Trouble

by Jesse Kellerman

  “I love you,” she said. “I’m sorry, I made a mistake. Please don’t be mad.”

  He had put on too much Neosporin; her skin gleamed; it was hard to get the Band-Aids to stick. “Hold still.”

  “Are you mad?”

  “I’m not m—Stop moving around.”

  “You’re mad, I can hear it.”

  He took a breath. “You need to let me do this.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  He wiped the area around the wound clean.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I did the wrong thing. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, please, I can’t stand it when you’re mad. Please don’t be mad. I’m so sorry, Jonah, please, I love you. I won’t do anything like that again. I made a mistake. I did it because I thought you would be happy but I was wrong. Tell me you’re not angry.”

  “I’m not angry.”

  “Good,” she said. “Good, good—I promise—I’ll make it up to you, what I did, I’m sorry.”

  “You hurt him,” he said. “Not me.”

  “I know, I’m sorry, I’m sorry…” She leaned her head against him.

  He finished with the dressing. It wouldn’t hold for long but it’d do for the time being. He tried to step away from her but she put her arms around his neck. Crying. Yes. She was crying. As angry as he was, she was once again small, and despite his best efforts he felt bad for her. His hands went around her. He pulled her close and she moaned gratefully.

  “You need to promise never to do anything like that again.”

  “I understand.”

  “I mean it, I need to—”

  “I’m not a child,” she said in a remarkably childlike way. “I understand. I won’t do it again. I made a mistake.”

  “All right.”

  “Haven’t you ever made a mistake?”

  Yes he wanted to say but it never involved physical harm.

  Then he remembered that that wasn’t true.

  “I’m trying to be explicit,” he said, “because when I wasn’t you took my words out of context.”

  She said, “It won’t happen again.”

  “Fine. Then. Then I don’t think we need to—I want to forget about it.”

  “Forget what.”

  “I’m being serious. I don’t want to—I could get nailed at school, or—”

  “Why would you?”

  “If he found out—”

  “Jonah Stem, nobody knows that I know you. Do you think I gave him my card?”

  “They called the police.”

  She shrugged. “So?”

  “So they could be looking for you.”

  “With all due respect, I think the NYPD has greater priorities.”

  “You’re not worried at all.”

  “No.”

  “Fine,” he said. “Then let’s forget about it.”

  “Consider it forgotten.” She smiled. “All better?”

  He paced around. “I called my sister yesterday.”

  “Really. And how are things on the money farm?”

  “I called her because I was trying to find you. You didn’t show up for five days.”

  “I’m sorry. As I explained earlier, I had things to attend to.”

  “I asked her to look you up in the Yale alum database.”

  “I’m not in there,” she said. “I find it a bore.”

  “I called the Beacon and asked for your phone number, and they didn’t recognize your name.”

  “Ah,” she said. “That’s because the director sent a memo to all staff instructing them not to answer questions about me. After my little runin with Raymond they were getting bombarded by media. Bad PR, you know, to have one of their patients—or citizens, as they call them—stabbing staff members. It wasn’t the first time Raymond had done that. He got into a fight last spring and they wanted to kick him out. I interceded on his behalf.”

  He recalled his conversation with the night nurse. Are you press? Eve dug in her purse and found a wrinkled business card with her name and the Beacon logo.

  “Is this your number?”

  “It’s a direct line for the center.”

  “I’ve been trying to reach you,” he said. “I wrote you e-mails.”

  “I know, and I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t you think it’s a little strange that I don’t have your phone number?”

  “No.”

  “It’s been a month and half, Eve, that doesn’t strike you as weird?”

  “You’ve never expressed this displeasure before.”

  “I haven’t needed to call you,” he said. “You’ve always been around.”

  “And here I am, c’est moi.”

  “But you weren’t,” he said. “I needed to speak to you. You have my number.”

  “You have testicles, and I don’t. Call it even.”

  He stared at her. “What’s going on here?”

