With a Voice that is Often Still Confused But is Becoming Ever Louder and Clearer

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With a Voice that is Often Still Confused But is Becoming Ever Louder and Clearer Page 9

by J. R. Hamantaschen


  He’d had a rebuttal planned. This wasn’t a medical record, he had argued, but a financial record to establish her income eligibility for medical and social welfare services. As a recipient of social services, she’d inherently consented to providing all information relating to her finances. Rather than debate with him, the receptionist told him to come in and speak with a Mr. Rampole.

  So, a day later, here he was.

  He found Mr. Rampole without difficulty, but not without surprise. He’d imagined Mr. Rampole to be a middle-aged man whose owl-like face screamed HR pain in the ass. Before Alex even spoke to the man before him, he assembled a case against him. Owl-faced, thinning hair, sharp features conveying handle with care. As further corroborating proof that the man before him just had to be the personality type befitting an HR tight-ass, Alex spied the brown, bulbous abnormality tucked under the man’s right ear. From that one visible defect, Alex concocted a pop narrative that led inexorably to this man’s current life as a HR dickhead: childhood teasing leading to an adult hypersensitivity, his only catharsis found by frustrating the hopes of all that requested his services.

  But no, that wasn’t Mr. Rampole at all. Whomever that man with the ear abnormality was, well, apparently of no mind. He nodded politely to Alex and walked off somewhere. Alex felt anxious guilt over his prejudices — whatever prejudice it was he was exhibiting, he wasn’t sure, prejudice against the owl-faced? — and just hoped that guy hadn’t made any snap judgments about the schlubby dude who’d been staring way too intently at his ear.

  “Hello,” said a perfectly average, six-foot white man in his late-thirties with a sharp outer-borough accent. “I’m Mr. Rampole. I heard you were requesting some information on someone who may have been a patient here.”

  “Yes, financial information.” No harm in framing the issue favorably from the outset. “I’m Gloria Hernandez’s case worker. She confirmed to us that she had medical services performed here. The nature of the services are of no concern to us. We are only concerned that, unfortunately, Ms. Hernandez may not have been entirely forthcoming to us about her income. We are just curious and hoping to cross-check the financial information she provided you with what she has provided us to ensure there are no discrepancies. Are you in charge of her records?”

  “I’m in charge of all records of anyone who may be a client.” Mr. Rampole exhibited a smile that was both somehow warm and cynical; warm in his empathy, cynical in his underlying world weariness.

  “Unfortunately, as explained to you on the phone before, we cannot give out any information without a HIPAA release.”

  “Yes, but — “

  And here Mr. Rampole put up a hand and, again with that smile, cut Alex off at the proverbial knee. “Yes, I’m sorry, as you must know as a social worker, we can’t give out that information. If you want, you must get a HIPAA release, or subpoena us.”

  What had Alex even come here for? Surely, he hadn’t expected differently.

  Maybe he just needed some hobbies.

  Maybe some part of him still expected people to genuflect, out of pity, to the kind requests of an underpaid, underappreciated steward of the poor? In his experience, he found social workers were only appreciated when they were craven and subservient; whenever they challenged the motives of their clientele, people seemed remarkably less sympathetic to them, as if their role was simply to rubberstamp any and all requests without question. He half expected that he got none of the social worker sympathy because, instead of being a cute, fresh-faced true-believer girl out of college, he was that dreaded creature: “That Guy.”

  Alex’s anxieties registered in his tone. “Look, sir, I understand, I really do. But we know that I’m not seeking medical information. Look, I’m a social worker, I know all about client confidences,” he exaggerated, giving himself the benefit of the doubt, “but financial documents … I am sure there are improprieties going on here, between what our client tells us and what is really going on with her finances. I know medical information is sensitive, but we are not interested at all in whatever medical procedures she may or may not have had performed here. It would be to everyone’s benefit for us to be able to review her financial documents.”

  He wished he recorded that. It would be wildly ineffectual, of course, but listen to that tone … the words … that left some hair on his chest.

