A few nurses from the E.R. came to see me. They looked uncomfortable and didn’t stay long. We joked about the Day-After-Thanksgiving sales I’d missed and the frantic shopping I’d have to do if I got out in time for Christmas. I didn’t bother mentioning I had no one to buy gifts for.

The bright side of the interminable visits were the newspaper clippings that people brought. While I wasn’t about to make a scrapbook of them, the articles offered more details of the crime and investigation than the vague answers I’d been given by the cops.

According to the press, the morgue attendant, Cedric Kebbler, had been attacked and killed by an unknown suspect, possibly an escaped mental patient. I had walked in on the murder in progress and had been attacked myself. I’d struggled, and the murderer fled through the morgue’s only window. I wasn’t interviewed due to my “critical medical condition” and “acute anxiety and post-traumatic stress,” the latter affliction diagnosed in a rush interview conducted by the staff psychiatrist while I was in a morphine-induced haze.

None of the articles mentioned John Doe’s missing body or the bizarre way the attendant’s body had been found. Either the police had neglected to mention these details, or the hospital had a crackerjack P.R. staff.

The most uncomfortable visit had been Dr. Fuller’s. Apparently, it wasn’t enough for him to have written me off as a doctor. He had to write me off as a living person, too. He’d come to the end of my bed, my chart in his hand, barely acknowledging me as he read the details. Finally, he snapped the chart shut with a deep sigh. “Doesn’t look good, does it?”

He was right. In the first week after my encounter with John Doe, I’d needed two surgeries. One repaired my damaged carotid artery, and the other removed the shards of glass embedded in my skull. In the recovery room after the first surgery, I flatlined, something my doctor noted later with a breezy wave of his hand, as though his disregard for the seriousness of the situation would somehow put me at ease.

I’d also endured a delightful course of precautionary inoculations, including tetanus and rabies vaccinations. I didn’t think John Doe had attacked me in a fit of hydrophobia, but no one asked my opinion on the matter, and I certainly hadn’t been in a position to argue.

During my lengthy hospital stay, I began to suffer strange symptoms. Most of them could be explained by post-traumatic stress, others as common side effects of major surgery.

The first malady to show itself was a body temperature of one hundred and four degrees. This struck the night of my heart failure and subsequent resuscitation. I was still heavily sedated, and I can’t say I’m sorry to have missed it. After forty long hours the fever broke and my body temperature lowered beyond the normal range, leaving me a cool 92.7 degrees.

It wasn’t until I read over my medical files that I determined this was the first indication of my change. It baffled the doctors. One doctor noted such a thing wasn’t unheard of and cited evidence of low resting temperatures in coma patients. It was the equivalent of throwing his arms up in defeat, and it seemed to be the end of the matter as far as they were concerned.