CENSUS_What Lurks Beneath

by Marshall Cobb

  Dave absently noted the gaze of several others in the room and chalked it up to a mix of boredom and a general disdain for strangers—partic- ularly those from the big city. He strode past the glares and walked up to the small chrome bell perched on the shelf which jutted out beneath the frosted windows. A handwritten note that read “ring for service”

  was taped to the counter via a generous application of scotch tape. Dave followed instructions and rang the bell, which was so loud that he im- mediately tried to cup it with his hand to mute it.

  The large frosted-glass pane on the left side suddenly slid sideways. The receptionist glared at the bell under his hand, then at Dave. “Can I help you?”

  Dave took his hand off the bell, and silently wondered why it was there if it elicited anger every time someone used it. “Hi. Yes. I’d like to see the doctor?”

  The receptionist did a version of looking him up and down that would have led to a lawsuit had their genders been reversed. “Do you have an appointment?”

  “No.” He lied, a little. “I was sent over by the hospital.”

  A murmur went through several of those in the waiting room behind him, who apparently viewed him as a potential threat to their appoint- ment. Dave ignored them and pressed on.

  “If I wait is there a chance I can get in to see him?”

  The receptionist almost rolled her eyes. “He is a she, and I first need to verify your insurance.”

  Dave felt the ears of everyone in the room listening in and pondered why the privacy laws

  regarding medical history hadn’t addressed the waiting room. “I don’t have insurance right now but I can pay cash.”

  She nodded and magically produced a clipboard with a thick stack of forms.

  “I’ll need to see your driver’s license, and while I’m running this through, please complete the new patient and medical history forms.”

  Dave fished out his wallet and grudgingly handed over his license. He’d hoped for complete anonymity but supposed withholding his ID would generate too much suspicion. He grabbed his laptop bag with one hand and the clipboard in the other as he turned to see who in the room looked the most interested in having company. There were no takers.

  Over an hour later Dave perched on the edge of the elevated bed/obser- vation table in room #5—the thick white paper crinkling beneath him. He checked his phone and noted that another five emails had just come in and again rubbed his head.

  A light knock on the door surprised him, and he looked up from his phone to see the door open. A lady that looked to be no older than thirty strode in and immediately frowned as she saw his phone before him. Her gaze then went to the sign prominently placed on the wall across from Dave that specifically forbade the use of cell phones in the room. Dave followed her gaze and made no comment as he sat up and slid the phone into his pocket.

  Her frown dimmed a little, and she extended her hand as she shut the door behind her and looked at the clipboard in her hand. “I’m Dr. Mad- dux. How can I help you Mr. Reynolds?”

  Dave rose from the table and shook her hand. “Hi Doctor. Thank you for working me in.” He paused as he thought through what comes next. “I’m having problems with headaches.”

  “Um hum.” She flipped through the multiple pages in the clipboard deal- ing with his medical history. “It doesn’t appear that you’ve noted any- thing related in your medical history.” She let the pages fall back to the clipboard and looked him in the eye. “How long have you had these headaches?”

  Dave absently rubbed his head. “It’s actually like one long headache and I’ve had it for over two months.”

  She looked back at her clipboard. “Based on the readings the nurse just took you have borderline high-blood pressure. Are you under any kind of unusual stress?”

  Dave involuntarily let out what would normally be a short snort, but it got away from him and ended up being significant, and with a touch of mania. The doctor, who was significantly shorter, looked up at him with concern.

  “I take that as a yes?”

  “Sorry, yes, but then again unusual stress is normal for me.” “Your job?”

  “Yes. And my home life.” Dave wasn’t sure why he volunteered that last element, but it was out there now, and there’s no taking it back. To his relief she let the comment pass without making note of it.

  “You don’t have a regular physician?”

  “I usually end up in the emergency clinic by my house a couple of times a year for a bad cold but, no, no regular doctor.”

  “And since you live in the Houston area why are you here today?” “Work. I’m here about every three months.”

  “Are you getting enough sleep? Do you feel fatigued?”

  Dave snorts again but this time it’s the normal kind. She jots that down as a yes and moves on.

  “Any nausea or vomiting?”

  “No.” He immediately thought back to the significant bout of nausea and vomiting that he’d just recently experienced, then dismissed the idea of correcting his response, as all of that was caused by the wriggling grasshopper remnants he’d had in his ear. Probably. The passing out for five hours thereafter wasn’t exactly normal, but he’d been tired, and he’d already indicated that he’d had trouble with fatigue.

  She stared at him closely as he went through this internal debate, very curious as to what was going on behind his eyes, which betrayed a lot more than a simple no.

  “Have you had trouble with dizziness?” “No.”

  “Seizures?” “No.”

  “Memory?”

  Dave paused. “Maybe a little, but I can’t tell if that’s just getting older.” She jotted down a question mark and pushed on.

  “Are you experiencing any kind of alterations to your senses or anything else that stands out to you as unusual?”

