Jessica Z

by Shawn Klomparens

  “It’s okay, Gert. Let go. Let me see it.”

  He takes his left hand away and for a moment I see a deep smile of open red flesh where he’s cut through the webbing between his thumb and palm. Then I put the towel over it and press it tight, and a spot spreads red through the cloth in my hands.

  “Keep your fingers straight. Keep your thumb in close.” I wrap the towel around as tight as I can. Gert seems almost unnaturally calm. He could be in shock, but I have a feeling he’s just tough.

  “I think I’m gonna need some sutures,” he says.

  “Do you know anyone with a car?”

  Just then Josh walks in, carrying a cardboard drink holder with three paper coffee cups in it. “Hey,” he says, and then he sees the blood on our hands and on the floor and his knees crumple and his face goes very pale. “Whoa,” he says, steadying himself on the corner of the table. “Whoa.”

  “Just sit down, Doc. Sit in that chair. You don’t have to look over here.”

  “Okay,” Josh says, and he sits and shakes his head. “Okay. Okay. That was just, I wasn’t expecting that.” He’s facing away from us. “What…what happened?”

  “I broke a glass and cut myself.”

  “Oh. Are you alright?”

  “It’s pretty deep. I think I need to go to the emergency room.”

  “Okay. Give me a second. Okay.” Josh stands up. He still doesn’t turn toward us. “I can get Hoffman’s car.” His color is back, but he’s not looking at us or at the blood.

  “I can drive, Josh,” I say.

  “No, no, it’s alright, Hoffman, he can be weird about his car. There’s only room for two. Come on.”

  “Hold on a second,” I say, and I get a roll of reinforced packing tape from the drawer next to the fridge.

  “I’ll get the keys. Meet me at the north lot.”

  “Can you make it to the north lot?” I’m wrapping Gert’s hand and the towel around and around with tape. He looks like he has a big pink club at the end of his arm.

  “I’m fine. That’s kind of tight, Jess. Nurse Jess.”

  “Yeah right,” I say. “Let’s go down.” I walk with him to the door, tracking bloody footprints across the floor of the studio. “You’re going to be okay? I need to clean this up.”

  “I’m okay. You don’t clean all this. Call maintenance, 2212 on the phone. They have the stuff to clean the blood. And I think they got to report it.”

  “Alright. I’m sorry, Gert.”

  “No, no, my fault. Thank you. You’re great.” He walks off down the hall, his raised right arm the only clue that something’s wrong with him.

  I dial 2212 and explain what happened, and it’s a few minutes before a shuffling custodial type wearing surgical gloves and a plastic face shield comes in with his big cleanup cart and starts to sprinkle some sort of powder on the floor. I go into the bathroom and sit on the edge of the tub to rinse off my feet. A voice calls, “Hello? Hello?” and I dry myself off and go back out. There’s a professionally dressed woman in the doorway, about my age, with a clipboard.

  “Is this where the incident happened?” she asks, and I nod. “How did you injure yourself?”

  “It wasn’t me. It was Dr. Hadden’s assistant.”

  “Can I speak with him?”

  “They went to the hospital.”

  The woman looks seriously annoyed. “You should have called us before anyone got medical care.”

  I’m about to ask the woman if she’s joking, but she turns around and leaves the room before I have the chance.

  “I am so damn tired of that woman’s attitude,” the janitor says. And just as he looks back down to his mop and the powdery, foaming mess on the floor, two men come in the door. They look polished, in coats but no ties, and they seem familiar in an unsettling way. They stare at me, both of them, and then, almost in unison, they look to the floor, and back at me again. It’s another moment before one of them opens his mouth.

  “Where’s Dr. Hadden?” the one on the left asks. He’s wearing square-toed shoes, and it sounds like he has a faint accent that I can’t quite place.

  “He took his assistant to the hospital.”

  “The hospital?” he asks. The other one stays quiet. “Was there an accident?”

  “His assistant cut his hand.” Now the janitor is watching the exchange.

  “Which hospital?”

  “I have no idea,” I say. “The closest one?”

