This entire speech is delivered with the exact same inflection on each sentence, as if she’s reading something taped to the register. She slams the cash drawer closed and hands me my change. I sneak a peek at the grimy touch screen on the register. There is a piece of paper stuck to the front. Like it’s too tough to remember, "Have a nice day"? What’s the world coming to?
Lily is already at the beverage bar, drawing a cup of Diet Pepsi. I join her.
"Do you suppose the youth of America are destined for insignificance?" I ask, pushing the root beer button.
"Are you talking about the girl at the counter? Cut her some slack. How excited would you be to work at Sandwich King? We can’t all be great authors, you know"
"Are you a great author?" I ask in mock astonishment.
"Very funny."
"Very true."
Lily rolls her eyes and points to a table for two at the front of restaurant next to the large window.
"How about over there?"
"After you."
We sit at the table only to be immediately interrupted by the crackling sound system. The speakers are so awful, I’m not positive if she called out our number or shouted something in Latin. I go back up to the counter anyway and hand the teenager my receipt. She hands me a tray with two sandwich plates on it. I smile. She chews her gum. We have achieved communication.
"I’m really curious to see Howard’s report," Lily says as I get back to the table.
"I haven’t even looked at it myself."
I pull the slim envelope out of my briefcase, tear open the top seal and pull out a small sheaf of papers.
"That’s it?" Lily says. "What does the cover letter say?"
"It’s just a note from Howard," I say, reading from the memo. "Per your request …executive summary … call me with questions. The basics."
I turn over the memo and start reading the first page of the summary. It’s broken into short paragraphs. The first couple describe the details of phase one and two of Nesler’s testing. These are the phases conducted on healthy volunteers. No side effects are noted other than the standard headache, diarrhea and nausea. I house sat for a nursing student once and she told me that on the drug interaction and side effect quizzes, if you answered, "headache, diarrhea and nausea" you were guaranteed to be correct ninety-nine percent of the time.
After this introduction, each paragraph appears to outline a specific participant from the early stages of phase-three testing. There are no names, just age, gender and length of time since initial diagnosis of neurological problems. I flip forward through the other pages, counting paragraphs as I go. There are twenty-four people profiled. The last page covers Nesler’s history and mission statement.
"So?" Lily asks.
"I don’t think there’s anything new. It’s just a listing of some of the original phase-three test participants."
I hold up the first page for her to see but she reaches out and grabs the whole thing. She scans through the pages then slaps it down on the table.
"I could have told you this. Is this really what you wanted?"
I’m actually delighted to get anything, but since Lily thinks I already know about these people, it’s probably best to feign disappointment.
"I was hoping for more details about the research, maybe even some editorial comments from Howard about specific results. But, they’re a big company. They probably don’t want me combing through their private papers."
"And why not?" Lily eyes demand an answer. She stabs at the ice in her cup with her straw. "They have everything to gain if you present them as a great company in Michael’s biography. Do you want me to talk with Howard again?"
"Not yet. There might be something here I can use. How’s your sandwich?"
"Are you trying to change the subject?"
"Not at all. What would you suggest we do about it?"
"I think we should talk with Howard again."
"To be honest with you, Lily, the guy gives me the creeps. I’d just as soon space out my conversations with him a little farther. Which reminds me, did you give him my phone number?"
"I don’t think so. Why?"
"He left a message on my answering machine this morning, checking that I’d received the report and asking me to call him with any questions."
"That was nice of him. Why does he give you the creeps?"
"Have you ever noticed how clean and pressed he is all the time?"
"Good grooming makes you nervous?"
"He’s so stiff. Like if he bent over he would snap."
Lily smiles and picks up her sandwich. She takes a bite and chews slowly. I watch her lips undulate. I must have been staring because she grabs her napkin and holds it to her mouth as she swallows.
"He’s no stiffer than any other CEO I’ve met," she says. "And I’ve always thought he was a pretty snappy dresser. If we’re trying to pinpoint odd characters at Nesler, I’d be more likely to put Gavin on the top of that list."
"VanMorten? He doesn’t seem bright enough to be so high up in the company. What do you know about him?"
"Not much. He hardly says a thing if Howard is around. The longest conversation I’ve ever had with him was about whales. He seems to know an awful lot about killer whales. I was waiting with him at the lab site one day. I don’t know where Howard was, probably on the phone. Anyway, I was making small talk about an article I’d seen in the newspaper, about that whale they shipped from Oregon to Iceland. Remember the one, from the movie?"
"Free Willy?"
"That’s the one. There was some story about him being flown half way around the world to be set free. I only mentioned it because I’d seen it in the paper that morning, but Gavin grabbed a hold of the topic and started going on and on. It was very odd."
"Some people have pretty unusual hobbies."
The topic is beginning to make me nervous. I smile at Lily.
"You have a sprout in your teeth," she says.
I clamp my mouth shut and search across my teeth with my tongue. It touches a sprout hair on the right canine. Great.
"Hey, don’t sweat it. If I didn’t like you, I wouldn’t have told you. I’d have let you go through the rest of the day with it wiggling in the breeze."
