Missing Chldren

by Gerald Lynch

  He turned and slowly beamed forth the irradiating smile. He took a few steps and hugged me, his arms wrapping me about the upper arms, his cheek on my chest, his Jew’s harp digging into my belly. I had the most incredible rush of good feeling. In my med-school days I’d sampled a snort of this and that (mostly to stay alert) and this was something like the initial rush, but more like pure light pouring through my veins. I’d come to the prison with raging feelings, ready to blame anybody and everybody for my troubles — Foster, Bob, the Lewises, even Veronica — with the sort of uncontrolled emotions that too easily find violent expression. And suddenly there I was, a sojourner in la-la land. If with benefit of residual Valium, true.

  He stood back, struck a boxer’s pose and bobbed and weaved a bit, dropped his guard and laughed. “Well, that was no chicken’s speech!” Then seriously: “Listen, Lorne, I can’t tell you right now who’s spreading the stories, sowing all the conflict. And I expect there’s more than even I — and certainly you — know about. But this is a personal matter between me and a dear old friend. That’s my problem, and I’ll take care of it. I will tell you some of it, though, because I know it’s become your problem too. Shawn. And poor Art here. Let’s you and me have a long talk after our visits, okay?”

  Foster said from his seat, “Yoo-hoo, down here? Don’t I get told the big secret?”

  Bob laughed, “You will, Art, and I promise my news will have you out of this place later this afternoon. I’ll be right back after my visit with Michael.

  “Michael?” I asked.

  “Him over there,” Bob pointed to the Market Slasher. “Earlier I promised him a longer visit, the poor bugger. Looks like Adonis but dumb-dumb as an ox. He was unpredictable as hell this morning and transferring his anger onto me! We need to work through that shit. Sorry for the psychobabble. You two catch up. Then we’ll call in the police.”

  I extended my hand, no longer surprised that Bob Browne had a relationship with the Market Slasher. “Okay, Bob, but first you and I talk. The detective who’s been investigating this case is supposed to be meeting me here. You’ll like him, I think, if he ever shows up. But I’m sure now that things are going to get better.”

  He walked away more jauntily than he’d arrived. At the containment corner for “special inmates” (there was actually a sign), he was thoroughly patted down. Then on to the Market Slasher, to Michael, whose shoulder Bob cupped before taking a seat. Foster and I watched in a kind of mesmerized silence. The Slasher knocked his hand away.

  But Bob was soon talking boisterously about the recent so-called Fight of the Century. “Yeah, what you said this morning, are you sure Pacquiao didn’t injure his shoulder after the fight hauling all those Yankee dollars to his Manila bank? Or maybe injured it on purpose, for a few million extra from Money Mayweather to set up a rematch? But they fight ten times, Mayweather beats Pacman at least nine? You’re crazy, gimme a —”

  When Michael slammed the table with his fist and got everybody’s attention. He stuck the same fist’s forefinger at Bob: “Fuck that bullshit! You been fuckin’ me all this time. You been fuckin’ little pepper on me!” he roared, his mouth throwing off toxic spittle.

  He flung himself back in the chair and dangled his arms, breathing audibly, a bad body ready to spring into action. The blond boy-man was long gone: the hair appeared less golden and more like dirty straw; his skin seemed to have lost tone as shadows played across his transforming face; his look grew so intense that even from where I sat his eyes appeared to cross.

  Alarmed Bob saw it too, of course. He dialled back the power of his playful argument. He straightened up and slid his ass back on the chair, removing himself by that much from the chemical dump that was the transforming Michael. His feet now dangling off the floor, Bob looked like a child waiting for reprimand or release. But he appeared confused too, even baffled, and I had to strain to hear what he said.

  “Little…Pep… Where did you get that, Michael?”

  The Slasher was now huffing and puffing, straightening from his slouch with his arms slowly rising and seeming to pump up, and with increased spittle beginning to look like actual foaming at the mouth.