  “…nothing.”

  “Then why are you acting this way. What is this. Is it a—a security issue?”

  She bit her lip.

  “Eve. What’s wrong.”

  She went to the window and looked out. All stations in the Museum of Human Frailties were offline, as though they had darkened the displays to install new ones. “I don’t think it’s fair that I should have to give myself to you if you won’t do it in return.”

  He said nothing.

  She said, “I love you. I don’t have any problem saying it.”

  “You’ll give me your phone number if I tell you I love you?”

  “Yes.”

  “That sounds backwards to me.”

  She returned to looking out the window.

  He had wanted to tell her about his blowout with George, about his plan to scale back. If she had been around a few days earlier…and if she hadn’t done what she did. He saw now that this was going to be impossible. He wasn’t prepared to say that, though, not with her hand cut up and his head hurting from all the activity. He would formulate a strategy. He would worry about it later. He couldn’t think about anything except what was right in front of him, and at that moment she turned and said, “Let’s go to bed.”

  • 14 •

  FOR THE NEXT two weeks they reverted to their previous schedule, he going to work and she greeting him upon his return home. She would ask him how Benderking was behaving these days, and though Jonah was loathe to admit it, he had noticed a change: although still outwardly gruff, Benderking took care not to cross the line between jerk and psychopath. Jonah didn’t tell her, of course. First of all, who knew what had caused the shift. Benderking might be scared; but he might also be quietly plotting his revenge. Maybe she’d given him a stroke that had burned out the cruelty center in his brain.

  Plus Jonah didn’t want to encourage her. Overnight he saw Eve differently. They continued to sleep together, but he no longer felt compelled to tell her everything that had passed through his mind; and he tried hard to look at her objectively.

  Two memories dogged him. One was her face on Lance’s video. He tried hard to put the image out of his head but it nagged him, cropping up while they rolled around on his bedroom floor. He found himself sneaking peeks at her, wanting to catch her in the act. Not that he would know what to do if he did catch her. Jump up with trembling finger: faker. Why did he need to have his suspicions confirmed? If he knew she was doing it—and he knew she was—he could either accept it or not. But torturing himself by looking, and looking, and looking…

  The other memory, the worse one, the one that kept him awake after she’d left, and frightened him when he admitted it to his consciousness: you did it for me. He could not abide that analogy, and if she saw what he’d done in that way, then, well, then he didn’t know what to do.

  He felt the tiniest bit scared.

  He had never been good at breakups, but if his experience with Hannah had taught him one lesson, it was that you saved everyone a good deal of grief by heading things off at the pass. Not yet but soon. He had a month of surgery left, plus the
Shelf, and he didn’t want to get tangled up in nightly heart-to-hearts, face-to-faces. He would miss the regular release, but there was always the Internet.

  WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 6, 2004.

  BLUE TEAM, WEEK FOUR.

  He exited the OR around one, and with ten minutes before his next Fatty, ran for the bathroom. On the way back he came across Nelgrave puddled in a chair.

  “Patrick.”

  Nelgrave’s head lolled and swiveled. He had a sharp widow’s peak that Jonah could swear had gotten more severe over the weekend. “Huh?”

  “Are you okay?”

  “I passed out during surgery.”

  “Shit. Did you hit your head?”

  “I fell forward. On the patient.”

  “…whoops.”

  “His chest was open,” Nelgrave said, his voice cracking. “I landed on his lung. I contaminated the entire sterile field. Then I vomited.”

  “On the patient?”

  “No. By that time, they’d thrown me off. That’s when I hit my head.”

  “Man,” Jonah said. “That sucks.”

  “I wanted to do plastics. Do you have any idea how competitive that is?”

  “They won’t flunk you for one bad day.”

  Nelgrave shifted around in his chair. His scrubs were a mess. His neck looked like it hadn’t been washed in a month. “They might.”

  “Look,” Jonah said, “you know way more than I do.”

