The Speed of Life

by James Victor Jordan

  I tried to escape the morbid feelings by intellectualizing, remembering Albert Camus’s The Stranger, Arthur Koestler’s Dialogue with Death, Sigmund Freud’s theories about the nostalgia for death, and Homer’s timé and kleos. What was I doing? Relapsing into philosophical conjecture to ameliorate despair? I knew better, so, wanting to assuage my melancholia, to return to the present, to the safety of what I could see and touch, I said to Abe, “Your accent? Where were you born?”

  “Ethiopia,” he said, and then after a pause, “There was a pogrom.” Fifty-five thousand Ethiopian Jews had been forced from their homes in Gondar, becoming refugees in the deserts of the Sudan where forty thousand of them had perished. As a toddler, he was among the rescued refugees who were brought to Israel. In the absorption shelters in Jerusalem, his mother was diagnosed with promyelocytic leukemia. Bunny and Harold brought the family to Los Angeles. “The chemo prolonged Mother’s life. If it hadn’t, I never would have known her,” he said.

  Abe’s phone rang, he took the call. While he spoke, I grappled with the contradictions – Bunny the humanitarian, Bunny the advocate of Abolishing Medicare, Bunny the Tea Party fund raiser. The phrase “Abolish Medicare as We Know It” began repeating in my mind like one of those obnoxious Christmas jingles you can’t get out of your head, and I realized I’d heard that actual phrase before, somewhere. Using my smart phone, I logged onto the American College of Surgeons website, entered my passcode, and then entered Bunny’s name in the search feature.

  A page titled “Rachel Siegel, M.D., F.A.C.S” appeared. It listed her college and medical school, the hospitals where she was on staff, and medical books and articles she had authored or co-authored. There was also a list of her articles in popular magazines. I selected one published about eighteen months earlier: “Abolish Medicare as We Know It.”

  Using multi-tiered economic models, the article proposed that the government directly run hospital and clinics for Medicare patients much as it successfully dispensed healthcare to servicemen and women, cutting out health-insurance profit centers. It proposed that the government, like health-insurance companies, negotiate prices with pharmaceutical companies. Bunny also proposed that the government pay medical school tuition and expenses for all medical students. In exchange and to keep their licenses active, doctors would have to work one week without pay every year in Medicare hospitals or clinics, a plan that would be anathema to Ayn Rand, to Rand Paul, to Paul Ryan.

  I felt as if the prophet Nathan had revealed my sins and forecast my punishments. How many more nightmares would I have to endure?

  Abe pocketed his phone and said to me, “I left the hospital against medical advice.”

  He held up his espresso cup and said to Kitaru. “May I have another?”

  “I dunno,” Kitaru said. “You driving?”

  “I am,” I said.

  “All right, then,” Kitaru said, heading for the espresso machine.

  “Actually,” Abe said, “I won’t need a ride. That was Bunny. She’s on her way over. The CT scan was negative, but she can’t reach my brother, so she wants me to spend the night at her place.”

  Dolores’s was bustling. I heard snippets of conversation about the storm.

  “So how are things going with you and Bunny?” Abe said.

  “It’s over,” I said.

  “Why?”

  “She invited me to a Tea Party fund raiser.”

  “Not possible,” he said. “She believes that members of political parties are lapdogs. It means she’s crazy about you.”

  “Hardly,” I said.

  “When they talked politics, Bunny often provoked Harold. Then she’d become intransigent and Harold would say something like, ‘How can a girl with your roots lack empathy?’”

  “She doesn’t lack empathy,” I said.

  “Harold also said that Bunny made him the happiest man on the planet. When he died, Bunny donated one hundred thousand dollars to the ACLU in his name. They sent her a lifetime-membership card; she sent it back.”

  “That’s rich,” I said. “She just gave me a law school-lecture on the first amendment.”

  I put my credit card on the check.

  “Thanks,” Abe said.

  In the parking lot, slogging through a flood, ruining my shoes, I was defenseless against the silver needles of rain. The streets were rapids, the storm drains overwhelmed.

