Fictions

by Nancy Kress

  He’d slipped in through the loading dock, she guessed, and caught her alone in the linens supply closet. He was gone after one punch, and when she called her exasperated lawyer and he found out she had no witnesses and St. Sebastian’s had “security,” he’d said there was nothing he could do. It would be her word against Jim’s. She had to be able to prove that the restraining order had been violated.

  Dr. Erdmann was talking about “proof,” too: some sort of mathematical proof. Carrie had been good at math, in high school. Only Dr. Erdmann had said once that what she’d done in high school wasn’t “mathematics,” only “arithmetic.”

  “Why didn’t you go to college, Carrie?” he’d asked.

  “No money,” she said in a tone that meant: Please don’t ask anything else. She just hadn’t felt up to explaining about Daddy and the alcoholism and the debts and her abusive step brothers, and Dr. Erdmann hadn’t asked. He was sensitive that way.

  Looking at his tall, stooped figure sitting on the desk, his walker close to hand, Carrie sometimes let herself dream that Dr. Erdmann—Henry—was fifty years younger. Forty to her twenty-eight—that would work. She’d googled a picture of him at that age, when he’d been working at someplace called the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory. He’d been handsome, dark-haired, smiling into the camera next to his wife, Ida. She hadn’t been as pretty as Carrie, but she’d gone to college, so even if Carrie had been born back then, she wouldn’t have had a chance with him. Story of her life.

  “—have any questions?” Dr. Erdmann finished.

  The students did—they always did—clamoring to be heard, not raising their hands, interrupting each other. But when Dr. Erdmann spoke, immediately they all shut up. Someone leapt up to write equations on the board. Dr. Erdmann slowly turned his frail body to look at them. The discussion went on a long time, almost as long as the class. Carrie fell asleep.

  When she woke, it was to Dr. Erdmann, leaning on his walker, gently jiggling her shoulder. “Carrie?”

  “Oh! Oh, I’m sorry!”

  “Don’t be. We bored you to death, poor child.”

  “No! I loved it!”

  He raised his eyebrows and she felt shamed. He thought she was telling a polite lie, and he had very little tolerance for lies. But the truth is, she always loved being here.

  Outside, it was full dark. The autumn rain had stopped and the unseen ground had that mysterious, fertile smell of wet leaves. Carrie helped Dr. Erdmann into her battered Toyota and slid behind the wheel. As they started back toward St. Sebastian’s, she could tell that he was exhausted. Those students asked too much of him! It was enough that he taught one advanced class a week, sharing all that physics, without them also demanding he—

  “Dr. Erdmann?”

  For a long terrible moment she thought he was dead. His head lolled against the seat but he wasn’t asleep: His open eyes rolled back into his head. Carrie jerked the wheel to the right and slammed the Toyota alongside the curb. He was still breathing.

  “Dr. Erdmann? Henry?”

  Nothing. Carrie dove into her purse, fumbling for her cell phone. Then it occurred to her that his panic button would be faster. She tore open the buttons on his jacket; he wasn’t wearing the button. She scrambled again for the purse, starting to sob.

  “Carrie?”

  He was sitting up now, a shadowy figure. She hit the overhead light. His face, a fissured landscape, looked dazed and pale. His pupils were huge.

  “What happened? Tell me.” She tried to keep her voice even, to observe everything, because it was important to be able to make as full a report as possible to Dr. Jamison. But her hand clutched at his sleeve.

  He covered her fingers with his. His voice sounded dazed. “I . . . don’t know. I was . . . somewhere else?”

  “A stroke?” That was what they were all afraid of. Not death, but to be incapacitated, reduced to partiality. And for Dr. Erdmann, with his fine mind. . .

  “No.” He sounded definite. “Something else. I don’t know. Did you call 911 yet?”

  The cell phone lay inert in her hand. “No, not yet, there wasn’t time for—”

  “Then don’t. Take me home.”

  “All right, but you’re going to see the doctor as soon as we get there.” She was pleased, despite everything, with her firm tone.

  “It’s seven-thirty. They’ll all have gone home.”

  But they hadn’t. As soon as Carrie and Dr. Erdmann walked into the lobby, she saw a man in a white coat standing by the elevators. “Wait!” she called, loud enough that several people turned to look, evening visitors and ambulatories and a nurse Carrie didn’t know. She didn’t know the doctor, either, but she rushed over to him, leaving Dr. Erdmann leaning on his walker by the main entrance.

