The Malfeasance Occasional

by Various Authors

  I imagined coming home to this after a hard day of slicing open women’s chests and then delivering the bad news that the cancer had spread.

  “You know, I have a very hard job. Sometimes I have to recommend biopsies that will hurt women.”

  I stood up and roamed around the doc’s house, thinking about all the misery that had brought me here.

  It had been two years, three months, and five days since the biopsy. And not a day in there when putting on a bra wasn’t intolerable.

  When I realized that my surgeon didn’t intend to help me, I’d gotten a second opinion, and then a third.

  * * *

  The second surgeon I consulted wore an expensive, tailored suit. He had a beautiful tan and a haughty attitude for my wasting his time on something as trivial as pain. He told me it was probably hormonal and offered to yank my ovaries. He said women came to him all the time in agony, begging him for help, but he never operated because of breast pain.

  The third surgeon was a woman, and she stressed that she was afraid that any surgery would make me worse. When I asked her what I should do, she shrugged and refused to answer. As I left her office, I heard her murmur something to her nurse about not getting involved.

  The only thing that all three surgeons agreed on was that the biopsy had absolutely been necessary, and that I was an ungrateful patient not to be glad I was benign.

  Then I went to see a personal injury lawyer. He looked at my scans and records and then asked his secretary to come in while he took a look at my boob. The attorney seemed very disappointed that my exterior scar was ugly but small, and most of the damage was internal.

  Without a doctor to testify that something had gone wrong in the surgery, and with most of the damage being invisible, he told me a successful lawsuit was incredibly unlikely. I argued that the scans showed that something had gone wrong, but he shook his head. Chronic pain after surgery is not necessarily an unexpected or preventable complication, and the biopsy had been required to rule out cancer.

  There was no way the lawyer would take the case on contingency, and even if I had the money to pay a retainer, he said he wouldn’t take the case. He wished me luck as he hustled me out the door. In an almost lustful voice, the lawyer mentioned that failure to diagnose cancer would be an excellent cause of action, but unfortunately, I was benign.

  Benign, my ass. My pain was a cancer that had metastasized into my soul.

  I left the attorney’s office, realizing for the first time that I really was going to be like this for the rest of my life. I’d never have a pain-free day again.

  * * *

  Sure, it felt good to wander around the doc’s home, getting off on the illicitness of it, maybe moving things out of place to try to freak him out, but was that what I really wanted to do?

  I wanted to hurt him, like he had hurt me. And then tell him: See you in six months.

  I walked around the house again, looking at his life. A diploma from a name-brand school, summa cum laude, for my surgeon; a certificate from the bar association for the wife. There were pictures everywhere of the happy couple: on their wedding day, in Hawaii, in Paris. Even the background picture on their computer was …

  I clicked on Firefox, pulled up Preferences and went to the Security tab. No way! The doctor hadn’t set up a master password. I clicked on “Saved Passwords” and “Show passwords” and, there on the screen—access to all of the doc’s life, including his Facebook, his Gmail … and what looked like remote access to the hospital records.

  I tried printing the window, but the computer beeped at me. Taking a screen shot of the passwords, I emailed the jpeg to myself and erased it from the sent mailbox and the documents folder. I was no hacker, but this was like taking candy from a baby.

  As I left the house, carefully locking the door the way I had found it, I realized that for a few minutes there I had forgotten how much my breast was hurting.

  I guessed I needed a project.

  If I hadn’t been angry with him before, after looking at the notes in my file, I’d have been furious.

  My medical chart was peppered with references to “exaggerated claims of pain,” “phantom pain,” “depression,” and “somatization disorder.” I couldn’t understand the amateur psychoanalysis: if they truly believed I was creating my pain in my head, why weren’t they sending me to a shrink for evaluation and treatment? If I could point to the spot that hurt and it showed up as abnormal on a scan, and we even had a presumed cause for the pain, how could that be “phantom pain” or “depression?”

