The garish cartoon faces on the wall—green-armored space creatures, with slitted bandit kerchiefs tied around their eyes—goggled down at him; with a sinking feeling, he became aware of the first, timorous lurch of the now familiar nausea. Fried eggs didn’t sit so well with the roentgens. They’d tasted good in the coffee shop but he’d known he’d be sorry later.
He’d been in the States for fifty years, had almost completely lost his accent, though even when he was a kid it had all been largely phony, all those Geordie MacTavish phrases like “wee braw lassie” and “och the noo.” His real name was Gordon Burns, but in the pictures he’d been Geordie MacTavish for six years. Geordie MacTavish the Highland Lad: Geordie rescuing hurt animals, Geordie breaking up smugglers’ rings and fighting the Nazis, Geordie sent away to public school. Twelve years old and skipping around in a bloody kilt like Bonnie Prince Charlie, sneaking smokes between takes with the cameramen. Then the contract with Paramount, bit parts in costume dramas. He hadn’t been in a film in thirty-five years. For the past thirty, he’d lived in Burbank with Dolores, in the same little pink stucco bungalow they’d bought when they were newlyweds, working on his golf game and doing public relations for one of the big production companies. He’d never been all that fond of P.R., had never been particularly crazy about his colleagues or the work that he did, but since he’d had to retire (it had got to be too much for him, he tired so easily, he just couldn’t do it anymore), he missed it desperately. Away from the camaraderie of the shared routine, the office acquaintances had begun to slip, and he didn’t see too many other people on a regular basis, not even in the neighborhood where he had lived for so long—moving vans always in the driveways, strange dogs, unfamiliar kids, faces changing all the time.
He was definitely feeling ill now; he wished Dolores were with him; he wanted to turn around and go back home. But how could you refuse a request like this? His doctor had told him about the little girl. Down at the Cancer Center in San Diego, he’d said, a bit of a drive, but it would mean so much; old stills of Gordon all over the walls and even a Dandie Dinmont terrier—named, of course, Bobbie, after Gordon’s sidekick in the series. Nine years old and dying of leukemia—some chromosomal kind, nearly always fatal. “She watches your movies before she goes into chemo,” the doctor had said. “Says Geordie’s never afraid and neither is she.” What a rotten world, thought Gordon.
He wouldn’t mind it so much if he stood any chance of actually cheering the poor kid up. But no matter how their parents tried to prepare them, warned them again and again that the films had been made fifty years before, children were always disappointed not to see another child. Sometimes the younger ones didn’t understand. They asked him where the real Geordie was, was he Geordie’s grandpa. But the older ones could scarcely conceal their dismay. He would never forget the afternoon several years before when a little girl—grandchild of a colleague at the production company—had been brought to meet him. Gamely, he had pulled out the old red tam-o’-shanter; gamely, he had answered the door, bending low to greet the little girl and booming: “Aye, then! And who’s this wee lassie?” He would never forget the look on the little girl’s face. It was a look of shocked recognition, then of dawning horror: as if it were her own death she saw, leaning down so close to greet her; as if she could see the ruin of the boy he had been—destroyed now, lost forever—buried deep beneath his sagging cheeks. (...)
He paused outside the door. It stood partly open, waiting for his arrival. He fumbled in his coat pocket for the tam and—glancing at the ghost of his reflection illumined in the chill glass of a reception area opposite—placed it at a jaunty, Geordie-like angle on his bald head. The dim outline of his face shocked him. Dentures; flaccid cheeks; ghastly pouches under the eyes. His nose was as pinched as a dead man’s. Maybe it’ll be a comfort to the poor kid after all, he thought crossly. To see what she’d have to look forward to, to die and to know what she’s not missing.
He nudged the door open. Instantly, a couple of anxious parents—young, kids themselves, really—rose nervous and smiling from their bedside chairs, but his fleeting impression of them was broken by a welcoming bark, a small gray blur dashing recklessly to meet him: Bobbie, he thought incredulously, Bobbie, and was knocked nearly breathless by a wild, mysterious surge of joy.
He glanced up. Everywhere he looked, his own lost face stared back at him, from rain-swept piers and rocky landscapes, from the thundery dark of the artificial skies: magical, defiant, impossibly young.
Then, with a jolt, he became aware of the little girl. She was sitting up in bed, propped on pillows and looking at him attentively. Tiny hands, like bird claws, rested on the edge of the coverlet; her face was mottled with broken capillaries, lurid purple blotches the color of grape jelly; she was as ugly and as fragile as a new-hatched chick. But there was a composure, a sweet intelligence about the eyes that regarded him calmly from the grotesque little face; on her head, as bald as his own, was perched a little red tam-o’-shanter.
Suddenly he was struck hard, disoriented, by a shudder of nausea: barking dog, chorus of photographs, the stare of his own heartless young eyes. The little girl—cruel plastic butterfly, which hid the needle of her I.V., perched bright on the tender veins of her wrist—was looking at him with a good-humored, impartial, open-ended welcome, as if he were a stranger whose eyes she had chanced to meet on a railroad platform while she was scanning the unfamiliar faces for the face of a long-awaited loved one. And then she smiled, as though he were the best thing she’d ever seen, as though she’d been waiting for him all her life: “Hello, Geordie,” she said in a high, clear voice.
