Flights of Angels

by Ellen Gilchrist

  She took a deep breath. “This is so boring and embarrassing to talk about. I can’t believe I have to tell this story again. I’ve told this story to three doctors: an internist, a proctologist, and a general practitioner. No one is helping me. The general practitioner sent me to you all. He said he thought the best place to go was Phyladda.” She sat down and folded her hands. Jodie pulled up a chair and listened even harder. “My father died in the fall,” she said. “I think this all began when that happened. He died of congestive heart failure. I watched him dying. His intestines shut down. So mine shut down too. I know that sounds stupid but I think that’s what happened.” She began to cry. Jodie reached over and put his hand on Mrs. Gaithwright’s knee. They were not supposed to touch the patients but sometimes he did it anyway when he thought they needed touching.

  “I live alone,” she went on. “That’s the problem too. I should get someone to live with me. I have a big house. It’s stupid to live alone in a house with seven bedrooms.”

  “I want you to start eating oatmeal every morning,” Jodie began. “With lots of sugar and butter or cream. I want you to drink a lot of the most expensive bottled water you can buy. Aside from that I want you to spend three days eating exactly what you want, what looks good to you, what tastes good. Then come back on Thursday and we’ll do some tests. You’re going to be fine, Mrs. Gaithwright. You don’t have any serious problems. This is not serious or life-threatening. This is going to be just fine.”

  “It is? You really think so?”

  “I can tell. I’m a diagnostician. I can smell cancer a mile away. I would know if you needed anything other than what I am prescribing. There is one more thing, however.”

  “What is that?”

  “I want you to have a massage, tomorrow or the next day. Before you return on Thursday. Here is a list of people we recommend. Maurice might be nice for you. He’s very gentle. Call him first, then Margaret, but any of them will do. Will you do this? Will you promise to get this done?”

  “Whatever you recommend. I’m desperate. I can’t live my life thinking about my bowel habits.”

  “I quite agree. Couldn’t agree more.” Jodie was sliding into his British accent, something he was always on guard against. It helped to dismiss the patient, however, and so he sometimes slipped into it against his own wishes.

  Mrs. Gaithwright gathered up her things and went back into the reception room to pay her bill. She felt better, lighter, she had bestowed her anxiety on Jodie and was ready to head out for a brighter day.

  “What’s wrong?” Jodie asked. It was his second patient of the day, a Mrs. Bailey. She seemed bright and intelligent. She was wearing flowered harem pants and a hot pink shirt. She had on silver thong sandals and jewelry to match, several extremely large diamond rings, and long pink fingernails to match the shirt. She’s trying, Jodie thought. It’s always a good sign when you can tell they’re really trying.

  “I don’t know where to begin,” she said. “My husband left me. Went off God knows where. I have enough money, I guess, and I have a new job, but I keep thinking I’m hurting myself. If the slightest bit of hot water gets on my hands I think I’ve scalded myself. I think every freckle is a skin cancer. I guess I ought to quit reading magazines. I think I get these ideas from magazines. I read a lot of them. I’m the receptionist at the arts council building. You know, the museum by the post office. It’s slow work this time of year. Maybe I’m just bored. I might be bored. You remember last year when we had the earthquake. The whole time that was going on I didn’t think I hurt myself. I keep thinking about that. So do you think I’m losing my mind? Maybe I’m getting forgetful. Like why did I forget I had the hot water on when I stuck my hand under it this morning?” She held out a beautifully manicured hand.

  “What did you do when it happened?”

  “I held it under cold water for twenty minutes. Then I put aloe vera cream on it. It’s a good thing Wimbledon is on. It gave me something to do while I waited to see if it was scalded. I used to play tennis all the time. I love Wimbledon but I never watch television in the morning. Never. I’m embarrassed to watch it at night as much as I do. Anyway, how does it look?”

  “It looks perfect. You did the right thing. It isn’t harmed.” He took the hand. He stroked it. “I think you’re having separation problems from your husband. I think you’re distracted. There’s nothing wrong with your brain. You sound very intelligent to me.”

