The Parallel Apartments (7 page)

Dr. Gonzales, who was eighty-six years old and had been a doctor since graduating from Universidad Autónoma de Guadalajara in 1944, shared his office with two other physicans: Dr. Rosental, a fiftyish neuropsychiatrist who collected sand from the beaches of the world, and Dr. Barney, a pediatrician who had gotten her medical degree at nineteen and still lived with her parents in Westlake.

Unlike Dr. Rosental's and Dr. Barney's shares of the waiting room, which were cheerily carpeted, strewn with invulnerable toys, and furnished with cushiony love seats and low, shin-killer tables stacked with antiquarian
Redbooks, Cryptotaxidermy Worlds,
and
National Reviews
going thirty-deep, Dr. Gonzales's waiting area was floored in antiseptic gray linoleum, furnished only with benches constructed of the same material bedpans were fashioned from, and entirely undisrupted by toys or magazines. It contained not a single manipulable entity with which one might pass the time.

The doctors shared a receptionist, Alva Giddings. She had worked for Dr. Gonzales for as long as Livia could remember. In 1966, during the summer before Livia's sophomore year at Austin High, Burt Moppett, her classmate and, later, husband—for three days—had been spending his lunch break from a shift as a university-sidewalk-weed-plucker by napping on a divan in the lobby of a dorm on the Drag, when Charles Whitman started to shoot people from the top of the UT Tower.

Two years later, just after she and Burt had started dating, he told her he remembered waking up to see people racing urgently, but in eerie silence, through the dorm lobby.

“When I think of people running scared,” he'd said, pulling Livia closer as they sat in the car on Friday night watching Olivia Hussey enchant the drive-in, “I always think of it coupled with screaming. Don't you, my little October pumpkin?”

Bubbly goose bumps crept up Livia's neck at the word
coupled.

“I do, darling, I sure do,” she'd responded, stroking his ear as he yawned and stretched in preparation for a catnap. They'd both seen
Romeo and Juliet
twice and were just here to mess around and give Burt a chance to catch up on his sleep. Burt especially loved sleeping on the bench seats of cars.

“But it was all quiet. I went outside and stood next to a telephone pole on the sidewalk, looking to figure why all the automobiles were stopped smack in the middle of the street and folks were crouching behind mailboxes and pickemup trucks and it was a hot afternoon, and real quiet except for faraway shouts and faraway sireens and itsy-bitsy pops.”

Burt had seen a man in an undershirt across the street pointing to the top of the Tower. A tiny puff of smoke appeared there. An instant later, a head-high chunk of the phone pole near Burt exploded. A substantial splinter, half a yard long and glazed with creosote, speared him laterally through the meat of the tip of his chin, where it lodged, hat-pin-style.

The man in the undershirt hoisted Burt over a shoulder and hauled him dazed and bleeding to Dr. Gonzales's office, a block and a half away. But Dr. Gonzales had gone to Brackenridge Hospital to help the other victims; the only one left at the office was Alva, the receptionist.

Alva ordered the man in the undershirt to lay Burt down on the bench in the waiting room. She emerged from her reception booth with an old-fashioned leather doctor's kit, put her white leather nurse's-shoe-shod foot against Burt's jaw, pulled on the splinter with one hand, was defeated, and so used both, with success. Burt squeaked and fainted. Alva cleaned him up, sutured the entrance and exit wounds, and left him resting on probably—surely—the same bench on which Livia and Charlotte were now sitting.

With a fingernail Livia picked at a flaky bit of the bedpan-bench between her legs and thought of Burt:
He bled here. At least he was lying down. Burt loved to be prone.

Over Alva's window hung an analog clock calibrated in military time. Livia practiced holding her breath. Given her mother's recent spleen, which promised a future of patience-testing, Livia decided it was time to move her nerve-calming, breath-holding exercises to 130 seconds.

