by Roy Freirich
The man smiles, pained. “Neither of us drink, no.”
What wild, lost youth could have turned these two into teetotalers? Unimaginable.
“Now . . . your medications?” Sam bends to the chart. “Just your Lovastatin, Ed? And Lenore, your diuretic, Duranol?” He glances up with an encouraging smile.
They simply nod, but then Ed begins, “Well, I was on another statin, but they thought—”
“Let’s talk about your room, your bed, did you sleep the first night you were here?”
They nod, immediately, no equivocation there, not that it clarifies anything.
“Okay, that’s good, but—”
“The bed is wonderful, I think, it has a pillow top mattress—”
Ed can’t resist. “Must be new, because they usually indent in a few months, and then you’re stuck. All those stories, the reviews online—”
“Any strange odors or noises on the second night? The air conditioning in the room?”
Now they think, or appear to. Ed’s leg is jerking up and down, his heel tap tapping the linoleum. Lenore blinks rapidly. The hyper-activity could be a clue, but to what?
“Anything at all different the second night?” Sam presses.
Ed and Lenore shake their heads in unison. Until Ed remembers, “Well, sure, one thing: neither of us could sleep.”
Sam lifts his gaze slowly to meet theirs. “O . . .kay. Let’s run some completely unnecessary tests. Blood panel, urine sample, so we can do our part to increase the costs of health care for all. Okay with you?”
Lenore smiles weakly. Ed shrugs.
−−−
Minutes later, Sam glances quickly at the chart Paula has prepped for the next patient, and knows the name: Carl Blonner, GTE lineman, in last week, in fact, for a quick tetanus shot after a minor laceration in the field: right hand, rusty nail.
Sam rolls the rattling little stool out from under the countertop and sits. He and Blonner share the wry, simpatico connection of active bachelors, though Blonner might not know that Sam’s less of one these days. “Hey Carl, what brings you? The hand okay?”
Ungainly on the exam table, Carl fidgets, his eyes narrowed into a wince. Sam is grateful, at first, to hear today’s complaint: a severe headache, gradual onset, with some Parade Magazine-style speculation. “Power lines, they’re saying now, can eventually affect people, EMF. I don’t worry, but, I mean, environmental factors are factors.”
A quick neurologic exam turns up nothing. Carl’s eyes track, and sensation, proprioception, reflexes, and therefore nerve induction, all look good. Sam draws some blood, proffers a codeine and aspirin scrip, and some casual advice: “Shut your windows, pull your curtains. Try dim and quiet for a change. Maybe get some sleep.”
“What I’ve been telling you.”
They trade a smirk as Sam scribbles a scrip, tears off the page, and hands it over. “Take one of those. Check back tomorrow if you don’t feel better, you know where to find me. We’ll run a few tests meanwhile. I’ll send Paula in.” He gives his quick smile and edges out.
When Sam and Paula confer in the hall, she shakes her head at the coincidence. “Next-door neighbors, Carla and Jim? Up all night, too.”
“Maybe they ran late at the Pier View again. Had the karaoke cranked up too loud?” Even as Sam offers it up, he replays the hours, and the sounds he knows by heart, of last night’s sleeplessness. “Though I guess I didn’t hear it.”
“So . . .”
“Yeah, no. I didn’t sleep so well either.”
She glances up with knowledgeable, amused eyes, but her gaze wanders over his shoulder and her faint smile grows fainter, as her head tilts curiously.
He hesitates, and then his eyes follow her gaze out to the waiting area, where others have entered and sat in the salmon-colored plastic chairs along the back wall: an elderly man in a jacket and tie stares at an upside-down magazine; a woman applies dark lipstick, a crooked slash. Just beyond the plate glass, in the lane outside, grizzled charter hand Dale or Walt dances clumsily by himself, earbud wires dangling, his face tilted skyward, eyes shut tight.
