Another Broken Wizard (10 page)

“Shoot.”

“I’m going to say Brookline. I have a cousin there and that seems like where you live.”

“Why’s that?”

“Because you dress like him, like a yuppie, but not. And you’re wicked sarcastic. Well? I’m right, right?”

I paused for a minute and watched the long-coated doctors walk by behind her.

“Actually, I live in New York. But I’m from Worcester. And I’m staying in Westborough while my dad recovers. That about covers it.”

“New York, heh? Well, I still think I did a good job of guessing. I was just thinking of around here. I didn’t know I’d have to choose from the whole world,” she said, putting one hand over the bracelets on her other forearm, leaning forward and smiling.

“No, you did alright. It’s not like you guessed I was from Leominster or something. By the way, my name is Jim.”

“I’m Olive. It’s a pleasure,” she said.
Uh pleashuh
. She held out her hand and I shook it.

She told me how her father’s surgery ruined her winter break, how lucky I was not to have to deal with my family right now, how exasperated doctors could sweep into the waiting room at any moment with news of our fathers’ deaths, how her mother kept losing her cool and making things worse, how the whole calm atmosphere of the hospital was a sick lie, and other impious things.

“Fuckin’ Judge Judy and fuckin’ soap operas, how the hell is that supposed to help? And you can’t turn off the TVs if you want to. The nurses don’t even
have
the remote,” she said.

“I know, and the fucking magazines. It’s like ‘well, they’re holding my dad’s ribcage open and cutting around his heart at this very moment. But I sure would like to know what
Runners World
has to say about the new Reeboks with the extra fucking springs inside.’”

“Right, what the hell? God, why can’t you smoke in here? And that fucking wop nurse, I know that’s racist, I’m sorry, you’re not Italian are you?” Olive said in what seemed like one breath.

“No, I think I had the same nurse, go ahead.”

“My dad is already half unconscious. And my mom is barely holding it together. And the nurse starts talking about how her husband says that her plan to remodel the kitchen for the fourth time in six years is excessive and how she is trying to get him to
see the light
. No bullshit, those were the words she used.”

“She talked to me about a TV show about remodeling.”

Just then, Olive’s little brother came up to the table and started pulling on Olive’s black cardigan.

“Mom wants you to come back,” he said, his eyes pinched half-shut between his bulbous cheeks and his bulbous forehead, all covered in freckles.

“Is the surgery done? Did the doctor come out?”

“No. She just wants you back.”

I saw Olive pull a black ball point pen out of her sweater pocket and grab a napkin off the table. She started writing as she addressed her little brother.

“Tell her I’ll be back in a minute.”

“She said to come back
now
.”

“Okay, I’m going. You are such a
pain
,” Olive said, folding and pushing the napkin to me, then getting up and leaving.

I opened the napkin. It said probably more than it should have: “OLIVE FROM THE HOSPITAL” then a 508 phone number, then “SHHHH.” I stayed and finished my donut and watched whiskeynose work the sparse traffic.

20.

Back in the waiting room, Olive and I passed the hours looking at each other and pretending not to. It was the sort of petty and ridiculous thing that living people do. My surgeon came back before theirs did. He was an Indian guy, just a couple years older than me. His eyes were sober and competent, like he could do three more of the same surgery that day. From what Dad told me, he might.

“The surgery went well. We removed the mass. And looking at it, I don’t think it was malignant. But we’ll know more after we run some tests,” he said in the middle of a lot of words that disappeared.

“Can I see him?”

“I think the nurse will let you know when. We’re moving him to the ICU. It should be another hour or so before you can go in.”

After he left, Olive made a not-too-furtive gesture asking “What did he say?” I gave her a quiet thumbs-up. Between meeting her, and Dad’s good news, the next hour passed faster than I probably deserved. In the surgical ICU, Dad could have passed for dead if not for all the machines and beeping screens to say otherwise. The room had glass walls and a huge sliding glass door. The patients on either side of it were ministered to in identical fashion in a long row of high-tech sarcophagi. I tried just to look at his face, which seemed neglectfully unshaven around the breathing tube. But he had too many tubes and wires going into and out of him.

