Dry Ice (2 page)

    The focus of Diane's designing enthusiasm had a simple purpose—it was the spot where our patients hung out before their psychotherapy appointments. To me, a simple purpose called for a simple room.

    Diane once shared that naïve vision. But no longer—the changes she envisioned were far from mundane. When she began to conceptualize her project, the room was furnished with the pedestrian crap we'd bought from office-supply catalogs when we'd first hung our practice shingles. Her case for transformation was simple: "We're not dentists and we shouldn't have a dentist's waiting room."

    I'd replied that I thought the room was fine, but my argu ment was pro forma. In the best of times I lacked the will to stand up to a determined Diane.

    Diane was determined. It wasn't the best of times. Not even close.

Diane and I had co-owned the little Victorian house for a long time. The building was on the edge of the once-sleepy, once–light industrial side of downtown Boulder, the few blocks closest to the foothills, a neighborhood that after a couple of decades of determined gentrification had earned the moniker the "West End."

    The natural light in the waiting room came from a pair of north-facing double-hung windows. The dusty mini-blinds came down and bronze curtain rods as thick as my wrist replaced them. Soon the indirect sunlight was being filtered through silk panels that were the color of the worms that had spun the threads. Diane had a name for the hue that I forgot within seconds of hearing it. New lamps—two table, one floor—provided just enough illumination to allow reading. The shades on the lamps were made from nubby linen in a color that was a second cousin to the one she'd chosen for the drapes.

    "Organicity," Diane had explained for my benefit. "It's crucial."

    No, I hadn't asked.

    As resolute as Diane was to transform, that's how committed I was to stay out of her way.

    Paint? Of course. Not one color, but four—two for the walls, one each for the trim and ceiling. The new furniture—four chairs, two tables—reflected Diane's interpretation of "serene." Two chairs were upholstered and contemporary. Two were black leather/black wood slingy things, and contemporary. The rug was woven from wool from special sheep somewhere—I thought she'd said South America but I hadn't really been paying attention and the sheep may have been shorn of their coats in Wales or Russia or one of the nearby 'stans, maybe Kazakhstan. The rug—indifferent stripes of muted purples in piles of various heights—was placed so that it cut diagonally across the ebony stain Diane had chosen for the old fir floor. She'd put the rug in place one morning while I was in a session with a patient; I came out to greet my next appointment to all its angularity and hushed purpleness.

    "Need to break the symmetry, Alan. We can't have too much balance," Diane explained to me over our lunch break.

    Neither symmetry nor its absence had ever caused me angst. But I said, "Of course." The alternative would have been to ask "Why not?" Diane's answer likely would have troubled me. I feared that I would have had to set my feet and steel myself for the words "feng shui."

    I didn't want to have to do that. I really didn't.

    As a lure to join her for the waiting room picnic she'd picked up takeout from Global Chili-Chilly on Broadway. The bait had worked. My role, I suspected, was to applaud as she admired the purple and the stripes. My mouth was on fire but the curry was good so I didn't mind the heat. Truth was, I didn't really mind the rug either.

    Diane didn't specify a fountain as the design of the room evolved, but when she announced that the room lacked a focal point I knew that running water was a coming attraction. I could feel it the way I can taste a thunderstorm a quarter hour before the first lightning bolt fractures the clarity of a July afternoon.

    The water feature was the final piece to arrive. Diane had it custom-made by a water artist who had a studio on a llama ranch a couple of miles east of Niwot. I could tell that all of the details—the ranch, Niwot, the llamas—were important to her. I didn't ask for particulars. Again, I didn't really want to know.

    The fountain had been installed the previous weekend.

The red tint in the water? I couldn't make sense of it.
I really 
don't need this,
I thought again.

The sculpture was a clever thing of black soapstone and patinated copper that sent water coursing through a series of six- and eight-inch bamboo rods in a manner that I found phallic. Diane was blind to any prurient facet of her gem so I kept the critique to myself. Since the fountain's presence was a fait accompli I comforted myself that the scale was right, even if the volume of all the gushing water was a little too class-five-rapidish for the size of the room.