  They look at each other, and the one on the right says something I don’t hear. Then they turn away, quickly, and their footsteps snap snap snap off down the hallway. The janitor looks at me.

  “Do they work here?” I ask him.

  “Never seen those men before.”

  “Weird,” I say. I hear my phone buzzing—I usually put it on vibrate for the studio—inside my bag, and when I pull it out and flip it open I see Gretchen’s name on the display.

  “What’s up?” I say.

  “Where are you? Are you watching the news? They stopped another one in Denver.”

  “Wait, they stopped a bombing? Another one? Isn’t that, like, the third time?”

  “The third, yes, find a TV.”

  I go down the hall, with Gretchen in my ear; I stick my head in Hoffman’s always-open studio door. Everything Josh is, Hoffman is not. There’s loud music from a paint-smeared boom box, and a flat screen television is on at the same time; the news channel he has on shows a circling aerial shot of maybe a hundred police cars around a van. The headline says, “THIRD DENVER BOMB PLOT DISRUPTED,” and in the ticker across the bottom I read, “What Is Denver Doing Right?”

  “What is Denver doing right?” I say.

  “Good question,” Gretchen says. “Hot cops? I got pulled over once in—”

  “Stop it,” I say.

  Hoffman (I’ve never heard his first name; maybe that is his first name) is a sculptor, and he’s working—paying no attention to the news or to me standing in his door, apparently—with a giant pile of clay on one of his tables. There are newspapers and articles of clothing on the floor of his studio, and across in his kitchenette I see piles of dirty dishes and carryout containers. There are muddy gray streaks up to his elbows and on his face and beard, and his hair rises up from his head in a Unabomber-style coif.

  There is also a cell phone clipped to his belt.

  “Aren’t you being scanned?” Gretchen asks.

  “Josh’s helper—”

  “The tall guy?”

  “Yes, he hurt himself, we’re on hold this morning.”

  “So Gert cut himself?” Hoffman finally growls.

  “Yes,” I say, holding the phone away from my mouth while I speak to him. I raise my other hand and wag my thumb to try to illustrate the location of the cut, but Hoffman doesn’t look up from his work.

  “Bad?” he asks.

  “It’s pretty bad. He was washing a water glass, and it broke in his hand.”

  “Who are you talking to?” Gretchen asks.

  “The dumbass,” Hoffman says, shaking his head.

  I step away from the door and head back to Josh’s studio with the phone back to my mouth.

  “Sorry,” I say. “That was one of the artists here.”

  “No problem. How’s the copy going?”

  “Done, actually. I just need to type it up. Which I think I can do now, if Josh hasn’t changed the password on his laptop.”

  “What?”

  “He’s weird about me using his computer.”

  “Ohh, yeah. Secrets.”

  “I don’t care about his secrets, though.” I’m back in the studio, and the janitor is gone. The place smells vaguely of bleach.

  “Come on, you’re a snoop. I’m a snoop.”

  “Seriously, I don’t care. He only goes to Latin American Web sites, I think. All of his browser history is in Spanish.”

  “Ha! You’ve looked!”

  “Well, yeah, I mean, you can’t avoid it, really.”

  “Snoop. Ma
il me the copy.”

  “Okay.”

  Josh, I’m happy to learn, has not changed his password from “emmy0782.” I set myself up at his desk with one of the now-lukewarm cups of coffee and spend the next half hour transcribing my handwritten text filled with word pairs like:

  Spacious kitchens.

  Private suites.

  Luxury accommodations.

  And my favorite overused combination:

  Romantic getaway.

  I mail the copy off to Gretchen, and since she’s online almost all the time, I leave the computer on to wait for a reply. Josh’s leather planner is on the desk, and peeking out of it is the dark blue corner of what looks like a passport. I slide it out of the planner—I can’t help myself, really—and open it up and laugh out loud when I see the photo. It’s Joshua Alan Hadden for sure, birthplace Columbus, Ohio, USA, but he looks younger in the picture and I’m astounded by the fact that he has long, straight hair hanging down over his shoulders. Every page is stamped too; places in South America, Asia, and nearly every country in the EU seem to be represented here. Additional pages had even been pasted in to accommodate more stamps.

