Drug of Choice

“Yeah, great.” He sat up. “Where am I?”

“You’re in the LA Memorial Hospital, where the resident staff believes that there is something wrong with you.”

“Me? Wrong with me? I feel great.”

“I’m sure you do,” Jackson said, with a quick glance at Clark. “Would you mind walking around for us?”

“Sure, man.” The Angel started to get up, then stopped. He felt under the sheets. “Hey, what’s going on here? Somebody’s been fooling with my—”

At that moment, for the first time, Clark remembered the blue urine. He moved around to the side of the bed and picked up the bottle. “By the way, Dr. Jackson,” he said, “there is one unsolved question here. This man’s urine. It’s blue.”

Clark held up the bottle.

“It is?” Jackson said, frowning.

Clark looked at the bottle. The urine was yellow.

“Well,” he said lamely, “it was.”

“Isn’t that interesting,” Jackson said, with a pitying smile.

“Hey, listen,” the Angel said. “Get this damned tube outa me. It feels funny. What kinda pervert did a thing like that, anyhow?”

Jackson rested a reassuring hand on the patient’s shoulder. “We’ll take care of it right away. Just lie back for a minute. As long as you’re here, you might as well have lunch with the other patients.”

The rounds group moved off to the next case. The interns were muttering among themselves. Clark stared at the floor.

“I swear to you, sir. Last night his urine was bright blue. I saw it; Dr. Spence saw it; the metabolic boys saw—”

“At this moment,” said Dr. Jackson, “I am perfectly willing to believe that you saw polka-dot urine. In this hospital, anything is possible.”

The patient, Arthur Lewis, was discharged at 1:00 P.M. Before he left, Clark talked with him. The patient remembered nothing about a motorcycle accident, or the police. He claimed he had been sitting in his room, smoking a cigarette, when he fell asleep. He awoke in the hospital; he remembered nothing in between. When Clark asked if he had ever urinated blue before, the Angel gave him a funny look, laughed, and walked away.

There were jokes about Clark at lunch that day, and for several weeks afterward. But eventually it blew over, and was forgotten. For Clark, there was only one really disturbing aspect to the whole situation.

The day Arthur Lewis was discharged, Clark had stopped at the front desk on his way home, and talked to the lobby staff.

“I hope there wasn’t any trouble about that Angel in here last night,” he said.

“Oh, he was discharged this morning,” a receptionist said.

“No, I mean his friend. A huge guy. Came up to the seventh floor at five A.M. with a switchblade.”

“Friend?”

“Yes. Another Angel.”

“At five in the morning?” the receptionist said.

“Yes.”

“I was on duty all night. There was no Angel. I do remember an awfully big man—”

“That’s him. Very big man.”

“—but he was wearing a sportcoat and turtleneck. And he had a little briefcase. Very pleasant-looking man.”

Clark frowned. “You’re sure?”

The receptionist smiled in a friendly way. “Quite sure, Dr. Clark.”

“Well, that’s very peculiar.”

“Yes,” she said, with a slow nod. “It is.”

2. BY LOVE DEPRESSED

Her name was Sharon Wilder, and she was quick to point out it was her real name: “Everything about me,” she would say, licking her lips, “is real.” Certainly there were enough bikini photographs of her on magazine covers around the world to verify her claim. And her agent, an ex-Marine named Tony Lafora, was often heard to say, “Sharon is a very real person. A very real person.”

She had made just one film, a sexy robbery story set on the Riviera called “Fast Buck.” Her role had made her famous overnight. Sharon Wilder was twenty-one, five feet six, black-haired, black-eyed, full-lipped, lush — and real.

One cynical reporter wrote of her “rising young talents,” but mostly, the press was cordial, and the studios, directors, and photographers were nothing short of ecstatic. In the months after her film opened, press coverage of Sharon Wilder was staggering. She appeared twice on the cover of Life, once on Look, once on Newsweek, three times on Cosmopolitan. An article about her and the Hollywood image-making process appeared in Harper’s. She modeled Pucci for Vogue.

The week she appeared on the cover of Time, she was wheeled into the emergency ward of the LA Memorial Hospital. It was nine in the evening, and she was in a coma. The medical resident on duty was Roger Clark.

Clark could not have been more astonished. At the time, he was sipping coffee and discussing a new case of chicken-pox with an intern. A nurse had come up to him and said, “Dr. Clark, you’d better hurry.”

“What is it?”

“The reporters.”

“What reporters?”

“They’re all out in the lobby. They want to know about Sharon Wilder.”

“Sharon Wilder? I don’t know anything about her.”