Exley (11 page)

Finally, I clear my throat. “Ahem,” I say. She looks up at me; her fingers rise from the keyboard, and with both hands she grips the desk, tightly, as though she might flip it over. Her eyes are buglike, although I don't think thyroidal: I believe she
makes them
buglike. She is distinctly unfriendly — unfriendly and, indeed,
hostile
. I take a step back, and that seems to mollify her somewhat: her eyes recede a little back into their sockets.

“Yes?” she inquires.

“Yes,” I say. “I'm looking for one of your patients.”

“And who are you?” she asks, as though I'd told her I was looking for myself. This takes me by surprise — by surprise and, indeed,
unawares
— which is why I sputter a bit before telling her my name, then repeating my name and putting my title —
Doctor
—in front of it. This perhaps makes things worse: when she hears I am a doctor, the receptionist bulges her eyes again. “What kind of doctor?”

“I'm a mental health professional,” I say.

“A psychiatrist?” she asks.

“Just as I said,” I say. The title
psychiatrist
has sundry unfortunate associations and attendant nicknames —
shrink, headshrinker
, and the like — and it is my learned opinion that if we call ourselves mental health professionals, then those associations and nicknames will disappear and we will no longer be thought of as lab-coat-wearing goons who wield long, dripping needles, or who strap patients onto the electroshock table, or who scalpel out the offending part of the frontal lobe. This is why I have for several years lobbied my professional association to change their name from the North Country Psychiatric Association to the North Country Mental Health Professionals. So far, they have not done so, but I've begun calling them, and us, by that name anyway, hopefully to facilitate the change. “I'm here to see T.L.R.”

“Is he your patient?” the receptionist asks, still looking at me and not at her computer screen, where presumably M.'s father's name could be found or not.

“Well, not exactly,” I admit.

“Not exactly?”

“He's the father of one of my patients,” I say. Her eyes advance further toward me and away from her face; I can tell this is starting to go badly. “A boy. Nine years old. Dirty blond hair cut into a bowl shape. Tiny teeth. He says he's been here to see his father. He even mentioned you.”

The receptionist raises her eyebrows, then once again begins staring at her computer screen. I think perhaps she is looking up the name T.L.R. after all. But after a minute she says, still staring at the screen, “Only immediate family members are allowed to visit the patients.”

“But . . . ,” I begin to argue, when the phone at the front desk rings. To answer it, the receptionist swivels in her chair, so that her back is to me. In front of me is a pair of swinging doors. According to M., his father is in room D-1, just past those doors. I sneak another look at the receptionist; she is still talking on the phone and her back is still to me. I wipe my perspiring hands on my dungarees.
You must not
, I say to myself.
Yes, you must
, Dr. Pahnee says back. And then before I can talk myself out of it, I run through the doors, past the usual hospital apparatuses — vending machines, X-ray machines, and the like — until I come to room D-1. I push the door open and walk inside. The room is curtained and gloomy; the only light (dim) emanates from a wall fixture above the patient's bed. Yes: there is a bed, and there is a patient in it. I walk closer. He is as M. has described him: pale, clean shaven, with a crew cut. He is, as M. claimed, hooked up to a number of machines, and they are all connected to one another and to the patient in mysterious ways. Before I became a mental health professional, I briefly considered becoming a physician. But the sick body requires too many complicated machines to heal it. Besides, the machine of the juvenile mind is complicated enough. I take another step forward. I am on the patient's right side. His right wrist is bare and resting on top of his left hand, both of his hands resting on top of his stomach. I can see a white bracelet on the patient's left wrist, a bracelet on which, no doubt, is information pertaining to the patient's identity — his identity and, indeed, information that will help me
identify him
. I am reaching over to lift his right wrist off his left when someone yells, “What do you think you're doing?” I turn my head and see two men in green military uniforms. I almost revert to myself, grovel, offer my apologies, beg their forgiveness, and slink out of the room. But being Dr. Pahnee has gotten me this far . . . which is why I exclaim what M. has instructed me to exclaim at the end of each session: “ ‘I've got human life — do you understand that?
Human life!
—in my hands!' ”

My words sound impressive to my own ears, but they seem to have the opposite effect on the guards. They step forward, each grab me by the elbow, drag me out of the patient's room, back through the swinging doors, past the receptionist, through the automatic door, and then deposit — deposit and, indeed,
dump
— me on the sidewalk outside.