  Yes, I was depressed. It’s not like I ever denied it. You live in pain for two years and tell me how much fun it is. Spend your life arguing with doctors, researching on the internet, and bankrupting yourself trying alternative treatments, and see how many friends you have left.

  I spent the next week thinking and plotting. I read all the doc’s emails. Boring as hell, of course. But monitoring my surgeon’s Facebook page, something seemed odd.

  Every few days, he would post an update mentioning a “challenging” surgery. But when I checked his hospital records for those days, it didn’t look like the surgeon had even been scheduled for surgery. The next time he wrote about a “challenging” procedure, I decided to follow him again.

  I sat in my car parked on the street just outside the hospital parking lot, surveilling just like Rockford or Magnum had on those old TV shows.

  It was a good day. My breast was a slow simmer of aching, not the hot, incapacitating fire of my worst days. But even on my best days, I iced preventively and took my full complement of pain relievers: it had taken a long time to accept that these good days were an anomaly. Each one gave me hope, and then I crashed harder each time when I realized it was just a solitary respite. I tried keeping a pain journal, but the fucking randomness of it all made it so much worse. To have absolutely no control over my well-being was slowly destroying me, and I knew it.

  The red Mercedes stopped at the security gate. My surgeon’s skilled fingers inserted a plastic card into the machine, and the car proceeded out of the hospital parking lot. I tailed him to a hotel downtown: the Palace Suites, la-di-dah. He pulled into the lot and waved at the attendant, who seemed to recognize the doctor and nodded back. I parked and followed him into the lobby.

  He registered at the desk, casually, confidently. Pushing the registration papers over to the clerk, he glanced around the lobby. My surgeon looked right at me, and right through me. Guess he didn’t recognize me without the shorty paper gown—you know, the one that makes you feel more naked than if you were completely nude? The doc turned back and accepted a keycard from the clerk.

  I didn’t push my luck and sat down in the lobby, my profile to the doc, while watching covertly. He checked his watch and looked around again. I kept my face forward and watched from the corner of my eye as a woman joined him. As she kissed him on the cheek, I took a photo with my phone and then pretended to make a call, muttering nonsense into the receiver. “How you doin’… yeah, know what you mean … uh-huh … okay, later then.”

  As the couple disappeared into the elevator, I got the hell out of there.

  That afternoon, dressed in a corporate skirt and blouse, with sensible heels and pantyhose, I dropped an interoffice memo envelope on the desk of my doc’s wife’s secretary at her law offices. My handy internet research, you see. Come on, what would Charlie’s Angel Jill Munroe one of Charlie’s Angels do? Hang on, Bosley, I’m almost out of here.

  I glimpsed the surgeon’s wife, seated behind her desk, her phone cradled by her shoulder as she worked hard on some legal case or another, and I felt a little twinge of guilt. She hadn’t hurt me, but she was going to suffer just like my surgeon.

  You know what? Fuck her.

  Dinnertime on the cul-de-sac. I was seated on my stump in the woods again, watching as the happy couple returned home. It played out like a movie in front of me, the light of the room showcasing their angry gesticulations through the blackness of
the evening. The surgeon grabbed something from his wife’s hands, and I realized he was tearing up my photo.

  Like that’ll do any good.

  The doc tried to hug his wife and she pushed him away, leaving the room with him following. I strained my eyes, trying to see what the hell was happening, and then a light went on in an upstairs room. I could see her pass back and forth in front of the window. Packing, I supposed.

  The surgeon joined her. It looked like he was begging her not to go. I really wished I could hear him, imagining the pain in his voice as he tried to explain himself.

  I could hear the front door slam all the way out in the woods. The blue Mercedes sped out of the cul-de-sac, tires screeching a little. Guess she couldn’t wait to get away from him.

  It felt good. I had caused this misery. I had fucked up their lives the way he had fucked up mine.

  The surgeon wandered into the kitchen. As the night became darker, he was cast into sharp relief, tipping a bottle and clinking it against a heavy leaded glass. Two fingers of solace. I knew how that went.

  But it wasn’t enough.

  I wanted him to know that I had done this to him.

