Nerve Damage

by Peter Abrahams

  The boyfriend polished off the rest of the doughnut.

  “Like damages and so forth,” Skippy’s mom added, but Roy was already walking away.

  She raised her voice. “It’s on you.”

  Skippy heard that and slumped a little more.

  Delia lay in the cemetery behind the Congregational church. It was a place Roy never went, but he did before setting out for Baltimore. Some of the gravestones, closest to the church, dated from the 1600s. The newer ones stood on a slope rising toward the forest, Delia in the last row, next to the trees. She had a plain granite stone, dark gray, with nothing on it but her name and dates.

  Roy found the stone covered with snow almost to the top. He remembered one winter as a kid in Maine when a snow fort had collapsed on him, and the buried-alive feeling that followed. Roy cleared the snow away—one-handed—down to the frozen turf. Some people in his position might have thought about being back together in the not-too-distant future. Four months to a year. But Roy just didn’t believe it; not only that, he didn’t think anyone else believed it either, not in their deepest parts. If you really believed a rosy afterlife with lovers and families back together was in the offing, believed it as fact, then what would be the point of getting so worked up about death? But everybody did, the fear of death somewhere in their minds from the moment they first found out about it, and the death of someone close was the worst thing that could ever happen.

  “Or am I missing something?” Roy said aloud.

  Had he and Delia ever discussed this? Not really. He tried to imagine what she’d say now, and couldn’t.

  “I looked up Dr. Chu on the Internet,” Roy said. A brilliant guy, with degrees from the best schools and scientific prizes from three countries.

  Brilliant guys are a dime a dozen. The question is—can he do it?

  That thought came to him in Delia’s voice, so clear she might have said it aloud. In fact, he couldn’t swear she hadn’t said it aloud, not on any sensory basis. It stunned him. Roy crouched in front of the gravestone, a wind rising in the trees.

  He got through the funeral all right: hearing the news—everything about that call from Tom Parish still completely unfaded in his mind—had been the big blow. The Institute flew the body back from Venezuela, in an ornate white coffin she would have hated. Lots of people came to the service—old college friends, art-world people, hockey people, Washington people, including Tom Parish—none of whom Roy saw anymore, except for Krishna and the hockey guys. Tom told a funny story about Delia squeezing a donation out of some tinpot dictator. A guitarist sitting on a stool by the grave site played “For All We Know”—one of Delia’s favorites, especially the Billie Holiday version. Not long after came that first spadeful of earth, landing with a soft thump on the coffin. Roy had flinched at the sound. No one said anything about the baby inside her: still a secret between Roy, Delia and the obstetrician.

  The wind picked up. Snow started to fall, hard little pellets that stung Roy’s face. He rose, walked out of the graveyard, her voice still fresh. The question is—can he do it?

  Roy drove his pickup to the gas station at the southern edge of town, pulled up at the pumps. He filled the tank, was replacing the nozzle when he noticed the car on the other side: a Subaru wagon, packed top to bottom, with two big ski carriers on the roof. Roy looked up, and their eyes met, his and Jen’s.

  She looked great, the kind of woman who, unknown, he would have wanted to know—in some former period of his life, of course. A snowflake clung to one of her eyelashes; her skin glowed like it was a sunny day.

  “Hi, Roy.”

  “Hi.”

  “I’m off,” she said.

  What if Dr. Chu really could do it? Roy’s heart started beating very fast; he thought of saying Don’t forget about me, don’t even sign a lease, everything may change, but got a grip and simply nodded.

  Jen glanced over at the pickup, saw the suitcase sitting on the front seat. Some over-the-top romantic thought ran through her mind—he could see it—like Is he coming with me?

  “Business trip,” Roy said quickly, heading off any meeting between those unspoken thoughts, his and hers.

  Jen smiled. “You’re a businessman now?”

  Roy felt his face redden. “Taking a quick tour of scrap yards,” he said.

  “Working on something new?”

  “Just an idea.”

  “You always have good ideas.”

  “I don’t know about that.”

  They looked at each other.

  “Feeling all right, Roy?”

