I.D.

I.D.

_____________________________________

George J. Brewer

Copyright © 2000 by George J. Brewer.

Library of Congress Number:       00-192618

ISBN #:         Hardcover                               0-7388-4512-4

                   Softcover                                 0-7388-4511-6

                   Ebook                                      978-1-4691-2149-9

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or

transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,

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and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the

copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents

either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used

fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or

dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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CONTENTS

PRELUDE

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

CHAPTER 18

CHAPTER 19

CHAPTER 20

CHAPTER 21

CHAPTER 22

CHAPTER 23

CHAPTER 24

CHAPTER 25

CHAPTER 26

CHAPTER 27

AFTERMATH

I dedicate this book to my wife, Lucia,

my two daughters Jeannie and Katie,

and my two son-in-laws,

Rocky Lang and Mike Brewer-Berres.

PRELUDE

The young man with blondish hair was quite good-look

ing except possibly for a nose that was slightly too large for the rest of his face. He switched on the light in what appeared to be a large storage room. The room had no windows, and on three sides it was ringed with shelves holding a variety of supplies and equipment. One wall was devoted to supplies of a medical nature, such as intravenous equipment, and solutions, and a variety of drugs and chemicals packaged for intravenous use. A second wall contained supplies useful in a biochemical laboratory, such as incubators, glassware and chemicals. Shelves on the third wall contained equipment and supplies of a mechanical and electrical nature, including tools for working on that type of equipment.

But it was the fourth side of the room that drew your attention, and was drawing the attention of the young blond man. On this side there were no shelves. Instead, there were four large black casket-like devices lying on the floor, lined up with one end against the wall, and spaced such that there was room to walk between them.

On the wall above the caskets, and along the entire width of this wall, were two rows of electrical circuits, one of the circuits providing 220, and the other 110, volt outlets. Only one of the caskets was plugged in. It had wires from both circuits entering the casket on one side, where holes had been drilled for this purpose. In one corner of the room, next to one of the caskets, were two standby gasoline generators, one for each of the two circuits. They were hooked up in such a manner that if they sensed a power failure, they’d automatically provide emergency power. The exhausts of both generators were vented through the wall, presumably to the outside.

An intravenous stand with a plastic bag containing a yellow fluid stood close to the head of the casket that was plugged into the electrical outlets. The tube running from the bag, itself carrying the same yellow fluid, ran down and entered the casket through its own special hole.

Upon approaching closer to the caskets, one could notice yet another significant difference from caskets used for burial. There was a good-sized glass face plate on each casket, perhaps a foot square, and positioned to be in the approximate location above the face of a body or person inside. A small switch was located beside each face plate.

The young man approached the casket that was plugged into the electrical circuits, knelt beside it, and peered into the face plate. Then he moved the switch beside the face plate to the on position.

As the light went on inside the casket, the eyelids of the face that could be seen through the glass gave a momentary flicker, the sign the young man was watching for. He said out loud, Oh, good. Six months and still counting. This system is definitely ready for use.

The brain of the man inside the casket seethed in a mixture of emotions running the gamut from anger to dread. He’d long since lost any ability to move even the tiniest muscle of his body. The eyelid flicker was an involuntary response to the sudden light shining directly in his eyes. When he’d first awakened in this, his living tomb, after being rendered unconscious with an injection of some drug, he had been able to move a little. At that time, the cold was terrible, and he had shivered incessantly. Then, as the feeling of cold disappeared, so did the shivering, but also did all ability to consciously move any part of his body.

While his body was essentially in a state of suspended animation, his mind was not. True, his thought processes were sluggish, but they still existed. And therein lay the horror of this living death—a seemingly endless parade of thoughts for huge expanses of time, interrupted occasionally, and mercifully, by dream-like periods. But the almost endless thinking periods without knowledge of where he was, or why, without being able to move a muscle, were what made this an obscene nightmare. For he was aware. He was aware that he was entombed and rendered helpless, and was occasionally being inspected. He couldn’t see out the face plate, but he assumed the person inspecting him was the person who had done this to him in the first place, and he hated this person with every fiber of his being.

However, the emotions that followed the hate were always dread, and fear. He knew he was helpless, completely at the mercy of the person who peered in at him from time to time.

