The Speed Chronicles (21 page)

Then, holding tight to his arm, the girl took off her long boot and showed him her withered leg, luminescent under the ghostly lights.

He touched her leg with trembling hands and she looked up at the sky and said, Do you know what these lights signify? And she asked it again and again until she started crying. Her face white from the gloomy lights, he at last knew beauty and magic and wanted to cure her and everyone else.

For seven years, he worked in the orthopedic ward at a hospital in Darke County, and then four years in the army. But it was not until hanging his sign on the door of the second-floor office of the Reefy Building that he felt his life had become his own. At last, he could minister to his patients in his way, in the intimate confines of that place, behind the beveled-glass door, seated on his examination table, their legs dangling, so vulnerable. And the comfort they felt the minute they looked into his eyes and saw only kindness, relief, release.

One, a jaundiced fellow with a pencil mustache, came to him weekly, nattily dressed and smelling of Violet Mints that nudged from the top of his smooth breast pocket. Before the doctor, he had been stricken by such dolor he could not rise from bed and thus had lost his job. Now, he ran the Imperial dining room at the country club and never, ever stopped smiling.

Another, why, before the doctor, he was in dire straits. Mr. Alfred Matheson. The owner of the sprawling emporium on Chess Street, but something had come undone after his beloved daughter moved to California to experience new things. Since then, Mr. Matheson had begun spending evenings at Watson's Bar, drinking and playing the same mournful Irish ballads over and over on the juke box and not letting anyone else put coins in. Long after the commuter trains had stopped rolling into the station across the street with late-returning men in rumpled suits and red Strouss' bags, he would sit under the fairy lights and speak to all who would listen, saying dark things about how the Atomic Age, like man himself, was born in suffering.

Privately, Dr. Tremblay could not disagree.

“Did you see him?” whispered the clerks at Mr. Matheson's store, the ones who spent their days dipping their dirty hands in the undergarments bins and strolling the bright aisles as if kings. “He is not sound.” They would talk about how he laughed for no reason and sometimes cried into his desk blotter, shoulders heaving. And the way he licked his lips and moaned when Dinah Shore came on the radio, because, he said, Dinah hails from Winchester, Tennessee, and had polio as a child, as did his sister.

But they could not see what the doctor could. They lacked the glowing eye in the center of his forehead which no one could see but his patients. The one that said: All I need is to be tended to. That is all I need.

And the doctor did. For Albert Matheson, a steady supply of blue pills, each one shaped lovingly like a heart, and twice-weekly injections customized for his particular and exceptional (they were all exceptional) circumstances. When needed, twice a day.

“You told them you were giving them rejuvenators, regulators, revivifiers,” the government man said. “But what we found were various mixes of vitamins, enzymes, procaine hydrochloride, dextroamphetamine amobarbital, methamphetamine, and … human placenta.”

“I gave them life,” the doctor replied.

Without him, he knew what many would do. There was one young woman who, before the doctor arrived in town, had relied on the proprietor of an exotic notions store on Tamm Street to provide her with a hobo bindle filled with morphine-soaked raisins she could suck on all day. Another, a crater-faced young man, consumed by misery of a variety too dark to penetrate, would surely return to his prior acts of desperation, sneaking, in the blue-dark of night, to Acme Farms to steal amphetamines from the jobby throats of chickens, who produce eggs with sumptuous rapidity so dosed. Who but the doctor could look at this nervous young man and know all there was to know for what his inner being cried? Who knew what was needed to salve the wounds of a life spent feeling Other?

What would become of Eleanor Lang, a housewife with four children under five and a husband who spent six days a week traveling for Pan Am? Without the doctor's cross-marked wonders doled out in strict tidy rows she would surely have finally done the thing she threatened to do many times before. Twice, this tiny woman nigh on five feet tall had taken a hand drill and once a Bakelite phone handle and once more an awl pick and vowed to stop the train bearing down on the center of her skull. With the doctor gone, the only thing to stop Eleanor Lang would be the experimental surgery her husband kept reading about in
The Rotarian
. No better than the hand drill, the awl.