 

 

A
fter advanced reading I had study hall, math, and social studies (I was an advanced eighth-grade reader, but a normal eighth grader in every other subject). Then it was lunch. I got in line in the cafeteria with my tray. I got my little carton of milk, my thing of pears swimming in syrup, my two slices of white bread with gravy and chunks of meat on top. I pushed my tray on the metal track toward the cashier. As I did, I looked to the right, toward the cafeteria tables, and saw Harold. He was sitting by himself. There were plenty of reasons why. Harold whinnied instead of laughing, and always at things that weren't funny. He had never made it even halfway up the rope in gym class. He had a long, skinny neck, and that long, skinny neck housed a huge Adam's apple. Probably the biggest ever. Probably even bigger than Adam's, whose apple must have been really big, since it was named after him. And Harold had terrible raisin allergies. He might have been the only person in the world allergic to raisins. I don't know what else I can say about him except that I was the only person who ever sat with him at lunch. But I just didn't want to be that person right then. Not when my dad was in the hospital, waiting for me to bring Exley to him. So I left my tray there on the track and walked in the other direction. “Hey, you can't do that,” the cashier said. But I did. I left the tray there and ran: away from Harold, the cafeteria, the school, until I was running down Washington Street, toward the Crystal.

Washington Street looked completely different than it had the day before. The buildings and the people were still there. But after reading
A Fan's Notes
, Washington Street was a different Washington Street. Exley described driving down Washington Street on the way to the hospital when he thought he was having a heart attack. In the chapter, the leaves were turning color and falling, and Exley said that “Washington Street
was as lovely as I had ever seen it” and that it “looked like some dream of a place.” He also said he hated the place, but the writing itself said he didn't. Sometimes how you say things matters more than what you say. And now that I'd read Exley, I could see how pretty Washington Street really was. The leaves had already fallen and had been raked into neat piles along the side of the street. Most of the snow from the night before had melted, but there was a little bit left on top of the piles. It looked like frosting. The trees were bare, their branches waving happily in the wind. I had never seen the sky so deep blue. The sun was so bright that it was everywhere; it seemed to be bouncing back and forth from one hospital's windows to the others'. But I wouldn't have noticed all this without Exley's book. As I walked by the VA hospital, I remembered the time when me and my dad and Mother drove down Washington Street. It was fall then, too. The cigarette smokers were outside the YMCA, the fat women were in a slightly shorter line outside the welfare office, the soldiers were on their cell phones. The trees were bare. The sky was blue then, too, but Mother didn't seem to notice it. All she noticed was some guy walking around and around the Public Square. We were stopped at a red light. The guy was wearing sweatpants with one sweatpant leg pushed up to the knee, and old cracked leather basketball sneakers without any laces. He walked bent over at the waist, looking at the ground, like he was going to get sick. But he didn't get sick. He just kept walking like that, around and around the Square. I don't know where he thought he was walking. It didn't look like he was out there for the exercise.

Finally, just when the light turned green, the guy stopped — right in the middle of the intersection. He reached down and picked a cigarette butt up off the street and put it between his lips. I could see the little twisted, burnt nub of it sticking out. Then he started patting himself down, turning his sweatpant pockets inside out. He was still in the middle of the street. Mother reached over to the steering wheel and beeped at the guy. He glared at us and for a second I was scared. I pictured him whipping off one of his sneakers and beating our car with it. I figured maybe that's why he wore them without laces.

Anyway, he didn't do that. The guy tipped his imaginary hat at us and then kept walking, around and around the Square, as we drove on.

“It's so depressing,” Mother said.

“It's not so bad,” my dad said. He said that because he'd read Exley. I didn't know if Mother had read Exley or not, but if she had, she'd read him wrong. I knew that now. This was how my plan would work; I knew that once I found Exley, he would make my dad feel better, because his book already had.