"Is that supposed to make me feel better?"
I reach in with my pinkie nail and scrape the offending vegetation off my tooth and onto a napkin.
"I once let this girl I worked with go the whole afternoon with a giant piece of spinach covering one of her front teeth," Lily confesses. "She didn’t realize it until she went to the bathroom after a big meeting we’d had with the head of our department."
Lily laughs. I like this slightly evil side of her personality.
I reach over and take back Howard’s report. It’s open to page four and I began reading about a seventy-four-year-old male diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. His cognitive function had been deteriorating rapidly for twelve months. Brain scans as close as three months apart showed a clear downward spiral. After just three weeks in the Nesler trial, his cognitive function had improved to the point he’d been at three months prior. After five weeks, he had returned to the cognitive function of nearly nine months prior. And after twelve weeks, his cognitive function was higher than when he was first diagnosed. It sounded miraculous. I show the page to Lily.
"Do you remember this guy’s story?" I ask, sliding the paper in front of her.
She reads for a few moments and then looks up.
"That sounds like Charles. He’s the musician, the pianist. A pretty good one. I think he might have even been a little famous. When he started the Nesler trials, he’d completely forgotten how to play. He still knew what a piano was and what it was for. His children said he’d sit in front of the keys for hours, staring down at them. Then one night, about ten weeks into the trials, his daughter woke up in the middle of night to the sound of a Beethoven sonata. She went downstairs and there was her father at the piano, playing exactly as she remembered him doing s
o many years before. Tears were streaming down his face but he kept playing and playing. I’m sure Michael must have told you about him."
I nod slowly, as if remembering the actual moment when Michael told me the story.
"Have you ever met any of these people?" I ask.
"No, I've only heard the stories."
"Did Michael meet them all?"
"You know, I don't know. If he did, he never mentioned it to me. I know he helped select the new patients for this next phase of testing. That part is so hard. People are desperate. Drug trials are usually their last hope."
Lily takes another bite of her sandwich and sips a bit of Diet Pepsi. Silence stretches out across our little table. I can hear people at the other tables talking about their days, their plans for the weekend, their lives. Their real lives.
I’m about to take another stab at getting some new information when Lily pipes up.
"Did you know Michael’s father, Augie?" She asks, picking the sesame seeds off the crust of her sandwich.
This was tricky. Michael had spoken often in interviews about his own father's struggle with Alzheimer's. I knew it was the source of his dedication to the research, but I didn't know any more about Augustus Rudolph than anyone else who watches Oprah or CNN.
"I met him a couple times during college. Why?"
"Just wondering, I guess. Reading through these stories makes me wonder what would have happened if Augie had been able to be a part of the testing."
She licks her finger and sticks up each fallen sesame seed on her plate then sucks them all off. I want her to do it again.
"He was such an incredible man," she continues. "So smart. Smarter than Michael I think."
"Well, anyone who could put together a fortune like his from scrap metal must have had a pretty good head on his shoulders."
My brain is frantically clicking through data, searching for anything about Michael’s father.
"Isn’t that the truth?" Lily agrees. "Everything wears out sooner or later. It's the perfect self-sustaining business. Did you know Augie was one of the first to figure out how to make money in recycling? It was his chemistry background. He could tell you what anything was made up of and what it could be broken down into."
I remember seeing several pictures in Lily's living room of a tall, muscular man with white hair and a bushy mustache. In most of the photos, he was in shirtsleeves. No tie. Nothing formal about him. That’s it. Brain data hit!
"He always seemed like a regular guy when he visited us at school," I say. "In fact, I never even knew Michael came from money until I saw his dad on TV one night. He was part of some presidential symposium on recycling. He was sitting right next to Ronald Reagan. It was unreal. Michael just shrugged it off, saying something about how his dad didn’t like Reagan and he couldn't believe he was sitting there with a straight face."
This tidbit was mostly true. One of the stories I'd pulled up on the Rudolph family was a New York Times piece about Augustus Rudolph's strange dichotomy of influence on and revulsion of the Reagan administration.
"He was not fond of Ronnie," Lily agrees. "It's kind of ironic that the same disease ended up killing both of them."
"How bad did it get? At the end, I mean?"
"It was pretty bad."
She stops and looks down again at her plate. Her finger searches across it for imaginary sesame seeds or maybe she’s writing something with her finger on its white plastic surface.
"I’m sorry," she says, finally looking back up at me. "I guess I don’t like to remember him that way."
"Was he completely gone?"
"No. I almost wish he had been. It would have been awful to have him not know who we were, but I think it would have been better for him if he forgot everything."
"What do you mean?"
"You’d watch him struggle to find the right word, he wouldn’t be able finish his thought, he couldn’t follow the simplest of directions. Most of the time it bothered us much more than it bothered him, but there were times he’d have flashes of clarity. Some message would make it all the way through his brain, and you could tell he knew something was horribly wrong."
"Is that what you meant about never losing the fear?"
"What?"
