Writer, M.D.

by Leah Kaminsky

  “Nobody’s alone,” I say.

  “I mean that if I’d made more of an effort with people, I would have friends now. I would know the postman and the Giffords and the Kohlers, and we’d be together in this, all of us. We’d sit in each other’s living rooms on rainy days and talk about the children. Instead we’ve kept to ourselves. Now I’m alone.”

  “You’re not alone,” I say.

  “Yes, I am.” She turns the light off and we are in the dark again. “You’re alone, too.”

  My health has gotten worse. It’s slow to set in at this age, not the violent shaking grip of death; instead—a slow leak, nothing more. A bicycle tire: rimless, thready, worn treadles already and now losing its fatness. A war of attrition. The tall camels of the spirit steering for the desert. One morning I realized I hadn’t been warm in a year.

  And there are other things that go, too. For instance, I recall with certainty that it was on the twenty-third of April, 1945, that despite German counteroffensives in the Ardennes, Eisenhower’s men reached the Elbe; but I cannot remember whether I have visited the savings and loan this week. Also, I am unable to produce the name of my neighbor, though I greeted him yesterday in the street. And take, for example, this: I am at a loss to explain whole decades of my life. We have children and photographs, and there is an understanding between Francine and me that bears the weight of nothing less than a half a century, but when I gather my memories they seem to fill no more than an hour. Where has my life gone?

  It has gone partway to shoddy accumulations. In my wallet are credit cards, a license ten years expired, twenty-three dollars in cash. There is a photograph but it depresses me to look at it, and a poem, half-copied and folded into the billfold. The leather is pocked and has taken on the curve of my thigh. The poem is from Walt Whitman. I copy only what I need.

  But of all things to do last, poetry is a barren choice. Deciphering other men’s riddles while the world is full of procreation and war. A man should go out swinging an axe. Instead, I shall go out in a coffee shop.

  But how can any man leave this world with honor? Despite anything he does, it grows corrupt around him. It fills with locks and sirens. A man walks into a store now and the microwaves announce his entry; when he leaves, they make electronic peeks into his coat pockets, his trousers. Who doesn’t feel like a thief? I see a policeman now, any policeman, and I feel a fright. And the things I’ve done wrong in my life haven’t been crimes. Crimes of the heart perhaps, but nothing against the state. My soul may turn black but I can wear white trousers at any meeting of men. Have I loved my wife? At one time, yes—in rages and torrents. I’ve been covered by the pimples of ecstasy and have rooted in the mud of despair; and I’ve lived for months, for whole years now, as mindless of Francine as a tree of its mosses.

  And this is what kills us, this mindlessness. We sit across the tablecloth now with our medicines between us, little balls and oblongs. We sit, sit. This has become our view of each other, a tableboard apart. We sit.

  “Again?” I say.

  “Last night.”

  We are at the table. Francine is making a twisting motion with her fingers. She coughs, brushes her cheek with her forearm, stands suddenly so that the table bumps and my medicines move in the cup.

  “Francine,” I say.

  The half-light of dawn is showing me things outside the window: silhouettes, our maple, the eaves of our neighbor’s garage. Francine moves and stands against the glass, hugging her shoulders.

  “You’re not telling me something,” I say.

  She sits and makes her pills into a circle again, then into a line. Then she is crying.

  I come around the table, but she gets up before I reach her and leaves the kitchen. I stand there. In a moment I hear a drawer open in the living room. She moves things around, then shuts it again. “Sit down,” she says. When she returns she sits at the other side of the table. She puts two folded sheets of paper onto the table. “I wasn’t hiding them,” she says.

  “What weren’t you hiding?”

  “These,” she says. “He leaves them.

  “They say he loves me.”

  “Francine.”

  “They’re inside the windows in the morning.” She picks one up, unfolds it. Then she reads:

  “Ah, I remember well (and how can I

  But evermore remember well) when first …”

  She pauses, squint-eyed, working her lips. It is a pause of only faint understanding. Then she continues.

