Do No Harm (40 page)

Diane gazed through bleary eyes at the small clock on the wall. "Eleven o'clock, huh?"

"It's ten."

"Oh. Either way, you look exhausted. Go home and get some sleep."

He felt a pull toward the door--a necessity to pursue, to investigate, to undo--but he could not move. Diane's face was shiny with antibiotic creme and, inexplicably, even more beautiful for its scars. They seemed to highlight her elegance, like the black spots on the water-smooth red wings of a ladybug. "I wanted to see you."

"You saw me yesterday."

She looked down, picking at a thumbnail. The swelling on her face had begun to weep. She patted her blisters with a square of gauze. David looked in the trash can beside the bed; it was full of soiled gauze pads. She'd spent all day sitting up here, mostly alone, trying to staunch the fluids leaking from her face.

It took him a moment to find his voice to continue. "I wanted to see you again."

"Don't you dare. Don't you dare feel sorry for me." She raised the heel of her hand to her eyes but couldn't touch her face. He knew her tears were burning her. "Goddamn it," she said softly. "Goddamn it."

He crossed to her and sat on the bed. She found his hand and squeezed it so tight he could feel his wedding band digging into his other fingers. Carefully, he brushed the hair off her forehead, sweeping it back from her face. He took the stained gauze from her trembling hand, threw it out, and pulled a fresh pad from the box on the bedside tray.

He dabbed at the blistering on her right cheek, her forehead, around the socket of her right eye. Her hands went limp in her lap as she let him work, wincing from time to time. He shifted on the bed, moving closer to her. Her left cheek and chin were unmarred, the curved bow of her lips perfectly smooth. He moistened a clean square of gauze with some saline and swept it along the elegant line of her jaw, cleaning her.

Her breathing was sharp and shallow. Through the swelling around her eye, her iris shone, ice-green and pristine. She turned, a sudden shy movement, and her lips were against his, impossibly soft. He felt the gentle suck of her breath in his mouth and the room seemed to swirl around him, smelling of disinfectant, Silvadene, and a distant trace of her perfume. She cringed against the pain of her face moving against his. He started to pull back but she moved her face forward to keep it pressed against his, kissing him still as the salt tears burnt tracks down her wounded cheek.

CLYDE had been taking the pills more and more, but they didn't do what the book promised they'd do. He stayed in bed mostly, rising to drink and piss and reheat beans in a dirty pot. He'd stopped feeding the cat. He took to urinating in jars again and carefully labeling each jar with the time and date.

The ancient Zenith TV in the corner got terrible reception. Now and then, if he angled the antenna just right, he could get the audio on a porn channel, though static still blotted the screen.

He gathered his dirty sheets in a ball between his legs and sat in bed, looking out the window and fishing pickle after soggy pickle from a wide jar. When he finished his sloppy crunching, he tilted back the jar and drank the sour, green-tinged juice. The juice left his lips stained a fishy gray, as it had his left hand to the wrist.

Leaning the mirror against the base of his bed so he could see his reflection, he smiled at himself and practiced talking. He spoke gently and softly, reaching out to touch his water-spotted reflection. Sometimes his voice was drowned out by grunts and groans from the TV.

At night, a few girls walked past the window, their giggles carrying into his dirty apartment, and he looked around, pupils jerking, as if seeing the room for the first time. The mounds of dirty clothes, the halved capsules piled on the pocked wooden table, the grease splatter up the kitchen wall above the stove.

He cried for a little bit without gasps, just a slow leaking of his eyes, then rose and stood in the middle of the room in his white underwear. He pulled on some loose scrub bottoms and his yellowed Adidas sneakers. Hunting around, he found an old button-up shirt under the bed. He pulled it out and shook it to rid it of cat hair. Laying it on the bed, he flattened it as best he could with a swollen hand.

He pulled it on and looked at himself in the mirror. He fixed the collar, twisting it back into place. He practiced a smile, then murmured a greeting to himself. In the kitchen, a jar atop the refrigerator was filled with change. He poured it on the floor and counted the few silver coins out of the wash of copper.

When he left the apartment, he made sure to turn all three deadbolts.

The bar at the corner had tinted windows and a torn green awning. He shuffled inside, eyes on the ground, and climbed onto a bar stool with considerable effort. He rested his hands on the bar, but then looked down at them--swollen with pitted nails--and put them in his lap.

The bartender, an older lady with wrinkles and blush, slid a rag up the counter. "What'll it be?"

He lowered his eyes, his hand clutching the ball of quarters in his pocket. "Water," he said. "Two waters."

She made a disappointed clucking noise. "We're not a welfare office. You don't order something soon, we'll ask you to leave."

A blush bloomed beneath his pocked cheeks. His button-up shirt clung to his body, dotted with sweat. "Sorry," he said. "I'm just thirsty. So thirsty."

"Then buy a goddamned beer," she muttered, as she filled two glasses with water from the tap.

An attractive blonde sat on the stool two over from him, turned toward a girlfriend. The water glasses banging down on the bar in front of him nearly startled him off his stool.

The bartender looked regretful when she saw his expression. "Look, I'm sorry. You can take some time and finish those up before you go." She moved down the bar to serve other customers.

He sat alone in his little bubble--a man on a bar stool at a bar--breathing heavily, murmuring to himself, counting down from three.

He drained one glass of water, then the other.

His thumbnail was so severely pitted it had begun to flake. The skin beneath it had reddened, like an enormous hangnail. He worried it with his teeth for a moment, head angled down, and chanced a look at the blonde to his left.

She turned with a jangle of bracelets, mouth open in a bark of a laugh from her girlfriend's joke, and then she spotted him.

Her face changed. The light in her eyes vanished. Her lips drew together and curled in disgust, distorting her nose.