  Mr. Rampole just shook his head emphatically.

  “I’m sorry, but again, no. And, I must ask, what makes you believe we have any such documents?”

  “Well, I assumed … “

  “Ahh,” Mr. Rampole stuck up a finger, “that’s the problem. Assumed.” He may have well had said it with a fucking wink. Asshole.

  “I understand how difficult things have been here recently, what with, all that stuff in the news. I read about protests and all that — I don’t know if that’s happened up here at all at this clinic, but —”

  Mr. Rampole nodded graciously, although they continued their conversation as two ships passing each other in the night. Two actors reciting their own lines. There was no point to this.

  Mr. Rampole again extended his sympathy regarding Alex’s role in all of this, instructed him to return with the necessary documentation, and wished him the best.

  The owl-faced man returned and wished him adieu. Literally. Adieu. He then escorted him back to the waiting room.

  Funny, Alex noticed. Every single woman being served here was heavily and visibly pregnant. Maybe to be expected — this was an abortion clinic, after all — but where were the frightened teeny boppers here for pregnancy tests or free birth control, or even the early trimester women not visibly carrying a wide load?

  Alex remembered how he and his high school girlfriend used to get free birth control pills at their local Planned Parenthood clinic. Then, it seemed that everyone was there just for free condoms or birth control pills. Maybe that was the amateur league, and this was the pros. One thing about that Planned Parenthood clinic he’d never forget — and which made him think that clinic was amateur league — was its phone number: (914) 666-0295. 666? Seriously? When their political opponents already viewed the world in biblical terms, having your number begin with 666 just seemed like trolling.

  >< >< ><

  “So,” Kevin began, as Kevin was prone to begin, “let me get this straight, and stop me if I’m missing something.” Kevin had done mock trial in high school and college, and for all intents and purposes he was now back in the courtroom. The little smirk evident on Kevin’s face tipped his hand: he felt he had a good case here against Alex. Kevin loved nothing more than disagreeing with Alex (unless Alex was complaining about a coworker: then they’d become in sync).

  “So, this is her third time getting an abortion. Wait, let me back that up. This is her third time being pregnant, not including when she had her son, and, to our knowledge, this is her third abortion. She had an abortion at this Washington Heights Clinic. When you met with her after her last abortion, you felt like she was acting differently somehow.”

  “Wait dude — “

  Kevin put his hand up, his signal for “let me finish.” He was making his opening statement. “You felt like she was acting differently, mainly because she is usually uncouth but, at that moment, was acting civil and accommodating. Also, she may have been hiding fancy fur coats. A week or so later, you saw her getting a fancy meal. Also, some guy in her apartment made it sound like he thinks she is getting some kind of good benefits deal. Did I miss anything?”

  “Eh.” Kevin had fucked up the order of events a bit. Alex also suspected whenever Kevin began a sentence with “also,” he’d been downplaying and burying suspicious facts. There was some nice gradual layering of mounting suspicion, he felt, that got lost in Kevin’s rendering of events.

  “Dude, also, she implied that someone had paid her or helped her get the abortion, I don’t know, it was weird. She said ‘the mone
y I made,’ not the money she borrowed or was given or was gifted, or something like that. ‘The money I made.’ And this was in reference to her talking about her abortion, definitely. She tried to spin out of it after, but that’s how it came out.”

  “Eh, ok. Then, you go to the clinic, all Sherlock Holmesian, doing no research whatsoever, and, not surprisingly, they don’t give a shit about your bullshit and tell you to go fuck off, basically.”

  “Like you’d have done any research first. Like it would have mattered.”

  “Word, I wouldn’t have done any research, either. You caring at all is more than I’d have done. I am sort of jealous actually, it sounds interesting, more interesting than our usual shit, anyway. I mean, if it were me — well, if it was me, I wouldn’t have given a shit to begin with — but, anyway, I’d be shocked if over half our clients weren’t just bullshitting us in some way or another. But still I think you should pursue it, just because honestly this job is boring and I want to hear about something exciting.”

