The Extinction Event

by David Black

  The clerk in the intake office at the Berkshire Medical Center said, “I don’t know if I can give you that information.”

  She was tall, rangy, with hair the unnatural red of supermarket beef. Her skin looked like hide, tough; she must have spent her childhood in the sun. She wore a blue sweater draped over her shoulders, held in front by a gold-colored chain. She frowned, unhappy not to be able to accommodate them.

  “Can you at least tell us the name of the doctor who treated her?” Caroline asked.

  Rain dripped from Caroline’s hair, which was plastered to her face; from her chin, from her elbows. Her blouse and sweater, sopped, clung to her. So did her slacks. Jack admired the outline of her ass.

  “I’m a lawyer,” Caroline explained. “It’s germane to a case I’m handling.”

  “I think you need something from the courts,” the clerk said.

  “It involves a murder,” Caroline said.

  “Then, the police, too,” the clerk said. “I guess.”

  Jack had told Caroline he’d hang back, figuring she came across as more respectable, more trustworthy than he did.

  “You think?” she had asked.

  “It’s your face,” Jack had said. “The bone structure.”

  Caroline had put her hands on Jack’s cheeks and had turned his head so he was staring at himself in the car’s rearview mirror. They were parked in the hospital lot next to the Emergency Room. Outside, the rain swept across the asphalt in what under the sodium lamps looked like mica sheets.

  “That face,” Caroline said, forcing Jack to look at himself. “How could you not trust it?”

  “I don’t trust it,” Jack said. “And I’ve been looking at it all my life.”

  Gently, he detached Caroline’s hands from his face, not releasing them, holding them lightly in his upturned palms.

  “When I was ten,” he said, “maybe I trusted it then. But since puberty, no way.”

  “I trust it.”

  “That’s news.”

  She nodded and said, “A recent development.”

  “I don’t trust recent developments,” Jack said. “Not in my emotional landscape.”

  “What’s your emotional landscape look like?”

  “Andros Island,” Jack said. “In the Caribbean.”

  Puzzled, Caroline knit her brows. The three vertical lines forming between her eyes made it look as if someone had tugged a string on a sachet, furrowing the cloth.

  “Mangrove swamp and clay,” Jack said. “A few palmettos. Nothing can live on it. At least, not on the west side. I went there on vacation once.”

  “And my emotional landscape?” Caroline asked.

  “Very green,” Jack said. “An arbor. Covered with baby-blue trumpet flowers.”

  “A secret garden?” she asked.

  “I saw it through a hole in your hedge.”

  “You’ve got a dirty mind,” Caroline said, reaching for the door handle.

  The rain slapped the sides of the car.

  “Just like getting out in a car wash,” Jack said. “Ready?”

  Caroline nodded.

  They opened their doors at the same time and ducked into the downpour.

  2

  Once the intake clerk had turned them down, Jack and Caroline ran back out into the rain, slammed into the car, and drove around to the hospital’s main entrance. Again, dripping, clammy, their clothes sticking to them, they entered the hospital.

  “Do you have a towel?” Jack asked a guard, who was so bony it looked as if he had a wire hanger inside his square-badge jacket. “My wife,” Jack gestured at Caroline, who looked like a wet cat. Rain puddled where she stood. “She got a call, her uncle Monroe, they brought him in about an hour ago. Monroe Ruggerio?”

  “I just got back from my break,” the guard said. When his mouth was closed, his large teeth under his upper lip made his face look like a death’s-head. As if someone had pulled thin rubber over the bone. He poked his thumb over his shoulder. “The ladies’ room is down the hall. Around the corner. First door on the right.”

  “Honey,” Jack took Caroline in his arms. Their clothes squished, drizzling between their bodies. “Why don’t you dry off? I’ll see what I can find out about Uncle Monroe.”

  Jack kissed Caroline on the lips, which tasted fresh. Rainwashed. Surprised, she opened her eyes wide, then relaxed, and stuck the tip of her tongue into Jack’s mouth.

  Jack watched her sway down the hall, leaving damp footprints.

  “Men’s room?” Jack asked the guard.

