by Chase Novak
Lies, lies, thinks Leslie. Whoever said the camera doesn’t lie?
Kis sits behind at his desk, indicating with a wave for Leslie to sit as well. Before him is an old-fashioned rotary phone, a bottle of water, and a small plastic bottle filled with ovoid white pills. He opens the pill bottle, shakes two of them into his hand, and washes them down with water swigged out of the bottle. The pupils of his brown eyes are smaller than punctuation marks, and the irises themselves swim uneasily in a sea of pale red.
“I remember you,” he says, pointing at Leslie. “You are married to the American lawyer. Am I correct?”
“My husband is dead.”
Kis does not seem to have heard this, or he simply does not care. “Reggie was with me back then, is that correct?” He takes another drink of water and taps a couple more of the white ovoids into his palm, looks at them for a moment, and puts them in his mouth, swallows them. “And because of me, you had a child. Is that correct?”
“Twins.”
“So! Pay me double.” He claps his hands and then reaches forward with the right, as if really expecting payment.
“You destroyed me, Doctor. You turned me and… and my husband into…” She shakes her head. “Into something I can’t live with.”
“What possible difference can it make, we live, we die. I have ceased to worry. My conscience is clear. Clear! You and your husband came here desperate for a child and I gave you the thing you wanted. Double! Don’t forget. One for free. How many people in my field can say that? These doctors, they collect millions of euros and still their patients end up going to Africa or Ukraine or the moon for an adoption. I made your body work. I made it give to you the thing it was refusing.”
“Many things happened, Dr. Kis. Many things. I think you are aware of all that’s gone wrong.”
“In some few cases. Why does no one bother to speak of the thousands of successful treatments? What is it about humanity that we only concentrate on things that go wrong?” He taps two more pills out of the bottle and shakes them in his hand, the way men do sitting at bars when they are contemplating the consumption of a couple more peanuts.
“People are dying, Doctor. And monsters are being created.”
“Is this what you have come to tell me? Listen to me. We doctors are in a chess match with nature. Nature wants to cripple you, nature wants you to have cardiac failure, nature says you must have small breasts, or wrinkles, or leukemia, or be unable to conceive new life. So we look and we think and we scheme, and then we make our move. And sometimes we are victorious, and nature backs away, and her plans are forestalled. But she only backs away, yes? She does not go away. She returns, stronger than ever. And she always wins in the end.” He smiles. “Leave me in peace, miss. There is nothing more I can do.”
“You said you had…” Leslie closes her eyes for a moment, tries to muster some sense of composure, while the tireless little demons within disrupt her thoughts, hide the words she means to say. Ah: but one of the little demons has failed to do its mischief and there it is, the word, in fact a whole chain of them, all linked beautifully together. “You said that you have developed some sort of procedure by which the side effects of the treatment could be…” Uh-oh, here come the demons again. Could be… what? What is she trying to say? “Reversed.”
“And I said this to whom?”
“And that there were also procedures in place to help the children, so that when they get older…”
“I said these things on advice from counsel. Now everyone is against me. You understand? A cabal of jealous doctors and let’s not for a minute forget the pharmaceutical companies all over the EU and in the U.S. too, who were scared little rabbits as they watched me succeed where they had failed.” He finally tosses the pills into his mouth, this time not even bothering to take a swallow of water to wash them down. “And so what is to happen to our Dr. Kis? Hmm? All the people who come here shaking and weeping and begging, Please, Dr. Kis, give me a child, please, Dr. Kis, save my marriage, make my life worth living, here is my money, here is my body, please help me. Where are they now when the world turns against Dr. Kis? Have you come here to help me? Is that why you are here in my home? Or are you just one more voice in the chorus, in the great hallelujah chorus that says Down with Dr. Kis, feed Dr. Kis to the wolves, let us all join together and destroy this terrible man who made dreams come true? Is that why you are here, miss?”
