Almost Complete Short Fiction, page 44
He could imagine Angel smiling through her surgical mask.
“Miles?” she said.
“I dunno. . . .”
“Please. . . .”
“If it were anyone else but you and her, I wouldn’t. OK, Angel, my ass is on the line now too. Do it good, lady.”
Angel glanced back at Thorny. “Looks like all our rears are uncovered,” he said.
“OK. I’m going to reestablish cardiopulmonary bypass and cardioplegia.”
What happened next was a blur, like watching the operation on a fast forward. Unhindered by human reaction time, Angel showed her full range of talents. Much more now, Thomy realized, than what the consortium had built into her. Tools seemed to fly into her hands as she plucked them off their trays unerringly. Microwaldos buzzed like hummingbirds. Thorny could follow only the large-scale details in real time. The heart was stopped and laid open, the valve repaired, and the entry closed in a matter of minutes. Angel restarted the heart as the doors to the OR flew open.
“You can’t do that, Angel! Benson, make her stop!” Creighton shouted as he caught on to what was in progress. A first, Thorny realized—Creighton had addressed Angel directly, admitting, essentially, her personhood. However, Thorny thought grimly, it was too late, and he would choose to ignore Creighton’s accidental trip to reality.
“No,” Thorny responded, “Angel and I can do it. With Angel, I can do more than any specialist, and be a friend to my patients as well. You should consider retraining in family practice, Elvis—you might learn to like it.”
“Do you want to close, Dr. Creighton?” Angel asked, surgically.
Angel’s next appearance before the Director was at a meeting of the full medical staff in the ground floor auditorium. Winter was in full cold bore again outside, and the coat racks were full of greatcoats and stocking caps, not a few of which were hand-knit white with big red hearts on them; Thorny’s yarn bill was beginning to get significant.
Linda Coombs was accounting for some of that; Thorny was helping her finance her boutique by buying the raw material. Last he heard, she was getting friendly with a skier who’d bought a sweater from her. She was writing a book about her experience, with Angel’s memory to help, of course.
The atmosphere in the meeting was much more friendly this time, now that Elvis Creighton no longer sat as department head. The “official” line was that Creighton had resigned from the staff to pursue a better employment opportunity in another state. But word travels fast in a hospital, and everyone was talking of how the Director had invited him to review, in her presence, a huge folder filled with formal complaints filed against him by patients and staff—the last few from Linda and Nurse Miles.
When he was done, the story went, she had smiled thinly and raised both eyebrows.
Thorny’s report and recommendations concerning Angel had been accepted, unconditionally.
“Angel,” the Director called. “Would you come up here?”
Angel smiled and walked up to the dais. The Director first handed her a frame wrapped in brown paper, which Angel unwrapped. She read what was in the frame and gave a squeal of delight.
“What is it?” Nurse Miles called out.
“It says I’ve completed my internship!” Angel gushed. “Thank you! But how did you manage that without my being a person?”
There was a bit of a gleam in the Director’s eyes as she answered, and a twitch upward at the corners of her normally severely straight, thin, lips. “Forgive me if I found an obstetrician’s solution to that little problem. This,” she produced a simple vanilla envelope and read it, “is for you, Dr. C. Thornhart Benson. Congratulations.”
He went forward and accepted the envelope. Angel looked at them in confusion.
Thorny opened it and then laughed hard and long. “Well, assuming this holds up in court—”
An eyebrow went up and Thorny coughed a retreat. “Ahem. Angel, it appears I’ve finally become a father. It’s a birth certificate. Yours.”
His Father’s Voice
Paradoxically, the ongoing search for better ways to store information makes it harder and harder to read old records. But if the incentive is strong enough. . . .