  “Are you a doctor? I’m Carrie Vesey and I was bringing Dr. Erdmann—a patient, Henry Erdmann, not a medical doctor—home when he had some kind of attack, he seems all right now but someone needs to look at him, he says—”

  “I’m not an M.D.,” the man said, and Carrie looked at him in dismay. “I’m a neurological researcher.”

  She rallied. “Well, you’re the best we’re going to get at this hour so please look at him!” She was amazed at her own audacity.

  “All right.” He followed her to Dr. Erdmann, who scowled because, Carrie knew, he hated this sort of fuss. The non-M.D. seemed to pick up on that right away. He said pleasantly, “Dr. Erdmann? I’m Jake DiBella. Will you come this way, sir?” Without waiting for an answer, he turned and led the way down a side corridor. Carrie and Dr. Erdmann followed, everybody’s walk normal, but still people watched. Move along, nothing to see here . . . why were they still staring? Why were people such ghouls?

  But they weren’t, really. That was just her own fear talking.

  You trust too much, Carrie, Dr. Erdmann had said just last week.

  In a small room on the second floor, he sat heavily on one of the three metal folding chairs. The room held the chairs, a gray filing cabinet, an ugly metal desk, and nothing else. Carrie, a natural nester, pursed her lips, and Dr. DiBella caught that, too.

  “I’ve only been here a few days,” he said apologetically. “Haven’t had time yet to properly move in. Dr. Erdmann, can you tell me what happened?”

  “Nothing.” He wore his lofty look. “I just fell asleep for a moment and Carrie became alarmed. Really, there’s no need for this fuss.”

  “You fell asleep?”

  “Yes.”

  “All right. Has that happened before?”

  Did Dr. Erdmann hesitate, ever so briefly? “Yes, occasionally. I am ninety, doctor.”

  DiBella nodded, apparently satisfied, and turned to Carrie. “And what happened to you? Did it occur at the same time that Dr. Erdmann fell asleep?”

  Her eye. That’s why people had stared in the lobby. In her concern for Dr. Erdmann, she’d forgotten about her black eye, but now it immediately began to throb again. Carrie felt herself go scarlet.

  Dr. Erdmann answered. “No, it didn’t happen at the same time. There was no car accident, if that’s what you’re implying. Carrie’s eye is unrelated.”

  “I fell,” Carrie said, knew that no one believed her, and lifted her chin.

  “Okay,” DiBella said amiably. “But as long as you’re here, Dr. Erdmann, I’d like to enlist your help. Yours, and as many other volunteers as I can enlist at St. Sebastian’s. I’m here on a Gates Foundation grant in conjunction with Johns Hopkins, to map shifts in brain electrochemistry during cerebral arousal. I’m asking volunteers to donate a few hours of their time to undergo completely painless brain scans while they look at various pictures and videos. Your participation will be an aid to science.”

  Carrie saw that Dr. Erdmann was going to refuse, despite the magic word “science,” but then he hesitated. “What kind of brain scans?”

  “Asher-Peyton and functional MRI.”

  “All right. I’ll participate.”

  Carrie blinked. That didn’t sound like Dr. Erdm
ann, who considered physics and astronomy the only “true” sciences and the rest merely poor stepchildren. But this Dr. DiBella wasn’t about to let his research subject get away. He said quickly, “Excellent! Tomorrow morning at eleven, Lab 6B, at the hospital. Ms. Vesey, can you bring him over? Are you a relative?”

  “No, I’m an aide here. Call me Carrie. I can bring him.” Wednesday wasn’t one of her usual days for Dr. Erdmann, but she’d get Marie to swap schedules.

  “Wonderful. Please call me Jake.” He smiled at her, and something turned over in Carrie’s chest. It wasn’t just that he was so handsome, with his black hair and gray eyes and nice shoulders, but also that he had masculine confidence and an easy way with him and no ring on his left hand . . . idiot. There was no particular warmth in his smile; it was completely professional. Was she always going to assess every man she met as a possible boyfriend? Was she really that needy?

  Yes. But this one wasn’t interested. And anyway, he was an educated scientist and she worked a minimum-wage job. She was an idiot.

