Blood Test, page 14
“Do you habe any adwice?” I asked her, holding my head tilted back. With my nose stuffed with Kleenex, the words came out sounding clotted and European.
“Maybe you should go away for a while,” she suggested, as the blood from my nostril soaked the tissue implanted there. “Hawaii is nice. Beaches. Active volcanoes. Sunshine. Pacific Ocean breezes. Get away from the winter blahs. I also have a psychiatrist I can recommend, Dr. T. D. Bowen. Deet—that’s his nickname. Deet is very good, if you want his help. He’s a virtuoso of the prescription pad. He’ll give you drugs no one else has ever heard of.”
“Isn’t Deet a mosquito repellant? Is this guy a shrink?”
“We don’t call them that anymore.”
“But that’s what he is. Doctor, I’m not crazy.”
“I didn’t say that you were.” She continued to smile at me in a friendly way, but you could tell that she had other patients to get to and wanted to finish up with me. It was what you’d call an impatient smile with a micro-hint of downbeat irritation. Doctors have rigid schedules to adhere to. Insurance firms insist on that. Her face was a barometer and not that hard to read. “Sanity has a wide spectrum. You should learn to relax. Do you play basketball? Do you swim at the Y? Do you have hobbies? A lot of people enjoy collecting stamps or taking long walks, or they sign up for ballroom dancing. And how about swing dancing? That’s a great stress reliever. And it’s fun! You throw your partner around. Or you could learn a foreign language at Kingsboro Community College. You could sprechen Sie Deutsch. The world,” she said, sounding like a middle school guidance counselor trying to prevent suicide attempts, “is full of wonderful activities.”
“I sense that you’re grasping at straws,” I said. “But I do appreciate your efforts.” I took the old tissue out of my nostril and inserted another one. A drop of my blood landed in my lap before I could daub it away, staining my khakis. People are quick to notice bloodstains on your clothes, as a rule. They’re giveaways to all other kinds of unpleasantnesses. Meanwhile, Dr. Curtis—I had once called her Evelyn and she had given me a dirty look, so I never did that again, having learned that doctors are deeply invested in their own importance and don’t care for familiarity from their patients—fetched her prescription pad and wrote out an Rx for Rezillify.
“This might calm you down,” she said, ripping the sheet off the pad. “But don’t take these pills habitually and don’t drink at the same time. They can knock you out flat. And they’re slow to metabolize. I don’t want to find you at the ER. I don’t want to hear that you’ve died.”
“Or that I’ve murdered someone?”
“That, too,” she said. “Why do you say that?”
I didn’t want to go into the whole Generomics misadventure, so I said, “Oh, I didn’t mean anything by it.” She nodded. “Thank you, Doctor,” I said, taking the prescription from her hand.
“Take care, Brock,” she said. “If you have any more hallucinations, give the office a call. Mind how you go.”
A British expression! I wonder where she got it from.
* * *
—
Our household resumed its usual routines, with the addition of Bobby the rat, who was doted on by both Joe and Lena, who carried him around the house (the rat’s favorite perch was the top of Joe’s head, where he clung to Joe’s hair and scalp) and brought him to the dinner table, though I drew the line at having him scampering around from one salad plate to another, snacking on leftovers. I don’t care how companionable or clean white rats are; they’re still rats. It didn’t look good, having a rat on the table at mealtime. The rat’s run of the crockery and silverware suggested that ordinary standards of sanitation were not being observed. I should mention that around then, after Thanksgiving, Joe’s suicidal notes also stopped, as did his various despairs, now that Burt was semi-muzzled by his injuries. I still heard the clanking of Joe’s barbell equipment in the basement, however, as he huffed and puffed his way through his workouts toward his goal of looking like Adonis. Lena and Pete turned in their college applications as the dreaded holiday season descended, and so far I hadn’t killed anyone, as had been predicted by the algorithms. I noticed, as the winter gained momentum, that Lena and Pete’s passion for each other seemed to be diminishing, and though their fire had not been totally quenched, judging from the telltale banging of the headboard, the sound was less fervent and more subdued, almost domestic. They were getting more and more like a married couple. I did not comment on that, though it brought a wry sadness into my heart.
As for Burt and my ex-wife, they were on the horizon, cooking up various storms, speaking of barometers.
Sometimes I would excuse myself from the office, claiming to my assistants that I was out on business, and instead of doing any sort of commercial transaction I would drive to Knoblauch County Park, partly because Trey worked there and partly because my nerves were shot. I’d go into the interpretive center, where she worked, and she’d give me a loving peck on the cheek, and I’d admire her in her green park uniform and the name tag and the jaunty hat with the wide brim, and sometimes I’d listen to her as she lectured the assembled fourth and fifth graders about foxes, owls, and snakes. Then I’d go out to the hiking trails—it’s a large park, and some of the circle trails are three miles long—and do my best to get lost, to lose myself out there.