6
Outrigger, Galleon, Spindrift. The Jeep leaves ruts as Chief roars past another lane’s beach steps. He knows these by heart, and past a few more he’ll be at Barnacle, where a frantic weekender has just phoned in a semi-coherent domestic disturbance complaint.
Two dead old-timers aside, he’s seen enough full moon crazy already today, though nothing yet as dire. There was the new kid in Bon Soiree Frozen Yogurt who screwed up the freezer thermostat and slipped in a puddle of melted Espresso Chip and Banana Manna and thought it was all a big joke. Add the shark-boater who charted the inlet forty years ago and this morning ran aground and maydayed, and then failed to give his correct position, sending the bluefishing fleet to the ass-end of the island and back, radioing colorful language. Silliest of all: the FD auxiliary who sat and dialed his own cell phone again and again, cursing when he couldn’t get through.
Just ahead, a small crowd of beachgoers has gathered before a big, boxy post-modern beach house, jeering or cheering, hard to say. Chief pulls up and climbs out to see the crowd is staring up at a wild-haired woman standing three stories up at the edge of the roof, clearly naked beneath a half-tied bathrobe. She’s not unattractive, but her eyes are frightening, wide with terror, and her face twitches with revulsion. A few of the guys in the crowd seem dazed, just slack-jawed ogling, entranced by the possibility of a breast exposed or a flash of dark triangle between her legs, but Chief only sees crazy and pathetic in the spectacle, and even worse, sad.
Bits of voices find him: “—Chief!”
“—hey—”
“—drunk, you ask me . . . crazy . . .”
On the roof, the woman’s mouth twitches, like someone about to be sick, but words emerge, shouted slowly as if to a child, “Make it . . . fucking . . . STOP!” She slowly lifts a hand and points over their heads, behind them.
Chief glances back behind them all, but there’s nothing, just fifty yards of empty kelp-strewn beach and the flat blue-gray ocean, which seems to hesitate, and then gather itself up into a waist-high wave that falls apart, gushing onto wet sand.
Most of the crowd laughs, but some fall silent, oddly cowed, perhaps considering it; the sound of the surf is incessant, even insistent maybe, once you start to think of it that way, but why would you?
Chief steps closer and calls up to her, “Ma’am? Can we talk for a minute? Can you just stay right there while we do?” Steady and slow wins the race.
Behind the woman now, a man appears, her husband? “Baby?” he pleads. “Come on, now, come on back. You’re just tired.”
She wavers, and the crowd goes still, until she finally lets out a long breath like a sob, sagging, enervated. Her husband or boyfriend puts his hand out, and she takes it and collapses into his arms.
The crowd boos, hooting catcalls of disappointment and derision.
Chief looks at them all, disbelieving, but what’s to do? It’s all bozos, all the time this year, and there’s no law against it.
Inside their rented beach house for the debrief, the woman grips her robe tightly around her throat and seems sheepish and sensible enough at the moment—over-tired, she explains, from lack of sleep. The man—not her husband it turns out, but player enough to book the whole place for a weekend date—makes his eyes round with sympathy as Chief hands her one of Sam’s cards.
“See Dr. Sam Carlson, Pines Beach Urgent Care, if you feel yourself getting anxious again.”
“Sure, Dr. Carlson. I’ve seen him,” the boyfriend offers, as if to reassure.
He and his date nod, sober and earnest, but fidgety, as if they can’t wait for Chief to be gone so they can go at it on the kitchen floor. Go figure.
Climbing back into his Jeep, he squints out at the crowd sluggishly dispersing. A few
frat-types meet his disapproving gaze through the glass, smirking, and he keeps the stare on until they shrug and turn away, murmuring and laughing.
Chief dons his earbud, just as his phone chimes. He clicks through. “Chief Mays.”
A stranger’s voice, a woman’s, shrill and urgent, crackles at him: “Thank God. You have my boy, I think. I heard you have one. Thank God.”
Chief leans forward, cupping his hand over his earbud. “Ma’am, yes, we do. Come to the Urgent Care Clinic in Pines Beach. You are gonna have to—”
“Clinic? But—is he okay?”
