There's Something I Want You to Do

by Charles Baxter

  Now Mrs. Lundgren was talking about Somali refugees, and the terrible conditions in the Sudan, and the shocking treatment of women in sub-Saharan Africa, clitoridectomies and the like. “And that’s not the half of it,” she said. The doctor nodded. “It makes you wonder sometimes about those people, how they think,” she continued, as the doctor squirmed and closed his mouth, through which, he realized with embarrassment, he had been breathing. “We’ve been there, after all,” she said. “We saw it with our very own eyes. We worked in a refugee camp. We know what we’re talking about, so.”

  “Where was this?”

  “The Kiziba refugee camp in Rwanda! Very inspiring!”

  Mr. Lundgren glumly shook his head while he studied his hands. “But very hard work,” he muttered.

  Very hard, his wife repeated, but God expects us, she said, to help take care of the less fortunate, didn’t the doctor agree? He did. Time passed. Global troubles were mentioned and disappeared into the conversational haze as if they were items of gossip. Suddenly the doctor remembered something his son had told him: Donna’s mother worked as a middle school world history teacher. As teachers do, she continued to drone on: they, the Lundgrens, had tried to give all their extra money away to the poor for the sake of justice, and they had assembled a little scrapbook with photographs of children whom they had sponsored. “It’s over there. We could show it to you. You can’t go into heaven carrying bags of money!” Mrs. Lundgren said, shaking her head and laughing mirthlessly over the comic irony of it all. Every life was sacred, she said, didn’t he agree? You could walk into heaven accompanied by the souls to whom you had lent a helping hand. That was possible. He that dwelleth in the secret place of the most High shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty, she said, confabulating.

  No wonder Jupie had turned out the way she had.

  The doctor rose to his feet and approached the plate of cookies, taking three for himself. Rarely in his life had he felt so hungry or so sleepy. He was starving in every possible way. He needed a nap, right now, and his hunger felt like an embrace of emptiness hugging him pitilessly, stifling him. His hunger, he suddenly thought, was empirical. In his mind arose an image of a man drinking a six-pack of air, one empty bottle after another. In rapid succession he ate the cookies and took three more, while Mrs. Lundgren lectured him on the holiness of all human existence and how existence was not a choice but a gift. Well, at least he knew where this was going. The lowest and highest hold the same rank in God’s eyes, she was saying, tapping her finger on her knee. Of all the democrats, God was the greatest democrat. Status meant nothing to Him. He cared nothing for trinkets or the glittering machines of success. Before Him, we are all the same. The doctor felt himself growing impatient at all this moralizing and its transparent intentions. Everything she said sounded like a practiced speech, prepared and canned, like tomatoes in the basement. What did he, the doctor, think would save him?

  “Excuse me?”

  “Well, we were wondering, what will you do to be saved?” She leaned back and smiled. “We were wondering about that.” She reached over for a Ritz cracker and popped it into her mouth. The doctor watched her chew. She ate like a peasant.

  “Isn’t that a very private matter?”

  “Yes, it is,” Mrs. Lundgren said, keeping her gaze on him, and suddenly he knew whom she resembled in both appearance and manner: Margaret Thatcher. “But you are the father of the young man who caused our daughter to become pregnant, aren’t you? We wondered what values you had instilled in him. It may be a private matter, but it’s ours now. Our matter.”

  “It’s a father’s job to instill values,” Mr. Lundgren said, from his corner. “That’s what a man does, so.”

  “I have tried to teach him to love the world,” Elijah said. “And to treat everyone with respect. And to fight for what is right.”

  “Well, that’s not enough,” Mrs. Lundgren said, and the doctor intuited that she was a skilled tactician in argumentation and probably coached the high school debate squad. “If the world were enough, being worldly would be a virtue, wouldn’t it? But it isn’t. Does the world include our grandchild, yours and ours, the one who died?”

  “You should take this up with your daughter,” the doctor said.

  “But we have,” she told him. “And she seems to have been converted by your son. Converted to oblivion.”