“Conspiracy to violate federal drug laws relating to stimulant drug. Willfully, knowingly, unlawfully selling, delivering, and disposing of a stimulant drug, namely 22.1 grams of amphetamine sulfate on the following dates—”

“I never sold them,” Dr. Tremblay said. “I never sold anything.”

“You didn't charge for your services?” the government man said snidely. “You're just the old charity ward, eh?”

“Young man, if you think I did this for pecuniary gain,” the doctor replied, his eyes grave—so grave and portentous that even the government man straightened and drew down his propped leg from the desk—“then I deeply misunderstood you. It is rare, but it does occur. Because when I looked at you, past the brute ignorance of your generation and type, I thought I saw something else. Something deeper. Perhaps I was wrong.”

Yes, at times even he could not forestall all horrors. A patient who comes only once leaves his office, returns home, and assaults his lady friend with a telephone. A young woman triples her prescribed dose and takes a meat fork to her roommate, then to herself. A knot-browed young man calls at all hours to tell the doctor his skin is radioactive, that his dead mother watches him through a periscope, that his father, long dead, has poisoned the city reservoir, and that we, all of us, are drinking toxins every day. Troubled souls who did not trust enough in him and whose damage is too ancient for him to undo. But are these aberrations to be laid at his creased-leather feet?

As much as he told himself otherwise, he did in fact know he couldn't cure every heart he held in his aging hands. He couldn't even rightly reckon with all the mysteries of the heart. The dark chambers invisible even to my physician's-eyed scalpel. But he had tried.

The one they called to testify—why, watching Mrs. Moses-Pittock nearly brought him to acrid tears. A very wealthy woman, age sixty-two, with the daintiest of ways, and a thick coil of gleaming pearls that looped five times around her neck like an Egyptian snake charmer. For three years she had been coming several times a week for shots, sliding her alligator wallet from her handbag, a handbag soft as curling caramel, and giving him bills crisp from the New Century Merchants Bank, which her father founded a hundred years ago. The newspapers said that he had injected her in the throat, as if she were a horse. Why would he do that? There was no need. It was a beautiful act, seated across from one another, his knees locked against hers, hers locked together.

She would speak to him only once the medicine was in the syringe. And then she was transformed, even before he pulled the plunger.

His grip on her stemlike elbow. The needle and its blooming rescue.

The blood floating like a pink balloon.

Then she would let her moon-shaped fingertips touch his lab coat, her eyelashes fluttering, the faint sound of her filigreed rings clicking against each other.

In court, she had made her grand way to the witness stand, Chez Ninon wool suit the color of a very bright olive, pilgrim pumps tapping the oak planks, and so seeming without trouble in all God's green world. But the doctor knew. He knew about her son's wayward life in Greenwich Village, and about her own private abuses to keep her body slim as the pea shoot her husband had married, abuses he had ceased. And he knew the thing that happened twenty years before, when she accepted that ride from her husband's business partner and the thing he did to her, her mouth pressed shut by his hand, in his gleaming roadster. He knew her suffering, and how to stop it.

After an hour or more of courtroom politenesses, of delicacy, and Mrs. Pittock's sweet-faced resistance, the prosecutor mopped his forehead with frustration. “Mrs. Pittock,” the prosecutor said, “do you understand that these were narcotics? That he was putting your health at risk?”

“He has always been so kind,” she said from the witness stand. “One August day, I was feeling so unwell I couldn't leave my bed. He walked the four miles to my home to deliver my medications. He has no car, you know. It was nearly 102 degrees. When I asked,
Aren't you warm?
he said,
Such luxuries I can't allow myself.”

Listening in court, the doctor remembered walking under the barrel-arch ornamental plaster ceiling, tending to her in her damask-walled sitting room, her face white with woe. It was not a world the doctor knew. The doctor knew his aluminum percolator and the prickling static of his RCA.

“He made me feel like a princess,” she said.

But it was not Mrs. Moses-Pittock with whom the government men were interested. The doctor knew this. The doctor knew that it had all begun with the scientist.

