Peter found me the next morning, naked on the floor of the shower, where I’d fallen asleep sometime around dawn with the hot water streaming down.
He reached in, grabbed my shoulder, shook me awake, then turned off the water, which had long gone cold.
“Ben? Are you all right?”
I nodded without looking at him, and struggled to my feet. He grabbed me under one arm and helped me up, but as soon as I was steady, I pushed him away. He backed off as I stepped out.
“Did you get drunk last night or something?”
“Yeah, drunk on my own bravado.”
He handed me a towel, and I buried my face in it, long enough to know that what had happened the night before had not been a bad dream, but still wishing it was. Then I looked at myself in the mirror, mostly into my eyes. The reality sank in more deeply, like a sickening weight settling at the bottom of my gut, anchored by the knowledge of what might be happening inside my body. I felt filthy, diseased, vile, and incredibly frightened all over again. I closed my eyes, trembling.
“What is it, Ben?”
“Fate, Peter. Punishment for a life lived recklessly.”
When I opened my eyes, he didn’t look any less confused, which was fine. I felt his fingers touching my upper arms softly, like a caress.
“What happened to you?”
He’d found some of the bruises where I’d been grabbed and held down. Ordinarily, the slightest touch from him sent a pleasurable sensation rippling through my body. Now I pulled away, wanting nothing to do with him, least of all his hands on me, or any sign of his sympathy.
I moved past him out of the bathroom, toweling off, feeling icy cold. He followed me into the kitchen, as I wrapped the towel around my waist.
“What’s going on? Why won’t you look at me, Ben?”
I kept my back to him, filling a teapot with water at the sink.
“Your friend Alexandra’s been trying to reach you.”
“I’ll call her, Peter. Thank you.”
“She phoned me upstairs, asked me to come down, see if you were home.”
I whirled on him.
“I said I’d call her! OK?”
He blinked sharply in surprise. I put the water on the stove, turned on the gas, wishing he’d go away.
“She sounded pretty upset, that’s all.”
I dumped a spoonful of dark crystals into a cup, thinking of the old T. S. Eliot line about measuring out your life in coffee spoons, and how much more meaning it had now that instant coffee, neatly and conveniently packaged, had been thrust upon the world. A shiver of dread ran through me like a cold wind through an old, empty house.
I tried to seize on my other life, the one before last night.
“What was she upset about, Peter? Did she say?”
“Your friend Harry.”
“What about Harry?”
“She just said you should call her right away, that it was important.”
I went to the phone and called her. Templeton got right to the point: Harry was at UCLA Medical Center. He’d suffered a stroke.
Peter stood beside me, listening. When I hung up, he asked what he could do.
“Take Maggie for a walk. Feed the cats. Clean their litter box. And don’t ask me any more questions.”
I poured boiling water into the cup, stirred it, and carried the cup into the bedroom, where I started pulling on clean clothes. Peter came in, and I caught him staring down at the underwear I’d worn the night before, which was soiled with blood and shit. I kicked it under the bed, and when he reached out again to touch me, I put my hand up to ward him off.
“Please, Peter. Don’t.”
His voice, like his eyes, were tremulous with hurt, with confusion.
“Don’t touch you?”
“Yes, don’t touch me.”
I finished the coffee staring out the window at the neighbor’s fence, while Peter sat watchfully on the small bed. I didn’t care now if he was there or not. I grew oblivious to him as I gulped the coffee, oblivious to anything outside myself. I was fixated on the nerve impulses dancing frantically inside my overcharged mind. I suddenly shuddered, close to tears.
I went into the bathroom, sat down on the toilet, and endured a minute of tearing pain as I shit blood and semen into the bowl. Then I cleaned up again, hurried from the house, and drove the twelve minutes to the hospital trying to pay attention to the traffic signals along Santa Monica and Wilshire boulevards. The medical center sat along the southern boundary of the UCLA campus, a massive complex of buildings that were enveloped in the quiet of the Sunday morning. Harry was in the neurology ward, on an upper floor. Templeton was waiting for me near the nurse’s station when I stepped from the elevator. She was dressed in a classy beige pantsuit with big dangly earrings and open-toed pumps, as if she were on her way to a Beverly Hills brunch. I hugged her perfunctorily, feeling robotic.
We began walking down a corridor. I had no idea where we were going, I was just following. I saw Oree Joffrien ahead, standing at the entrance to a visitor’s hospitality room. He was wearing stonewashed jeans and loafers without socks, a pin-striped cotton shirt, blue on white, and a darker blue striped tie knotted loosely at his open collar, a splendid specimen of a man. It occurred to me that he and Templeton were going to brunch together, perhaps after they visited Harry, and the possibility of that angered me, although I wasn’t sure why. They had a right to look handsome, a right to eat. All the nice white people could stare at them and think what a lovely black couple they were, what a credit to their race, what beautiful babies they would make together. The nice white people could lower their voices and talk about how encouraging it was to see a black couple paying with cash and not food stamps before going back to their sanitized lives feeling proud about how tolerant and progressive they were.
Templeton was talking.
“Harry’s in ICU. He suffered a blood clot in his brain, something about the carotid artery, I didn’t get all of it when I spoke with the doctor.”
“Can he talk?”
She pressed her lips together, and shook her head.
“What else?”
“He’s paralyzed, Ben. On his right side. His arm and leg, most of his face.”
I didn’t say anything, so she kept talking.
“The doctor said the stroke hit the motor fibers to his right arm and leg, but it also hit his speech center, which is on the left side in right-handed people. Harry’s right-handed. I’m not sure why it affects the right side when it hits the left side, but that’s what the doctor said. Unless I’m getting it all wrong.”
