The Narcissist's Daughter (4 page)

I
t both irritated and impressed me that Dr. Kessler was right. Not only did the logistics of nights work well for me but I found myself falling into their flow as if I’d been born to it. I came to love that otherworldliness, the sense that we who worked there lived in the same place as everyone else but in our own dimension of it. More important, whatever happened on the surface of my life was subsumed by a much deeper satisfaction that I was more securely in this place I wanted to be, and that I found myself believing in the possibility of my future in a way I never quite had. Medicine had seemed a slightly fantastic dream, a thing to lust after but not quite to trust in the possibility of, as with a girl you knew was too good for you so that when she flirted you held something back in order not to be crushed when she ran away. Though I was taking a full load of classes now for the first time, I found myself doing well, the texts seeming to beam themselves into my brain. I’d come into a zone of concentration and focus I had never visited before. Old Dr. Masterson even called me into his office to congratulate me on how it was all going.

In the mornings when I came out I liked to stand on top of the parking garage and breathe. The night air was frigid now and the fetid fragrances of the city tamped down by it, and as the sun broke over the sagging houses outside the high fence and between the great brick buildings inside and came off all the thousands of panes of glass, I had to narrow my eyes. I often came off so hungry that my gut hurt as if I’d been punched or was sick. Sometimes I joined others at the Sunshine Diner for the breakfast platters or went out with Ray; often I went somewhere by myself and had only fruit and oatmeal and cigarettes; some mornings I went to Jerry Sobecki’s on Monroe just where it came into the downtown. It was one of the rare decent places open that early and was always nearly empty then except for the odd wino or some autoworkers when the AMC plant was running a third shift, or sometimes a few from the hospital, people I knew well enough to nod at but not to want to drink with. Once or twice in the beginning they waved for me to join them but soon they stopped. I sat alone at the bar and sipped from the small eight-ounce bottles of Little Kings, intent only on the flavor and the intense coldness and the burn and rush of the cigarettes and of Jerry or his fat wife, Estelle, reading the morning paper behind the bar, waiting for someone to need something and the smoothness of the wood and the darkness and quiet and the low pleasant stench of that old place.

The workday sunlight and empty house I woke into later on the weekdays I didn’t have early classes felt like a place I’d only come to visit yet I found some peace there. I began to walk through the tight neighborhoods in the afternoons, then to run—I’d once been a halfback and a sprinter; now I came to crave what opened in me only after a couple of miles. When you start, the legs ache and the chest burns from the cigarettes and the chilled air, but soon the muscles relax into that state of spring-like tension and the chest opens and deepens and finally the mind stops registering pain and begins to take in the world in a way that you otherwise feel only when you are stoned or in a city you’ve never seen before, when the sky is clear and hard and every detail, the faces of women and the shapes of buildings and the sounds of language and traffic, is exotic and beautiful and unspeakably fresh.

My nights off felt endless. I went out sometimes on the weekends with other students or a few times with hospital people, I studied and read novels, I watched television until I couldn’t stand it, I lifted the basement weights Brigman had long ago stopped using. Sometimes I sat at the window in my bedroom and peered through the telescope Sandy bought me when I turned twelve (back when my scientific curiosities went beyond the human body to encompass the heavens) into the houses on the next street or into the three-story apartment houses that rose beyond them. I might sit for more than an hour waiting for that flash. I never saw anything of real consequence or carnal value but it didn’t require that; a glimpse was all it took, a man stepping to the window to lower the blinds before getting into bed with his wife, a high school girl bathing open-mouthed in the azure cast of her television, a woman sitting under a desk lamp chewing her pencil, turning it in her mouth. I closed my eyes then and grew harder and hummed to myself until I came in silent unsatisfying waves.