Scott caught himself staring at the bare wood and web-cluttered beams of his late aunt’s attic instead of packing, but he found it hard to concentrate. Ten days ago, Scott hadn’t even known who his biological parents were. Now, his search for his heritage had led to a dusty cardboard box in this dusty attic, filled with faded and broken moments of the long dead hopes of a father and mother he’d never known. Carlo Valdez had been a poor man with a little talent who had tried so hard to be more than a cog in the universal machine, and Theresa Rodriguez a plain girl who had once upon a time seen the light of his father’s soul and been momentarily blinded.
Theresa, it turned out, had died years ago, but her sister Maria had lived in this house they shared, increasingly frail, saving everything for “someone, someday, to make amends.” Scott’s arrival seemed to have completed something for her; he’d known her only a week, but in hours of talk, they’d begun to be friends.
Now Aunt Maria was gone too, her house filled with strangers going through things trying to decide who would get what. Some were so closely related to him that he had the uncanny feeling of looking in a mirror when he talked to them.
Thank goodness it was a loving family; the arguments were all of the “here, you take this, she would have wanted you to have it,”—“No, you take it, it meant so much to you. . . .” variety. Then everyone had been too kind to even speculate that Scott’s surprise appearance might have hastened Aunt Maria’s heart attack.
The pictures in the album weren’t faded, though some of them were black and white. They’d been treated well and, except for the quaint clothes and old cars, looked like they’d just come back from the photo lab. Some pictures were of the people downstairs in their younger days, some of strangers.
But a couple of them included a thin girl with long straight brown hair, thick glasses and buck teeth in an artfully sophisticated pose: his biological mother, Theresa Rodriguez. The house was full of her, too, but as an older, more accomplished woman, in whose eyes and face the world weariness was not affected. There was little of her counterculture years here, a decade-long flight from reality that, Aunt Maria said, really ended only when they heard of Carlo’s death. Scott had two boxes full of Theresa Rodriguez: full of photos, clippings, school papers, and other things that kind people, trying to make up for what they’d done forty years ago, insisted he take.
Also, there was one precious picture, not one of the best, but good enough, of his father in an apron in front of a barber shop. He could see himself in his father; short but wideshouldered and deep-chested. The same pattern of baldness, offset by a neat, well-trimmed moustache. If Carlo Valdez had been nearsighted like his son, he hadn’t worn glasses; or hadn’t been able to afford them. If so, Scott thought, that might explain some of his father’s people problems.
Scott understood all about people problems. The person who had come up with the concept of the “alpha male” would probably have given Scott an “upsilon” or “phi.” He’d been fourteen by the time the school had discovered he was mildly nearsighted; too late for all the unrecognized acquaintances, miscopied assignments, and athletic failures.
With his build, Scott should have been a football player, but he was, as it worked out, an untalented but adequate and diligently informed keyboard musician who supplemented his “maintenance engineer’s” income by fixing electronic and acoustic instruments, playing at weddings, and teaching. His one stroke of luck, a few years back now, had been to help compose and play the keyboard on the pop hit, “Rather be Blue,” that had paid the mortgage and still produced a few hundred a year in royalties. But people in the business had got to know him, shunned him, and he’d had to fall back on janitorial jobs to support himself.
Carlo Valdez had been a barber to make ends meet. But the man had been a singer in his heart and in his spare time; a basso in the Tri-city Lyric Theater and chorus for years, who had even changed the spelling of his first name to sound more Italian.
Then, at the age of fifty-four, with no savings to speak of, after years of romantic failures painfully documented in the bundle of letters, Carlo had made love with the stage-struck Theresa. It happened, the letters revealed, the night after his one and only performance as Don Giovanni as a last minute substitute for the Lyric Theater. A homely, artsy-craftsy girl throwing caution to the wind and an over-the-hill want-to-be had tried, for one night, to be real people. In 1964, the pregnancy had been a major scandal.
“People were so stupid and cruel, back then,” one of his new cousins had said. “Theresa really loved him. He only lived three blocks away, and they’d talk when she came home from school. He would have married her, but your grandfather wouldn’t have any part of that. So he left town, she left town, and you went up for adoption. She found Carlo years later, when she was on her own. She was a secretary, you know, worked for Peabody and Cramer for thirty years.”