She started to cry, and I put my arm reflexively around her. We stopped when we reached Oree, and he put out his hand, which I shook.
“Sorry to be meeting again under such circumstances, Ben.”
“Sorrier than the last time?”
My tone was flip, and I instantly regretted it. He said nothing, just blessed me with his calm gaze, which infuriated me, even though he was the one with every right to be angry. Templeton dabbed at her eyes with a tissue, then offered more details.
“They said that in a case like this the prognosis is totally open. They have no idea what to expect. With therapy, he could regain all of his mental and physical capabilities. Or he could just stay the way he is—even get worse, completely comatose.”
“What do you mean, the way he is?”
“He’s not responding, Ben.”
“Not responding to what?”
“He can’t communicate.”
“At all?”
She shook her head.
“He can’t write notes with his left hand?”
“They tried that. All they got was some gibberish. They said his hand may not be doing what his brain tells it to, if the brain is putting out any kind of signal at all.”
My voice rose.
“He can’t even blink for a yes or a no?”
Templeton clouded up again, and looked away. Oree took my arm and led me several steps down the hall, lowering his voice.
“He’s pretty much out of it, Ben. What the doctor called a semivegetative state. They think he can hear what’s being said to him. They aren’t sure how much, if anything, he understands.”
“Semivegetative.”
“Not a very pretty term. But honest, I guess.”
I attempted a smile.
“Three cheers for honesty.”
“How are you holding up? You seem a bit remote.”
“I’m fine, thanks.”
“You don’t sound fine.”
His brown eyes were keen with concern, trying to bridge the gap. I’d wanted that so much such a short time ago, which now seemed like a lifetime away.
“I’d like to see Harry.”
“They’re not allowing visitors yet, Ben.”
“Just to look in.”
He gave me a room number and pointed down the hall. From the doorway, I saw Harry in a room by himself, stuck full of needles and tubes, surrounded by monitors and gauges, and a nurse, who was adjusting his IV drip. He was covered up to his neck with a sheet, and his eyes were open but expressionless. The color was gone from his face, and the right side of his mouth was pulled down, as if invisible fingers were tugging at it. A male nurse with a setup for a catheter entered past me, went to Harry’s side, and pulled up the sheet. I turned away, unable to watch, sickened by the whole thing.
That’s when I saw Roger Lawson stepping from the elevator far down the hall and lumbering in Templeton’s direction. He was moving at his usual agitated clip, as if something were chasing him, tucking his flapping shirttail into the big waistband of his ill-fitting slacks, red-faced, glasses riding on his big apple cheeks, trademark ponytail bouncing behind him.
Before he reached Templeton, I was there to meet him.
“Why the hell are you here?”
“To see Harry Brofsky, of course.” Lawson pushed past me, toward Templeton. “How is he?”
“He’s in ICU, Roger. Not doing well.”
“How soon can he have visitors?”
“They aren’t sure.”
“I just need a moment with him. I only have a question or two.”
“He can’t talk, Roger.”
“Oh.” Lawson shoved his hands into his pockets and paced in front of us, chewing the inside of his jowly cheeks. “We could give him a notepad, have him write down the answer I need.”
I put myself in front of him again.
“What exactly is it you need, Lawson?”
“Some information of importance to the paper. Nothing that concerns you, Justice.”
“Anything you say to Harry from now on concerns me.”
“Oh, really? And why is that?”
“Because you helped put him here, more than anyone else.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“The pressure you’ve been putting on him—”
“We’ve all been under pressure.”
“The jobs you’ve made him cut.”
“We’re trying to save a newspaper, Justice, not destroy one, which is more up your alley.”
“Trying to save the paper, Lawson? Is that why you put the kibosh on the Fairchild investigation? One of the big boys downtown get to you? Tell you to back off, that Taylor Fairchild is off limits? Or maybe Rose Fairchild wrote you a nice check.”
We were nose to nose. He sucked in his big gut and puffed up his chest, but he still looked to me like the nervous, flabby guy in high school who always rode the bench, always had the cleanest uniform. I smelled liquor on his breath, despite the early hour, which helped explain the profusion of broken capillaries across his crimson cheeks and nose.
“If anybody’s responsible for putting Harry Brofsky where he is, that would be you, Justice. His slide didn’t start at the
Sun
. It started eight years ago at the
Times
, when you copped a Pulitzer you had to give back, and took Brofsky down with you.”
I grabbed Lawson by his shirtfront, propelled him backward, and slammed him against the wall, hard enough to dislodge a hospital commemorative plaque that clattered to the floor.
“You want to hear my definition of a bully, Lawson?”
He was breathing hard, and his soft chest had dropped back into place, nearer his waistline. Rivulets of sweat appeared on his broad forehead.
“Not particularly.”
“A guy who enjoys abusing people, but who never challenges anyone his own size.” I tightened my grip on his shirt, and pulled it up under his chin. “Tell me, Lawson, when was the last time you picked on somebody your own size?”
He snorted derisively, but had no words to go with it.
“Ben, let him go.”
Templeton wedged herself between us, prying me off. When I wouldn’t let go, she leveled her eyes at me.
“Ben, this is neither the time nor the place.”
“He helped kill Harry.”
“Harry isn’t dead, Ben.”
“He helped kill his spirit.”
“Roger is working to keep the paper solvent, Ben. In his own way.”
“This prick doesn’t have the heart and soul of a newspaperman.”