    I told her the fountain was "nice." I could tell that she'd been hoping for something more effusive.

    My share of the renovation was absurd. I wrote a check.

Why had I acquiesced when Diane had suggested that our waiting room was overdue for transformation? Why had I agreed to let her do whatever she wanted? Diane had suffered through a brutal couple of years—the waiting-room project was important to her. I knew its purpose had much more to do with her emotional health than with any design imperatives. For her the room represented a new beginning.

    And basically I didn't give a shit.

    Less than half a year before I'd watched a patient of mine killed on the six o'clock news. That event had shaken me to my core.

    I knew that my reaction to his death—emotional withdrawal mostly, my downhill slide lubricated with too much ETOH— was upsetting the equilibrium in my marriage. Controlling my decline felt beyond me. The timing wasn't ideal. My wife's MS, always a worry, was in a precarious phase. She and I each needed caretaking. Neither of us was in great shape to give it.

    That's why I was way too weary to quarrel about remod

eling with a friend I adored. The design of the waiting room wasn't likely to climb high on my ladder-of-life concerns. Dental? Psychological? Didn't matter.

I drew a solitary line in the sand at Diane's request for piped-in yoga music. She didn't call it yoga music; she'd said something about needing the sound of humility in the space. I knew what kinds of tunes she wanted. She was talking Enya.

    
Uh-uh.

    She didn't argue when I vetoed the background drones. Her silence didn't indicate abdication. She planned to wait me out. If I was serious about wanting to keep Enya at bay I would need to be vigilant.

    I doubted that I had the energy to keep my flanks defended.

    Diane knew me well. Well enough to know that about me.

I WAS slow, but I got there.

Holy shit, he's covered in blood.

    The pink hue and the slimy red worms of coagulating plasma that were streaking through the water in the fountain had befuddled me at first—naïvely, I didn't immediately consider either sign to be alarming. My initial, fleeting impression was that Diane had introduced yet another new design concept into our waiting-room ambience and I was too far out of the current consciousness loop to recognize it for what it was.

    Only seconds before I opened the door and spotted the fouled fountain I'd been walking down the hall from my office to retrieve my next appointment, a young man named Kol Cruz whom I'd seen only twice before. As I turned my attention from the perplexing fountain and its pink water I spotted Kol sitting on one of Diane's new chairs opposite the water feature. Despite the profusion of blood—the glimmering mess covered his hands, arms, and face as well as the front of his shirt, his fleece vest, and his trousers from the knees up—he seemed reasonably serene.

    The waiting room was having the effect that Diane so cherished—for Kol her design intervention seemed to be having an anxiolytic impact equivalent to high-dose beta-blockers or IV Valium.

    "I tried to wash up," Kol said without looking at me. Although he sometimes glanced toward my face, his gaze never settled higher than my mouth.

    On closer examination, the rosy mess on his delicate hands and arms did appear to be diluted. I was still thinking
I don't
need this,
but I was also reflexively preparing to try to do something useful, even—well—therapeutic.

    I reminded myself of a lesson from my distant internship training in a psychiatric ER: The single most important thing to do during an emergency is to take one's own pulse. After that? In the current circumstances I had no idea. I didn't know whether Kol needed a seventy-two-hour hold, an ambulance, stitches, or a big roll of Brawny.

    "Are you still bleeding?"

    "No," he said.

    
Okay.
"Is that . . . your blood?" The alternative was worrisome.

    "Yes."

    I was somewhat mollified. I put on a serious, concerned expression and said, "Kol? Are you all right? Don't you think you need to . . . maybe see a doctor? That's a lot of blood."

   He said, "You are a doctor, Dr. Gregory."

   Kol had me there.

I HAD misread the early clues.

