by Sam Winston
“My, my,” said the woman behind the desk. “What a beautiful little girl.”
Penny straightened up and beamed in her direction. Her father standing behind her with one hand on each of her shoulders. “We’re here about her eyes,” he said.
The woman bent forward, enchanted. Those bottomless blue pools. “Really,” she said.
It occurred to Weller that he couldn’t guess how old the receptionist might have been. Her skin was flawless, her eyes were bright, and the movements of her compact body—sleekly clad in gray wool—were as lively as those of some small animal. She was youth and vigor made flesh, and yet there was something in her manner that suggested otherwise. Something that hinted at experience and maturity. It might have been the result of her breeding and station, but then again she was certainly Management, and therefore no higher in the scheme of things than Carmichael’s uncomfortable assistant.
The woman smiled and looked at Penny.
The assistant cleared her throat.
The woman got the idea and broke away and turned her attention to a screen mounted on the desk, shaking off the enchantment cast on her by the child. A grandmotherly reflex that she could barely help. In that moment Weller decided that she was an advertisement. An old woman made young again. A reminder that in this particular world there was no need to look at an old woman. Not even among the lower class.
An orderly who could have been the woman’s brother took them to a glass elevator and from there to a suite on the fifteenth floor. A suite with Penny’s name on the door, overlooking Central National Park just at the level of the tented wire mesh. Three rooms and a full bath. The orderly left the assistant on a couch in the first of the rooms and showed Weller and Penny into the next, where there were two enormous beds and a wall-mounted television and tall built-in closets of gleaming cherry. Clothing in the closets just their sizes. Penny tried on everything. Spinning in front of a floor to ceiling mirror and getting in close to see and then spinning away again.
Her father let her spin and put on a three-button suit himself and fumbled with a necktie for a while. Every knot he knew, until he finally gave up and put it back and cracked opened the door to the next room. Steel and rubber and tile. Hoses hung from the wall and fittings mounted along the side of an upholstered table and machinery suspended from gimbals. Bright lights overhead and a low hum of electronics. He closed the door and took her arm and sat her down on the bed. He knelt before her and looked into her grave little face and asked if she understood what was going to happen now that they’d finally made it to the hospital, and she said she did. “I’m sorry we haven’t had more time to talk about things,” he said. “We’ve been so busy these last few days.”
“That’s all right,” she said. Looking like she understood everything in the world. Everything they’d been through and everything to come.
“I’m not sure exactly what to expect next, but you’ll have the very best doctors in the whole world. What they’ll do in particular, I can’t say.” Feeling himself helpless within the machine of this medical system.
“That’s easy,” Penny said. “They’ll fix my eyes.”
“Right. They’ll fix your eyes. And I won’t leave until you’re all better.”
She said she knew that.
There were flowers in the front room when they came back out. Two bouquets as big as Penny herself and each with a card attached to it. The first card was engraved with a filigreed letter C and signed Mr. and Mrs. Anderson Carmichael in a hand that surely belonged to neither one of them. The second bore an embossed version of a familiar wheat stalk, and was signed Your friends at PharmAgra. Friends that she didn’t have before, but you never knew. Both cards signed by the same hand if you looked at them together. Weller put them on the table and pulled out one tulip for Penny and gave it to her. Then he sat down at the table across from the assistant and the orderly and asked when would the doctor be coming.
The assistant said soon. It was all arranged and he should be right along.
The orderly said Penny looked lovely in that new dress.
Penny said thank you.
Time passed.
The doctor arrived, a slight man built like a greyhound, shouldering the door open as if he believed in touching as little of the world as possible. Coming in with a white coat unbuttoned and a stethoscope hanging around his neck and a very white smile that was pasted on but just barely. The Assistant’s smile was pasted on too, pasted on and brittle, and the orderly rose and stepped in to negotiate between them.
The doctor had a small beard trimmed tight against his jaw and he smelled of fresh laundry and rubbing alcohol. He fastened his eyes on Penny and said, “Let’s go, shall we?” but she didn’t move. She just stood holding her tulip. He reached out a hand in her general direction but there was something disdainful in it even though he was plainly doing his best, and she didn’t respond.
Weller stood up and put out a hand of his own toward her and said, “Come on, honey.”
The doctor asked the obvious. “Are you the father?” Lowering his hand. Relieved but not entirely.
Weller allowed that he was.
The doctor said, “I’m pleased to meet you, Mr. Weller, but your daughter’s the only one I’ll need right now.”
Weller picked up Penny and headed in that direction. Saying, “I guess you might be the doctor, but there are still a few things you don’t know.” Not confrontational. Just filling him in.