  “Great.”

  “Arm okay?”

  He waved it in the air to show just how okay; that hurt.

  Cars pulled in behind them. She came forward, kissed him on the cheek.

  “Drive safe.”

  “You too.”

  Roy followed her as far as the interstate. Jen tapped her brakes goodbye as she took the ramp. He kept going.

  “Before we get started,” said Dr. Chu, “I have something to show you.”

  Dr. Chu came around his desk, opening a folder. His office had rice-paper blinds and simple wood furniture, reminded Roy of a yoga retreat he’d tried a year or so after Delia’s death, lasting less than a day. Dr. Chu took a photograph from the folder, showed it to Roy: a picture of Dr. Chu, wearing shorts, a T-shirt and flip-flops, standing next to one of the Neanderthal sculptures with a big grin on his face. Roy noticed a palm tree in the background: Number Twelve, on the campus of the University of Miami.

  “Two years ago,” said Dr. Chu. “The annual conference.”

  “What annual conference?” said Roy.

  “The International Association for Mesothelioma Research,” said Dr. Chu. “Of which I am the founder, in fact. But my point was how our paths seem to have crossed previously in this way.”

  Roy had thought of that already: it gave him a bad feeling. “Dr. Honey says four months to a year,” he said.

  Dr. Chu slid the photo back into the folder, moved around the desk, sat in his chair. “I know Dr. Honey,” he said. He gazed at Roy, his eyes not so friendly now; almost a different man from the tourist in the photo. You want this guy on your side, you dope: Delia’s voice again, this time so clear she might have been in the room. Roy decided he preferred this unsmiling version of the man anyway and kept his mouth shut, waited for Dr. Chu to say more about Dr. Honey.

  But Dr. Chu did not. Instead, he thought for a moment or two and then said, “I will outline my approach in the area of unresectable pleural mesothelioma. The common weakness of all current chemical and radiation treatments is their lack of curative result, a result that will almost certainly persist notwithstanding current work with pemetrexed/ cisplatin, pemetrexed/gemcitibane, gemcitibane/carboplatin with or without bevacizumab, flavopiridol with or without FR901228, or other compounds presently in trial phase. The reasons for this are various—as the biology of cancer is even more various. My current phase one study in nonsurgical stage two and three is predicated on a neoadjuvant combination of tumor antigen and an angiogenesis inhibitor cocktail developed in my lab.”

  Pemetrexed, gemcitibane, flavopiridol, neoadjuvant—all these strange words, so unconnected to the language as he knew it: Roy began to lose the thread. Even ones he thought he knew, like antigen, now eluded him. The only one that stuck was cocktail, a very optimistic word. Sound flowed by, logical, persuasive, egotistical, but his mind turned to other things. Can he do it? Through the window Roy could see a distant scrap of blue, maybe Chesapeake Bay.

  He grew aware of a change in Dr. Chu’s tone, saw that the doctor was leaning forward. “…both to starve the cancer cells and turn them against each other at the same time, do you see?” he was saying. “To put it in the simplest terms, I am not interested in three extra months, four extra months, even a year or two.” His voice fell, as though he were imparting a secret. “I want more, much, much more.”

  Roy nodded. He did, too.

  Dr. Chu sat back.
/>   “Questions?”

  “How’s the study going so far?” Roy said.

  “Since it is a phase one study, very early, there are only five participants at this moment, four if we restrict the definition to only those still actually living,” Dr. Chu said. “I would categorize the current status of the study as promising.”

  “Then I want in,” Roy said.

  “We have not discussed potential side effects.” Dr. Chu went over potential side effects—rashes, nausea, hair loss, confusion, other things, none near as bad as death in four months to a year. “Questions?”

  “No.”

  Dr. Chu rose, picked up a stethoscope. “I will now listen to your chest.”

  Roy raised his shirt, fumbling a little. Dr. Chu glanced at the cast on Roy’s arm, said nothing. Dr. Chu placed the end of the stethoscope on Roy’s bare chest. His touch was light and gentle. He listened. Their faces were very close. Dr. Chu’s eyes had an inward look; he might have been in a trance. Intelligence radiated off him; Roy could feel it. At that moment, he believed his insides were being examined by something more probing than any scanning machine.