  Dave pondered his answer here as well. “You mean am I seeing things that may not actually be there?”

  Doctor Maddux looks slightly alarmed. “I was asking more about changes in your sensory perceptions—if your sense of touch feels any different, if things now smell differently than they had previously.” She pauses. “Are you saying that you’re experiencing hallucinations?”

  Dave realized that he had accidentally gone into the deep end of the pool. Now it was his turn to stare intently, evaluating just how much he trusted the idea of doctor-patient confidentiality.

  Did I imagine the storm of grasshoppers?

  Are there dark shapes lurking behind my family in the game camera shots? What about the deer in the game camera?

  How much of that horrific sequence was real—all of it, right? And the ants. What the hell is going on with the ants?

  Do I bring up the power lines running across the property and the H2S ap- parently bubbling underneath it?

  Doctor Maddux continued to stare at him with a growing level of con- cern during his internal debate that felt to him like a mere moment, but in reality transpired over a couple of seconds. She opened her mouth to prod him with an additional question. In the end it was her serious nature that invited his trust—to a degree. He decided to give a version of what could be the truth. There was no reason to say anything more at this point. “I’ve had an extremely stressful couple of months. I’m not sleeping well and I now have what appears to be a permanent headache. I’m not ‘hallucinating’ but I know enough about myself to realize that something is off.”

  She nodded, while jotting down another question mark. “And I see you rubbing the side of your head. Is that where it hurts?”

  Dave nodded and she motioned for him to sit back down on the table. Her fingers were cold and methodical as she searched through the hair above his ear and then probed his scalp. She then migrated back to his face, where she used a light to probe his eyes.

  “I don’t feel a bump or see anything exceptional here.” She makes another notation. “Often pain like this is transitory.”

  “I’m more than happy for it to go away, but I thought it might
make sense to check it out.”

  Her right foot, which was housed in a thick, rubber-soled shoe, began to tap impatiently. “How exactly would you like it checked out?”

  “An MRI?”

  She looked at him quizzically. “That’s quite a leap.”

  She looked again at the form he had completed. “I don’t see any history of cancer in your immediate family. Is there something else I should be aware of ?”

  Dave wasn’t expecting this kind of grilling for something that from his point of view was inconsequential to the referring doctor. She’d write him the prescription and he’d get the MRI—what skin was it off her back to let him get on his way? He decided to play along and give her something that, conveniently enough, was true.

  “I’m sorry. I was in a hurry when I filled that out and must have missed that question. I lost both my grandparents to cancer. My grandfather was just a little older than I am now when he died.”

  “Grandparents aren’t considered immediate family but where cancer is concerned it might well be relevant. Which side of your family?”

  “My father’s.”

  “What kind of cancer?” “Lung and lymphoma.”

  Doctor Maddux took a step back, made a few additional notes and then chewed absently on the end of her pen. She then looked up and held his gaze. “I don’t like this. It is to say the least unusual that a patient from halfway across the state walks into my office and essentially demands an MRI based on a headache.”

  Dave offered nothing in return. He had either wasted an afternoon, or she was going to give him what he wanted—but talking about it further

  wasn’t likely to help. He attempted to look earnest, and gave in to the compulsion to rub his temple again for further support.

  She held his gaze for a moment, then flipped a few pages farther into the stack of papers. “How is it that you are without health insurance Mr. Reynolds?”

  “I have cash, and I wasn’t aware that I was required to use insurance for medical care.”

  She continued to ponder him, but felt she better understood his moti- vation. Other patients, on occasion, were concerned about hiding their condition from the employer, or their family. “I’ll write the prescription for the MRI, which will not be cheap, and I’ll see you to discuss the re- sults once they are available. But if the results are negative, which may very well be the case, I want your word that you will find a doctor in Houston and have a full physical. I also want your word that you’ll scale back on whatever it is that you’re doing Mr. Reynolds. You look tired, not necessarily sick.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN: Family

  Dinner

  That night Marilyn Reynolds busily chopped a small pile of onions on the cutting board before her into increasingly smaller pieces. She was not particularly detail-oriented in many facets of her life, but took pride in producing fragments of onion smaller than an individual grain of rice. Part of this effort came from the fact that neither Dave nor Adam liked onions. Particularly when cooked, these small pieces avoided detection, and the inevitable rejection of the meal. Unlike the male members of her family, Marilyn enjoyed onions.

  A skillet of ground turkey simmered behind her on the gas stove. She missed ground beef, but since Dave wouldn’t eat it she did the best she could with turkey.

  She was interrupted from her work by a loud thud from the ceiling. She put down the large knife and stared up at the ceiling. “Adam, stop jump- ing off your bed!”

  There was no response to this edict. “Adam! Do you hear me?”

  From what sounded like a mile away Adam cheerfully responded, “I wasn’t jumping off the bed, Mom.”

  Marilyn grabbed a dish towel off the counter and busily wiped the onion residue off her hands. Still calling out to the ceiling, she replied, “I’m not

  going to play this game tonight Adam. Your father will be home soon and you need to clean up your room.”