  “Our flame began, when scarce we knew what was

  The flame we felt.…”

  When she finishes she refolds the paper precisely.

  “That’s it,” she says. “That’s one of them.”

  At the aquarium I sit, circled by glass and, behind it, the senseless eyes of fish. I have never written a word of my own poetry but can recite the verse of others. This is the culmination of a life. Coryphaena hippurus, says the plaque on the dolphin’s tank, words more beautiful than any of my own. The dolphin circles, circles, approaches with alarming speed, but takes no notice of, if he even sees, my hands. I wave them in front of his tank. What must he think has become of the sea? He turns and his slippery proboscis nudges the glass. I am every part sore from life.

  Ah, silver shrine, here will I take my rest

  After so many hours of toil and quest,

  A famished pilgrim,—saved by miracle.

  There is nothing noble for either of us here, nothing between us, and no miracles. I am better off drinking coffee. Any fluid refills the blood. The counter boy knows me and later at the café he pours the cup, most of a dollar’s worth. Refills are free but my heart hurts no different from a bone, bruised or cracked. This amazes.

  Francine is amazed by other things. She is mystified, thrown beam ends by the romance. She reads me the poems now at breakfast, one by one. I sit. I roll my pills. “Another came last night,” she says, and I see her eyebrows rise. “Another this morning.” She reads them as if every word is a surprise. Her tongue touches teeth, shows between lips. These lips are dry. She reads:

  “Kiss me as if you made believe

  You were not sure, this eve,

  How my face, your flower, had pursed

  Its petals up.”

  That night she shows me the windowsill, second story, rimmed with snow, where she finds the poems. We open the glass. We lean into the air. There is ice below us, sheets of it on the trellis, needles hanging from the drainwork.

  “Where do you find them?”

  “Outside,” she says. “Folded, on the lip.”

  “In the morning?”

  “Always in the morning.”

  “The police should know about this.”

  “What will they be able to do?”

  I step away from the sill. She leans out again, surveying her lands, which are the yard’s-width spit of crusted ice along our neighbor’s chain-link and the three maples out front, now lost their leaves. She peers as if she expects this man to appear. An icy wind comes inside. “Think,” she says. “Think. He could come from anywhere.”

  * * *

  One night in February, a month after this began, she asks me to stay awake and stand guard until the morning. It is almost spring. The earth has reappeared in patches. During the day, at the borders of yards and driveways, I see glimpses of brown—though I know I could be mistaken. I come home early that night, before dusk, and when darkness falls I move a chair by the window downstairs. I draw apart the outer curtain and raise the shade. Francine brings me a pot of tea. She turns out the light and pauses next to me, and as she does, her hand on the chair’s backbrace, I am so struck by the proximity of elements—of the night, of the teapot’s heat, of the sounds of water outside—that I consider speaking. I want to ask her what has become of us, what has made our breathed air so sorry now, and loveless. But the timing is wrong and in a moment she turns and climbs the stairs. I look out into the night. Later, I hear the closet shut, then our bed creak.

/>   There is nothing to see outside, nothing to hear. This I know. I let hours pass. Behind the window I imagine fish moving down to greet me: broomtail grouper, surfperch, sturgeon with their prehistoric rows of scutes. It is almost possible to see them. The night is full of shapes and bits of light. In it the moon rises, losing the colors of the horizon, so that by early morning it is high and pale. Frost has made a ring around it.

  A ringed moon above, and I am thinking back on things. What have I regretted in my life? Plenty of things, mistakes enough to fill the car showroom, then a good deal of the back lot. I’ve been a man of gains and losses. What gains? My marriage, certainly, though it has been no knee-buckling windfall but more like a split decision in the end, a stock risen a few points since bought. I’ve certainly enjoyed certain things about the world, too. These are things gone over and over again by the writers and probably enjoyed by everybody who ever lived. Most of them involve air. Early morning air, air after a rainstorm, air through a car window. Sometimes I think the cerebrum is wasted and all we really need is the lower brain, which I’ve been told is what makes the lungs breathe and the heart beat and what lets us smell pleasant things. What about the poetry? That’s another split decision, maybe going the other way if I really made a tally. It’s made me melancholy in old age, sad when if I’d stuck with motor homes and the national league standings I don’t think I would have been rooting around in regret and doubt at this point. Nothing wrong with sadness, but this is not the real thing—not the death of a child but the feelings of a college student reading Don Quixote on a warm afternoon before going out to the lake.