  Bunny’s BMW turned into the lot and rolled to a stop beside me.

  “It’s raining dogs and cats,” she said. “Get in.”

  Her car was warm, the leather seats supple and heated. A neon sign on the diner blinked. It said: the best of yesterday brought to you today.

  “I won’t tolerate intolerance,” she said. “What would you say if the shoe was on the other foot?”

  I thought of saying, to forgive is divine. But I couldn’t because within every woman, man, and child the well from which forgiveness springs is sui generis.

  Instead I said, “If we were on Noah’s Ark would it matter who had the shoe?”

  Part IV Ras

  The Lineup

  At three o’clock, an afternoon rainstorm precipitates a mudslide, barricading Laurel Canyon where the two-lane road twists back into Ras’s view beyond the curve a quarter mile ahead. His Prius is a link in a chain of cars inching up the hillside like a centipede. Abe, his brother and only living relative, riding shotgun, isn’t speaking to him, hasn’t said a word since they got in the car, hasn’t said a word to him for five months.

  They’re on their way to the police station in Van Nuys where Abe might be able to identify a woman in a lineup who the police believe is the hit-and-run driver who killed their father. And if they’re late, the woman – a citizen of France, which has no extradition treaty with the United States – will be released.

  The cars preceding theirs come to a standstill. The cars following them stack up like a deck of cards, as if each had been crammed into one of those too-small-compact-car parking spots in an already overcrowded lot. City of Los Angeles Transportation Department workers – wearing yellow rain jackets, floppy hats, and black boots – and motorcycle cops patrol the oncoming lane, keeping it open for the bulldozers, dump trucks, and other road-maintenance vehicles rumbling by.

  The windshield wipers beat against the rain – right, left, right, left – one hundred ten sweeps per minute, the rate of his pulse. A Beatles song, “Yesterday,” plays softly through the car’s tinny speakers. Washed-out green surgical scrubs cover his stately plump physique, his abundant belly alarmingly close to the steering wheel. His face is soft, jowls flapping beneath his chin, while Abe’s face is angular, hard, set with the fierce determination that gets him out of bed every morning before dawn for his daily run. A face that says, I’m right, even when it’s not.

  He’ll join a gym after his boards in five weeks. For now it’s a matter of priorities; there is so much to do, so many worries, the fission of time inflaming his molten anger.

  He came directly from the hospital to Abe’s apartment, where he had to wait while Abe showered and shaved and dressed in slacks, a white shirt, a Magen David that hung from a silver chain around his neck, and a tan gabardine trench coat. Lord knows what else he did as he kept Ras waiting – what was the cliché? cooling his heels? – except that didn’t describe Ras’s pacing back and forth, thinking, can we please get out of here before the rain? And then, as he fumed, the “what else” came to him: obstruction of justice.

  The possibility of being late is killing him but it’s a trifling compared to Abe’s refusal to speak to him. Ordinarily he savors silence, but now, having to tolerate it, he suffers. During the past five months he’s read Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, the Torah and the Talmud, hoping to find wisdom to help him come to terms with his dispute with Abe. He’s found nothing that would cause him to question his belief that justice is each man and each woman fulfilling G-d’s intentions for them. It would have been unjust had Einstein abandoned physics or if Beethove
n, or the Beatles for that matter, had abandoned music. G-d’s purpose for Abe is for him to become a doctor.

  Yet despite his study and prayer, despite his scoffing at cynics who described justice as a one-word oxymoron, despite his dead certainty about what justice really is, an uncertainty he doesn’t understand causes him to ask himself repeatedly, can anyone really know G-d’s purpose for them? But of course, the truly devout can know because the mind is G-d’s creation for the reception of His wisdom, the ultimate answer to the question: What is real? This was proven by Descartes some four hundred years ago, and no philosopher has disproved it since.

  If Abe can identify the hit-and-run driver, then maybe closure will enable him to receive G-d’s intentions: return to medical school and finish the two semesters that remain. This would serve justice – not revenge, though that would be sweet. Justice is what this trip to the lineup is about. And if they’re late, this justice – Abe becoming a doctor – may be denied.

