Nerve Damage

by Peter Abrahams

  Jerry looked up, his eyes wet and silvery.

  “Sorry for your loss,” Roy said.

  “Thank you,” Jerry said. He blinked. “I’m afraid I can’t quite place—”

  “We haven’t met,” Roy said.

  “You’re a friend of Richard’s?”

  “Not exactly,” Roy said. “We talked on the phone a few times. My name’s Roy Valois.”

  A little pause. Raindrops trembled on Jerry’s bald head. “The sculptor?” he said.

  Roy nodded.

  “Richard mentioned you.” The expression on Jerry’s face changed.

  “Not favorably,” Roy said.

  “No, maybe not,” Jerry said. “I’m not sure why. I’m not sure about anything today.” He folded his arms across his chest, hugging himself. The keys fell to the wet pavement.

  Roy picked them up. “I contacted him about a story he was working on.”

  “He always had so many stories on the go,” Jerry said. He gazed into the distance. “What happens to them now?”

  “I don’t know.” Roy held out the keys. Jerry looked confused for a moment; then he took them. “The story was my obituary,” Roy said.

  The word itself made Jerry wince, as though he’d felt a sudden pain inside. “He hated obituary assignments. The future—that’s what interested Richard. He always had to know what was around the corner.”

  Jerry bent closer to the door lock, tried to stick in a key that was much too big. Roy pointed out the right one; Delia had had a car just like this when they first met.

  “Thanks,” Jerry said. He tried with the right key, but couldn’t get it to work either.

  “I know this is the wrong time,” Roy said. “But Richard was looking into a mistake in his research on my background. I wonder if he mentioned anything about it.”

  Jerry straightened, glanced up at Roy. He was a very small man. “Now I remember. He said you must be a megalomaniac.”

  “Why?”

  “Didn’t you break into the morgue? Still young—already so hooked on how posterity was going to rate you. That’s what he said.”

  “The mistake’s not about me,” Roy said. “It’s about my wife.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “She died. I just want the facts to be right.”

  “Oh, God,” Jerry said. “Recently?”

  “No.”

  Jerry covered his face with his hands for a moment, composed himself. “What do you want from me?”

  “I’d like to know if he was making any progress on the correction,” Roy said.

  “Not that he told me,” Jerry said. He gazed down at the keys. Roy took them from him and unlocked the door. Jerry sighed, a racking sound that sank deeper and deeper inside him. “Maybe there’s something in his notes.”

  Roy waited. He knew he should feel bad about what he was doing, but did not.

  Jerry opened the door. “You can follow me if you want.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Don’t thank me,” Jerry said. “It’s what Richard would have done.” His voice rose in anger. “He cared about the facts.”

  The house—two stories, white with black shutters and trim, immaculate—stood on a side street off Connecticut, not far from where Roy and Delia had lived after the apartment in Foggy Bottom. Jerry parked in the driveway, Roy on the street. A locksmith was at work on the front door.

  “Just about done,” the locksmith said.

  Jerry led Roy inside. “I don’t know why I’m bothering,” he said.

  “Bothering with what?” said Roy.

  “Changing the locks.” They stood in the kitchen. Tidy, except for wreckage of a wooden chair, piled in a corner.

  “Wasn’t it a break-in?” Roy said.

  “No, as a matter of fact,” Jerry said. “They either had a key or Richard let them in, according to the police. But the point I was making is how am I supposed to live here?” He gestured to the floor, a spot between the counter and the broken chair. “That’s where I found him. What was left of him, the bastards.” He hurried from the room.

  Roy moved to the corner, poked at one of the splintered bits with his toe. That last conversation with Gold came back to him: hang on a second; a little crash, as though a glass had fallen; dial tone. An idea rose in his mind, crazy, impossible: How about gluing all the pieces back together, but roughly, clumsily, emphasizing rather than disguising the repair?

  Jerry returned, necktie gone, eyes red. “The study’s upstairs. I don’t think you’re going to find much—they stole his laptop, too. But you can try his daybook.”