  “Nice logic. I’m consulting fucking Yoda here.”

  Kevin presaged his attempt at a terrible impression, inhaled too much and looked too excited, which made the impression even that more terrible, “Err pursue the liar you will.”

  “Ugh, dude.”

  “Yeah, that was bad. I got to piss, if you want to continue the conversation, follow me, or wait here and I’ll be back.” That was Kevin, alright. He wasn’t joking, he was refreshingly matter-of-fact.

  Eh whatever, he shrugged and followed Kevin to the bathroom and they both used adjacent urinals.

  Alex scratched his head, keeping his eyes straight. “I’m old enough now to realize that a good life is a necessarily boring life. That’s why that Chinese curse is like, ‘may you live in interesting times.’” Throughout the day, almost at random, Alex wondered what Caroline would think if she overheard whatever he’d last said. At this stage in their relationship, she’d probably charmingly agree to lead a stable, intertwined, boring life together. “Boring together,” he imagined them chanting together, high-fiving and smooching. He smiled inwardly.

  Kevin, not noticing or perhaps not caring about Alex’s daydreaming: “Word. Anything ‘interesting’ is usually disruptive.”

  “Word,” (when Alex talked with Kevin, his vocabulary retrogressed to the monosyllabic; not that he was complaining). “Losing your job is an ‘interesting’ change. I’ve heard cancer brings interesting changes too. Becoming an orphan probably leads to some interesting changes in perception, also.

  “So anyway, Kevin, listen to this, you’ll appreciate this” –

  Kevin farted as he wrapped up. “Listen to that,” he laughed before he could even finish the sentence.

  “Dude, what the fuck, man?”

  “What? It’s a bathroom?”

  “Yeah, but I’m right next you. And I was a captive audience, I was stuck peeing right next to you.”

  “I know, that’s what made it funny. It’s a bathroom man, anything goes, you can fart without fear in a bathroom.”

  “False. There are bathroom rules. One is you don’t fart when someone is at an adjacent urinal. Another is that you wouldn’t fart in the bathroom on a job interview, right? If you were on a job interview, would you have farted in the bathroom?”

  “Hmm.” Kevin kept his mouth shut and pondered that. “Interesting.”

  “I win. So anyway,” he segued the conversation back to the important stuff after they washed their hands and headed back to their corner of the office. Kevin didn’t really care about much — work investigations and farting semantics occupied the same general level of importance to him — so Alex had to make a special effort to keep the conversation on course. “At the clinic, I was like, trying to play the sympathy card.”

  “Nice. Except no one has sympathy for social workers when we are trying to actually, you know, do our job.”

  “Word. Anyway, I was like, ‘I know things have been difficult, what with some prominent anti-abortion protests, and deaths, and hub-bub and controversy going on — ‘“

  “Did you actually say ‘hub-bub?’”

  “Hah, no.”

  “Ahh, too bad. I’m sure you’d get sympathy then.” Kevin took a bite of an apple he’d kept next to his computer, and didn’t let his chewing stop him from talking. “You should have heard Kaye cackling about those protests and like, some prominent protestor activist person dying of a heart attack recently. They found like, plaque build-up in his heart or something weird. Probably some fat fuck. You should read the article in the Post. Pretty weird shit. I thought plaque was for teeth, you know?

  “It’s pretty funny, actually: whenever, like, a hurricane strikes America or something, these religious people will look at the hurricane info-graphic on the Weather Channel and be like, ‘look, it looks like an unborn child! It’s a sign from God. Repent!’ and all that bullshit. Yet, by their logic, you’d think they would look into the fact that God seems to be killing them off, like, out of the blue, giving all of them random-ass heart attacks.”

  “Word. It’s not God, it’s like, Richard Dawkins with voodoo dolls.”

  “Word. It’s Christopher Hitchens, back from the dead. Back for revenge!”

  “A revenant.”

  “Word.”