  She strode across the kitchen and began to ascend the stairs. She was only a few steps up when Adam quickly course-corrected and called out, “I wasn’t jumping from the bed mom. I was jumping from the book- shelf.”

  Marilyn stopped, one hand on the banister, and stared at the empty land- ing above her. “No jumping off anything Adam! And clean up your room!”

  “I think Dad’s here mom.”

  A low grumbling could be heard over the simmering meat as Dave’s truck rolled into the driveway.

  Marilyn turned around and headed back down the stairs to the kitchen. Dave was already walking in the side door by the time she was back to her onions. Sampson, also quite eager, burst into the house and rushed over to greet her. A small cloud of dog hair hung in the air above and behind Sampson.

  Marilyn bent down to greet Sampson. Dave dropped one pile of gear in the breezeway and then went back to the truck for another load. He came back in, lowered his computer bag and a duffle bag to the floor and then sniffed the air. “Is something burning?”

  “Shit!” Marilyn stopped petting Sampson and hustled back to the stove, where the turkey had moved well past the simmering stage. She turned down the heat, grabbed the wooden spoon laying on the counter, then realized that her hands were covered in dog hair. “Dave, can you grab this?”

  She went over to the sink to wash her hands while Dave strode in to move the skillet to a cold burner and continue stirring the now well- done turkey—some of which was stuck to the bottom of the skillet.

  “Mom! I heard that!” Adam cried out from his perch upstairs.

  “Yeah, Mom,” Dave said with a smile on his face, “what’s with the lan- guage?”

  Marilyn dried her hands on the dish towel and glared at him for a mo- ment, then relented and held her hand out for the spoon. “You look tired Dave. Are you getting any sleep?”

  Dave handed her the spoon and kissed her gently on her cheek. “No.”

  Marilyn deftly eased him aside and continued to stir the turkey. “Well, you can go to bed right after dinner.” She paused and pondered it further, “Why didn’t you just stay out at the farm one more night and do the drive tomorrow?”

  Dave, walking back to his pile of debris in the breezeway, retorted dryly, “Yeah, right. I’ll just go to bed and the 150 emails that collect in my inbox will just go away.” He bent down to pick up his laptop bag and walked it over to the kitchen table. He left her second question unanswered, but inwardly reflected on the fact that staying out at the farm was no longer a restful event.

  He started to pull his laptop out of the bag when Marilyn interjected, “Nope. No laptops at the dinner table.”

  He stared at her to see if she would relent. She did not. He stuffed the laptop back into its bag, which he walked over to the counter. “Onions? Really?”

  Marilyn realized that her secret had been exposed and quickly moved to scrape them into the skillet with the meat. She moved the skillet back onto the active burner and replied, “Oh, you can’t even taste them.”

  Adam walked into the room and stared at the mass of chopped onions atop the skillet—all of which were just about eye-level to him. “If you can’t even taste it, why do we need to put them in?”

  “Yeah, Mom,” Dave piled on as he held his arms open for Adam, “why do we need onions at all?” Adam raced across the kitchen and jumped into Dave’s arms. Dave squeezed him while Sampson jumped up into the air excitedly around them, sending more clouds of dog hair into the air.

  Adam turned from his perch to stare at Marilyn. “And, Mom, why did you say a bad word?”

  Marilyn turned from the partially burned meat in the skillet to take stock of the cloud of dog hair, the bags laying in the breezeway, the son she knew had not cleaned his room, and the husband who looked like he hadn’t slept in a week. “I can’t think of a good reason Adam.”

  She looked down to see that Sampson was licking the wooden spoon at her side. She sighed and tossed the spoon into the sink. “Nope. No reason.”

  A few hours later Dave leaned down to kiss Adam goodnight.
He was woefully behind on the work front, but he hadn’t seen his family in days and decided that the emails were just going to have to wait. Adam hap- pily accepted the kiss, and then pulled Dave down to his level using the collar of his shirt.

  “Daddy, one more book.”

  Dave carefully unhooked Adams fingers from his collar, kissed him one more time and then pulled away. “Tomorrow night, okay?” He took a quick look at the clock on the wall. “8:45? Are you kidding me?”

  He tickled Adam’s belly and incited a round of giggling. “You’ve got to get to sleep little man!” Dave went for one more quick tickle and Adam’s giggling amped up another five levels.

  From downstairs Marilyn cried out, “No tickling Dave! Don’t get him all riled up!”

  Both Adam and Dave froze for a moment. They shared a guilty look, and then broke into a fresh round of giggling. Dave tried to regain com- posure but Adam’s giggle was infectious. He covered his mouth and slowly backed to the door. He wagged the index finger of his free hand at Adam, but it had the opposite effect as the laughter kept coming.

  “David!!!” Marilyn’s scream scared them both. Dave clicked off the light and partially closed the door.

  Dave whispered, “Good night little man.”

  Adam, still fighting the giggles, waved back at him and settled further into his pillow.