“I came here because you said—”
“The authorities were closing in on me, and I did not want to be burned at the stake like a heretic. I was aware of the problems.” He opens the desk’s bottom drawer and pulls out a sheaf of papers, a mélange of letters and legal documents. He shakes them at Leslie before slamming them onto his desk. “And, yes, I was working on solutions. But was I having success? With no money, no peace, no time. How could I?”
“But you said. I watched you. There was a…” Her heart pounding, Leslie moves her hand around and around, like someone turning the crank on an old movie camera.
“The Internet,” says Kis. “It’s a storm of lies, with little bits of sunlight here and there.”
“You were lying?”
“I was saying what I was told to say. I was playing for time. What else could I do? They wanted to wipe me out so I needed to make a story that I was onto something big, something valuable. And I was trying, believe me, miss, I was trying, night and day. But you can’t—what’s the phrase?—you can’t put shit back into a donkey. Things happen; they can rarely be reversed. The rain falls from the sky, it happens very quickly. But for the moisture to go back up in the air, that is very slow, a gradual process. And unfortunately for everyone involved, the general mood was not to wait for things to develop slowly.” Yet again, he reaches for the bottle of pills and then gives it a shake. It rattles like a deadly snake.
Tears slowly roll down Leslie’s face, though she is barely aware of them.
“What am I going to do?”
“What am I going to do, lady? You can live your life. Me? They are determined to destroy.” He opens the pill bottle, pushing up on the cap with his thumb.
“What are you doing?” Leslie asks, gesturing toward the pills. “Are you sick?”
“Yes. Dr. Kis is sick. Dr. Kis is dying.” He lifts the bottle up toward Leslie, as if extending a flute of champagne before a toast.
Leslie leaps out of her chair and grabs for the bottle of pills, but Kis evades her and pours a countless number of them into his mouth. Some he swallows right down, some he chews, showing his long gross teeth, and others dribble out and bounce onto the desk.
“You’re killing yourself.”
“Too late, it’s done,” he slurs through the thick white sludge of the half-masticated pills.
Leslie scrambles across the desk and grabs the old doctor. He tries to twist away from her, but she is too quick, and far too strong.
“Spit them out,” she says to him.
He presses his lips closed, shakes his head no, furiously.
“You have no right,” Leslie says. “You are not going to die, not until you—”
Kis slips from her grasp and falls to the floor. He rolls onto his side, tucks his chin into his chest, and covers his face with her arms. In less than a moment, Leslie is upon him. He is no match for her strength. She uncovers his face and rolls him onto his back.
“Let me die!” he cries to her, and clamps his mouth shut again and continues to swallow the remains of the pills.
Leslie has no plan, no idea of what to do next. All she can think of is getting those pills out of Kis’s mouth, and maybe sticking her fingers down his throat, forcing him to vomit up what he has already ingested.
His face has turned a darker shade of gray. Large beads of sweat appear on his scalp, his forehead, the long grooves on either side of his mouth.
“Open your mouth,” she commands.
He shakes his head no. And every time she reaches for him, he moves away.
But on the third
try she has him. She holds his grizzled chin in one hand. She pries his lips apart and inserts two fingers into his mouth. She attaches her fingernails to his bottom row of teeth and with that small purchase on his mouth she forces it open. He is fighting her off with all that he has, but he is old and the oxycodone tablets are already having their effect.
“Open! Open!” Leslie growls, and with that she gives his mouth an all-out yank. She is angrier than she has ever been, more desperate, more frantic, and she does not know her own strength. She hears the deep dull wet sound of a bone snapping. The bottom half of his jaw breaks off in her grip like a chunk off of a rotted jack-o’-lantern. He cannot even scream. The only sign he gives of the ruin that has come over him is a slight widening of the eyes—they open to their fullest aperture and they stay that way as the light is slowly extinguished from them.
Leslie gets up, still holding the doctor’s jaw. Slowly, she relaxes her fingers and the bloody, toothsome thing thuds to the floor.
