When a Psychopath Falls in Love

by Herbert Gold

  “What are you thinking?” Marvin asked.

  “It’s too warm in here. Is that for the benefit of the geriatrics?”

  “Pay attention. I have the right to ask that, Dan. What we think, and the second opinion you insisted on, confirm …”

  “Are you insulted about the second opinion?”

  “It’s your right. Professionally, I agree, even if personally I know what I’m doing. I agree with myself. We can go for hormones first, slow down any proliferation…” Marvin was avoiding the rude words, tumor, growth, spread. “… keep the extra cells out of circulation, then maybe we’ll have surgery ...”

  “Who’s we around here?”

  “… chemo, some people like the radium implants, Sweden, for some reason. Some go for radiation alone – there’s a guy, Walsh, at Johns Hopkins …”

  “Quite a menu you’re offering, pal. We is me.”

  Marvin toyed with a present from a drug company on his desk, a paperweight containing a happy senior citizen reaching toward the sunlight inside clear plastic. It was a vision of the blessings of cortisone in a superior formulation. He flipped it upside down when he caught Dan staring. Snow swirled around the happy senior citizen.

  “After the hormones, sometimes the other options are more effective.”

  “Will I still be able to get it up?”

  “After the hormones kick in? Problematic, but you may not even want to.”

  “I will. I’ve a good memory.”

  “Later, it depends. This is art, not science, Dan.”

  Marvin sighed. Dan wasn’t making it easy for him, but this partic­ular discussion was never easy. “Okay, there’s that other choice. The Dutch, the Poles, some of those peripheral medical systems – the Hungarians …”

  “That’s the choice I choose. Do nothing. Don’t you call it ‘watchful waiting’?”

  Marvin still sighing. Office noises, medical hush. The clinical tiles and pipes, the nurse with soft white shoes, the door not quite shut, the filing cabinets. The framed family photographs on Marvin’s desk, the diplomas on the walls, the beige sound of Muzak because the doctor needed to concentrate and needed his patient to focus. Marvin’s do-not-disturb mutter to a folder- and chart-bearing techni­cian who parted the door and peeked in with a look of urgency.

  “Last I looked, we’re not Poles, Dan.”

  Time was money in the era of HMOs. Marvin Feldstein would take all the time in the world for Dan. He leaned forward in a chair with a bulge constructed especially to support his spine. Marvin had lumbar region issues; even a doctor needed help with the problems brought on by anxiety, a few extra pounds (maybe forty), a weakness for the consolations of fondue and old-fashioned cooking with high-density butter. The fact was that from the get-go human beings were not designed to take stressful parade positions or spend years in classes, labs and examination rooms. Hunters and gatherers roaming the forest and fields weren’t out trapping fondue or harvesting French sauces.

  Although scoliosis involved soft tissue changes, the normal attri­tion of gravity, cartilage wear and tear, sheaths narrowing to impinge on nerves, Marvin Feldstein had noticed by the time he reached the age of fifty that this type of normal complaint was – here came a professional summary beyond mere diagnosis – the shits. It was a pain in the butt and related regions, such as the head. Sympathy for his patients was bad for the neural sheaths; so had been his marriage with its lack of sympathy from his wife; so were the host of non-cartilage-related hassles. Like this one: explaining to bull-headed Dan Kasdan that he would die if he didn’t take the best medical advice while admitting he would also die if he did. Timing was the only issue. This justified avoiding the words ‘death’ and ‘die.’

  Dan was asking, “I’ve got time, don’t I? Marvin? To do some things I want to do first?”

  “Depends on how long you take. I can’t guarantee any time frame.”

  Immortality was one of the enjoyments of youth, like deep and uninterrupted sleep, which both Dan and Marvin had gradually given up.

  “Why that expression on your face, Marvin?”

  “It’s just my look.”

  “It’s even worse than usual. I’d describe it as sour if you asked me.”

  “I didn’t ask you. Okay, it’s my back. This pot I carry isn’t good for me, but I seem to like things that aren’t good for me. Last night I had dinner at that new Swiss place out on Clement – you know it? Chez Somebody, but the chef, he’s terrific, really gourmet, oh boy the fondue, is from Hong Kong.