“Hey, Dad. How are you doing?”

In a movie, this is where I would say my soliloquy. But I was too tired to even be pissed off, never mind philosophical. I watched him breathe and beep for a few minutes. I stepped outside at the same time as the nurse who was checking on the young black man in the glass sarcophagus next to him.

“How long is he going to be like this?”

“Which one? Monaghan?”

“Yes. My father. The man who is lying over there,” I said, perhaps with too much pepper on it.

The nurse, a tall blonde with a cold manner to her, walked with me over to his bed and took his chart from the foot of it. She was wearing scrubs, which negated any sex appeal she might possess in the outside world. She spent a minute looking it over and probably an extra minute killing time just to let me know she was in charge.

“He’ll be intubated for at least the next three days, and mostly unconscious. But you’re free to stay with him as long as you want.”

“So, would he be upset if I just came back tomorrow? I mean, he’ll be pretty doped up between now and say, like, noon tomorrow. It won’t mess up his recovery, will it?”

“He’s pretty stable. We like to say that sitting and talking helps the patient. But he’ll be out of it for the rest of the night,” she said, looked me over and moved on.

My exhaustion had become a dark curtain lowering over everything. I did the math and decided the coming weeks scored me dutiful-son points out the ass, and left. I gave whiskeynose the ticket and four bucks and drove back to Dad’s apartment building.

The dome lights and pale blue doors in the apartment hallways repeated into distances obscured by plain disinterest. I was so exhausted and out of my head that the Fountainhead actually felt like my natural habitat. In the apartment, I put an action movie on the TV, loud. I was all alone, and started looking for porn and pills, because I felt I was owed that much. I found some blood-pressure prescriptions and some old Tramadol, but nothing that would get me high or put me to sleep.

I pulled the blinds away from the sliding glass door that opened onto the narrow balcony. Beyond the parking lot and the street was a low hill that used to be a landfill. I remember driving by and seeing the bulldozers work a corkscrew up and down the pile of mottled dirt there. After a decade of letting it settle, they covered the mound with sod, parking lots, a Wal-Mart, a McDonald’s and a Friendly’s. Beyond the stores and restaurants, a wooded hill hung over the Route 9 traffic like a wave that would never crash.

On TV, the hero realized, with rage and horror, the terrible truth about the corporation that manufactured the robots in the movie’s idea of the future. I was asleep on the couch before he could make things right.

21.

After a few hours, the phone in my pocket rang.

“Jim, what are you doing, like, right now?” Joe asked.

“Sleeping, why?”

“Because that plan we talked about—I did some asking around and I thought about what you said. I think I found a way to get out of here faster. But I need help. Could I borrow, like two or three hundred dollars tonight? An opportunity came up that I need to jump on like immediately.”

I paused while I remembered Joe’s plan. From my pause, Joe took as read whatever I was supposed to have said and continued.

“My brother, don’t worry. Seriously. I have this so under control you wouldn’t believe it. But I need your help to make it happen. I can even pay you back, say, four hundred next week, if you loan me a whole three hundred,” Joe said.

I stood up to clear my head and took a deep breath. Walking over to the big glass door, I stared out into the night.

“I don’t want interest. I just want you to be careful. It’s one thing to be a drunken yahoo about town. What you’re talking about is something different.”

“Like I said, everyone involved is a friend. This is about as safe as this kind of thing gets. I just really need your help with the money part of it.”

“Fine. But I do need this money back, and sooner rather than later.”

Even against my better judgment, tired and disoriented, on an errand with no possible reward, on a pain-in-the-ass cold night, I was glad to go see Joe. When you saw him, he was always there, almost too there. He might run out on you to get high or laid, but he never ran out into the automatic conversation of the recap, the recited anecdote, or the well-manicured opinion. Unlike so many people, I never felt lonely talking to him.

