Does Not Love

by James Tadd Adcox

  Annotation

  Set in an archly comedic, alternate-reality Indianapolis that is completely overrun by Big Pharma, James Tadd Adcox's debut novel chronicles Robert and Viola's attempts to overcome loss through the miracles of modern pharmaceuticals. Their marriage crumbling after a series of miscarriages, Viola finds herself in an affair with the FBI agent who has recently appeared at her workplace, while her husband Robert becomes enmeshed in an elaborate conspiracy designed to look like a drug study.

  James Tadd Adcox's first book The Map of the System of Human Knowledge was published in 2012 by Tiny Hardcore Press. His work has appeared in TriQuarterly, the Literary Review, PANK, Barrelhouse, and Another Chicago Magazine.

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  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

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  James Tadd Adcox

  Does Not Love

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  I

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  Viola is sitting on the examination table at the doctor’s office in a green dress with an empire waist and sky-blue shoes. She is thinking about floating up through the ceiling of the doctor’s office. She is thinking about passing through the clouds then coming to the edge of the earth’s atmosphere and then continuing onward, past the rim of debris caught in the earth’s gravitational pull, past the meteors and the asteroids and so forth, she’s not picturing the details too clearly now, past the moon and the earth-like planets, past the unearth-like planets, out of the solar system. Her husband Robert is holding her hand. This is their third miscarriage. Robert is wearing wrinkle-free gray slacks and a wrinkle-free white shirt. The doctor is telling them about how it is possible to have a healthy child even after multiple miscarriages.

  “Spontaneously abort,” is the term for what Viola’s body does and has done with the pregnancies. There is not always a good explanation for it, the doctor explains.

  They are cursed, Viola thinks, Viola and Robert and the doctor, to repeat this scene over and over, like ghosts replaying the circumstances of their untimely deaths.

  Viola and Robert have a fight in the parking lot of the doctor’s office, except that it’s not a fight, because Robert is being too reasonable. That’s how Robert gets when he’s upset: too reasonable. “It would make me feel a hell of a lot better if just for once you’d raise your voice,” Viola says.

  “I’m not going to raise my voice,” says Robert.

  Viola wants to go back inside and tell the doctor to get the damn thing out of her. “Then we should go back inside and talk with the doctor,” Robert says. “We should discuss our options.”

  “It doesn’t make any sense to have the doctor get it out of me,” Viola says. “It’s an unnecessary procedure and potentially damaging to my health.”

  “That’s true,” Robert says. “I mean that may be true. The part about it being potentially damaging to your—”

  “I don’t have diabetes,” Viola says. “I don’t have heart disease, or kidney disease, or high blood pressure or lupus. My uterus contains neither too much nor too little amniotic acid. I don’t have an imbalance of my progesterone nor a so-called incompetent cervix. I have had ultrasounds and sonograms and hysteroscopys and hysterosalpingographys and pelvic exams. I have eaten healthy. I have exercised. I have refrained from tobacco and alcohol and caffeine. I have taken folic acid and aspirin and—” Viola starts crying, standing there in the parking lot.

  “You’ve done everything exactly right,” Robert says.

  “I know that,” Viola says. “That is what I am trying to tell you.”

  During the drive home, news helicopters fly overhead. On the radio there’s a story about another shooting downtown. Outside their windows, rough parts of Indianapolis stream by.

  ~ ~ ~

  On the midday news the governor of the state of Indiana discusses the downtown shootings. “We will not stand for them,” the governor says. “These shootings. They will not be stood for.”

  “Is it true that all of the victims have been associated with the pharmaceutical industry?” asks a reporter.

  “I didn’t say it was time for questions,” says the governor.

  “Is it true that the shooter was dressed in what appeared to be a fake fur coat and black goggles, brandishing two silver pistols that glowed in the moonlight?”

  “No questions,” the governor says.

  The governor and his retinue fold themselves back into the governor-van, and they remove themselves from the press conference.

  “Was that ‘no questions’ or ‘no question’?” the anchor asks, from his desk at the studio.

  “I believe it was the former, Bill.”

  The wind picks up throughout the city, a great whistling through trees and between buildings.

  ~ ~ ~

  Viola’s aunt and uncle arrive from North Carolina. They are prepared to do whatever they can to help. What is there to do? Viola presses her face into her aunt’s bony shoulder. Viola’s huge uncle walks around the house, testing the structural integrity of the walls. Robert returns from the grocery store.

  “I bought a baked chicken,” Robert says. “It’s… I don’t know. Normally I would cook something but… ” Robert removes the baked chicken from its plastic container and puts it on a serving dish, which he places on the carved walnut dining table. He adjusts it. “There,” he says.