* * *
The tests took a week. Weller didn’t know why he’d let himself expect some kind of abracadabra, and he realized that he should have been tipped off by the suite with the two beds and the living area out front and the clothing, but he guessed you had to live and learn. Some afternoons when Penny was looking at the television or resting in the darkened bedroom with her eyes dilated, he’d walk around the hospital and see what was what. The hallways were vacant for the most part, empty and hushed. Everything that went on went on behind closed doors. There weren’t even any scanners that he could see. Freshly shaven and showered and dressed in one of the suits from the closet, he could have been anybody. He could have been Management or even Ownership. Strangers greeted him as such, strangers clutching computer tablets and strangers bearing huge floral arrangements and strangers pushing elegant carts laid out for room service, and he decided that the operating principle was always to assume upward. If they didn’t know you, then you were a patient or a patient’s family. That meant Ownership. So they consulted their tablets, hid behind a bank of flowers, or adjusted the already perfect placement of a napkin. And moved on.
Ultimately the doctor said they weren’t one hundred percent sure. He didn’t say it in front of Penny. He told Weller at the table in the front room while she was still sleeping. Early in the morning and the shadow of the hospital still heavy over the park below. He said they’d had their very best people on it and they’d consulted with specialists in Boston and Los Angeles and not one of them was one hundred percent sure either. They weren’t sure about the root of her trouble and they weren’t sure about how they might correct it. They had theories, and they had a protocol worked out, but there were going to be uncertainties on every hand. They would have to see what they could see.
The doctor was apologetic. In spite of his white coat and his neatly trimmed beard and his youthful canid vigor he looked beaten. Beaten by the conclusion they’d reached, and beaten by having to confess it now to Weller. Admitting failure or the possibility to one like him. An interloper from the Empowerment Zone.
Weller asked how it could be. How it could possibly be that they weren’t sure. Hadn’t doctors in a hospital like this seen everything before?
“It’s environmental,” the doctor said.
“Environmental.”
“Something she breathed,” he said. He drew a long finger across the tabletop. Tracing the grain. “Something she ate. That’s about all we know.”
Weller sat stunned for a minute. He looked out
the window at single pigeon flapping against the wire mesh of the park. He kept looking. Watching it try to escape into a world that would have eaten it alive. “Then it’s definitely a mutation,” he said.
“Yes. A mutation. Meaning if we correct it surgically, it might come back.”
“But you could correct it.”
“We could. As I said though, it might come back. It probably would.”
“If you don’t know the cause of it, how can you know that for sure?” Not even looking at the doctor. Not able to.
“We have to make certain assumptions. And I don’t want to make any promises I can’t keep.”
The pigeon gave up and Weller turned back to the doctor. His face ravaged. “I guess I thought you’d have seen a lot of problems like my daughter’s.”
“We used to see them. The literature was full of these cases for years. People got into things they shouldn’t have gotten into because nobody knew. Nobody knew the risks. They thought food was food.” He sighed, either remembering or imagining. Impossible to tell because it was impossible to tell his age. “The system got overloaded. All of those people so terribly sick and too many variables to be sorted out, given the funding. Funding that dried up pretty rapidly, seeing how quickly those cases disappeared from the literature. They were just kind of a blip, if you look back on it now.”
“A blip. They were people.”
“A spike then. They came and went. Anyway, the insurance companies would have gone bust if they’d had to keep on covering all of them. It’s better now.”
“Better now that you don’t have to look at them.”
“Well.” Rethinking his position. Smiling. That doglike grin. “Better now that we all know what to avoid.”
Weller kept on. “But you have to look at her,” he said. “You have to see Penny.”
“And I assure you that we’ll do everything we can on her behalf.”
“Money’s no object.”
“That’s right.”
“No expense will be spared.”
“Correct.”
“All right then. When do you get started?”
* * *
The good news, her father told her, was that there wouldn’t be any surgery. At least not right off. No knives and no lasers.
“Well,” the doctor put in, “maybe some lasers.”
Penny’s jaw dropped.
“Depending,” said the doctor, which didn’t help much. “You won’t feel a thing, though. Before or after. Not a thing, I promise.”
Penny was sitting at the end of the upholstered table in the examining room. The bright overhead lights were dimmed and screens along the walls pulsed with images from inside her skull. Three-dimensional fly-throughs in constant motion and various digital cross-sections arranged like geological records. The doctor before her smiling wolflike and her father in a chair to one side. Looking at the doctor and deciding that his mouth must have been remade that way at some point. Wondering why they hadn’t fixed it. Wondering if maybe they had.
The doctor pointed to his own eyes and said he’d had cataracts taken off years ago with a laser and it hadn’t bothered him in the slightest. These days he saw better than ever. Twenty-twenty. Nothing to it.
Penny asked was that what she had. Cataracts. Saying the word carefully because it was new.
The doctor said something like cataracts. Not exactly but almost. They’d try some other treatments first, though, and maybe they’d shine some light in there later on if they had to. That’s all a laser was, he said. A little light you shined in places.
Penny nodded.
Regardless, he said, they’d use it only if the other treatments didn’t work. Some injections they’d be giving her.
Penny asked what he meant by injections and he said they were like the blood that the nurses had been taking but the other way around. Putting something in instead of taking it out. He pointed to the cannula taped to her forearm and said we’ll use that and it won’t hurt a bit.
* * *
After three days Carmichael’s assistant came back, not for a report but to sit down with Weller. Ten days had passed altogether and her employer was running out of patience. “He’d been under the impression that they’d operate and she’d recover and that would be that,” she said. “He wasn’t counting on this delay. These complications.”