There’s a story that I read in college that has stuck with me, even though I can’t remember the author or the title of the story. It’s about a man who one day leaves his wife and family, and the house where they all live, and he walks a block or so away and moves into a rented room with a window from which he can see his own house—who’s coming and going. He stays in the rented room for days, weeks, months, years. He watches his wife entering and leaving the house. Does he still love her? The story refuses to say. (But how could he?) He sees how distraught she is at first, given his disappearance from her life, and then how quickly she seems to be aging, given his absence. Yet he does not return to his home. Time goes by, and—I think this is right—he even passes her on the street, and she doesn’t recognize him. He’s now a certified stranger. After decades, he leaves the rented room and returns to the house he had once abandoned. In the last line of the story, he goes in through the old familiar door. The author then calls him “the outcast of the universe.” Even though the story is not plausible, it made a big impression on me. The best stories are the ones you almost can’t believe because they’re so true, the truth that surpasses plausibility.
That was how I was beginning to feel: that funny outcast sensation. The first few times I went to the county park, I walked down this path turning south, an old tree stump moldering on my left, and a bird feeder—no birds there—on my right, and slowly made my way to a little pond circled by cattails where geese and mallard ducks hung out, though at this time of year, with the temperatures falling, the geese were preparing to fly south and therefore had anxious and irritable demeanors like travelers in airports. The air was cold and damp, and you could perceive a muddy wildlife smell reeking of nitrogen. On two occasions I saw a muskrat crawl into a hut-like habitat, and on yet another walk I saw a raccoon ahead of me on the path, lumbering along like a little bear. Hearing me, it turned around and gazed at me without surprise before it ambled away. Exchanging a glance with this animal made me feel as if I hadn’t completely severed my ties with daily life or with the natural order of things. I was grateful to that raccoon. Brother Raccoon, Sister Muskrat, how was your day?
All the same, what Generomics had done to me, combined with Burt’s accident and the difficulties I had had with Joe, made me feel as if I had somehow broken away from my family, and my community, and the mysterious chain of being that ties us all together, if I could put it that way. I was out there floating in space, turning end over end, lost in my errant thoughts. So these walks I took in the county park reattached me to what was going on at ground level. That particular day I had brought some birdseed in my pocket, and when I arrived at a turn in the trail, near a cedar grove where I saw some chickadees, I put some seed in my palm and held my hand out flat, at shoulder level, and, sure enough, a brave chickadee flew down and picked and pocked at the seed before it flew away. Trey had fed wild animals, and now I could, too. Having a wild bird alight on your hand will take away your troubles for moments at a time, believe me. The few ounces of wildness in your hand are a visitation from the other world, the one that we know is there, which we can’t see. There is another world and it’s here, now. Wild animals can bring you evidence of that.
I continued on my walk. Up ahead near a very old maple tree whose branches appeared to be sagging from age, I saw a deer, a male—judging by his antlers—grazing on old grass, and I had expected the animal to run away in fright as they usually will, but this buck stood quite still after it raised its head, observing me, and it occurred to me that maybe he had the advantage: sharp hooves, bulk, and antlers. The deer was also in better physical condition than I was, given his daily exertions and his struggles for existence. As he stood there, he snorted. He had no interest in friendship between species. He distrusted humans, and for good reasons. At that moment I felt a tug at my sleeve: Trey, in her park ranger uniform, drawing me away from where I stood until we were a good half mile in the other direction. She must have been following me without telling me, as people will do when they start to worry about you.
“I was fine,” I protested. “That deer had nothing on me.”
“You’re bluffing,” she said. “If he had wanted to, he could have mowed you down.”
“Is that the word?” I asked. “ ‘Mowed’?”
“In your case, it is,” she said. Right then I felt the warmth of her love for me, and on top of that particular feeling, I had a surge of gratitude that she had gone to the trouble to leave her post in the interpretive center to trail me, signifying her worries, but the moment was even larger than that: I felt gratitude (to her, to life) that she loved me and that I loved her, that it was reciprocal. I saw her graying hair underneath her cap, a sign that the clock was ticking for both of us. At that moment when we were both standing on the trail in the Knoblauch County Park on a gray overcast day, I asked her to marry me, and she accepted. I hadn’t known that I was going to do that—I didn’t have an engagement ring handy—but the realization had come to me that I wanted her in my life not temporarily but permanently, so I fashioned a little sprig of grass into a ring, tying the ends together with a tiny knot, and I put it on her finger, and she did her best to keep it there as we walked back. She was crying. I suppose I was, too.
19
Women don’t like it when you make generalizations about them. Everybody is someone special, they will say. However, I will be so bold as to assert that when you propose marriage and a lifelong commitment to support and sustain one of them, the woman in question tends to receive the offer with sweet tenderness rather than scorn even if she ultimately rejects you. Women—here’s another generalization again, go ahead, reader, sue me—love to be loved, whereas love, for many men, is often a pothole in the highway of life. For many men, sexual attraction followed by marriage is the ultimate bait and switch. Furthermore, women are moved by professions of love even when they themselves are unable to return love in any of its forms. I am of course speaking hypothetically, but there was nothing hypothetical about my love for Trey or hers for me, or so it seemed, and we set a date for going to the courthouse to solemnize the nuptials. We did not plan to dress up for the occasion, but we did have to arrange the move of some of her belongings into my house, space being limited among the two teenaged children and Lena’s (almost) live-in boyfriend, Pete, and what I assumed would be Joe’s eventual introduction to me and everyone else of the first guy he would love and want to bring home. Life, in other words, was as complicated as ever, if not more so.
