Breed (37 page)

“You are, Mom,” Adam says.

“We love you, Mom,” says Alice. “We’re sorry we ran.…”

Leslie’s eyes fill with tears. She has not felt like this in years, so tender, so grateful for her children, so calm, so human; it’s almost as if Kis has already worked his reverse magic on her.

“But he has to make us better too,” Adam says.

“There’s nothing wrong with us,” Alice says.

“You want to end up like Rodolfo and those others?” Adam says to her, his voice rising.

“I’ll go first,” Leslie says. “We’ll get you two in after that.”

Slavoj leads the children back to the car, and Leslie takes a moment to compose herself in front of Kis’s door. She is about to knock but thinks better of it and instead tries to let herself in. She notices that a little whatchamacallit camera has been set up above the door and its one glassy ignorant eye is staring down at her. Below the camera is a red light that beats off and on like a tiny heart. As soon as she touches the door it opens an inch or two. Startled, suspicious, Leslie steps back. The surveillance camera peers down at her. The lens catches a bit of sunlight from somewhere and a prism of colors shimmers across its surface, like a trace of oil in a puddle.

Leslie pushes the door open wider and walks in. She is in a small room, damp and dark, and redolent of the centuries. A small sofa is the only furniture, and hanging above it is a medical drawing of the human reproductive system. Opposite the sofa is a rather large aquarium, the water murky, but with no fish in it. At the end of this room there is a door, painted dark blue. Long scratches have scored some of the paint. A thick blanket of silence covers the place; all Leslie can hear is her own breathing. She takes a tentative step forward. The old floorboards creak and she stops, paralyzed for a moment.

Suddenly, she hears footsteps rushing her way, and the scarred blue door flies open, revealing Dr. Kis, very much aged from the last time she saw him. He is wearing shapeless brownish-gray pants held up by suspenders, and a baggy T-shirt. His hair is a thin white tangle. He is unshaven. She can smell the alcohol on him, his breath, his skin. He is holding a walking cane over his head, wagging it back and forth, as if his greatest desire is to strike someone with it. He slurs something at her in Slovene.

“My name is Leslie Kramer, Dr. Kis. I have come a long way because I need your help.”

“No more. There is nothing more for you or for me or for any other person. Nothing can be done.”

“But you said there was a way back, Doctor. You said you could reverse—”

“Closed for business,” Kis says with a cruel, crooked smile. “Everything finished.” He looks around, as if to make certain Leslie is alone. “Who let you enter?”

“The door was open. Now listen, please—”

“You tell me to listen? You steal into my house to give me orders?” He takes a wild swing at Leslie with his cane, but her reflexes are very quick and she catches the walking stick mid-arc and wrests it out of his hand.

“You ruined my body,” Leslie says, tossing the cane across the room. It rattles its way under the sofa. “And everything else.”

“I don’t know you,” Kis says, trying to regain his dignity. He stands a bit straighter, folds his arms over his chest.

“Please, Dr. Kis, I am begging.”

He purses his lips, shakes his head. “Okay, follow.”

He turns. The outline of a pint bottle bulges in his back pocket. Leslie follows him into the next room, which is a makeshift examination room. There is a table with stirrups, a glassed-in case holding medical supplies, a scale, a blood pressure cuff. The walls are covered with snapshots, hundreds of them, showing babies, toddlers, children, young teens, some standing, some running, some dressed for church, some for football, some with their proud parents on either side of them, some with their twin, or their two triplets. It could be the cover of a UNESCO pamphlet—children from all over the world, radiating joy, parents beaming, the great symphony of life at its most stirring crescendo.

Lies, lies,
thinks Leslie.
Whoever said the camera doesn’t lie?

Kis sits behind at his desk, indicating with a wave for Leslie to sit as well. Before him is an old-fashioned rotary phone, a bottle of water, and a small plastic bottle filled with ovoid white pills. He opens the pill bottle, shakes two of them into his hand, and washes them down with water swigged out of the bottle. The pupils of his brown eyes are smaller than punctuation marks, and the irises themselves swim uneasily in a sea of pale red.

“I remember you,” he says, pointing at Leslie. “You are married to the American lawyer. Am I correct?”

