Vexation Lullaby (6 page)

He and Lucy gave notice to their landlord, then waited while the construction crew put the finishing touches on their new condo. They moved in on a raw day in March and two months later she left, taking with her the espresso machine that the property management group had thrown in as a housewarming gift. Peter assured her he had no patience for the temperamental machine, but they both knew she'd become addicted to steamed milk chai.

F
IRST MARGO DISAPPEARED
, then Lucy, then the contractors. Now, Peter was alone in the building. Not alone, exactly. Though owner occupancy hovered around 30 percent, the developers had started renting units on every floor. Nobody talked to anyone else. Selling wasn't an option. Depending on whom he talked with, the market had either corrected or retracted or collapsed. If he tried to walk away, the loss, at least on paper, would have been an obscenity. The graphite-colored cement kitchen island consoled him. The precision of his recessed cabinet hinges consoled him. The view from his bedroom consoled him. He tried not to consider the rest. The lap pool never materialized, nor the sauna, nor the concierge, nor the women in their cocktail dresses.

P
ETER RODE THE
shuddering elevator down to the garage. When the doors opened, he looked at the same maroon Subaru he'd been driving since before he started med school. It wasn't one of those aggressive rally-cars with the wing on back or one of those overbuilt wagons that seemed designed to shuttle kayaks and mountain bikes into remote places so their owners could have sex in tents or while dangling from a rope off a cliff face. He had the one that resembled an early Camry—Martin had urged him to buy a new car, telling him, “A car is like a suit. The right one can enhance your best attributes and conceal your shortcomings.”

Well, Peter never
needed
a luxury condo and look where that had landed him. No, he'd drive his car until it died. That would teach him a lesson. The car would probably run for another ten years to spite him.

A
S SOON AS
he pulled out of the building, his phone rang again.

A woman's voice asked if he would please hold. Tremulous flute music filled his ear, reminding him of the dusty tape player Judith kept behind the counter in the gem shop. He could picture the electrical cords taped to the carpet and the little strongbox bolted to the floor of her closet.

“Dr. Silver?”

Peter had heard Tony Ogata deliver the keynote for the National Association of Inpatient Physicians and at a three-day affair in Reno called ReThinking Wellness. And, of course, Peter recognized Ogata's voice from the Ken Burns specials (he'd described field amputation in lurid detail for
The Civil War
and in
Baseball
he outlined the advantages of Tommy John surgery). In his mind's eye, Peter saw Ogata, that shock of white hair, the hair of an artist. “Yes?”

“Hey, I'm glad to get you on the line. It's been a crazy morning. ABC sent a crew over so I could explain polyps—supposed to be a two-minute segment, but they wound up shooting an hour's worth of tape. You still there?”

“Is this Dr. Ogata?”

“Listen, Peter, I know your blood type, your credit score, and what you missed on the MCATs. You're the man of the hour. What I don't understand is why an accredited professional would agree to see a patient and then not even attempt a proper examination? Are you some kind of faith healer? Did you compare his aura to Benjamin Moore paint swatches? That's a joke. At least faith healers lay hands on their patients. I'm kidding. You there?”

“I'm here,” Peter choked out. Could Ogata have seen his MCAT scores?

“So, what's the deal? Jimmy hasn't pulled this sort of stunt before. Not that I'm calling it a stunt.”

Peter pulled up on the hard shoulder of the road, his tires squealing against the curb. “I met him at his hotel last night.”

“You can't get him in a hospital. I should know—he's been my patient for forty years. It's easier giving a cat a bubble bath. My question is did you see anything?”

At first, Peter thought of the blinds and the candied almonds. No, there was more. “He reported some cognitive issues, memory problems. He mentioned having some lapses.”

“Help me out. Are we talking catatonia? Fugue states?”

Somehow Peter was shocked that the guy sounded the same on the telephone as he did on TV. “He said time seemed ‘slippery.' He mentioned a hallucination.”

“Does that sound serious to you? Because where I'm sitting, the hairs are sticking up on my arms. So why didn't you check his b.p.?”