LIKE
I
SAID
earlier, the Crystal was my dad's favorite place in Watertown. And it was my dad's favorite place because it was one of Exley's. I knew that after reading his book. According to his book, Exley went to the Crystal on Sunday, and only on Sunday. But I didn't think I could wait a whole six days to look for him there, and I didn't think my dad could wait that long, either.
I know it's Monday
, I told Exley in my head.
But please be at the Crystal
.

I crossed the Square and walked up to the Crystal, but I didn't go in right away. Because there was a guy sitting on the sidewalk, his back up against the empty building just to the right of the Crystal. His arms were crossed over his chest the way I'd seen the girls in my class do when they were underdressed. Maybe because he was underdressed, too: just a thin flannel shirt and paint-spattered white jeans with loops at the hips to hang your tools on and unlaced work boots and no hat and no jacket. His eyes were open a little, not enough to tell if he was actually seeing me with them, but enough to see how red and runny they were. There was a green army backpack on the ground next to him, and on the other side of him was a bottle of vodka. Its red label said Popov. The guy had a gray beard and messy gray hair, just like S., the guy at the New Parrot; and just like S., he looked old and used up. He looked like he could have been Exley, in other words. He also looked like he could have been half the guys in Watertown. I was trying to be smart. I was trying to be realistic. I was trying to use my head. And my head was telling me,
Miller, remember what happened with S. You can't just draft the first or second guy you meet and expect him to be Exley
. But then I told my head,
What if I don't draft him? What if he volunteers?

“Who the
fuck
are
you
supposed to be?” the guy asked after he apparently noticed me standing there, looking at him. His voice was faraway
and wet and rattling, like he was talking from the bottom of a deep, phlegmy hole. I didn't answer him, and so he asked the question several more times, using several of the same class of swear words, the same sort of swear words Exley used in his book. This went on for a while, I don't know how long exactly, because I was still having the argument with myself, in my head and with my head, and my head was saying,
Another drunk bum? Why do you think Exley has to be another drunk bum? Why couldn't he turn out to be that guy?
Then my head pointed at the guy walking past us, a tubby, clean-shaven guy with slicked-back black hair who was wearing a shiny blue suit and obviously worked in a bank.
Because Exley would never turn out to be that guy
, I said back.

Why not?
my head wanted to know.
Your dad would never turn out to be that guy who joined the army, either, except he did. He was
.

I didn't have an answer for that. I just stood there and let the white noise of the guy's swearing wash over me, until my head argued,
This is ridiculous. You might as well call him Popov. He's as likely to be the guy they named the vodka after as he is to be Exley
.

But my dad doesn't need a guy named Popov
, I argued back.
He needs Exley
. And after that, my head was quiet for a while.

By now, Exley had stopped swearing and started hacking, hacking and hacking. I leaned over, picked up the half-full bottle of vodka, handed it to him. He drank straight out of the bottle, drank until the vodka was gone. By the time he'd finished it, Exley was pretty much gone himself. He gave one of those satisfied, all-over body shivers, then slumped down against the wall, his pale, spotted hand still strangling the neck of the now empty bottle. I crouched in front of him. His eyes were slits, barely opened, but he wasn't sleeping, not yet; I could see his pupils in there, lazily moving from side to side, like a searchlight.

“Are you Exley?” I said, and shook him a little. His eyes opened a little wider, and his mouth opened, too, I guessed in an attempt to say something. Except no words came out, only a sweet, rotting smell, like a cow that'd died from eating too much cotton candy. I moved back from Exley and held my nose, hoping he'd take the hint. He didn't, just lay there with his mouth hanging wide open. Still holding my nose, I took a couple of steps toward Exley, and with my free hand I closed his mouth for him. He
let me, too. He watched my hand move toward his mouth, felt my thumb under his lower lip, my fingers over his upper. But he didn't do anything to stop me. It occurred to me, despite his swearing, that Exley was a sweet, passive guy. He was looking at me, lips pursed, head cocked to the side, as though to say,
What next?