He took his fruit to the second floor, prying the rind free with cold, red fingers as he alternately checked his watch and over his shoulder. Through the picture window, taxis swirled like bees, hungrily swallowing pedestrians. Wind whipped streetlight banners, stripped newspapers from commuters running for the subway.
He braced himself and headed out into the storm, walking north on Central Park West until he spotted a cab, which he directed to the HUM dorm via the longest route imaginable.
By the time he got upstairs, it was nine thirty, bringing his travel time to two hours and forty-six minutes. He dropped his stuff near the futon. The apartment was quiet; Vik and Mike were out, and Cutler’s door was closed, the light off.
Raymond’s laptop had refused to start when he’d tried it at home the previous night. Having left it charging all day, Jonah now slid it from his bag and fired it up. It took forever to boot, getting snarled in a virus scanner that hadn’t run for months. Up popped a wallpaper of Derek Jeter, his pinstripes straining as he swung at a ball stretched oblong by speed. Other than this one gesture toward customization, Raymond seemed not to have used the machine a whole lot. For that matter, Jonah doubted that it’d been Raymond who’d put the photo there.
Who was Simón Iniguez kidding? His brother couldn’t sustain a job coaching high-school sports. Picturing him as connectophile, as data processor, as dot-com entrepreneur…It was too pathetic to think about, running shoes for a paraplegic. Jonah felt a dull wet pop; he’d destroyed more than a person: a talisman against hopelessness.
And when people looked at him: what did he represent? Did his friends draw strength from him; did his parents, or George? He didn’t think so. They pitied him, like the little girl with the pigtails, DeShonna, did. In twenty-six years in the world he had failed to learn hardness, like a real person should.
The computer’s beep poked him in the eye. The virus scanner needed to be updated. Would he like to do it now or to be reminded in fourteen days?
CANCEL
CANCEL
CANCEL
CANCEL
HE SPENT AN HOUR OR SO DIGGING. THE LAST WEBSITES Raymond had visited were exactly what Jonah would have expected: Sports Illustrated, MLB.com, the Weather Channel, pornography. The browser’s cache held a worthless mess.
Upon opening, the mail client prompted him for a password. He tried yankees and jeter and combinations thereof, adding numerals and punctuation and misspellings. He tried newyork, bombers, steinbrenner; tried bostonsucks and fucksox and, feeling that he was reaching here, mickeymantle and lougehrig. Then he typed simon and the program popped alive with an error message: the network could not be found.
The archived mail sat in the inbox. Jonah scrolled to the first e-mail, dated July 2003. Raymond’s ISP welcomed him to the service, confirmed his username, and reiterated their Terms of Service in case he hadn’t read them the first time.
For the first few months the mailbox served as a repository for rubbish-hucksters with spam-filter-evading names like Unforeseeable H. Mackenzie and Propeller E. Decipherable. They advertised cheap Viagra and the chance for him to break down walls with your HUGE SHAFT!! Every so often, Simón sent a note: circumspect encouragement couched in small talk. Weather and sports. Jonah recognized the authorial tone as the same one he used with Hannah, a frivolous, chary optimism that painted all successes as unarousing and all setbacks as minor.
Raymond never replied.
In October 2003, a new correspondent appeared. At first, Jonah bypassed the name, thinking the letters junk. But around January, they spiked in frequency. Someone named First Lady had taken a shine to Raymond. Jonah scrolled to the first one.
Dear Raymond Iniguez—
It was a pleasure to make your acquaintance. You have nice hands.
Fondly,
Eve Gones
Jonah read it several times in search of some hint of what was to come.
It was a pleasure to make your acquaintance.
Its simplicity disarmed and depressed him.
You have nice hands.
She knew. She could divine latent rage.
It all started by complimenting a man’s hands.
