A Study in Honor

by Claire O'Dell

  Better than a dirt farm, I reminded myself. Better than starving.

  I clicked Apply before I could second-guess myself, but by now I felt emptied out and longed for my hostel room. One more, I told myself. Then I would visit the pharmacy to refill the painkillers and eat a proper meal for lunch.

  Job number seven was for a medical technician at the VA Medical Center in DC.

  No time to stop, to reconsider. I clicked the icon and a bubble appeared midscreen.

  Assistant’s primary responsibilities are to prescreen patients in regards to their medical condition and forward reports to the physicians and surgeons on staff. Additional duties might include follow-up review and monitoring patient recovery. Must have good communication skills and practical medical experience. Opportunities for training and advancement.

  Two-thirds the pay rate of the lab technician’s post, more than twice the responsibilities. Funding had dropped along with the rest of the economy, while costs for material goods were higher than ever before. And what if I could not get my new device by winter? Or spring? I would need adequate savings to establish myself anew.

  I just have to get that ER job, don’t I?

  I clicked Apply. Then, before I could change my mind, I logged out of the job portal and shut down my browser session. My hands, both of them, were trembling.

  “Go to the pharmacy,” I whispered to myself. “Get lunch. And you’ll need better interview clothes. If not for these jobs, then for something, someday.”

  The litany continued on its own. A cell phone to replace the one lost or stolen. One of those convertible tablets with a keyboard and memory sticks so I wouldn’t have to rely on the VA computers. A monthly Metro card. Better shoes, for when DC’s transportation system failed me. Hair oil from the neighborhood store. The to-do list was nearly enough to send me pelting back to my hostel room. I had to grip the chair while I ran through the breathing exercises the therapists had taught me, before the roaring in my ears faded and I could walk with some semblance of normality toward the exit.

  I had my hand on the door when someone called out my name.

  “Captain? Dr. Watson? Is that you?”

  A lean and knobby black man limped toward me and reached out a hand. I flinched back, still tangled up in my earlier panic.

  His smile flickered upward and then faded at my silence. “Do you remember me?” he said.

  His face was a study in brown, crisscrossed with old scars. His hair was a grizzled gray and covered his skull in patches. It was the combination of the limp and the scars that reminded me who he was. Jacob. Corporal Jacob Bell. He had transferred to our medical unit and served as my assistant before taking a disability discharge.

  “I remember,” I said. “I’m sorry—”

  “It doesn’t matter, Captain. I understand.”

  To be sure, he would. He had been captured by the enemy and tortured. He had escaped on his own, but some things you could never leave behind.

  “How you doing these days?” I said.

  “Good enough, Captain. Busy. Not nearly as busy as I was in the service, though.” He paused, and I could see the many, many questions he wanted to ask.

  “I know a tasty diner,” he said at last. “I’m hungry. Are you?”

  To my surprise, I was.

  I nodded. “Lead on, Corporal.”

  His tasty diner was a restaurant in the U Street corridor that specialized in Greek dishes. We ordered an enormous plate of feta cheese and hot peppers to share, then a second one of baked phyllo stuffed with roasted lamb and spinach. There were hot tea, cold water, and an abundance of food of the kind and quality I had dreamed about in Illinois. For a while I could do nothing but eat. Jacob did not trouble me. He understood the need to devour food when we had the opportunity. Eventually, however, we both slowed and I could take in my surroundings and my companion. I refilled my water glass. Jacob poured tea for us both.

  “You surprised me,” I told him. “Popping up like a rabbit the way you did. What happened to going back home to Maine?”

  His hesitation was brief but said a lot. “Times be hard, Captain. You know how it goes. The job they were holding for me went to someone else. And . . . other things were harder. Anyway, I ended up in DC. The VA found me a job in the medical center. Orderly. It’s not my first choice, but they added a student loan for a local tech college to sweeten things. I go to classes there afternoons and evenings. You?”