  Dr. Chu stepped back. “We begin first with a vitamin infusion, mostly B12 and folic acid.”

  “When?” said Roy.

  “If you’ll go to the waiting room, the nurse will call you soon.”

  “So I’m in?”

  “You are in.”

  He was in. Was this a moment for handshaking? None ensued. He went to the waiting room.

  Roy had the waiting room to himself. He filled in forms. He drank from the watercooler. He studied a framed aerial photograph of the Great Wall of China. An hour went by. What did soon mean? He spent a few minutes on some magazines, all of the celebrity type, of no interest to him. Then he noticed a section of the New York Times in the wastebasket beside him. Roy fished it out.

  Section D of a days-old paper, business and sports, with a coffee stain in the bottom right corner. Roy leafed through the business section—where sometimes there were stories from the art world, but not in this one—and moved on to the sports. But just before the sports came a page of obituaries. He scanned it, looking for Richard Gold’s byline. And Richard Gold’s name was there, although not as a byline, instead in a context that made him feel very strange.

  RICHARD GOLD, TIMES REPORTER, 41

  by Myra Burns

  RICHARD GOLD, who won several important awards during a fifteen-year tenure at the New York Times, died yesterday at the age of forty-one. He was killed during a robbery at his house in northwest Washington, according to Sergeant Irwin Bettis of the violent crime unit of the Metropolitan D.C. police. “This is a terrible loss for the Times family,” said managing editor—

  “Roy?”

  Roy looked up. A nurse stood before him. “All set to go,” she said.

  Eight

  “I’m Netty,” said the nurse. “No sense asking which arm—what happened?”

  “Hockey,” Roy said.

  “My, my.”

  He rolled up his right sleeve.

  “What a nice vein,” Netty said.

  “Thanks.”

  “Might feel a little sting.” She stuck in the IV needle. Roy felt nothing. Vitamins flowed into him. She watched the IV bag. “Where you from, Roy?”

  “Vermont.”

  “Supposed to be beautiful.”

  “Yeah.”

  Their eyes met. The nurse was middle-aged, heavy, with a soft, tired face. “Dr. Chu’s a brilliant man,” she said.

  It took ten minutes. Roy went back to the waiting room, feeling pretty good. Was it possible that the vitamins were doing their work already? He breathed, deep breaths, the first real breaths he’d taken in a while.

  Roy put on his coat, moved toward the chair where he’d left Section D of the Times. But at that moment the door to the hall opened and a man in a wheelchair came through, pushed by another nurse. The man had an oxygen tube in his nose. Judging from his hair, slightly gray at the temples, he might have been Roy’s age, but the rest of him was skeletal. Skin the color of cold ashes, except for raw unhealed sores here and there; eyes dull; neck scrawny: and shivering, although he was covered with a blanket.

  Was he in the study? Roy didn’t want to be anywhere near the man in the wheelchair. He left Section D of the Times where it was and hurried out of Dr. Chu’s office.

  Roy checked into a hotel, went down to the bar and ordered dinner: chowder, T-bone steak, roast potatoes, Caesar salad, a glass of heavy ale, and then another, plus pecan pie with ice cream for dessert. A big dinner: but Roy had always had a big appetite, had often polished off meals like this, after a day on snowshoes, for example. This time the chowder would have been enough. Roy forced the rest down.

  “I like to see a man eat,” the bartender said. “Here on business?”

  Roy nodded.

  “What do you do, don’t mind my asking?” she said.

  Roy gave his usual answer for situations like this. “I’m in metals,” he said.

  “Like gold?” said the bartender.

  He got that a lot. “Scrap,” he said.

  “Oh.” She moved away; the usual reaction, except for the odd man who asked if there was any money in it. Roy kept eating. After a while, she said, “Mind the TV?”

  Roy didn’t mind. The bartender turned on the TV.

  Local news. A reporter stood in front of a small white house on a tree-lined street, Georgetown, maybe, or Chevy Chase.