  In that charged interval, Bob casually placed his Jew’s harp in his mouth, keeping his own gaze averted, avoiding any mistaken visual challenge to the Market Slasher. For the first time I heard that Jew’s harp as music. Just a single tone to begin, a lone one-note tune unearthed from deepest hurt, from buried sorrow and loss, from pain. If it continued that plaintively it would be too much to bear. So he changed to a twang of hope, picked it up and mixed it with something buzzing high, dropped again but now less forlornly. There really was a music to tame the savage breast, or so I felt and for his sake hoped.

  The Slasher stood and stepped behind Bob’s chair. In one practised motion he wrapped his left arm around the face so that Bob’s chin was held in the crook of the elbow, reached for the Jew’s harp with his right hand, cocked back the head, stabbed the neck and dragged the prong from ear to ear. He dropped Bob, who bounced on his chair and toppled sideways to the floor. The Slasher walked calmly past the stunned guards and through an interior door.

  A slo-mo dawning…then the room went wild, with coffee cups and other small items flung into the air and the visitors instantly coagulating in a rush for the exit as the inmates pushed towards the containment corner to get a look. Foster and I began shouting that we were doctors, but with their big batons the guards pushed me back on top of Art, while those behind kept shoving Art forward into me.

  I grew frenzied as the critical first moments ticked away and Bob’s blood pumped onto the floor like a plum halo. I realized that Foster’s shouting the same thing as I was made it impossible for me to be taken seriously, so I turned and grabbed his collar and flung him into the sickos behind. I was trying to make my case more sensibly and caught a stick broadside on the chest. “I am a doctor!” I managed to scream, flailing at the guards. I heard a hiss off to the left and my eyes stung fiercely.

  My cry was taken up by those around me and screeched effeminately — I am a doctor! I’m a doctor! I’m a doctor! — until the whole room was screaming it. I was alarmed at the amount of blood pooling now around Bob’s whole upper body. I lost it.

  I remember only that the bigger of the guards had me in a chokehold much like the one the Slasher had used on Bob. I may have been Tasered. The room was crackling and flashing and I felt myself losing consciousness… Released just before blacking out, I sat hard on my ass on the polished concrete floor. Noise, muffled, drowned vision, medicinal smell…

  In a clearing daze I looked around. Armoured reinforcements had arrived and all the prisoners, Foster among them, were being shoved out to an alarm like the nasal sound teasing kids make, and through it all a calming female voice over the PA: Lock down, return to cells immediately, lock down, return to cells immediately, lock down…

  I got to my feet and, gulping air, coughed out my plea to go to Bob. Freed up, the two guards finally checked my identification and, without apology, let me go.

  I knelt down in the pool of tepid blood and turned Bob over. I let him lie against me sideways, I held him. He might have survived the shallowly cut throat, but the harp’s trigger had torn both carotid arteries. Knowing that no pressure anywhere could do any good, I fought my doctor’s reflexes and simply smiled into his shocked face.

  “Bob, relax, you’re dying, that’s all, but quickly.”

  His face eased and he smiled small at the memory. Whispered, “Some joke, Thorpe.”

  “What heals can hurt …”

  He weakly touched the harp on its intact cowhide necklace, spluttered blood.

  “Bob, I’m sorry but you have to tell me now. Who told you I was making fun of you?”

  I could feel the life ebbing with the pulse’s slowing thump…thump pump of blood from his neck. He was rasping, cheyne-stoking. Yet he managed hoarsely:r />
  “I’m the one who’s sorry, Lorne. I should have faced it long before now. Before he cut me, Michael growled, ‘She loves me, you sawed-off runt. That’s what she called you.’ She learned how to make men love her a long time ago, as a child, the poor thing. Life could be lived only as a lie. I still love her. Will you tell her that for me, Lorne?”

  A sharp intake of breath, his eyes stared, then an emptying exhalation and I was sure he was dead.

  I let him slump away from me, grabbed a fistful of his orange hair and yanked: “Who, Bob? Who?”