One night in the Med-Surg ICU I couldn’t find a scheduled draw. It was a bed number I’d never seen in the main open ward where the critical lay separated from each other by green drapes. I found it finally—an isolation cubicle in the back, a room barely big enough to maneuver in. It was an old old woman, older than people I knew who’d died of old age years before. The birth date on the work order, 7/23/78, had confused me, since Peds had its own ICU on a different floor. The patient was a hundred.

She lay still, her dark skin glazed and creased, lips drawn back, eyes closed. I tied a tourniquet on her upper arm and felt at the antecubital. It was warm but nothing came up, no hint of venous turgidity. I touched her hand and then jerked away as if its coldness had burned me. I saw then that she was too still. A handwritten note taped over the bed said NC in red letters—No Code. I felt up along her arm and found the line of demarcation midway between her wrist and elbow, the point to which the heat of life had receded.

A nurse stepped in. She wore green scrubs and over them a blue cotton smock. A red stethoscope hung around her neck. Something in her face went into me and I did not speak, neither of us spoke for a long moment. Then she looked at the woman and back at me and said, “Is she—?”

I nodded.

“I am so sorry,” she said. She came over and rested her palm on the cooling forehead and brushed back the sparse white hair. Against it her hand with its high blue veins looked beautifully strong and vital. “Poor old dear,” she said. “Are you new?” She glanced at my ID badge. “Daniel Redding?”

“Just to the night shift,” I told her. “Call me Syd.”

She was thirty-five anyway, I guessed, probably forty. Her rings, a fat diamond, a heavy gold band, an opal, hung from a safety pin on her smock. Her hair was streaked in blonds and blacks and layered back. She had hazel eyes and clear skin and a full and generous mouth, and she had that look that long pain brings, the kind you endure, whether it is physical or something else. I did not think she was quite beautiful. I had always liked the word handsome when I read it in a description of a woman, and wondered what sort of a real one it would fit. Here, I thought, was one.

“Don’t tell me my husband chased you away.”

And so I knew who she was—Ted Kessler’s wife. It was right there on her own badge. I had seen her up here before, of course, on a few occasions, but hadn’t made the connection.

I said, “Okay, I won’t tell you.”

She laughed and then in a gesture that felt both incongruous and endearing reached across the dead body, her hand open, palm up, beckoning. I wasn’t sure what she wanted. I put out my own hand, and she grasped it and placed her other hand on top of it. I thought maybe we were going to pray.

“He does it to everyone, sooner or later,” she said. “I’m Joyce. Welcome.”

In the basement I set the tray on the counter in the office and washed my hands, which were trembling as they did when I let myself get too hungry, though I had eaten not long before that. I wrote “Cancel” on the order and tossed it on the table where Phyllis was playing solitaire and eating a cheese sandwich.

She said, “What happened?”

“Dead.”

She nodded and moved a card.

“She was a hundred.”

“Hm,” Phyllis said, never looking up.

In the lounge, Ray sat with his feet on the table. Oween, the clerk, was at the sink, washing out the coffee pot.

I said, “That one was easy.”

Oween sucked in her breath and said, “You talking ’bout that old Mrs. Washington?”

I nodded.

“She pass?”

“Yes.”

“Lord in heaven. Can you imagine?”

“I can,” Ray said. “Dying is what old people do best.”

“I’m talking ’bout havin to live on this earth for that long.” Oween opened a foil packet of coffee and poured it into the machine and closed it and turned it on. Taped to the machine was a sign written on a paper towel that said: “Coffee ¢25, if you dont pay this WILL be terminated.” Someone had crossed out the word “This” and written “You” over it.

I came home one weekday morning in that same gray season, a time when the street should have been as quiet as the dead, to see Donny bent under the hood of the Road Runner.

