Beyond Physical

by D Pichardo-Johansson

  Richard stared at his own image in the mirror. He’d forgotten long ago about that face, his face at age nine. To his surprise, it wasn’t Ray’s face, as he thought he remembered; it was his. Much thinner, much less tanned, no lines yet, no gray hairs, same hazel eyes. He was struck by the look of desolation on the face, and he slowly felt a deep pain grow in his heart.

  “Where on earth have you been? I’ve been waiting for you all day!”

  His mother’s angry voice startled him. She held a leather belt and used her free hand to grab his arms and shake him, looking at him with an expression of deep hatred.

  “I’ve been worrying to death. I’ve told you a million times not to leave the house without permission. But you don’t care about anybody but yourself! I’m sick and tired of your attitude. You’re just like your father!”

  She belted little Richard violently. He cried in pain.

  * * *

  The sound of his own voice screaming woke up Richard. He was back on the bench. Laura hugged him tightly.

  “It’s okay, Mr. Fields. It’s okay. You can come back.”

  It took him a moment to realize where he was. His heart was pounding. His breathing was agitated. He was sweating.

  Springing off the bench, he walked backward, unstable. Looking around him, disoriented, he shook his head and mumbled, “I have to go.”

  He rushed across the garden into the parking lot, looking for his car. He climbed inside and drove off. He wasn’t sure that it was safe to drive in his condition, but he needed to get away as quickly as possible.

  His heart was still pounding when he made it to his neighborhood. He sped through the gate and didn’t slow down when he nearly crashed into two elderly men in their golf cart. He left the car in the driveway and rushed inside his home. Feeling suffocated by his clothes, he undid the buttons on his shirt as he walked to his bedroom.

  He took his shirt off and looked at himself in the full-length mirror on the closet door. He could almost see the old bruises from her belt punishment all over his body. The scars had faded over the years, but now he could feel the pain in each and every one of them as if they were new.

  The hazel eyes in the mirror were the exact same eyes he’d seen in that nine-year-old boy. The same deep sadness and loneliness he’d felt in his dream invaded him.

  He sat on the floor with his back against the wall and his knees up to his chest, and he cried. He cried for the little boy who couldn’t find his father at home. He cried for the boy who’d been hit so many times. He cried for the boy who looked into his mother’s eyes and saw hatred.

  * * *

  The distant sound of his cell phone woke Richard up from a deep sleep. It was already dark outside. He stumbled out of bed and followed the noise. He found the cell phone on the bedroom floor.

  He looked at the incoming call. It was Joy.

  “Oh, shoot!” He answered the phone. “Joy? I’m so sorry . . .”

  “Richard! Thank God! Are you okay?”

  “Yes. I’m sorry I left like that.”

  “That’s fine, I took a taxi. But I’ve been worrying to death about you. What happened?”

  Richard thought for a moment. Walking back to his bed, he sat down and lied. “I . . . there was a work related emergency. I tried to text you, but I just noticed the text didn’t go through. I’m sorry.”

  There was a short silence. Joy said, “Richard, if there’s anything I can help you with, let me know.”

  “Thank you, Joy. I’ll be fine. Have a good night.”

  “Good night, Richard.”

  He hung up and held his head with his hands. He felt exhausted and confused. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d cried before that day.

  He started getting dressed. There was only one person he could talk to in a moment like this. He got back into his car and drove to Carl’s house.

  Chapter 23

  It took Carl three more weeks to get Richard talking about his father. About how he’d abandoned his family when Richard was seven, rarely ever visiting after that—and usually drunk when he did. And how, when he was thirteen, his father had showed up out of nowhere and announced he had throat cancer, guilting his mother into letting him move back in with them and taking care of him.

  “I was terrified to see the hole the doctors made in his neck so he could breathe.”

  “A tracheostomy,” Carl offered.

