The Art of Forgetting (36 page)

              “Give me just a little more time,” Lloyd said.

              Beverly Spalding looked down. “Time is a precious commodity, Dr. Copeland. I just don’t know how much of it we have left.”

              Beverly returned by her husband’s bedside. Lloyd stepped away to speak to Dr. Birch. It didn’t take much haranguing to convince him to let Cecil Spalding go home, not when Birch could document on the medical record that the discharge was cleared by the patient’s private neurologist.

              “So what are
you
doing in these parts?” Lloyd asked Birch after writing his phone number on the discharge papers.

              “A little moonlighting, as usual,” Birch said. “I used to moonlight to pay off my student loans. Now it’s to pay the alimony. Can’t complain. It’s all in the life of an ER doc. And don’t get me wrong. I love this place: peaceful setting, great nurses, the nicest patients you’ll ever meet in your life. Gotta bring your own coffee though.” Birch tapped the top of a stainless steel thermos that looked like an artillery shell. “The management is Seventh Day Adventist, you know, but good people. Man, they’d love to have you around here. This place could use a good neurologist.”

              Lloyd placed his pen back in the inside breast pocket of his jacket and smiled. “I’m not looking for a new gig just yet.”

              Chapter 39

             
A
wedge of Manchego cheese sat in a drawer of the refrigerator stacked between a package of black olives and a brick of cream cheese. Lloyd took it out, peeled off the cellophane wrapper and shaved off a slice. With thumb and forefinger, he snapped a corner off the slice and placed it on the floor in a corner of the kitchen, hiding it behind a paper grocery sack.

              He walked to the living area and bit off a chunk of cheese as he peered into the mouse cage. Frederic clambered onto its hind quarters and scratched at the wall of the enclosure with his front paws.

              “You smell that don’t you? You hungry?”

              Lloyd popped the rest of the cheese in his mouth and lifted the lid of the cage. He scooped up the mouse and said. “You know where it is. Go get it.”

              He put the mouse on the floor. It scurried in a straight line to the kitchen, bulldozed the grocery sack out of the way with its little body and began feasting on the piece of cheese. Lloyd paced to the kitchen, waited for the mouse to finish gnawing the last few crumbs then picked him up.

              “So what’s it like to be you?”

              He carried Frederic to the sofa, lay down and placed the creature on his chest. The mouse walked around tentatively, its tail outstretched. When it tried to burrow inside Lloyd’s shirt in the space between two buttons, Lloyd pulled it back out grabbing it by a hind leg and said, “Oh no you don’t.”

              He held the creature in his hand and pet its head with a finger. “It looks like it’s just you and me now,” Lloyd said. “You and me and our memories.”

              There was a tapping sound by the window. Lloyd sat up and turned to see what it was. A white pigeon with brown splotches was on the outside ledge, pecking at the glass.

              “And then there’s always someone trying to crash the party,” Lloyd said to the mouse. He put Frederic back in the cage and closed the lid. He walked to the window. The pigeon stayed on the ledge, strutting and bobbing its head. Lloyd rapped his knuckles on the glass pane and the bird flew away.

              He walked back to the kitchen, washed his hands, rolled the remaining cheese in plastic wrap and opened the fridge to put it back. He stood there a moment staring at the stainless steel doors of the appliance, placed his hand on the freezer door handle, hesitated for a few seconds and opened it.

              The carton of Rum and Raisin ice cream stood in a corner covered in a thin layer of frost. He took it out, removed the lid and peered inside. Reached in and removed a vial, held it up to the light streaming in through the kitchen window and gently shook it. He set the vial on the kitchen counter and placed the ice cream carton back in the freezer. He rolled the vial between his palms a few times before holding it up again in the column of light to look through the amber glass.

              The prion solution had always been meant for him. That was the ultimate goal of his research, the only goal: to try to stem the devastation of the disease he knew lurked inside him – dormant, but waiting for its moment to come alive to ruin him, just like it had come alive in his father, just like it had ruined his grandfather and his great-grandfather and countless other men in the dwindling Copeland clan. And now, he didn’t need it. In fact, it turned out he had never needed it.

              Would he have invested all the time and effort in its development had he known that he was not at risk? Of course not. Lloyd knew that at his core, he was self-centered, egotistical, indifferent to the suffering of others. He had latched onto a selfishness borne of a flawed ideal of victimhood. For years he had brandished a silent suffering which fed his growing sense of entitlement. He expected reparations for his pain in the form of sexual exploits, of gratuitous orgasmic relief. But there had been no persecution. Any pain he felt was the result of self-flagellation. He had never been a martyr and never would be. It was his own mind that had chained him down; his delusion of persecution that had tethered him to his psychological Calvary.

              And then there were people who really did suffer. People who managed to carry their suffering with dignity. There was Cecil Spalding, and there was Beverly. Who would relieve their pain?

              Lloyd twirled the vial between his thumb and forefinger then quickly set it back down. If there was anyone capable of bringing respite to Spalding’s suffering and the suffering of countless others crushed by the weight of amnesia and dementia, it was Dr. Lloyd Copeland, even without the damned hospital privileges. And that ability entailed exceptional responsibility.

              Yes, the prions had always been intended to save his own hide and now he didn’t need them. But who would be better at judging their effectiveness? Who else but his own self to confirm their safety? And what if they weren’t safe?

              The temperature of the vial was sure to be rising by several degrees. It was time to put it back in the freezer. Instead, he let it sit on the kitchen counter.

              He went to his bedroom, grabbed the doctor’s bag that sat in the corner of his closet, turned it over on top of his bed and dumped its contents over the bedspread. Along with a tuning fork, a stethoscope and a half dozen individually wrapped tongue depressors, out fell a couple of syringes, packages of two-by-two gauze and a butterfly needle still in its sealed sterile package. He picked up a few items, grabbed a belt that hung from a hook in his closet and returned to the kitchen.