  Now, with Francine upstairs, I wait for a night prowler. He will not appear. This I know, but the window glass is ill-blown and makes moving shadows anyway, shapes that change in the wind’s rattle. I look out and despite myself am afraid.

  Before me, the night unrolls. Now the tree leaves turn yellow in moonshine. By two or three, Francine sleeps, but I get up anyway and change into my coat and hat. The books weigh against my chest. I don gloves, scarf, galoshes. Then I climb the stairs and go into our bedroom, where she is sleeping. On the far side of the bed I see her white hair and beneath the blankets the uneven heave of her chest. I watch the bedcovers rise. She is probably dreaming at this moment. Though we have shared this bed for most of a lifetime I cannot guess what her dreams are about. I step next to her and touch the sheets where they lie across her neck.

  “Wake up,” I whisper. I touch her cheek, and her eyes open. I know this though I cannot really see them, just the darkness of their sockets.

  “Is he there?”

  “No.”

  “Then what’s the matter?”

  “Nothing’s the matter,” I say. “But I’d like to go for a walk.”

  “You’ve been outside,” she says. “You saw him, didn’t you?”

  “I’ve been at the window.”

  “Did you see him?”

  “No. There’s no one there.”

  “Then why do you want to walk?” In a moment she is sitting aside the bed, her feet in slippers. “We don’t ever walk,” she says.

  I am warm in all my clothing. “I know we don’t,” I answer. I turn my arms out, open my hands toward her. “But I would like to. I would like to walk in air that is so new and cold.”

  She peers up at me. “I haven’t been drinking,” I say. I bend at the waist, and though my head spins, I lean forward enough so that the effect is of a bow. “Will you come with me?” I whisper. “Will you be queen of this crystal night?” I recover from my bow, and when I look up again she has risen from the bed, and in another moment she has dressed herself in her wool robe and is walking ahead of me to the stairs.

  Outside, the ice is treacherous. Snow has begun to fall and our galoshes squeak and slide, but we stay on the ploughed walkway long enough to leave our block and enter a part of the neighborhood where I have never been. Ice hangs from the lamps. We pass unfamiliar houses and unfamiliar trees, street signs I have never seen, and as we walk the night begins to change. It is becoming liquor. The snow is banked on either side of the walk, ploughed into hillocks at the corners. My hands are warming from the exertion. They are the hands of a younger man now, someone else’s fingers in my gloves. They tingle. We take ten minutes to cover a block but as we move through this neighborhood my ardor mounts. A car approaches and I wave, a boatman’s salute, because here we are together on these rare and empty seas. We are nighttime travelers. He flashes his headlamps as he passes, and this fills me to the gullet with celebration and bravery. The night sings to us. I am Bluebeard now, Lindbergh, Genghis Khan.

  No, I am not.

  I am an old man. My blood is dark from hypoxia, my breaths singsong from disease. It is only the frozen night that is splendid. In it we walk, stepping slowly, bent forward. We take steps the length of table forks. Francine holds my elbow.

  I have mean secrets and small dreams, no plans greater than where to buy groceries and what rhymes to read next, and by the time we reach our porch again my foolishness has subsided. My knees and elbows ache. They ache with a mortal ache, tired flesh, the cartilage gone sandy with time. I don’t have the heart for dreams. We undress in the hallway, ice in the ends of our hair, our coats stiff from cold. Francine turns down the thermostat. Then we go upstairs and she gets into her side of the bed and I get into mine.