“Ma’am, I’m gonna need some information. Names, first. How long has he been missing?”
Silence. Chief touches his earbud, tilts his head. “Hello?”
Nothing. Damn. He shakes his head, fishes out his cell to check his connection bars—all good, even as it rings again.
But it’s Carlson now, of course, nagging: “Chief, I’ve had some patients here, they—it’s—you get any noise complaints last night?”
“Among others. It’s full moon crazy out here. But good news? The boy’s mother called. On her way to the clinic to pick him up.”
7
The larger question looms, of course, and when Sam reaches her, Kathy isn’t shy about asking it: how does a mother lose a child for a day and a night, if not more, and not call the police?
“We’ll know soon enough,” he assures her.
“Huh. I just got him cleaned up, too. Well . . . we’re on our way.”
They click off, less than entirely relieved.
Other questions linger, too many, and Sam steals a moment between patients for microscopy and gram-testing blood samples, as good as it gets in an urgent care. He adjusts the eyepiece that gives him back the shadow of his own lashes until he blinks and rolls focus to reveal the lighted circle of cells on the slide, swimming in Brownian motion. In sample after sample, nothing presents out of normal range, nothing but the reminder: we are our cells, and in a droplet of blood magnified a thousand times, we are anybody, nameless as the next.
He moves to the back hallway utility counter, pulling up lab results on the frustratingly slow desktop computer. He scrolls to teetotalers Comptroller Ed and wife Lenore, just in. Gut checks first, always, for small intestine issues and resultant heightened glutamine levels, which can sometimes but not often create excitability. No, nothing. Levels well within range.
Infection: viral, bacterial? No WBC elevation, and none of the rapid-result antigen testing he has available indicate anything.
Tox screen for amphetamine, excess alcohol? Nothing. Heavy metals, other poisons? No, not that anything in their narrative suggests use or exposure.
Scrolling, scrolling.
Next patient, Carl Blonner, local GTE field employee. Click: same negatives as above, with a touch of hypercholesterolemia. No help.
Paula’s next-door neighbors Carla and Jim’s results yield less, though Carla has a touch of borderline proteinuria, suggesting a full kidney workup might eventually be in order.
Charter boater Walt’s scores reveal nothing, though a bump on the back of his red neck looks like another basal cell carcinoma, just in time for his quarterly skin check with his mainland dermatologist.
In all, there are simply no common anomalies.
Distantly, the clinic landline is ringing, and he barely hears Paula pick up, her voice low in measured, reassuring tones.
She peeks around the little lab room doorframe, phone still in hand, with news that can’t wait. “Sam? Lady on her way, who thought her boy was gone? Found him under the porch next door, playing fort with a neighbor kid.”
Sam winces. Good news for her, much less so for anyone else. He checks his watch: 5:26, after CPS regular hours, and well after the last ferry from anyplace else. A deeper worry intrudes, and he shakes it off with a sigh.
He dials the chief to head him off.
“The mother show up yet?” Chief demands. “What’s she saying? I’m on the way.”
“She’s not. She just called, found her kid.”
“Jesus. She—”
“Didn’t you ask her how long her boy was missing?”
Chief’s tone turns chilly. “I’m not too sure how you do it back home, but we like to ask the questions in person here.”
Sam takes a breath, waits, lets it go. “Child Services, here tomorrow? It’s high season, we have enough on our plate, I know you agree.”
“Tell me. People need to get some sleep, if you ask me.”
The pieces of the day arrange themselves suddenly, into an even more unwelcome, disquieting, bigger picture. “People need to—say again?”
“Sleep, what I said.” After an odd, wary beat of hesitation: “Why?”
Sam begins to pace. “Huh. We’re seeing it here—”
“Seeing—”
“Well, maybe a dozen insomnia complaints. And there’s the possible sleeping pill overdose this morning—”
Another beat. “So . . . what’s it mean, Sam?”