  “It happened last Thursday?” Roy said.

  “Somewhere between seven-thirty when I left for work and nine when the car service came for him,” Jerry said. “Normally, I don’t go in that early on Thursdays. Normally.”

  “What do you do?”

  Jerry waved that question away and led Roy upstairs. Roy knew he might have overheard the killing of Richard Gold, or at least the beginning of the attack. Had the killers let themselves in? Or had Gold gone phone in hand to the door? Were there good reasons for sharing any of this with Jerry? None that Roy could think of.

  They went into the study. “That’s his desk,” Jerry said. It stood by a window, overlooking a backyard with a big stone barbecue and two chaise longues. A bluebird glided down, snatched a white scrap of something in its beak and flew away. Jerry opened a desk drawer. A cell phone and a leather-bound daybook lay inside. Jerry handed Roy the daybook.

  He leafed through. Gold had neat, small handwriting, never crossed out anything. When had Roy first called Gold? He tried to reconstruct events, basing his calendar on Kegger-league games. And there, at the bottom of a left-hand page with notes like NAFTA invu, and mining indictments?—check 2:30, he saw: obit—. Last entry on the page. Roy looked at the top of the next one, read, notwithstanding three more expected indictments—Edwards, which didn’t seem to follow, and then came more about the mining story. A few moments went by before Roy noticed the rough edges along inside of the binding and realized a page had been torn out.

  He turned to the end—last notation: J—re dinner—and found the rough-edged evidence of another missing page. There wasn’t a word about him, Delia, the Hobbes Institute, the UN.

  “Anything?” said Jerry.

  “No.” Less than nothing. “But thanks for the help.” Roy held out his hand.

  Jerry shook it, his own hand cold and trembling. “That megalomaniac remark,” he said. “I wouldn’t want to leave you with a false impression.”

  “About what?”

  “About what Richard thought of you. After you contacted him, he looked up images of your work and was quite impressed.” Jerry took the cell phone out of the drawer. “In fact, he went out to Georgetown and took a picture of one of those Neanderthals of yours.”

  Jerry pressed buttons on the cell phone. “I’m not too good at this,” he said. “Richard was the—” He clamped down on the rest of it.

  Richard Gold’s cell-phone photos: first, Jerry himself, wearing a Redskins cap and smiling a goofy smile; then a big man with blond hair fading to white, standing under an umbrella on the far side of a busy street; after that Neanderthal Number Three, donated by Roy to the university.

  “Here we are,” said Jerry.

  “Go back,” Roy said.

  “Go back?”

  “To the one before.”

  “But—”

  “Just do it.”

  Jerry went back to the photo before Neanderthal Number Three, the fair-haired man.

  “Who’s that?” Roy said.

  “No idea,” said Jerry.

  Roy took a close look. Not a very clear image, the man’s face shaded by the umbrella; and almost fifteen years had passed. But: Tom Parish. Time had been good to him.

  “Did Richard say anything about this picture?” Roy said.

  “No. He just showed me the sculpture.” Jerry had a sudden thought; it made him look sick. “Why? What are
you suggesting?”

  “Nothing,” Roy said. “Nothing to do with you. Can you tell where it was taken?”

  But Jerry was unnerved now, shook his head quickly from side to side, not really looking. Roy scanned the photo for details, noticed a newspaper box next to a Starbucks, and next to that what looked like wine bottles in a display window.

  “All set,” called the locksmith from downstairs.

  Jerry jumped at the sound.

  Roy turned to go, paused. He gestured at the smashed-up chair. “Want me to take care of that?” He couldn’t help himself.

  Jerry gazed at the pieces for a moment, then shrugged. Roy, stooping to pick them up, realized he was still wearing the skullcap. He folded it neatly and put it in his pocket.

  Ten

  Rain fell harder. Roy set his armful of wood on the passenger seat. As he drove off, a police cruiser pulled over, took the spot he’d had. Roy circled the block. The cruiser was still parked outside Jerry’s house but no one was in it. Roy did a U-turn, found a space on the other side of the street, a space with an unblocked view of Jerry’s front door and the cruiser. He waited. Rain pelted down on the pickup, light drumming waves of sound that washed over him.