  Viola’s aunt and uncle encourage her to eat. “Eat, baby, eat,” they say, rubbing her back, stroking her hair. Viola looks down at the baked chicken.

  Viola’s uncle asks Robert what he
thinks about the secret law. “I’m in favor of it,” Viola’s uncle explains. “I might not be in favor of it under other circumstances, but these are difficult times.”

  “Is it about to come back up for a vote?” Robert asks.

  “It is unclear whether the secret law requires a vote, constitutionally speaking. Or whether the secret law can be said to be governed by the constitution at all. There is, perhaps, a secret constitution, corresponding to the secret law. One might go so far as to suppose the secret law’s existence to create a secret constitution, through the rules of logical implication. Though I’d expect you know more about that than me… ”

  “I don’t work in secret law,” Robert says. “I do corporate litigation.”

  “How is the corporate litigation world these days?”

  “Complicated.”

  Viola stays in bed for an entire day. She looks at the blinds. I’ve never liked these blinds, she thinks. Bamboo. They don’t go with anything else. Why do we have these damn blinds.

  ~ ~ ~

  Viola and her aunt get drinks at a country-western themed bar in a strip mall near the actual mall. There are cactus-shaped strings of lights hung from the ceiling and the servers are dressed in cowboy boots and western-wear shirts with name tags on them. Stuffed vultures perch atop plastic tombstones lining the wall.

  Viola still looks pregnant. The blond waitress who comes to their table stares at her belly, dubious. According to the doctor, Viola’s body should expel the child naturally in several weeks. “I don’t want to expel the child naturally,” Viola says, slightly drunk. “I want it out of me.”

  Several nearby patrons glance over. “My womb is become a grave,” drunk Viola says, trying to be quieter.

  “What?” says her aunt.

  “My womb is become a grave.”

  Viola’s aunt, who never had kids of her own, helps Viola into the car.

  “My womb is become a grave,” Viola, still a little drunk, whispers to Robert in bed that night.

  “Stop it,” Robert says. “Your womb is become no such thing.”

  The next day Viola heroically cleans the bathroom.

  Every night for a week after that Viola dreams about giving birth to her dead child. Or, it appears dead, at first, but after a moment it coughs, rubs its eyes, and crawls from the doctor’s hands up onto her belly.

  “I thought you were dead,” Viola says.

  “Oh sure,” says her son. “I was. But according to the ancient laws of pregnancy, after three times, something is born. You can’t expect to give birth three times without something being born.”

  “I suppose not,” Viola says. Sometimes, in the dream, she’s back in North Carolina, on the coast, where she lived as a girl with her aunt and uncle, and everything around her has once more been flattened by Hurricane Diana. Other times she’s walking through downtown Indianapolis late at night when the first contractions hit, and she gives birth surrounded by empty corporate towers and closed restaurants, terrified that something or someone will swoop down on her and steal her child before it has the chance to speak.

  ~ ~ ~

  The chief of police says, “This is my good friend John T. Rockefeller, from the FBI. He’s here to tell us what the FBI is going to do.”

  A clean-cut man in a dark suit approaches the microphone. He smiles at the representatives of the media, then assumes a serious expression. “Primarily, the FBI is going to investigate. That’s something that the FBI is very good about. The FBI has labs like you wouldn’t believe, full of technologies so new they don’t even have names yet, and we bring the full weight of this technology to bear on investigating. Plus, the FBI can fit into very tight spaces. Any space large enough for the FBI to get its head into, it can fit into that space. You might think that you have hidden something very well — someplace that you feel no one in a hundred years would think to look — underneath a floorboard, or sewn into the bottom of your mattress, or inside a crack in the wall of your house leading, so far as you know, only to the terrifying emptiness beyond. In all likelihood, the FBI has already found it. The FBI will squirm into those spaces you thought forever hidden, and we will find what you have put there. And then we will test those things, in our labs.

  “Of course we welcome and even expect the good-faith efforts of local and state police to assist us in these endeavors, keeping always in mind that, no matter how crude their efforts may appear in comparison, we think of them nonetheless as our ‘brothers in enforcement’ and fellow upholders of the Law… ”

  ~ ~ ~

  “I want to be kind towards you,” Viola says to Robert. Robert is cutting up a tomato for a tomato sandwich. “Ultimately this is your loss, as well as mine. But I’m not sure if I have enough kindness right now to show towards both of us.”

  “I get that,” Robert says. “That makes sense.”

  “In the future I will probably be kinder,” Viola says.

