“And in Minnehaha Hostels, too—right?”
William nodded. Senator Burton definitely represented a threat to the Onamia project. He was grateful that Ms. Bright had insisted that he meet with him.
Burton continued. “And back in ‘88, when Minnehaha Hostels was still the Mille Lacs Lake Investment Group, you were buying up all kinds of properties around the lake. Real cheap.”
“It didn’t seem that cheap then.”
“But they sure as hell are going to be worth a hell of a lot more once the MDS project goes through, and every cabin and motel room is rented to outpatients at a hundred dollars a day and upwards. And not just in the summer season, but year round, according to the prospectus I read.”
“Minnehaha Hostels hasn’t been the only investment group to foresee that possibility. The building boom has been going on for a couple years now.”
“But Minnehaha was the first, by a few years, and it’s still the biggest. That is, if you don’t count Northwestern Development Fund, which has just about gobbled up every acre in Mille Lacs County that’s gone onto the market since 1993. Now you can’t tell me that’s all just a big coincidence.”
“In a way, it’s been the biggest possible coincidence. The Northwestern Fund was started up in response to the prospect of the global climatic changes that are going on right now. The Great Plains are drying up. Saskatchewan and Manitoba and the northern counties of Minnesota are going to be the Iowa and Kansas and Nebraska of the next century, and Mille Lacs Lake stands at the south edge of that new corn belt. It’s a big enough body of water that it may survive through the period of transition. That made it look like a good investment then, and that’s why the Northwestern Fund was started up.”
“I’ve read the brochure.”
“The need to establish a research community has only made that investment mature earlier than expected.”
“Conveniently for you.”
“For everyone who’s invested in the fund.”
“And you wouldn’t care to say just what percentage of the stock in Northwestern, and in MedSec, and in Minnehaha Hostels is owned by you and your relatives?”
“All my investments are in a blind trust.”
“Blind trust, mm-hm. Well, maybe some people have blind trust, but not me, Michaels. I think I lost mine when I was around twenty-one, twenty-two years old and watching Watergate on the TV every night with my folks after dinner and hearing my old man say, ‘If the president says something, I think we got to believe it. If you can’t believe the president, who can you believe?’ I got into politics back then because I decided the only answer to that question was myself. I don’t trust politicians, or preachers, or big business, or even high school quarterbacks who swear they don’t take drugs. It was me who got the law passed that started random blood testing at any high school or college sports event in the state. Everyone said what an invasion of privacy that was, and ACLU fought it all the way to the state supreme court. And when they finally started running the tests, do you know what percent tested out that they’d been using steroids? Thirty percent.”
“It must have been a heady experience for you, Senator. And now, I imagine, you’re hoping to get back in the headlines again with a new cause célèbre you can drag through the courts for a few years.”
“We’ll get into the headlines together, Doctor.”
“Of what exactly do I stand accused? Of having invested too wisely?”
“Mille Lacs County belongs to the people who’ve been living there. Not to some investment group that comes in and sucks up all the real estate on the market and then just warehouses it for a few years so there’s less tourist business than before, less business in the stores, and stores folding. And you think now that you’ve sucked it almost dry, you can turn us into a human waste disposal facility, and have the whole country ship all the ARVIDS patients here that they’re afraid to keep in their own hospitals. Well, twenty years ago, there was a company tried to turn the north part of the county into a toxic waste dump, but the people didn’t let that happen, and the people won’t let this happen either.”
In the course of the senator’s diatribe, William had eased open the drawer of his desk to survey the possibilities. There was a small stack of business cards printed up with an extension of William’s home phone number that was operative but never answered. These were his most reliable medium, as they had two built-in safeguards: they were effective only upon the individual who first was handed the card and took effect only after that person had dialed the number on it. William had only to specify the particular affliction he wished the card to transmit.
Finishing his peroration, Senator Burton smiled as though listening to silent applause.
From his shirt pocket William removed a gold Mark Cross fountain pen that bore a transferred charge from the caduceus. He touched it to the topmost card in the pile, and beneath his breath intoned a curse he’d used many times before:
When next you sleep, before you wake,
A massive stroke your frame will shake;
Paralyzed, no speech but tears,
You’ll linger half-alive for years.
Senator Burton rumbled some phlegm in his throat and demanded, “Well, Doctor?”
“You must give me some time to think—and to speak with my associates.”
“I intend to issue a statement to the press tomorrow.”
“Then why did you come to see me? Simply so you could threaten me in person? There are many people besides myself with a stake in the Mille Lacs development. I don’t have standing authority to speak for them or make decisions for them. Indeed, the project already has so much momentum, I doubt it could be stopped, even if Medical Defense Systems withdrew.”
“That’s all the more reason for me to act right away.”
“Would a week make so much difference?”
“I don’t know. Would it?”
“Let me find out.” William rose and extended the business card that bore his curse. “Meanwhile, if you’ll take my card—this has my home phone number on it—and let me know beforehand, at that number, if you mean to make any statement to the press.”
The fat man levered himself into an upright position cumbersomely, like a balky construction crane. Then he held out his hand to take the card offered him, but the pudgy fingers were not quick enough, and the slip of pasteboard fluttered to the Persian carpet with a butterflylike motion that seemed willfully evasive.
