The Resurrectionist (23 page)

Hauser rattles the ice in his glass. “We think you're back on the meds,” he says.

McMichaels looks at Hauser angrily, then turns to Jacob. “I object to Doctor Hauser's lack of diplomacy, Jake, but I can't fault his assessment. You don't seem well. All the signs are there. We're left with very little choice of how to proceed.”

“Kirstin,” Jacob says. “Please tell them that's not the case.”

Reithoffer looks up at him coolly. “I smelled alcohol on your breath at the staff meeting Wednesday. That was ten-thirty a.m., Jacob. And all week you have displayed the symptoms of a relapse. Fatigue, irritability, disorientation. We have this information from several sources.”

“Jesus Christ, Jim,” Jacob says. “Tell them what's been going on.”

Jacob can feel rage kindling in his chest, but McMichaels only shakes his head sadly.

“What about my urine samples? What kind of information do they give you, Kirstin?”

Reithoffer's eyes never waver, do not even blink. “The last specimen tested positive for Xanax,” she says.

Jacob can feel his eyes smarting with tears, so he nods his head, hoping this will help him keep his features composed. Why not, he thinks—why shouldn't the specimen test positive? If Jim can get his hands on a file like Greer's, what's so complicated about switching a urine sample, or making a certain notation in the right file? As he raises his head and looks from Reithoffer to the dean, he feels the panic of a few minutes ago ebbing into something like grief.

“I've noticed the symptoms for years,” Hauser says loudly. “I suspect you were using the stuff back when we were interns.”

“Go fuck yourself, Hauser. You know that's a lie.”

“Meyer Siegel kept you under his wing for too long. He babied you. I wouldn't be surprised if he was covering for you back then.”

Jacob takes a step forward. He wants to put his hands on Hauser. “Leave Meyer out of this. He was better than the lot of you.”

Hauser takes a sip from his drink. “So go back home and screw his daughter.”

Before the others can move between them, Jacob has crossed the distance to where Hauser sits and slapped a hand across his cheek so hard he can hear the teeth clacking together. Hauser is beginning to rise when Jacob hits him again, backhanded this time, and sees the blood start to flow from his burst lip.

Then the others are moving, Mitchell and Turner pinning Hauser in the chair, Reithoffer standing in front of Jacob with her hands out, pressed against Jacob's chest. “Enough!” McMichaels is shouting over the voices of the men.

Jacob looks Reithoffer in the eyes before he speaks. “Don't touch me, Kirstin. You're getting me dirty.”

Reithoffer backs away, and Jacob can see that Hauser is blotting a white handkerchief against his mouth. “I rest my case,” he says. His left cheek is blazing with the imprint of Jacob's hand.

“
Enough
,” McMichaels says again.

“That's right, Jim. Enough of the bullshit. I've had all I can take. Let's forget the intervention charade and call this what it is.” The others look at him mutely as he walks to the door and rests his hand on the knob. “I can't believe this is all the membership you guys could scare up. Seems like you're short of a quorum.” He nods toward Reithoffer. “Even if you have gone coed.”

“Jacob,” McMichaels says sadly. “Please, no more scenes. You're better than this.” He nods to Reithoffer. “Let's get it done.”

Reithoffer clasps her hands behind her as Jacob has seen her do so many times before, in clinic and at the lecture podium, and speaks.

“In view of your recent record, I cannot recommend that you be cleared by the Physicians' Task Force. We have scheduled admittance for you tomorrow morning, eight o'clock, at Midlands Rehabilitation Center. The standard twenty-eight-day program. But you must voluntarily agree to the treatment. We require a letter from you requesting a medical leave of absence, stating your recent difficulties specifically—the symptoms, the levels of medication you have been abusing.”

“Tomorrow?”

Malloy clears his throat and speaks. “Tomorrow morning. If Greer does show, there'll be nobody there to meet him. School locked down. We'll let this little bit of hysteria flare up, then we'll wait it out.”

“Because I'll be away.”

Malloy nods.

“And if Greer doesn't let it die?”

Malloy seems unable to meet Jacob's eyes. “If it comes to it, we'll give him to understand that a member of our faculty, ah, misrepresented the extent of the medical waste to the black community. We'll mention substance abuse if we have to. Either way the basement will get taken care of. Bowman's lining up a new crew for Monday.”

“And when the month is up?” Jacob asks, his mouth dry.

McMichaels will not look at him directly. “When you finish your treatment we'll reassess the situation.”

“We can't afford any more mistakes,” Turner says. “There are accreditation issues, licensure risks. Another relapse would bring a lot of others down with you.”

Jacob nods bitterly. “No guarantees, then.”

But Turner does not respond. In the heavy silence Jacob looks at each of them in turn, thinking of their titles, their positions, their security. He would like to speak, but his throat has tightened again and his eyes are burning.

“I'm playing the back nine at the country club in the morning.” McMichaels says finally. “I'll check in at the office afterward. If the letter is on my desk, I'll know you're with us.”

“With you, right,” Jacob says quietly as he opens the door to the sound of the party outside. He looks at them once more, then turns to make his way through the crowd.

He is in the anteroom, hurrying across the open space and fishing his valet ticket out of his pocket, when a smiling Adam Claybaugh comes through the front door, looming in the entrance larger than life in his tuxedo. He begins to speak, but Jacob shoulders his way past roughly, half hoping that Claybaugh will raise a fist so that he can wrap up this evening with a full-scale brawl, go all the way back down to his origins. But Adam only looks after him, shocked. Shaking his head, he turns back to the ballroom and sees McMichaels and Reithoffer coming out of the study, Malloy and Hauser filing out after them. His face clouds.