From the other side of the room came the communicable hacking and barking of ill children, the
schk
of magazine pages being turned, and the occasional thump of a toy's durability being tested by one of the barking
children. During the brief intervals of silence, all that could be heard was ambient music, tuned to a tiresome KUT program of the sort where the DJ, in order to demonstrate his diverse musical acumen, might play a forty-minute timpani soundscape immediately followed by Dessert Helmet covering Hootie, or maybe the Niagara Chickenshits playing their notorious live version of “It's Damp” (the one with the Tek-9 tragedy uncensored), segued inharmoniously into any one of the many upsetting ballads Livia couldn't help but associate with the last, hopeless moments of a junior-high-school dance. Livia hated the unpredictability of such programming. She liked her radio to reliably stick to a genre. Psychedelic rock, for instance.

Alva glanced up once and stared at Livia. Livia stared back. She suppressed an urge to stick out her tongue. Alva continued to stare until Livia cowed and looked down at her fingers, which had started to tremble. Her mother's fingers, crossed tightly in her lap, as was her habit when she wan't permitted to keep them busy operating cigarettes, were perfectly still, though stained red and blue from the Fimo.

By 16:35 the waiting room was mostly empty and had grown quiet. Livia had lost two more stare-downs with Alva. At nine seconds before 17:00, Alva slid her window to the side with a sandy crunch and shouted, “Durant, Charlotte Gue.”

Charlotte, who seldom moved at a pace quicker than could be described as purposeful, leaped.

The door to Dr. Gonzales's office opened, and Charlotte disappeared into it as though swept in on a simoom. The door swung shut. Livia found herself alone with Alva and the depressing chirr of Gene Pitney.

A new song took over. It was familiar, too—three-chord rhythm guitar, tinny drums, thwippy bass line—but Livia couldn't quite place it. Maybe the vocals would help.

Like ye jar of fireflies…

Livia jumped up. She ran to Alva's window and tapped urgently. Oh, what a look Alva did beam. But she slid her window aside.

“Miss Alva, would you turn up that song?”

Livia hadn't heard that voice in decades, and never had she noticed the plangent boyishness in it.

…
love trapped inside of me…

How often she and Archibold had spent a day searching record shops and junk stores and yard sales looking for records by Burt's band, Ye Moppe Hedds, but never finding anything, even an old 45, its label nearly rubbed away and the grooves worn matte by time and tonearm needles.

Alva stood, steadied herself with a complicated walker whose legs were coated in several generations of medical warnings—biohazard trefoils,
CAUSES DROWSINESS
es, photoluminescent quarantine stickers—made her way to the back of the office, and turned the radio off.

It didn't really matter. Livia'd heard enough. The entire song came back to her as though she were watching Burt right this minute, his chin decorated with absolutely the sexiest scar in the history of such things, onstage at Wolford's, singing and strumming the guitar he'd bought new at Sears, the nightclub stuffed with screaming, sweat-drenched women. Livia, deep in her memory, barely noticed the appearance of Dr. Gonzales, his shrunken, white-coated figure ushering Charlotte out of his office and into the waiting room. Livia barely noticed Charlotte's blood-test-bandaged arm, her plastic bag of drug samples, her flushed, happy, guilty,
erotic
radiance.

III

May 2004

In the lobby of the Frito Motel, just off of I-35 in Austin, Justine waited impatiently, all her weight borne by her left leg, behind a man and a tall teenage boy pokily registering for their stay. The two were evidently digging the check-in experience.

Her whole drive down, Justine had been anticipating this very moment, when she would be given a key to a room in which she could live until every credit dollar and every real dollar had been spent. She would rest. Reset. She would research. She would decide whether to keep the baby. She would hunt down and confront her awful family and wring some truth from them. She would find Gracie Yin, seduce her, and then move to Houston with her to make art and have sex and be in love and work in a pharmacy. Or maybe waitress, where the real money was, until the collage commissions from her elegantly simple website started pouring in.