  “I do well enough,” I said. “It’s early days, but . . .” With an effort, I expelled a breath and found I could almost smile. “I need money. I want to stay in the city a few months or so. They said they might find me a new arm.”

  Jacob simply nodded. “Might be. Could be.”

  Neither of us mentioned the waiting lists, or the cuts in funding that made those waiting lists even longer.

  We fell silent over the remains of our lunchtime feast. The waitress brought us a second pot of tea and our bill, with the murmured addendum that we need not rush. We didn’t. I was grateful for this chance meeting with an old friend. Jacob too seemed glad for the unhurried meal and the conversation that followed.

  “You want a job,” he said eventually. “And a better place than that hostel.”

  I had described my room to him—a bit too vividly, no doubt.

  “The problem is money,” I said.

  “It always is. But maybe I can help. I know someone . . .” He glanced around. “Not sure if she’s right for you, though.”

  “She?”

  He shrugged. “A friend of mine. She’s not service, but she’s not so bad.”

  I waited, knowing there was more.

  “She’s . . . particular about things,” he went on. “Some might call her difficult, but she has her good points, too. I happen to know she’s looking for a partner to split rent on some rooms.”

  My throat went dry with a sudden and all-too-familiar panic. A stranger. Someone to witness my nightmares, to stare at my missing arm while pretending not to. It was difficult enough in the hostel.

  Jacob was watching me with that same kindly smile I remembered from our time in the service, on the days when blood and death became too much for me to bear. A smile that spoke of understanding and not pity.

  “You can always say no,” he said.

  “That I could.” My voice came out shakier than I liked. “When do you think I could meet her?”

  “Today, if you like. I know where to find her on Saturdays.”

  No, no, that was much too soon. I needed time—

  The panic rushed back, stronger than before. I shut my eyes and gripped the edge of my seat. Usually I could pinpoint the cause. The bang of a car engine that recalled the explosions of war. The touch of a stranger, which yanked me back to that struggle with enemy soldiers as I tried to save my patients. This . . . this was less easy to identify. So I breathed deeply and steadily until the panic subsided.

  When I opened my eyes, Jacob appeared to be studying the bill.

  “Let’s go,” I whispered.

  He paid the bill over my protests. I retaliated with a generous tip.

  “You say you know where to find her?” I asked once we had exited the diner.

  “Always. Or, always when she’s in the city.”

  “Then she has rooms now. What happened? Did she secretly murder her former roommate?”

  Jacob laughed softly and shook his head. “Not that I’ve ever heard. No, she lived with friends who had a house in Alexandria. A temporary thing, she said. But then her friends took jobs on the West Coast, and Sara wanted to stay in DC. She found a new set of rooms. They cost more than she likes to pay, but she’s decided she has to have this apartment and no other. As I said, she’s particular.”

  “Sara.” I repeated the name to myself. “Sara what?”

  “Holmes. We met last year. In a movie theater, if you can believe that. She kept cursing up and down about the soundtrack. Which I can tell you was awful, but still. Making that kind of rucku
s does no good. I told her to take her noisy self to see the manager, or if she couldn’t do that, she ought to buy me a drink. She bought me a drink, then argued with me the whole time.”

  I laughed. “But you like her.”

  He smiled back, somewhat ruefully. “As much as she lets me, yes. We talk now and then. Now and then, she buys me a drink. For old times’ sake, she says. She knows a fair bit about the service, for all that she’s never served.” He indicated the crosswalk, where the pedestrian signal blinked green. “Let’s turn here. Less traffic this way.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “National Gallery. She likes to spend her Saturdays there, when she can.”

  We followed R Street east a few blocks, then turned south again onto Ninth, avoiding the tide of Labor Day weekend tourists and the high-security zone around the White House. Drones passed by overhead, marking the outlying borders of that zone. They were thicker in the air than before—a precaution against those latest threats from the New Confederates? Or more of the same from those days when ISIS and al-Qaeda sent their suicide bombers to our shores, when right-wing protesters from within our own country turned violent and presidents could not rely on their own security details?

