Nerve Damage

by Peter Abrahams

  “There is the matter of the cough,” said Dr. Bronstein.

  “Except for the cough,” Roy said. With an effort of will, he overcame the tickle, made it go away. “But a cough could be anything.”

  Dr. Bronstein’s gaze rose a little more, and now met Roy’s. “That’s why we need the biopsy,” he said. “Then we won’t have to speculate.”

  Tuesday nights in winter meant Kegger-league hockey in the valley, all players thirty-five plus, no checking, no slapshots, no uniforms, helmets optional; beers after at Waldo’s with losers buying, not optional. All the teams had women’s-clothing names, a practice long preceding Roy’s arrival. He was on the Thongs. Tonight they were taking on the first-place D-Cups. Most of the players had high school or college hockey experience, a few had made it to the minor pros, and one, Normie Sawchuck, first-line center for the D-Cups, had skated two seasons with the Bruins. Normie, twenty or thirty pounds overweight now—he ate and drank for free at Normie’s Burger Paradise—was still the fastest player in the league, especially on his first few rushes.

  And Normie was leading a three-on-two now, bearing down on Roy, gliding backward on right defense, the position he’d played all his life. Roy could actually skate backward faster than he could forward but that didn’t put him in Normie’s class, nowhere near. Normie cut across the blue line, ice chips flying off his blades, faked a pass to his left-winger, a fake that Roy ignored—Normie never passed this early in a game—and deked right. Roy went with him, keeping both shoulders turned up ice, ready for anything. But not that: suddenly the puck came loose off Normie’s stick. Or seemed to, because when Roy reached for it, it was gone, now tucked back between Normie’s skates. The Kharmalov move: Normie giggled as he blew by Roy. But not quite by. Miracle One: Roy, whirling, flailing with his stick, somehow managed to nick the puck. It came loose, bounced against the boards, and Roy, sweeping it up saw—Miracle Two: nothing but open ice between him and the goal. He wheeled away—could actually feel his jersey billowing in the wind, as though some hockey god had suddenly turned him into Bobby Hull—and angled in alone on the goalie. Roy didn’t even bother with a move, just went high on the stick side. Flick of the wrists and—ding. The puck banged in off the post, rippling the net.

  “Fuckin’ A,” said the goalie.

  The whole game was like that. Final score: Thongs 6, D-Cups 1. Roy had a hat trick, zoomed around all night, wasn’t even sweating at the end. When had he last played like this? Years and years ago, or maybe never.

  “Christ, Roy,” said Normie, bringing a couple of foaming pitchers to Roy’s table at Waldo’s, “whatever you been smoking, I want some.”

  Roy felt so good he almost skipped the biopsy.

  An open biopsy, the gold standard, meant a general anesthetic. Roy had never had one before. He lay on a gurney under bright lights. The anesthetist—or maybe a nurse, Roy wasn’t sure about all the personnel—approached with an IV and said, “Nice veins.”

  “Thanks,” said Roy.

  “What’s that bruise?” she said, inserting the needle.

  “Puck.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “From hockey.”

  “It flew into the stands?”

  “No,” said Roy. He started to feel a little funny. “I play hockey.” Been skating since I was three. Roy was wondering about adding that little fact when Dr. Honey, his face masked, loomed into his line of sight. Dr. Honey had bright blue eyes, ceramic eyes, if that made sense, that all at once seemed scary.

  But his voice was gentle. “We’re going to take good care of you, Roy,” he said. “Your job is to count backward from ten.”

  “What’s yours?” said Roy.

  Everybody laughed.

  “Ten,” said Dr. Honey.

  “Nine,” said Roy. “Eight, seven, six—that’s my favorite number—fi…” He began to feel light, lighter and lighter, as though he could float into the air, drift out of the room, out the front door of Mass General, out of Boston, home. Not home to Ethan Valley, or the old home in Foggy Bottom, but the very oldest home, way up in the woods of Maine. Dr. Honey’s ceramic eyes closed in. “Bobby Greelish,” Roy said.

  “What was that?” said Dr. Honey.

  “Missed it,” said someone behind him.

