Ras peered at the picture. “No,” he said. “Have you heard from Abe?”
“Not yet.”
“Something’s happened; that’s why he hasn’t called.”
“He needs space. You’ve got to stop pressuring him about medical school.”
“Medicine is his life. This writing thing, it’s just an escape,” Ras said. “Don’t you see? He’s become lost dealing with his grief.”
Joost closed his book. “He’s not going back to med school.”
Ras sipped his coffee. “He’ll go back, or I won’t support him. I’ll kick him out.”
Joost said, “Oh, please.” His forehead scrunched, and the faint lines of crow’s feet danced at the corners of his eyes. “He doesn’t need your money.”
Or so Joost thought. And Abe? That’s probably what he thought too. Money was fueling this crisis. For each of his sons Father had purchased a two-million-dollar life-insurance policy with double-indemnity. He and Abe would each receive four million dollars. But Father had been wise, and if Abe dropped out of medical school thinking he didn’t need to earn a living, then Ras would have to do exactly what Father would have done to ensure that didn’t happen.
Ras had just finished talking to Dr. Percival, admitting he still hadn’t discovered how the cancer could have gotten into Teresa’s brain, when the intercom chimed. He hurried to the security panel and pressed the speaker button. “Abe? Is that you?”
Abe answered, “I lost my keys.”
Ras pressed the entrance buzzer, then squeezed his eyes shut, trying to relieve the ache hammering the sides of his head.
There was an impatient knock on the door, and he opened it. Abe touched the mezuzah with his fore and middle fingers and kissed them. He was holding bandages, dripping rainwater, his forehead bleeding. He stumbled into the apartment, tracking blood on the carpet. He dropped his backpack in the kitchen, pulled off his suit jacket and tie. His shoulders hunched forward.
Ras washed his hands, slipped on latex gloves and cleaned Abe’s wounds. He put ice in a towel and said, “Hold this against your head. What happened?”
“A cop hit me,” Abe said.
“Oh Lord,” Ras said.
“Where did you spend the night?” Joost said.
Abe stared at Joost with undisguised hostility.
“Well?” Ras said. “Are you going to tell us.”
“At Bunny’s.”
“Brother, I don’t understand. Why didn’t you call me? Why didn’t Bunny call?” Ras said.
“She called you,” Abe said.
Ras’s cell phone was on the table where he and Joost had been working. Joost picked up the phone. “Three voice mail messages from Bunny, two from Abe, some others, numbers I don’t recognize.”
“Oh, Lord,” Ras said. “I didn’t check my phone?”
Joost said, “You both had tough nights.”
“Bunny let you leave her house like this?” Ras said.
“I left before she woke up, called a cab.”
“You need stitches. C’mon. We’re going to the E.R.”
“I’m not going anywhere,” Abe said. “It’s the Sabbath.”
“Oh, Lord,” Ras said in a tremulous voice. He gave Abe a preliminary neurological exam: Did you lose consciousness? Blurry vision? Tinnitus? What day is today?
“I just told you. It’s the Sabbath. Lay off,” Abe said.
Ras took his medical kit out of a cupboard.
“I couldn’t let them get away with it,” Abe said.
“Them?” Joost said. “How many cops were there?”
“Three hippies. They were tearing up the flowerbeds.”
“What flowerbeds?” Ras said.
“You know— the ones in front of the church.”
“What church?” Ras said.
“The church! The one across from the schul. I yelled at them to stop; they called me Nigger.”
Abe was standing now, hands clenched.
“It’s okay,” Ras said, his large hand on his brother’s shoulder, easing him back into his chair.
Ras said, “I’ve applied a topical anesthetic, but this will still sting.” As he sutured, he missed a stitch, then another, each time muttering, “Shit.” Then he tried again, repeating the pattern – a missed stitch followed by an expletive.
Abe remained stoic, but Joost interjected, “Watch out!” and “Careful!” time and again. When Ras finished, Joost said, “When you see the scar, you’ll wish he’d taken you to the E.R.”
