“I guess so.” He hated when people could tell at a glance.
“Don’t guess so—know so!” she replied.
“Yes, I’m gay.”
“But you don’t engage in homosexual behavior?”
“Sometimes. Just not that thing you mentioned—not that way. Yet, I guess.” He wanted to disappear into one of those magician’s dry-ice plumes.
“A gay black man,” Doc Carla said. “You sure got it easy, kid.” Suddenly, she exhaled—it was almost ecstatic—and said: “Look at these veins. Oh, my. They are just pristine. And look, I don’t even need to really coax.”
The time seemed right, so Tucker cleared his throat. “I read about your work with prostitutes. In the Times.”
She rubbed his skin with iodine. “They check in with me every couple years. I almost didn’t talk to them this time.”
“Why?”
“Every time they write about me, the do-gooders come out of the walls. I’ve gotta peel ’em off. They’re useless. I can’t take their checks because I’m not a charity and if they volunteer one night, they never come back. Their tender sensibilities and all. I just lost my van driver.”
“Yes, I read about that in the article.”
Tucker closed his eyes as Doc Carla slid the needle into his vein; the initial prick gave way to a dull ache. After a moment, he opened his eyes and saw her attach a small vial to the tubing. Tucker watched as his blackish blood rushed through the needle. He felt dizzy. Doc Carla noticed.
“Jesus, stop looking, honey! Focus on Lulu,” she commanded, pointing to the cat, who was still sitting in the window. “It’ll help. She’s one of the stations of Brahma. What do you do for work, Tucker?”
He hesitated. “I work in film.”
She withdrew the needle and prepared a second one. “I’ve heard that before.”
“It’s not like that. Legitimate film. I’m just a production assistant.”
“Gotta get that foot in the door. I better give you an AIDS test, too, even though you tell me you’re a monk.”
She removed the second needle from Tucker’s vein and held a piece of cotton over the tiny wound.
“Could I go with you once?” Tucker asked.
“On one of my runs?” Doc Carla asked. She studied his face again, the way she had when he first sat down on the exam table. “Do you drive?”
“I’ve driven before.”
She snapped off her plastic gloves. “You ever been around hookers?”
“No,” Tucker said.
“You squeamish?”
“No,” Tucker lied.
“Then meet me here tomorrow night. And wear old clothes, not this million-dollar shit,” she said, flicking the wide lapel of Tucker’s Goodwill jackpot find, a purple paisley Calvin Klein dress shirt.
When Tucker met Doc Carla the next night, she’d braided her thick, almost mangy hair and rolled it into a bun at the nape of her neck. The van was parked out front. “You know how to drive shift?” she asked.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Don’t call me ma’am. Makes me feel old. And I’m not old. I’m not even forty. Jesus H. Christ.”
“I’m sorry.”
Doc Carla handed him the keys. “Eleventh, Twelfth, and Thirteenth, mostly between Second and Third. Full of IV-drug users.”
“That’s where I live,” Tucker said.
“Bad blocks,” she said. “How’d you end up there?”
“It’s where I ended up,” Tucker said.
“You know any of the girls there?”
“No.”
“They all seem alike when you first meet them—bad makeup, bad skin, neon green or pink high heels, black stretch pants, usually got a hole in ’em. But they’ve all got their own attitudes. They say finding a specific hooker in New York is like finding a needle in a hay factory, but it’s not true. I can find anyone. I’ve got to. Somebody’s got to start keeping track of how many girls this thing kills. They need condoms and doctors and they need food.”
The van was outfitted with a little kitchen and a miniature examining room, separated from the rest of the van by a Peanuts bedsheet tacked to the ceiling. There were venipuncture and butterfly needles, plastic cc vials, stacks of McDonald’s vouchers for free meals, sanitary wipes, tampons, and condoms. Boxes and boxes of condoms.
They pulled up in front of a tenement building on East Eleventh, and within minutes a tiny woman with black hair, half of it in her face, walked up to the side of the van.