“I’m working on it. I ran everything on site I could, random-sampled urine, blood, even drug-tested. Trace of cannabis, some high cholesterol. But nothing across the board. And there’s no other symptoms, white blood cell counts all in range, so I don’t see how we’re looking at anything infectious. I sent them home, said to check back tomorrow if it keeps up. There’s no reason to think it will. Fatigue is cumulative.”
“Right. But, same question.”
Has he understood nothing? “Like I said, working on it.” Sam tries to keep the edge of annoyance from his voice, but fails. “Just . . . Child Services, okay?”
Next call: Kathy again, who’s good-natured, as always, but how can there not be issues for a forty-plus woman, childless and suddenly confronted with responsibility for one? Luckily, “discussion” is not Kathy’s style, a relief in so many ways. They both know enough to extend the honeymoon phase as long as possible, but it requires a constructive non-engagement with the rest of the world, where the lives of others will inevitably present questions about their own.
Blll-iiing! His cell rings again, startling him. Do we ever really finish a thought, or do others just crowd it offstage?
“Sam? It’s Howard, thought you might know why, we’ve had a run down here. On all the over-the-counter sleep meds. PM aspirin, melatonin, even Nyquil. People are asking for prescription. What’s going on?”
Sam’s hand tightens into a fist around the phone. “Howard, check your pharmacy stock. And nothing to anyone without a scrip.”
“Sure, I know that, will do, but what—”
“I’ll get back.”
He clicks off and turns in place, gaze wandering as if for a clue, and it falls on more evidence everywhere, it seems. In the waiting area, a thin, sallow man paces, murmuring to himself in argument. Hair awry, in mismatched clothes, a woman smiles beatifically at nothing, her eyes preternaturally wide, unblinking. A little girl shows her drawing to her mother, and even from here he can make it out: a frightening mess of smeared black crayon.
He thinks, and grabs the keyboard and brings up a Google search field, rapidly typing:
CDC
He pauses and looks down the hall again to the waiting room, gaze drifting now to the feet of these patients—in flip-flops trailing beach sand—and to their bathing suits, some still damp enough to darken a beach wrap or a shirt pulled on over.
He backspaces, deleting, and types instead:
EPA
8
“Yes, I’m a physician.” On the line with a second EPA flack, Sam keeps his voice carefully level.
He paces the hall past Exam Three, where a wide-eyed, improbably thin teenager waits, and then about-faces and heads back past Exam Two (a bee sting!) and One (generalized itching?).
He glances out at the waiting area again and thinks of asking And
rew to sweep the sandy linoleum, but Carratuck is nothing but a sand bar with houses on it, anyway. Pointless.
“And you are requesting—?” Flack needs a recap, before Sam’s even started.
“A conversation, for starters, and then water, air and soil samples tested.” He brings the cell phone closer to his mouth, as if it will help persuade. Maybe environmental hazards only turn up during business hours and they’re all past ready to head home to family and television, but basic prudence and avoidance of doubt demand he gets a hearing, at least.
“Can you tell us what you think you’re looking for out there?” Flack wants to know. He’s jotted her name, Suzanne Calder, and her title, “Assistant Field Coordinator,” but her qualifications are nowhere in evidence yet.
“No, honestly, not at this point—some sort of agent capable of—”
“—what signs of illness can you describe, exactly?” She’s working down a checklist, of course, and it makes sense; they need to cull the cranks from the initial incident reports, or else fly helicopter HASMAT teams everywhere, all hours, every time a stoned high school kid makes a prank phone call or some conspiracy theorist thinks we’re all being poisoned.
“No physical illness, but behavioral changes. Insomnia. A dozen official cases, and we’ve had a run on over-the-counter sleeping pills at our local drugstore, as well.”
“So . . . no underlying physical illness. Any . . . fatalities?”
Is she disappointed? “Do I need to have some?”
“Sir, I’m doing what I can to help you with your situation. We—”
“Two deaths, waiting on forensics, but it looks like Lotosil—sleeping pill—overdose. Insomnia would certainly be a contributing factor.”