  Richard assented. “I remember the gloomy daily trips to radiation therapy. But my father never finished it. The tumor eroded into the main neck artery, the carotid, and he bled to death one random night in the living room. It happened so quickly that he was gone before the ambulance made it there.”

  Having heard that part of the story before, Carl commented, “And you were with him when it happened?”

  He nodded. “I’ve never been able to forget the pulsating stream of bright red blood spraying out of his neck.”

  Always sensitive to see when Richard was emotionally tired, Carl looked at him with affection. “I think you’ve had enough for one day. Let’s chill out now.”

  Richard smiled, feeling gratitude. Carl had learned to work with him in short, intense blocks, alternating with longer stretches of relaxed, friendly conversation, not to overwhelm him. That had been the key to keep him coming back.

  Richard still had mixed feelings about these choppy efforts of informal psychotherapy and all the disturbing, questionable information about himself they were revealing. Was his difficulty connecting with his son really coming from his childhood with an absent father? He could see that. Was his attraction to unstable women an attempt to rescue his own mother? A little harder stretch. Were his authority issues a secret desire to be punished to recreate childhood? Too much for him to buy.

  Finishing the contents of his teacup, Carl put it on the table. “Tell me; how’s your girlfriend doing? What’s her name . . . Hailey?”

  Yawning, Richard stretched his arms. “She wasn’t really my girlfriend. But it doesn’t matter; she’s not around anymore.”

  Playfully, Carl raised one eyebrow. “She’s not around? What. Did you get her killed?”

  Richard laughed. “No! I just lost interest. I’m getting too old for her hunger for adventure “

  Carl nodded. “It’s not uncommon that, as we grow psychologically and spirituality, people who can’t keep up will fall out of our lives.”

  “She left me a message the other day, asking to meet again and I ignored it. Maybe I should’ve considered it.” He stretched his arms in a yawn. “At least she was company and sex. I’m not sure there’s anything much better out there.”

  After a silence, Carl asked with a casual tone of voice, “How’s Joy doing? You haven’t talked much about her lately.”

  Richard rolled his eyes. “Carl, when are you going to understand that there has never been anything between us?”

  “Do I sense a little disappointment about it?”

  Sighing, Richard picked up his own cup. “If you have to know, I haven’t seen her since that day at the Psych Hospital when Laura hypnotized me. I could never face her after the way I left.”

  “You say I imagine things, my friend, but that day you told me you’d run into her after those months apart, you were beaming.”

  Richard chuckled. “Carl, I’m not going to pretend that I’m indifferent to Joy this time. But let’s say that I’ve given up the idea that she’s ever going to be anything more than my platonic crush.”

  “Why the pessimism?”

  “Two times I’ve tried to ask her out, and it didn’t work—the last time my own fault. I guess it’s not meant to be.”

  Frowning, Carl said, “I wonder what would have happened to the world if every scientist in history had given up after two failures.”

  Richard didn’t answer. Carl added, “I know this is not my business, but I do want to throw a different spiritual theory in there. Are you ready?”

  Used to the drill, Richard smiled. “Okay, shoot.”


  Carl leaned forward. “I think the first two times you were not ready to handle it yet.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Yes. Sometimes we’re asking the Universe to deliver something to us that we don’t feel deep inside that we deserve or that we can handle. We send mixed messages and end up blocking our own success. Maybe you still had to go through this process of healing to be ready for her.”

  Richard considered it and then said, “I wish I could believe that, but no matter how much I change, she is never going to admit that she’s interested in me. I risk making a fool of myself.”

  * * *

  Richard lay in bed, watching a video of Michael O’Hara in one of his last public appearances, the ground breaking of a public park. It was one of dozens of old DVDs of news footage that he’d brought home a few months back and hadn’t finished watching.

  As he watched it, he pointed at O’Hara on the TV screen with his unloaded gun, pulling the trigger from time to time to enjoy the pleasure of pretending to shoot him. Tonight, he deeply hated that man.