“Hey, Doc, you got some tissue or something? I want to get this fuckin’ cum off me.” Tucker almost retched, but Doc Carla didn’t even blink.
“You need to start carrying hygienic supplies, Renata,” Doc Carla said, handing the woman a handful of tissues. Renata ran the tissue down her pant leg, then shoved it into her pocket. “Got any free McDonald’s, Doc?”
“If you got time for a test,” Doc Carla said. Renata sighed, but walked back toward the sliding door and waited for Doc Carla to unlock it. “I give ’em these vouchers and ten bucks if they take an AIDS test. It’s about twice as much as they get for a blow job down here.” She walked to the back of the van and opened the door for Renata. “When was the last time I saw you, beautiful?”
“I don’t know, Doc,” Renata said as she climbed into the van. “The nights all get sort of smushed together. Don’t know what’s a month anymore.”
After Doc Carla drew Renata’s blood, other women began materializing like specters out of darkened doorways. An hour later, Doc Carla had Tucker drive into Brooklyn, to an empty lot near the waterfront, in the industrial badlands around the corner from Bush Terminal. The lot was surrounded by a tall metal fence, with a van-size hole in it.
“I made that hole a year ago,” Doc Carla said. “There’s another one on the other side, but it’s girl-size; that’s how they get in here.” It had recently rained, and the mud was a cesspool of candy wrappers, gloves, scraps of paper, used condoms, and the amber shards of broken beer bottles. Tucker tried to ignore the pins-and-needles feeling taking over the right side of his face.
“See that clump of ailanthus trees?” Doc Carla said. “Pull the van up under those ugly things, by the Dumpsters.”
“The Tree of Heaven,” Tucker said, easing the car forward.
Doc Carla laughed darkly. “Can’t polish a turd, Tucker.”
As they approached the Dumpsters, women began appearing from behind them. A few even came out of the Dumpsters themselves, some of which had been turned on their sides and made into rude shelters. Tucker wanted to put the van into reverse and speed away before he saw any more. Instead, Doc Carla opened the passenger-side door.
“There’s Sandy,” she said. “God, I’ve wanted to test her again for three months. Sandy!” The woman wandered over. “Did you know what I meant last time when I said you tested positive for HIV?”
“I don’t know which one that is,” Sandy said.
“It’s one of the newish ones,” Doc Carla said. She reached into the glove compartment and handed Sandy the same brochure she had given Tucker the day before when she’d sent him home. “You know I never tell you girls to get off the streets. That’s not my call. But Sandy—sweetheart—you gotta stop working, honey, because you’re going to start killing people. And please come see me. I can help you.”
“But I’m feeling good, Doc. I’m getting fat. I don’t think I’m sick anymore.”
“Who’s watching the baby tonight?”
“Oh, the state took her already,” she said.
“What’d you call her?”
“Daphne.” When she saw Doc Carla writing this down in her notebook, she added, “But they probably already changed it, Doc.”
Later, after they finished their rounds, Tucker stole a glance at Doc Carla as he turned the van onto Houston Street. Her bun had come undone, and the braid now lay across her right shoulder.
“Do you do this every night?” Tucker asked.
“Every night.” She looked at him
sleepily and reached over to touch his face, half of which now hung slack. “Bell’s palsy. Have you had it before?”
“Yeah,” Tucker choked out. “But not for a long time. Tonight’s the first time in a long time.”
They drove down Houston for a while. As they waited for the light at Avenue A, Doc Carla said, “It’s stress that brings it on, the palsy. It won’t last long. But you probably know that.” She sighed. “This may be too much for your tender sensibilities, honey. It’s almost too much for mine, and mine are damn blunt instruments.”
A sob swelled in Tucker’s throat. All he could manage was a thick, “Please.”
He could see her studying him, and tried to hold it together, but his need at that moment was depthless. “Your parents,” Doc Carla said. “Do they both hate the gay thing, or is it just your dad?” Tucker tightened his grip on the steering wheel, and she noticed. “I’m sorry, honey. I have a bad habit of letting my mouth run.”