  He tried to grip my wrist but was without strength, his fingers trailed off and splashed down. “She wants…save children…lil…pep …”

  There is nothing more dead than a human body at the moment of death. Life is radically an on-off condition. I began to feel Bob’s draining life drain my own body, as I did whenever a child died on me. Bob’s body was only about the size of a…child’s…

  That’s right! Little Marnee’s heart had given out in the night! I had work to do!… True, I was a bit sticky with Bob’s blood, but I could change at the hospital.

  Unchallenged by the guards even though my pants, especially from the knees down, were sopping with blood, I walked out of that place. Still in red bow tie and canary-yellow suspenders, only A-Channel videographer Donny Kynder had hung around through lunch, but I was past his lulled self before he roused and recognized me. “Dr. Thorpe,” he called after, “given that Dr. Foster was apprehended in your car, do you not admit to any culpability…in …”

  Speeding off in Veronica’s little Golf I popped a friendly Val.

  I couldn’t face my underground spot, so parked at emergency and put my sign on the dashboard. The doctors’ dressing room was empty. I cannot fathom why we doctors are required to change in a sub-basement room with clanging metal lockers and a green-painted cement floor like a… Hey! The CHEO Team suits up!

  Otto Fyshe, our mascot, came in before I could escape.

  “Lorne, how are… Lose something?”

  “Otto, would you say that down here we’re on a level with our parking spots?”

  “Perhaps, maybe a bit above. What are you doing down there?”

  “Look at this.”

  “How’s Veronica? Is that blood? But you’re not on the emergency-surgery roster?”

  I traced the crack for Otto, from the floor drain to where it disappeared behind the lockers, and looked up at him. But the man really is thick as a brick. I stood, thinking how gratifying it would be to punch him right in the face. I would. But then I remembered one useful thing about Otto: he’s a sucker for flattery.

  As I shucked off my weighted clothes: “Otto, you’re a better pediatrician than any two men half your age. Please don’t ever retire. We couldn’t run this place without you!”

  He smiled warily and nodded as I pulled on the green surgery scrubs and took the lab coat from my locker.

  “Would you do me a biggie, Dr. Fyshe, and look after the paperwork to close Marnee’s file? She’s Dr. Foster’s patient and he’s, uh, indisposed for the foreseeable.”

  “No problem, Lorne. I heard. Is that what’s eating you? Hey, here,” he barked after me, “take my hanky! There’s no call for …”

  From a corner of the ceiling I watched myself risk a first-ever Tamara with Tamara: “Sistah, you be da bestest bee-otch at da stee-otch fac-a-tory.”

  She didn’t get it. Let’s face it: I was having an abominably bad day with jokes. I’d bombed with Foster, with Bob, and now with Tamara. This latest bomb jolted me right out of my senses. I didn’t know who I was or who was watching whom. I thought of Dad… that bastard!

  “Dr. Thorpe?” Tamara said. “I will ignore …” Then whispered, “Wait, I’ll call you a cab.”

  “No! Call me Jekyll! Or Heckle! You’ve always thought me some sort of racist albino crow anyway, haven’t you? Well, haven’t you? Just who do you think you’re talking to?”

  She stepped back from her high counter: “I honestly don’t know …”

  I knew it!

  She held a phone at the ready: “Is Veronica home?”

  Per usual, I wasn’t da go-to man o’ da house. I had to go up on tiptoe and lean way across to pinch her glowing ebony chin in thumb and forefinger: “Not when where what who and Wy, my Nubian princess. Don’t be dumb-dumb. Who am I?”

  She materialized a fistful of Kleenex and kept one for herself. I blew my nose and simply tossed the mess on the floor. Like it mattered in this waiting room for hell’s toilet! The stink of death and cleanser! Have I mentioned those?

  Suddenly everybody’s treating me like shit. Wazzup wid dat? Me…Dr. Lorne Thorpe! There. It had just been the momentary post-traumatic stress disorder of always having to be such an uptight prick and saviour of children, not even allowed a joke! You just try that for a lifetime! I needed some time to be alone with me, some “me time,” as the good Dr. Phil regularly prescribes. But where?… I remembered the scene of my most recent triumph over Foster in the case of the arsenic-poisoned girl (it could be a Conan Doyle story title!), the Catholic privacy room — perfect! And beat a hasty.

