by Dick Cluster
Before she knew that, Linda pushed the button that raised the upper section of her bed. This made her feel like a quadriplegic, controlling her movement with motors, but that was how a fancy hospital bed worked. She was benefiting from a marvelous technology and shouldn’t complain about small things that might be overdone. Temporary, temporary, she told herself sternly. It’s all temporary. I get to walk out of here. Thirty days, forty days, I start to be my own woman again.
The doctor looked pouchy. He looked as if he’d been up all night. He really looked like that, it wasn’t just his face being filtered through her own heavy-lidded eyes. She thought, I don’t care. I’m too tired and I hurt too much to care about why you were up all night.
Today was her day, Day Zero, the day her charts would all bottom out but also the day all the variables should start to climb back up. Predictably, like a sine curve. She’d been dosed and zapped beyond what the body was designed to take. She’d felt as nauseous as the drunkest and most seasick she’d ever been, and as weak as the most flu-sick and hung over. Right now she had tubes giving her blood products, tubes giving her antinausea medicine, catheters sewed into her chest and another coming out of her bladder. Besides everything else, post-treatment they needed to give her insides a good hosing out. Fine. All fine. Because today she’d start being herself again. She wouldn’t feel any better, but that wasn’t the point. She’d get five long fat syringes each filled with what would look like colored water injected into her central venous line. She pictured how it had looked on the video. So, she thought, let’s get on with it, Doctor. I don’t care about your problems today. I don’t care that you’re hung over. As long as your thumb can still push that plunger, those five successive plungers, that’s all you need to do.
The doctor still hesitated, so she picked up the plastic sponge lollipop thing and ran it around the inside of her mouth, so dry and sore, in case she was going to have to talk. Let’s get going, she thought. Let’s get counting. Kevin, next door, was already on day eleven. Kevin already had his counts coming up. Not that she’d ever met Kevin in the flesh. She’d never touched him, barely seen him in fact. All the staff on the unit had seen them both, touched them both, could usually see them both at the same time. But the two of them pushed buttons and talked on the telephone. Kevin was a godsend. Only she wanted to catch up with Kevin, not to be always a week and a half behind.
“Linda,” the doctor said. His voice was taut. “We’ve got a problem that’s going to delay the reinfusion— delay, not prevent. I’m going to tell you the truth.… We don’t have your marrow right now. Someone took the specimens and is holding them for ransom. We’ve paid the ransom. They’ve responded and promised your specimens will be returned unharmed. I don’t know what else to say. This is— it’s something that just never occurred to us. It will never happen again.”
For a minute Linda Dumars simply went someplace else. An exact place, a place she had once actually been. She’d already picked this spot, days ago, as the place to visualize when she was in trouble, when she needed to be somewhere in time before now, somewhere far outside this machine-laden cocoon.
She went to a high pass in the Cascade Mountains. She knew it although she couldn’t remember its name. The clouds blew through this pass, so that sometimes she stood in nothing but murk and fog. She couldn’t see anything. Her feet rested in a snowbank left over from the past winter, that was all she really knew. But sometimes the clouds were gone and she could see that she was standing in a saddle with deep lush valleys below and rocky peaks on each side.
It had been a long time since she’d actually stood there, at that pass in the Cascades. She’d stood there, holding hands with a man— not Tom her husband, a different man, before Tom, before the kids were born. That had felt symbolic, earlier this week, noticing she’d picked a place with a different man.
She felt a hand on hers now, Yvonne’s. She shrank from it, and she squeezed it. Nobody was supposed to hold hands with her, not here, touching was supposed to be kept to a minimum, only what was absolutely necessary, even by medical personnel. She tried to stay on top of the pass. She’d told Yvonne about this pass, and Yvonne had nodded and said it sounded nice, she wished she could see it sometime. She hadn’t meant it that way, but it made Linda understand that Yvonne had never been any place like that, perhaps had never had the chance. Now Yvonne’s hand tightened on hers because someone had taken her marrow? Some abominable snowman, some Bigfoot had come up behind her out of the fog and clobbered her with a massive club.
“What?” she said. Not because she hadn’t heard. “What?” She heard her voice sound not like her own voice, but like a scared mouse’s squeak. She saw her children. It was morning. Tom would be getting them in the car and taking them to school. She couldn’t see them clearly because she didn’t know the weather, what they’d have on. She felt Claire stamp her foot and heard her say, “What do you mean Mom has to stay in the hospital forever?” She saw Nicky look away, close his eyes.
“Somebody went to the tank and removed the frozen marrow in its case.” Once he’d gotten started the doctor didn’t hesitate anymore. Really she wished he’d slow down, because she still wasn’t quite here and she certainly wasn’t up to her ability. But now he was rattling things off, like a text that didn’t give you a chance to assimilate each point, each conclusion, before going on to derive the next. “They called me yesterday, after your last treatment, and informed me it was gone. They asked for money, and the money was delivered this morning. What they’ve done so far convinces me they understand what they’ve got and how to take care of it. They say they’ll return it within two days.”
Linda said, “They say.”
“I suspect they feel they need that time to get away, or to process the money somehow so it can’t be traced. Then they’ll return your marrow. In the meantime, we’ll take a few extra precautions.”