  “Bobby,” said Roy. “Where’s Bobby?”

  “See the size of that rat?” said Bobby.

  “Where’d it go? said Roy.

  Roy and Bobby worked out in the open, welding steel basins for the assembly line at the chemical plant in Bath, one of Mr. King’s biggest customers. They were in plain sight of Mr. King’s office window, and he kept an eye on them so there was no fooling around. Except when it rained: then they moved under a corrugated roof that blocked Mr. King’s view. There Roy and Bobby got away with all sorts of things, like building a go-kart, customizing Bobby’s motorcycle, melting random meltables, vaporizing spiders and other bugs with their torches. They were searching for the giant rat, torches in hand, when Mr. King came up undetected behind them.

  “You boys stealin’ from me?” he said.

  They whipped around, shutting off the nozzles. “Stealing from you, Mr. King?”

  Mr. King’s hair, what little he had, was plastered down on his skull from the rain. It dripped off his bony nose and pointy chin. “I pay you to work, don’t I? Goddamn good money. So when youse not workin’ I call that dippin’ your dirty hands straight in my pocket.”

  “We were just testing the mixture,” Roy said. “We weren’t—”

  “Takin’ food right off of my fuckin’ table’s what it is.” Mr. King looked from one to the other, his little eyes darting around in fury. “I oughta can both your sorry asses.”

  “But, Mr. King,” they said. That would be bad: the money they brought home—both boys raised by single moms—was important.

  “Sure,” said Mr. King, mimicking them. “Now it’s ‘but, Mr. King.’” He glanced across the yard, seemed to get an idea. “Tell you what,” he said, calming down. “Mebbe I can see my way clear to givin’ one more chance.”

  “Thanks, Mr. King.”

  “I’m a softie, always been my problem,” said Mr. King. “But fact is, could be I got a special job.”

  “Yeah?” said the boys. They were getting pretty bored making those steel basins day after day.

  “Ayuh,” said Mr. King. He crooked a finger at them.

  The special job lasted till it was time to go back to school and turned out to be kind of fun.

  “This here, boys,” said Mr. King, leading them to the farthest corner of the yard, dark forest just the other side of the barbed-wire perimeter fence, “is where it all begun.”

  They gazed at an old tumbledown building, paint mostly peeled off, windows broken.

  “Where what all begun?” said Bobby.

  “King Machining and Metals, for fuck sake,” said Mr. King. “But my granddad started out in cement. You’re lookin’ at the old warehouse. Thing is, now I need the space, so you boys is gonna knock it down fer me.”

  “Knock down the building?” said Roy.

  “Whole shootin’ match,” said Mr. King. “Bust it into itty bitty pieces. Dump ’em in the Dumpster.”

  Mr. King’s old cement warehouse was timber-framed, probably not very well built in the first place, now pretty frail. Roy and Bobby busted it into itty bitty pieces, mostly using ten-pound sledgehammers, but sometimes chain saws, and when things got a little crazy, their own bodies as battering rams, testing whether they could actually run through walls. Lots of old supplies lay around the warehouse, including rotting bags of this and that. Heavy work to carry all those bags to the Dumpster, so usually the boys just went at them with chain saws. When the bags split, the stuff inside came boiling out, like a blizzard was blowing through what was left of the warehouse, coating them from head to foot, like two snowmen in August. The boys got a kick out of that, plus it saved them work because the white stuff vanished in the next rainstorm, or even in a strong breeze. M
r. King peeled off a twenty-dollar bonus for each of them on their last day.

  Four

  Chest sewn back up—only four stitches needed—and still a little groggy, but feeling no pain, Roy waited for the biopsy results, no one else in the outer room. Dr. Honey had lots of old National Geographics. Roy found himself staring at a beautiful photograph of a forest cabin with bright red wildflowers growing by the front door and a fast-running brook in the background. For a while, he could hear the water and almost smell those flowers. The loveliness of nature and how sweet just being alive could be overwhelmed him. Then the grogginess began to dissipate, and the weaknesses of the photograph became apparent: it was like an all-dessert meal, too rich, too superficial, too eager to please. But just before Roy closed the magazine, the picture made a connection with something deep in his mind, hooking onto a bit of residue not yet swept away with the ebbing drugs inside him.