  “Across from the ladies’,” the guard said.

  Jack caught up to Caroline around the corner, out of sight of the guard, and grabbed two towels from a supply cart. He tossed one to her, wiped his face, ruffled his hair.

  “What’s with the tongue?” Jack asked.

  “Did it give you a thrill?” Caroline said.

  From the cart, he took a white medical smock, which he slipped on.

  “Upstairs,” Jack said. “Find an empty room. Make a scene. Where’s my uncle?”

  “Uncle Monroe Ruggerio.” Caroline smiled.

  From her pocketbook, she took a comb, ran it through her hair, and handed it to Jack, who also combed his hair. Then, ducking into a dark room where two patients were sleeping, Jack grabbed a clipboard from the bottom of a bed.

  “What if there’s an emergency?” Caroline asked, nodding at the sleeping patient, whose chart Jack had stolen.

  “There is an emergency,” Jack said. “Two people have been murdered.”

  3

  In the elevator, Caroline held her forefinger over the panel and gave a questioning look at Jack, who shrugged. Randomly, Caroline hit a button: the third floor. The elevator door slid closed.

  The third floor was quiet. The neon lights under their marcelled ceiling panels buzzed. At the nurses’ station, a woman with close-cropped blond hair, sitting at a computer, glanced at Jack and Caroline, both in their medical smocks, Jack holding a patient’s chart.

  “Rubinstein?” Jack asked.

  “Not on this floor,” the nurse said and went back to the computer.

  “Third,” Jack said.

  “Not here,” the nurse said.

  Another nurse, a man rubbing his face, was going into the nearby break room. At the end of the hall to the left, a custodian was polishing the floor with an electric hum. Jack smelled the wax.

  The hall to the right was empty.

  Jack walk up to the nurses’ station, tapping the chart he held.

  “R-u-b-i-n-s-t-e-i-n,” Jack spelled the name.

  “I know how to spell it,” the nurse said, concentrating on her typing. The more insistent Jack was, the more the nurse ignored him. “He’s not on this floor.”

  “She,” Jack said. “Sadie. Sadie Rubinstein.”

  Caroline walked down the hall to the right.

  “I can’t help you,” the nurse said, not looking up.

  “Could you check what floor she’s on?” Jack asked. “They told me third.”

  The nurse sighed, typed, looked, typed again.

  “No Rubinstein Sadie,” she said.

  Jack flipped through some pages on the clipboard.

  “Find her records, would you please? She’s got to be somewhere.”

  Again sighing, the nurse again typed, again looked, again typed.

  “No record of Rubinstein Sadie,” she said.

  Which is when the nurse heard Caroline’s scream.

  Leaving the computer on the patient records file, the nurse jumped up and ran down the left-hand hallway, almost colliding with the nurse running from the break room.

  “Uncle Monroe!” Caroline cried at the end of the hall. “Where’s my uncle?”

  Jack glanced at the custodian, who ignored everything, moving the polishing machine in circles across the right-hand hallway floor.

  He slipped around the counter of the nurses’ station and quickly typed in Jean Gaynor’s name.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN


  1

  Caroline’s car stalled half a dozen miles from Mycenae. Two miles from the closest house, they hit a puddle deep enough to swamp them.

  “Just as well,” Jack said. “Can’t see anything in this rain anyway.”

  … missed Houston but ravaged the Beaumont-Port Arthur area in southeastern Texas yesterday, blowing down trees, knocking out power and interrupting refinery operations. The storm hit shore—

  Jack cut the engine, turning off the radio.

  Now that the car wasn’t moving, plowing through the rain as if parting billowing curtains, the wipers were useless.

  “If you get chilly,” Jack said, “I’ll turn on the motor. Turn on the heat.”

  During the forty minutes they’d driven from the Berkshire Medical Center, they had both dried a little in the blowing heat from the vents.

  For the first half hour out of Pittsfield, they had discussed what Jack had found on the computer: Jean Gaynor had checked into the Emergency Room complaining of headaches, muscle aches, fatigue, dizziness, ringing in the ears, irregular menstruation, irregular heartbeat, hallucinations, difficulty in concentration.

