Red 1-2-3 (9780802192844)

by Katzenbach, John

  Sometimes, he told himself, the best jokes are those you alone can hear. The three letters were now in the hands of one of the busiest postal processing systems in the United States—and one of the most reliable. He wanted to howl out loud with anticipation, bay at some distant moon hidden by Grand Central’s cavernous roof. His pulse raced with excitement. The din of the trains and people around him slipped away, and he was abruptly enveloped in a warm, delicious silence of his own creation. It was like descending into azure-clear Caribbean waters and floating, watching shafts of light slice through the enveloping blue world.

  Like the diver he imagined himself to be, he exhaled slowly, feeling himself rise inexorably toward the surface.

  He thought:

  And so it begins.

  Then he let himself be swept forward with the rest of the anonymous masses onto a jam-packed commuter train. He did not care where it was going, because wherever it stopped wasn’t his real destination.

  2

  The Three Reds

  The day that she became Red One had already been a difficult one for Doctor Karen Jayson.

  First thing in the morning she’d had to tell a middle-aged woman that her test results showed she had ovarian cancer; midday she’d received a call from a local emergency room that one of her longtime patients had been severely injured in an auto accident; at the same time she was forced to hospitalize another patient with a crippling kidney stone that couldn’t be managed with routine pain medication. Then she had to spend nearly an hour on the phone with an insurance company executive justifying her decision. Patients in her waiting room had backed up, everything from routine physicals to strep throat and flu, which each sufferer had blissfully spread to everyone else waiting in various states of frustration and illness.

  And then, late in the afternoon of what she thought was already a relentlessly bad day, she was called to the hospice wing at Shady Grove Retirement Home—a nearby place that was neither in a grove nor particularly shady—to attend the final moments of a man she barely knew. The man was in his early nineties, with not much more than a sunken-chest-and-gaunt-eyes wisp of him left, but he had clung to life with pit-bull tenacity. Karen had seen many people die over the course of her professional life; as an internist with a subspecialty in geriatrics, this was inevitable. But even so, she could never get accustomed to it. Standing at the man’s bedside doing nothing other than adjusting the IV Demerol drip, it roiled her emotions. She wished the hospice nurses hadn’t called her, had managed the death on their own.

  But they had, and she’d responded, and there she was.

  The room seemed stark and cold, though the heat was blasting through old-fashioned radiators. It was shadowy and dark, as if death could enter more easily into a dimly lit room. A few machines, a shuttered window, an old metal bedside lamp, some tangled, dingy white sheets, and a faint odor of waste were all that surrounded the old man. There was not even a cheap but colorful painting on any of the flat white walls to fracture the atmosphere in the bleak room. It was not a good place to die.

  She thought: Poets be damned, there’s nothing even slightly romantic or elegiac about dying, especially in a nursing home that has seen better days.

  “He’s gone,” the attending nurse said.

  Karen had heard the same things in the final few seconds: a slow release of breath, like the last bit of air leaking from a balloon, followed by the high-pitched alarm from the heart monitor familiar to anyone who’d ever watched a doctor drama on television. She reached over and turned the machine off after watching the flat, lime-green electronic line for a moment, thinking that the routine of death had none of the cinematic tension people imagined it to have. It was often just a fading away, like banks of lights in a huge auditorium being shut down after a crowd has dispersed, until only darkness is left behind. She sighed, told herself that even this image was too poetic, and let habit overtake her. She placed her fingers against the old man’s throat, searching for a pulse in his carotid artery. His skin seemed paper-thin beneath her hand, and she had the odd thought that even the softest, gentlest touch would leave telltale scars on his neck.

  “Time of death, four forty-four,” she said.

  There was something mathematically satisfying in that series of numbers, like squares placed inside each other, fitting together perfectly. She examined the old man’s DNR form and then looked over at the nurse, who had begun to unhook wire leads from the man’s chest. “When you finish Mister”—she glanced at the DNR form again—“. . . Wilson’s paperwork, will you bring it around for me to sign?”