“My husband is dead.”

Kis does not seem to have heard this, or he simply does not care. “Reggie was with me back then, is that correct?” He takes another drink of water and taps a couple more of the white ovoids into his palm, looks at them for a moment, and puts them in his mouth, swallows them. “And because of me, you had a child. Is that correct?”

“Twins.”

“So! Pay me double.” He claps his hands and then reaches forward with the right, as if really expecting payment.

“You destroyed me, Doctor. You turned me and… and my husband into…” She shakes her head. “Into something I can’t live with.”

“What possible difference can it make, we live, we die. I have ceased to worry. My conscience is clear. Clear! You and your husband came here desperate for a child and I gave you the thing you wanted. Double! Don’t forget. One for free. How many people in my field can say that? These doctors, they collect millions of euros and still their patients end up going to Africa or Ukraine or the moon for an adoption. I made your body work. I made it give to you the thing it was refusing.”

“Many things happened, Dr. Kis. Many things. I think you are aware of all that’s gone wrong.”

“In some few cases. Why does no one bother to speak of the thousands of successful treatments? What is it about humanity that we only concentrate on things that go wrong?” He taps two more pills out of the bottle and shakes them in his hand, the way men do sitting at bars when they are contemplating the consumption of a couple more peanuts.

“People are dying, Doctor. And monsters are being created.”

“Is this what you have come to tell me? Listen to me. We doctors are in a chess match with nature. Nature wants to cripple you, nature wants you to have cardiac failure, nature says you must have small breasts, or wrinkles, or leukemia, or be unable to conceive new life. So we look and we think and we scheme, and then we make our move. And sometimes we are victorious, and nature backs away, and her plans are forestalled. But she only backs away, yes? She does not
go
away. She returns, stronger than ever. And she always wins in the end.” He smiles. “Leave me in peace, miss. There is nothing more I can do.”

“You said you had…” Leslie closes her eyes for a moment, tries to muster some sense of composure, while the tireless little demons within disrupt her thoughts, hide the words she means to say. Ah: but one of the little demons has failed to do its mischief and there it is, the word, in fact a whole chain of them, all linked beautifully together. “You said that you have developed some sort of procedure by which the side effects of the treatment could be…” Uh-oh, here come the demons again. Could be… what? What is she trying to say? “Reversed.”

“And I said this to whom?”

“And that there were also procedures in place to help the children, so that when they get older…”

“I said these things on advice from counsel. Now everyone is against me. You understand? A cabal of jealous doctors and let’s not for a minute forget the pharmaceutical companies all over the EU and in the U.S. too, who were scared little rabbits as they watched me succeed where they had failed.” He finally tosses the pills into his mouth, this time not even bothering to take a swallow of water to wash them down. “And so what is to happen to our Dr. Kis? Hmm? All the people who come here shaking and weeping and begging, Please, Dr. Kis, give me a child, please, Dr. Kis, save my marriage, make my life worth living, here is my money, here is my body, please help me. Where are they now when the world turns against Dr. Kis? Have you come here to help me? Is that why you are here in my home? Or are you just one more voice in the chorus, in the great hallelujah chorus that says Down with Dr. Kis, feed Dr. Kis to the wolves, let us all join together and destroy this terrible man who made dreams come true? Is that why you are here, miss?”

“I came here because you said—”

“The authorities were closing in on me, and I did not want to be burned at the stake like a heretic. I was aware of the problems.” He opens the desk’s bottom drawer and pulls out a sheaf of papers, a mélange of letters and legal documents. He shakes them at Leslie before slamming them onto his desk. “And, yes, I was working on solutions. But was I having success? With no money, no peace, no time. How could I?”

“But you said. I watched you. There was a…” Her heart pounding, Leslie moves her hand around and around, like someone turning the crank on an old movie camera.

“The Internet,” says Kis. “It’s a storm of lies, with little bits of sunlight here and there.”

“You were lying?”