  “She was a drug addict,” Caroline said.

  “That’s what the doctor who looked at her figured,” Jack said, leaning forward and peering as he plowed through the rain, going no faster than ten miles an hour.

  “A lot of symptoms,” Caroline said, also peering through the windshield. “There’s a stop sign. So many symptoms,” Caroline continued.

  “She said it started when she moved,” Jack said.

  “To the place that was searched?” Caroline asked.

  “Another address.” Jack handed her a slip of paper from the hospital. On it he had scrawled: 17-41 Rostyn.

  “Mycenae?”

  Jack nodded.

  “Where she was living when she went to the Emergency Room. At least, it was the address she gave. Said about three months after she moved there, she started feeling sick.”

  “So she moved out.”

  “To Galvin Avenue.”

  “Because she thought the place”—Caroline looked at the piece of paper again—“17-41 Rostyn was making her sick.”

  “That,” Jack said as he hit the puddle that stalled them, “and the ghosts.”

  2

  About three in the morning, the rain let up.

  “Hey, Five Spot,” he said gently. “Time to wake up.”

  Caroline blinked. Turned her head, gazed at Jack.

  “I’m the guy who’s driving,” Jack said. “Remember?”

  “I fell asleep,” Caroline said.

  Ahead, the setting moon hung close to the horizon. Jack’s window was open. The air smelled of soil, manure, cinnamon. The wet road hissed under their tires.

  Before Caroline fell asleep, the rain drumming on the car roof, Jack had told her about the notation at the end of Jean’s hospital record: Along with physical symptoms, Jean had complained about seeing a ghost. A little girl bouncing on a bed and running through the halls of 17-41 Rostyn.

  “Coke hallucinations?” Caroline asked.

  “The doctor wasn’t about to get out a Ouija board,” Jack said. “Wasn’t about to do any more tests once he realized how much blow, God-knows-whatever stuff, Jean was doing. A real humanitarian.”

  3

  At Caroline’s, dried off, the smell of fresh coffee from the kitchen, Jack watched while Caroline searched for Jean’s symptoms on the Internet.

  Caroline wore a blue terry cloth robe. Her hair was pinned up with a big red plastic clip.

  “It sounds like she had serious neurological damage,” Caroline said.

  “Drugs’ll do that,” Jack said.

  Caroline printed out the research. Each page crisply slid from her printer. Jack could smell the hot ink and paper.

  “I was married,” Caroline said, belatedly answering Jack’s question from the car.

  She collected the pages from the printer, not looking at Jack.

  “For three years,” Caroline said. “Until two years ago.”

  Jack sipped his coffee. It burned his lips. But he kept sipping.

  “I still see him,” Caroline said. “Occasionally.”

  “Do you still make love?” Jack asked.

  “That’s the question you want to ask?” Caroline said. “That’s the question?”

  Jack sipped the scalding coffee.

  “Why do you want to know?” she asked. “You’ve got no reason to ask something like that.”

  As Jack stared at her over his coffee cup, the steam from the hot coffee made his eyes water.

  “I was infertile,” Caroline said. “Well, not at first. A tubal pregnancy. Four months. Sixteen weeks. How could I not know? But I didn’t. I always was irregular. I always had lots of cramps. Lots of cramps. The tube burst. Internal bleeding. Very messy situation. The doctors took everything. Hollowed me out.”

  “That’s why you left him?” Jack asked.

  “He left me,” Caroline said. “I needed time and assumed he’d understand. He didn’t.”

  Jack sipped his coffee.

  “I’ve had seven lovers,” she abruptly said.

  “Like Snow White?”

  “Most were taller than five feet.”

  “Go figure,” Jack said.

  Part Two

  CAROLINE

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  1

  Outside, Jack walked toward the river. The sky was clear. The stars bright as pain.

  Twenty years earlier, Jack met a woman with hair as red as fox fur and luminous green eyes that rarely blinked. She had freckled breasts. Pale skin. And long, almost prehensile toes, which she used to pick up dropped hair bands, quarters, socks. Penny Robartes.