  “Chez Fong? Fang?”

  “I should do leg lifts. Maybe I should try acupuncture.”

  Then they just sat there awhile amid the muffled technology creaks and grindings through office walls. Marvin was the kind of doctor who couldn’t adjust to assembly-line stacking of patients prepped by nurses, ten-minute HMO-approved appointments, twenty minutes for serious cases. Kasdan let his eyes wander as if it were happenstance that he didn’t meet Marvin’s fixed stare. “Okay, so you’ve suddenly gone all Polish on me? Now you’re in love with watchful waiting?”

  “Been doing that all my life, Marvin,” Kasdan said.

  He re-admired the diplomas with their calligraphic notations on the wall. Kindly board-approved Marvin, making a living complaining only about his back

  But his sighs were contagious. Kasdan decided not to sigh in return. He converted the impulse nimbly into a yawn; stood up; stretched. “Thanks for the interlude,” he said, and shook his old buddy’s hand.

  Kasdan had saved a few bucks by parking on the street, not in the medical building parking lot (first twenty minutes validated, after that pay for each twenty minute segment.) A pleasant walk in the September sun down Geary would fix him up nicely, as usual, although generally it wasn’t the offer of a death sentence which needed fixing. While basking, strolling, enjoying, just ambling, admiring the leafage of trees and the grassage of grass, he took the time to go through one of life’s occasional periods of re-adjustment.

  Elbow burn from sex in the missionary position used to be his worst ailment. This was no longer true. Maybe he could think of a hungry tumor with its network of greedy new baby blood vessels as a fashion accessory for late middle age. Murder was a relatively original consolation.

  By the time he eased himself into his Honda, beat up by its time on the road in San Francisco, beat up by collateral parking damage in the street near his flat on Ellis, his spirits were repaired. Elbow burn used to respond to Jergen’s Lotion; impending final silence required a stronger treatment

  He called himself to order, as he sometimes had to do during his Spanish-English interpreting service for alleged perpetrators, so-called purse-snatchers, accused gang members, night strollers charged with burglary only because they happened to be found in some stranger’s bedroom at three a.m. Occasionally he worked for a shooter or knifer, unjustly caught in the act, but this didn’t offer the experience he needed for his own case. The logical choice for a first killing... Already he was ahead of most of his clients, who seldom pre-selected their victims. The Hall of Justice, 850 Bryant, the court­rooms, hallways and holding pens, was not a resort of considered arrangements. Under the circumstances, the logical choice was someone whose life he did not value but whose death could both profit and gratify him. Now, whoever could that be?

  The question seemed a bit hard-hearted, but anyway: who could it be?

  It’s obvious, Signor Kasdan.

  Ferd Conway, the expert plea-bargainer sliding along the corridors at 850 Bryant, just as smart as those shitfaces from Stanford Law, Boalt, or Yale, no matter what the shitfaces thought about him. Ferd Conway, eking his way to prosperity but not yet awakened to the regular use of dandruff-remover shampoo (flaking scalp and snowy shoulders), and this was far from his worst character flaw. Ferd was representing the Yerba Buena Foundation with its complex tax-free enterprises of massage parlors, escort outcalls and coke-dealing, when Amanda had checked in by telephone with the words:

  “Mr. K
asdan? I’m your daughter.”

  “Who?”

  “Margaret Torres is my mother.”

  “Who?”

  “Nineteen years ago. I don’t put you down for not remembering who you fucked, Dad.”

  So now, as a father with limited time on his hands, he could try to be useful to a daughter with needs. He could give his only child something to remember him by, such as money, in addition to warm wishes.

  Ferd.

  Ferd Conway, who persisted in calling him Cowboy, although Dan asked him not to. In due course, at the proper, most profitable, grat­ifying moment, he would live up to Ferd’s rakish name for him.

  You’ll never feel as good as you do today?

  Oh yes I will, Kasdan decided. It was a new life ahead. Cowboy Dan was planning on good days to come, profitable and gratifying, after exercising due diligence.

  Stubborn Cowboy Dan.