Three weeks later she wrote again, a longer letter referring to events that Jonah didn’t understand. This time around, Raymond wrote back.
thak you i like yuo to
What started out as sporadic swiftly assumed an epic pace, not a correspondence so much as a monologue, as the ratio of her text to his got more and more exaggerated: fifteenfold, one hundred fiftyfold; one thousand polysyllables for every chickenpecked word; burning supernovae of language. It was unthinkable that Raymond understood her. Jonah—who considered his reading comprehension skills pretty sharp—could barely follow as she scampered through an impassable underbrush of adjectives and allusions. Ten densely written pages would elicit a single yes or a single no, leaving him to wonder what question Raymond was answering. Was it Some would argue—and on this matter I avow agnosticism—that the duality (interior inaccessability/known universality cf Scarry) of corporeal sensations is precisely what make them objects of a sort of ekphrastic fixation, in that the primeval need to be confronted with an omnipresent always-applicable yet unknowable entity (formerly expressed as God-head reverence etc) has never truly disappeared, even in our deicidal age, becoming rather sublimated (and in many cases psychically dissolute to the point of pathologization), the impulse possibly assuming form as the Intellectual Quandary (eg quantum physics, Shakespeare’s True Identity) or the Unworkable Ideological Quest (eg Global Warming), although in my eyes for your money you’re better off sticking with what you can grab in two hands that Raymond intended to affirm with his yes? Or was he trying to tell her that, yes, he did like it when I touched you there?
For several months she wrote him a half-dozen theses a day. Then, in late February—right before Raymond’s fight at the Beacon—she took a turn for the terse, her e-mails shrinking to no more than a few lines, in which she exhorted him to carry out some small task. As before, it began benignly enough.
The next time you get on the subway, hold the doors till someone gets angry.
Or
Drop trash in the Turtle Pond.
Or
It would enthrall me, make me so happy, if you brought me a dead pigeon.
Soon she grew blunt, and alarmingly more specific.
If you love me, Raymond, you will put ink in Jerry’s shampoo bottle.
I want you to go to Port Authority, walk downstairs to the bus depot where all the people are waiting, enter the women’s restroom, and smash the mirror with a ball-peen hammer. Take a piece home in your pocket for me.
How many of these requests had he carried out? A few of her e-mails expressed gratitude for an unnamed act and promised a vaguely sexual reward: these were outnumbered by e-mails venting displeasure that he had disappointed her yet again, his noncompliance evidence of a feeble superego grappling with itself. The script for these scenes sat on the tip of Jonah’s tongue. He had been a much better player, but the part was essentially the same, and he could not help but feel a sad kinship.
Oh, we had some good times, Raymond and I. Not on the order of the times had by you and me; they lacked the intellectual verve. But enough to whet a lady’s appetite.
He read on with an unwillingly prophetic eye.
All her nonsense about keying cars and shoplifting Zippos and scaring tourists by spitting on their shirtfronts: it was her way of testing mettle, figuring out if he was ready to do what she really wanted. Where’s the beef he wondered.
Then, in May, she sent him an e-mail headed Doggerel for Raymond.
You make
me ache
Well done
my son
Jonah set the computer down, stood up, stuck his head out the window, and breathed the cold ninth-floor air.
By that time he had been reading for two hours; the machine computer whistled with overexertion, its internal fan whirring. He was d
ebating whether to return to it when he heard a key in the lock. He rushed to close the computer and opened the door.
Snow had collected in Vik’s erect, unkempt hair, making him look like a human shaving brush. His clothes were wrinkled and his face bloated. Under one arm he’d tucked a bag of groceries. Jonah went to help him unload the stuff.
“I left you towels,” Vik said.
“Thanks. How’s OB?”
“It’s a sorority. What’re you on now? Psych?”
Jonah nodded.
“You must like that,” Vik said.
“It’s interesting. I’m supposed to be following up one case for the next three weeks. This girl from the projects.”
Vik nodded. He looked spaced-out, and Jonah apologized for keeping him up. “I’ll put the rest of this away,” he said.
“All right.” Vik yawned. “I round at five.”
“Shit. Well, go to bed.”
“You’re okay out here?”