CHAPTER 1

My brain seemed suspended several feet above my body, as if it wanted nothing to do with the scene below. The gray-haired lady in the white nurse’s uniform spoke again, this time more sharply, Did you hear what I said, Mr. Martin? You have your nerve, you know, trying to sell blood. You’re infected with the AIDS virus!

My mind continued to behave in its surreal manner, hoping, I guess, that this whole episode was just a bad dream. But the sick hollowness developing in the pit of my stomach signaled otherwise. I said weakly, I don’t understand. I don’t have AIDS.

The sternness in her face faded a little. You mean you didn’t know?

No, I don’t have AIDS. There must be some mistake.

She sat down beside me on the worn leather couch, one of three that bedecked the blood-bank waiting room, and opened a manila folder. Technically, you don’t have AIDS. That’s the disease. You’re infected with HIV, you know, the virus that causes AIDS. The test we did with the blood you sold us last month came back positive. You know, we really should get our money back for that unit, since we couldn’t use it. But if you really didn’t know, I guess it’s okay. A lot of people try to cheat us, selling bad blood, you know. Her voice trailed off.

I don’t have AIDS. There’s no way I could’ve caught it. I continued to feel sick. This was a nightmare. A friend of mine had AIDS, and he was a mess.

She glanced at the folder again. You were negative a year ago, when you sold us blood. You must’ve caught it in the last year, you know.

God, this is awful. Could the test be wrong?

Mr. Martin, your face looks so white. Are you gonna be okay? Can I get you some water? Her face was full of concern. She’d gone from an avenging witch to a solicitous grandmother.

I feel kind of sick, actually.

She reached for my wrist and felt for a moment. Your pulse is a little weak. This must of been quite a shock, you know. I’ll get you a doughnut and some milk. Would you like us to repeat the test, just to make sure, you know?

Would you please?

After having my shocky body nourished by a doughnut and milk from my blood-bank grandmother, blood was taken from me for the retest, and I headed out the door, my head whirling. I retreated to the parking lot, found my old wreck of a car, and headed home. Halfway there I stopped at a liquor store. Since I only had four bucks, I bought a bottle of cheap red wine. I was going to need something to get rid of the demons that were flitting around in my head.

I parked in the lot of my apartment building, and clutching the bag holding the wine, I headed up the two flights to my cheap little efficiency. I hated the thought of going to an empty apartment, feeling like this. Joannie’s leaving maybe had a down side after all.

Midway through my third big glass of wine, the alcoholic numbness began to take over, and the desperation eased. As my brain settled down at last, I began to contemplate things. Surely, this was my worst day ever, truly a day from hell. Worse, today was likely to turn my life into hell.

I thought about yin and yang. I had never really been a believer in the yin and yang philosophy of life, explained so carefully in a lecture by Professor Yocum in a philosophy course I had taken some time back. In a nutshell, the philosophy says if something good happens to you—a yang—it will be followed by something bad—a yin. And vice versa. Although I’d seen no reason why yin and yang should be true, I had thought it was a pretty good way to think about life. It kept you from getting too carried away when a good thing happened, and from being too depressed when a bad thing happened.

But the last two days have me thinking that maybe there is something to yin and yang. Yesterday was wonderful. I was yanged three times. My grades for my second term in graduate school had come in—all A’s. Second, the bane of my existence, a lack of money, had finally been solved when I was selected by Professor Maloney as his prime ESP research subject. For the next two years I’m to receive one thousand dollars a month just to lay on a couch a couple of hours a week and exchange thoughts with the Professor. And finally, that stone around my neck, Joannie, had finally decided to take a hike.

Sure, I had a few bad feelings about Joannie leaving. We’d lived together for almost five years, ever since I started college at the University of Michigan. I’d met her the summer after high school back in Bloomington, Indiana. She was a little older than me, five years or so, but we liked each other right from the start. She worked as a cocktail waitress—short dress, with good figure and all, which I have to admit was what first attracted me when she served beer to me and a couple of my friends.

We seemed to hit if off real well that summer. She loved to party, and I developed a big crush on her. I was rather shy around women, and was still a virgin. No problem, she took care of that. I experienced my first sex with Joannie, who seemed to know quite a lot about it and enjoyed teaching me all the delights. We decided she’d go off to college with me, we’d live together, and her earnings would support us while I went to school. Of course, we’d get married at some point.