Abe glared at Joost. Joost started to speak, but Ras cut him off with a gesture.
“I met this lawyer, Bunny’s new boyfriend. He may be able to help us find that woman, the one who killed Father.”
Ras said, “Take a shower and go to bed. We’ll talk about the lawyer later.”
“I’m not tired!”
Ras handed Abe a pill. “Humor me.”
In the late afternoon there was a lull in the storm. Ras was reviewing leukemia studies and Joost was writing about Gatsby and class discrimination when Abe walked in.
“What’s wrong with you,” Joost said, “calling me a Judas?”
“Before class you said my play was great. Afterward you told me to revise it. Either you were insincere beforehand, or you’re a jellyfish.”
“This is about your play? That's why you're angry?” Joost said.
“Who says I’m angry?”
“Hey, Ras,” Joost said, “give us a few minutes, okay?”
Ras stepped onto the balcony with a mug of coffee. A rainbow spanned a tangerine sky.
Seventeen years earlier, Ras, Abe and their parents were rescued from The Sudan and taken to the absorption shelters in Jerusalem for Jewish Ethiopian refugees. But their stay was brief. Harold and Bunny brought the family to Los Angeles so that Mother could receive experimental chemotherapy. Ras and Joost met two years later, the year Mother died, and the two had become fast – though in the eyes of many, unlikely – friends: the tall, gangly, black Ras with his broken English and the diminutive white Joost with his funny Afrikaans accent.
Years later, Ras had spent a day in the Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C., where he saw exhibits of Nazi medical experiments. One of the displays featured photographs of a dwarf who’d been a university professor. In the first photograph, the man was alive, wearing a tweed coat, holding a pipe, looking professorial. The next photograph was the man’s nude corpse. Subsequent photographs showed the man’s body in various states of dissection. The final photographs showed several views of his skeleton. It was then Ras understood that his bonds with Joost were formed by something deeper than just their boyhood-outcast status and Judaism.
Ras drummed his fingers on the balcony railing. Twenty, maybe thirty minutes had passed and Joost and Abe were still talking. Ras headed into the kitchen determined to focus only on what had killed Teresa, but he couldn’t help overhearing Abe and Joost.
“When your professor said your premise was convoluted, I saw the problem,” Joost said. “I know your story because I know you. He doesn't even know you’re Jewish. That’s why he doesn’t believe there are black Jews. He can't see your characters, but it’s not his fault. You have to bring the audience into the world where your characters live. When you do that, they’ll be believable.”
“You’re not saying I should chuck it?”
“Au contraire, mon frère. I see it on Broadway.”
When Ras brought his coffee into the dining room, Abe was alone, studying Teresa’s charts.
“What’s going on?” Abe said, holding up a stack of lab reports. “You can’t take patient charts out of the hospital.”
“Teresa died last night.”
“Oh, G-d. What happened?”
“Hemorrhagic stroke. There must have been an astrocytoma in her brain. Percival told me to bring the charts home and figure out why we didn’t see it,” Ras said, his voice faltering.
Abe sorted through the charts. “This lumbar puncture shows elevated proteins. Where’s the cerebral sp
inal fluid test?”
Ras rubbed an eye, dislodging a contact lens. “The proteins were nonspecific: no infection or vascular irregularity in the spinal cord.” He held his forefinger on his closed eyelid and rotated his eyeball until the lens readjusted. “They were normal in subsequent LPs. We had no reason to evaluate CSF.”
Abe turned to the first page of a chart. “She had blurry vision on admission.”
Ras pointed to a notation. “Intermittently and only in her right eye.”
“That’s important: only in one eye,” Abe said.
“We changed her pain meds; afterward her vision was perfect,” Ras said.
“Did you order a Visual Field Test? Call in an ophthalmologist?”
Ras shook his head. “To treat a non-recurring insignificant symptom?”
“Here’s a CT scan of her head,” Abe said, tossing it aside. “Nothing will be visible on that. Where’s the MRA?”
“I’m telling you, for four months her vision was okay.”