Though Ogata's voice maintained its unshakable optimism, his question landed like a body blow. What was Peter's excuse? That he'd been blinded by fame? Could Tony Ogata understand what fame did to an outsider? Peter would have better luck explaining wet to water.

“Our meeting got cut short—he had a plane to catch.”

“He came down to see me in Costa Rica this spring; I gave him a ride in this souped-up CAT scan I've got down there. It's an amazing machine, but the FDA won't allow it into this country.” Ogata sounded incensed.

“Why not?”

“It has nothing to do with gamma rays. It's a political thing.”

“I told him he needed to take these symptoms seriously.”

“Jim and I visited Fermi Labs once; he talked theoretical particles with those eggheads. He made an observation. He said that once they found the smallest thing, if they looked inside it they'd find a mirror! I don't know where he came up with it, but it blew everyone away, Italians, French, Russians. Those guys couldn't get enough of him. Hold for a second.”

The flute music came back on. Was Ogata closing the distance between them? Were they repairing a rift? And, if so, who had caused it and how?

“He said you wanted to bring him to the hospital. Maybe you're on to something with these cognitive issues. I'm sure you considered TIAs. He can't have a stroke. I'll try to get him on low-dose aspirin. Maybe we can get him to submit to an MRA. Baby steps. He's under a lot of stress with Allie showing up.”

“I'm not sure who that is.”

“Of course you do, Alistair, his kid.”

Ogata was right. Peter knew something about Alistair. There had been a grainy video of Cross's son being escorted off a flight at LAX. Maybe Alistair had thrown his shoes at someone or he'd refused to come out of the bathroom—Peter wasn't sure if he was remembering one incident or two. Alistair had been one of the trailblazers who established public fuckup as a viable form of celebrity. But he wasn't some kid anymore; he had to be close to Peter's age.

Ogata exhaled. “We need to talk about your exposure.”

“Exposure?”

“If you witness a person hit by a car, then you're obligated to give aid, but you went over there on your own. You agreed to see a patient outside of the medical facility where you're employed. Whether you realize it or not, you opened that hospital of yours to a huge liability. Can you imagine the kinds of damages Jimmy's people would seek if he keeled over? Do you have a copy of your contract?”

“There wasn't any contract. He knows my mother.”

“I'm talking about your employment contract. The hospital sure as hell had you sign some paper. Typically they stipulate that you can't practice medicine outside of their facilities, not without informing a supervisor. Have they called you yet, probably someone senior, someone who you didn't think knew your name?”

“They don't know I saw him.”

“They know. I spoke with the director this morning.”

“You spoke with the hospital's director?”

“If you want to get to the bottom of something, you have to start at the top. I've got her name here somewhere. You absolutely had to call someone before you went over.”

“You spoke with Dr. Larsen.”

“We kept it short because of the TV people.”

How could the hospital expect Peter to know the protocol for something unprecedented? Was he, as Lucy had intimated, a person who succeeded despite a crippling inability to read the writing on the wall?

Ogata was going on about attorneys. “These people,” he said, “are the stones that grind the wheat.”

Peter rolled his window down. How could the air feel so humid and so cold? The wind was an eel on the bottom of a pond. “Is the hospital mad at me?”

“A hospital cannot be mad,” Ogata said, unhelpfully. “And Jim seems to think you're pretty special.”

“I did him a favor.” Peter closed his car window. “He could have just said thanks and left it at that.”

“You want to lecture him on manners? He's Jimmy Cross.”

It was all true. Ogata probably knew his MCAT scores, his shoe size, and what he'd eat for lunch.

13

Gene had built a little deck at the top of the stairs. A pair of vintage aluminum chairs bookended a glass-topped café table. A maple hung over the place, lending it a tree-house feel.

Inside I find a cramped kitchenette with a Formica table; beneath a skylight, a plush armchair sits on a knotted rug. In the corner, a farm quilt drapes over an iron-framed bed. The place makes me feel docile in my bones.

After filling a water glass, I go outside to sit. A breeze twists leaves on their stems. Lawn mowers drone in the distance and for a few minutes I entertain the idea of checking the garage to see if Gene has a mower—I haven't done yard work in so long that I almost forgot I despise it.

