Evie felt like she wanted to say something, but she couldn’t think of anything that wouldn’t sound hollow. Besides, Jericho was talking to her, telling her the story she’d wanted to hear, and she was wary of breaking the spell.
“It started with his hand.” Jericho paused, sipped from Evie’s glass of water, resumed. “One day, he couldn’t make a fist. I remember that moment so clearly. He turned to me and said, ‘It’s like my doggone hand is drunk. Kid, you didn’t take my hand off base for a quick one while I was sleeping, didya?’ He said it like it was a joke. But I could tell he was scared. He didn’t tell the doctors, though. He just kept telling them he felt fit as a fiddle.”
Jericho worried the edge of the sheet between his fingers, pulling it taut, relaxing it again.
“He would get awful moody. Agitated. Once, he threw a plate of potatoes against a wall, and it left a hole there. His eyes were haunted. He asked me to run with him. He ran me into the ground. He couldn’t or wouldn’t stop. I let him go; I couldn’t keep up. Later, I saw him standing in the courtyard in the rain. Just standing there, letting it wash over him. I ran out to tell him to come inside, and he said, ‘It’s like I’ve got too much inside me. It just pushes and pushes with nowhere to go.’ I got him to come inside and lie down. I could hear him in the dark, whispering, ‘Please… please… please.’ Anyway, one night he went a little crazy. He stripped off all his clothes and ran through the hospital like an ape, swinging from the pipes, smashing windows. ‘I am the future!’ he screamed. It took four orderlies to catch him and strap him to the bed. The doctor came in and explained that the process had become unstable. For his own good, they’d need to stop it.”
Jericho buried his head in his hands for a minute before continuing.
“He was shouting at them, screaming, ‘You can’t do this to me! I’m a man! Look at me—I’m a man!’ over and over. They gave him a shot of something to calm him, but he kept struggling, kept screaming that he was a man, he had his rights, they just needed to give him a chance, a stinkin’ chance. Then the drug began to take effect; he couldn’t struggle much. He was crying, begging, pleading with them and God as they wheeled him out.” Jericho shook his head at some memory beyond words. “They reversed the process, I heard. Even worse, they had to take the other arm, too. It had spread throughout his body.”