              For once in his life he had the opportunity to do something selfless. This was his moment. He couldn’t let it go.

              He had spent some time extrapolating the dose of prions for humans from the experience he had accumulated in injecting mice. He went over the calculation a final time in his head. A full vial seemed about right. The vial on the kitchen counter seemed just right.

              He tightened the belt around his left biceps, grabbed a bottle of vodka, uncorked it with his teeth and splashed some on his antecubital fossa, withdrew the contents of the amber vial by pulling back on the plunger of the syringe and with a steady hand, pierced his skin, bevel side up. A red plume appeared in the transparent hilt signaling that the needle had entered the median cubital vein of his left arm. He slowly pushed down on the plunger until the rubber piston bumped against the end of the syringe’s barrel. He loosened the belt, withdrew the needle, pressed a piece of gauze on the puncture mark and flexed his arm.

              What would happen now? He would have to focus on every sensation, every symptom he would experience. For now he felt no different than if he had ingested a multivitamin. He’d just have to wait and see.

              Chapter 40

              For all his years of research, despite his supposed expertise, Lloyd really didn’t know what to expect. Would he feel something like an epiphany, see a flash of light as if a switch were thrown, or would the effects of the prions arise insidiously? Would anything happen at all? Had he calculated the dose correctly? Would a human brain respond to the preparation the same way as that of a mouse did?

              Or would he be poisoned? Would he have to endure the agony of mercury toxicity?

              Barred from his work, Lloyd felt a biting need to fall into some form of routine. He started his mornings with a brisk run to Mills Park, passing just a block away from Erin’s apartment. Then he fed Frederic and filled his water dispenser with tap water (with apologies to Kaz).

              One morning, as he sipped on a hot mug of coffee, he spied the mouse sprinting on his exercise wheel, his tiny body repeatedly tumbling as if in a miniature clothes dryer when he broke his stride and the wheel kept spinning. Lloyd decided that the mouse’s quarters were inadequate. He immediately drove to a big box pet supply store and dropped two-hundred bucks on a six-level “habitat” intended for ferrets.

              In the afternoons Lloyd spent some time reviewing his back-dated medical journals, tearing out articles he was likely to read and tossing the rest of the journals in a blue recycling bin. He scanned the rescued articles onto his computer wondering if he’d ever have the chance to practice medicine again.

              One afternoon, he was sitting at the dining table perusing an article on a promising new antiepileptic drug when he heard a cooing sound. He glanced at the window. The white pigeon with brown splotches was back, strutting along the ledge. Lloyd grabbed a journal, rolled it up and was about to toss it at the window when he stopped, his arm already cocked in a throwing position.

              “Okay, I’ll let you stay this time,” he said. “Just don’t make it a habit.”

              Another routine he engaged in was setting a stopwatch as he subjected himself to a variety of memory exercises, recording his disappointing lack of progress in a soft-covered notebook with a black elastic strap. But much of the day was spent deep in thought: thinking of the events of the previous weeks, of the death of the mice, of Lasko. And at night he would think of his mother, of Roy, and most of all, Erin.

              There was one more memorial service to attend. Kaz’s remains were cremated and an informal service was held to scatter his ashes over Lake Michigan. An eclectic collection of people climbed onto the tour boat that was rented out for the purpose: a half-dozen lab technicians and other hospital employees, a larger gathering of friends from the community garden (Lloyd wondered if the attractive woman with long braided hair was the Guatemalan rose who didn’t drink coffee), and a small contingent of stout men in dark suits who huddled at the aft of the boat, wincing as they smoked cigarettes, giving them an appearance that suggested annoyance more than sorrow. These must be the Russians, Lloyd thought.

              An easterly zephyr blew across the lake in stiff gusts. After a fifteen minute sail, the pilot revved down the engines and a tall thin man with a streak of gray in his goatee began to speak. Lloyd was distracted. He kept thinking of Lasko, certain that the Chief of Staff must have played a role in Kaz’s death.

              An urn was handed to the speaker. He said a few more words and then paused, glancing at his sides anxiously. The boat had turned with the current and the wind was now blowing straight into the bow. A discussion on wind direction ensued. Finally, a guy in a guayabera and khaki slacks approached the pilot and asked him with excessive politeness if he could turn the boat around.

              The pilot sighed and said, “Suit yourselves.”

              The bow was now pointed straight at the John Hancock building. The thin man removed the lid of the urn, gave the receptacle a shake and the ashes were caught in the wind, but rather than being picked up by a draft to be scattered every which way, they were shoved quite unceremoniously straight down into the water just a few feet from the boat, creating a muddy stain. Some mourners tossed flowers overboard missing their mark, as the hull of the boat steamrolled over the stain. The Russians lit up cigarettes in near unison.

              Back at home, Lloyd fired up his laptop and typed “Cardio-Prime Technologies” in the search window of his web browser. The heading on the company’s home page declared, “The world leader in cardiac pacing and monitoring science”. Lloyd scanned the web site, not finding anything that roused his interest. He looked through the names of the board of directors and the directory of the “distinguished speakers’ bureau” without recognizing anyone. Finally, he typed the name “George Lasko” in the website’s search box. He found only dated references to talks Lasko had given, but not a mention in more than a year.

              Lloyd sat back and looked out his window. He stared blankly for a minute, then straightened, went to the kitchen, pulled out a slice of multigrain bread from a plastic sack and walked to the window. He cranked the glass pane open, removed the metal screen and scattered crumbs on the ledge. He sat down again leaving the window open.