  This lithography thing must have worldwide appeal.

  I know I should put the passport back, but I keep going back to stare at that long-haired photo. When I do finally put it away, though, I see there’s a new mail from Gretchen that simply says, “Looks great.”

  Maybe this brevity is why she’s so good at what she does?

  I know Katie is in class right now, so I can’t call her. I’d send her an instant message, but there’s no client on this computer, and I don’t want to aggravate Josh by trying to install one. So I shut down and fold up the laptop and set it back in its approximate original location with the thought that maybe he won’t even notice I had used it. And this is good, because it isn’t long before I hear Josh’s voice down the hall.

  “Hey,” he says when he finally makes it into the studio. He picks up one of the cold paper cups of coffee and takes a sip before throwing it and the others into the trash can.

  “How’s Gert?”

  “Gert’s fine, he’s home, resting. They gave him a shot for the pain, so I suspect he’s fast asleep.”

  “And the hand?”

  “The hand is not so good. He got the tendon in there. Needs surgery.”

  “Oh no.”

  “He’s fine. Did you use the laptop?”

  “Um. Well. I had to write some stuff for work.”

  “You should get your own computer.”

  “I have my own computer. In my home. Where I rarely am anymore.”

  “A laptop would solve that problem.”

  “You’re right. And one did. Yours.”

  Josh looks at me, and then goes into the bathroom. He leaves the door open and the rushing sound of him peeing is like ruptured plumbing. I guess he’s vigorous in that too.

  “Are we scanning today?” I call over the noise of him washing his hands.

  “I think scanning is off for the day.”

  “Then let’s do something.”

  “Like?”

  “Like something other than sitting around here. Can we use Hoffman’s car? We could drive up to Marin. You could sketch wildflowers or something, and we could have lunch. We could be like a real boyfriend and girlfriend, and we could have a picnic.”

  Josh smirks at this, but he looks interested.

  “See if we can take Hoffman’s car,” I say.

  “I’m sure we can take Hoffman’s car.”

  “Are you saying you want to go?”

  He still has that stupid smirk on his face.

  Hoffman’s car, to my complete surprise, is an older—but immaculate—Porsche convertible. It’s a gorgeous day, cool but sunny, and we have the top down and Josh is driving maybe a little too fast. I’ve never been the sort of person to be impressed by cars, but strangely, I’m thrilled by this combination of things.

  When we started out, I considered directing us to Mario’s for sandwiches to take on our picnic adventure, but that was my secret with Patrick and seems not right for the occasion. So I opt for Plan B, the Brent Deli, which has no chicken salad but is less out of the way (and, incidentally, connected to a wine store).

  “Did you hear about the thing in Denver?” I ask as we drive through the city.

  Josh shakes his head. “Really, how hard should it be to blow something up? You have to be a pretty big idiot to mess up something like that.”

  “What are you talking about? You wanted him to blow up?”

  “I’m not saying that. I’m simply commenting on the guy’s incompetence.”

  “You’re so odd, Josh.”

  “I’m not odd. I just look at all the angles.”

  We’re coming up to the Golden Gate, zipping through traffic; Josh is shifting and accelerating and we’re talking and acting like a couple, almost. I think I’ve only ever acted at this. Is being a couple really just acting?

  We halt for a moment at the bridge inspection station for the uniformed kid to look under the car with his mirror on a long stick, but the soldier behind him shakes his head at the traffic behind us and waves us forward and says, “Let’s go let’s go let’s go!”

  Josh puts the car into gear and we move on, and the tires sound different driving on the bridge. This is only the third time I’ve been over it since I’ve lived here.

  “It’s old,” I say.

  “What’s that?”

  “The bridge. It’s old. But big. Isn’t it the biggest?”

  Josh looks over at me. “Biggest bridge? Like biggest suspension bridge? No, it’s not. The biggest is in Michigan.” He says this in the same authoritative voice he uses for all trivial facts.