  This seemed to cheer him. “That’s true.” He got up, smiled, patted Jonah on the shoulder. “You always know the right thing to say, Stem.” Then he walked away.

  ALTHOUGH BARIATRICS WAS a nonemergency service, he took call like everybody else. He reported at eight for what turned into one of the busiest nights of the year. Three ped-strucks (a couple in a crosswalk mowed down by a taxi; a tourist dashing through Times Square); a man beaten up in a bar fight, both collarbones and his jaw broken; a recent patient whose wound, improperly tended, had turned gangrenous. They removed the arm at the elbow, slicing through the joint.

  After one A.M. things slowed down, and Jonah snuck off for a nap. He managed thirty minutes before his cell phone buzzed.

  “Get down here.”

  As he sleepily tied his shoes, the phone rang again.

  “Don’t bother. He died.”

  He went back to bed.

  Waking shortly thereafter to extremely proximate yelling.

  “MEDICAL STUDENT.”

  Jonah rolled over. “Yuh?”

  “I paged you an hour ago.”

  “Y…you said he died.”

  “Died?” The resident shook the lounge’s bunk bed. “Are you nuts? You must’ve dreamed it. Hey—you’re the guy from the paper.”

  Jonah nodded.

  “Let’s make use of your talents. I have a new job for you. You won’t pass out on me again, will you? Good. The copy machine’s broken, go fix it.”

  Jonah didn’t know how to fix a copy machine. They had copy-machine repairmen whose job it was to fix copy machines.

  “Okay,” he said.

  It was The Paper Jam That Ate Milwaukee. He sat down crosslegged with a pair of dissecting forceps and picked out toner-besmirched confetti. The tedium caused him to repeatedly pitch forward, snoring. At one point he grazed one of the machine’s hot internal organs, raising welts on his hand. An hour later, a test copy—of his extended, injured middle finger—came out clear. He went to tell the resident, who gave him a hearty clap on the back.

  “Good job, Supercock.”

  By three thirty A.M. Jonah had been in the hospital for twenty-three hours, on his feet and active for the vast majority of those. He felt like a bald tire. He was heading to clean up for rounds when a wad of paper beaned him on the back of the head.

  “Hello, Jonah Stem.”

  He hurried over. “What are you doing here?”

  She giggled. “You look adorable in your coat.”

  “You can’t be here. You could be arrested. Where are you going.”

  She descended to the basement. The few people they passed nodded at her as though she had every right to be around; her bearing conveyed a sense of divinely mandated authority, the cushion of air found beneath the heels of movie stars, royalty, maître d’s. Jonah tailed her at a distance, voicing dissent.

  “Geeeez,” she said. “Cease and desist. If I didn’t love you so much, Jonah Stem, I might find you a real downer.”

  “You can’t go in there. It’s locked.”

  “Rubbish, I’ve done my research.”

  “This is illeg—”

  “Shhhh,” she said in a stage whisper. “Someone…might…HEAR…us.”

  And like that she was inside.

  “Eve,” he said to the wall. “Eve.” He had a feeling that, were he to try and wait her out, she would win. He didn’t want to be caught standing here, doing nothing; that could lead to much worse. He’d have to go in and get her out as quick as he could. He turned the knob and stepped into MRI room 4.

  She was staring at the machine. “I have always fantasized about being able to see through things. You know what this reminds me of, those early computers, behemoths that ran three city blocks.” She laid a hand on its smooth tan shell. “One day we’ll shrink these down to a size convenient enough to carry in your handbag. Everyone will own one, they’ll be like telephones or credit cards. We’ll all walk around with MRI glasses, seeing people without their skin on.”

  “We can’t be here.”

  “I thought our romantic life could use a pick-me-up,” she said, prancing around the far side of the machine. “Something’s been feeling off to me.”

  He glanced at his watch, at the door.