She looks at me, quizzically. A what-are-you-nuts expression.
"When we were at Nesler the other day, you said you thought fear was the last thing to go."
"Did I? Maybe that’s right."
Lily pauses, picks up her paper napkin and wipes each finger. Quickly but carefully, systematically, like a surgeon.
"Have you ever been lost in the woods?" she asks.
"I’m not really the outdoorsy type."
"I got lost once when I was little. Our family was on a hike and I ran off without them and got all turned around. I remember seeing a tree and thinking it had to be the same tree I’d seen when I’d run off the path, but I looked at it again and I wasn’t so sure. At first glance everything looked familiar. I’d look a second time and it would all be wrong. I’d never been so scared. I think that might have been what it was like for Augie. Something would look familiar to him again for an instant and then just as quickly it would morph into something completely foreign."
"You’re saying it would have been better for him if he didn’t recognize anything?"
"I was perfectly happy running through the woods until I stopped and realized I was lost."
"And you think Augie knew he was lost?"
"Michael told me about one morning, really close to the end, when Augie looked him right in the eye and said, ‘Pack my things, I won’t be coming back.’ At the time, Michael thought it was just nonsense. Augie had been rambling about all kinds of things for days. But later, after he was gone, Michael realized it was the last time his father had looked at him. I mean really looked at him."
As she speaks, Lily stretches and twists her napkin into the shape of a serpent.
"When I go," she says, waving the napkin snake in my direction. "I hope I just get hit by a truck."
"Or an explosion," I offer. "They say a gas explosion can take you out just like that."
I snap my fingers.
SEVEN
"How about a cup of coffee?"
Lily looks down at me as I sit in front of her computer. We’re outlining chapters this afternoon, trying to decide what each one will be about, discussing how much space to devote to Michael’s childhood, his schooling, research, theories. I find it grueling, mostly because I have to think so hard to maintain the illusion of competence. If I’d known I was going to get myself trapped in an alternate personality, I would have picked something way easier to be, like a shoe salesman or the President. This book writing shit is for the birds. The stress must be showing on my face if Lily thinks I need coffee. I don’t believe it will help, but I’m grateful for any interruption.
"That’d be good," I say, taking my hands from the keyboard to roll up my sleeves and poke the tails of my shirt back into my jeans. Perhaps if I look less rumpled, I’ll also look less disturbed.
"You keep going. I’ll be right back."
I watch her leave the room. It’s a nice view. Her short denim skirt pulls across her backside a little as she walks and her pink sweater brushes her waist. If she lifted her arms you’d see skin.
I can’t take this much longer. Not only are we starting to get into the actual writing part of this farce, I can’t be around Lily without picturing her naked. I’m not sure if she can tell. It’s ridiculously obvious to me, but if she knows, she’s being awfully gracious about it. Either that or she finds it so pitiful she puts up with me, like some hideous creature she has to visit in the hospital. Let’s chat while I pretend not to notice half your face is mutilated beyond recognition.
This distraction aside, the larger problem is the fact I will not be able to prolong this researching and outlining stuff much longer. Very, very soon I am going to have to start writing. This will be disastrous. Not difficult, not a challenge, but
simply and wholly ruinous. I cannot write. Oh, I can put pen to paper to produce an investigative report denying an insurance claim, but that’s not writing. That’s stringing words together into sentences.
How about all those eulogies, right? I make those up. They’re two, three, four-minute stories born of circumstance. They hang in the air like smoke. People breath them in, enjoy the smell, and then they’re gone. Forgotten. No one quotes me. No one checks back to see if what I said made sense. But … a book, that’s serious business. That’s tens of thousands of words, lumped into paragraphs, broken into chapters. And this is a real person. A real important person who did real important things. I need more than a cup of coffee. I need caffeine injected directly into my veins with a whiskey chaser.
Lily comes back into the room with two steaming mugs. I’m frozen in the exact position she left me. Hands in my lap, eyes staring past the screen into oblivion, perspiration running down my ribs. Hopefully she can’t see that last part.
"Are you okay?" she asks, setting down a mug near my immobile hands. "You look a little pale. I hope you’re not coming down with something. I know more people who have some horrible flu thing right now."
"I think I just need a little break." I stretch back in the chair and rub my neck, enjoying the release until I remember how sweaty I am. My shirt is now stuck to my back and my hand is damp.
"Then let’s take a break," Lily says. "Get up from that chair and come sit over here."
She grabs my mug and moves it over to a table next to a soft brown chair that resembles a well-worn baseball mitt, like you could collapse inside it with a satisfying thunk.
"This was Michael’s favorite chair. It was in his room when he was a kid … in fact," she leans down and touches the side of one arm. "He wrote his name right here and drew a funny little face. Look."
I get up to walk over to the chair. While she’s not looking, I wipe my hand on my butt and tug at the back of my shirt to create a small, drying breeze. Bending down to look over Lily’s shoulder at Michael’s chair, I catch the scent of vanilla in her hair. She’s pointing to some black markings, faded but still visible against the grain of the leather.
The Eulogist Page 8