something I saw on the night Michael died or maybe something I didn’t see. I could have been hallucinating it. I could have been wrong. I saw it out the window of the library from the catwalk. And it was dark.”
“You’ve been hallucinating?” Jimmy said.
“I don’t know,” Mark told him. “I really don’t. It was just so weird. And I tried to tell a bunch of people, Cherie Wardrop, even Philip Candor, although he hates the hell out of me, but he’s the kind of person people tell things to. And nobody would listen. Even the police wouldn’t listen. So I thought Gregor Demarkian would, and if I was just hallucinating he’d find that out, too, and I could just check myself into a loony bin. Except I don’t feel like I need to be in a loony bin anymore. Are you going to go get me something to eat? We’ve got to do it before Mom gets back because she’ll make me eat broccoli and stuff. Except she won’t if the food is already here. You know.”
“You sound better than I’ve heard you in months,” Jimmy said.