  I stood before the mural of Christ sitting beside the tree on that big solid rock cupping his holier-than-thou ass like a Flintstone easy chair, his arm loosely around a boy’s waist. (Welcome touching, we can assume? Productive only of Yes feelings?) He was not preaching or exposing the thorny organ of his bleeding heart, thank the gods, or thank his dad, just smiling away at the little girl still proffering the lily …

  Ah-ha! I was right! A shadowy fold in a petal of the white calla lily aligned perfectly with a fold of Jesus’ white-ish robe, which crack I followed upwards, which just missed Jesus’ ear before disappearing into the ceiling. There was a crack in the wall. I hadn’t been imagining it. It came from behind the couch, and not a hairline crack either but an expanding fissure! The trajectory pointed perfectly to my parking spot way down there.

  Note to self: We are spending scarce funds on emergency generators because of power failures brought on by overuse of air conditioning brought on by global warming brought on by the scientific revolution of the Enlightenment that makes my medical miracles and the Krazy Kitchen possible and here the whole hospital is falling down around our ears!

  Bring it!

  I bolted for the Golf.

  Chapter 16

  Veronica had gone next door permanently, moving in with­ that glorified, oh-so-respectful grease monkey, Jack Kilborn! It was inconceivable! My wife of twenty years shacking up with the worst neighbour in the whole neighbourhood!

  Jack wouldn’t let me in the door. I reasonably said, “Jack, I need to talk with my wife. Everybody’s been asking after her, per usual. I don’t even know where Shawn is. Is she in there too, Jack? Or has she been spirited off by aliens? I need to talk with my wife and daughter, Jack. Don’t make me force the issue or your door!” (Good one.)

  The sun was shining down brightly, well past the meridian by then. Jays were laughing in the big blue spruces that surrounded us and crows were mocking me from the peaks of my neighbours’ roofs. Over Jack’s shoulder I caught sight of Veronica fluttering about his kitchen, preparing lunch for his retarded son!… But I must have hallucinated that. The Veronica I knew would be off somewhere crying. Regardless, my wife should be crying only in my house.

  The wiry Jack stepped outside and squared up to me as if better to block my way. “Lorne, I don’t own Trixie and you don’t own Veronica.” That got no reaction but my wincing at the stink of booze off him. “Where exactly have you been living for the past fifty years, Thorpe?”

  “What the fuck does that mean exactly, Jack? Just because Trixie left you doesn’t give you the right to covet thy neighbour’s wife and family. Where the fuck have you been living for the past four thousand years, you ape!”

  I moved to step around him, but he shifted to his right an
d blocked me. I stepped back and gave him my best appraising look. I smirked at his thin, pasted hair, greasy from spending so much time under cars. He fixed me with his squinty Jack look, like he was examining me with a mechanic’s lamp.

  “Lorne, have you been in an accident or something?”

  “Oh, you are so fucking sensitive, Jack. Well, fuck you! Fuck Trixie, and fuck that fucking wife of mine! Do you hear me in there?”

  I half-turned, as if leaving, then rushed him. In a blink he took my left wrist, turned me around, bent the arm up my back and tossed me off his stoop.

  “Don’t try that again, Lorne. For your own safety. I’m a third-degree black belt in Muay Thai. I’ll kick the shit out of you.”

  Try what? What had happened? My left arm was raging at the shoulder. I could hardly prop myself on my knees. I shuffled round on all fours to face him or, rather, to look up at him. What could I do again? Ram him in the knees with my head? Had that been a fight? I’d been manhandled. His front door shut softly behind him.

  Up there with the crows, I watched myself get up, dust myself off, turn and haul my pitiful carcass to my garage. I was looking down at a silly little man in a doll’s house. For some reason of un-reason, the sorry fellow was still wearing his doctor’s costume. With the sort of smile that defines dissociation, I fondled his stethoscope. Or mine. At least I was back in my body.

  I heard the noise of an aluminum door opening. My heart leapt — Veronica, Shawn and Owen come to hug me! Surprise! You’re on America’s Funniest Fuck-ups!