“I’m sorry,” said Weller.
“I am too.”
“I guess that’ll teach him to play doctor.”
It was early in the day and Penny was still sleeping. They sat on opposite sides of the table. She’d given up on maintaining the niceties of status, so it was just the two of them face to face. Weller would never have it any other way without her having to remind him, and the very act of reminding him was a loss of status right there, so what was the point. “The doctor tells me it will be a couple of weeks before we know anything,” she said.
“A couple of weeks at the inside.”
The flowers on the table were still blooming, but not by means of any miracle. New arrangements arrived fresh every morning, from Mr. and Mrs. Anderson Carmichael and Your friends at PharmAgra. Contractual clockwork. No flower anywhere in the hospital was permitted to fade for even a moment.
“Mr. Carmichael doesn’t like waiting,” she said.
“I don’t care much for waiting either. But I think the results will be worth it.”
“I’m not talking about waiting for Penny.”
“I know you’re not. I am.”
“But you think it’ll be worth it, you said.”
“I do.”
“That’s good,” she said. “Because we want you to get started for Washington right away.”
Weller laughed.
“Tomorrow morning. First thing.”
Weller laughed again.
“It’s not a laughing matter.”
“I know.”
“Look,” she said. “You’re confident about your daughter, we’ve established that. Mr. Carmichael has been extremely patient, we’ve established that. But I’m here to tell you that he’s not going to wait forever.”
“He can wait a little bit longer.”
“No. It’s time.”
“It’s not time. Not yet.”
“You’re not acting in good faith.”
“I’m acting in good faith toward my little girl. If he hadn’t expected that, he wasn’t paying attention.”
She pushed her chair back a quarter of an inch. “I could send both of you home right now. You and Penny. Find you in breach of contract and stop her gene therapy and send you home.”
“Carmichael would kill you if you did that. He’d lose the car.”
“You’re not the only individual capable of doing the job, Mr. Weller.”
He thought for a minute. “Something tells me I am.”
“Then go home.” Rising. “I’ll speak to the staff and have her released.”
“Carmichael will have your head.”
“He relies on me too much,” she said, pushing in her chair. “If he has to have somebody’s head, he’d rather have yours.”
She was out the door and down the hall and signing something at the nurses’ station when he figured it out.
“My wife,” he said. “Send somebody for my wife. Get her here to look after Penny, and I’ll be on my way.” He knew that the assistant would go along with it. And he could hardly wait to get back and wake up his daughter and give her the news. Her mother was coming.
* * *
The reunion was too brief. Liz was exhausted from travel and aghast at the needles in her child’s arm and amazed at how her husband looked in those suits. The three of them couldn’t get enough time together. They sat up talking too late for their own good and they slept halfway through the morning like a pile of housecats or emperors and when they finally roused up there were clothes hanging in the closet for Liz as well. Clothes and a half-dozen pairs of shoes in just her size and a soft white bathrobe that matched Penny’s and
made the two of them feel like twins. As if they could have felt any closer at just that moment.
Weller didn’t ask Liz how she felt about the progress Penny had made in spite of her old doubts. He didn’t need to, and it wouldn’t have been kind. To turn such a good thing into the results of a contest. In return, Liz didn’t say how worried she was about everything it might take for him to hold up his end of the bargain. He’d done so well so far. Letting hope give birth to hope.
Careful of Penny’s arm, her mother bathed her in a tub. Both of them knowing that she was too old for this kind of thing but what of it. You made exceptions. The tub was like nothing she’d seen before, big enough for two people and plumbed all over with nozzles and air jets that they didn’t try. The supply of hot water was endless, and even with an exhaust fan whirring overhead the mirrors steamed up. Weller sitting outside the door listening to them. To the squeak of his daughter’s skin against porcelain. To the soft murmur of his wife’s voice. That second a thing he hadn’t even realized how painfully he’d missed. The particulars of her. Each little aspect. You get started on something and you go where it takes you and you set aside other things because you don’t have any choice. Because if you didn’t set them aside you would never be able to go on. And then if you’re lucky enough you get back to where you started and you realize your mistake. You realize how difficult it is to keep everything in your heart at the same time. How impossible. You can only keep so much and still go on. You come back for the rest if you’re lucky enough.
The tub drained and the door opened and Penny emerged in a cloud of white terrycloth inside a bigger cloud of white steam. Borne up by both of them. Her mother staying behind and drawing more water for herself, and Weller coming to his feet and stepping inside and closing the door and embracing her. Helping her out of her clothes. Her warm skin in the warm room. He wondered why he hadn’t thought of this before. Thought of having her brought down here to be with Penny. To be with both of them. Another of those thoughts you can’t keep in your mind all at once, there are so many. He latched the door and they heard their daughter turn on the television and in the front room the buzzer sounded meaning someone was at the door. Penny switching off the set and the sound dying and the damp slap of her feet on hardwood. Silence and then her voice coming back high Daddy Daddy it’s Mister Carmichael he says it’s time.