    Over the first couple of days of the previous week the musical soundtrack that accompanied the bustling early-evening family time in our house had traveled from the familiar territory of the White Stripes, Oasis, and Neko Case to a surprising but far from disquieting pause at the second and third U2 albums. After Bono's extended cameo the musical selections moved back in time to Joni Mitchell, the young Van Morrison, Dusty Springfield, the Doors, Don McLean, and then on a particularly wacky turn, to Leonard Cohen—
Leonard Cohen?
—before settling for a couple of evenings on a repetitive set of Erik Satie interspersed with some alluring tracks from Tord Gustavsen.

    Other artists made brief appearances. Patsy Cline and Johnny Cash each got two-song auditions in advance of dinner one day, and a Keith Jarrett piano improvisation lasted all of five minutes late the next afternoon while Lauren was deveining shrimp for stir-fry. John Coltrane didn't even get to finish introducing a haunting little melody before he was banished into the digital ether as I was loading the dishwasher after supper.

    Although I recognized that changes were occurring in the score that accompanied our lives' pulse—Leonard Cohen's laments as counterpoint to the delight of my daughter's bath time was a contrast that was hard to ignore—I was too intent on trying to force the data into the confines of my experience to see it for what it really was.

    Since her previous birthday my wife, Lauren, had become the family DJ. Why? She had a new iPod. Although I was the gift-giver, I didn't share her enthusiasm for the device; I had only recently started feeling comfortable with CDs.

    Lauren moved into the digital world without me. Her wireless network humming, she'd curl up with her laptop in our bed in the evening and download songs and develop playlists in the quiet hours after Grace was in bed. All that was left for her to do was to stick the iPod into a slot in front of a pair of speakers and we would have music coursing through the house.

    The tracks she plucked from her iPod's inventory hinted at her moods. The better she was feeling—pick a category: about life, about her health, about work, about her husband— the more contemporary and upbeat was the music she chose. The more troubled or reflective she was feeling—increasingly common moods those days—the more oldies and ballads and jazz and classical reflections tended to accompany our family routines.

    I used the music as a barometer—if I knew the aural pressure variants, I liked to delude myself into believing I could forecast which way the winds were blowing.

    Maritally, it had been an inclement winter. It was looking like an inclement spring.

    When the tunes were downers those days I considered myself to blame.

I tried to decipher the meaning of Lauren's recent playlists and their melancholic homage to whatever part of the past they represented. Even if I ignored Patsy Cline, Johnny Cash, Keith Jarrett, and John Coltrane I remained mystified by the Morrisons—Jim and Van—and Leonard Cohen. I was completely confounded trying to fit the loop of Satie and Gustavsen into any category. Upbeat they were not.

I feared something was up, maybe something more than her

growing intolerance for an increasingly distant husband who stayed up nights alone drinking vodka.

    "How are things at work?" I'd asked. "You feeling okay?"

    Her answers told me nothing. I waited with trepidation. I was coveting routine those days, holding on to it with the kind of denial that a nine-year-old uses to keep bedtime at bay as he grips the last light of a summer evening.

That night in bed Lauren mumbled something into the still air. Her breathing had been regular and shallow, her body so tranquil below the thick comforter that I suspected she was vocalizing unintentional color commentary on the progression of a dream. But I hadn't understood her words, if words they were, and I decided not to risk waking her by intruding with a vocalized "What?"

    Then she sighed. I opened my eyes. People don't often sigh in their dreams.

    "Music hurts," she said ten seconds later as part of a rushed exhale.

    The was-my-wife-awake-or-was-she-asleep conundrum wasn't totally resolved. "Music hurts" was a vague enough pronouncement that I couldn't fit it into either level of consciousness. The earlier sigh remained unexplained.

    I was beat up. I was tired physically and in just about every other way. I flirted with pretending she hadn't spoken. I wanted to close my eyes and pray for sleep that wouldn't come. But when she sighed a second time I asked, "You awake?"