  On the ground, the telephone poles carried signs for the upcoming election. Posters for Jeb Foley and Roy Donnovan were plastered over those of their old opponents from the primaries. Another businessman turned politician, running on the Independent ticket. There were even a few digital signs for the Communist Party, which some prankster had rewired to read Ellison, Obama, and Booker.

  Two months and a couple days until the vote. I had hardly thought about the elections before now. War and surgery had consumed all my thoughts. Then came the invasion and my own personal combat to regain myself. Foley and his conservative friends were easy to reject. They hated me and mine, and only a couple of steps separated them from the New Confederacy, as far as I could see. Donnovan . . . was a more difficult pill to swallow. A white man, a straight white man with a history of voting the Centrist Party line, with one or two progressive causes he favored. I understood why Sanches had taken him for her VP, but as president?

  At Constitution, we turned back east to the main entrance to the National Gallery. Every spring my teachers had organized a trip to the Mall to see the cherry blossoms. Every autumn, my parents had insisted on a visit to the Museum of Natural History or the Museum of African Art. If Grace and I were extra well behaved, they added the Air and Space Museum to the list.

  I miss them. I wish . . .

  I wished I’d had the prescience to take a break after the all-consuming years of medical school and my subsequent residency. But there were so few doctors and so many casualties. As the war continued into Sanches’s second term and Congress debated whether to undo civil rights for all those people who’d been told they were less than equal because of the color of their skin or gender they loved, just to placate the New Confederacy, I told myself that it was my duty to serve. There would be time enough after my tour of duty ended.

  Then came a letter from the State Department, informing me of what I already knew from the newsfeeds—that my parents had died along with hundreds of others when terrorists from the New Confederacy bombed the Atlanta airport. Then a letter from my grandmother, insisting I quit the military, as if she could rule the government as she had once ruled our family. The even more formal letter from my sister’s lawyer, dividing our inheritance.

  And then, and then . . .

  And then came the bloody dawn, with thousands of rebel soldiers overrunning the front lines. The frantic broadcasts from the camp radio tower, broken off with the first explosion, and the even more frantic hours that followed as I and the other surgeons attempted to carry our patients to safety.

  * * *

  We climbed the broad steps to the National Gallery’s marble portico and into the rotunda with its black tiled floor and the fountain of silver-veined stone. Cool air fell over me like rainwater as we passed through wide corridors to a staircase leading down to the lower level. After that came a series of smaller rooms with paintings from the twentieth century, then a longer gallery dedicated to works by French and Belgian masters. At last we arrived in a small chamber anchored by two marble statues in opposite corners, and a grand sweep of canvas against the far wall.

  Dalí’s Sacrament of the Last Supper.

  I was no Christian, not these days. But, oh, those luminous colors. The images upon images. The small trickeries my teachers had pointed out that added layers of story to the most obvious and outermost one. It almost didn’t matter that the Son of Man, a child of Israel and the King of the Jews, was portrayed as a pale-skinned man with yellow hair.

  Fuck it, I’m lying. It did matter, the same way it rankled when people—mostly white people—stared when I said I was a doctor, a surgeon, and a veteran of the wars. But I could still look beyond the unthinking bigotry of this particular artist, and the assumptions of his age, to the moment he portrayed, when Christ drank the wine and spoke of his body and his blood.

  I shivered and passed a hand over my eyes.

  Only then did I notice a woman standing in the corner.

  She was tall and lean. Her complexion was the darkest brown I had ever seen, the angles of her face were sharp enough to cut, and she wore her hair in locs, arranged in a careless, complicated fashion wound around her head, then plaited and pinned, so they fell in a thick cascade down her back. The cant of her cheekbones, the almost imperceptible folds next to her eyes, spoke of East Asia, or certain nations in Africa. Of a world outside my own.

