by Tim Waggoner
As a doctor, she well understood the effects of sleep deprivation, both physical and mental. Logically, she knew that she couldn’t do her best work if she didn’t take care of herself. You have to take care of the machine, as she always told her patients. Used to tell. The way she’d neglected her practice the last few months, it was all but dead. But that was a small price to pay to achieve her ultimate goal. She would give anything, do anything, to make it happen.
Conrad’s question—which she’d both interrupted and completed—came back to her.
Isn’t the attainment of such a goal worth four people’s lives?
She didn’t want to think like that. She was supposed to be a healer, for Christ’s sake! But despite her protestations to Conrad, she couldn’t deny that deep down she did think that way. She wasn’t proud of the fact, but there it was. However, even though she knew how important it was to get her rest, emotionally she found it almost impossible to tear herself away from her work. About the only time she slowed down was to make a fresh pot of coffee, and she justified that to herself only because she needed the caffeine to keep her alert. She couldn’t afford to slow down. She had to keep pushing herself. They were depending on her.
She was no psychologist, but she had done a psych rotation in med school, and she knew that while it was vital to keep pushing herself if she hoped to succeed, there was another, deeper reason she refused to slow down. If she kept her mind busy, she didn’t have time to think about anything but work. It was when she allowed herself to rest that she remembered—or worse, dreamed.
She finished her coffee, got up from the table, and poured herself a refill. She headed back to the table, but instead of taking her seat again, she set the mug down, then walked past the kitchen, down a short hallway off to the left, and entered the family room. The lights were off, as they always were these days. She never went in there anymore, so there was no point in wasting electricity. She reached for the wall switch, but couldn’t find it. She couldn’t have forgotten where it was... could she? This was her home. She should be able to remember something as basic as the location of a light switch. She fumbled in the dark for several moments before her fingers finally encountered it and she flipped it with a sharp gesture of irritation, although inside she felt more than a little relief.
The illumination from the track lighting over the couch dazzled her eyes for a second, and she raised a hand to shield them. When her vision adjusted, she lowered her hand and saw that the room looked the same as always, with the exception of a light coating of dust on the cherrywood coffee table and the black leather couch. It almost looked like the room was covered with a thin layer of snow. No, she decided, it was more like she was looking at a faded photograph. A large flatscreen TV hung on the wall above the fireplace. The latter was empty and cold, but there used to be flames in there almost every night, even in summer. On the mantel above the fireplace beneath the television were a number of framed pictures. As Catherine stood there, she experienced the strange feeling that she was somehow trespassing in her own home.
She crossed the crème-colored carpet and stopped in front of the mantel. The first photo she picked up was one of her and Marshall on their wedding day. Both of them were laughing at something the photographer had said—she couldn’t remember what. It was her favorite picture of the two of them. The joy they exuded in that frozen moment perfectly captured the essence of their relationship. Love was only part of it, although of course, the largest part. They had genuinely enjoyed each other’s company, too. Some couples said they were also best friends, but in their case, it had been true. Marshall looked so handsome in the photo, and so young. They’d been in their early twenties when they married, but even so, the man he would become was visible. Thinner, a bit more hair, but the playful intelligence was present in his brown eyes, and it would only sharpen as the years progressed. And his smile... God, how she missed it.
She placed the picture back on the mantel and picked up another, this one of a pretty teenage girl with long brown hair, dressed in a tie-dyed T-shirt and shorts, sitting on the ground surrounding by flowers. Catherine had taken this picture of Bekah herself in the spring, out in the garden. She and Bekah had spent so many wonderful hours planning, planting, and tending the garden. It had been so long since she’d gone out back, she didn’t want to think about the kind of condition it was in. She supposed it was nothing but a tangle of high grass and weeds.
She remembered exactly when she’d taken this picture of Bekah. Eight days before her fifteenth birthday. Nine days before she’d gotten her learner’s permit. Twenty-three days before her father took her out for her first night-time driving lesson. That had been four months ago. It was the last time Catherine had seen either of them alive.
She didn’t recall much about the night itself after seeing them off. She assumed the police called her at one point, and she must have called someone after that, because she had a vague memory of sobbing in someone’s arms. She thought it might have been Ronetta, her office manager, but she wasn’t certain.
The details of what had happened to her husband and daughter, though, those she remembered, or at least could imagine, perfectly.
At approximately 8:40, Marshall and Bekah—in Marshall’s BMW, Bekah behind the wheel, excited and nervous—approached a railroad crossing outside of town. They got there just as the warning lights came on and the wooden crossing gate lowered. Bekah braked and together she and her father waited while the train passed. Over the months since, Catherine had wondered what, if anything, they’d talked about. She was certain no music had been playing. As much as Bekah would have loved to cruise to some tunes, her dad would never have permitted such a distraction while she was in the early stages of her driver’s education. She thought they might’ve rolled down the windows so they could better listen to the sound of the train’s passage and feel the wind it kicked up. She imagined them looking at each other, grinning and sharing a special moment, just the two of them, father and daughter.
The train passed, the crossing gate lifted, and Bekah took her foot off the brake, gently pressed the gas, and eased over the tracks, looking both ways as the BMW juddered across. Once safely on the other side, Bekah accelerated. An instant later a pickup with its lights off came flying out of the darkness, weaving back and forth, its driver one Earl Fulmer, a local plumber who’d just left a poker game at a buddy’s house, running with more alcohol than blood in his veins. Earl hit Bekah and Marshall head-on at what the police estimated was in excess of seventy miles per hour. There were no survivors.