“All set.” He had said that he needed a place to crash for a few weeks, Vik’s unflappability enabling him to ignore the inconvenience caused by such a request. “Whatever you guys need while I’m here, I’m buying.”
“Not necessary.”
To press the issue would have been insulting, so Jonah thanked him and said goodnight.
As the crack beneath Vik’s bedroom door went dark, Jonah returned to the computer to read the rest of First Lady’s correspondence. It yielded nothing of further significance, and he was about to give up when he had an idea.
For this, Raymond’s computer, lacking Web access, was useless. Jonah took out his own laptop, joined the apartment’s wireless network (Club Valsalva), and searched for First Lady’s e-mail address, striking gold among the newsgroups. Scores of threads filled up the monitor, all posted to a group called alt.rec.pain.
While First Lady had authored the bulk of the content, there were a few oddballs mixed in, posting anonymously or behind fake addresses. That people avoided using their real names didn’t surprise Jonah at all, seeing as how the posts were invariably obscene, asking Mistress First Lady to punish them or spank them or whatnot. To one such suitor Eve replied: You are mistaken. My interest is aesthetic. There are plenty of websites where you can indulge your asinine coprophilic fantasies without disrupting my train of thought. Go there.
And please stop posting here without proper grammar, spelling, and punctuation. Your ignorance turns a chapel into a corral.
In another post, overrun with quotes from Artaud and the Bhagavad Gita, she decried the “petty anodynes” of “standard bondage,” deriding the activities of “mainstreamers” as “jejune.” Like Coke she wrote only the Real Thing will do.
The real thing being—pain? Death? He could not make head or tails. Flung into cyberspace, the same heady rambling that had clogged Raymond’s inbox read as animalistic, a maniac shouting into a wind tunnel. One item, however, caught his eye.
Req: vid will pay top $$$
He clicked on her reply.
E-mail me your phone number and we can discuss this in private.
HE HOPED HE sounded like someone else.
Dear First Lady,
Your project excites me. What have you been creating recently? I would like to obtain footage of your work. I am unable to give you my phone number as I do not want my wife to answer. I can send you a money order. What are your rates? Please send me your phone number or address.
Sincerely,
Sam H.
• 28 •
FROM PAGE THREE of the Guide:
Your responsibility to a patient does not end when he or she is discharged from your service. Continuity of care, as affirmed by the bylaws of the American Medical Association (H–140.975, 5), remains a priority for physicians, especially those treating underserved populations, for whom a healthy lifestyle and continued access to medication may not be readily available.
Traditionally, because of the nature of the third-year clerkships, students do not often see the same patient for more than the duration of the hospital stay. This creates difficulties in developing ongoing relationships. To combat this problem, HUM has introduced the Home Helpers initiative, which allows the student doctor to follow a patient beyond immediate treatment. You are encouraged to look at the programs as an opportunity to forge a stronger connection to both the individual as well as the community in which you work.
FRIDAY, DECEMBER 3, 2004.
CHILD AND ADOLESCENT PSYCHIATRY, WEEK ONE.
The Home Helpers program was the brainchild of the medicine department. Third-years would accompany attending physicians on housecalls, a way of ensuring that the most infirm and the most isolated, forgotten by the world, did not forget themselves, their pills, their diet regimens. Soleimani had been the one to integrate the program into the psych department, and it was with him that Jonah set out on foot that morning, accompanied by the social worker handling DeShonna Barnsworth’s case. Yvette Wiltern’s radiant smile underscored the fatigue etched in her fine brown face.
“I’ve been trying to get in touch with the aunt for three days. DeShonna should be getting out of school about now. Although I don’t think she’s been enrolled in years.”
“As in how long?” Jonah asked.
“As in ever.”
They walked north. Block by block the neighborhood degraded, chichi delis mutating into high-fat chain restaurants; dry cleaners becoming pawnshops. Clogged gutters created swamps of melting snow, rafted by six-pack rings. A van coasted by, woofers thumping, fanning water onto the sidewalk. They passed a block lined with nothing but funeral parlors and, turning east toward the river, met a vicious wind. Up rose the dead canvas of the projects.