“So— there’s no M R Angiography,” Abe said, enunciating each syllable as if his mind were only one step ahead of his voice. “That’s why you didn’t anticipate vascular abnormality in the occipital cortex. That’s where the leukemia infiltrated. The tumor impinged the optic nerve of her right eye—”
“Or affected its blood supply,” Ras said.
“The tumor eroded—”
“Into her blood vessels.” Ras exhaled slowly and audibly. “A blood vessel rupture triggered the stroke.” His eyes teared again. “She needed intrathecal chemo. Why didn’t I see it?” His hand trembled, splattering coffee on the table and floor. “When I write it up, it’ll be an admission of malpractice,” he said, taking no notice of the spill.
Abe fetched a towel from the kitchen. When he returned Ras was jotting notes.
“Chemo in her brain might have killed her,” Abe said, wiping up the puddles of coffee.
“Possibly, but—”
“You’re the senior resident. Percival was her oncologist. Why are you blaming yourself?”
Ras said, “Percival didn’t see what was happening to Teresa. You did.”
“All you talk about is Teresa. Why won’t you talk about Father?”
“I’m not following,” Ras said.
“I can’t get it out of my mind—” He stood with his back to Ras and said, “I couldn't do anything. I couldn't tell the paramedics what happened. I couldn’t even talk. It wasn't like looking at a trauma victim in the E.R. He was . . .”
Ras said, “There wasn’t anything you could have done.” He put his arm around Abe.
“I just thought about getting Father’s blessing,” Abe said.
“For what?”
“If I couldn’t even help Father, what kind of a doctor could I be?”
“Father died instantaneously,” Ras said. “It’s black and white. Not like Teresa’s case.”
“I talk about Father; you talk about Teresa. Why should I listen to you?”
Ras considered the question. “Want to go for a walk?”
Abe said, “Get your raincoat.”
The sidewalks were slick; the rainbow had faded into a livid sky. The brothers walked in silence until Ras said, “I know what Father would have told you. I can’t say it as well. He would have reminded you of our surviving The Sudan. I saw my best friend die of malnutrition, his arms skinnier than pencils. I saw our cousin raped – she was twelve – her father castrated. We were starving when the Israelis found us.”
Abe said, “I’ve heard these stories. What’s your point?”
What exactly was his point? There were so many points. So many things to keep track of. So many things to worry about. If he let himself go for one second, if he lowered his vigilance, relaxed his guard, all would be lost. He’d learned that in The Sudan. He’d learned it when he lost his parents. He’d learned it as an oncologist.
A pair of hummingbirds hovered in the cold, moist air near red bottlebrush, bobbing and weaving like boxers. Two squirrels dashed through puddles and scampered across the street. A taxi driver slammed on his brakes, narrowly missing them. Survivors.
“I’m not saying Father wouldn’t have given you his blessing to become a writer,” Ras said. “But he would have been able to show you the wisdom of becoming a doctor first. You’ve wandered off track; you’re lost. Father would have helped you find your way back. He always said there was a reason we were rescued while others perished. You survived because G-d chose you to be a healer.”
“Who are we healing? Teresa? Father?”
“You have a calling.”
“You hear my calling?” Abe said.
“Mother would have told you what I’m telling you.”
“When I hear Mother's voice,” Abe said, “that's not what I hear.”
“Oh, Lord.”
“You didn’t see what I saw,” Abe said. “I’m not going to be in the death business. I can't even watch hippies kill flowers.”
“When Father purchased life insurance, he placed it in trusts. When I graduated from medical school, he dissolved my trust and made me a direct beneficiary. And then he also made me the successor trustee, after himself, of your trust. When you graduated from med school, Father would have dissolved your trust too. So you see, you’re my responsibility now.”
Abe stopped walking, turned to face his brother.
“If you don't become a doctor, you won’t see a penny of the life insurance until you’re thirty-five,” Ras said. It began to drizzle. “You have only two semesters left. Get your degree. Then if you don’t want to practice medicine, you don’t have to.”
Abe turned his back on Ras and headed home.