  She got Dr. Erdmann up to his apartment and said good-night. He seemed distant, preoccupied. Going down in the elevator, a mood of desolation came over her. What she really wanted was to stay and watch Henry Erdmann’s TV, sleep on his sofa, wake up to fix his coffee and have someone to talk to while she did it. Not go back to her shabby apartment, bolted securely against Jim but never secure enough that she felt really safe. She’d rather stay here, in a home for failing old people, and how perverted and sad was that?

  And what had happened to Dr. Erdmann on the way home from the college?

  THREE

  Twice now. Henry lay awake, wondering what the hell was going on in his brain. He was accustomed to relying on that organ. His knees had succumbed to arthritis, his hearing aid required constant adjustment, and his prostate housed a slow-growing cancer that, the doctor said, wouldn’t kill him until long after something else did—the medical profession’s idea of cheerful news. But his brain remained clear, and using it well had always been his greatest pleasure. Greater even than sex, greater than food, greater than marriage to Ida, much as he had loved her.

  God, the things that age let you admit.

  Which were the best years? No question there: Los Alamos, working on Operation Ivy with Ulam and Teller and Carson Mark and the rest. The excitement and frustration and awe of developing the “Sausage,” the first test of staged radiation implosion. The day it was detonated at Eniwetok. Henry, a junior member of the team, hadn’t of course been present at the atoll, but he’d waited breathlessly for the results from Bogon. He’d cheered when Teller, picking up the shock waves on a seismometer in California, had sent his three-word telegram to Los Alamos: “It’s a boy.” Harry Truman himself had requested that bomb—”to see to it that our country is able to defend itself against any possible aggressor”—and Henry was proud of his work on it.

  Shock waves. Yes, that was what today’s two incidents had felt like: shock waves to the brain. A small wave in his apartment, a larger one in Carrie’s car. But from what? It could only be some failure of his nervous system, the thing he dreaded most of all, far more than he dreaded death. Granted, teaching physics to graduate students was a long way from Los Alamos or Livermore, and most of the students were dolts—although not Haldane—but Henry enjoyed it. Teaching, plus reading the journals and following the online listservs, were his connection with physics. If some neurological “shock wave” disturbed his brain . . .

  It was a long time before he could sleep.

  “Oh my Lord, dear, what happened to your eye?”

  Evelyn Krenchnoted sat with her friend Gina Somebody in the tiny waiting room outside Dr. O’Kane’s office. Henry scowled at her. Just like Evelyn to blurt out like that, embarrassing poor Carrie. The Krenchnoted woman was the most tactless busybody Henry had ever met, and he’d known a lot of physicists, a group not noted for tact. But at least the physicists hadn’t been busybodies.

  “I’m fine,” Carrie said, trying to smile. “I walked into a door.”

  “Oh, dear, how did that happen? You should tell the doctor. I’m sure he could make a few minutes to see you, even though he must be running behind, I didn’t actually have an appointment today but he’d said he’d squeeze me in because something strange happened yesterday that I want to ask him about, but the time he gave me was supposed to start five minutes ago and you must be scheduled after that, he saw Gina already but she—”

  Henry sat down and stopped listening. Evelyn’s noise, however, went on and on, a grating whine like a dentist drill. He imagined her on Eniwetok, rising into the air on a mushroom cloud, still talking. It was a relief when the doctor’s door opened and a woman came out, holding a book.

  Henry had seen her before, although he didn’t know her name. Unlike most of the old bats at St. Sebastian’s, she was worth looking at. Not with Carrie’s radiant youthful beauty, of course; this woman must be in her seventies, at least. But she stood straight and graceful; her white hair fell in simple waves to her shoulders; her cheekbones and blue eyes were still good. However, Henry didn’t care for the way she was dressed. It reminded him of all those stupid childish protestors outside Los Alamos in the fifties and sixties. The woman wore a white T-shirt, a long cotton peasant skirt, a necklace of beads and shells, and several elaborate rings.

  “Erin!” Evelyn cried. “How was your appointment? Everything okay?”

  “Fine. Just a check-up.” Erin smiled vaguely and moved away. Henry strained to see the cover of her book: Tao Te Ching. Disappointment lanced through him. One of those.