In my previous life, Patricia and I shared a two-story colonial in a similar neighborhood. At night she and I had the conversations indigenous to those sorts of places. We talked about our aging parents, our disappointing friends, and whether Gabby deserved a sibling—she was a happy enough kid, but she used to follow us around the house as though we were her source of oxygen. We ended up getting her a yappy dog from the pound, a little dog with a curly red coat and a tail that appeared blurry in every photograph. Cherokee, that's what we named him.

Every chance he got, the dog would bolt outside to chase his sworn enemies: squirrels, kids on skateboards, and cars. We were perpetually bracing for some swift and final accident, but it never came.

And the dog loved eating. Despite the vet's admonishing, we fed him snacks at the table. By the time I went on the road, Cherokee was slowing down, though he was only three or so.

I jump when I hear a jet roar overhead.

Gene's right: I'm still the Restless One.

14

Peter was a regional doctor at a regional hospital. He didn't attend to internationally recognized recording stars and he didn't consult with medical personalities who had their own cable shows.

He'd grown up in North Carolina, in a tourist-trap town just outside a National Forest. Judith owned a store called Natural Wonders, where she sold nugget gold, raw emeralds, and geodes. The store sat wedged between a seasonal ice cream parlor and a damp nightmare called Snake World. A Pentecostal church faced them across the street.

He and Judith lived in an apartment above the store. At night, after finishing his homework, Peter would sit in front of the TV and split geodes that they bought in bulk from an outfit in Chihuahua.

Where was his father?

Judith called him the Scientist. She said he worked on magnets in New Mexico. The way she said it made Peter suspicious of magnets, of New Mexico, of the whole desert Southwest. He pictured scorpions and rattlesnakes, though the Scientist probably worked in a lab. His given name was Lawrence Brand.

I
N ELEMENTARY SCHOOL
, Peter played little league. He liked the compression of the stirrup socks and those warm summer nights when the spotlights grew furry with insects. At the plate, he swung at everything; when he connected, the sound of the ball coming off the bat almost stopped his heart. Sometimes, in his excitement, he'd slide into first or else he'd leg out a blooper only to meet a teammate camped out at second. He was uncoachable. He preferred soccer, because at halftime the whole team sat together to eat orange sections.

In middle school Peter caught someone's attention with his score on a standardized test. He was invited to spend a week at a community college, dissecting fetal pigs and learning the math that saved the lives of the Apollo 13 astronauts.

In high school, Peter and a kid named Anatoly Tcherepnin had the privilege of eating lunch with the AP Math teacher.

Mrs. Bertini had been accepted into the aeronautics program at Cal Tech, but she hadn't enrolled because her husband didn't want her turning into an egghead or hanging out with astronauts. Peter would have preferred to eat in the cafeteria, but it didn't seem fair to leave Mrs. B. alone with the other boy. If you gave him a four-digit number, Anatoly knew, to the second decimal place, the number's square and cube roots. He'd also memorized the armor class and hit points of every creature in the
Dungeons and Dragons Monster Manual
. Staring at the pink creases in Anatoly's neck, Peter wondered if the boy's head weighed more for the things it contained.

Sometimes Mrs. B. would give the boys brainteasers from a pulpy workbook, but she preferred to talk about personal stuff: where did Peter go to church; what had Anatoly's parents done in Russia (when the boy appeared to hesitate, she said, “Starve, I suppose”); if they had girlfriends; if Peter's mother had a boyfriend; what they liked to watch on TV—TV gave Anatoly migraines. The questions never felt invasive to Peter because Mrs. B. always managed to turn the answer back to herself. One time she asked Anatoly if there were lots of orphaned children in Russia, but before he could answer she told him there were, that she'd been dreaming about them. When she told her dream to Mr. B., he'd cried, despite the fact that Italian men don't cry, as a rule.

Peter didn't laugh when Anatoly got in trouble for rollerblading between classes, or when the boy recited pi at the talent show (the anti-valedictorians at the back of the auditorium cough-shouted, “Sixty-nine”). Peter respected Anatoly, how the boy always carried a book, and not a textbook but something from the town's library, maybe a history of the French and Indian War or a guide to martingale betting.