But the moment was a disappointment. Austin seemed like a city now, stormy traffic, cloverleaf interchanges, strip development stretching so far out that the neighboring towns had been annexed and were now more like
suburbs, and an architecturally brisk skyline visible at ten miles. She did not feel welcome. The homesickness burn that had grown itchier as she drove south remained, unscratched, somewhere in her large intestine, even though she was “home.” Plus, she was lame: the rental car's pedals had seemed like they did not care to leave New York and were fighting back, so hard were they to depress. Her accelerator foot buzzed, the attached ankle and calf shuddered, her knee creaked as though the cartilage had turned to oak. Justine had had to stop dozens of times to massage and baby her right side.

Judging by his rosy, whiskerless cheeks, the younger man in line must have been at the junior-high-school end of adolescence. He was about seven feet tall. He kept bumping his head on the security camera over the check-in desk.

“Pelletier,” said the older man, who lisped slightly and wore old-fashioned wire-rimmed glasses encumbered with heavy bifocal lenses. “We have a reservation. We're here for the Ninth Annual Symposium on Cults and Extreme Clubs.”

“Of course,” said the clerk, a young woman whose perfectly radial blond bangs complemented the many ounces of gold jewelry that encircled her neck and appendages. “I'm Amy, your Frito front-desk specialist team player. 'Kay. Member, leader, or scholar?”

She adjusted her monitor with both hands; it creaked and she jangled.

“Uh, scholars?”

“Okay… sorry, but only cult leaders get a 10 percent price break on the room. Scholars, historians, gawkers, cult members, and the deprogrammed pay full price.”

“What about friends and families of victims?”

“There's a schedule of CultAnon meetings taped to the waffle machine, there behind you.”

“Yeah, well, Jimbo here,” said Mr. Pelletier, indicating his son with a gesture similar to a game-show hostess calling attention to a shiny Frigidaire, “his sixth-grade teacher was Manfred Truwt.”

The clerk looked up at him and smiled. “Hello,” she said, waving.

“'Lo,” Jimbo said, waving back.

“Pretty exciting,” she said, blushing lightly and touching her bangs, perhaps checking them for radial symmetry. “Was Manfred weird? Like did
he mesmerize you and the other kids with unignorable charisma and get you to do his yard work?”

Jimbo mumbled and turned a color akin to salsa.

“Jimbo's shy,” said Mr. Pelletier. “Look, which way's Palmer Auditorium?”

“See that highway?” said Amy, pointing out of the tinted windows of the lobby at a roaring overpass not thirty feet away. “I-35. Go south—thataway—and then…”

Amy incanted directions that included roads Justine was familiar with. It soothed her to hear their names, even though there was nothing comforting about the memories of events to which the streets themselves once bore witness.

“…but you'll have to pay for parking, in cash, so be ready. Okay, let's get you situated. That'll be $32.99 a night.”

Thirty-two ninety-nine, thought Justine. That's twenty bucks less than they told me on the phone.

The clerk gave each of the Pelletiers a key and a smile.

“Again, I'm Amy, if you need anything.”

“And you've got our reservation for January, right?” said Mr. Pelletier. “Two thousand five? We'll be here for the serial-killer convention, too.”

“True crime
convention,” Amy politely corrected. “Not just serial killers this time. There'll be experts on spree rapists, kids who kill, black widows, internet scammers; there'll be capital-punishment seminars, DNA-exonerated prisoners, weapon-mongers, life-size famous-assassination installations, a scholar on Scary-Clown Syndrome, loads of crime skits, an Are You a Sociopath? booth, and also Sanazaro Ballopio, the president of the political wing of the Reviewers, will be there. Do you know who they are? They invade people's homes to destroy immoral objects.”

“I know who they are.”

“Right! Plus that guy will be there, the one who wrote
Bad or Batty,
you know, about criminality being nature or nurture. And plenty of TBAs. Okay then, looks like your reservations are confirmed.”

Amy watched Jimbo as he left with his father.

“Uh, yes,” said Justine, hopping up to the registration desk. “I have a reservation.”

“Name?”

“Justine Moppett. I think the rate I was quoted was too h—”

“Here we go. Miss Moppett. Welcome to the Frito. Your reservation is for four nights? That'll be $52.99 per night plus—”