  Roy took out his cell phone, called information for North Grafton, Maine, asked for Bobby Greelish’s number. No listing for a Bobby or Robert Greelish. The only Greelish in the directory was Alma: Bobby’s mother. Roy called her.

  “Mrs. Greelish?” he said. “Roy Valois.”

  “Roy?” An old woman; he didn’t recognize her voice at all. “This is a surprise. How’s your mom these days?”

  “Fine,” said Roy. His mother had left North Grafton long ago for an apartment he’d bought her in Sarasota. “I’m looking for Bobby, actually.”

  “My Bobby?” said Mrs. Greelish.

  “Yes,” said Roy. “Bobby.”

  “You mean you never heard?”

  “Heard what?”

  “Bobby…” Her voice thickened. There was a muffled pause, as though Mrs. Greelish had covered the mouthpiece with her hand. Then, her voice under control, she came back on the line and said: “Bobby passed away, two years this Christmas.”

  “Bobby’s dead?” Roy thought: motorcycle accident. That was his hopeful side piping up.

  “Passed,” said Mrs. Greelish. “He caught this horrible rare disease.”

  “Called?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “The name,” said Roy. “The name of the disease.”

  “Oh, sorry, Roy,” said Mrs. Greelish. “It’s a big long word—I never did learn to say it properly. Bobby’d get a little impatient about that.”

  So Roy wasn’t totally unprepared for the biopsy results, could even be said to have taken it well: he could read that on the faces of Dr. Honey and his staff.

  “You’ve got someone to do the driving?” said one of the nurses on Roy’s way out.

  “Waiting in the car,” Roy said.

  He drove himself back up north, alone. Clear blue sky with silver overtones, small golden sun, glaring but somehow cold, snow that grew whiter and whiter the farther north he got: a lovely winter day, and winter was Roy’s favorite season. He especially liked when ice sheets coated the granite outcrops where the road builders had blasted through, and there was lots of that today, those hard rocks shining bright. It brought tears to his eyes, and Roy, no crier but here in complete private he couldn’t come up with a good reason not to, let them flow. Not for long, though—one exit, maybe two. By the time he’d crossed the Connecticut River and entered Vermont, he’d pulled himself together.

  Diagnosis: sarcomatous unresectable malignant pleural mesothelioma, stage three in the Brigham staging system.

  How many stages?

  Four.

  So it could be worse.

  True.

  Good. So where do we go from here?

  From here?

  In terms of treatment.

  Ah.

  Sarcomatous unresectable malignant pleural mesothelioma: there turned out to be a lot of meaning crammed into that little phrase. The word unresectable alone packed a tremendous punch.

  Treatment: palliative care.

  Palliative?

  It means—

  I know what it means. Is that all you’ve got?

  There are clinical trials, but you don’t qualify.

  Why not?

  The diagnosis.

  Isn’t that a little circular?

  Dr. Honey had seen some justice in that remark. Then he mentioned that his wife knew all about Roy’s work, was amazed at her husband’s ignorance. After that he brought up an experimental program a friend of his was about to start at Hopkins.

  Can you get me into it?

  I’ll try.

  Try hard?

  Prognosis: four months to a year.

  Roy went cold all over when he heard that. And Dr. Honey seemed to shrink in size, as though Roy was suddenly seeing him from a distance, already going or gone.

  How certain are you?

  Nothing is certain in this profession, not certain in the absolute sense.

  So it could be thirteen months?

  It could.

  Fourteen?

  Possibly.

  Eighteen?

  Nothing is certain.

  That means there’s hope.

  Always.

  I had a hat trick the other night.

  Hat trick?

  An unfamiliar term to Dr. Honey. Roy, wishing he hadn’t said it, didn’t explain. Hat trick sounded pretty frivolous next to a word like unresectable.

  Roy drove up to the barn. A kid in a sweatshirt and unlaced boots was shoveling the path. Roy did his own shoveling. He got out of the car and said, “Hey.”