As she hurries through the little Slovenian town to rejoin her children and Slavoj, Leslie rubs her hands against the sides of the old stone houses to wipe off the blood, but it isn’t enough to really clean them. One at a time she puts her fingers in her mouth and sucks them, and when she is finished with that she licks her palms and then dries them against the legs of her pants.
The twins are in the car and Slavoj sits on the hood, smoking a cigarette and reading the newspaper. “Lucky day?” he asks when he sees Leslie approaching the car.
She shakes her head. “I’m all out of lucky days,” she says.
“So we wait?” He looks at his watch. “Maybe some lunch. My cousin has a place, not too far.”
It’s all Leslie can do to shake her head. She opens the door to the backseat. The twins look at her, hopeful that the doctor has helped their mother, fearful that they are next, and even more fearful still that nothing has changed.
“Take us back to the airport, please,” Leslie says. “And if you can hurry that would be…” She pauses, steals a look at her hand. It’s worse than she thought. “That would be good,” she says.
“Now what?” Alice says as Slavoj turns the car around and starts off for the main highway.
“You’ve never had a chance to know your aunt Cynthia,” Leslie says.
“Mom,” Alice says, “I mean it. What are we going to do now?”
“Mom?” Adam says insistently. “We’ve come all this way.”
“She’d be a really fun person to live with,” Leslie says. “Fun for you, and fun for her.”
“Mom, what are we doing?” Alice says.
“I don’t think we should be leaving,” Adam says. “We came all this way. Maybe the doctor just went out and he’s coming back.”
“No,” Leslie says. “He’s not coming back.” She forgets there are traces of blood on her hands and she puts her arms around her children and gathers them close. “He’s not going to be able to help us. I’m sorry. I know children like to believe that there’s always someone out there who’s going to rescue them, maybe we all believe that, maybe I do too, or did, but that’s not how it works. Not now, not for us. We’re on our own.”
The children’s expressions are grave. She feels their hearts, the rise and fall of their chests as they breathe as one.
“Oh, my darlings,” Leslie says.
A thin skin of deep bluish gray spreads over the low-hanging clouds as the oncoming evening paints the first coat of darkness across sky. The airport lights burn bright yellow. Slavoj turns into the departures lane, drumming his fingers nervously against the steering wheel.
“You have tickets, everything you need?”
“We’re all set, Slavoj,” Leslie says. “Thank you for everything.”
“My job and my pleasure,” he says. “You are good people and the doctor you have come to visit is a bad man. But don’t worry. Justice in my country sometimes slow, but she arrives, she always arrives.”
He pulls up to the curb in front of the international departures and runs around the other side of the car to let them out. With great solemnity, the twins shake his hand and say their good-byes. He can see the fear in their faces, but there’s nothing more to do now but smile and pretend that this is just another trip to the airport, another good-bye.
“Here is something for you, Slavoj,” Leslie says, reaching into her purse. She takes out the envelope holding the diamonds and sticks her thumb and forefinger into the corner of it. She pinches up three small diamonds. “Open your hand,” she says, and when Slavoj does as he is asked, she places the glittering little stones in his palm. “They’re valuable, Slavoj. Bring them to any jeweler. You’ll see.”
Slavoj looks at the diamonds winking in the cadmium airport light. Slowly, his hand closes on the little jewels, and he makes a small nod in Leslie’s direction.
“Safe flight,” he says.
They are in luck. There is a flight to Munich leaving in half an hour, with a connecting flight to Newark, a night flight, which will mean only an hour and ten minutes’ layover in Munich. Despite there being plenty of open seats on both flights, Leslie has to pay a penalty for changing her reservation, but other than that it all goes smoothly. While they were not required to go through immigration on the way in to the country, going out is a different story, and as they wait in line, holding their passports, Leslie grows increasingly anxious. The possibility of catastrophe has doubled—police in America will be looking for them, and perhaps they have put a tag on their passports, and police here in Slovenia by now might have discovered Dr. Kis’s body. Step by step, they draw closer to the booths where the immigration officials check documents, the eerie icy light of their laptop computers glowing on their hands.