  “Don’t lecture me.” The doctor spoke, but it was Gerald who had spoken up. Elijah seemed to be turning into his wife’s fictional creation. Okay, fine.

  “I’m not lecturing you. We’re just asking questions and offering an opinion. We want to know what sort of man you are. As if we were all family here. Which we sort of are. Whatever did you teach Raphael? If I may ask?”

  “Well,” the doctor said, “first of all, we’re not a family. What I taught Raphael, that’s my business. And as for what I am, I’m a pediatrician.”

  “Yes, we know that. That’s what you do. You care for children, which is quite admirable. But I asked you what you are.”

  “By what right do you ask me such a question?”

  A rather long air pocket of dead silence followed, accompanied by the music. The doctor had never heard such a silence, with music in it.

  Finally Mrs. Lundgren said, “The right of one parent to another. We have blood on our hands. All of us. And our children have blood on their hands. They have snuffed out a life, those two. They have caused suffering.”

  “Oh, for shit’s sake,” Gerald blurted out. “A woman has a right to choose. We all know that.” Neither Lundgren flinched, as he had hoped they would. “I have to leave now.”

  “I don’t think so,” Mr. Lundgren said, and the doctor felt a chill.

  “Do you think the happy choices of our children should depend on the suffering of fetuses? Is that the ticket? Is that the ticket to the universe? To its meaning? You should read your Dostoyevsky,” Mrs. Lundgren said, a mild frenzy in her voice. “Don’t you think a father should protect his infants and not kill them?”

  “That’s enough,” the doctor said, standing up, although all he did was to reach for more cookies. Dostoyevsky in Delano! Of all things.

  “You opened a jar,” Mrs. Lundgren said. “The jar was full of pain. It was your jar.”

  He felt the room constricting and growing hot, warmed up from its already overheated condition. He felt Gerald overtaking him. It was Gerald who blurted out, “With all due respect, fuck you, ma’am, and you, sir, and good night.”

  She laughed, and for a moment the doctor felt himself admiring her. “What a silly person you are,” she said. “Obscenity is not an argument. It is weak-minded. I had thought you would be more thoughtful. After all, you have a medical degree. You have not thought any of this through, not any of it, I can see that now. How shallow is the pool in which you swim. You are therefore self-deluded, cruel, and mean-spirited. I’m sorry to be so blunt, but we are in pain. Isn’t it ironic? Your name being Elijah? And you, a doctor?”

  “Now you’re name-calling. I’m not a monster, and neither is my son. Perhaps you are the monster. It’s time for me to leave now. Time to go.”

  “Is it time?” She glanced theatrically at her watch. “Perhaps I am a monster. But if I am, I’m a monster in the right army, and you’re in the wrong one.” She was still smiling eerily at him. The smile, fixed and meaningless, appeared to be surgically applied. Inside the walls of the house, the mice, perhaps on a salary, continued to play The Nutcracker. “The doctor is too busy to give us more than a few minutes of his precious time. So we must bid him farewell, Herb.” She turned toward her husband, who seemed to have been mummified in his La-Z-Boy chair.

  Who was Herb? It was only at this moment that Elijah realized he had already forgotten the first names of the Lundgrens. They had introduced themselves, what seemed like years ago, but their first names had not stuck. He put on his hat and coat, which had been draped over the newel post, and without another word, walked out to his cold car, thinking
that never in his entire life had he had a social encounter like this one, nor would he ever again.

  —

  The stars had a spectral clarity in the moonless sky; no wonder people thought of them as the lights emanating from the dead. Shaken, hungry, and sleepy, the doctor took several random right turns until he finally found himself where he wanted to be: on a dirt road between fallow fields with hardly a house in sight. He wanted to be lost, and he was. He turned on the car’s radio and turned it off again after hearing a few bars of atonal orchestral music. On the passenger seat rested a bag of Oreos, a box of Goldfish crackers, Cheetos, and Funyuns.

