by Renee James
Perspiration pours down his face and his upper body. His palms are wet. His mouth hurts. It even hurts to swallow fluids now. He should just get up and go back to his dreary apartment, put a hollow-point in the chamber of his Glock, and blow his brains out. The only thing that’s going to happen here is they’re going to tell him he’s going to die, but he’ll have to wait in this torture chamber for an hour before they get to it. And they won’t just let him die, they’ll make him do other things, painful things that mean coming into doctor and dentist offices all the goddamn time.
He should just go home and eat a bullet and get it over with.
But he has things to do first. He has to try to fix things with his kids. He’s got to get his case files in order for whoever takes over. He has to close out the Strand case. No one else would put in the time. No one else would risk the bigotry tag he got for liking a tranny for the crime. He snorts an ironic laugh. How the world has changed. How many times he was called nigger by rednecks and John Birchers and expected to take it, even though he had a badge and a gun. Life was so screwed up sometimes.
Doors slam inside the oncologist’s office. The receptionist leads Wilkins to an office. Three physicians stand to greet him with handshakes as he enters. The oncologist is a wiry, fiftyish white man with a Russian name and a light accent. The internist is an African-American woman in her thirties with large eyes and a kind smile. The oral surgeon is the same young white male who started everything, a clinician who looks at a patient and sees a specimen, not a person.
There are four files on the table, one compiled by each of them and a fourth from the ENT who specializes in cancer diagnosis and treatment.
The oncologist speaks first. “I’m afraid we have bad news, Detective.” There is regret in his voice, but he makes eye contact and gets right to the point. Wilkins appreciates that. Let’s get it over with so I can get out of here and breathe again, he thinks.
“You have extensive cancerous tissues in your mouth. There are squamous cell carcinomas on the left side of your mandible, your lower jaw. The cancer has spread to your gums and your tongue. I’m afraid it is too advanced for routine treatment. When we catch these lesions early enough, we can treat the patient with a relatively simple surgery and/or radiation therapy.
“Unfortunately, your cancer has advanced far beyond that stage. Radical surgery is required—”
Wilkins feels his world shake. It’s about what he expected to hear, but somehow, hearing it rocks him. The oncologist defers to the oral surgeon to discuss the surgery, but Wilkins is barely aware of the change in voices and speakers. The surgeon’s technical dissertation passes far beyond Wilkins’ comprehension.
The oral surgeon stops speaking and looks at Wilkins expectantly. “Do you have any questions?” he asks.
Wilkins blinks, shakes his head slowly. “I don’t really understand . . .” He wants to say what he doesn’t understand, but he doesn’t understand any of it. He doesn’t understand why his life has come to this. An early death, alone. A life trying to make the world safe for others coming to an end in a sterile office surrounded by strangers.
The internist speaks softly. “Detective Wilkins? Can you hear me?”
His mind comes back to the present. His eyes focus on the internist’s sympathetic face. He nods yes.
“To save your life, we are going to have to do a mandibulectomy and a glossectomy. A mandibulectomy is the surgical removal of part of your lower jaw. It is a disfiguring operation even with reconstructive surgery. The glossectomy is a partial removal of your tongue. It will affect your speech. You may have difficulty being understood by others when you speak. You may also need to undergo radiation therapy and maybe chemotherapy, too, after the surgery.”
She lets him absorb her words, then continues. “There are several other serious side effects that can result from this treatment. You may suffer from fatigue. You may have swallowing difficulties. Some people experience memory loss and dizziness. You may have to depend on a feeding tube for hydration and nutrition—”
Wilkins almost passes out from shock. The kindly internist is describing a nightmare, a vision more hideous than anything he could ever imagine.
“Detective Wilkins?”
He gradually becomes aware of the doctors again. The internist is saying his name. He focuses on her. She watches him expectantly. They all do. He has missed something. He’s supposed to say something but he doesn’t know what.