But gradually the luster wore off. A big problem was that I couldn’t keep Joannie from going to bed with other men. One of them was my brother, Floyd, for Christ’s sake! A drink or two and she was easy pickings. As I thought about it, I realized it wasn’t too surprising I had HIV infection. Joannie was on the pill, so our sex was always unprotected. The way she played around, she had no doubt become infected, and then infected me. As I grew to resent her sexual escapades, especially the episode with my brother, she grew to resent supporting me. Except for paying the rent, she kept her money to herself. So toward the end I was pretty poor. So poor, I’d begun to sell my blood on a regular basis to the University Hospital Blood Bank.

And, of course, we got so we quarreled all the time. I don’t know why it took her so long to get sick of what had become a miserable life and decide to leave. As for me, I couldn’t seem to terminate it, I guess because I felt sorry for her. She didn’t seem to have any place to go or any plans for the future, except to get married and live this American dream as a housewife. When it became clear I wasn’t going to marry her, she wasn’t able to deal with it. But finally she had decided to do something—move out—and yesterday it had happened. Yeah, I was a little sad. But not for long. We’d really started to dislike each other.

Truthfully, I have had some misgivings about one of my yangs. My project with Professor Maloney will provide cash, desperately needed cash, but it has also frightened me a little. I don’t know exactly what it is, but the professor gives me the jitters if I’m around him very long. Maybe it’s because we are quite good at exchanging thoughts in our ESP sessions, and once in a while I catch a thought from him when we’re not in session, and sometimes they’re scary. Or maybe it’s because I’m afraid he’s picking up my thoughts, and I might think something I don’t want him to know. Of course, I have no choice but to do the project in spite of my misgivings, because I need the money.

But today, being told I was infected with HIV, I paid big time for my three yangs of yesterday. You might say I really got yinned. Until my first check from Maloney’s research project arrived, I had to keep some money coming in. I had temporarily been laid off from my part-time job at a drug store, so I had begun to sell my blood, only to learn about the positive blood test. Jesus Christ, I was going to have AIDS! This was a yin of all yins, the big yin, the super bowl of yins!

I managed to find enough money around the apartment to stay in an alcoholic haze for three days. During this time the lady from the blood bank called to confirm the positive test results. After running out of money, I mostly slept for two more days. It was as if I couldn’t face my new reality. Finally, after about five days, I began to recover from my day from hell.

I decided I should call Joannie, and make sure she knew about the positive HIV test. She’d left a forwarding address and phone number for her new apartment. A male voice answered the phone. I asked, Could I speak to Joannie, please?

His voice was surly. What about? Who’re you?

I’m Jim Martin, a friend of hers. I have something important to tell her.

She don’t want nothin’ to do with you, says you’re bad news. You shouldn’t call here.

I heard Joannie’s voice in the background, and a moment later she came to the phone. What do you want, Peckerhead? You want to repay me for all that free rent, right, Peckerhead? And she laughed raucously.

She’d been calling me Peckerhead for the last year, with increasing frequency as she became more upset with me. I said, Joannie, I’m positive for HIV!

She didn’t seem too surprised at my news. More than anything, she seemed to get even angrier at me. She said, So you’re positive. So what? What do you want me to do about it, Peckerhead?

Well, since I’ve never had sex with anybody but you, I must’ve caught it from you. You must be positive too, and you’ve got to be careful with other people.

I bet you’re as pure as the driven snow! All that fake innocence. I probably caught it from you!

It suddenly hit me. The little bitch had known all along that she was positive, and hadn’t bothered to tell me! Maybe that was why she was so slow in leaving—she wanted to give me every chance to get infected! I said slowly, So you knew, and you let me get infected, didn’t you?

Her voice was full of spite, If it happened that way, you deserved it, after screwing up my life!

I felt sick, and I felt like killing her. But I controlled myself, and all I said was, Nice going, Joannie. Your life’s fouled up, so you decide to foul mine up too. I hope in the short life you have left you get everything you deserve!

So this told me what had happened, but now I had to figure out what to do with the rest of my life. It’s amazing how one little thing like this can turn your whole outlook around. Before the HIV test the world was my oyster. I was a strong young man, well built, six foot tall, with a full head of blond hair, and good-looking, I’d been told, except maybe for a nose that was a little big for the rest of my face. I was smart too. I’d done well in college, and was now successfully started in graduate school, planning to get a Ph.D. in psychology. Although I was poor, I’d solved that problem for the next couple of years, and I was convinced I had a great future. Now that Joannie was out of the way, I could start dating some of the cute women in my classes who were always hinting they’d like to go out with me.