  “So what do you think I should do? I mean, I’m really going to hurt myself if it keeps up this way. I ran into the back of a pickup truck the other day. It was lucky I was wearing my seat belt.”

  “Maybe you should stop wearing it. No, I’m joking. I want you to do something for me. I want you to take this list I’m going to give you and get a massage. I want you to get back in touch with your body. You’re anxious about your body. It happens after a divorce.”

  “That’s a good idea.” She sat up straighter, looked him in the eye. “I love massages. Sure, I’ll do that. You think that’s going to help?” She crossed her legs, pulled in her stomach, started giggling. “I heard this was a good place to go,” she said. “I heard this was the best doctor’s office in town.”

  Jodie went into the attendants’ lounge and got a Coca-Cola out of the refrigerator and drank it. Then he ate the biscuit he had picked up at Hardee’s on his way to work. He had picked up three biscuits. Two for the ride to work and one for his ten o’clock break. Jodie was very methodical. He had become methodical to the tenth power since he gave up sex. He spread jelly on the biscuit, ate it, then went into the lavatory and brushed his teeth. He straightened his tie. He went back to work. He worked a long hard day and while he worked he kept thinking about his mother. Mrs. Bailey’s harem pants had reminded him of her and the crazy clothes she used to make herself on her sewing machine. Harem pants and dresses with peplums and long full skirts with rickrack around the hems. I guess I was embarrassed by her enthusiasm, he decided. That was pitiful of me. I think I’ll send her some flowers for a surprise.

  That night he called to see how she was doing. “I’m okay,” she said. “I’d be better if you’d come to see me. I’ll pay for your airline ticket. I saw on television they were having a sale this week.”

  “I have frequent flyer points. You don’t need to buy it. I’ve been meaning to come see you, Momma. It’s just been so busy.”

  “I’m glad you’re working in a hospital. I wish your father was alive to know. He’d be so proud.” She was silent then and Jodie picked up the gambit and gave in.

  “I’ll come this weekend,” he promised. “I’ll come Friday and stay till Sunday.” When he got off the phone he called the airline and used his last twenty thousand miles to purchase a ticket to Carbondale, which is the nearest airport to Harrisburg, Illinois.

  His mother met him at the airport and drove him to his home. She drove and he concentrated on rolling his larger personality into a ball and storing it in a corner of his mind. He was her child and she did not want him to be gay or in any kind of danger. So he told her lies.

  “I’ll get a raise soon,” he told her. “I’m going out with a nice nurse at work. I’m thinking about taking some biology classes in my spare time. I think I’ll get a part in a movie pretty soon. If I do, I don’t know what I’ll do about Phyladda. The woman who started Phyladda has been nominated for a Nobel Prize in medicine. She probably won’t win but you never can tell.”

  “You’ll have to make a choice,” his mother said. “I hope you choose to stay in medicine. You can’t depend on movie people. I read all about them in People magazine. They end up having bad lives. And all those women look terrible. They’re way too thin.”

  “I know.” They had come to the house where he was born. It stood on its lot like a perfect living symbol of the Midwest. Every tree was trimmed, every leaf was raked, the striped awnings on the side windows had been cleaned for his arrival, inside would be a roast beef and a casserole of macaroni and cheese, t
he television would be on to CNN.

  “I have some bad news,” he lied as they got out of the car. “I have to leave tomorrow night instead of Sunday. They asked me to do extra work this weekend. There’s been a flu epidemic. We’re so understaffed.”

  “Oh, God, I hope you had a flu shot.”

  “We have everything. I could go to the tropics with my inoculations.”

  After dinner the long evening began. I can take a sleeping pill at ten, Jodie told himself. Or I can just go to bed and listen to my self-hypnosis tape. Tomorrow I’ll catch the five o’clock flight back to L.A. It’s less than twenty-four hours. I can take it.