“I have a voice in me that speaks,” the scientist told the doctor. “He says that I am a monster. He speaks to me late at night and at other times too. When I hear him, I cannot move. I cannot rise from bed. I cannot go to my office. I cannot perform my duties. I am no longer a man.”

His name was Warren Tibbs of Tibbs Square, the tree-lined common down on the central boulevard. He was a college physics professor, age forty-six but looked ten years older. He had four children, a wife with true yellow hair and a dimple in one corner, and a house that had been his father's and grandfather's, stately and American in all ways. All this, the sparkling sterling silver service and Hepplewhite chairs and a big brass front door that shone in the sun. But the sorrow in his eyes was five fathoms deep and Dr. Tremblay knew he must help him. His problem was not his heart condition, for which he took digitalis and quinidine daily.

For ten years, Warren confided to the doctor, he had been an important researcher at the Argonne National Laboratory just outside of Chicago, but the stresses of the job depleted him and he had retreated to his hometown. Warren told the doctor this while laying on the oriental carpet in his den, looking up at the doctor through hands laced across his eyes. The truth was, Warren added, his superiors felt his behavior had become erratic and his security clearances were rescinded. For which he was, he admitted, glad.

“Maybe,” Warren said, his face in his hands now, “you have read of the Argonne Laboratory in the newspapers.”

The doctor said he had.

“Did you know that radium used to be used to make a luminous paint?” he asked. “They used it for those clocks with the numerals that glow in the dark.”

The doctor did indeed know this. Had read about it in the medical journals. He knew that the girls who worked in those clock factories painting those radium dials had all died of bone and brain cancer. It was their dentists who had discovered it.

“Every day, countless times, they wetted the tip of the brush with their tongues so they might get nice, clean numerals on the dials,” Warren Tibbs told him. “Some of them had fun with it and decorated their fingers and eyelids. One painted a Cheshire Cat grin on her face to surprise her beau. At night, walking from the factory, they all gave off this lambent glow. They must have looked quite lovely, those girls.”

The doctor opened his bag.

“My mother used to have one of those alarm clocks,” Warren added. “Isn't that something?”

And so the doctor's treatments began.

It was two months later that Warren Tibbs summoned Dr. Tremblay to his own home. “I have things to show you,” he said. “You will be amazed.”

The doctor walked the mile and a half out to the Tibbs home half in wonder. Two months and the only contact had been through the physics department secretary, who called weekly and then twice weekly for the professor's prescriptions. That day, Warren Tibbs himself opened the front doors, his shirt sleeves rolled up, his smile wide, and his face flushed and vibrant.

“Dr. Tremblay, I have always wanted to do something significant,” Warren Tibbs said. “Many think I already have. They are wrong.” He was not wearing any socks or shoes, and the doctor noted that the brightness in his face had an intensity that worried him. “I wanted to make my mark, wanted my life to have meaning,” Warren Tibbs continued, his whole body nearly shaking with energy, “and now you have made it possible.”

And then Warren Tibbs opened the doors to his study. On the leather-banked walls were ten, twenty, thirty canvases, bright paintings thick with roiling swirls of oil, brilliant vermillion, scarlet, gold, and when the doctor peered closer, he saw within the swirls dainty, flickering images of what appeared to be girl sprites or elves dancing, slipping on the tiniest of feet along the swoop and whorl of each throbbing helix.

Paint spattered all over the floors and curtains and dappled Warren Tibbs's trouser cuffs and, the doctor now noticed, streaked up one of his arms. It was in his hair.

“You do not even know yet,” Warren Tibbs said, voice scratchy as if he had recently been screaming. He slapped his head against the light plate on the wall and the entire room fell to darkness.

The doctor was transfixed. The sprites, the elves, they glowed with an unearthly power, a searing green luminescence radiating off every canvas and like nothing he had ever seen before. And yet he had. Long ago, in Marfa, Texas. These glowing monuments to all that is mysterious and unreachable and unknown.

Standing there in the dark, looking at these paintings, the doctor immediately knew their power, and they spoke to him, and it was like the voice from the buried center of his own buried heart. Warren Tibbs turned to him, so close the doctor could smell the rotting of his teeth. He felt Warren's hand take his, and the two men stood for some time.