Yvette said, “I have another client here I was visiting last June—that heat?—when the trash didn’t get collected for two weeks.” They crossed a courtyard and she pulled open the broken lobby door.
After colorectal surgery, Jonah figured that no smell would get to him ever again. He was wrong. Urine, bolstered by snack cheez and decaying phonebook. He felt as though he’d been jammed into the tank of a portajohn, and thought of Erich inspecting wine. This vintage has affinities with poultry and fruit. The smell of DeShonna’s home had affinities with despair and poverty.
A dripping crack in the ceiling nailed him; he gave his head a canine shake.
Soleimani, commenting on the elevator, said, “Slow.”
“It doesn’t ding,” said Yvette. “You have to watch close or else you can be waiting here for a half an hour.”
“We can walk.”
“They’re on the seventeenth floor.”
Ever the optimist, Soleimani said, “I need the workout.”
Jonah wondered aloud about DeShonna’s mother’s funeral.
“I’ll ask the aunt.”
“What’s her name?” Soleimani asked.
“Veronica Hutchins.” Yvette read from a spiral notebook. “DeShonna’s mother’s sister. Three kids of her own, works at a perfume wholesaler on Lex. I leave messages with her boss, but she never calls back.”
“Are we sure someone’s home?”
“We’ll find out soon.”
The elevator came, and they crowded inside a scarred faux-wood box with an even chewier odor.
The hallway to Unit 20N-I was warped and grungy. Welcome mats had seen better decades. Cans of paint were stacked near the electrical closet.
“Home improvement,” Soleimani remarked.
Jonah decided that that could mean anything, including closing one’s eyes.
The theme song of a daytime talk show blared, obscuring the doorbell. “One thing you get on the job is tough knuckles,” Yvette said, pounding.
A doe-eyed girl of about sixteen answered. Leggy, in form-fitting jeans, she wore hairy yellow socks that undulated as she compulsively flexed her toes. Against her hip she held a scrawny, wrinkled five-month-old. Behind her the apartment was dark.
“Yeah?” she said.
“Is Veronica Hutc
hins home?” Yvette asked.
“No.” She shifted the baby to her other side; a tiny hand clawed the air.
“We’re from the Hospital of Upper Manhattan,” said Soleimani. “We’re here to see how DeShonna’s doing.”
The girl pursed her lips. “She ain’t here.”
“May I ask who you are?”
“You may ask it, yeah.”
Yvette smiled. “Are you Veronica’s daughter?”
The baby chirped crankily, and the girl shushed it. “Yeah, so?”
“Did DeShonna go to school today?” Soleimani asked.
The girl shrugged.
“Can you give this to your mom?” Yvette said.
The girl crushed the card into her pocket, where Jonah thought it likely to stay for a long, long time.
“You from Social Services?” said the girl. “Cause we got a problem here.”
She turned and went inside, plainly expecting them to follow. “Look,” she called.
A television provided most of the apartment’s light, bluing the floor, upon which a handful of choking-hazard figurines lay scattered, as though swimming, round the legs of two plastic chairs. In the corner was a pile of disarticulated cushions. Movement flitted through Jonah’s peripheral vision, the darkness itself crawling: roaches.
“Look.” Near the kitchen baseboards, a greenish substance oozed from the floor.
“What is that?” Soleimani said.
The girl looked at him like How the fuck do I know.
“How long has that been there?” Yvette said.
The girl chewed her tongue contemplatively. “Every day some more comes out.”
“Did you talk to your super?”
The girl snorted.
Yvette said, “I’ll call someone from the Housing Authority.”
The girl said, “It’s like alive.” She turned to them. “You think it’s alive?” Then, loudly, she began to cry. Nobody seemed to know what to do; Jonah looked at Soleimani, who looked at Yvette, who took the girl gently by the arm and led her to a back room. A door closed.
Trouble Page 25