  He looked at the blond guy on the screen. What did people see in him? He looked like a character from a 1950s movie. He sported a perfectly groomed, rigid hairstyle, an elegant suit and expensive tie, and a crisp white shirt with not one wrinkle. The same could be said of his pale, baby face—that guy desperately needed a tan.

  Michael waved and smiled at the people who cheered for him. What a fake smile. There was no way those teeth could be that perfectly straight and white naturally. He must have had some work done on them, if not veneers.

  Michael was presented with a shovel and a sapling. With a pompous gesture, he took off his jacket and his tie, handed them to his assistant, unbuttoned the top buttons of his shirt, and rolled up his sleeves.

  “Oh, please,” Richard said aloud. “Don’t try to look like a simple working man to earn more votes. Everybody knows you’re an elitist snob.”

  As Michael worked on shoveling the dirt from the ground, still waving and smiling to his followers, Richard noticed something shiny below the now open neck of his shirt. Getting closer to the screen, he got glimpses of something metallic catching the sunlight. It appeared to be a pendant necklace.

  Getting the disc out of his DVD player, Richard took it to his laptop. He fast-forwarded to the scene in question, paused it, and zoomed in.

  * * *

  Squinting, Samuel looked at the high-resolution screen in the monitor.

  “Samuel, do you see it too? It’s the same coin we found on his body, the symbol of the Lords of the Universe. It’s not a coin . . . it’s a medallion!”

  Samuel shook his head in disbelief. “Are you sure?”

  “It’s the same shape, size, and shade. We need to confirm it has the symbols on it.”

  “But how come nobody we interviewed ever saw it before?”

  “Maybe because he never took off that damn shirt and tie.”

  Samuel scratched his head. “But what does this mean? This throws away all our theories. It would mean . . .”

  “It would mean that the killer didn’t put the coin on the body the day of the crime. It was already there, because he was wearing it.”

  Samuel paced around the room, disturbed. “This means we’ve been following the wrong track all this time. We’re wasting our resources by investigating Rachel Hayes and tracking down every single common contact she had with O’Hara. Even all this time you’ve been spending with Dr. Andrews was pointless.”

  Richard thought for a moment. “Or, this could be another clue. This changes our perspective. Do you realize that this may mean that Michael O’Hara wasn’t necessarily killed by the Lords of the Universe, but that he was one of them?”

  Samuel stopped pacing and looked at him with interest.

  “We also found the coin on two of the three remaining victims,” Richard continued, “and we’re working under the assumption that it got lost in the crash for the fourth one.”

  “That would mean that being part of the LOTU group is the common denominator and has something to do with the motive of the crimes.”

  Richard nodded and added, “Which means we may have been worrying about Levenstein and Fox for nothing.”

  “But, then, who killed the four of them?”

  Richard took a turn pacing around the room. “My bet would still be that a member of the same group did it. From what I gather from my conversations with Andrews, they all had such different agendas that it was only a matter of time until they started killing each other.”

  “Do you think Rachel Hayes was killed too? From what I know, her sudden death was a surprise for everybody. She was a relatively young woman.”

  “It’s worth it to review her autopsy files.”

  “I’m afraid that this means something else too.”

  “What, Sam?”

  Samuel spoke slowly. “Have you realized that, if Michael O’Hara belonged to this weird fraternity, it’s unlikely that his own wife didn’t know about it?”

  Richard was startled. Somehow the idea hadn’t crossed his mind.

  “There’s a chance she’s also part of them, that she could be our way to find them,” Samuel added.

  Blinking rapidly, Richard shook his head. “I doubt it. We followed her for so long. She doesn’t attend any social gatherings. She barely has a handful of friends.”

  “I’m not sure, Richard. Maybe you should start monitoring her again.”

  At that moment, Richard’s phone rang. It was Nana.

  “Hello, Nana! Can I call you right back?”

  Her next words startled him. “Richard, something terrible happened to Dr. Clayton.”