Precautions. Yesterday the room had been sterilized while she was down getting radiation. Then Yvonne had given her a sterile bath and fed her bowel prep. Bowel prep was oral antibiotic, foul-tasting fluid that had her throwing up into one bed pan while she was shitting into another like a newborn not yet able to produce a solid stool. This morning she’d woken up to the drone of the blower, like a machine breathing for her, an iron lung. For a month nobody was supposed to dare to kiss her, touch her face, bring her flowers even, because in flowers there were too many things alive. What more precautions? Fuck precautions. What mattered was somebody getting her goddamn marrow back.
She knew Dr. Harrison was waiting for her to say something he could gauge her reaction by. Her stomach heaved, but there was nothing left in it to come up. Stop it, she told herself. There was the image of the snowman, coming out of the fog to club her from behind. She concentrated on the feel of Yvonne’s hand. She liked Yvonne, she trusted her, but the reassurance was automatic, part of the job. She needed to talk to Kevin, to Kevin who had been through a war. You lost my goddamn marrow, Doctor, she wanted to scream at this man standing over her now. She wanted to shout and shake him. He searched her with his pale blue eyes and tried to reassure her with a poor attempt at a smile. That moved her, for some reason. Actually it was a good attempt at a smile, it just didn’t succeed was all.
“Do you have any idea who took it?” Linda asked in practically her real voice. She marveled at how cool she sounded. Had she had this nightmare, imagined this possibility? She knew she’d had one in which the line came loose from her vein, and the marrow dribbled incontinently to the floor. “Was it just for money, is that what you really think? Or is somebody mad at the hospital? Somebody whose— who somebody they loved, you didn’t save?”
People did that, that was a story that showed up in the paper, men stormed into hospital lobbies with rifles after their father, their son died. But this was more sophisticated. A hand reaching into a tank. The snowman’s hairy hand, shoving the marrow into its hungry mouth. No. A human hand, calculating. Calculating money, or calculating h
urt?
Linda Dumars was a mathematician. She worked for an insurance company, she developed models for calculating injury and survival rates. Even now, some part of her was able to weigh the possibilities, coolly, while another part tried to fight off the snowman and reach for her children and reach for Tom but also fight him off at the same time.
“I don’t know,” the doctor said. “We’re trying to figure that out. All I can say is so far they act as if they don’t mean you any harm.”
“Yes,” she said. All he could say was nothing, so he might as well get lost. “Thank you for telling me. I’ll be okay. I think I want you to leave me alone.”
“I’m leaving you my home number,” he said, “you can call me anytime, here or there, or through my beeper. I’m sorry this happened, but it’s going to be all right.” He watched her for a minute, then turned and went through the portal. She called it the portal. The looking glass that didn’t reflect but like Alice’s was a way into a different world.
“Bowel prep in a few minutes,” Yvonne said, businesslike. She waited for Linda to relax the grip on her hand, then turned to go too, pausing to check the drips, the stack of bedpans, and whatever else she checked among the array of instruments and implements and tubes. “I’ll be right back.”
Linda let the nurse go. She got herself ready to swish and swallow the foul preparation that cleaned out her mouth, her throat, her stomach, her intestines. She needed to get herself together, to figure out all the possibilities about why this could be happening. No matter what, she told herself, it’s temporary. No matter what, you’re going to walk out of here your own woman again.
She’d already come up with the possibility that it was someone with a grudge against the hospital. In that case she was a random victim. The other extreme: it could be somebody who wanted to hurt her, personally, even to kill her. Someone who wouldn’t mind making some money at the same time. Enough money, say, to buy him pleasures that would make him forget what he’d done. Enough money to buy Claire and Nicky substitute mothers galore. This was the only person she could think of who might want to kill her, who at times certainly did want to kill her. Tom.
This isn’t happening, Linda Dumars thought. I’ll wake up. It didn’t work. She tried a more limited denial. Nobody can kill me, she told herself. Not easily. Not without a fight.
When Yvonne came back she swished and swallowed the bowel prep without protest, managing to keep most of it down. Die, you organisms, she commanded. Get you before you get me.
11. Dee
Alex sat in Meredith’s office and pushed buttons on her phone. After a few tries, Alex figured out he needed to push the send-additional-digits button before he entered his credit card number. Probably there was a way to make the phone’s memory store this number so he wouldn’t have to enter it for each call, but he couldn’t find a user’s manual in a quick search of Meredith’s desk. He didn’t want to search further because, among other things, he didn’t want to read the job application letters that would be someplace around. Given the fiscal crisis facing the university, there wasn’t likely to be a tenured position for her here in either English or Women’s Studies. So she’d started sending her resume all over the country, and back to England too.
“Apply now, pay later,” Meredith had said. “It’s insurance, really. Maybe I’ll get a job someplace else in Boston. Maybe I’ll drive a taxi and write my novel. We’ll see.” The domestic implications of a job elsewhere were clear, and there wasn’t much new to say about that. It would be hard for Alex to move because he split custody of Maria with Laura, his ex-wife. If Alex really wasn’t prepared to have another child, it might be hard for Meredith to stay. She was past thirty-five now and needed to make up her mind.