  It is dark. We lie there for some time, and then, before dawn, I know she is asleep. It is cold in our bedroom. As I listen to her breathing I know my life is coming to an end. I cannot warm myself. What I would like to tell my wife is this:

  What the

  imagination

  seizes

  as beauty must be truth. What holds you

  to what you see of me is

  that grasp alone.

  But I do not say anything. Instead I roll in the bed, reach across, and touch her, and because she is surprised she turns to me.

  When I kiss her the lips are dry, cracking against mine, unfamiliar as the ocean floor. But then the lips give. They part. I am inside her mouth, and there, still, hidden from the world, as if ruin had forgotten a part, it is wet—Lord! I have the feeling of a miracle. Her tongue comes forward. I do not know myself then, what man I am, who I lie with in embrace. I can barely remember her beauty. She touches my chest and I bite lightly on her lip, spread moisture to her cheek and then kiss there. She makes something like a sigh. “Frank,” she says. “Frank.” We are lost now in seas and deserts. My hand finds her fingers and grips them, bone and tendon, fragile things.

  Dog 1, Dog 2

  NICK EARLS

  You are unsure of all of this, but maybe that’s just you.

  Ever since the Dean lined you up for The Influence, If Any, Of Maternal Low-Dose Piroxicam On The Development Of The Sublingual Fat Pad In Fetal Marmosets as your doctoral thesis, you have realized that the world progresses in particularly small steps, some of them (some of the biggest) backward and a great many sideways in screaming lunatic tangents, arms flapping, lips slathering, eyes bulging with the glee of infinitesimal discovery. Such, you feel, is your work with, for, and on behalf of the marmosets. They didn’t thank you. Their eyes bulged only with a feral, shuffling ignorance. Ignorance of your intent, ignorance of their antenatal exposure to piroxicam and its implications (if any), ignorance even of their own sublingual fat pads. Science barely thanked you either. It gave you your doctorate, one paper, one lecture, and a one-way ticket to more of this.

  So now you are here, at Kranfield Pharmaceuticals, with perhaps your only progress the fact that you no longer work under the insipid gaze of marmosets. This is not an insipid lab. It is under the control of a man called Robert who is far from insipid. He is, in fact, a complete shit.

  He seems to ooze when he moves, and he has great difficulty controlling flatulence. At times, when you are updating him about your work, his cheeks redden, his eyes bulge (though not with the innocence of marmosets), and he stares a good distance away, maneuvering uncomfortab
ly on his lab stool. It is as though he is carefully digesting what you are telling him and, realizing its worthlessness, he is about to shit it in front of you. You go out of your way to make your reports hard, nuggety, pointed, just to put pain on his face as he purges himself of your cleverness.

  All of this is part of the unspoken collective consciousness of the lab. That which has been spoken allows a disgruntled worker to refer to a bad day as one that would really give you the Roberts.

  The man is a shit, and though it’s not just your problem you feel it more keenly than most, as the only other person in the lab with a doctorate.

  The main thrust of your present work involves dogs. Someone at Kranfield has taken the familiar piroxicam molecule (a fine drug and a great earner, but, regrettably, someone else’s), fiddled with a side-chain, and slapped a patent on the end result. You have to prove that it’s safe for humans, or, at least, unlikely to be downright dangerous. You do this with dogs, and in increasingly large doses.

  Now, dogs aren’t cheap, so you can’t do it with thousands. Unfortunately, you have a small enough number to name them, chat to them, invent personalities for them with the help of the technicians. Dog One becomes Rowan, after your large and lazy brother-in-law; Dog Two becomes AB, following his excellence in specific physical tests, the fact that he’s an all-round good bloke with the respect of the whole team, and a general feeling that he would be more than willing to stand up to the most venomous eight-foot West Indian fast bowler, and with a straight bat too. And so it goes.

  You are clearly bored with the work, but perhaps you should have thought this naming business through. You should have learned all the necessary lessons about scientific detachment around the time you were snipping the tongues from newborn marmosets. But revulsion soon gave way to statistics, writing, proofreading, revising, waiting, waiting, waiting. And then word from the Dean that the examiners were giving the thumbs-up.