For the time being, Trey would keep her house and therefore many of her belongings over there, with the house serving as a warehouse of her accumulations, but she would transfer her essentials (clothes, sewing machine, and knickknacks) to this house and to our spacious bedroom. We bought a dresser for her and put it near the bedroom window, and certain of her odds and ends found their way into the basement near the antique one-ton RCA color television and the antique Betamax tape player. By January we had worked out about 50 percent of what went where, and by the end of the month we were married. We hadn’t eloped exactly, but given the way we did it, there were no fireworks, wedding toasts or speeches, drunkenness, dancing, rice throwing, one-night stands among the guests, or tin cans attached to the getaway car. We just said our vows before a witness and a judge, and we left the rest to circumstance. When you’ve got what we have, you don’t need much ceremony.
Being married to Trey improved my mood (I didn’t feel like an outcast anymore), and I had almost forgotten about Generomics and their predictions. But I hadn’t forgotten about Burt Kindlov. I had wanted to, but fate wouldn’t let me, so I couldn’t. For one thing, I continued to send Cheryl money, even more money for the roof replacement that hadn’t happened yet, and money for a healthcare professional who dropped in on Cheryl and Burt every few days to help in Burt’s rehabilitation. If you are a successful insurance agent like me, trustworthy and decent, you can make a respectable living, but you can’t support everybody in the world, particularly Cheryl and Burt, for whom I had small love and very little empathy and minimal interest. Also, I was anticipating the college expenses that Lena would incur next year as a freshman; even with a summer job and the part-time job to follow, once she enrolled, she would, I knew, come up short financially. I was watching my pennies, is what I’m saying.
* * *
—
I had not been over to Cheryl and Burt’s house for a visit. Kingsboro is not a large community, and as a rule we are friendly and familial here, but after Burt’s rant in the hospital, to say nothing of the way he had treated Joe, and the fact that he was living with my ex-wife, I didn’t feel a single drop of the milk of human kindness, as it’s called. Interesting that the expression includes the word “milk” and not “gasoline” or “olive oil.” Why not the “water of human kindness”? I didn’t feel any of those liquid things for Burt—just the opposite, in fact. Perhaps I felt the gasoline of antipathy. You could supply your own metaphors here.
So that was how things stood when the phone rang on a Saturday morning just before lunch. I took the call in the kitchen, and that landline does not happen to have caller ID, just my luck. It was Burt. “Is this you?” he asked. He has a slurry voice like a drunk disc jockey working past midnight, easy to recognize.
“Yes,” I said. “Who’s this?”
“This is Brock Hobson,” he said.
“No, it isn’t. Burt,” I said, “you’re confused. I’m Brock Hobson, not you.”
“Oh? Is that right?” he asked. It sounded like “riiiiiaaaaaght.” He was having a problem with vowels, to say nothing of his confusion of personal identities. I was interested that he thought he was me. “Who are you whatever to say who you are?” he asked nonsensically. “What gives you the riiiaaaght? Listen,” he said. “I’ve got a thing or two to tell you, I’ve had time to think about it, you lousy son-of-a-bitch bastard. I’ve had a lotta time to think about you and what a piece-of-nothing shit you are, and a menace to society.”
“Oh, really? What are your thoughts? Tell me.” Sometimes you can’t turn away from the bad movie, especially if it’s about you.
Whereupon he launched into a largely unprintable tirade, using bits and pieces of R/Q Dynamics (including their fixation on lethargy-inducing plastic particles in our drinking water), along with other theories straight from “the Commandant” (R. Stan Drabble himself), and then veering off into a list of my personal failings that had something to do with how I had treated members of my family. Interspersed with these attacks on my character were his loathsome sidebar social commentaries, mostly about minorities. You can’t reproduce his talk without being contaminated by it. I will therefore try to give the gist of what he said, while redacting the unprintable contents. You can imagine what’s missing.
“You know who you remind me of?” he said, his voice sounding like an audible sneer. “You remind me of those ███ who ███ ███ ███ and just expect the ████████, those dumb ██████████. ██████████ I misunderestimated you. You █████ are just dragging the country down, you and those ██ ████ who never ███ and expect the ███████████ to ██████████. And something else: You know what Cheryl told me about you? She said that ██████████ and that ███, and she said that you were so ████ that she couldn’t stand to █████████ with you anymore. It’s too bad that we’re down on our luck and that I’m ████ on account of we still need that money to get by. I shoulda been friendly to you but I can’t abide freakshow scum at the bottom of the ocean like yourself. It’s not like ███ like those ███ ████ and █████ who never ██████████. The Commandant talks about people like you, and he says—”
“Stop.”