  Karen was a little ashamed that she stumbled over the old man’s name. Death should not be so anonymous, she thought. The old man’s face looked—as she expected—peaceful. Death and clichés, she thought, simply go together. She wondered, for a moment, precisely who Mister Wilson was. Lots of hopes, dreams, memories, experiences disappearing at four forty-four. What had he seen of life? Family? School? War? Love? Sadness? Joy? There was nothing in the room in his last moments that said anything about who he was. For a moment, Karen felt a surge of anger over death’s arriving alongside anonymity. The hospice nurse must have sensed it, because she interrupted the creeping silence.

  “It’s sad,” the nurse said. “Mister Wilson was a lovely old man. Do you know he liked bagpipe music, of all things? But he wasn’t a Scot. I think he came from the Midwest somewhere. Like Iowa or Idaho. Go figure.”

  Karen imagined there had to be a story behind that love, but now it was lost. “Any family I should be calling?” she asked.

  The nurse shook her head, but answered, “I’ll have to double-check his admission forms. I know we didn’t call anyone when he came in to hospice.”

  The nurse had already passed from one routine—helping someone who had reached his nineties pass from this life to the next—to her subsequent responsibility, which was properly processing death bureaucratically.

  “I think I’ll go outside for a moment while you get the paperwork together.”

  The nurse nodded her head slightly. She was familiar with Doctor Jayson’s postmortem order of business: sneaking a cigarette in the far corner of the nursing home’s parking lot where the doctor believed no one could see her, which wasn’t actually the case. After this solitary break, the doctor would head back inside to the main office, where she kept a desk solely for filling out Medicare and Medicaid forms and signing off on the inevitable conclusion to stays in the home, the state-mandated death certificate. The home was several blocks away from the square redbrick medical building where Karen practiced internal medicine alongside a dozen other doctors competent in everything from psychiatry to cardiology.

  The nurse knew that Karen would smoke precisely one-half of a cigarette before coming back inside to complete Mister Wilson’s paperwork. In the pack of Marlboros that Karen thought she had hidden in her top desk drawer, and which all the staff at the hospice wing were aware of, the doctor had carefully and painstakingly measured each smoke and marked the midway point with a red pen. The nurse also knew that regardless of the weather, Karen would not bother with a coat, even if it was pouring rain or freezing cold in western Massachusetts. The nurse imagined that this lack of concession to the vagaries of the weather was the penance the doctor paid for continuing to be addicted to a disgusting habit she fully knew would kill her before too long and one that was held in total contempt by virtually everyone in the health care business the doctor was a part of.

  It was night and well past the dinner hour when Karen pulled onto the long dirt and gravel driveway that led to her house, stopping at the beaten old mailbox by the side of the road. She lived in a rural part of the county, adjacent to conservation land and walking paths through dark woods, where modestly expensive homes were pushed back away from any roadway and many sported views of distant hills. In the fall this landscape was spectacular as the leaves changed, but tha
t time had swept past, and now it was trapped in cold, muddy, and barren winter.

  The lights were ablaze inside her home, but this wasn’t because there was someone to meet her; she’d had a timing system installed because she lived alone, and she didn’t like coming home to a dark house on sad nights like this one. It wasn’t the same as being greeted by a family, but it made the return home slightly more welcoming. She had a pair of cats—Martin and Lewis—who would be waiting for her with feline enthusiasm, which, she was sad to admit, wasn’t really very much. She was torn about her pets. She would have preferred a dog, some bounding, tail-wagging golden retriever who made up for lack of brains with unabashed eagerness, but because she worked such long hours away from her house, she hadn’t felt it fair to a dog, especially a breed that suffered without human companionship. The cats, with their lofty self-determination and haughty approach to life, were better suited for the isolation of Karen’s daily grind.