  “Find a Penny, pick it up,” Penny said to Jack after they made love for the first time, “and all the day you’ll have good luck.”

  A month after they met, they moved into a farmhouse in Vermont. South of Brattleboro. A broken-down two-story building with peeling 1950s wallpaper—large yellow and red and white blossoms in the dining room; a repeating blue-and-white design of pagodas that looked like electric towers in the living room; Jack and Jill with their water pails walking up and tumbling down a green hill, a pattern of repeated failure, in the bedroom.

  On the second day after they took possession of the house, they hired a local handyman to mow the backyard and weed the overgrown gardens. The handyman arrived as the sun was rising. When he started work his breath in the chill billowed from his steam-engine mouth as he mechanically moved through the yard, ripping out weeds, hacking away roots. By midmorning, beads of sweat riveted his forehead. At two, he’d come to the front door; and, having lost his larynx to cancer, he’d hold a device to his throat and ask, robot voiced, for his wages.

  Penny owned a mutt, Sweetie Pie, who was a crotch dog. To keep him from burying his snout between her legs in the morning—they slept on a mattress on the floor of a bedroom with a bricked-up fireplace—Penny would strip off her panties and throw them to the dog.

  A week after the handyman had started working for them, Penny stripped off her panties as usual and wandered through the house looking for her pet. Figuring the dog had gone out, Penny stood, naked in the kitchen doorway, left hand holding open the screen, right hand waving her panties, as she called, “Sweetie Pie? Oh, Sweetie Pie, come and get it.”

  From the flower bed in the backyard, the handyman watched Penny calling and waving her panties—“Oh, Sweetie Pie, come and get it…”—and came around to the front door where, holding the device to his throat, he told Jack, “Your girlfriend needs help. I quit!”

  When, after a year, Penny left him, Jack vowed he would never fall in love again.

  And he didn’t.

  Until that night he left Caroline.

  2

  The revolving police car light flickered on Jack’s face red, blue, red …

  “What’s it this time, Al?” Jack asked. “I drop a Mounds wrapper back th
ere or something?”

  “Or something,” Sciortino said, leaning across the passenger side through the open window. “Want a lift?”

  “Is no an option?” Jack asked.

  Sciortino’s face was in shadow. A strip of light illuminated his eyes like a mask. His pupils were big. He blinked.

  “Not tonight, pal,” Sciortino said.

  The police car door handle was so cold Jack felt a ping in his right wrist. As he slid into the car, he rubbed his hands together.

  “This official?” Jack asked.

  “Are you in cuffs?”

  “So unofficially what’s up?”

  “Seems to me, Jack, you’ve got enough on your plate. What the hell you doing back at the buffet?”

  “Who’s talking to me?”

  “Okay, so I’m a ventriloquist. A medium. Channeling people who don’t like you for starters. And can hurt you bad.”

  “And you want—”

  “To make sure you stay on the right side of the tracks.”

  “Al, you know, that’s not where I feel comfortable.”

  “Next time I see you—”

  “It’ll be official?” Jack asked.

  “It won’t be polite,” Sciortino said.

  Jack opened the door.

  “I appreciate the warning,” he said.

  “Be smart,” Sciortino said.

  The sound of the slamming car door was hollow in the cold night.

  Sciortino watched until Jack turned down toward the Hudson.

  “Fuck me,” he said and slowly drove away.

  3

  Jack’s house creaked in the wind. Through the cracked window opposite the foot of his bed, Jack watched the sky change from black to gray to purple to streaky red. He heard an owl hoot. In the distance, a truck downshifted. The damp morning air held a whiff of skunk.

  Dragging the quilt off the bed and pulling it around his shoulders like a cloak, Jack, feet arching from the cold of the bare wood floor, walked across the room to the window and gazed out at the mist rising from the damp earth.

  Through the cracked window, almost motionless in the rising mist, Jack saw two rabbits fucking.

  One rabbit hunched over the other, which made spasmodic motions.

  The rabbit on top had its teeth fastened to the back of the bottom rabbit’s neck. Like cats. When they fuck.