William and Senator Burton looked down at the card on the carpet, each uncertain what to do. Even if he had been equal to the task, the senator was reluctant to bend down and pick up the card from the floor. And William, at the very instant the card had sprung to life and flown away, had remembered the god’s advice of only minutes past, that he would be tempted to use the caduceus but that he must forbear.
“Here,” said William, dipping back into the desk drawer and taking out a second card, “is another.”
Burton accepted it and tucked it into the breast pocket of his suit.
When he had left the room, William retrieved the card that had fallen to the carpet. For a moment he considered destroying it (an ashtray and lighter were ready to hand), but then he reconsidered. It had been weeks since he’d visited the Obstschmecker house to renew the charge in his pen. There was untapped power still in the business card, and William’s was a frugal nature. He put the card in his own suit pocket, wedged behind the handkerchief, in case he might need it.
62
Except for its high-gloss state of maintenance and the flag atop its flagpole, the Henry Michaels Memorial Clinic did not declare its institutional character from the sidewalk. It appeared to be no more than the amplest home along Luckner Boulevard. Inside, however, it was a model of health care management with facilities sufficient for the care of sixty patients, though only thirty-seven beds were filled at the present moment. Madge Michaels kept it going with a staff of twelve nurses and male aides and a maintenance crew of five, mostly blac
k, who served her with a military esprit de corps.
In some ways the Henry Michaels Memorial Clinic was a lot easier to run than a nursing home that catered to geriatric or terminally ill patients, since all its residents shared the same perplexing incapacity as Madge’s son Ned, a condition for which there was no certain etiology nor even a commonly accepted name. (The clinic’s promotional literature referred to it as Colmar’s syndrome, after its most famous victim, the astrologer Gloria Colmar.) The thirty-seven patients, of both sexes and a wide range of ages and backgrounds, were almost as easy to tend as a row of cabbages, and they afforded similar long-term satisfaction with regard to their response to the therapy they received. These improvements were slow to manifest themselves and rarely dramatic: Mrs. Johnston in bed 12 had begun to be able to refuse food spooned into her mouth by spitting it out; Mr. Reiner in bed 6, who had been in the clinic since it had opened in 1994, suddenly developed the ability to follow a moving object with his eyes, a sign not only of muscular regeneration but of some kind of mental life as well. (All the victims of Colmar’s syndrome displayed a steady, if low, level of alpha rhythms, much as though they were yogis in a state of trance instead of semicomatose, catheterized vegetables.) None of the patients had yet achieved the big breakthrough that was the object of the staff’s unceasing efforts (and Madge’s unreasoning hope): none had regained muscular control sufficient to communicate—by the blinking of an eyelid or the stirring of a finger—that there was still intelligence behind the dull-eyed, slack-jawed mask of Colmar’s syndrome. But Madge was certain that someday, when enough data had been amassed, the pieces would fall into place, and medical science would find the cure for the disease and Ned would be well. All that was needed was the data and the patience to gather the data and the money to fund the research effort.
So new patients were always welcome, even those who had to be received as charity cases, and the newest, Robert Corning, was the most welcome of all, since his medical history bore a striking resemblance to Ned’s. They were approximately the same age (Ned was thirty-seven, Robert thirty-nine), and they had both, atypically, developed Colmar’s syndrome as children. Robert might, in fact, be the first actual case of the disease, having manifested some symptoms as early as 1969. In his case, however, there had been a progressive degeneration of his capabilities, from an initial condition of spastic imbecility to the general incapacity characteristic of other victims. Because of this, and because he had been tended at home by his parents and received little professional attention, Robert Corning had not been diagnosed as suffering from Colmar’s syndrome. Only after the death, a month ago, of his surviving parent, when he had become a ward of the state, was Robert’s condition properly diagnosed. The clinic had been notified at once, and his transfer effected.
And here he lay, in bed 38, the most pathetic patient in the clinic, wasted to a skeleton, muscles the thinness of twine. How could his own parents have let him come to this? Almost all the patients had been in some way victims of neglect before being brought to the clinic—vitamin deficiencies and bedsores were common—but none had presented such a spectacle of wretchedness as Robert Corning. According to the social worker who had spoken to the Cornings’ neighbors, the parents in their last years had lived at the extreme edge of destitution, rarely leaving their home on Kuhn Avenue. They’d avoided the attention of charities for fear their “Bubby” would be taken from them and had subsisted on a diet made up mostly (to judge from the mounds of detritus in their kitchen) of powdered milk, strawberry Jell-O, sardines, and canned peas. It seemed amazing that Robert had survived so long under such a regimen.
Now, as though she were atoning for his parents’ years of neglect, Madge gave at least an hour of every workday to Robert’s particular care. Sometimes she would feed him, sometimes bathe his matchstick limbs; most often she undertook the task of patterning, exercising the muscles he could not exercise himself. Years ago, when she had first begun to do the patterning for her own son, the endless repetitions had been a purgatory of boredom. Lift the foot, bend the knee, tilt to the right, tilt to the left, pull the leg straight, flex the instep, stretch the toes. Then the other leg. But now, after performing these rituals for almost half her lifetime, they’d become a source of inner peace. She’d read once, in a book about Gandhi, that he’d insisted that all his followers spend part of each day, as he did, operating a primitive spinning wheel. These bodies were Madge’s spinning wheels, and the hours she spent in patterning exercises were her devotions.