  That she lived alone, away from city lights and energy, was something she had simply fallen into over the years. She had been married once. It hadn’t worked. She had a lover once. It hadn’t worked. She’d engaged in a relationship with another woman once. It hadn’t worked. She had given up on one-night-meet-you-in-the-bar stands and Internet service dating sites that promised real compatibility once you filled out the questionnaire and suggested that love was waiting right around the corner. None of these had worked, either. She had discovered that solitude didn’t bother her in the least. It gave her confidence.

  What she had was her job and a hobby that she kept hidden from her physician coworkers: She was a dedicated if completely amateur stand-up comic. Once a month she would drive to any of the dozen or so comedy clubs throughout the state that had “open-mike” nights and would try out various routines. What she loved about performing comedy was its unpredictability. It was impossible to gauge whether any given audience would be howling with laughs, guffawing with hilarity, or sitting stony-faced, lips curling up, before the inevitable catcalls started to ring out and she would be forced to make a rapid retreat from the unrelenting spotlight. Karen loved making people laugh, and she even oddly appreciated the embarrassment of being hooted off the stage. Both reminded her of the frailties and eccentricity of life.

  She kept a small Apple laptop with only a few applications on it to write her comedy routines and try out new jokes. Her regular computer was jammed with patient records, medical data, and the ordinary electronic life of a busy professional. The smaller one she kept locked away in the same way that she concealed her hobby from coworkers and her few friends and distant relatives. Comedy, like smoking, she told herself, was an addiction best kept secret.

  Her mailbox door had been left slightly ajar—a habit the delivery person had that often resulted in her mail being soaked by the elements. She got out of her car, jogged around to the mailbox, and grabbed everything inside without looking at any of it. It had started to spit freezing rain, and a few drops hit her neck and chilled her. Then she hustled back behind the wheel and launched herself up the driveway, tires spinning against loose gravel and some ice that had already formed.

  She found herself fixating on the old man who had died that day. This wasn’t uncommon for her, when she signed off on a death. It was as if some sort of vacuum had been created within her, and she felt a need to fill it with some bits of information. Bagpipes. Iowa. She had no idea how that connection was made. She began to speculate, trying to invent a story that would satisfy her curiosity. He first heard the pipes when he was a small child, after a new neighbor arrived from Glasgow or Edinburgh into the weather-beaten house next door. The neighbor would often drink a little too much, and he’d become melancholy and long for his native land. When this loneliness came over him, the neighbor would bring down his instrument from a shelf in the closet and decide to pipe in the evening dark, just as the sun would set over the flat Iowa horizon, all because he missed the rolling green hills of his home. Mister Wilson—only he wasn’t yet Mister Wilson—would be in his bedroom, and the rich, unusual music would float through his open window: “Scotland the Brave” or “Blue Bonnet.” That was where the fascination came from. Karen thought that as good a story possibility as any.

  She wondered: Is there a routine in this? Her mind churned up So, I watched an old man who loved the bagpipes die . . . and could she make it seem like it was the unusual notes from the instrument that killed him and not old age?

  The car crunched to a halt by the front door. She grabbed her briefcase, coat, and the pile of mail, and arms filled, she hustled through the gloomy darkness and damp chill toward her home.

  The two cats sort of stirred to greet her as she came through the front door, but it seemed more an idle curiosity combined with dinner expectations that had forced them from slumber. She headed into the kitchen, intending to pour them a new bowl of dry food, fix herself a glass of white wine, and consider what leftover in the refrigerator wasn’t too close to homicidal spoilage to reheat for dinner. Food did not interest her much, which helped keep her build wiry even as she crept in age into her fifties. She dropped the coat on a bench and shoved her briefcase beside it. Then she went straight for the trash bin to sort through the mail. The letter without any identifying characteristics other than the New York City postmark was stuck between a telephone bill from Verizon, another from the local electric company, two promotional letters for credit cards she didn’t need or want, and several solicitation letters from the Democratic National Committee, Doctors Without Borders, and Greenpeace.