I’d always seen him as a stupid boy and later a stupid boy-man, twenty-four going on fourteen who, if you told him you thought down was a pretty direction, would jump. He’d been a year ahead of me in school until the fourth grade, when he got held back. It was a kind of attraction-repulsion dichotomy between us. Donny was big early and I was not until much later, so the natural progression was that he thumped me around a little now and then, a well-timed shove that put me on my ass or a quick abdominal uppercut to short circuit my breathing. In retaliation, sometimes delayed for several days, I’d lay into him with my tongue (“Dimwitted dickhead!”) and often as not make him cry before I left with a final epithet flung over my shoulder (“Fat-fuck flunker!”). It makes me cringe even now to remember the alliterative viciousness that came to me so naturally (“Repulsive reject! Reeking retard!”). Nothing he did to me could have hurt so much, and the sight of that big blotchy blob of a bully-boy blubbering tears and snot down over his lip, the fact that he had such a soft spot, that he could be so wounded after seeming almost animal-like, a product of nature’s grosser forces, fascinated me.

I went inside and stopped in the living room before the stacks of magazines and papers and cardboard boxes and the filled ashtrays and the empty beer cans on Brigman’s TV tray. I stood very still. The house should have been as quiet as the street but there was a noise in the kitchen, then Brigman came in holding a can of Schlitz. It could have been he’d called in sick or taken a vacation day but it wasn’t. It went through me as a physical shock, another piece of evidence of the slippage of Brigman, which had been going on now for six years.

He was younger than Sandy by some years and never felt like Dad to me, even after they got married, nor do I think he wanted to. I couldn’t go around calling him Step-Dad, so it’d just stayed Brigman and we’d spent much of our time together since then circling, grappling, I suppose, with the question of who we were to each other: competitors for Sandy’s attention, friends, quasi-brothers, sometimes I guess even father and son. But there was no single word for it.

He said, “Hey, Little Syd.” (My full name is Daniel Sydney Redding, in honor of my vanished blood father, Sandy’s first brief husband, who was, I once pestered her into telling me, an Aussie.)

After the accident, though it must not have been easy, Sandy was able to cover us with her income. Nothing seemed to Chloe and me to change really except that Brigman wasn’t there. When he got out, he didn’t return to the plant and when he finally did take a part-time job at a small stamping shop at a fraction of his former wage he only held it for five months. Donny got him on at UPS after that; he stayed a year. Each subsequent job seemed to take him farther from what he knew how to do, which was to make machinery. He currently worked on the loading dock at a nearby IGA, but that was now apparently done, too, because they’d told him a week earlier that if he missed another day for whatever reason he was gone.

“You hungry?” he said. “I can do some eggs and pancakes. Coffee.”

“I ate,” I said, though I hadn’t. “I’ve got class. Got to get some sleep.”

He wore a white V-necked T-shirt and a pair of old green work trousers that sagged on him, and I saw in the morning light as I had not noticed somehow before how much his hair had thinned and lightened and that his several days’ growth of beard looked thinner, too, and patchy. The skin on his red hands was flaked and cracked, and the flesh on his arms hung sadly. Before the accident he had always been about building up in whatever ways he could, but it took that away from him and now I could see, as if it had come suddenly, that he was an old man or near to it.

He looked happy to see me, though, as if this all happening in the morning instead of at night made it new somehow. He set the can down, took a pack of Marlboros from his pants pocket, and slipped one out. He held it pinched between his thumb and middle finger, the ember next to his palm, and said, “You doin’ all right?”

“I’m all right, Brigman.”

“Work and school, I mean. You holdin it together?”

“I always have.”

“Not really.”

“What do you want me to say?”

“Nothin. If you need some help—”

“You’ll give it to me?”

“Try.”

“With what?”

He watched as I went over to the staircase, then said, “Syd.”

“Yeah?”

“It matters you do good at it and get out of here.” He looked around at the dingy room full of trash and the dingy broken house, all the dingy houses on the dingy streets in this forgotten place. “I know it’s been tough. Just do what you have to do, whatever it is.”

The ceiling creaked. I looked up.

He said, “Chloe stayed home, too.”

“Why?”

He exhaled and peered at me through the smoke, his eyes narrow and mean-looking as they sometimes got.