Jacob is down at the turnaround, restlessly kicking at the pea gravel as he waits for the valet, when he hears the sound of heavy footsteps behind him. Adam is calling his name almost desperately, his deep voice strained. When he reaches Jacob he grabs his arm and turns him around.

“They set you up, didn't they?”

“Leave me alone, Adam.” He tries to free his arm from Adam's grasp.

“They can't do it.”

“They
have
done it. It's over.”

“Get on the right side of this, Jake, and the rest will work itself out.”

Jacob looks up at him, smiling bitterly. “You really believe that?”

“I
know
it.”

Jacob jerks his arm free. He wipes at his nose, tears starting in his eyes as he speaks. “Fuck you, Adam. I just picked up the tab for your purity. So take your Eagle Scout bullshit somewhere else.”

The BMW pulls into the turnaround and Jacob starts toward it. After a few steps he turns back with a finger jabbing the air. “You guys. All the same. Always somebody else taking the fall.”

Jacob climbs into the car and puts it into motion, the wheels already spinning in the gravel, before the valet can shut the door. Adam watches the little car speed down the drive until it rounds a corner and the taillights disappear.

When he turns to climb the stairs again, Kaye is standing at the top of them, her face knotted with concern as she looks down the drive after the car. “Adam, what's happened?” she says. “What have they done to Jacob?”

He is beginning to answer her when he hears the voices inside the house subside, the crowd beginning to hush. In its place, insistent, comes the bell-like sound of a knife tapping against a crystal glass: McMichaels calling for a toast.

T
HE
BMW R
OARS
down the westbound lane of the Old Augusta Highway, scattering the early-fallen sycamore leaves that have piled up on the shoulder as Jacob winds the car up to 95, straining to push it into the triple digits on the straightaways. He checks the tachometer and drops the shift down to fourth gear as he clears the grove of sycamores and bursts into an open space of bottomland where cornfields stretch out on either side of the road. The wind coming in over the windshield is bracing and as strong as a hand against his face. He hears it in the cornstalks just off the shoulders, whistling through the dry leaves that nod at his passage through the late-evening mist that has settled over the bottom. The pedal beneath his foot is taut, pressed nearly to the floor, when he sees the needle rise and hover at one hundred. His tachometer has reached nearly into the red, which suits him. He envisions blowing the engine just as he reaches the state line. And after that, he cannot say.

The little car dips and curves as the cornfields withdraw behind him and he enters more woods, this time pine and darker than the open night sky. His headlights carve a passage through the dark tunnel of branches, the xenon lamps burning like flashbulbs against the blackness framed by pine needles. The engine gives a throaty rumble as he downshifts again for a short curve, tossing the car into the turn to maintain his speed, and as he straightens into the next stretch he sees out front of him at perhaps seventy yards a deer grazing on the shoulder.

Jacob reacts with frantic swiftness, but his movements seem slowed to half speed as he downshifts again and the engine howls in protest. He moves his foot to the brake pedal, presses it too hard, and he feels the brakes clamp down. The deer is still there, just inches outside the white line, staring into the oncoming lights. He sees now, while he feels the brake disks pumping beneath his foot and hears the tires begin to whine, that it is a buck, with a rack of antlers that seems to grow larger in each half second that draws him closer to it. He tugs the steering wheel to the left, but it moves only a fraction of an inch, the warring momentum of the car and the pull of the brakes keeping him on a dead line straight ahead.

The deer's head is raised and cocked against the noise of the car when it begins to move. Jacob sees the great body gathering its strength in the hind muscles and then it is nearly aloft, beginning a leap as he closes the last ten yards before impact with the tires squealing now like wounded things. The deer's front legs rise with a glacial slowness and he is nearly under it when he hears his back wheel catch the gravel on the road's shoulder and the car begins to spin.

He throws his hands up as the deer looms outsized in front of the windshield, rising now. He feels the impact of its rear hoof on the car's hood first, then hears it as the hind leg slides down the hood to the headlight, which bursts under the pressure with a hollow explosion of glass. The car twists again, under the deer now, and in spite of himself, Jacob looks upward as it passes over the two-seater's cockpit, seeing it all out of sequence as the car spins: the thorny tangle of antlers, a black hoof trailing blood as it vaunts skyward, the alpine white of its pelt below the raised tail, every bristle of the pale fur as distinct as a pixel, pristine. Then it is gone.

The BMW shudders sideways across the road and off the blacktop, hitching as the tires finally catch in the roadside gravel and it vibrates to a stop on the eastbound shoulder.

Jacob hears the clapping of hooves on asphalt, followed by a sound of crashing brush that fades quickly into the forest, leaving behind it only the ticking and humming of the engine and his own labored breathing. He raises a hand to his face, his scalp, checking for injury, but he can find none. For a long moment he stares out into the black walls of the pine trees where the animal disappeared, wishing he could see through the darkness to the deer, hoping it is all right. The vision of it passing overhead flashes through his mind again and he shakes his head at the intensity of it. No way all that could have crossed the visual cortex that fast, he thinks. Impossible.

He unbuckles his seatbelt and climbs out of the car, walks around to the front to have a look at the hood. The metal is crimped into a crease that runs down the lower third of the passenger side to the gouged pocket of the headlamp, which is dark now. Across the road he sees the shards of its glass cover lying on the asphalt and glimmering faintly. He walks over and kicks them off the road.

He is still standing in the westbound lane, parsing through the sequence of the buck's flight and trying to fashion some order from it, when he hears his cell phone ringing. Slowly he crosses the road and sits down in the car, fumbling in the light of the dashboard for the phone before he finds it and picks it up, presses the green button.

“Jacob, my God. Where did you run off to?”