  Rafe had trained in tae kwon do from the time he was a child. He had begged for lessons starting in second grade. The last time the doctor had seen Rafe sparring, the boy jumped so high that his father was startled; Rafe’s moves were perfectly coordinated, and his flexibility seemed impossible. When he did a front rising kick, his extended foot was higher than his face. And fast. He dominated his opponent with a complicated series of kicks, and then he leaped out of range before his opponent could land anything on him. He never retreated. Why was the doctor thinking of that particular match, now? The blank merciless expression on Mrs. Lundgren’s face had reminded the doctor of his son’s face in combat.

  In the distance the doctor saw the blinking red light of a radio transmission tower.

  When you got down to the heart of things, you found desolation. Even in the midst of joy, you would find it. But you would find joy everywhere too. His son took joy in combat and sometimes laughed in practice sessions. So complicated, the mixture of the two. The doctor reached for the Oreos and ate several. He had attained a new low, or was it a new high, in sleepiness. He felt like fighting the drowsiness, but the drowsiness welcomed him, as any narcotic does, taking him up and away.

  Christmas is coming, the doctor thought, the geese are getting fat. A child’s rhyme from elementary school. Please put a penny in the old man’s hat. Why are the geese fat? Who feeds the geese? If you haven’t got a penny…what will do…the doctor heard a sound, without definition, and the road tilted a bit…

  —

  Then things were flying around him—the cell phone had escaped from his coat pocket and was airborne in front of him, as were various other items, including the bags of snack food and a clipboard from the front seat—and he heard the sound of crunching or of some huge animal chewing up the car as it rotated and fell down into a ditch, and Elijah, now thoroughly awake, felt his driver’s-side door open (how had that happened?), and he was ejected sideways, having forgotten to buckle his seat belt. Narcolepsy, he thought, with an odd diagnostic lucidity even as he came to rest on a little hill at the side of a field with, he instantly knew from the pain, a broken leg, a fractured tibia. He had always been a crack diagnostician, and even now on his back in the dirt, staring up at the night sky, cookie crumbs on his lips, his skills had not deserted him. How stupid pain is. From below the knee, thanks to the fracture, pain sent its dull, insistent message upstairs to the brain. Pain was like a siren. Pleasure never worked that way. The air had turned very cold.

  Now he felt himself shivering rather violently from the cold and shock amid the field’s dirt and snow. He saw the constellations above him wheeling in their eternal rounds, and a great peacefulness took hold of him, like the slow spreading of pleasure under the skin in a vague fog diffusing itself in a warm glow—a fog that lit up the soul. Underneath the peacefulness dwelt the pain. They could coexist.

  He sniffed. The temperature was below freezing. He would die of hypothermia out here. No one would see him. He had landed in the middle of nowhere. His right hand was lacerated and was bleeding steadily. But it was perfectly all right, all of it, especially the bleeding.

  The image of his son sparring intervened, and he realized that he didn’t want the last faces he ever saw on Earth to be the faces of Herb and Eleanor Lundgren. Yes! He had remembered their names! He tried to sit up, and he looked around: in the distance, across the field directly behind him, stood a farmhouse with a single light at the top of a pole illuminating its driveway. He would have to be Gerald, it seemed, to get over there, and he could do it, and he thanked his wife for imagining Gerald, a combative man, into existence. He began crawling, using his elbows and dragging the rest of his incapacitated body, and he distracted himself from his own loud cries by admiring the sky full of stars indifferent to his situation, and also admiring the plainspoken stupidity of pain burning a hole in his leg. He crawled a certain distance, he didn’t know how far, trying to reduce his cries to groans. What was the point in groaning? No one would hear.

  He was in terrible pain but a rather good mood.

  Ahead of him, in the field, to the right, out of the cold, out of the dark, out of the emptiness, a bell rang: his cell phone.

