[mrBitch]

Looking for title : guy visits comatose old guy in nursing home mental genius.

I remember that the first few visits he hears the old guy speak out stock exchange abbreviations and horse names that he then discovers win (in both cases).

he starts to play the stock market and the horses and makes a lot of money very quickly.

also gets a crush on the nurse in the nursing home, which suddenly starts to make advances towards him.

SPOILER :

long story short, he realizes that the old guy in the nursing home wants his body to be taken care of, in due course he will be "born" which will require the entire mass of the earth for energy required for his "birth".

anyone read this book and know the author and or title ?

[mrBitch]

found it !

the book I have been looking for is :

TETRASOMY TWO - by Oscar Rossiter
http://www.amazon.com/Tetrasomy-Two-Oscar-Rossiter/dp/0552102806

book cover :
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?VISuperSize&item=400206032330?ssr=1&iurls=0%23http%3A%2F%2Fi.ebayimg.com%2F00%23%24%28 KGrHqN%2C%21jcE2HIWLGlHBNkgDKY0zw%7E%7E0_1.JPG%23% 24%28KGrHqN%2C%21jcE2HIWLGlHBNkgDKY0zw%7E%7E0_12.J PG%23%24%28KGrHqN%2C%21jcE2HIWLGlHBNkgDKY0zw%7E%7E 0_3.JPG&dtid=0&vs=1&sh=1&title=PB+1976+Tetrasomy+Two%3A+Oscar+Rossiter%3A+C orgi+221156

book review :
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/books/2004068109_rossiter16.html

" .. An inspired idea

The premise of the book is genius itself. Narrator Dr. Boyd, doing his first year's residence at a state psychiatric hospital, becomes fixated on a 55-year-old patient, Ernest Peckham, whose chart has read so monotonously for the last eight years — pulse, temperature and blood pressure all the same, week after week, month after month — that it's scarcely credible.

Not only that: Peckham has perfect teeth, he blinks every 39.75 seconds on the dot and each of his stools weighs exactly 184 grams. He also gives great stock market tips — perhaps out loud, perhaps telepathically. It's difficult to say.

Dr. Boyd, however, has trouble convincing his colleagues how extraordinary Peckham is. So he digs deeper, investigates Peckham's history ... and finds that this unusual patient has been institutionalized from childhood and that he may want it that way.

Indeed, although Peckham seems to have "tucked himself away in his mind," he may be influencing events around him to a remarkable degree.

Peckham is the mystery at the heart of the novel, but Dr. Boyd is its main attraction. With his odd habits (including fountain-pen collecting), his desperate flustered crush on one of the nurses (the enigmatic Mrs. Waggoner) and his ever-more-peculiar movements of mind, Dr. Boyd is a brightly zany presence on the page."