Flawless

by Joshua Spanogle

  “Fascinating.”

  “Uncle Tony is ‘those people.’” She touched the corner of her glasses again. “I didn’t even know he was involved until Dr. Fang mentioned it. We always knew that Uncle Tony had some things on the side, but we didn’t know what. Anyway, after that, I was scared. I’d been off work for a month by then. I went up to Napa, took Tim with me, tried to disappear. I mean, my face was a mess and who could I complain to about it? I knew what I’d done was illegal. I was being threatened. I was scared. But my face was getting worse—I was scared. I ended up going to a Mohs surgeon, who cut out the tumor.”

  Mohs micrographic surgery is a tissue-sparing procedure for removing skin cancer. The surgeon narrowly excises the tumor, then looks at it under the microscope to see if he got it all. If not, he cuts again, looks at the scope again. He repeats the process until no cancer is visible at the margins.

  “He got it all?” I asked.

  “He said so. Great, right? Clear margins. Maybe with makeup, I could even go back to TV.”

  She tried to smile, but the scarred right lip, the tumor-infested left, pulled to a snarl, couldn’t pull it off.

  “When did the other tumors develop?” I asked.

  “A few weeks after the first one was removed.”

  “But you didn’t go back to the surgeon? To remove them?”

  “No.”

  “Why?”

  “They found out about the first surgery. ‘Those people,’” she said bitterly. “So they took my boy. They took Tim.”

  76

  THE SUN HAD DROPPED ANOTHER inch in the sky, the shadows cast by the trees were lengthening, and Dorothy Zhang said she was beginning to hurt.

  “I didn’t have time to get the painkillers,” she explained as we made our way down through the canyon to the car.

  “They’re in the sink at your apartment,” I told her. In a grand-old-doctor sort of way, I added, “The tumor wraps around and invades the nerves. That’s where the pain comes from.”

  “I don’t care where the pain comes from,” she snapped.

  There are times, I admit, when I forget there’s a reason not everyone in the world went to medical school. What doctors think is fascinating—causes, mechanisms, pathogenicity—is, for most people, beside the point. They hurt, they want relief.

  At that point, though, I was not what Dorothy needed. I had a DEA number, but had not gone through the bureaucratic labyrinth to get licensed in California. Being able to write prescriptions for my nonexistent patients hadn’t seemed like a priority. Now, however, it would have been nice to write a script or two. It would have been nice to relieve someone’s pain.

  “We can’t go to your apartment,” I said. I thought of Brooke for a moment, then of Ravi Singh. “I have a friend who can write prescriptions. What’s most effective?”

  “OxyContin worked best.”

  “I’ll call him.”

  I rummaged for the cell phone, but she put her hand on my arm. “No. It’s okay.”

  “I thought you said—”

  “It hurts. But the drugs make me fuzzy and I can’t…I need to be able to think.”

  “You need to deal with the pain,” I insisted. I felt the overwhelming need to protect this woman, to offer her relief in whatever way I could. Maybe it was that whole Nate-only-likes-sick-people thing; maybe it was something else. “I’m here now, right? We’ll work tog—”

  “You don’t understand.” She removed her hand from my arm, and started again down the hill. “I think they’re very scared.”

  “Good. That’s good.”

  “No, Nate, it’s not.”

  Since I could now see, and since Dorothy was adjusting to a world without narcotics, I drove her car. She kept touching her face, massaging it lightly here and there. She hadn’t taken her sunglasses off until long after the day’s bright light had faded. Half a dozen small tumors spread out from the corners of her eyes.

  For the first time, I noticed her fingers—long, fine, the skin beautifully maintained. Her nails were painted pink; I caught another whiff of perfume. Strange, I thought, that we grab on to these insignificant things to keep ourselves grounded. Long ago, I cared for a patient who had the bad luck of getting squamous cell carcinoma on her forehead. Normally, this was a very curable form of cancer, but hers had tracked along a branch of the trigeminal nerve and had gotten into her brain. The surgeon who tried to remove the cancer—who chased it across her forehead and along the nerve—finally gave up. Or, at least he gave up trying to cure her. Even though the woman had a life expectancy of less than a year, she insisted the surgeon give her a cosmetic reworking. And so she endured yet another surgery—flaps, skin grafts—just to look presentable in her final months of life.

