“It’s OK. I appreciate it.” He zips his fly. “Can I give you some advice? You seem like a nice girl. You should clean up and go back to Minnesota or wherever you really come from.”
“I know. I’m going to.” Rena is so high she can’t stand up.
“They have rehabs and things like that.” His eyes have the pinned determination of someone who will never set foot in a rehab.
Rena tries a smile but her facial muscles aren’t working. “It’s been a stressful weekend.”
“Yeah, well, it’s been a stressful couple of centuries.” He opens the door. “Be good.”
He leaves Rena on her knees.
RICK’S HEAD WEIGHS NINE THOUSAND POUNDS, IMPOSSIBLE
to lift. The room is filling with the lava of the morning’s sun. What do you do with a nine-thousand-pound head? Open your eyes, Rick! He does and he’s blinded by the brilliance. He closes his eyes again, rolls off the lip of the bed and crawls to the bathroom, blind. He rappels up and over the edge of the tub, only to find he’s still got his pants on. Shrugging them off, he digs a mangled pack of cigarettes out of the pocket. Lights. Inhales, head swimming, flips the taps and lays under the flow like a corpse, arm extended out past the fake rain like Marat.
Don’t fall asleep here, big fella, you’ll burn the house down. Trembling, he stands, head hung low, keeping the butt dry, pissing saffron onto black wet ashes. Gooseflesh embroiders his nakedness. I wonder how my liver is doing these days? Kidneys? Lungs? Prostate? Does jerking off prevent prostate cancer?
Weak-kneed, Rick extricates himself from the streaming jets and shaves without bothering to towel off. Eye bags and wrinkles have appeared overnight. “Ladies and gentlemen, the ugliest man in the world!” he announces to the mirror, shaving cuts bleeding pinkly into the white lather. “Why does Laura stay with me? Shitty bod. Ugly face. Must be my breath.” Rick flosses his wooly teeth, doesn’t brush, gets dressed, pants sticking to damp legs. In the kitchen he chews six Advils, flushes them down with half a can of Miller Lite and forces movement out into the world.
The car drives itself to the ferry, parks itself. Rick finds the men’s room in the terminal and throws up. Onboard he buys coffee and chugs two more Advils. As the ferry cuts into the Hudson, he drapes himself over the rail and lets the rushing wake hypnotize him. Bringing the hot coffee to his lips, he loses his grip and the cup tumbles down into the green froth.
Making land, he propels himself through the dead streets to the clinic, irritated by the heaps of trash, the broken bottles, sodden bits of clothing and dry lumps of dog turd. The baking sun glazes the exhausted streets, evaporating the bodily fluids and leftover alcohols into a miasma.
Too early, he creeps around the empty office suite of the clinic like an intruder. I need Zoe to revive me with her flirting. I should have paid more attention to her, appreciated her. Why couldn’t I have an average screwed-up life, like all the other doctors, married, fucking my assistant? Doesn’t that solve things? Don’t the small problems distract you from the larger ones?
Zoe appears eventually but it does no good. Rick fumbles his way through his appointments until lunchtime when he surrenders to the hangover and stretches out onto the cool skin of the examination table. He closes his eyes. Everything stops and Rick drops into a chasm of black, thinking, this must be what death is like. Out of the void, Zoe knocks gently, her face at the crack of the door whispering that the waiting room is full. Rick wakes unrefreshed, stale and angry. He splashes rubbing alcohol on his face, rinses with cold water and swallows two ten-milligram tablets of dextroamphetamine sulphate, stuff left over in an unlabeled vial from his intern days. Doubtful of the potency, he forgets he’s taken the dexies until a half hour later, when he starts feeling human. An hour later he’s obsessing on how he’s never told his dad how much he loves him. He considers making a call and decides to postpone the emotional moment.
Just before four o’clock, Rick notices a new face in the waiting room while guiding a middle-aged patient to the front desk. Rick knows who the new face is. It’s the girl who called about her brother. The crazy guy from the ER. The girl flips idly through a magazine, her body almost too long for the leather-clad Knoll couch. Her hair is pulled back, revealing an amazing facial symmetry. Ankle to wrist Dolce & Gabbana, no jewelry. Like a visitor from another universe, nothing like the stylishly shabby downtown patients Rick is used to seeing in his waiting room.
Rick ushers Rena into his office. On the phone she’d been hesitant and careful in her description of the situation. In person she seems weirdly calm. Now they sit, facing each other.