“Do you have any questions, Detective Wilkins?” She says it gently. He deduces that was her original question.
He collects his thoughts. “Survival? What are my chances?”
The doctors defer to the oncologist. “It’s hard to say. The odds are pretty good that you can extend your life by a year or two. The five-year prognosis is less promising. There aren’t good numbers for cases as advanced as yours, but I’d guess we’re talking one chance in four, maybe less, that you’ll live five years.”
Wilkins calculates what a year or two could mean. Patch things up with his kids. Close the Strand case. He tries to think. There was something else he wanted to ask. Something he heard before he zoned out.
“Disfigurement,” Wilkins says. “What does that look like?”
“We have some photos of others who have undergone a mandibulectomy,” says the oral surgeon. “But I have to warn you, they can be very shocking. You might want to take a day or two to digest everything before we get into that.”
Wilkins shakes his head. “No. Let’s get this over with.”
The oral surgeon opens a medical text to a marked spread and pushes the book across the table to Wilkins. A half dozen photos jump off the pages of gray text. Four show vile growths in people’s mouths. The other two show horribly disfigured faces, scarier than any Halloween mask, their mouths tiny circles, their faces caved in on one side like a rotting jack-o’-lantern. Monsters.
“Sweet Jesus!” Wilkins gasps. He sits back in his chair and looks at the ceiling as if struck by a fist. Tears come, then sobs. He leans forward. He vomits. He cries uncontrollably. His mind fills with the sight of his son and daughter recoiling in horror from the sight of their father, his ex-wife hiding her eyes at the sight of him. The photos are the end of his life. He will never get his family back. He is no longer human.
* * *
THURSDAY, DECEMBER 4
I spend the morning pouring my heart out to Marilee about everything, but especially about my relationship with Betsy. She counsels patience and she’s convincing. I leave in the lightest mood I’ve had in days, but that evaporates as soon as I get back to the apartment.
Betsy greets me with a scribbled note and a demand. “We need to talk.” The note is a phone number and a name: Detective Allan Wilkins.
We sit at the kitchen table. I realize it’s quiet in the place. Robbie must be playing with the neighbor. Betsy has been expecting me.
“Who is this man?” she asks, tapping her finger on the note in front of me.
“Didn’t he tell you?”
“Don’t be coy, Bobbi. I don’t know if he’s investigating you or if he’s your latest cop lover.”
Her hostility makes me wince. “He’s the cop I told you about. He’s investigating a murder that he’d love to charge me with. I’m not going into the rest of it because it can only get you in the middle of something you don’t want to be in. Here’s all you have to know: I didn’t kill anyone.”
“There’s more to it than that, Bobbi. There has to be. If you aren’t willing to trust me with what happened, how can I trust you?”
“I’ve told you everything I can about Wilkins. I’m sorry. I can’t do more.”
“You have too many secrets.” She grimaces. She rattles off a list of secrets I’ve kept from her, from transitioning to my promiscuous sex life. “Good God, Bobbi, is there anything or anyone you won’t fuck? One day it’s a woman, the next time it’s a man. Now it’s a murder you can’t talk about. What am I supposed to think?”
; I’m at a loss for words, but she’s not ready to hear me anyway.
“I need some truths here, Bobbi. Who are you? How are you involved in this murder? I need to know if my daughter is safe here. I need to know if you’re going to be a bad influence on her.”
She stares at me, seething with anger that borders on hate. I don’t know where to start or what to say. She glowers at me, silently demanding a reply.
“I don’t know what I am, Betsy. I am trying to be a good person. I’ve had sex three times this year and I’ve never killed anyone.”
“How do I know you’re telling the truth?”
I blink. Good question. “I don’t know,” I say. “Maybe you just have to take it on faith. Like how you believe in God.”
“You’re comparing yourself to God?”
“No. I’m saying the truth about me is a lot easier to see than the truth about God. You just have to make up your mind. Am I a person who goes to work every day, cares about people, loves you and Robbie? Or am I a closet nymphomaniac axe murderer?”