  Karen set the bills on a counter, tossed all the others into a bin for paper recycling, and tore open the anonymous letter.

  The message made her hands twitch, and she gasped out loud.

  When she became Red Two, Sarah Locksley was naked.

  She had stripped off first her pants and then her sweater, dropping them to the floor beside her. She was slightly drunk and slightly stoned from her usual afternoon combination of vodka and barbiturates when the postman pushed her daily mail delivery through the slot in her front door. She heard the sound of envelopes slapping against the hardwood floor of the vestibule. She knew most would be marked Overdue or Final Notice. These were the daily deluge of bills and demands that she had no intention of paying the slightest attention to. She stood up and caught a glimpse of herself in the reflection of the television screen and thought it made no sense to go halfway, so she tugged off her bra and stepped out of her underwear and tossed it all onto a nearby couch with a flourish. She pirouetted right and left in front of the screen, thinking how little of her seemed to be left. She felt scrawny, emaciated, too thin by a half, and not from obsessive exercise or marathon race training. She knew that she had been sexy once, but now her slenderness was caused solely by despair.

  Sarah picked up the remote control and switched on the TV. Her own reflected image on the screen was immediately replaced by the familiar characters of an afternoon soap opera. She found the mute switch on the remote and killed off the dialogue. Sarah preferred to make up her own story, substituting what she believed they should be saying for whatever the writing staff had come up with. She wanted her dialogue to be more trite. More clichéd. More stilted and more stupid. She did not want to allow even the slightest touch of emotional accuracy or acceptable reality into her versions of the soap operas. She wanted it to be sloppy and overwrought and she did not trust the soap opera’s writers to be as over the top as she could be. She did not expect to be able to do this for much longer—the Big Box store where she’d purchased the television on credit was likely to come asking for it back any week. The same was true for her furniture, her car, and probably her house as well.

  Her voice seemed to echo around her, her words slurred slightly, as if they were photographs taken out of focus.

  “Oh Denise, I love you so much . . . especially your unbelievable Barbie-doll figure.”

  “Yes, Doctor Smith
, I love you too. Take me in your arms and spirit me and my medically augmented breasts away from here . . ..”

  On the television screen, a dark-haired, strapping man who looked significantly more like a male model than a heart surgeon was embracing a statuesque blond woman whose most serious disease ever might have been a cracked nail or the sniffles. The only time she’d ever had to see a doctor was when she’d had her teeth capped. Their mouths moved with words, but Sarah continued to supply the dialogue.

  “Yes, darling, I will . . . except your test results have come back from the laboratory, and, I don’t know how to say this, but you haven’t much time . . .”

  “Our love is stronger than any disease . . ..”

  Hah! Sarah thought. I bet it isn’t.

  Then she told herself: I guess I’ll be writing the lovely Botoxed Denise and the handsome Doctor Smith out of my life.

  Sarah walked over to the front window as the show’s credits scrawled across the screen. She stood motionless for a few moments, arms lifted above her head, totally exposed, half-hoping one of her nosy neighbors would see her, or that the afternoon yellow school bus from the junior high school would roll past jammed with students and she could give all the preteens a real show. Some of the kids on the bus would remember her from her days in the classroom. Fifth grade. Mrs. Locksley.

  She shut her eyes. Look at me, she thought. Come on, goddammit, look at me!

  She could feel tears starting to well up uncontrollably in the corners of her eyes, running hot down her cheeks. This was normal for her.

  Sarah had been a popular teacher right up to the moment she resigned. If any of her former students saw her this day framed in her living room window stark naked, they would probably like her even more.

  She had quit a little less than a year earlier, on one of the last days of the semester before summer vacation started. She quit on a Monday, two days after the bright, warm morning her husband had taken their three-year-old daughter on the most innocent of Saturday errands—a trip to the grocery store for milk and cereal—and never returned.