  He crawled toward it. He dragged along the ground every cell of his corpulent body. By the time he reached the phone, the screen read, “Missed Call.” The phone had been flung, as he himself had been, from the car, and now here it was, a gift from the gods who perhaps did not want him dead after all or had changed their minds, and after grasping the phone and reading the missed-call message—it had been from Democratic Party headquarters, no doubt soliciting a donation—he called home and told Susan what had happened to him and that he loved her, as she cried and shouted and then at last calmed down and told him how much she loved him and always had. Where was he? she demanded. He said he didn’t know and would call the police. He promised to call her back, and then, peering down at the numbers, he called 911. He tried to describe his location to the dispatcher, but he didn’t know the name of the road he had been on, so, between the bursts of imbecilic pain, he did his best to inform her about everything he saw, the blank landscape, the nondescript trees, the constellations above him (he was in shock, he knew), and again luck was with him: he said he thought he could maybe spot a tattered sign in the distance advertising a U-pick apple orchard, and the dispatcher said, oh, all right, yes, she knew where he was, and besides, they could find him using his phone and a GPS track. Stay calm, she told him. Don’t move.

  —

  He disobeyed her. When the EMT guys arrived, their incandescent spotlight found his face, and he waved his arm at them and shouted for his life.

  In memory of THB

  and for Chris

  Vanity

  He had stuffed his suitcase into the empty overhead bin, having purchased early-boarding rights from the airline, and had settled into his nonreclining seat, 32-B, when he had to stand up again to let the passenger in 32-A get past him. 32-A accompanied almost every move—taking off his raincoat, placing his crossword-puzzle book on the seat—with an unpleasant, guttural grunt. 32-A was a short man, of a certain age, stooped but solid, with hair dyed inky black. Apparently indifferent to mere appearances, he displayed traces of dandruff on his rumpled suit. Dandruff had also made its way onto his soiled and unpressed lime-green necktie. Harry Albert, who, by contrast, dressed rather elegantly and could still turn heads for his handsomeness, gave the man a nod, but 32-A did not nod in return. When 32-A finally sat down, he said, “Whoof.”

  Harry nodded and, between staged laughs, said, “That’s right!” trying to be friendly. However, 32-A did not seem interested in Harry’s amiable agreement and pulled out a battered copy of that day’s Minneapolis Star Tribune. He turned to the business page and commenced to read. From time to time he uttered subvocalizations. Grim-faced, the flight attendants announced that they had “a very full flight.” They proceeded to help passengers force their luggage into the already crammed overhead spaces. They gave instructions in the use of seat belts and oxygen masks, and eventually the plane was airborne.

  Going through the cloud cover, the plane bounced and rattled. A few passengers laughed nervously. One overhead compartment popped open. A little girl screamed. The captain announced that there would be no beverage service, for now: too much turbulence.

  “Bumpy flight,” Harry Alber
t said.

  “Unhrh,” 32-A replied.

  Well, he wouldn’t bother to introduce himself to a man whose only conversational gambit consisted of nonverbal animal-like rumbling. Trying to doze, Harry heard 32-A making more peculiar sounds, like a dog having a nightmare. It would be impossible to doze off with this guy growling next to him. Feeling despondent, Harry reached for his paperback copy of Schindler’s List, which someone had recommended.

  32-A glanced over and grunted again. Finally he spoke up. “I was one of those.” He had traces of a middle European accent, nearly gone, mostly dead but still living, a ghoul-accent.

  “One of what?” Harry asked.

  “I was a Schindler Jew,” 32-A said.

  Harry Albert felt a slight electrical shock. “I’m honored to meet you, sir,” he said. He held out his hand and introduced himself to the man, who replied with his own name, “David Lowie.” Or at least it sounded like Lowie. Harry didn’t think it would be polite to ask 32-A (or, no: a person shouldn’t think of a Holocaust survivor as 32-A) to repeat his name, so he refrained. Nor could he address his seatmate as David, presuming on an intimacy that did not exist. Mr. Lowie? Well, for the duration of an airplane flight, who needs names? Anonymity was the rule.

  Apparently his seatmate didn’t think so. “Harry Albert?” the man asked. “What’s your last name?”

  “It’s Albert.”

  “Rrrgggr,” the man replied dismissively. “That’s an English name. But it sounds like a first name. Ha ha ha rrrgh.” He coughed into a stickily soiled handkerchief, crusted with dried extrusions.