  His mother did the dishes and turned on the television set and Jodie wandered around the house looking for something to read. In a bedroom he found a shelf of books that had been in his paternal grandmother’s house. His grandmother had been a high school English teacher and had belonged to book clubs. There, on the highest shelf, he found what later he would always believe had been the true reason for him going to visit his mother, two old books: Magnificent Obsession, by Lloyd C. Douglas. Beside it, Doctor Hudson’s Secret Journal.

  He pulled the books down from the shelf and went into the living room where his mother was watching a program called The Coming Plagues. He sat beside her reading. She turned the volume down low and watched rapt as victims died in jungle hospitals of dengue fever and Ebola and hemorrhagic fever and penicillin-resistant tuberculosis.

  “Watching that stuff can make you sick,” Jodie said at last. “Why don’t you watch a movie instead?”

  “I have to know what’s going on,” she answered. “There’s no one to take care of me now that your father’s gone.”

  “I think I’ll go on to bed,” he said. “I found these old books of Grandmother’s.” He held them out. “I loved these books when I was young. Could I take them home?”

  “Of course. She’d want you to have them. What are they? Oh, those old books about the doctor who got rich doing good deeds.”

  “Secret deeds. He had to keep everything secret to get power from goodness. I used to try it when I was in junior high. I’d be nice to somebody no one liked or something like that and wait and see if I’d get a reward. Then, finally, I tried it with giving away money and something funny happened. Well, I can’t talk about that. But I got my reward.”

  “Like what? What did you do? What did you get for it?”

  “That’s the thing. You can’t tell even years later. If you tell, the power gets taken back.”

  “Well, that’s pretty crazy. You can’t tell something that happened in junior high? I don’t remember anything special happening to you in junior high.”

  “That’s because you were sick that year. Don’t you remember? And you had to go to St. Louis to the hospital.”

  “Oh, well, I don’t want to remember all of that. I put that out of my mind. I got well, that’s the main thing. And I haven’t had any trouble with that since.”

  “That’s right. You got well.” Jodie stood up and leaned over and kissed her on the forehead. He ran his hand across her thin shoulders and left it for a moment on her shoulder bone. Then he straightened up. “I’m going on to bed then, Momma. Call me if you need me.”

  She watched him leave the room. She was not fooled by the story about the nurse but she did sometimes think he couldn’t really be gay. Maybe he was just gay in his head and didn’t do anything about it. She turned up the volume on the television set. She gave her full attention to a ward full of patients dying of yellow fever in a hospital in Zaire.

  Jodie got into bed and opened Magnificent Obsession and read until two in the morning. He was a fast reader and it was a short book. He was near the end when he turned to the last page and read it as he fell asleep.

  On the plane home he read Doctor Hudson’s Secret Journal. He had only hazy memories of the month his mother was in the hospital in St. Louis. But he knew he had taken sixty dollars out of his savings account and given it to a family of kids who needed clothes for school. He had skipped school one day and gone to the mother and given her the envelope with the money. Then he had sworn her to secrecy and told her to give the money to another needy person when she was back on her feet.

  A week later his mother had come home cured. It had scared him to death. He told his father he threw the money away shooting craps in the schoolyard. He took the mild tongue-lashing he received and even sort of enjoyed it. His father was a mild man who never punished him physically and was secretly proud that Jodie had finally done something manly and bad.

  Then Jodie put the whole thing out of his mind. If there had been some magic power, he didn’t want to have anything else to do with it. It was too strange. Too far away from everything Harrisburg, Illinois, stood for. It was enough to have to hide his growing fascination with handsome men. He sure didn’t want black magic added to his burden of secrecy.

  He still felt funny about the books. When he got back to his borrowed apartment he put them on a high shelf in the unused guest room. He had given a twenty-dollar bill to a beggar at the newsstand where he stopped to buy a paper on his way home. That was enough of that craziness.

  The next day he was glad to be back at work. He came in early and scrubbed up and put on his white coat and went to work.