  So, little things matter. Pink nail polish matters.

  “Let me call my friend,” I told Dorothy. “There’s no reason—”

  “No,” she said, and turned away from me.

  We found a cheap motel on University Avenue in Berkeley. Dorothy went to the room while I walked a few doors down to grab some Chinese takeout. When I returned, I saw that Dorothy had laid out a couple of towels on one of the beds; a roll of toilet paper perched next to the towels. Her hat and sunglasses were off, and I could see hints of the beautiful face—the cheekbones, the almond eyes—under the roiling flesh.

  “Don’t spill,” she said, “or you’re going to be toweling off with hoisin sauce.”

  We sat cross-legged with the food between us. The boxes canted dangerously on the lumpy bed; not only was I worried about toweling off with hoisin, I was worried about sleeping in it. I readjusted the moo shu.

  “We should get your car,” Dorothy said.

  “It’s outside your place. Probably not wise to get it just yet.”

  “Probably not.”

  Expertly, Dorothy maneuvered a sizable bite of beef and broccoli into her mouth with the chopsticks. As she chewed, soy sauce and broth rolled down her chin on the left, where the tumor prevented her lips from closing. She ripped off a piece of toilet paper and daubed. The crumpled toilet paper then went to the floor, to a growing mound of white dappled with brown and tan. We had worked our way through the restaurant’s napkins in the first five minutes of the meal.

  Another stream of saliva escaped her mouth. Frustrated, she grabbed again at the TP.

  “This is so disgusting,” she said. “I can usually control it, but—”

  “Hey,” I said. “It’s fine.”

  “It’s not fine. It definitely is not fine.” She threw her chopsticks on the towel. “I can’t even eat with somebody. I can’t even eat.” She rested her elbows on her knees, gripped her hair in her hands. I reached out a hand to touch her, but she flinched away from me.

  “You need to go back to surgery,” I said. She shook her head. “The Moh’s surgery worked, right? No recurrence?” She didn’t answer. “We need to find everyone who has this, get them to the surgeon. It can be taken care of.”

  “I can’t. They can’t.”

  I felt my frustration spike. Simple solution, right? You have a disease, there’s a cure. Just get it done. It’s like watching a guy with two bypasses, on twelve different heart meds, and a train wreck of an echocardiogram continue to smoke two packs a day.

  “Dorothy, this is killing you, and there’s no reason for it. I know about the Mings, I know people are scared, but come on, if everybody came forward at once…”

  She looked up at me. The harsh yellow light on her tumors inked shadows across her face. “And what if not everyone comes forward? What if it’s only you, and you’re out there in the open and your kid doesn’t come home from school one day? Nobody’s going to do anything, Nate. Why can’t you see that?”

  “We have the pictures,” I insisted. “Paul’s photos.”

  “I had the photos, too, Nate. I had names. That’s why my apartment was wrecked. You know how much good they did me and how stupid the bastards were who came to my apartment? The names were all fake.
I followed up on each one of them and every one was a lie. Come on, Nate, what do you think the pictures were for? The ones Paul had? What do you think they were for?”

  “You wanted to do what I’m saying,” I said weakly. “You wanted everyone to come forward.”

  “It was a stupid and naive plan that Paul and I had to expose this whole thing. I was going to do a huge story on them, take the whole scam to the police or Sixty Minutes. But it never worked out. We didn’t even really know who was doing this—”

  “Your uncle—”

  “Okay, my uncle’s involved, but how? It’s not like I can give him a call and say, ‘Hey, Uncle Tony, what’s going on?’ It’s gone too far for that—they don’t trust me and I certainly don’t trust them. And now that Paul’s…Now that he’s gone, I can’t do anything. I can’t go poking around. I’m a freak, Nate. Just looking at me scares people off.”

  “Paul was killed because of this?”