For all these reasons Alex would have preferred to be sitting in the converted VW Bug bucket seat mounted on a hinged swivel base in his own shop. There he could lean back and put his feet on his own cluttered desk, snooping into the lives of strangers and for the moment leaving Meredith to live her own. But he’d wanted to catch her after her first class and tell her what had happened on the beach. And he’d wanted to know what she made of the poem, if that’s what the note was.
He’d told her what worried him about the note: not the two-day delay, so much, but the style in which it was conveyed. It had a craziness, something in the odd juxtapositions and the singsong rhymes, the sudden veering from the abstract to the concrete. He felt that the person who wrote that note might, if thwarted or frustrated, make good on a promise to serve up the tasty, bloody substance as a treat for a hungry pet.
“Say them again,” Meredith had said. “The words on the note.” She’d brushed the red hair back over her right shoulder and looked out the window at nothing, listening. Alex had known she was trying to find something she could get hold of in this frightening tale. That was a trait they had in common— wanting to find the piece of a situation, a text, or a car that they knew what to do with. If you found a part you knew what to do with, you could start from there. “I don’t think it shows the kidnapper’s state of mind entirely,” Meredith had concluded. “I think at least part of it shows Emily Dickinson’s state of mind. I’ll check as soon as I get out of my ten o’clock class.”
Alex punched the last digit and put his mental picture of Meredith aside as a woman somewhere in Baltimore, Maryland, answered the phone.
“My name is Alex Glauberman,” he said into the handset for the second time, “and I’m a research assistant to Dr. Harrison of the Dennison Center for Cancer Research here in Boston. We’re doing a longitudinal retrospective study of the incidence of certain cancers among certain populations. I’m trying to track down a member of one of our sample groups who was enrolled at your college. Paul Foster is his name. The community relations office referred me to you.”
“I see. Now, what class was he enrolled in, please?”
“I don’t have that information exactly, for some reason. The notes I was given just say he first enrolled in the early or middle sixties, I’m afraid.”
“Just a moment,” she said. She worked in the alumni records office at Morgan State University, an institution whose name was vaguely familiar to Alex, possibly because some pro football or basketball player had come from there. Morgan State had been upgraded from college to university some years ago, community relations had told him. By whatever name, the place was where Jay Harrison recalled that Foster had at least temporarily been enrolled. Foster had gone to school there, or somewhere like that, until a brush with the police had landed him in front of a judge who’d made him choose between the army and jail.
When the woman came back on the line she said, “Now, tell me again whom you said you’re working for?” Her voice was soft, southern, and African-American, Alex thought.
“Dr. H.J. Harrison. He’s an associate professor at Harvard Medical School and an attending physician at the Dennison Center for Cancer Treatment and Research. I can give you his direct line, if you’d like to call him or his secretary to confirm this. If you could just give us an address, so we can send Mr. Foster a questionnaire. It will be entirely his option whether or not to reply.”
“Just a minute,” she said again. Alex sighed, but he knew that a mixture of patience and pressure was the key here. That combination came easily to him, because it was a good mechanic’s stock-in-trade. Especially when you dealt, as Alex increasingly did, with older cars on which the threads of every bolt grew more and more rusted in. Owners didn’t want to hear that he’d busted a bleeder valve or brake adjuster in a vain effort to get it loose. Many such parts could be hard to find, or had to be ordered from a distributor who might be backed up for weeks. Whether he broke the part or the part wore out on its own, the customers wanted to hear that he could rebuild it for them, and soon. More and more he’d been having to handcraft things, to work wonders with his little bench lathe, to change the shape of a wiper motor brush with layers of epoxy, to concoct a new window lifter out of wood when the old one ruste
d out.
He was putting pressure to bear now, as patiently as he could. As for tools, Jay was probably right that nothing could match a title, an unimpeachable purpose, and a dash of medical jargon delivered in a confident, entitled way. The alumni records staffer came back and said, “I don’t have any record of a Paul Foster graduating in those years. I have a Paul J. Foster in 1955 and Paul O. Foster in 1970. And a Pauline Foster, in ’83.”
“No,” Alex said. “I don’t think any of those are right. It’s possible he didn’t graduate, or came back and graduated later, in the seventies…”
“I told you the only graduates I’ve got, sir. I don’t have any information on students that didn’t get their degrees. If you want to try the registrar…”
“Please.”
She tried to transfer him but ended up cutting him off, so he had to enter all those digits again. The voice at the registrar’s office sounded older and more suspicious and gave no sign of being impressed by Dr. Harrison’s affiliation. It insisted that only transcripts were available, that copies could be sent only by mail, that no information could be given over the phone. Also any requests had to be signed by the student. “So I don’t see how you expect me to find somebody for you. I don’t know who told you to talk to me.”
“Alumni records. Could you please transfer me back?”
This time at least the call went through. He repeated his story to alumni records, got put on hold again, got his same informant back, and settled for the address of Paul O. Foster, class of ’70, now residing in Pikesville, Maryland, which was a suburb of Baltimore, she said. “Is your man Paul O.?” she asked him.