  – 3 –

  So what that he was going to die; doesn't everybody? When was the more interesting question. No one here was offering a date. Since Marvin had predicted it, “absent radical decisions, absent miracles that don't happen except in the National Inquirer” – absent treat­ments that would make Dan Kasdan less of a Dan Kasdan – he needed to get busy with a few present obligations, Amanda, Sergei, and the husband and father, D’Wayne.

  D’Wayne was now family, too, professionally the greeter and screener at the Yerba Buena Foundation, a clinic which was inter­mittently closed down by chickenshit cops who were impatient for promotions. The chickenshit cops claimed this therapy center was just a brothel that happened to keep computer records of its clients’ individual preferences. “Them’s patient histories,” D’Wayne explained, “plus, I’m only there to run security.”

  Doorman at the Yerba Buena Foundation did not make easygoing D’Wayne a prolific earner. There was no family health plan. Although the Foundation provided compassionate support for clients with sex­ual problems, such as sudden horniness after the bars closed, and “issues,” such as special needs not remedied by an uptight wife or girlfriend, it was subject to eruptions of civic interference. The job had been adequate for a bachelor; but now D’Wayne was married and his baby had issues of its own. When Kasdan remarked to Amanda that he didn’t feel real overjoyed about his son-in-law’s career, she dutifully mimicked him: “I didn’t feel real overjoyed, Dad, about not meeting my father until I was a grownup trying to hustle up a life. So now why don’t you say, ‘I hear you, Amanda’?”

  I hear you; pretty sarcastic. It was what the county mental health counselor told her to tell her father to say if he wanted to prove he was paying attention, cared, was digging the emissions. I hear you. (Also: I wish your mom had let me know our two-night run – maybe three nights – had resulted in this angry darling, standing with arms folded across her chest and one hip cocked, so I hear you.)

  Kasdan believed his appetite might not follow him into the heaven he did not believe in, so he should take a big bite out of the world as it was before he left it. He wanted to leave Amanda and D’Wayne with occasional kind thoughts about him. Whether Sergei would have a kind thought about him was a matter up to the nervous system of Sergei.

  Their apartment smelled of baby piss and Johnson’s Baby Powder. It was a smell which brought a fond smile to D’Wayne’s face when he returned home to Mose Sergei (not yet decided whether to call the child Mose or Sergei; in due course a decision would occur). The smell was one Kasdan might have known if he had been present during the early life of his daughter.

  “Dad,” said Amanda.

  He said her name, he tried to hug her and her beauty, slick with sweat. She stiffened, pulled away, and then suddenly sank against him. She couldn’t get used to her son’s diagnosis. Sometimes Amanda seemed okay, but then she turned into a broadcaster of grief. Mose or Sergei was snoring in his crib – are babies supposed to snore? Kasdan had never learned about such things. The child was yellow, a pale yellow-green with a wet pink bubble at his lips, as if he had hepatitis or malaria, or perhaps these were the colors of “developmentally disabled,” as the pediatrician put it.

  Yellow-green may have been a trick of Kasdan’s aging eyes or San Francisco morning light reflected across the alley from the next building. Perhaps it had nothing to do with muscular dystrophy but was an heirloom tint, thanks to a black father and a Hispanic-Jewish mother. The skin of Sergei Mose, like his name, should have seemed interesting, a genetic privilege, interestingly ethnic. Unless the scientists worked faster than they seemed to, the beloved son and grandson was born to trouble and disappearance before he could enjoy his interesting skin color.

  He cried; all babies cried. He cried too much. It’s wrong when a baby cries too much. Sergei bawled; the bawls diminished to whim­pering; then he opened his mouth and howled until he was hoarse. It hurt Kasdan in the chest to hear it. He couldn’t imagine what it did to Amanda and D’Wayne, day and night, their son suddenly waking for no good reason, convulsing, choking, screaming for breath. “An error of metabolism, nerve signals to the muscle cells,” the pediatrician mumbled, trying for vagueness and succeeding – no comfort to a mother and father who loved their son. It was their right.

  The child cried with cramps. He might not live long enough to learn the word “cramp.” In his body and soul, he seemed to know this was a terrible injustice. The child twisted and screamed. A helpless grandfather could do what was necessary. He could get money from Ferd Conway. He could take pleasure in the getting. Sergei might be taught to extend his life with the help of doctors who did not mumble.