  “You could scan us while we did it. You could see our insides as it happened.” She poked her head into the tunnel. “You could watch your glands in mid-contraction.”

  He made a show of refusing—if they got caught, oh holy fuck—but when she climbed into the MRI machine he was right behind.

  Miraculously, they fit. The mechanical bed was in the out position, giving them an extra six inches, not that that helped him: he could barely move in any direction, squirming against a rubberized cable, depilating the nape of his neck. He corkscrewed his body and his back sang nooo. He felt like a dolphin lodged in a waterslide.

  Whereas she was positively acrobatic. She came to rest atop him, her woolly sweater bunched against his nostrils; he sneezed into her throat. You’re a master of your trade, Jonah Stem. I knew the minute we met. You’re a prodigy. She grated long itchy sleeves down his flanks and undulated and emitted what he could tell were fake moans. He felt angry at her for lying to him and he said Stop it. He tried to push her off. She arched against the top of the tunnel, exerting tremendous downward pressure.

  Be good she said.

  I don’t want to do this.

  You do, you do.

  He tried to will himself soft but he could not. She was in his face. Do something for me. She grabbed his arm and brought it to her cheek. Here.

  He stroked her face lightly.

  Harder.

  He didn’t understand, and then he understood. She wanted him to hit her. This was new. They had done what normal lovers do. But this was different, and no way was he going to comply. He jerked his hand away; she grabbed his other arm and he retracted that, too, so that he seemed to have flippers, Thalidomide Baby Versus the Humpamatic 3000. He refused. He told her No.

  Hearing this, she said Fine.

  Swiftly winding up, she bashed her head against the tunnel wall.

  The noise was ferocious, as though he was sitting inside a church bell; as though he’d been the one brained. She bent to do it again, and did do it again, WHAM, the whole room rocked. His mind filled with wild pictures: Eve killing herself, her stiffening corpse trapping him, her skull opening like a soft-boiled egg, brains and cerebrospinal fluid and blood across his face. She wound up to do it again. He reached out to restrain her, and she seized his hand. Good boy. What could he d
o to stop her, hit her? And he felt her growing excited. This was why she liked it when he grabbed her buttocks; this was why she had him pull her hair. This was what she wanted, and although he felt sick to his stomach and there was no way he would allow it to happen, he allowed it to happen: he wanted to be surprised, but wasn’t, not really; he had earned this. He offered his arm and let her flog herself. She made her whale songs; every sinew tight; pummeling herself in the face one two three times, kept on until her nose bled and splattered his forehead like bird droppings, and just as he could bear it no longer she shook and said Oh oh oh and her insides contracted on him and he could not help it, he came.

  The machine hummed. He had never had an MRI before. Hannah had had one on her shoulder. He felt a curious mixture of dead peace and electrical agitation. Eve’s weight atop him was a blanket, a burden. A vein in her neck drummed against his cheek. She whispered to him. Blood, her blood, sledded through the bristles of his two-day beard, tracking a route to the corner of his mouth. He was freezing. His hand throbbed; later he would see that he’d opened a huge gash along his knuckles. They’d contaminated the inside of the MRI. He would have to sterilize it. Red smudges along the walls like bad cave art. She sat up, her tongue bulging out her lower lip, rooting as after a persnickety piece of spinach. She drooled a bloody chunk into her hand. Her eyed widened, and she displayed the bounty: a tooth.

  Her smile disclosed a newly formed gap. She collapsed against him again.

  “There, my love,” she murmured. “Was that so bad?”

  • 15 •

  WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 13, 2004.

  SURGICAL SELECTIVE, WEEK ONE.

  HIS LAST MONTH of surgery consisted of two two-week subspecialties. Ophtho wasn’t bad. The attendings all had beards, like it was a board requirement.

  “You’re shivering.” The surgeon, Dr. Eisen, was pointing a gloved finger at him.

  “It’s cold in here,” Jonah said.

  “You’re not used to it by now?”

  “Some things you never get used to.”