“You don’t have any other lovers?”
“I don’t have any lovers at all. Jen has a new heartthrob, and Phil doesn’t want to see me or talk to me. I think he’s pretty grossed out by having fucked a tranny.”
“Do you think that’s all it was for him? A conquest?”
It hits me then, what really makes it hurt. “No. I think he actually likes me and I think he found me attractive and when we made love, we made love. It was after that, when he realized he had feelings for a transsexual, and what that meant about him, that’s when he started thinking of me as a barnyard animal or a venereal disease.”
For all her anger and suspicion, Betsy’s face softens.
“There are some things I’m never going to have, Betsy.” I say this to her, but really to myself. “I’m never going to have children of my own. I’m never going to have a deep, passionate, long-lasting love. And no one will ever see me as an actual woman. Not even me.”
We sit in total silence for a long while. Betsy rustles in her chair. “Are you going to call him?” She nods toward the message.
“Yes.”
“Are you ever going to tell me what happened?”
“I need some time,” I tell her. That secret chapter of my life is becoming a wall that surrounds me and it’s getting higher every day. With every fiber of my being I want to tell her everything right now, but I can’t get past how dangerous it would be to us both.
* * *
THURSDAY, DECEMBER 4
“I need to talk to Stephen.” Wilkins tries to say it nicely, but thirty-plus years on the force makes everything come out in the clipped staccato of a tough street cop. A man who fell into the role of the “bad cop” because he looked the part and stayed there so long he was the part.
“I’ll see if he wants to talk to you.” Her reply is just as clipped. She hates him. Crazy. The divorce was her idea. He didn’t fight her on anything. Gave up everything he had, even his kids it turned out. They decided he was the bad guy. The only way to deny it was to say their mother was wrong, which he couldn’t do.
“It’s important,” he says. “I wouldn’t bother you if it wasn’t very, very important.”
“Hang on.” The phone clicks as she puts it on hold.
Several minutes later, the phone clicks and his son’s adolescent voice comes over the airwaves. “Hello.” Flat and cold.
“Stephen!” He tries to greet his son with enthusiasm and energy. “Good to hear your voice, Son.” He waits a moment for Stephen to respond, gets a mumbled syllable.
“Something’s come up and I need to see you, Stephen.”
“What about?”
“Well, I don’t want to get into it over the phone. How about we go for a walk after school one day this week?”
“I don’t know. I have things to do.” His son is mumbling, his words barely distinguishable.
“How about setting aside an hour, say, Thursday. I won’t bother you again.”
The boy says he has to check with his mother. He puts a hand over the mouthpiece of the phone and has a short conversation. “Okay,” he says when he comes back.
Wilkins sets up the meet for Lincoln Square. Near the kid’s school. Scenic neighborhoods. Nice cafés.
* * *
FRIDAY, DECEMBER 5
“Wilkins.” Even on the phone, when you can’t see him, the guy sounds like a mean prick.
“What do you want?” I don’t bother saying who’s calling.
“Thanks for calling back, Logan.” I almost faint with surprise. A thank-you from a troll. And he used my name instead of calling me Cinderella or Queenie.
“I want to sit down and talk to you,” he says.
“How stupid do you think I am?”
“I don’t think you’re stupid. I want to talk to you about the case, what I’ve got. All off the record. We can meet anywhere you want.”
“Why? What’s in it for me?”
“After you hear me out, I’m going to offer you a deal. If you like it, you take it to your attorney, and I’ll take it to the DA. Maybe we can get this closed by Christmas.”
“If you think I’m a murderer you have to think I’m a liar, too, so what kind of deal are you offering me?”
“The best deal you’re ever going to get.”
“Why? Why would you offer me a good deal? You think I’m vermin and I murder men because I hate them.”
“I have my reasons.”
“Give me one.”
“I’ve learned some things, okay?”
“I don’t believe you. Give me another.”