  The child slept while his grandfather watched over him. In this respite, it was a joy to Kadsan that his life had a plan beyond getting out of his bed on Ellis in the morning. In his sleep Sergei twitched like any other person twitching in a dream, with visions of the future or the past, a life before his life or a life to come, dreams sparking in a tangle of ganglia and appetites which were genetic collages of parents and grandparents; including the grandfather now watching and par­taking of this ordinary miracle. The grandfather leaned over the child with this strange new passion, love, in which he was enrolled for a late study. It felt something like hatred and something like adoration. Longing and hurt burrowed into the flesh of living creatures. Dogs twitched with dreams, too; dogs with their snarling wolf ancestors slept under the imprint of appetites to breed, nurture and kill.

  A bubble of saliva grew at Sergei’s mouth. Kasdan remembered that sometimes he woke from a dream of love-making with his face wet, tears of desire or a wetness from lips imagining love. A richness of drool gathered at the parting and down the soft, so soft skin. If Sergei lived long enough, later, if he survived his childhood, his lips would remain dry in sleep. And still later, at the age of his grand­father, the old guy, Sergei would again give up control over saliva flow and the dreams no one really controls. Kasdan tried to remem­ber: did he need to wipe his mouth when he awakened to pee at three in the morning?

  Sergei wouldn’t live long enough to have a swollen prostate. Calamity had come for him in a rush before the oily placenta had been wiped away and before much else of life had come to him. A consultation like Kasdan’s with Marvin Feldstein was not on the schedule for Sergei Mose.

  Along with his gentle snore, a soft bubbling, the child shivered. He was wetting his diaper. The room smelled of baby talcum powder, the Johnson’s perforated can, just over there on the thrift shop changing table with its pink rubber sheet; the room smelled of baby powder and piss; an astringent, charming, sincere smell, it seemed to Kasdan. Sometimes he ate sour pickles out of the barrel at Tommy’s Joynt on Van Ness, also an odd smell to treasure. He wondered if he should try changing the diaper. It was easier all around to let Sergei rest.

  Kasdan watched. He never sat so still, marveling over a child’s busy sleeping, dreaming, pissing; his grandson was a multitasker! Kasdan felt the nerve behind his left eye, the one that twitched when he was tired or distressed, begin its signaling. Who could take care of thi
s child without a lot of money? How could this child find every possible remedy for an incurable affliction?

  Kasdan’s personal migraines, that throb of anxious nerves, had occasionally interrupted his routines even before he knew he had a daughter – an ache of things wearing out in the flat on Ellis where he was spending the nights of his life. It had always been a selfish head­ache, only concerning the harborer of the headache.

  “Dad?” Amanda called from the kitchen. “What’re you doing in there?”

  “He stopped crying. He’s sleeping.”

  “So what’re you doing?”

  He had pulled a chair up to the crib. When a child slept, even this damaged child, the mother’s voice would not awaken it.

  “You’re just sitting there in the dark, Dad?”

  “I know. It’s restful.”

  Kasdan was going further to be useful and entertained than Ferd Conway could ever imagine for the sucker he called Cowboy.

  “Sometimes I think, Dad....” Now she was going to start to cry. Ignorant though he was, an innocent in fatherhood, Kasdan recog­nized the cloudiness, swelling, reddening, the incipiency of tears. “Sometimes, Dad, I think it would be better....”

  And her lip would bleed if she bit it any harder.

  “Go ahead. Say it.”

  “I can’t say it to D’Wayne. I can’t tell D’Wayne.”

  “You can tell me.”

  There were flecks of blood on her lip. “It would be better if ...”

  “No! You don’t want to say that!”

  “But I think it, Dad. I can’t say it to D’Wayne, but that’s what I think sometimes.”

  Surely D’Wayne thought it, too. Surely Kasdan thought it. Surely everyone around here sometimes thought Sergei might be better off not born. But here Sergei was, there in the next room, bubbling saliva in his sleep, and their voices were low as if he might be listening.

  Kasdan put his arms around his daughter.

  “I have to tell someone, Dad.”