  “I’ve never been there,” Roy said.

  “Where?” said Delia.

  “Venezuela,” Roy said. “What we’ve just been talking about. Your trip.”

  “It’s not my favorite place.”

  “What’s wrong with Venezuela?”

  “Nothing.”

  “That doesn’t sound convincing.”

  She rolled over, laid her head on his chest. Her lips moved against his skin. “Do I have to convince you, Roy?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Nothing. Maybe I just don’t feel like going.”

  He tangled his fingers in the curls of her hair. “Why not?”

  “The whole thing’s just so…”

  “What?”

  She sighed; her breath flowed, warm and soft against his chest. “It’s not worth talking about. I have to go. That’s that.”

  “But I thought you were excited about this project. What about the pineapples?”

  “Fuck the pineapples,” Delia said. Then she laughed to herself, a low, throaty laugh Roy loved. She reached down, took his balls in her hand, hefted them like a produce manager sizing up the goods. “Fuck the pineapples,” she said.

  Roy opened his eyes.

  “What the hell?” he said.

  No rain. No rain and late in the day, tree limbs, chimneys and roofs all in black silhouette against an orange sky. Across the street, the police cruiser was gone and Jerry’s house dark. A woman walked up to the front door, laid a bouquet on the front step and moved off, entering a house down the street.

  “What the hell?” Roy said. He’d wanted to talk to that cop. “What’s wrong with me?” He drove back to Baltimore.

  The same bartender was working the hotel bar. Roy ordered what he’d had last time—chowder, T-bone steak, roast potatoes, Caesar salad, heavy ale, pecan pie with ice cream. Tonight he actually felt hungry. All at once, with no warning, he found himself rising into a good mood, as though some internal helium pump had clicked on. He hadn’t been in a good mood in a while, had almost forgotten the power of its lift.

  “How’d the scrap business treat you today?” the bartender said.

  “Not bad.”

  “I was talking to this cousin of mine,” she said. “He says with commodity prices like they are, there’s real money in scrap.”

  What would Murph say to something like that? Not from where I’m sitting. Roy said it.

  “You’re just the modest type,” she said. “I can tell.” She leaned forward a little, was wearing a low-cut top to begin with. “There aren’t many modest guys around these days,” she said. “But there sure as hell should be.”

  Roy laughed.

  She gave him a quick look. Roy read a lot into it, maybe too much. “What’s your name?” she said.

  “Roy.”

  “Nice name—I’ve never known a Roy,” she said, topping up his glass. “I’m off in an hour, just dropping in that little fact.”

  No, he hadn’t read too much into it. The bartender was nice-looking, smart, a little on the plump side, even matronly—but that felt right at the moment, perfect, in fact. Roy was about to smile, take the next step, when she added:

  “I’m Jennifer, but friends call me Jen.”

  That ended it right there. The rest was awkwardness, confusion, distance.

  Up in his room, Roy scrolled through the numbers on his cell phone until he came to Jen’s. She’d be in Keystone now—maybe, with the time difference, still on the mountain, getting in one last run; she loved being the last one down. Sometimes in the moguls she made a whooping sound. Roy gazed at her number, came close to dialing it, so close that he knew one night he would. He deleted it instead.

  Roy awoke in the night, very hot, the sheets soaked with sweat. He took a cold shower and remade the bed with fresh sheets. Outside his window, a full moon hung in the sky, seemingly very near, its surface details sharp. A huge rock, forever circling overhead: there was something unsettling about it, at least tonight. Roy got back in bed and just lay there, eyes open, mind full of black thoughts, refusing to come to order, the good mood long gone. Then, out of nowhere, came the memory of an image he’d sometimes used as a little boy to get himself to sleep, a practice he’d totally forgotten. The image: an igloo in a wild blizzard, and inside Roy, sitting calm and cross-legged before a cozy fire. He could see it now, all the component parts at once—blizzard, igloo inside and out, the fire from little Roy’s point of view, little Roy himself from an external point of view—in a way no person ever sees anything, whole and complete. And a perfect peace slowly enfolded him. Roy slept.