And a street and commune hippie for ten years before that, but only Maria had told him that. Scott had just nodded. “Yes, she found him. They wrote after that; the letters were in the box.”
“Theresa,” the cousin added, “got that box in the attic after he died; it arrived UPS from his boarding house saying it was all there was left and that Carlo had wanted her to have it. Then she moved in with Maria, and the box came with her. They looked for you, did you know? If you’d only been a few years earlier—”
“I didn’t know,” he’d told them. “I didn’t know.”
He’d lost his concentration again. He looked down from the rafters to the cardboard box. Dust. A photo album. Old letters. Programs from various productions Carlo had been in. Discharge papers—Carlo had been in World War II. Some vinyl phonograph disks, heat warped, cracked, in cardboard dust jackets. Unplayable. Pinza, Callas, Tucker, Tebaldi and what was this? Tri-city Lyric Theater! Excerpts from The Student Prince, The Mikado, The Merry Widow, and Don Giovanni. Don Giovanni? It had been that live performance; Carlo was listed in the title role. Why had they recorded that one? Was it the only night they’d had first-rate recording equipment? Or was it the best?
Impatient with excitement, Scott tried to pull the record from the dust jacket. But it was too warped to slide out easily, and before he thought to simply cut the dust jacket, it broke completely in two under the stress of his pull. He extracted the pieces and looked at the simple inexpensive label.
Scott groaned aloud. Damn! Was there some kind of curse running through his blood that decreed that his kind would get to touch the goal of their dreams once, then have it snatched away? Scott wanted to hit something, slam his hand into it and feel pain. But that would make too much noise, and then he’d have to explain and deal with the sympathy.
He took a deep breath instead and focused his attention on the fine grooves of the broken record; the music, his father’s voice, were still there if he could think of some way to repair a record as broken and warped as the artist’s life. He wrapped the pieces in an old newspaper so they wouldn’t get further scratched, and fitted them gently, reverently, back into the jacket.
There must be something someone could do about that, he thought. Scott’s inheritance, the one good thing in his father’s life. Aunt Maria said Theresa had listened to that record over and over in her last month, dreaming of what might have been as her cancer consumed her drugnumbed body. Theresa had hung on until the turn of the century, but had not woken up on January first, 2002.
Scott carefully packed everything in the fresh book-pack moving box he’d brought, taped it up, addressed it to himself, and carried it downstairs.
There were polite good-byes all around and then, stuffed with fajitas and tacos, mellow with a Corona, he let his rental car drive him to the airport.
He was still distracted and disconnected when Betty picked him up in their ancient Reliant and brought him home from San Jose Airport to their two-bedroom ranch house in a cheap part of Mountain View. It had been built well over half a century ago, more for tight-budgeted junior officers from the old Navy field than for software executives. But even with the mortgage paid, the taxes were almost more than they could afford. The neighborhood was poor, but relaxed; people who had bought recently were poor from making payments, long-term residents had always been poor. The streets were lined with old, dented, gas-engined pick-ups, and the air was multicultural with outdoor cooking from everywhere around the planet.
Scott took his precious box into the garage through the rear door to his shop. There was, he realized, the same sense of neatness and order to his workbench as in his father’s photo album and the other things in that old carboard box. Carlo Valdez had not had much, but as Scott’s new relatives assured him, what he had was always in good order. So with his son.
Scott had taken two years of junior college physics, but didn’t go on. He’d really been more interested in music. His adoptive father died drunk in a car wreck and he’d gone to work after school to help make ends meet. That had been the end of good grades. He got his AA and did band gigs.
In ’95, the China War caught his reserve unit, and when he got back, Mom—she would always be Mom to him—had lost her job. He’d gone to work full time for the school then and played for money at night. When Mom passed, Betty, a simple woman from a good family whom he had thought of only as a friend on the job, had offered to help with the inheritance taxes in exchange for the spare room.