  * * *

  I rang the doorbell, humming a little under my breath. The sight of him guzzling whiskey had been delightful. The surgeon threw the door open, expecting … maybe the wife, regretting her haste?

  Nope, just me. Just that annoying patient who won’t go away.

  “Something wrong, Doc? You seem upset.”

  “Wait … what are you doing here?” He tried to block my way, but I pushed past him, walking into the house. “Excuse me, you’re going to have to leave. It’s not appropriate for you to be here.”

  “Appropriate?” I laughed. “Is this a bad time? Did something happen?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Feeling a little out of control, Doc? Maybe things are just not working out the way you pictured them?”

  “You did this? You sent her the picture?”

  “It blows, huh? Oh, by the way, I’ll see you in six months. We’ll reassess how you’re doing at that time.”

  “I didn’t hurt you on purpose!”

  “But you’re certainly not trying to help me now.”

  “God damn it, you are just not grateful enough that you’re benign. There are plenty of women dying from breast cancer who’d be thrilled to have your pain.”

  “Cancer isn’t everything! I want my fucking life back!”

  He snarled at me, “Listen, I’ll deny it till the day I die, but the reason I won’t do your surgery is because I won’t give you cause to sue me. No surgeon will fix your breast, because they don’t want to get involved in a malpractice suit. We won’t admit that anything went wrong with that surgery, ever.” He turned around and grabbed his drink, dismissing me. “It’s a little pain. Deal with it.”

  I rushed at him. For all the times I’d pounded on my steering wheel in frustration, thrown a glass at the wall, screamed at the top of my lungs until the cat ran in fear.… I knocked him down with the full force of my body, gouging at his eyes with my fingers.

  With the heel of my hand, I shoved his chin and forced his head back onto the stone floor with a satisfying thump. He tried to push me off and rolled the two of us over. My elbow smashed onto the floor and my ankle twisted unnaturally. I tried to knee him in the crotch. But the doctor anticipated me and struggled out of my grasp, lurching to a small table in the entranceway.

  Panting and trembling, he yanked open a drawer and pulled out a gun.

  He shot me, almost without aiming.

  The bullet gouged out a huge chunk of flesh. With a surgeon’s precision, he’d transected my areola and carved out my biopsy site. And as I bled onto his exquisite granite floor, I realized my breast didn’t hurt at all.

  CAROLINE J. ORVIS has traveled around the world performing as a professional musician. A voracious reader since an early age, she started writing as a hobby six years ago. “Benign” is her first published work. Between gigs, she is working on her first novel.

  Them Old Blues

  by Ken Leonard

  The truth is I started feeling for her pretty fast. Lying there in my swaybacked bed that first time, her man Tom out of town for a couple days, it was more than just comfortable. It had a special feeling to it. She was pretty, in kind of a tired way. A real sweet woman with a good disposition. One who deserved better than she got. But beyond that, there was just this vibe. A good energy. Like we fit together in some way we hadn’t yet uncovered.

  She was lying in the crook of my arm, running her fingers through the small patch of hair on my chest. “What are you thinking?” she asked.

  I mulled it for a moment. I figured we were close enough now that I could say what was on my mind. “I was wondering why you don’t leave him.”

  Her hand stopped moving. “Oh, Frank. It’s a little early for that, don’t you think?”

  I smiled. “I didn’t mean because of this. I meant just in general. I mean, you’re a good woman. What do you wanna be with a guy who … who doesn’t treat you right for?”

  Her nail was tracing small figures on my chest. She wasn’t looking at me. “Oh, I don’t know…” she sighed. “I—well, I was gonna say he wasn’t always this way, but really I guess he was. In the beginning, when he chased other men away … well, I guess it made me feel safe. Feeling like he cared so much about me. And then when I’d go to visit with my girlfriends, he started asking me a lot of questions about where was I going and who was gonna be there. He started getting angry if I was on the phone too much. By that time, we were married, had some kind of life together. And by the time I figured out how bad he really was … I guess I felt ashamed. I didn’t want anybody to know what kind of man I’d married. So I just kept to myself. It was easier.” She laid her cheek on my chest. I stroked her slender, white back while she spoke. I couldn’t see her face, just the long, honey-and-hay tangle of her hair. “And when I woke up one day and realized just how unhappy I was, I thought about leaving. I wanted to. But … I guess I was afraid.”