  And she was wealthy. I could tell by the clothes she wore. Loose trousers cut in the latest fashion, and a thin sleeveless shirt made from an ivory cloth, gleaming bright as sunlight and shot through with gold threads. A few pearls were visible among her locs.

  Holmes’s expression was contained, but I had the distinct impression she was amused. “Bell,” she said, her voice rough and low. “What have you brought me?”

  “A friend,” Jacob said. “Sara Holmes, my friend Dr. Janet Watson. Shake hands, Sara. I know you can.”

  Sara laughed, a laugh that matched her voice. We closed the distance between us, then both of us hesitated. I sensed a Rubicon before me, an array of choices wise or foolish. Gaius Julius Caesar had made his own choice in that matter and died. Or perhaps I was being fanciful.

  Then Holmes reached out to me with a hand covered in lace. “You’ve come from the war in Oklahoma,” she said, and clasped my hand in hers.

  My pulse jumped. Of course, I told myself, she would see my metal arm and recognize that I was a wounded vet.

  “Hardly a difficult guess,” I said. “Unless you stopped reading the newsfeeds.”

  Sill holding my hand, she regarded me with an amused expression. “True. I don’t need this”—here she lifted her other hand, also gloved, and twisted it around—“to make that deduction.”

  Light glittered off the metallic lace, changing the pale gold to threads of silver. Even in the muddy fields of Alton, we’d heard about this newest offering in network connectivity. I spotted the tiny earbuds that confirmed my guess, and just behind them, the small black discs that implied permanent implants. If she could afford this kind of advanced technology, why did she need someone to share the rent?

  “You like my toys?” Holmes said.

  My stomach lurched. Not so much at her words, but the attitude behind them. I knew the likes of her from medical school—rich and privileged and mocking those beneath them.

  “No,” I replied evenly. “I do not like them.”

  Now she was smiling. “I’m not surprised, Dr. Watson. But my toys tell me you graduated second in your class at Howard University. You finished your residency with honors. And you had three offers within the week, all very good positions as a surgeon. You even had a lover, with lucrative offers of her own in the city. Yet you decided to enlist in the army.”

  I was sweating, but I knew the cause this ti
me.

  “I joined because I wished to,” I said. “And I am not afraid of your toys.”

  She regarded me with wide bright eyes, eyes the color of a midnight sky, flecked with molten copper. “Maybe not. But you are afraid, nevertheless. You have been, since long before the New Civil War and the Shame of Alton. That missing arm terrifies you, Dr. Watson. But not as much as the terror you felt that you could never truly succeed, even with the best arm in the world.”

  I tried to draw a breath and found no air to fill my lungs. Dimly, I heard Jacob Bell scolding Holmes, but I could not get my throat and tongue to cooperate. A hand clasped my arm. I felt something brush against my leg. Abruptly I broke away and ran back through the corridor. Someone—Jacob—called after me. I rounded a corner into a nest of smaller exhibit rooms, then went to the stairs leading up.

  But I could not face the city streets and all those strangers. Not yet. I ducked through to another hall and found a marble bench where I could sit and gather my shreds of courage. To my relief, the hall was empty. I bent over double, arms clasped around my knees, waiting for the thundering in my skull to die down. From a distance came the echo of voices—tourists arguing over their next stop. Then a set of footsteps, as sharp as nails on the tiled floor, approached the nearby entryway. I waited, sick and apprehensive, but no one entered. No one spoke to me.

  The footsteps retreated. Gradually the quiet returned. Much more gradually, my pulse slowed and I found my breath again.

  God. Dear goddamned God with your so-called love that does not include me or mine. What the everlasting fuck were you thinking to bring me and her together?

  God was a trickster, my father used to say. If so, then Sara Holmes could be its manifestation, cruel and capricious.

  The image of Holmes as God’s trickster called up laughter, however weak. I rubbed my hand over my face. Poor Jacob, the unwilling witness to that scene. I would have to track him down later and apologize. Not here in the museum, though. Not where Sara Holmes might still be lurking. Best to leave now before I encountered her again.