by Harvey Click
His cellphone rang just as he was getting ready to go to bed. He answered it, and someone said, “It’s time for your checkup.”
Though the voice was a nondescript whisper, it was instantly familiar. Jack remembered having heard it many times in many places, but it took him several long seconds to remember the name.
Doctor Good.
“I’m at the Brian Hotel, room 320,” Dr. Good said. “Do you know where it is?”
“No.”
“Take a taxi,” Dr. Good said.
Jack phoned for a cab and waited outside the apartment building with a feeling of anxiety. Dr. Good’s voice had caused some buried scraps of memory to reassemble themselves, and now he could vaguely remember a dozen other times when he had gone to see the doctor in a dozen other places, though when he tried to focus on the memories they vanished.
There must be a checkup every month, he thought. Last month we met in a room at a motel outside of town. No, it was an old gas station with the windows boarded up. No, that doesn’t make any sense, it must be a dream. Maybe it was a storage room above an antique store, and there was a collection of old dolls in a cardboard box. No, that must be another dream.
The taxi was taking its time. Jack’s head hurt, and he started to shiver in the damp breeze. He wanted some aspirin. He went back inside, put on a warmer coat, and took two aspirins. The bottle was nearly empty. Time for a checkup, time for a new bottle, he thought. He hurried out when he heard the taxi honking.
“Brian Hotel,” he said. “Know where that is?”
“There’s no such place,” the cabdriver said. “You must mean the Priant.” He was fat and bald, and there was a bright red blister on the back of his scalp.
“I guess so,” Jack said. “Just hurry, I have an appointment.”
Damp air blistered into rain while the taxi drove beyond downtown into ghetto. Jack shivered and stared at tenements and townhouses with their windows boarded up. He buttoned his coat, turned up the collar, and still felt cold though the heater was on. He thought he usually felt like this when he saw the doctor, chilled to the bone summer or winter, but he wasn’t sure.
The Priant Hotel looked like it probably made just enough money from prostitutes to pay off the officials who should have condemned it. The desk man asked if he wanted a room for an hour or the whole night.
“I’m visiting someone in room 320,” Jack said.
“Take the stairs, the elevator’s broke,” the desk man said.
Bright slashes of graffiti dressed the dark stairwell and the third-story hallway, which stank of stale sweat and semen. There was an argument in one of the rooms, angry shouts mixing with piggish grunts coming from farther down the hall. Jack found room 320 and knocked on the door.
“Come in, Jack,” the familiar voice said.
Dr. Good sat on a chair in the corner of a small dark room. He looked exactly the way Jack remembered him, black coat with the collar turned up, black hat with the brim pulled down, white face obscured by shadow. Only the thick black mustache, black-framed glasses, and dark piercing eyes were distinct.
“Shut the door and sit down,” he said.
Jack sat on the narrow bed. He was just a few feet from the doctor but still couldn’t see him clearly. The only lamp was behind the doctor’s head, and the bulb was dim.
“You’re shivering,” Dr. Good said. “You look ill. Take two of these.”
He handed Jack a large bottle of aspirin, the same generic drugstore brand as always. Jack took two tablets, pulled his coat tighter, and shivered again.
“Lay back on the bed,” Dr. Good said.
Jack did, and the doctor sat beside him on the edge of the bed and shined a penlight into his left eye. He blinked the light on and off several times, and then did the same with the right eye.
“Hmm,” Dr. Good said. “Describe our last visit.”
“I think we met in a bigger room somewhere,” Jack said. “I think it was some kind of storeroom, I remember some broken mannequins on the floor. Or maybe that was the month before.”
Dr. Good wrote something in a notepad and said, “Go on.”
“That’s all I remember.”
Jack felt the welcome glow of the aspirin dissolving in his stomach, and the tiny room seemed warmer now. He shoved the bottle into his coat pocket and held it in there in the warm darkness of his hand.
“What did you do this month?” Dr. Good asked.