“I want to close this case before Christmas.”
I laugh sarcastically. “Detective Wilkins, there is nothing attractive to me about you closing this case before Christmas.”
“You have nothing to lose. I won’t tape the conversation, no bugs or listening devices, just you and me. Take it or leave it.”
“I’ll leave it.”
“You can pick the place. I’ll get your boyfriend to check me for wires before we sit down.”
“Phil? Detective, poor Phil isn’t my boyfriend and he wants nothing to do with me.”
“He told me he’d do it.”
“When?”
“Today. I talked to him before I called you.”
We go back and forth for several minutes, like a tennis rally, on my safety, his promises. I ask if he’d be willing to put in writing his guarantee that nothing said between us is ever used in court. He is. He agrees to bring a signed statement to the meeting.
“Okay,” I say. “When?” We jockey back and forth and settle on a weekday evening. He asks where and I tell him to call me at the salon on the day of the meeting. I’ve read some spy books.
His call lingers in my mind like a bad dream. The end is near for me, I can feel it. He’s going to give me a choice. I can wait to be indicted and go through $50,000 in legal bills and a year or two of litigation and having my reputation and the image of my salon shredded in the news media. Or I can plead guilty and get some kind of reduced sentence, something that would put me back on the street when Robbie is having babies and people are flying space ships instead of driving cars. I can see the faces of Betsy and Robbie as my failure leaves them abandoned in a failed economy, at sea in a country that equates personal financial failure with immorality and people hope you die badly as a result.
I can see Betsy never ever again trusting me for failing her now. Why would she? Could I start over? A transwoman in her sixties or seventies, alone, trying to make new friends? Trying to do hair? I can’t bring myself to commit suicide, but it would be the best option. My life is essentially over. I got to be a woman for five years and an aunt for three. That’s something, I guess.
19
SATURDAY, DECEMBER 6
COLD WINDS LACED with rain and sleet force a change in plans. Wilkins can no longer tolerate the cold. He arrives at the café a few minutes early, but Stephen is already there, s
itting at a window table staring at his smartphone.
The teenager looks up as Wilkins approaches. His handsome face goes from recognition to an uncertain frown in a blink or two. Wilkins takes off his coat, drapes it on a chair, offers a handshake to his son. Stephen shakes hands without standing up. His eyes are frozen on his father, his face painted in shock and consternation.
“Are you okay, Dad?” he asks.
Wilkins savors the moment his son calls him “dad.” It doesn’t happen much anymore, only when the kid forgets himself, forgets he’s supposed to hate his dad for divorcing his mother. That moment of happiness is blotted out by the greater realization that he looks like shit, even to his son. Especially to his son. Jesus Christ, imagine how the kid would have felt if he walked in here with a monster face and feeding tubes sticking out of his body.
Wilkins takes a deep breathe to regain his composure.
“I have some health problems, Stephen. That’s why I wanted to talk.”
“What kind of health problems?”
“I have oral cancer. I need surgery. It’s risky. No guarantees. So I want to talk to you about a few things in case I don’t make it.”
Stephen leans forward, his arms on the table, his head dropping. “Damn,” he says. He breathes deeply. He looks up again.
“I’ve written down some things for you,” Wilkins says, pushing an envelope across the table. “You can look at them later. It’s a rehash of what I’m going to say.
“First off, you need to know this cancer is my own fault. I’ve always been scared to death of dentists. So I haven’t seen one in many years. I’m telling you this in case you inherited my fear. If you did, go anyway. Think about what I look like as an incentive.”
“But you’re going to get better.” The kid says it, but it’s a question, a statement of hope that he wants to have confirmed.
“Not really. I can extend my life, but I won’t ever look any better. I’ll never be able to eat solid food again. I will lose body mass and strength. I’ll have a lot of other problems, too. That doesn’t matter. The important thing is, you take care of yourself. Don’t make the mistakes I did. Will you promise me that?”