  Kevin lined up as if he was taking a free throw shot and lobbed his apple core at the trash. It landed in the trash can with a hard thunk. Kevin raised his arm in victory, his voice now excitable:

  “Dude, remember that woman with her ‘retarded kids’?” Whenever shady client practices were at issue, the ‘retarded kids’ story came up. This was a woman who kept coming in with her two kids over the years — the first time, they were aged 2 and 4, then 3 and 5, then 4 and 6 — arguing that they were both functionally retarded, thereby entitling her to Social Security benefits on their behalf. All that stood in her way was the voluminous evidence to the contrary. Blessed, apparently, with the extraordinary power of discerning that her two children were mentally retarded despite any evidence, she’d been dubbed ‘the retard whistler’ and became a shorthand between them for the lengths some people would go for free money.

  “Yeah, I remember her. I actually got a voicemail from her, not too long ago, saying she was going to come in. That was a month ago.”

  Kevin laughed heartily. “Are you serious? Oh, man.”

  “Yeah. Makes Gloria look like Mother Theresa. Anyway, I should go.”

  Alex got up to leave Kevin’s office.

  “Wait, Kevin, since when the fuck do you eat apples?”

  Kevin shrugged.

  >< >< ><

  A good life, Alex had realized, was an eddy of bemused contentment. To be able to contemplate, ponder and reflect, while being in a generally stable, positive environment. That’s it. That’s all you can ask for. A high, by its nature, is unsustainable, and can only be recognized as a high in contrast to the metronomic pace of a normal life. You went to work, it paid enough and was manageable and maybe you got some satisfaction out of it. You met someone and stayed with them and encouraged the relationship to become something reliable and sturdy, and in oft-moments you fleetingly remembered the fantasies you’d concocted for yourself or the sexual peaks and frontiers of your tender ages, and your heart beats a bit faster, and that’s your high now. The closest true high you’ll get is going to the gym, and your heart will pump and you’ll feel the world is at your fingertips, you can do anything, you can improve your life in a myriad of ways; but you’re old and mature enough to know that soon your heart and hormones will achieve their normal equilibrium, and you’ll want an equilibrium too: you’ll want stability and security and comfort. Sure, your job is repetitive and your friends and family and loved ones are the same, but imagine having to learn and master new people and experiences and skills every day.

  The best life is an ouroboros of contentment. />
  And, as mopey and beleaguered as he knew he could be, he had to admit that’s what he’d achieved, and no transient social media-inspired jealousy changed that crucial truth. That’s what life was, and it was oddly glorious. He had his job, his loving girlfriend, his television shows and his books, indeterminate plans to go to Spain with Caroline, the same songs on his iTunes he listened to in college, the eucalyptus plant on his desk to water.

  A fucking eucalyptus plant! He had it made.

  That’s how life was and how it went for the next couple of weeks.

  An example: a life where, on one weekday night, Caroline cooked a veggie concoction and he cleaned the dishes, and he showcased a really clean bowl that just minutes ago contained pungent kale and bean soup, and she cooed in melodramatic appreciation.

  But whenever he picked up the phone to call Gloria, he felt that this was a moment. Here was, however minutely — and God, it was minutely, it was imperceptible — but there was something, not a high, exactly, but a split-second where the curve of his normal life took a jagged little turn. The phone call — to be honest, this little quest — in this there was a chance of a sharp left turn. However slim. However imperceptible. He didn’t think it, he intuited it. Somehow, he could only compare it to that crepuscular nostalgia of bygone youthful days: he’d think of those days and his heart would beat in a different way, he’d view the world in a different way. That was the feeling when he rung Gloria, and he didn’t know why it was, but it was what it was.

  He was picking up the phone and calling without even thinking. It was like he woke up in the middle of the conversation, as if he could simply not deal with the fact that time was experienced linearly, and he just had to know where this would lead.

  He was talking to Gloria — she was being cagey — and there were mixed feelings inside him. Suddenly, he wondered if he was just pinioning this poor woman. Was this malicious? No, he didn’t think so, but, as a hedge, all the cards would come out, so if he was enjoying putting the squeeze on her he’d force his hand to make it all be over.

 

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