  “Michigan? For real?”

  “It’s the Mackinac Bridge. Connects the Lower to the Upper Peninsula.”

  “You’re not kidding? It’s not like the Brooklyn Bridge or anything?”

  “I’m serious. Mackinac. We used to drive over it every summer. My dad and uncles had a cottage in the Upper Peninsula. Off in the woods. Right on the lake. We spent a lot of time up there. Tons of time. Every summer.”

  “That sounds fun.”

  “God, it was fun. Us, my cousins.” He laughs. “You know, me and Emily…” I wait for him to go on, but the mention of his sister has pulled him back from wherever he was. We’re off the bridge now.

  “You and Emily what?”

  “Ah, we were kids. Summertime.”

  “Does your family still have it?”

  “The cottage? No, my uncle Charles got sick, he died, and my dad and other uncles, they thought it was time to sell it. All the kids were big anyway, nobody was going up there much anymore. It was really hard on them when Charlie died. Really hard on my dad. Charlie was the oldest.”

  We drive for a while, headed west, and the water, bright with the midday sun, shimmers far down to our left. “Is your dad retired?” I finally ask. I think this may be the most personal information I’ve coaxed out of Josh at one time.

  “Nope, no, he still works.” The road is twisty now, and we pass a sign saying we’re in a state park. “He’s a pilot for Delta.”

  “No way. Like, ‘this is the captain speaking’ pilot?”

  “Yes, like that, but he isn’t a captain. First officer. Like the copilot. He could have moved over to captain a long time ago, but he didn’t want to give up his seniority. In the airlines, that’s everything.”

  “That’s so cool.” We’re parking in an empty gravel pullout.

  “Yeah. I guess it is. We got to travel all sorts of places when I was a kid too. The company was good that way.”

  “I bet he has good stories,” I say, pulling my bag and the white paper sack with our lunch from behind my seat. Josh laughs at this.

  “Maybe too many stories,” he says. “I’ve heard them all. Usually more than once.”

  We’re up on a windy bluff looking out over the Golden Gate Bridge and the city beyond th
at. A small plane is flying over the city, towing a banner that we can’t read.

  “What is this thing?” I ask. We’ve walked out onto a big concrete platform, like a round, graffiti-covered patio.

  “It’s a gun turret,” Josh says. He waves his arm out over the view of the water. “If the invasion was going to come, you know, this was where it was going to be. So they’d shoot the ships from up here. Blow them out of the water.”

  I walk around the circle, around Josh. “That’s a big gun,” I say, and sit down cross-legged to look out at the ocean. The concrete is warm and the sun is perfect, so I pull off my jacket and tie it around my waist.

  “Very big.”

  “Why isn’t it still here?”

  “Obsolete. Who’s going to invade by boat?” He sits down behind me and starts to rub my neck. “When it was the Soviets, it was going to be missiles or something like that. And now, now, you know, what’s this big gun going to do to a guy in Denver?”

  Josh has entered rhetorical mode, so I keep my mouth shut.

  “What’s a big gun like this going to do to a guy on a bus with a backpack?” he goes on. “We don’t even know who the guy is. He could be over there. Up there. He could be right behind you. Right behind you. Who knows? So melt the guns down. Make nickels out of them or something.”

  “Pocket change,” I say, but he doesn’t hear me. Rather, he hears me, but he’s not listening.

  “Things didn’t need to get this way. Things could have been different. Goddamn Washington.” Now I really brace myself, but he leaves it at that.

  I take the opportunity to get the sandwiches out, along with a bottle of wine I grabbed at the deli’s package store.

  “You are hopeless,” Josh says as he slides around to my side and grabs the bottle from in front of me. He’s smiling, though, as he reads over the label. “Do you just travel with this wherever you go? It’s cold, even. Do you have ice in that bag? I want to know what else is in there.”

  “Bag of secrets,” I say. “You probably looked in there already. Maybe when I was in the shower.”

  “I take offense to that remark. I am offended.”

  “Come on.”