  His first patient was a woman who couldn’t go to the mall because she was afraid she’d catch something from the recycled air. “I already can’t go for walks because of Lyme disease,” she said. “I don’t step on anything green.”

  “Your shoes would protect you,” Jodie suggested.

  “They can climb up socks,” she said. “Those little things get on the soles and move on up.”

  “I am going to send you to a psychiatrist,” Jodie said. “I really think this is something you need to work out with an expert.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with my mind,” she said. “I just want to know what kind of gloves to wear and if there is a mask I can get that really filters out the germs.”

  It took Jodie thirty minutes to persuade the woman to make an appointment with the man whose name he gave her. After she left he became depressed thinking that she would not really go. “I don’t like to be in doctors’ offices,” she said. “Too many germs. Too many people who are sick.”

  WASTE OF TIME, Jodie wrote on the bottom of the chart and decided it proved that giving twenty dollars to a beggar hadn’t catapulted him back into Doctor Hudson’s magic.

  His next patient was named Suellen Smithe. She had a blood pressure problem. When she was at the health club working out, her blood pressure was ninety over seventy. When she was in a doctor’s office it was one hundred and thirty over a hundred and ten. If a nurse would be patient and take the pressure over and over again it would finally drop into a normal range. Almost no nurses had the time or patience to do this, however, so Suellen had stopped going to doctors. It was too big a hassle to worry all week about whether she could control her blood pressure in a doctor’s office. She treated her illnesses herself by going to the bookstore and reading all the two-hundred-dollar medical books on the shelves. Which was why she had allowed a simple cold to turn into a raging bacterial infection in her chest.

  “Tell me what’s wrong,” Jodie said. He had honored her request not to have her blood pressure taken. They almost never took blood pressures at Phyladda anyway unless the patient requested it.

  “This cold is keeping me awake all night. I coughed all night. I took some NyQuil but it didn’t help. I think maybe I need some medicine. I don’t know. I think I ought to get well. I’ve had it for three weeks. Three weeks is too long to have a cold, don’t you think? Listen, I’m a distance runner. I’m a tennis player. I don’t get sick. Nothing is ever wrong with me.” She stopped talking and went into a paroxysm of coughing. She gasped for breath and coughed some more.

  “Oh, my God,” she kept saying. “I’m sorry. Oh, my God, what’s wrong with me?”

  “We’re going to have to get you to a doctor,” J
odie said. “Come with me.” He pushed an emergency button on the wall and held out his hand.

  “Aren’t you a doctor?” She stopped coughing and stood up beside him.

  “No, I’m a diagnostician. Come with me. We have a car and driver waiting. I’ll go with you. We’ll go to the emergency clinic. I think you need to get on antibiotics right away.”

  “What is this place?” she asked and then went into another spasm of coughing. “What (cough) is this if it’s not an emergency clinic?” Cough, cough, cough. Deep throat and chest rattles.

  “This is Phyladda,” he answered gently. He took her hand. “We are a place of refuge. We diagnose. We sort things out. We can’t treat or prescribe drugs. We listen. We help you decide what to do. I have some cough drops that might help until we get you something better.” He fished in his pocket and brought out some Swedish cough drops. He held one out to her. She took it. She took off the wrapper and put it in her mouth.

  “Then what’s wrong with me?” she asked. “What do you think I have?”

  “I think you have a bacterial infection. I think we had better get you to a doctor quickly.”

  “Well, they can’t take my blood pressure. I’m a distance runner. My blood pressure is ninety over seventy. I don’t want it written down on any records that it’s any higher than that.”

  “Whatever you want,” Jodie answered. He helped her down the hall and out the back door to the limousine and got in with her and they were driven to the Medi-Quick clinic down the street on Monroe Boulevard and he went into the clinic with her and waited while she was examined, given some antibiotics, and sent home to bed. “Let me drive you home,” Jodie said. “You call later in the day and one of us will bring you your car. Is there anyone there? At your home, I mean.”