  “Of course he was!” she said furiously. “What kind of people do you think we are? We tried to do what you’re suggesting. I sat outside the clinic, waited for anyone in a big hat and sunglasses or anyone who kept her face to the ground, anyone who looked like me. When I found them and they saw I had the fibrosarcoma, they were willing to talk. Good little reporter that I am, I built rapport quickly. Some of them let me take their pictures, as long as I swore to them they would be safe. If I pestered enough, some even gave me their name. But they were scared out of their minds; Dr. Fang had given his warnings about their safety, about their families’ safety. When the names they gave me started turning out to be false, Paul and I didn’t know what to do. That’s why he contacted you.”

  “The Mings,” I said, feeling sick. “I spoke with them.”

  “And now you know why they were murdered.” Dorothy said it bluntly. “And everyone who has what I have knows exactly why they were murdered.”

  I placed my chopsticks on the towel, hoisin sauce staining the white fabric brown. I pictured Beatrice Ming, her gaping black hole of a mouth. I thought about Ravi and me stumbling into a world Beatrice and her husband were trying so hard to protect, and destroying it. I understood now why they’d left the hospital. I wished they’d left sooner. I wished I had never seen them.

  “What’s the deal with you and Paul?”

  “Does that really matter?”

  “You tell me.”

  She sat up straight and, for a moment, I thought she was about to answer. Instead, she grabbed a fortune cookie, broke it in half. I took my cookie. Dorothy tossed the broken pieces to the towel and read the little slip of paper inside. She didn’t speak immediately, so I read mine aloud: “You may have some interest in travel, the arts, or business. Wonderful,” I said, and ate the cookie. “That’s the dullest fortune I’ve ever read. What’s yours say? You may possibly be reading a fortune from a fortune cookie?”

  Dorothy crumpled her fortune, threw it onto the towel. “Are you done?” she demanded.

  I said I was.

  “Then let’s clean this up.”

  We began to break down, separate, and consolidate the remains of our picnic. “How well did you know Paul?” Dorothy asked.

  “I hadn’t seen him in ten years. I hadn’t even talked to him. How well did you know him?”

  Dorothy got off the bed, walked to the sink, which was set in a slab of wood and formica at the end of the room opposite the door. She began washing her hands. The remnants of her fortune cookie lay like a cracked snail on the white towel; the little piece of paper was there amongst the wreckage. I put the broken cookie into my mouth and read the fortune. Beware false friends, it said.

  Dorothy shut off the water and dried her hands. She turned, leaned back against the sink. She crossed her arms in front of her, as if she were protecting something. “Then you didn’t know Paul was having trouble with his wife.”

  The wife. Diane, was it? The woman I let die. That phrase of Dorothy’s—“having trouble with his wife”—brought Diane back to me. I imagined the fights, the tense silences suffused with Mahler floating from the cheap radio in the kitchen. In that moment, she seemed very alive and I began to fill in the blanks on a woman I’d never really met: readying the two kids for school, crawling into bed next to Murph, the PTA meeting the night she was killed. Diane.

  Then the blood covering her body. The last breath.

  “Paul and I met at a charity event in the city,” Dorothy said. “An educational foundation the TV station and Paul’s company both supported. His wife wasn’t there because of something to do with the kids. My husband wasn’t there because I no longer had a husband. Paul and I just started talking—”

  “Ah, Christ—” I did not really want to think this about Murph, about the husband whose wife now lay in a grave beside him. I did not want to think this about the Boy Scout.

  A look of real displeasure dropped like a veil over her mutilated face. “One thing led to another.”

  “When did it start?”

  “Nine months ago.”

  “When did it end?”

  Her face had gone slack, as if something were shutting down. “When he died. They took my boy and then they took the man I loved.”

  This was the time to be sympathetic, to walk over and comfort this woman who’d lost her kid, her man, her career, her identity. Her face, for God’s sake. But I couldn’t bring myself to do it.

  “So,” I said, my words acid, “you had an affair with a guy who had a wife and two kids. Go on.”

  Dorothy shook her head and turned back toward the sink. “I’m taking a shower.”