  A transportation worker taps their windshield. The car in front of theirs swings into the open lane, heading back to Los Angeles, and then it’s their turn.

  “We won’t make it,” he says, maneuvering in the tangle of vehicles trying to turn around.

  “What are you worked up about?” Abe says, surprising him. “You’re not the one who’ll have to look at that woman and remember Father mangled, bleeding, dead.”

  Ras’s myopia is acute, but his peripheral vision is good enough for him to see Abe looking at him now, the question on his face as twisted as the tone of his voice. So what is the point of this interrogation? Whatever it is, this isn’t the time to start another argument. In his gut, he’s thankful Abe has spoken to him, and he knows he should just play along good naturedly, take this circuitous path that might break them out of their own gridlock, and find out what’s on his brother’s mind. But he’s not a subtle man; he knows this. It’s a limitation, a fault, something he has to live with, to be aware of, to work on all the time. But there are few things he hates more than playing head games.

  “She’ll get away with genocide,” Ras says.

  Abe says, “Will there be a war-crime trial?”

  Ras turns off the CD player. “I don’t have to be Father to know about genocide.”

  “Okay, let’s talk about the Armenians and the Turks.”

  What is Abe really asking? Is he asking about the denial of the Armenian genocide by the Turkish government? Is Abe asking a larger question about history? If events are denied, do they become less real? Unreal? If genocide is forgotten, did it occur?

  Or is the question straight forward? Does Abe just want to know if Ras knows about the World War I era relocation of the Armenians, more than a million killed, their property stolen. It was no different from the pogrom of his people, the Jews of Ethiopia, their slaughter in The Sudan, their homes in Gondar given to the ones who drove them out. It had happened in Rwanda, in Darfur, in Sri Lanka, in The Congo.

  Is Abe asking about the importance of preserving the truths about genocide, the importance of Holocaust museums? Despite the evidence in those museums of World War II of the wholesale attempts to eradicate peoples and cultures, more than a billion people – among them white supremacists, radical Muslims, other anti-Semites – deny that there had been a World War II slaughter of Jews and other people and their cultures. Is Abe asking about the more than one billion people who do not believe that there had been a September 11, 2001 attack on the New York City World Trade Center by radical Islamists? Or who believe that the attack was launched by Israel or the United States?

  Would an example of understanding genocide be found in the memoirs of the Confederate Lost Cause writers who ardently denied that the South’s attempted secession was about preserving slavery? Were the Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant sufficiently persuasive, as Grant hoped they would be, to preserve the truth: the southern oligarchy was willing sacrifice hundreds of thousands of their young men to preserve slavery to protect their wealth created by stolen labor, stolen lives?

  Plato had said that war is about getting money. Because Plato knew nothing of genocide, he was only partially correct. Ras had come to understand that war is about theft: stealing and defending wealth. Eradicating other races to enable plundering of their property is just one means of accomplishing the theft.

  Ras is impatient with these contemplations, as if his own mental wanderings – The World War II Holocaust, 9/11, Armenians, U.S. Grant, slaves and slavers – will make them late, so his mouth runs over his mind’s attempt to mediate his thoughts and he hears himself say, “What do the Turks and Armenians have to do with being late?”

  “What’s the point of talking?” Abe says, folding his arms, turning away from Ras, looking out the passenger-door window at the rain pelting the hillside.

  The cars that had been behind them start turning, trying to jump the queue, traffic moves with the alacrity of a glacier. Save for the sound of the windshield wipers swishing right, left, right, left, and the soft hum of the electric motor, there is only silence.

  Ninety minutes earlier, Ras was sitting in a conference room in the hospital’s oncology ward. Across from him on the other side of the too-large-for-the room, knotty-pine table sat Mrs. and Mr. Angelico. Ras was wedged between the table and the wall, as if sandwiched into a coffin.

  Mrs. Angelico clenched crushed tissues, her arm encircling her husband’s shoulders, her face composed. Mr. Angelico, larger than Ras, was unshaven. Purple bags bulged beneath his eyes. He held his nose with his own tissues as if to stanch a dammed flood of mucus if the prognosis were bad. The prognosis was worse than bad.