Two stoplights later, Doc Carla was asleep, her chin on her chest, and her braid falling over the seat belt and across her shoulders. Having her hand on his face had made Tucker feel less alone. Her question, though he’d left it unanswered, had made him feel human. He felt seen. And now he wanted nothing more than to remain forever in this metal beast loaded with condoms and coupons hurtling down Houston on a string of green lights.
Over the next six months, Tucker worked for Doc Carla after work, driving her van and getting to know the girls on the strolls. He never mentioned the doctor to his boss, and his boss forgot about her. When the film crew began work on a documentary about a cadre of squatters in a Lower East Side tenement, Tucker was tasked with locating archival footage at the Museum of Reclaimed Urban Space. That was when he began writing, in the five-minute stretches it took for the museum’s archivists to locate the requested VHS tapes. It had started as a diary, but soon became a story, then a novel.
Little in Tucker’s life had come easily, but the novel did: he wrote a complete draft in eight weeks. The filmmaker hooked him up with a literary agent, and the agent sold the book. A year later, it was published as Unfortunate. The summer after it came out, Tucker had been named the third tine on a trident of “promising” young male writers, christened thusly by New York. But Tucker always knew it was Doc Carla they were interested in, not him—the story, not the writer. He tried to forget this. He found that he couldn’t.
Tucker waited to tell Doc Carla about the book until he had a copy to give her; he had dedicated it to her. She was not happy. “You lack imagination and integrity. You mined me for material. You took from these women the last things they had—their dignity and their anonymity. This is real life, Tucker, not art. I thought you cared. You’re not an artist. You’re a voyeur.” She took the keys to the van and stopped answering his phone calls.
At first, Tucker ached for her presence as if she’d been a lover. He couldn’t sleep. He barely ate. It faded, over time, but there hung about him always a heaviness. For a while, he lived off his advance, but soon he had to beg the filmmaker for his job back. He spent the next few years logging archival footage, applying for licensing rights, and, later, proving his genius for administrative work, as a unit production manager on several well-received documentaries. He found he was unable to write. Doc Carla was right. He was not an artist.
In 1997, after managing a documentary about the birth of the National Science Foundation, Tucker was offered a job as a speechwriter with the NSF’s Office of Legislative and Public Affairs. He’d become friendly with a number of admins during filming, including the head of the NSF, Alexandra Scaletta. Tucker moved to Washington, D.C., where he was told to write pithy, diplomatic, “accessible” speeches for her. After the midterm elections, when the speechwriter position was eliminated due to congressional budget cuts, Scaletta decided to take Tucker with her on a trip to Antarctica. She wanted him to suss out the federal research stations, get status updates from the Program’s support contractor, and to meet Karl Martin, VIDS’s head of Hostile and Developing Regions.
It was during that first jaunt, a visit that took them to all three U.S. research stations in a single weekend, that Tucker had an hour-long tryst with a welder in the comestibles storeroom at Palmer Station. It was his first physical encounter in three years, and he had tried to pass off his inability to work his way through the man’s layers of ECW gear as a seductive burlesque. But eventually the welder grew anxious and wrenched off his overalls, his jeans, and his long underwear, and pulled out his well-insulated dick himself.
Although Tucker knew full well the unexpected rendezvous was a fluke, it colored his perception of Antarctica, infusing it with hope. He applied for the assistant manager position at South Pole Station as soon as he got back to Washington. Despite Scaletta’s letter of recommendation, Tucker was turned down the first time, due to a “lack of relevant experience,” but after his third try, he received an invitation to VIDS’s Denver campus, where he was deemed “exceptionally well-suited” for polar service.
One day, several years later and between Pole assignments, Tucker picked up The New York Times and read that the city had shut down Doc Carla at the urging of the American Medical Association and sex worker activists, who found her work with prostitutes greatly concerning. The doctors abhorred the McDonald’s coupon swap. The activists didn’t like the implications of the tests—they infringed on the sex workers’ human dignity. And so, after citing her for numerous violations, the Department of Health had confiscated Doc Carla’s van. When she refused to turn over the medical records she kept on the women she tested, they suspended her license and took her to court. No one came to her defense because no one she had cared for had a voice.