“I was saying what I was told to say. I was playing for time. What else could I do? They wanted to wipe me out so I needed to make a story that I was onto something big, something valuable. And I was trying, believe me, miss, I was trying, night and day. But you can’t—what’s the phrase?—you can’t put shit back into a donkey. Things happen; they can rarely be reversed. The rain falls from the sky, it happens very quickly. But for the moisture to go back up in the air, that is very slow, a gradual process. And unfortunately for everyone involved, the general mood was not to wait for things to develop slowly.” Yet again, he reaches for the bottle of pills and then gives it a shake. It rattles like a deadly snake.

Tears slowly roll down Leslie’s face, though she is barely aware of them.

“What am I going to do?”

“What am I going to do, lady? You can live your life. Me? They are determined to destroy.” He opens the pill bottle, pushing up on the cap with his thumb.

“What are you doing?” Leslie asks, gesturing toward the pills. “Are you sick?”

“Yes. Dr. Kis is sick. Dr. Kis is dying.” He lifts the bottle up toward Leslie, as if extending a flute of champagne before a toast.

Leslie leaps out of her chair and grabs for the bottle of pills, but Kis evades her and pours a countless number of them into his mouth. Some he swallows right down, some he chews, showing his long gross teeth, and others dribble out and bounce onto the desk.

“You’re killing yourself.”

“Too late, it’s done,” he slurs through the thick white sludge of the half-masticated pills.

Leslie scrambles across the desk and grabs the old doctor. He tries to twist away from her, but she is too quick, and far too strong.

“Spit them out,” she says to him.

He presses his lips closed, shakes his head no, furiously.

“You have no right,” Leslie says. “You are not going to die, not until you—”

Kis slips from her grasp and falls to the floor. He rolls onto his side, tucks his chin into his chest, and covers his face with her arms. In less than a moment, Leslie is upon him. He is no match for her strength. She uncovers his face and rolls him onto his back.

“Let me die!” he cries to her, and clamps his mouth shut again and continues to swallow the remains of the pills.

Leslie has no plan, no idea of what to do next. All she can think of is getting those pills out of Kis’s mouth, and maybe sticking her fingers down his throat, forcing him to vomit up what he has already ingested.

His face has turned a darker shade of gray. Large beads of sweat appear on his scalp, his forehead, the long grooves on either side of his mouth.

“Open your mouth,” she commands.

He shakes his head no. And every time she reaches for him, he moves away.

But on the third try she has him. She holds his grizzled chin in one hand. She pries his lips apart and inserts two fingers into his mouth. She attaches her fingernails to his bottom row of teeth and with that small purchase on his mouth she forces it open. He is fighting her off with all that he has, but he is old and the oxycodone tablets are already having their effect.

“Open! Open!” Leslie growls, and with that she gives his mouth an all-out yank. She is angrier than she has ever been, more desperate, more frantic, and she does not know her own strength. She hears the deep dull wet sound of a bone snapping. The bottom half of his jaw breaks off in her grip like a chunk off of a rotted jack-o’-lantern. He cannot even scream. The only sign he gives of the ruin that has come over him is a slight widening of the eyes—they open to their fullest aperture and they stay that way as the light is slowly extinguished from them.

Leslie gets up, still holding the doctor’s jaw. Slowly, she relaxes her fingers and the bloody, toothsome thing thuds to the floor.

As she hurries through the little Slovenian town to rejoin her children and Slavoj, Leslie rubs her hands against the sides of the old stone houses to wipe off the blood, but it isn’t enough to really clean them. One at a time she puts her fingers in her mouth and sucks them, and when she is finished with that she licks her palms and then dries them against the legs of her pants.

The twins are in the car and Slavoj sits on the hood, smoking a cigarette and reading the newspaper. “Lucky day?” he asks when he sees Leslie approaching the car.

She shakes her head. “I’m all out of lucky days,” she says.

“So we wait?” He looks at his watch. “Maybe some lunch. My cousin has a place, not too far.”

It’s all Leslie can do to shake her head. She opens the door to the backseat. The twins look at her, hopeful that the doctor has helped their mother, fearful that they are next, and even more fearful still that nothing has changed.

“Take us back to the airport, please,” Leslie says. “And if you can hurry that would be…” She pauses, steals a look at her hand. It’s worse than she thought. “That would be good,” she says.