“I think I killed two people, a man and a woman.”
“What were their names?” the doctor asked.
“Jack Branden and Buena. I don’t know her last name.”
“What do you know about them?”
“Jack worked at a grocery store and Buena was a bartender.”
“Why did you kill them?”
“I don’t know.”
The doctor wrote something in his notepad and said, “Are your headaches getting worse?”
“I don’t think so. They’re about the same.”
“Any other health problems or concerns?”
“No.”
“Very good,” the doctor said. “Now listen carefully.”
He leaned down and spoke quietly in Jack’s ear for several minutes. When he was finished he said, “Those are doctor’s orders.” He went back to his chair and scribbled for a minute in his notepad.
“You’re coming along nicely,” he said when he was done writing. “I’ll see you again next month. There’s a taxi waiting out front. Go home, take two aspirins, and go to bed. As soon as you leave this building, all of this will seem like a dream that fades quickly into darkness.”
***
Jack went home, took two aspirins, and went to bed. When he awoke in the morning, he vaguely recalled a strange dream. Already it was fading, but before it could vanish entirely he found a scrap of paper and wrote: “Brian Hotel room 320. Doctor Good. Aspirin is drug.”
He stared at the words he’d written. The dream was completely gone by now, and the words made little sense. Of course aspirin was a drug, everybody knew that. It came from some kind of tree bark, and even the ancient Indians had used it. Jack used it every day for mild but chronic headaches. There were two large bottles of it sitting on his nightstand, one full and one nearly empty. He shook two tablets into his hand and swallowed them without water, as he did every morning.
“Brian Hotel room 320.” He looked in the phone book, but there was no Brian Hotel listed. He found two Doctor Goods, one a gynecologist and one a cosmetic surgeon, and he was certain he’d never met either of them.
Just scraps of nonsense. Some might believe dreams were meaningful, but Jack didn’t. He could see little sense in scraping around searching for meaning in dreams; it was difficult enough trying to find it in his waking life.
It was a sunny day in early October. He was caught up on his work and didn’t want to waste such a nice day sitting in his apartment, so after breakfast he grabbed a sketchbook and some drawing pencils and drove to a city park several miles away. There was a larger park much closer to where he lived, but for some reason he felt in the mood for Schiller Park, with its statue of the German poet standing in a little flowerbed amidst several acres of old trees and comfortable benches.
He sat on one of them in the shade of a sycamore and did quick sketches of people, dogs, and trees. He’d been there maybe half an hour when a slender woman about twenty-five stopped and stared at him for two or three seconds and then walked quickly away when he looked up. A short while later he noticed her sitting at a picnic table not far away, facing him with her back leaning against the table top. She was pretending to read a paperback book, but it was obvious she was still watching him.
Jack always felt uncomfortable, even a bit paranoid, whenever anybody was watching him. Though he led a law-abiding and rather dull life, for some reason he always felt guilty of some unspeakable crime when he was being watched, as if the watcher could see into him and detect some character flaw even he didn’t know about.
But she was too petite to look threatening, and certainly she didn’t look like a cop or a mugger. She was wearing faded blue jeans and a pink long-sleeved T-shirt and was attractive with an elfin face, smooth blond hair, and slim, delicate shoulders. Whenever he glanced at her she’d look quickly back at her book. She looked edgy, maybe even frightened, and the way she kept fretfully scratching an arm or tossing her hair made him wonder if she was a meth addict.
After a while he decided two could play this game, and he put down his sketchbook and stared directly at her. She looked away, scratched her arm nervously, then stood and quickly walked away, disappearing behind some trees. Jack went back to his sketchpad, and a few minutes later he heard someone say, “Jack?”
She was standing in front of him, fidgeting from foot to foot. This close he could see how drawn her face was, with an insomniac’s dark circles under her eyes. Despite this, she was pretty, her green eyes luminous and her wide mouth childlike and innocent.
“Yeah,” he said. “Do I know you?”