To Tucker’s relief, there was no awkwardness when he got ahold of her. She acted as if there had never been a break between them. He encouraged her to begin seeing private patients again, but she told him she was done. “This was the only thing that kept my work meaningful, Tucker. They’ve taken it from me now, and I’m done.”
“Well, I need a doctor,” Tucker said.
“I told you—”
“It’s a tough assignment, though.”
There was a pause on the end of the line. “Go on.”
“It’s a clinic that sees injuries and illness not typically encountered in regular medical practice.”
“Go on.”
“It’s a lonely outpost. Populated by difficult patients. Impossible environment. Far from civilization. Lots of drunks. Lots of red tape. Poorly supplied. Plus, you’ll be responsible for any dental emergencies.”
“Is it in hell?”
“It’s at South Pole.”
* * *
The woman in Room 221—Cooper—was lying to him because she hadn’t prepared. The other artists and writers knew the game. They’d applied for enough grants and fellowships to have become adept at crafting the bloated prose required of artists in search of funding. But Tucker had been at the game long enough himself to know that the less slick the self-presentation, the better the artist. And then there were the eyes—anxious but penetrating. Tucker wasn’t concerned about the brother’s suicide, even though the contract psychologist was. She was paid to be. He was paid to be intuitive, and he sensed that Cooper was coming from a place of strength. She wanted to go to Pole for the reason he had gone: to avoid becoming a tragic figure.
Still, she was officially borderline, and Tucker would be expected to present some evidence at the final psych meeting that night which counterindicated the initial red flag. One thing that typically smoothed the way in these cases was a coherent, thoughtful reason for wanting to go to South Pole—one that didn’t include heroics or escape fantasies. But so far she had nothing for him and, by the time he was halfway down the hall, he had almost given up on her. Still, he wasn’t entirely surprised when he heard her calling his name from the doorway of room 221.
“I’ve got one,” she panted when she reached him. She told him it was a quote. History, Tucker thought.
No good, and he told her so. But she insisted, and so he acted as if he was going to write it down.
“‘If you are a brave man, you will do nothing; if you are fearful you may do much, for none but cowards have need to prove their bravery.’ Apsley Cherry-Garrard. Of the Scott party.” There was no imploring gaze, no clasped hands, no more fear in her eyes—just her frank, open face. “I’m a coward. Let me prove I’m brave.”
For some reason, Tucker thought of Doc Carla asking him if he knew how to drive, all those years ago. She seemed to be saying then, as Cooper seemed to be saying now, that if you were a coward and knew you were a coward, you would do fine in this life. Maybe that, along with regular chemical peels, was why Tucker had made it this far.
* * *
Doc Carla was sitting on one of the metal steps leading to the clinic, smoking a cigarette through her filthy balaclava. Only her tired face was visible. Tucker kicked some snow over a frozen mound of vomit, and took the seat next to her. Doc Carla glanced down at the puke and took a long drag off her cigarette. “Poor guy almost made it to the can.”
Tucker watched a grader grind down the entrance tunnel on its way to the work site and noticed Cooper walking across the long expanse under the Dome, alone, hood off but goggles on. She didn’t see him, and he restrained the impulse to call to her, to check on her. She had made herself scarce since getting lost a few days ago in the Utilidors—the underground utility tunnels through which Floyd had been leading Fingys on a tour. Her humiliation touched something deep in his being.
“The Crud’s rampant, Tucker,” Doc Carla said. “Got four of ’em beating down my door this morning.” She took one last drag off the cigarette, then dropped it in the snow. “But the Crud I can handle.” Tucker looked over at the doctor; they were not even to Halloween yet and she already seemed preoccupied. Tucker wanted Doc Carla to remain content, but he still wasn’t sure if diagnosing hematomas and treating cracked hands with Super Glue was going to keep her happy.
Doc Carla coughed. “So, you think she must’ve come here knocked up.”
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