  He felt good in the morning, opened the drawer of the bedside table even before getting up, took out the phone books—Baltimore, D.C., metropolitan counties in Maryland and Virginia. He found many Parishes, including fifteen Thomases, two Toms and eleven T’s. There were also four Paul Habibs and eight P’s. He began with a Thomas Parish on Crestview Lane in Silver Spring.

  “Hello,” he said. “I’m looking for a Tom Parish who used to work the Hobbes Institute, and maybe still does.”

  “Huh?” said a woman; she sounded very old.

  “Tom Parish,” Roy said. “Who worked for the Hobbes Institute.”

  “You’ll have to speak up.”

  Roy tried again, louder.

  “My husband Tom?” she said. “But he’s been dead for three years.”

  “I’m sorry,” Roy said.

  “What was that?”

  He raised his voice again. “I’m sorry. But did he ever work for the Hobbes Institute?”

  “Why, Tom worked at GE for thirty years. Is this about the pension?”

  Roy refined his technique as he ran through the Thomas Parishes and into the Toms. He got two disconnected numbers, one endless ring, three answering machines, and the answer no expressed in different ways. By the time he reached the T’s he was on the road, headed for the hospital, a list of the remaining possibilities in his hand. He finished up in the waiting room, made a sublist of callbacks—the four nonresponding Thomases plus three nonresponding T’s.

  “And how’s Roy today?” Netty said, taking three more vials of blood.

  “Good. Any lab results yet?”

  “Dr. Chu will see you before you go,” Netty said. “Then you’re not due back for twenty-one days.”

  “How come?”

  “Three days on, three weeks off—that’s the routine,” Netty said. “I’m sure Dr. Chu told you.”

  “Not that I remember.”

  “So much to take in all at once,” Netty said, fastening on the blood pressure cuff.

  Pulse: seventy-three.

  Blood pressure: one twenty-five over ninety.

  “Those are up,” Roy said.

  Netty checked the chart. “Always hig
her in a doctor’s office.”

  “But I was in a doctor’s office yesterday.”

  “Let’s get you weighed,” Netty said.

  Roy stripped down to his boxers, stood on the scale. Netty tapped at the weights.

  “One seventy…” She peered at the numbers. “Is that a four or a five?”

  “Five,” said Roy. “One seventy-five on the nose.”

  Netty wrote the number on the chart, in a box next to yesterday’s box—173 and a half—and the box from the day before that—172. Roy waited for her to make some comment, but she did not.

  Roy had squeezed the last drops from the IV bag and was sitting back down, watching the water pulse and shine in the fountain, when Dr. Chu entered.

  “Ah,” he said. “Seeing with artist’s eyes.”

  “I don’t know about that,” Roy said. “Have you got the lab report?”

  “Lab report?”

  “On the blood Netty’s been drawing.”

  Dr. Chu opened a folder. “Two days’ results,” he said.

  “And?”

  “The numbers are within the expected range.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Mean?” said Dr. Chu. “It means that the statistical norms have not been exceeded.”

  “Norms?” Roy said, thinking if his blood was normal, then maybe he was already on the way back to his old self.

  “Typical results for stage three disease of sarcomatous cell type,” said Dr. Chu.

  “Are you saying that the treatment is working or not?” Roy said.

  “Oh, the treatment,” said Dr. Chu. “Much too early to see any effects of the treatment. We are now only trying to establish a baseline.”

  “But I feel better,” Roy said. “The cough, the breathing, everything.”

  “Excellent,” said Dr. Chu.

  “I’ve put on weight.”

  “Excellent.”

  “Take a look at the chart.”

  Dr. Chu looked at the chart. “Four pounds!” he said. “And that’s with the cast probably getting lighter as it dries out and starts crumbling away.”