  The voice of a nurse over the intercom: “Dr. Demeke? Dr. Percival on the line.”

  Ras said, “Ben, please tell him—”

  Then Percival’s voice boomed, “Ras, Damn it. Where are the test results for Mrs. Lee?”

  “Excuse me,” Ras said, picking up the phone, his soft voice a counterpoint to Percival’s bombast. “I’m meeting with Mr. and Mrs. Angelico.”

  Percival greeted this news with silence. Ras pictured Percival’s sardonic grimace, imagined his blood pressure rising. Why hadn’t he just said he was with patients?

  Mrs. Angelico was a homemaker, caring for the family’s five children. Mr. Angelico was a financial-services worker who’d been laid off when his job had been shipped overseas. His health insurance and savings had run out months before. During an acrimonious meeting, Ras had persuaded Percival that the Angelico case had research value. When the latest treatment wasn’t working, Percival had said, “This isn’t a charity hospital.” Percival had told Ras to transfer the Angelico case to County Hospital. Ras hadn’t.

  After a brief pause, Percival said, “Give them my best wishes. Now about Mrs. Lee—”

  “Mrs. Lee is Dr. Maxwell’s patient.”

  “That so?” Percival said. Over the phone came the sound of papers rustling. Mrs. Angelico removed her arm from her husband’s shoulder, twisted, then shredded the tissue. Mr. Angelico wiped his nose with his sleeve. Then he got up from his chair, faced the wall, and tapped his forehead against it.

  When Percival came back on the line he said, “Find Maxwell!” Then he hung up.

  A half hour later, Ras held open the conference-room door. The fluorescent lights illuminated the red-silk scarf covering Mrs. Angelico’s head now bald from the effects of chemotherapy that no longer worked. Her weight had dipped to ninety pounds. She helped her husband from the room.

  Ras walked to the nurse’s station where Ben was preparing meds. By habit, Ras compared what was on the medication tray with the orders he’d written. The dosage for Mrs. Rigby, awaiting chemotherapy, was wrong. His cell rang. The caller ID said: Georges Bohem.

  Bunny had introduced her boyfriend, Georges, to Abe just one month after Father had been killed. At that time, the LAPD had come up with nothing in its supposed investigation of the hit and run. Georges had friends who had influence with high-ranking officers in the police department. And, acco
rding to Bunny, despite their age differences, Georges and his son, Dante, had become friends with Abe. Now Georges, who wouldn’t accept any fee, was his and Abe’s attorney.

  Ras answered his cell. “Georges? Can you hold for a sec?”

  Georges said, “The woman they think—”

  Ras said, “Ben, that’s four point four IUs, not forty-four.”

  “Ras?” Georges said.

  “Hey, Georges, can I call you back?”

  “A suspect in the hit and run has been apprehended,” Georges said.

  Silence – like in the moment before a guillotine drops – hung in the air. Then what Georges said next isolated Ras from his thoughts of Mrs. Rigby, the dosages of her medications, and everything else. Detective Bellow, a homicide detective assigned to the case the day after Georges became their lawyer, had brought a suspect to the police station in Van Nuys for a lineup. He didn’t have probable cause to make an arrest without Abe identifying her, and without an arrest, he couldn’t lawfully detain her beyond five o’clock. Detective Bellow had offered to send a car for Abe, but Abe wanted Ras to bring him.

  Ras said, “Where’s he living?”

  “My God,” Georges said. “You two still not talking? With Bunny on your case, I thought there would be a rapprochement by now. Have you and Abe talked to your Rabbi?”

  “Appreciate the concern, Georges. We’ve been down that road with Bunny. Abe is intransigent.”

  “There’s no middle ground?” Georges said.

  “What I’ve asked for is a middle ground. It’s exactly what Father would have wanted.”

  Georges gave Ras Abe’s address and then said, “Detective Bellow says, if they have to let her go, she’s out of the state, if not the country, by morning.”

  Ras said, “We’ll be there before five.”