“The Gandalf Orphanage,” she said.
He was speechless. It had been a long while since he’d thought about the Gandalf Orphanage. He didn’t allow himself to think about it.
“You were there, weren’t you?” she said. “You probably never saw me, since the girls and boys were kept separate. But my dorm room faced the yard, and every day I’d watch the boys out there playing. You were the one I watched the most, and I learned your name from one of the wardens. I thought you were really cute.”
She looked away, her pale face turning pink. “I guess I shouldn’t have said that—I mean it was just a silly teenage thing—but you are Jack, aren’t you, and you did live at the orphanage, didn’t you?”
“Sit down,” he said.
She sat beside him, crossed one leg over the other and a moment later crossed them the other way, her fingers fretting anxiously with her frayed paperback.
“I recognized you a while ago but was afraid to say anything. I mean, I don’t know if I should trust you, but I guess it’s too late now for second thoughts, isn’t it?”
“Why shouldn’t you trust me?” he asked.
“Well, you know. Or maybe you don’t.”
Neither one knew what to say for a moment. A man walked past them with a Golden Retriever on a leash, and some guy near the gazebo started playing a trumpet, its thin notes sounding mournful and out of place in the sunny air.
“I mean, I don’t know what you know and what you don’t,” she said. “Please just tell me if you were at the orphanage or not.”
“I don’t like to talk about it.”
“How much do you remember?” she asked.
“Not much. I don’t like to think about childhood. I got in some trouble when I was young and got sent to reform school. While I was there my parents were killed in an auto wreck, and I was sent to an orphanage. It’s nothing very pleasant to think about.”
“It was pretty much the same with me,” she said. “I was sent there after my parents were shot by a mugger. It was all very suspicious—I mean nothing was stolen, and the mugger was never caught. My name’s Rachel, by the way.”
Jack said, “Hi, Rachel,” and reluctantly shook her hand. It felt warm, small and fragile.
“Let me ask you something,” she said. “Do you remember any of the kids there ever getting adopted out?”
“I don’t know, kids came and went. We were all teenagers, and I suppose we were past the age where anybody wants to adopt you. Like I said, I really don’t like to think about it.”
“I’ve never seen you here before,” she said. “I like to come here every morning if the weather’s nice. I hate being cooped up, I like getting some fresh air. I’m a waitress, and I always have my mornings off.”
His headache was trying to come back, maybe because of the talk about the orphanage, and he reached in his pocket for the aspirin that he always carried with him in an old Altoids tin. He opened the lid and was fishing for two pills when Rachel suddenly exclaimed, “What’s that? Is it aspirin?”
“I have a headache.”
She grabbed the tin from his hand. The pills fell out onto the grass, and she jumped up and began crushing them with her feet as if they were fire ants.
“What the hell?” he said.
“You don’t know anything about any of this, do you?” she said. “Your memory is still suppressed. These pills are poison, you have to stop taking them.”
She sat back down and covered her face with her hands for a moment, trembling. “I’m sorry, I know you think I’m nuts,” she said. “But I know what I’m talking about. Those pills aren’t really aspirin. They’re some sort of fucked up hypnotic mind control drug.”
“They’re just plain old aspirin,” he said. “I got them at Walgreens.”
“Yeah, Walgreens—that’s the bottle they always use. But you didn’t buy them at Walgreens, did you? Dr. Good gave them to you.”
The name sent a chill down Jack’s spine. He remembered what he’d written on a scrap of paper that morning: “Doctor Good. Aspirin is drug.”
“I never see a doctor,” he said. “I’m in good health.”
His headache was worse now. He saw two uncrushed pills in the grass, and he picked them up and swallowed them quickly before she could knock them out of his hand.
“They’re highly addictive,” she said. “I stopped taking them five days ago, and I’m still jonesing like a junkie. That’s why my hands keep shaking.”