That had lasted two weeks, Scott remembered with a smile. A simple, determined woman, who’d seen something in him no one else had seen.
Staring at walls again, he reproached himself. Somehow, he would do something to make her right, something for Theresa and Carlo, something to close a wound half a century old. Back to work.
He spread paper towels on the workbench, opened the box, placed the broken halves of Don Giovanni gently on them, and stared. Somewhere, in the neat rows of boxes that lined the garage, was an old Girard turntable. He searched, found it, found connecting wires, found their old amp, used alligator clips to attach the speakers from the old boom box he had for companionship in the shop, and ran the ridges of his thumb under the stylus. Nothing.
Three hours later, he’d found the broken wire, soldered it, tested again and was rewarded by a hollow grating sound. Very good. Betty called him to go to bed.
After work the next day, he had disassembled, cleaned and lubed the turntable. Then he got it to play one of the unbroken records, after a fashion; it wowed as the needle went up and down the warped hills of the old disk. Nevertheless, progress.
Back to the recording of Don Giovanni. He blew the dust off and studied the broken edges again. With a dozen small clamps—you never have too many clamps, he thought—he managed to hold the edges back together. They fit. He got the Super Glue, carefully wet each edge and pressed them together, using large rubber bands around the clamp mounts to hold everything tight.
Two days later, he tried to play the record. But it broke again the first time the stylus hit the imperfect joint.
“What’s the matter, hon?” Betty asked as he crawled into bed. She levered herself up on an arm and looked at him with that motherly concern that falls full on the husband in a childless family. She’d never made any pretense at beauty; too strong-featured, too pear-shaped. But she ate sensibly, did physical work all day, and exercised those muscles that didn’t get what they needed that way. Her spare, big-boned figure wasn’t stylish; but it was pretty good for a woman in her forties.
“It broke again.”
“There’s got to be someone who can fix it.”
He stroked her gently with the back of his hand and she smiled.
“Yeah. But they’re expensive.”
“It means a lot to you. I’d rather put money into recovering your Dad’s voice than another dinner out.”
Scott laughed. “I’ll ask around.” Then he slid over to her and they began to make love. She was the only one he’d ever been with, and he was too grateful to be curious about others. She was heaven.
Afterward, they had the house turn the bedroom wall set on, and took a virtual trip over Pluto, courtesy of C-Span and NASA’s latest probe. It had vast areas of rolling, washboard-like hills, blown up dramatically to ten times their real scale by hype-desperate NASA publicists. Various geologists tried, without too much success, to explain the hills, and Scott wondered what they really looked like. Betty giggled as his fingers mimicked their eye’s virtual journey.
Scott’s thoughts drifted from Pluto’s valleys, to Clyde Tombaugh, and a meditation on persistence. When a chance to sing Don Giovanni had come along, his father, against all odds, had been ready for it. Never quit, Scott told himself. Never quit.
“Hmmm,” the Audion engineer muttered for the third time as he examined the broken record. Then finally, “Yes, I think we can do that. We’ll make rubber casts of each half, splice those together, and make a hard cast on that negative. That’s going to lose a little fidelity, but not too much. Then we’ll play it into the remastering system; you ought to get a pretty good CD out of it.”
Scott nodded, then asked the hard question.
“How much?”
“Not that much, really. Less than ten thousand, I’d guess. Our business people do the estimating though, so you’ll have to talk to them.”
Scott nodded again. “Well, thanks for your help,” he told the man with a confident sound in his voice, shook hands, and found his way out.
He didn’t stop by the business office and he didn’t let them see him cry.
Scott saw the garage sale on Calderon on his way home, and stopped because he was in the mood to buy something at a reasonable price. He noted some technical books on the card table next to a dirty laser-toaster. He shook his head; facing arrays of high-powered diode lasers, impossibly expensive twenty years ago, a top-of-the-line consumer product a decade ago, a piece of five-dollar junk now.