Her eyes said: You do not have a right to view me.

They said: You are something soiled and rotting.

They said: You are not fit to mate.

He looked quickly back down at the bar, hand rising to his head to block his eyes from hers. He felt a clump of hair give under his soft fingertips and drift down, landing on his shoulder.

"Disgusting," she said.

A strong hand on his back. A male voice. "Hello, ladies, is this guy bothering you? Are you bothering these women, pal? Whew, how 'bout you go take a walk through a car wash?"

Laughter.

"What's the matter, you don't answer when someone asks you a question?"

Clyde's lips moved, but no sound came out. They mouthed: Sorry. I'm sorry.

He stood, sensing the large male presence, and stumbled toward the door, uneven on his feet.

"Drunk fool," the blonde said.

As he reached the door, he heard the male introducing himself to the two women.

Leaning on lightposts and mailboxes, he made his way to the Healton's Drugstore about a block and a half from his apartment. The large white sign with blue Gothic lettering glowed into the night. It was something of a neighborhood beacon; when sitting in his bed, Clyde could see it through his window.

He couldn't afford a carton of cigarettes, so he bought a pack, counting out the coins on the counter before a frustrated worker. The chiming bells on the closing door seemed inordinately loud.

He walked back to the bar and stared at the people inside, barely discernable through the dark window. A few weeks ago, he would have endured such a rejection, dissolved it in the blackness inside him. But not anymore. Now he made sure that someone answered to him. Answered with their own pain. Their own fear.

He wandered away from the dark window, his lips moving to keep up with the rush of thoughts through his head. He found himself before the two-story house for retarded adults. The house that was no longer his own.

He moistened his thick lips and whistled a few beckoning notes.

Some time later, he found himself within the protective shell of the scorched Chevy, sitting on the brittle and lumpy newspapers that composed the driver's seat. He watched the house ahead, waiting for the nighttime signs of life, waiting for her to come downstairs and discover what he'd done.

He smoked the pack straight through, two cigarettes at a time.

The light went on in the room upstairs. A wait. The back door opened and she appeared. Same bunny jumpsuit, same messy ponytail positioned too high on her head.

He rocked slightly in the car, his hands gripping segments of the broken steering wheel. When he looked to the side, his pupils beat once, twice, unable to hold in place.

With a whooshing whistle, she stepped down off the porch, activating the motion-sensor lamp. Her hands fluttered up to her face as she gasped, her eyes widening until he could see the whites even through the spiderweb crack in the windshield.

The scraggly dog lay on its side in the tall weeds of the yard, its head bent back across the neck, broken. A trickle of blood ran from a wound at the base of its throat, where a jagged bone had punctured the flesh.

Her mouth bent wide, wavering. She sank to her knees.

He drank her tears.

He got out from the Chevy, slamming the car door behind him. She kept her gaze on the dead lump of fur, even as he walked toward her drunkenly.

Her hand trembled as she reached for the dog. She began to pet the coarse hair covering its ribs, her hand moving soothingly while her breath came in sharp gasps.

He stood over her, tall and powerful, the lamp casting his shadow across her face. She cowered in her bunny sweatsuit, but at last looked up at him, cringing. She smelled of tuna. Sounds came from within the house--an inner door closing hard, then the rapid beat of footsteps.

He fled, his feet dragging through weeds and broken bottles, leaving behind the light and the people. His breath came in animal grunts, sounds of exertion or of sobbing. He turned to squeeze his wide body through a missing slat in the wooden fence at the yard's edge and then he staggered toward home, his face flushed a deep red, almost matching the splatter of dog blood across his button-up shirt.

THE ER bustled. Broken legs, hemorrhaging wounds, a Rorschach blot of vomit on the tiled floor of Exam Seven. Don had been called in to provide double coverage in the rush, and he and David spun from room to room, pushed, prodded, and pulled by residents and nurses. David didn't have time to check on Security, but he knew they were working double-time outside, fending off the almost constant influx of media. The flurry of press surrounding the hospital over the past week made him feel increasingly claustrophobic.

At one point, David had tried to go up to see Diane, but he'd been pulled into a food poisoning case by an anxious medicine intern. It was already past lunch, and neither he nor Don had had a moment to sit down. A college kid who'd been in a motorcycle accident came in DOA, and Don was walking a medical student through the gestures with the defibrillator.

Stepping on a pedal to turn on the sink, David rinsed his hands and shook them dry before sliding on another pair of gloves and stepping back into the hall. He pivoted quickly, dodging a cooler that a smiling orderly wheeled past him from the ambulance bay--probably a heart on ice. When he stuck his head in the CWA, he saw the board was filled, a Magic Marker tribute to bad doctor scrawl.

"Someone call the blood bank and get a few units on the way for Jefferson in Fifteen Two," he said to a passing nurse. "Where's Carson? Has anyone seen Carson? Someone call him and get him in here. And get urology on the phone again--they're dragging their feet on Kinney in Four because he's MediCal." He glanced down Hallway One and saw, through the small windows atop the swinging doors, Don speaking to a man in his forties. Don held a hot dog in one hand and was chewing between words; the man's face was lowered and he held his head, as if in great pain. It took a moment for David to put it together--the man was the father of the student who'd died in the motorcycle wreck, and Don had just informed him of his son's death. While eating a hot dog.

His temper flaring, David stormed down the hall. He forced himself to calm down, knowing that it would make matters worse for the father if he made a scene. Instinctively, David thought to grab Diane to see to the father, before remembering why she wasn't working.

Don was finishing as David approached. "So, again, I'm really sorry to have to bring you this news."

David struggled to keep his rage from finding its way into his voice. "Dr. Lambert, would you mind if I had a word?"

"Not at all." Don gave the man's elbow a cursory squeeze before following David back into Exam Fourteen.