“They’re just aspirin,” he said. He was already beginning to feel a bit calmer, now that the pills were dissolving in his stomach, and he looked at the grass, hoping to find another. He did, and he snatched it up and swallowed it too.
Rachel watched him glumly. “Are you an artist?” she asked.
“No, just an illustrator. Let’s save the word artist for those who deserve it.”
“If I described a face to you, would you be able to draw it?”
“Maybe.”
He picked up his sketchbook and a pencil. A pleasant serenity was beginning to come over him, as it always did when he’d just taken some aspirin, and he decided there were worse ways to spend a sunny morning than sitting on a bench with a pretty young woman, even if she was bat-shit crazy.
“A long, narrow face with a heavy black mustache,” she said. “Glasses with black frames. His eyes are small and dark, and they look right through you.”
Jack sketched quickly while Rachel continued her description, and though her details were skimpy the face practically drew itself and looked oddly familiar to Jack, as if he’d seen it many times. He added a black coat with the collar turned up and black hat with the brim pulled down, though Rachel hadn’t mentioned a coat or hat.
He put down his pencil, and they both stared at the drawing for a long time without speaking. The trumpet player by the gazebo seemed to be hitting shrill, discordant notes now, and somewhere behind them a dog was barking ferociously.
“So are you going to tell me you’ve never seen this man?” Rachel finally asked.
“I don’t know.” Jack’s head was throbbing, despite the aspirin he’d taken. He shut the sketchbook, not wanting to look at the drawing any longer. “I’m not feeling very good. I’m going to go home.”
Rachel gave him a desperate look but said nothing as he got up and walked quickly away. He went home, took four aspirin, and went back to bed. He couldn’t sleep, but he lay there for several hours tossing and turning and trying very hard not to think about anything Rachel had said. Finally he got up and watched television. That helped a little.
***
The next morning he awoke very early with indistinct impressions of terrible dreams flitting though his head. He pushed them away and forced himself to forget them, but even forgotten they still seemed to cling to his brain like some sort of foul scum. He reached for his aspirin bottle and was about to swallow two pills, but he stared at them in the palm of his hand for a while and put them back in the bot
tle. Rachel had claimed they were addictive, and he intended to prove she was crazy.
It was still dark. He paced around the apartment, too anxious to eat breakfast or even sit down. He rummaged through his trash can and found the scrap of paper he’d wadded up the day before: “Brian Hotel room 320. Doctor Good. Aspirin is drug.” Maybe she was crazy, but if she wasn’t…
As soon as the sun beginning to color the sky through his east window, he hurried to his car and drove to Schiller Park. He paced around the sidewalks in a state of anxiety for half an hour before he saw Rachel walking in from the west entrance where the statue stood.
“I was hoping you’d come,” she said. “I know you think I’m nuts, but you need to hear me out.”
“I’ll listen,” he said. “But I’m probably not going to buy it.”
“Have you taken any aspirin today?”
“No. I’m walking proof they’re not addictive.”
“Let’s see what you think in a few more hours,” she said. “But you have to get off them. As long as you take them, you won’t be able to think clearly. You’ll be a slave. I can prove it to you, scientifically I mean.”
“How?”
“I’ll show you later, I can’t do it here. In fact we shouldn’t even be here together. Somebody might be watching us.”
“You’re being paranoid.”
“Am I? Then why do you know what Dr. Good looks like?”
“Who says I do? You described somebody, and I drew a picture, and you said it looked just like him. That doesn’t prove anything.”
“I didn’t say it looked like him. In fact I didn’t say anything. But it did look like him, and you knew it.”
“I don’t know anything. To be perfectly frank, I think you need some help. I think you’re suffering from delusions.”
“Am I? Then answer me honestly—how well does your memory work? How well can you remember the orphanage? How often do you feel you can’t remember what you did the night before, like there was a blackout or something?”
He didn’t answer. His head ached, and he was wondering why he’d been so eager to come here this morning. Maybe it was because he thought Rachel needed help. Or maybe it was just because she was pretty.