The cold in the parking lot woke me. Crossing out of Westborough on Route 9, I passed a glorious set of bright white lights set atop high poles, as if a visiting platoon of gods had made camp at the foot of a massive rampart. But it was just a Honda dealership, new and pre-owned. I pulled into a bank branch in Shrewsbury and went to the ATM under a cloudless sky. The sand on the parking lot crunched under my sneakers. The concrete seemed especially hard from the cold. My neck itched because I hadn’t shaved. Every detail of the walk to the ATM became especially vivid, the way things do when you suspect that you are making a sizable mistake.

At the ATM, I checked my balance. It still looked like a lot of money. But it had to last into an unforeseeable future. The severance from Bigelow was a good dose for six months. Not long after that, it would come time for hard decisions. I could afford the three hundred if it would help Joe. I took out a full five, to dilute the egregious fee the machine charged. I met Joe at the Bean Counter on Highland Street. He was engaged in a debate about the Iraq war with a hippie girl and a scruffy guy in a long, black overcoat, who had paused their chess game for the argument.

“What you refuse to see is that this is a war that goes back to the mid ‘70s in Tehran, when the Ayatollah took our people hostage …” Joe said. Then he caught sight of me and got up to let the couple discuss among themselves how much they disagreed with him.

“Jim, what’s up? Let me buy you a coffee.”

I demurred and we walked down Highland, past a cluster of businesses, restaurants, liquor, record and clothing stores, past the Store Twenty Four, toward Elm Park, where Highland Street is just three-deckers remodeled in a Victorian style. Once there, I handed Joe the fifteen twenties folded in half without breaking stride.

“Thanks. Where are we going?” Joe said.

“I don’t know. Just out of the way.”

“Nice tradecraft. But you could have just given it to me in the coffee place,” Joe said and started laughing. I couldn’t help but laugh too.

“I don’t know. I was never good at this stuff. You remember when I sold off that half-sheet of acid? I had that poor kid follow me into a swamp in Holden to make the deal. How that reduced the suspiciousness, I’ll never know.”

“I remember that. It was Freddie Ostrowsky. You scared the crap out of him. He told me he thought you were going to rob him or something,” Joe said, the momentum of the hilarity rolling over us, two maniacs laughing alone in the cold as the cars rolled by. We collected ourselves and walked back.

“What are you up to tonight?” he asked.

“I am still beat; I’m going back to Dad’s to get some more sleep. How’d it go with that girl the other night?”

“Who, Monique? It was cool, I mean weird. I got her shirt off and she had all these scars on her stomach. I asked her what they were about and she just shrugged and said ‘things happen,’ then we started getting it on.”

“Scars?”

“Like a lot of them, and not like surgery scars, well, maybe some of them.”

“Jeez. She let you turn off the lights at least?”

“Nah. She actually insisted on keeping them on. It was almost kind of hot. Almost.”

We made plans for New Year’s Eve and I left. Back at the Fountainhead, Dad’s bed was empty. But I opted for my inflatable bed. Call that what you will.

22.

Wednesday, December 31

I woke early and called back the people who had left messages on Dad’s answering machine. The conversations with the people who picked up were pretty much the same as the voicemails I left. Some offered whatever help I might need. I said thanks. That was all there was to say. Only one guy, Gerry, kept me on the phone any longer than that. He had a thick New England accent. Dad had worked with him. Now they played golf together.

“Your dad told me you were staying up for his recovery.”

“Yeah.”

“You’re doing the right thing. When my mother was dying, she was down in Cranston, Rhode Island. I let my sisters handle it. I just wrote the checks, paid for the hospital, the at-home nursing, everything. It wasn’t even an hour away. I said I was busy. I got down there a few times, but that was it. I said, ‘she’s a proud woman, she doesn’t want me to see her like this.’ You know how I found out she was dead?” Gerry asked and let the pause hang in the air. It was a dramatic pause I could imagine him using on a sales call. I didn’t feel like playing along and let the silence go on a minute.

“I was on vacation in Hilton Head. I got a phone call from my sister’s husband that she had passed. And I’ll tell you something. There’s not a day, not an hour, really, when I don’t regret I wasn’t there.”
Theeya
.