  Robert and Viola eat the honestly somewhat disappointing tomato sandwiches that Robert fixed. The tomatoes were beautiful, but not delicious. Later, they drive to a home furnishings store. They wander through aisles full of pepper grinders and salt grinders and ironing boards and extra-thick “European-style” towels. Viola keeps wanting to buy things that don’t go with anything else in the house. “Where would we put that?” Robert says.

  “I don’t know, Robert, I don’t know. What difference does it make?”

  Robert doesn’t have an answer for this.

  Inevitably they buy something. Viola holds the pillow that doesn’t go with anything else in the house in her lap on the drive back, and she imagines herself slowly, over the course of months or years, replacing everything in the house with something else, even the floorboards, even the walls.

  ~ ~ ~

  At work Robert empties documents from storage boxes, puts different-colored sticky notes on each document to identify what role it is to play in the upcoming deposition, then puts each document back in the storage box from which it came. There are mountains of storage boxes. New storage boxes keep arriving, smiling legal clerks rolling them in on handtrucks.

  Robert is an associate at an old and prestigious law firm in Indianapolis that has as its clients several energy companies as well as Obadiah Birch Pharmaceuticals, headquartered downtown. Birch has been accused of marketing an erectile dysfunction drug for use in the treatment of Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, an unapproved indication and one for which the drug seems wholly unsuited besides. Robert, with his sticky notes and his boxes and boxes of documents, is on the team handling the defense litigation. The lawsuit comes in the wake of several highly-publicized reports of once-rowdy students engaging in uncontrollable, albeit sedate, frottage in middle-school classrooms across the country. Robert doubts the case will go anywhere. Most likely, no one but he and his legal clerks will see a single one of his sticky- noted documents.

  The building that houses the firm was designed by the architectural team of Vonnegut & Bohn, whose other work in Indianapolis includes the Ayres Building, the William H. Block Co. Building, and the German Renaissance Revival-style Athenaeum, also known as Das Deutsche Haus. Several of the original Vonnegut & Bohn buildings have been torn down, which is unfortunate, culturally speaking, but many of those that remain are on the register of national historic places.

  Bernard Vonnegut, Sr., of Vonnegut & Bohn, was the grandfather of the writer Kurt Vonnegut, whose name is carved, along with those of Shakespeare, Plato, and Dostoevsky, in a frieze that runs along the outside of the library where Robert’s wife Viola works.

  “The question from a legal perspective is whether the company specifically encouraged this off-label use,” says one of the bright-eyed, smooth-skinned legal clerks.

  “Yes,” says Robert.

  “Of course doctors are free to prescribe off- label uses, if they want to,” says the legal clerk. “That’s not the issue.”

  “Right,” says Robert, sorting through the delivery that he has ordered for
his legal team. “Do you want a corned beef? What do you want?”

  “I believe actually I ordered the pastrami.”

  Robert thinks about the summer between his L1 year and his L2 year, before he met Viola, when he had briefly dated a blond, skinny legal clerk at the firm where he was interning in New York. She had such a good face. It was a long face, but Robert liked it. He keeps up with her occasionally; there is the occasional email. He knows basically nothing about her personal life, but professionally, she is doing quite fine.

  I showed a high degree of promise in law school, Robert thinks. I edited my school’s law review. I had offers from several more prestigious firms in New York, but chose instead to come here, back to Indianapolis. It was not Viola’s first choice, but she understood how important it was to me, the idea of home. She found a job here and for a while it seemed like everything was exactly right.

  During breaks he looks up vacation destinations on the internet: Maui, Barcelona, the Black Forest, Tibet. He looks at pictures of foreign destinations and feels a longing.

  Robert has so much money but it never feels like that much money.

  “How old are you now, Robert?” asks one of the firm’s senior partners. “Forty?”

  “Thirty-six.”

  “Thirty-six. That’s still quite young. In the grand scheme of things, Robert, that’s quite young indeed. You have your whole life ahead of you, Robert.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “And you have a beautiful wife. Is this your wife?” the partner asks, picking up the framed picture of Viola from Robert’s desk.

  “Yes sir.”

  “Beautiful,” the senior partner says.

  ~ ~ ~

  Viola's body naturally expels the pregnancy. The doctor hands the strange blue child to Viola without asking if Viola wants to hold it. She cradles the strange blue child. She puts two fingers over its closed transparent eyelids. “I’m not very good at mourning,” Viola says to the strange blue child. “I’m not sure how to mourn you. I’ve had dreams about you, but it wasn’t like this.” Robert stands beside her in the scrubs the hospital has given him. He can’t figure out what to do with his hands, whether he should be touching the strange blue child, what. “Robert, it’s okay,” Viola says. “You can cry too. No one is going to feel strange about it. You’re allowed.”