“So is your brother doing better?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Uh-huh. He was in pretty bad shape when I saw him.”
“Yeah.”
“I wasn’t sure if he was only momentarily disoriented or if it was something chronic. That’s why I suggested he get examined.”
“Yes. You did the right thing.”
“It didn’t seem Rikers was the right place for him.”
“No.”
“So.”
“So, they’re not being very helpful. Since you’re the doctor who signed him in I guess that gives you some kind of authority…”
Zoe knocks and pops the door. “Dr. Levine is on line one. He says it’s important.”
Rick picks up the phone with a tight smile to Rena. “Robbie?” Rick fiddles with a paperweight on his desk. On it are the words “Viagra” and in parentheses, “Sildenafil Citrate”—he can feel Rena’s eyes on him. “Yeah. Yeah. I got you. No problem. Have fun out there.” Rick hangs up. Zoe knocks again. She appears, but before she can speak, Rick interrupts her.
“Zoe? No calls till I’m finished here.”
Zoe’s eyes register a kind of panic. “Yes, Doctor.” She leaves without relaying her message.
“Listen. Ummm. You want to get a cup of coffee? It’s been a long day. I gotta get some fresh air.”
“Oh, sure.”
The diet pills have immersed Rick in a snap-crackle-pop reality. The last thing he needs is coffee. But he doesn’t want to talk to this woman in here. He’s not sure why that is, but he doesn’t. He says good night to Zoe and walks out the door with Rena.
At the patisserie, a place Rick usually avoids, Rick and Rena order skim cappuccinos, since they don’t make soy lattes, Rena’s favorite. All around them are tables of women dressed in linen and silk, clinking and gossiping. Large glossy shopping bags lie by their feet like sleeping dogs.
Rena pours three packets of raw sugar onto her coffee, letting the crystals float on top of the foam before folding them down into the liquid. She nibbles the sugary lather off the miniature teaspoon. When she catches Rick staring, she smiles. Rick sips from his own cup, burning his tongue.
“First of all, you should know that my degree isn’t in psychiatry. In med school, I took a few courses in psychology. I’m not a specialist. I’m just a GP.” Rick avoids her eyes, plays with the sugar. “My name’s on his file because I’m the doctor who signed the paperwork. The razor cut was very bad. He took about fifty stitches. And he was obviously not mentally stable. I figured someone should talk to him.”
“My brother isn’t a criminal. He drinks too much sometimes. See, we’re not from the city. We both grew up on a farm. Being here freaks him out. He needs to go home.”
“Uh-huh. But the institution where he has been, uh, mandated, is a lockup. He can’t leave now. It’s for, uh, patients who have committed crimes. That’s a separate issue. You need a lawyer for that.”
“He beat up some drug dealers. Believe me, they’re not going to press charges.” This guy thinks I’m some dumb blonde. Good. OK. Doesn’t mean he isn’t going to try to make me happy. Charm him.
“At the ER I see psychotics every night. Most of them are very nice people. But they don’t know what’s real and what isn’t. There’s only so much I can do and I don’t want to be blamed if something happens because I get him signed out.”
“Billy just wants to go home.”
“OK, look. I’ll talk to the people in charge.” Of course I will. You’re a babe. I’m a schmuck. You know it. I know it.
“I believe you.” Rena gazes into his eyes. She smiles. “Thank you.”
“When I have some info, I’ll call you and give you feedback.” Truly amazing eyes. And skin. What would it be like to touch that face? Just for a night. One night? One night in my whole life.
The waitress clears their empty cups. Rena squints at him and says, “It must be nice to heal people.” Why isn’t this guy hitting on me? Maybe he’s married. Maybe he’s a good guy.
“Sure.” Rick coughs. A cigarette would be nice right now. “I’m a regular Mother Teresa.”
“Who?”
“Medicine’s a business. But yeah, I like taking care of people. Sure.”
“Does the clinic belong to you?”
“Uh-huh.” This girl’s very existence is killing me. That someone this beautiful exists. Someone from another dimension, one I could never go to. How depressing is that?
“Does it bother you to be around sick people?”
“Most of them come in with colds. No matter how many times I tell my smart-ass patients that the common cold is caused by viruses unaffected by antibiotics, they insist on unnecessary scrips for amoxycillin and tetracyclin. These people are used to getting what they want. So I write the scrips.” What am I talking about?