  “…still no suspects in the murder of D.C.-based New York Times reporter Richard Gold, who died of blunt force trauma to the head.”

  A photo of Gold appeared: bald, fine features, thin lips. He was reaching for a phone.

  “Robbery is the probable motive, according to investigators. Mr. Gold’s wallet is missing, as well as a flat-screen TV and other valuables. Anyone with information is urged to call the number on your screen.”

  The bartender watched, hand on hip. “They never learn,” she said. “Soon as they start using the credit cards they’re toast. Happens every time.”

  Roy had a good sleep. In the morning he showered, shaved, checked himself in the mirror. He looked all right, except for the broken arm and those four stitches in his chest, maybe a little redder than they should have been by now. He went to the hospital for his first treatment with Dr. Chu.

  Roy didn’t actually see Dr. Chu. First Netty took his pulse and blood pressure.

  “Numbers okay?” said Roy.

  “Normal.”

  Then she collected three test tubes of blood, putting different colored stickers on each. After that, she had Roy strip down to his boxers and stand on the scale.

  “One seventy-two,” she said. “Is that your usual weight?”

  “More or less,” Roy said, although less was the true answer: he hadn’t been under one ninety since junior year in high school, and had topped two hundred several times since. He stepped off the footpad, felt sweat popping out suddenly on his upper lip. Netty was slipping the test tubes into envelopes, her back to him. Roy slid the two scale weights leftward to the neutral position, expecting the right end of the arm to bob up, meaning the calibration was too light, probably way off, and he weighed one eighty at least, or more likely a few pounds more, seven or eight, say. But the arm didn’t move, just hovered there in perfect balance, a picture of harmony. At that moment, not a good one, came a foreshadowing of a new idea for Silence. What about that part of him—could it keep going all by itself?

  “Roy? Roy?”

  He heard her, turned from the scale.

  “You can put your clothes back on. Just leave that sleeve rolled up.”

  Fully dressed, sleeve rolled up, Roy followed the nurse out of the examining room, along a corridor and into another room in Dr. Chu’s suite. An unmedical kind of room—soft lighting, a fountain playing on a descending series of honey-colored stones, a suede couch—the only medical touch being one of those rolling IV-bag racks.

  “The treatme
nt room,” said Netty. “Dr. Chu had it designed by a feng shui master. He came all the way from Beijing.”

  “That doesn’t sound very scientific,” Roy said.

  Netty smiled a wise smile. “If you’ll just lie down on the couch.”

  He lay on the couch.

  “Get comfortable.”

  He shifted around like someone getting comfortable. Netty wheeled over the IV rack. “Might feel a little sting.”

  This time he did, and not just a little. It hurt so much that Roy almost let out a sound. Had she done something wrong? He glanced down at his arm, saw the needle neatly in place, not a drop of blood anywhere. So: no clue. But his skin seemed so white, like someone else’s. Colorless liquid flowed from the bag, down the tube, into his arm. It could have been water.

  “All you have to do now is relax,” she said. “Think you can do that?”

  “Sure.”

  “I’ll be back in twenty minutes.”

  Roy lay on the couch like a relaxing man. He watched the surface level slowly falling in the IV bag. Invisible chemicals swam in that liquid. Were some of them already reaching the cancer cells, arrayed in some potent molecular formation, all set to unleash their sophisticated attack, cutting off blood supply, turning tumor against tumor, and whatever else Dr. Chu had in mind?

  Fight like bastards. Delia’s voice.

  “There’s a war inside me,” he said.

  After that, he was quiet. He listened to the fountain, water falling on rocks. So many different sounds, actually, gurgling, trickling, bubbling, and others for which he had no words. He’d never even thought of working with water. To shape water: How would he begin?

  A fountain stood in the lobby of the Hobbes Institute. He saw it once, at a reception, not long before the Venezuela trip, a fountain with Neptune, cherubs and coins winking on the bottom. All the women wore black, except for Delia, in red. Delia was a great one for circulating at parties, but on this night she didn’t leave Roy’s side, her hand on his arm almost the whole time.