Now, with HIV diagnosed, my whole world was turned upside down. Should I continue in graduate school? That would represent an investment of many years for what promised to be a short life. Would clients want to be counseled by a psychologist with AIDS? Maybe I should find some high pay-off career, like auto-racing, where the danger wouldn’t mean too much to someone with AIDS? And those good-looking women? Forget it—it wasn’t fair to them for me to even date them.

It took me some time to sort through those thoughts, and figure out a course of action. Maybe a cure would be found before my case progressed too far. I knew there were drugs to delay it. So an important thing was not to panic. Obviously, I should do my homework on the disease, then make very well thought-out decisions. Don’t do anything hasty.

I got to wondering if Floyd had caught it, too. It would serve the bastard right! As you can tell by that thought, there isn’t a whole lot of love lost between me and my older brother. For that matter, my relations with my entire family range from poor to non-existent. Oh, I’m on speaking terms with my aunts, uncles, and cousins, some of whom call me once in a while. But my father hates me, and that has poisoned them towards me some, too. Especially since he’s a rich bastard, and they don’t want to be cut off from all that loot. Even more so with the suck-up expert, Floyd.

Speaking of loot, I was completely out of money. Without the paycheck from my drugstore job, I’d counted on the money for my blood to tide me over until the first check from Maloney, not due for a couple of weeks. I needed a little cash to live on until then.

It was ten in the morning, and I was hungry, but of course, I had no money for food. Maybe I could get an advance from Maloney. I put the thought into action. Probably a personal appeal had a better chance then a phone call, so I jumped into my wreck and headed for Maloney’s office at the Medical Center.

The professor’s office was at the end of a short hall, around the corner from a longer hall, and it was rather secluded. From the short hall you could see into his secretary’s office, while his office was through a door which led from the secretary’s office. As I rounded the corner, I could see through the partially opened door to Maloney’s office—that he was embracing his secretary, Marie. Marie’s back was to me, and I could see Maloney’s hands under her skirt, caressing her ample buttocks, while they kissed.

Overcoming my shock, I quickly back-tracked, and disappeared around the corner, not wanting to embarrass them. After waiting a couple of minutes, I cautiously returned. Marie was now sitting at her desk. Marie was a pretty brunette, about thirty-five, with a figure that wavered between voluptuousness and obesity. She wore a gold wedding band on the ring finger of her left hand. Seeing me, she said, Oh, Mr. Martin. What are you doing here? Can I help you?

Hi, Marie. Is the professor here? I’d like to talk to him for a moment.

Yes, he’s in, but he’s very busy. What’s it about? Maybe I can help you.

I doubt it. I need an advance to tide me over until my paycheck.

I see. No I can’t do that. I’ll see if he’ll talk to you. She spoke into an intercom. Professor, I’m sorry to bother you, but Jim Martin is here and would like to see you for a moment.

I could hear a low growl, I’m very busy. Ask him if it’s important.

She looked at me. I said, If it’s important for me to eat, it’s important.

She said into the intercom, He says it’s important.

Okay. Have him come in.

She motioned toward his office door, and I went in. Professor Maloney had a big office, well-appointed, with book shelves lining the walls, a large mahogany desk, and a big comfortable-looking leather chair behind the desk which he occupied. Although only thirty-five, quite young as professors go, the big, almost luxurious, office was no doubt a reflection of Maloney’s success and reputation as an ESP researcher. Professor Maloney was a good-looking man, about an inch shorter than me, but well-built, with a full head of black hair and a full beard. He was very professional looking.

As I came in, he looked up from something he was reading and said, Good morning, Jim. What is it that’s so important?

Hi, Professor. It’s just that I’ve got a money problem. I’ve been laid off from my drug-store job, and a couple of other sources of money I was counting on to tide me over didn’t work out. Careful, I said to myself. I didn’t want him picking up any thoughts about one of the problems I was having. For all I knew. Being infected with HIV would disqualify me from his project.

He didn’t act like he was picking up anything, but he said peevishly, What do you think I am, Martin, a social service agency? We’re not here to give out financial gifts.

Jesus, what a prick, I thought to myself. Maybe he picked up my anger, because I suddenly felt in