She had finished with Robert’s lower limbs and begun the more delicate work on his neck’s wasted trapezius and sternocleidomastoid muscles—tilting the head back, then lowering the chin to the clavicle, tilting it, turning it to left and right, lowering it—when her stepson and employer appeared at the doorway of the room.
Being at work, she addressed him in her capacity as an employee. “Dr. Michaels! I wasn’t expecting you.”
“I’m not here as ‘Dr. Michaels.’ I was on my way home with Ben—Lisa’s planned an Official Family Dinner—and I thought I’d drop by here and see if I could tempt you to join us. Lisa and the boys will be off to visit her brother soon, and I know she’d love to have you come. The boys, too.”
“Oh, you know I’d love to. But there’s Mother.”
“She’d never have to know,” William inveigled. “You could say an emergency came and you had to stay late.”
Madge snorted amusement. “I can’t imagine what emergency could happen here, unless there was a fire.”
William looked down curiously at the withered carcass of Robert Corning. “Who’s this? I don’t think I recognize him.”
Madge knew he was not just being polite. William had a wonderful memory for all the patients in the clinic. Madge had just begun to fill him in about Robert Corning’s history when her secretary, Gail Robins, came to the door to say she had a very urgent phone call, and Madge had to excuse herself, adding, hopefully: “If you can wait just a minute, William, I really would love to take you up on your invitation.”
“I’ll still be here,” he assured her.
In her own office, she picked up the phone and said, “Nurse Michaels here.”
“Madge, is that you?” It was her mother: surely, by now, Gail should know that all Mrs. O.’s calls belonged in the “She’s in a meeting” category.
“Yes, Mother, it’s me. Is this you?”
But Mrs. O. was invincibly literal-minded. “Of course it’s me. Can’t you tell my voice on the telephone? The reason I called is there’s someone at the door and he won’t go away. He’s been here half an hour. I called before, but that secretary said you were in a meeting. I swear, you must not do anything else at that place but go to meetings. Finally, I told her it was an emergency. He won’t go away. He says he’s your husband.”
Madge did a silent double take: not Henry, Henry was dead. Could it be Lance? After all these years?
“Madge?”
“Do you mean my first husband, Mother? Lance Hill? Is that who’s there?”
“He’s out on the porch.”
“Why don’t you let him in?”
“For one thing, how can I tell he’s who he says he is? He looks like any other old man on the street.”
“We all age, Mother.”
“I mean”—Mrs. O. lowered her voice to a scandalized whisper—“he doesn’t look very clean. And he wants to park his car in the garage, and it isn’t even a car, it’s a pickup. And he wants to use the toilet.”
“All the more reason.”
“He could go to a filling station.”
“Filling stations don’t have public toilets anymore, Mother. Not even bars do.”
“Well, that’s not my fault. He can just hold his horses.”
“Mother, if you’re using the cordless phone, I would like to have a word with Lance. So would you slip the phone through the mail slot?”
“And what if he takes it and goes off?”
“Mother, we’ve bee
n through this before. Please.”
There was a longer silence, punctuated by the noises marking the phone’s passage through the mail slot. Then, like turning a corner and finding herself back in the year 1965, she heard Lance’s voice say, “Madge?” and there was no doubting it was Lance and that his voice had the same power over her that it had had when they’d started dating in high school.
“My God, it really is you.”
“That’s what I’ve been trying to tell your mother, but she’s been a lot harder to convince. From what I can see through the window, she hasn’t aged a day since I saw her last. Thirty-two years ago.”
“Thirty-two years ago,” Madge marveled. Tears were starting to form at the corners of her eyes, and in her chest the first clenchings of the fist of love’s old misery. In a way, her feelings were in perfect accord with her mother’s: she didn’t want to let Lance into the house.
“I guess I should’ve phoned in advance. But I wanted to surprise you.”
“You succeeded.”
“Do you think you could convince your mother to let me go to the toilet? I’d hate to get this far, past the border patrol and everything, and then be arrested for creating a public nuisance. Which I will any minute if I don’t get to a toilet.”
“Aren’t you here legally?”
“I’m not here as Lance Hill. I’m Launce, with a U. That’s what’s on all my ID now, and I guess it was enough of a difference to let me slip past all computers at Customs. You got to admit it sounds a whole lot classier: Launce.”
Madge chuckled. He didn’t seem to have changed one iota.
“Do you still have a mustache?” she asked.
“Yes, and chewing on it is the only thing keeping me from shitting in my pants at this point. Please, tell your mother to have mercy on me.”
“Okay, but Lance?”
“Launce.”
“It’s going to take me a while to say ‘Launce’ without giggling. There’s just one thing. Would you wait till I get home before you go up to see Ned? It’s just that… it could be upsetting, and I’d rather be there.”
THE M.D. A Horror Story Page 38