The immigration officer who looks over their passports has a sad, worried demeanor. He sighs frequently and his eyes are opaque, cloudy, the eyes of a defeated man. He seems barely engaged in checking their passports, going no further than trying to match the pictures in Adam’s and Alice’s passports with how they look now, three years after. His one vigorous act is to stamp their passports with a kind of controlled violence, and then he brusquely slides them through the slot in the bulletproof glass.
Next, they go through airport security. The two security officers, in bulky uniforms, the material as thick as porridge, stand with their feet wide apart, their hands folded behind them, staring intently at the monitors as the carry-on luggage rides the conveyor belt and is x-rayed.
Their flight is announced and Leslie and the children must make haste.
Leslie places their suitcase on the steel rolling pins that spin in front of the conveyor belt. She gives the valise a little poke with her finger and it begins its journey.
“Backpacks,” she tells Adam and Alice.
They do as she says, after which they follow her through the metal detectors. Leslie and Alice walk through without incident, but something on Adam’s person sets off the alarm. One of the security workers is roused from his fugue state, and he quickly intercepts Adam and takes him to one side, where he wands him, head to toe. The offending object is not difficult to find. Before leaving the hotel this morning, he put the corkscrew into his back pocket, and though he has been sitting on it all day, he has forgotten it is there. The wand reacts to the corkscrew with a frenzy of clicks. As the guard gestures for Adam to remove the corkscrew, Adam’s backpack is being x-rayed, and the other guard is discovering that nestled into the socks and T-shirts are two knives.
Adam is flushed with shame and fear. With one security officer having grabbed him by the arm, and the other emptying his backpack, he wonders if he is going to be taken somewhere, questioned, kept.
Alice’s face, as well, scalds with shame. Those knives are as much her fault as his.…
“Mom?” Adam says.
Her eyes are filled with tears. “Oh, Adam,” she says, her voice barely a whisper. “Oh, baby, poor baby.”
The security officers have no interest in detaining Adam. They simply conf
iscate the corkscrew and the knives and send them all on their way.
“We have to run,” Leslie announces, and the three of them hold hands and race down the corridor toward gate 11, where the Adria clerk checks their tickets and tells them in English that the bus to their plane is just about to leave. “Hurry, please, you are the last ones,” she tells them.
They go through the terminal gate, through the pedestrian tunnel, and down the movable metal staircase. A stiff wind is blowing now, though the night is clearing up; thin shreds of silvery cloud race past the full moon, which displays its many mountains and craters in a kind of hypervisibility and seems unnaturally close. Leslie, Adam, and Alice are the last ones on the bus, and as soon as they board the driver starts the journey over the tarmac toward the small jet that awaits them. On their way, they pass a Swissair jet, a Lufthansa, and a Federal Express jet, all of them 757s, warming their engines for takeoff.
There are still empty seats on the bus but the three of them stand, holding on to a single pole for balance. Adam is staring at his mother’s fingers on the cold silver pole. She feels the intensity of his stare and she knows without checking that he must see the little wisps and spatters of the doctor’s blood that she has been unable to wash off.
“It’s okay,” she murmurs to him.
“I love you, Mom,” he says.
“I love you too, Adam. I love you both.”
“We’ll find a way,” Alice says.
“I know you will,” Leslie says.
“She means all of us,” Adam says.
Leslie gazes at the other passengers on the transit bus. Businessmen, students, a pensive short-haired girl holding a French horn case. There are a couple of nuns sitting side by side and talking excitedly to each other, and for a moment Leslie is sure they are the same sisters she and Alex saw leaving Ljubljana ten years before. But how could they be? They are young, and those two nuns from the past were old, and now would be very old, possibly dead. Yes, nuns die too, and the thought of dying nuns fills Leslie with an unutterable sadness. Everyone dies, schoolteachers, husbands, everyone.