  “Oh, come on—”

  Her voice blazed. “Let me tell you something, Nate: people have affairs. Don’t be a sanctimonious jerk about it.”

  “And that makes it all okay, then, right?”

  “Paul was unhappy. He was no longer in love with his wife. She wasn’t in love with him. She was in love with the kids, with being a mother, with that nice house in Woodside. But she was not in love with him.”

  “And she’s dead because Murph was fucking around with some woman whose vanity was so strong she couldn’t bear to look her age.” Even then, I knew I was being unnecessarily cruel.

  “He was trying to help me punish the people who did this—to me, to all those others.”

  “Good for him.”

  She stepped from the sink to the bathroom and slammed the door. Hard.

  How quickly these things happen, I thought. How quickly I walk into emotional minefields with my chest puffed out and my head swimming with whatever zealotry I’d adopted that day. That day, in that motel, my zealotry was trained on adulterers.

  No, that’s not quite it.

  I was furious at myself for being duped, for squandering my grief and sympathy and juvenile revenge fantasies on a Boy Scout who forgot the oath to keep himself morally straight. Now I’m sure as hell not morally straight, but when did I ever claim to be a Boy Scout?

  I cleaned up the rest of the meal noisily, feeling like a teenager awash in emotions he can’t understand. After dropping the last white box into the trash can, I went to the bathroom door. From inside, I could hear crying.

  I knocked. I waited for a moment, then spoke.

  “Paul was my best friend in medical school,” I said. “You already know that. But we had a falling-out, which you probably also know. Paul was a little judgmental, and I couldn’t forgive him for that. So, I guess I’m saying I’m a little confused. This guy I spent all these years thinking was holier-than-thou, or at least holier-than-me, was having an affair that ended up getting his family killed.”

  There was no answer.

  “Look—I know life gets complicated. I’m not good at seeing things as complicated, which…which complicates things, actually. I’m trying not to blame anyone here. I’m trying not to blame Murph for getting three people who loved him killed. I’m trying not to blame you and all these other people for chasing the Fountain of Youth and getting burned because of it. Half of me’s
splitting apart with sympathy for all of you. And half keeps saying you got what you deserve.” I forced a laugh. “How’s that for a public health doc? Blame the victim and all that.”

  I listened; at least the crying had faded. “Paul stayed with you through the fibrosarcoma?” I asked the door.

  After a long moment, the response came. “Through the first tumor and surgery and the other tumors and Tim being taken from me. Yes—Paul stayed with me.”

  “He was a good man,” I said.

  “Mostly good.”

  I heard the lock pop, and the door opened a crack. Her eyes were wet, the boiling flesh around them plumped from weeping. Her face at that moment was grotesque and beautiful.

  “How is your pain?” I asked.

  “Stop being a doctor. Don’t get so obsessed with my pain.” She shook her head. “It’s bad, but I’ll live.”

  In that moment, I knew we were both thinking of those who didn’t live—Murph, his wife, the two kids, Cynthia Yang, the Mings…How many more? I wondered. How many deaths?

  We stood in the doorway for a few beats. My body was six inches from hers; I could almost feel her heat. I felt her fingers touch my left hand, watched her raise it to my face. “Your scars,” she said, and traced the heaped, glassy flesh with a pink fingernail.

  Then she opened my hand and brought it to her face. Palm against cheek, fingers splayed from her temple to the corner of her eye. I could feel the hard knobs of tissue.

  “We need to get you to the surgeon,” I said.

  “We can’t. Not yet.”

  “Because we need to get your son.”

  “Yes. Yes, we need to get Tim. I won’t do anything else until we do.”

  77

  I COULD HEAR DOROTHY PRETENDING to sleep in the next bed, shifting back and forth between the sheets. Pain doesn’t rest.

  After a while, I got out of my bed and found my shirt. I left the motel room with my cell phone.

  “Jesus, McCormick, you know what time it is?” Ravi’s voice was thick with sleep and irritation.

  “One-twelve a.m., Pacific time. I need a favor.”