“You sound like you don’t like your patients.”
“It’s a living.”
“But what if someone is really sick?”
“I refer ’em. It’s not my job to deliver the bad news, just to bird-dog it. Two years ago this old geezer came in who’d been a patient of mine since I started the practice. I detected a heart murmur, so I shipped him off to the cardiologist. Things got busy at work and I lost track of the guy. Last spring I heard he’d passed away. We stamped his chart “deceased” and dropped it into storage. Fucked up, huh?”
“My parents are dead.”
“Oh, I’m sorry.” Yeah. You asshole. Foot-in-mouth asshole. Trying to sound cool, end up sounding like an asshole.
“No. I mean. I don’t know what I mean.”
“Mine are alive. But I don’t see them much.”
“Well, you should try to see them, because when a person dies, that’s it. You don’t get any second chances. Whichever way you leave things, it’s kind of locked in like that forever. Besides my brother, I don’t really have a family. It’s just me.”
Her brother’s a psycho, tried to murder people. On the other hand, she’s so fucking beautiful. Makes me nervous just talking to her. Like a kid. Fuck. Say something, Rick. “When I was an undergraduate and decided to be a doctor, I thought, I’ll learn how to heal people and I’ll make lots of money. And people will respect me.”
The waitress appears. “Anything else?”
“The check.”
“Yes, sir.”
“What was I talking about? Oh, so I’m a med student. Gotta take all these verkocteh courses, stuff I’m never going to use. One day the professor takes a bunch of us down to a basement where some archeologists are sorting out a dig. So there’s this long wooden table and on it are like three hundred skulls lined up in neat rows. And in the center of each frontal bone, forehead, crown, whatever you call it, is a carefully inked numeral. The skulls of an entire extinct village. The scientists had dug them up, brushed off the dirt and brought them to this basement. They belonged to people who had lived five hundred years ago and now, here they were lying on a table.” Why am I talking so much? Fucking dexies. And the point is…?
“So I’m in this gloomy basement and I’m looking at what’s left of dozens and dozens of people. People who had been alive, just like you and I are right now. People who had smiled, laughed, cried, loved each other. People who had known each other by their faces, by their personalities. But now, without the skin and the eyes, they’re virtually identical. Because skulls don’t have faces, only sockets and exposed worn-down teeth. No skin. No hair. Just bare bone.” God, you are boring this poor girl into the ground. Just pay the bill and let her go. “Stick John Lennon’s cranium next to Princess Di’s and most people can’t tell them apart. All the personality we associate with someone, the faces we greet at the cocktail party, the smiles, the beautiful eyes, all that is beautiful or admirable, it all rots away. Everything we think of as a person is just a few bits of sculpted flesh and gristle, or in the case of the eyes, fragile globes of fluid.”
Rick’s voice echoes in the near-empty restaurant. Longest pause yet. Rena fiddles with a forgotten spoon. “And you’re married?”
“Fifteen years. My wife decorated the clinic.” She got a lot out of that speech. What did I expect? She’s a babe. A bimbo. She’s not even listening.
“Children?”
“Oh, yeah. Sweet, sweet kids. Two. Boy and girl. They’re away right now with their mom. On vacation, that’s why…” Why am I saying this? What am I telling her? She’s smiling at me? Laughing at me. “I’m sorry. I’m kind of burned out. I over-did it last night. Partied. Or whatever you call it. I’m getting too old for that shit.”
“Too old?”
“You know what I mean.” She’s probably into some Italian ski bum or rock star or bond trader. She’s thinking, OK, I got what I want, time to go.
“I don’t. What do you mean?” See the veins on the backs of his hands. He’s not young. He’s married with kids. Supersmart. Good guy. Why can’t I ever find someone like this guy?
What do I mean? I mean, I’m an old guy and can’t flirt with you because you’d laugh at me. “Well, anyway. Tell you what, I’ll make some calls and see what I can do for your brother.”
“Thank you, um, Doctor. I feel funny asking a stranger to help, but I don’t know what else I can do.”
“No, no. It’s my pleasure.”
No more coffee to drink, what happens now? Nothing. Rick shoves his chair back and it screeches on the floor. He rises. Rena looks at him, surprised? This is the kind of girl who hangs out all day in places like this, smoking cigarettes, looking beautiful. Sorry, sister, I’m in a big rush, I have to get home to my couch and my beer and my remote control.