  The kid swung around. “Hi, Mr. Valois. Figured you must be, you know, delayed, so I thought I’d just, um…”

  Skippy. Was this his tryout day? Roy had forgotten all about it. What had he told him? Show up at two? Roy checked his watch—three-thirty—then noticed a new path shoveled all the way across the yard to the shed, and another, completely unnecessary, that seemed to be following the entire perimeter of the barn.

  “I really don’t need…” Roy began. Skippy waited, a full load of snow poised on the blade. “Come on inside,” Roy said.

  Skippy flung the snow up and over the high bank and they went inside.

  “So cool,” said Skippy, his gaze right away on Delia.

  “In what way?” Roy said.

  “In what way?” said Skippy. “It’s awesome, Mr. Valois, all those rads. Got something in mind for the next one?”

  Next one. That coldness came over Roy, but not as intense this time. “How about coffee?” he said.

  “I’m good,” said Skippy.

  “I’m having some,” Roy said. He went into the kitchen, reheated coffee, poured two cups. Back in the big room, Skippy was near the computer.

  “Frozen, huh?” he said.

  “Happens all the time,” said Roy. “I just unplug and replug.”

  “Um,” said Skippy. “Mind if I see if maybe I can…”

  “All yours,” said Roy.

  Roy pulled up a chair near Delia. Skippy tapped away at the keyboard. The room darkened. It was peaceful, just the three of them, a family by no one’s definition, but that kind of peaceful just the same.

  “All set, Mr. Valois.”

  Roy got up, his chest a little sore now, and went to the computer.

  “Shouldn’t happen again,” Skippy said. “And I’ve cleaned up your desktop.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Want free phone service?”

  “Free phone service?”

  “I could write a little program, hook you up.”

  “Would it be legal?” Roy said.

  Skippy turned to him, greasy hair in his eyes. “Like how do you mean, Mr. Valois?”

  “You can call me Roy,” Roy said.

  “Okay, Mr…. um,” said Skippy.

  Turk McKenny was the goalie for the Thongs, and also Roy’s lawyer. He had an office on the top floor of a white house overlooking the green. Roy could see part of Neanderthal Number Nineteen through the window.

  “Hell of a game, Roy,” Turk said.

  “Thanks.”

  “Shoulda seen the look on Normie’
s face when you stole the puck.”

  “A fluke.”

  “I don’t know,” Turk said. “Raised your game a notch or two lately. What’s up with that?”

  “That will you’ve been bugging me about,” Roy said.

  “Huh?”

  “I’d like to get it drawn up.”

  Turk took his feet—he wore Shetland-lined suede slippers—off the desk.

  “Now,” said Roy, “if possible.”

  Turk slid a notepad closer, put on half-glasses. “We can certainly get started,” he said. His head tilted, eyes peering over the rims. “Anything special get you motivated?”

  “The usual,” Roy said. Which was pretty funny—so funny, in fact, that Roy started laughing. For a moment or two he wondered if he’d be able to stop. Then out of nowhere the cough erupted, swallowing the laughter, taking over completely. Roy lurched from the room, hand over his mouth, and hurried down the hall to the bathroom. He coughed over the sink. No blood this time, only a little yellowish liquid, the consistency of raw egg white. Egg white instead of blood: Good sign or bad? How could it be bad? Was there hope? Always.

  Roy went back to Turk’s office. Turk was hovering by the door.

  “What is it, Roy? What’s going on?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Come on.”

  Roy shook his head.

  “It’s me,” Turk said.

  Roy was silent.

  “And if that’s not enough,” Turk said, “at least let me do my job.”

  “What does that mean?” Roy said; the sound of his voice was rough and ragged.

  “I’m your lawyer,” Turk said. “Don’t keep me in the dark.”

  They were friends, went back a long way: had played against each other in college—Turk a four-year starter in net for Dartmouth—and even before that in a high school tournament final in the old Boston Garden. Delia had liked him, too: Turk had been a pallbearer at her funeral. And Turk was his lawyer, the only lawyer he’d ever had, looking over everything—taxes, investments, contracts, including the one with Krishna. Roy took a deep breath, aware at the same time that it wasn’t as deep as his normal deep breaths, not nearly.