Ras crossed the street and walked through the park. As he neared the mural, he could no longer distinguish the Ethiopian queen from his mother, and he had a sensation of floating with her up the glittering staircase.
The rain became more insistent. He saw an old man lying on a bus-stop bench. His legs skinny, his feet bare, his arms flecked with scale, his face pocked with suppurating ulcers. On the bench back was an ad. It said: Citibank. Live Richly.
By the time Ras got home, the cloudburst had become a downpour. He changed into dry clothes, and when he came back into the dining room Abe was talking to Joost. A suitcase lay on the floor beneath the antique tapestries.
“Where are you going?” Ras demanded.
Abe slipped into a raincoat, put on his backpack, picked up his car keys and the suitcase. “I can’t be something I’m not,” he said. “Not for you. Not for anyone.”
“Please don’t go out into the storm again, okay? Let’s talk about this later.”
“Nothing will change,” Abe said, and he walked out, leaving the door open behind him.
“What’s wrong with you?” Joost said. “Don’t let him go.”
“He’s right. I’m not going to change my mind.”
“Read this,” Joost said. “Pages from the novel he’s writing.”
“Oh, Lord! A novel? What novel? I thought he was writing a play.”
“He’s working on both. He’s a writer now.”
“Why should I read it?”
“Your father would have read this!”
“Under these circumstances, he would have refused.”
“Your father would not have let you disown your brother.”
Ras turned away from Joost.
“If you don’t read this, you’ll disown me too.”
“Et tu, Brute?” Ras said. He took the pages and read.
In the early morning of the third day after our escape from the rebel militia near Al Qadjärif, Mother collapsed. Father built a shelter in a grove of acacia trees, but there wasn’t enough shade to shield her from the sun. By midmorning, she was delirious. When I offered her goat's milk, Father admonished me.
“We can’t let Mother die,” I said.
“We’ll need that food for the trek to Sannär," he said.
“There are no Israelis in Sannär! Or anywher
e! There is no Canaan!" I said.
My aunt said, "Shame on you, Brother. Addis, listen to G-d. He will provide."
“THERE IS NO G-D," I screamed.
Father and my aunt left me alone with Mother.
Mother drank a small portion of milk. By noon the sky was a cloudless furnace. By early afternoon the blaze struck her deaf and blind. She didn’t even know me, calling only for my dead little sister, Lielit, calling her name softly and then softer still until finally she was mute.
The temperature soared past 100 degrees. Time passed slowly, as if the day intended to accentuate each moment of Mother’s suffering and preserve it in my memory forever. By sundown the desert had sucked the moisture from her body, and she shriveled into a fetal position, her corpse already a mummy.
Father cleaned her and wrapped her in burial cloth. "There will be no unveiling for Mother," he said. "We must dig her grave and erect a cairn."
As I gathered the stones to cover Mother's grave, I visualized the grave of my brother Gobide, the grave of baby Lielit, and the graves of everyone else in our family who had died in The Sudan. I imagined that each grave was a landmark leading us back to Ethiopia, into the past, where we would lift each lost life from the ground, revitalizing it with love during our journey home.
I picked up a fallen branch shaped like the Hebrew letter Gimel. Then I saw three Bedouins pointing rifles at me. The one closest to me said something harshly in a language I didn't understand, and the next moment three bullets shattered my skull, shredding my brain.
Ras was struck by the voice he heard. It was Father’s voice and it was Abe’s voice, too, a sorrowful voice he’d heard when they were young, lying awake in bed, talking after Mother died. Although it was formal, there was intimacy in the voice, as if he were listening to someone who knew his people. It was the sound of intimacy in Abe’s voice, a sound that had been fading this past month since Father died.
Yet it was also a stranger’s voice, a dangerous voice, a voice he couldn’t listen to. So he pushed away doubt as he had when Mother died, as he had when Father was killed. There could be no uncertainty. And so, denying to himself that he heard any voice at all, he said, “He’s got it all wrong. It didn’t happen this way.”
The Speed of Life Page 19