  “But you weren’t scheduled for a check-up, no more than I was. So what happened that—” Erin walked quickly away, her smile fixed. Evelyn said indignantly, “Well, I call that just plain rude! Did you see that, Gina? You try to be friendly to some people and they just—”

  “Mrs. Krenchnoted?” the nurse said, sticking her head out the office door. “The doctor will see you now.”

  Evelyn lumbered up and through the door, still talking. In the blessed silence that followed, Henry said to Carrie, “How do you suppose Mr. Krenchnoted stood it?”

  Carrie giggled and waved her hand toward the Krenchnoted’s friend, Gina. But Gina was asleep in her chair, which at least explained how she stood it.

  Carrie said, “I’m glad you have this appointment today, Dr. Erdmann. You will tell him about what happened in the car yesterday, won’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “You promise?”

  “Yes.” Why were all women, even mild little Carrie, so insistent on regular doctor visits? Yes, doctors were useful for providing pills to keep the machine going, but Henry’s view was that you only needed to see a physician if something felt wrong. In fact, he’d forgotten about this regularly scheduled check-up until this morning, when Carrie called to say how convenient it was that his appointment here was just an hour before the one with Dr. DiBella at the hospital lab. Ordinarily Henry would have refused to go at all, except that he did intend to ask Dr. Jamison about the incident in the car. Also, it was possible that fool Evelyn Krenchnoted was actually right about something for once. “Carrie, maybe you should ask the doctor to look at that eye.”

  “No. I’m fine.”

  “Has Jim called or come around again since—”

  “No.”

  Clearly she didn’t want to talk about it. Embarrassment, most likely. Henry could respect her reticence. Silently he organized his questions for Jamison.

  But after Henry had gone into the office, leaving Carrie in the waiting room, and after he’d endured the tediums of the nurse’s measuring his blood pressure, of peeing into a cup, of putting on a ridiculous paper gown, it wasn’t Jamison who entered the room but a brusque, impossibly young boy in a white lab coat and officious manner.

  “I’m Dr. Felton, Henry. How are we today?” He studied Henry’s chart, not looking at him.

  Henry gritted his teeth. “You would know better than I, I imagine.”
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  “Feeling a bit cranky? Are your bowels moving all right?”

  “My bowels are fine. They thank you for your concern.”

  Felton looked up then, his eyes cold. “I’m going to listen to your lungs now. Cough when I tell you to.”

  And Henry knew he couldn’t do it. If the kid had reprimanded him—”I don’t think sarcasm is appropriate here”—it would have at least been a response. But this utter dismissal, this treatment as if Henry were a child, or a moron . . . He couldn’t tell this insensitive young boor about the incident in the car, about the fear for his brain. It would degrade him to cooperate with Felton. Maybe DiBella would be better, even if he wasn’t an M.D.

  One doctor down, one to go.

  DiBella was better. What he was not, was organized.

  At Redborn Memorial Hospital he said, “Ah, Dr. Erdmann, Carrie. Welcome. I’m afraid there’s been a mix-up with Diagnostic Imaging. I thought I had the fMRI booked for you but they seem to have scheduled me out, or something. So we can do the Asher-Peyton scan but not the deep imaging. I’m sorry, I—” He shrugged helplessly and ran his hand through his hair.

  Carrie tightened her mouth to a thin line. “Dr. Erdmann came all the way over here for your MRI, Dr. DiBella.”

  “ ‘Jake,’ please. I know. And we do the Asher-Peyton scan back at St. Sebastian’s. I really am sorry.”

  Carrie’s lips didn’t soften. It always surprised Henry how fierce she could be in defense of her “resident-assignees.” Why was usually gentle Carrie being so hard on this young man?

  “I’ll meet you back at St. Sebastian’s,” DiBella said humbly.

  Once there, he affixed electrodes on Henry’s skull and neck, eased a helmet over his head, and sat at a computer whose screen faced away from Henry. After the room was darkened, a series of pictures projected onto one white wall: a chocolate cake, a broom, a chair, a car, a desk, a glass: four or five dozen images. Henry had to do nothing except sit there, and he grew bored. Eventually the pictures grew more interesting, interspersing a house fire, a war scene, a father hugging a child, Rita Hayworth. Henry chuckled. “I didn’t think your generation even knew who Rita Hayworth was.”