  Life ran out of Richard’s body. “What happened? For goodness sake, Nana, tell me . . . is Joy okay?”

  Nana hesitated. Each second felt like a year to Richard. “She’s okay, but she’s devastated; we all are.”

  There was a long pause before Nana said, “Richard, we’re losing the Hospice House. They’re being forced to close.”

  Richard was relieved but still dumbfounded. “What?”

  “They received a letter from the government. They’re withdrawing the support for the Hospice House.”

  “When did this happen?”

  “Two days ago. Dr. Clayton’s been working frantically on an appeal to try to make them reverse the decision. Do you know what this means, Richard? Hundreds of patients are losing all the care we have!”

  Richard shook his head. “I refuse to believe this.”

  He mumbled an excuse to Samuel and left the office.

  Chapter 24

  Richard went straight to talk to Ava, the office manager. She explained that the government was terminating their subsidy, alleging that in the past two years, they hadn’t seen the amount of money savings that Joy’s proposal had promised. The decision was likely made by a bureaucrat with no idea about patient care. Without that support, they couldn’t survive. He asked her for a digital copy of Joy’s proposal and cost estimates to compare them with the actual expenses. He took the information to the data processing tech agent he trusted the most and also gave him Ava’s contact email so she could answer the questions Richard couldn’t.

  It was 4:00 p.m. when he arrived back at the Hospice House. The outpatient area on the first floor was deserted.

  Richard entered Joy’s office but stayed at the door. She sat at her desk, speaking with someone on the speakerphone.

  “Please, Charlie, you’re my only hope.”

  “Joy, it’s not that easy; I’m only one vote. I’m trying to convince the other board members against this, but they don’t listen.”

  Richard recognized Charles Clark’s voice. “Joy, this may be worse than it seems. There’s a board member who seems to have something personal against you.”

  “Dr. Josh Levenstein?”

  “Yes.”

  Joy sighed in despair.

  “Worst case scenario, Joy, think about my proposal. My friend in Los Angeles is interested in
hiring you, and he’s extremely successful. You and the kids would have nothing to worry about.”

  “Thank you, Charlie, but I’m not giving up that easily. Good night.”

  Joy hung up the phone and hid her face in her hands. Richard walked toward her, knelt down on the rug, and touched her shoulder.

  She gasped. “Richard! You’re here!”

  She threw herself in his arms, and he hugged her tightly.

  While she cried, he stayed quiet, holding her and stroking her back until the intensity of her sobbing waned—he’d learned that from her, from watching her at work with patients.

  Lifting her head from his shoulder, she dried her tears with a tissue. He got up and sat on the side table close to her, remaining silent.

  Joy finally spoke. “I’ve always said that I don’t talk to institutions; I talk to human beings. I find it hard to believe that a human being can be completely indifferent to the situation of abandonment these patients will be left in.” She dried her eyes. “I need to speak to one human being who’ll listen. But it’s so difficult. I’ve called every single politician I ever met through Michael, from Washington, DC, to Sacramento. Thank God, my friend Fe’s home with the kids, because now I have to sit here for the rest of the evening and pray that one of those people or their secretaries will call me back.”

  Joy rested her head on her arms on the desk. Richard wished he could help her feel better, but he’d never been the best at giving emotional support.

  “Have you had lunch?” he asked.

  She shook her head.

  He was relieved to see there was something practical he could do. “I’ll get you something to eat. I’ll be right back.”

  Richard rushed to his car and went first to a nearby Italian restaurant where he put in a carryout order, then went to the grocery store, then back to the restaurant to pick up the food.

  When he came back to the Hospice House, he found Joy in exactly the same position he’d left her—her head on the desk, her eyes open.

  He made sure the tone of his voice was upbeat. “Here I come, ready to cheer up a lady in distress.” He went through the bags and laid down their contents on her desk. “Here’s one of the best comfort foods ever created: pasta.”