  “Afraid of what? Him?”

  “Well, that, yeah. But it wasn’t just that. I was afraid of being alone, I think. On my own. I don’t really have anybody but him now. He made sure of that. And, you know, the evil you know is better than the evil you don’t and all that.”

  I waited until I was sure she wasn’t going to say anything else. “Jesus, Katie, being alone is better than being with somebody who—” My eyes shot to the big, yellowing bruises on her side. “Who treats you bad. Tells you you’re no good. Couldn’t do any better.”

  Somewhere outside my little rented room, a car rumbled past, one of its passengers screaming with laughter. It cut an odd counterpoint and made everything seem more serious somehow.

  When she spoke, her voice was very quiet. “I just don’t know if I could take it.”

  “Being alone? Hell, being alone is easy.” I shrugged. “You get used to it.

  She shifted and looked at me, propping her head up on one elbow.

  “Are you alone, Frank?”

  “Me? Well, not now. Not right now, I mean. I mean.…” She was looking into my eyes, the soft openness in her sky-blue eyes, in her fine, slim face, encouraging me. I exhaled deeply. “After my ex-wife left, I was alone for a long time. A while. It was rough. Yeah. Maybe the loneliest I’ve ever been, I guess.” I shrugged. “But, you get used to it. It passes. And then one day you meet other people. Better people.”

  “I don’t know, Frank. I don’t know if you ever get used to loneliness. People aren’t meant to be alone. What do they punish a man with in prison, when he’s causing trouble? What’s the worst punishment they can give him? Solitary confinement. They force him to be alone.” She shook her head. “I don’t think it ever passes. I think maybe you just live with that terrible, lonely feeling for so long you just don’t always realize it’s still there, eating away at you.”

  * * *

  W
e continued to see each other over the next few weeks, seizing our opportunities when we could get them. Sometimes I’d be onstage in the middle of playing a song, something kind of tender, and a good, warm feeling would spread out through my body. And I’d look up toward the bar where Katie was picking up a round of drinks and our eyes would meet, and I felt like I could see that same warm feeling spreading out through her, like we were right there in the same place, the same moment, alone despite all the other people around, sharing something secret, the music wrapping just the two of us up in a warm little bubble. And as much as I wanted those moments to last, I was careful never to let them linger long enough to arouse suspicion. I never let my eyes cut directly toward the door where Tom sat when he wasn’t busting heads.

  And then one night, Katie didn’t show up for work. She was always there by the time I came in—running drinks when it was busy, standing by the bar when it wasn’t—sometimes studiously ignoring me, sometimes favoring me with a fugitive little smile. But as I finished my first set I could still see the other waitress running ragged trying to handle a Saturday night by herself.

  Duane, all teeth and shaggy brown hair, was behind the bar and gave me a grin as I sidled up and ordered a Johnny Red. “You see the action earlier?” he asked me.

  “Afraid I must have missed it.”

  “Old boy got drunk up in here, wanted to start some trouble with a fella. Tom got in to break it up and the drunk punched him.”

  “Oh, Lord.…” I said. I’d seen Tom fight one time and it had shaken me deeply. He was brutal. Merciless. Women had cried, one of them screaming for him to stop. He fought like he wanted to kill somebody. Just thinking about it made me feel itchy and restless, like I had somewhere else to be.

  “I bet there’s still blood out there on the floor if you look close,” Duane said, setting my whiskey on the rocks in front of me. “Old boy’s own mom probably wouldn’t recognize him.”

  “Jesus,” I shook my head. My nerves were jangling. I tried to make sure I held the glass steady as I raised it and took a sip. “Was he just born surly, or did they have to beat it into him?”