As a doctor, Catherine knew her husband and daughter had died quickly, and despite the horrific injuries they’d sustained, they hadn’t suffered. At least, not for long. But even though she knew this intellectually, emotionally she imagined their experience of the accident as very different. She knew that human perceptions became heightened during times of extreme stress, giving rise to the common belief that a person’s life flashes before their eyes at such times. She imagined the accident seeming to occur in torturous slow motion while Marshall and Bekah’s consciousnesses operated at normal speed. If that were true, every wound they suffered would have seemed to take an eternity to inflict. The agony would have been inconceivable. She knew it was a foolish scenario to imagine, one that had no firm basis in scientific facts, but in her heart she believed it to be true, so she grieved not only for the loss of her loved ones, but for the unimaginable suffering they had endured before finally dying.
She looked at Bekah’s photo one last time, brushing the tip of her index finger across her daughter’s hair, feeling only cold glass. She replaced the picture on the mantel and walked out of the room, flipping off the light switch as she went. She passed through the kitchen, ignoring the coffee, opened the basement door, and headed down the stairs.
In the first days after the accident, Catherine had wished she’d ridden along with Marshall and Bekah that night. Wished she’d died with them. But that was before the morning Conrad D
ippel visited her office, not as a patient, but as what he called a “potential colleague.” He said he’d read about her “lamentable loss” in the Broadsider, and had what he believed might be a solution to her “profound emotional distress.” She’d almost tossed him out on his ass right there and then, but there was something in the tone of his voice, an unwavering confidence that made her want to listen to what he had to say, regardless of how crazy it might sound. Conrad had more than words with which to convince her, too. He’d brought a briefcase filled with the results of hundreds of experiments. The data had been intriguing, but nowhere near as intriguing as the demonstration he gave her in the temporary lab he’d established in the abandoned bicycle factory.
She’d watched him kill a rat by cutting its throat, stitch it up, and then—after administrating a combination of chemicals to the small corpse, in conjunction with some chanted words and hand gestures that she was certain were just for show—bring the animal back to life.
At that point, Conrad Dippel moved from “potential colleague” to a fully-fledged one.
Catherine had left the fluorescent lights on when she’d exited the basement, and had no trouble making her way across the lab. Much of the equipment was Conrad’s, transferred from the bicycle factory, but she’d added to it over the previous few months. A stainless steel operating table stood in the center of the basement, an array of surgical equipment laid out atop a table close by. Another table contained vials, jars, and beakers filled with various chemicals, along with other necessary equipment: pipettes, scales, microscopes, slides, and more. Stored on the floor beneath the table were several plastic containers labeled NuFlesh Biotech. Catherine ignored everything and crossed to the large horizontal freezer on the far side of the room. The machine’s powerful hum filled the basement, and she could feel its vibrations through the soles of her feet as she approached. She reached toward its metal surface, the cold kissing her skin before her fingers came in contact with the metal.
“I won’t rest until we’re together again,” she said in a soft, loving voice. “I promise.”
She lingered there a moment longer before turning away and once more resuming her work.
* * *
“Hey, Joe. What’s the word?”
Joe Riley sat on the curb outside the Fill ’Er Up convenience store. He’d just finished eating an energy bar, and now was nursing a cup of brown water that the store manager had the gall to call coffee. But it was warm, and that was all he cared about. He looked up as Billy Sutphin approached and gave him a weak smile.
“Sucks is the word. How ’bout you?”
“Same.”
Billy settled onto the curb next to Joe with a grunt, knee joints popping.
“Gettin’ old,” Billy said.
“Aren’t we all?”
Joe didn’t think Billy was all that old. In his mid-fifties, maybe. It was hard to tell people’s ages when they lived on the street. Such a life took its toll, and it was possible Billy could be in his thirties and only looked twenty years older. It didn’t help that his thick brown beard was shot through with gray. Joe had only been homeless for four months, and even in that short time, he’d changed to the point where he didn’t like looking in a mirror. His face was leaner, complexion sallower, eyes bloodshot, the flesh beneath puffy and bruised-looking. He did his best to keep his teeth clean, but they’d yellowed, and one of the bottom left molars ached all the time. He figured he probably had a cavity. Too bad he didn’t have enough money for a dentist.
Joe wasn’t well acquainted with Billy, but Brennan wasn’t a large town, and its homeless population tended to know one another at least well enough to say hi and shoot the shit now and again. They also tended to keep an eye on one another, make sure folks were doing okay, staying healthy, both physically and mentally. They called this “checking in,” and Joe recognized that was what Billy was doing now. There was also a certain kind of networking that went on among Brennan’s homeless. Tips were passed along—which church was giving away secondhand clothes, which buildings were vacant and good for a few nights of sheltered sleep before the cops rousted everyone out. Vital information if you wanted to survive on the street.
“Tried my luck at the highway exit today,” Billy said. “Stood there all afternoon holding a ‘will work for food’ sign.” He shivered.
Homeless folk knew to dress in layers when it was cold, and Billy wore a shirt and hoodie beneath an unzipped parka. But even with his limited experience, Joe knew that no matter how warmly you dressed, you could never keep the cold entirely at bay. Hell, he was dressed in layers too, only he had on his Dad’s old army jacket instead of a parka, and he felt the night’s chill. It was why he’d gotten the coffee in the first place. He offered Billy a sip to warm him up, but Billy declined with a shake of his head. It was too easy to pass germs that way, and homeless folk avoided getting sick at all costs. Joe felt stupid for forgetting that.
“How did it go?” he asked.
Billy shrugged. “’Bout as well as you’d expect. I need to shave off this damned beard. Makes me look too scary, you know? People don’t want to stop and open their windows to talk to a guy that looks like some kind of backwoods killer out of a horror movie. You’re smart to keep yourself cleanshaven. Men look less intimidating that way.”
Maybe so, but Joe’s first winter being homeless was approaching, and he figured he’d better start working on a beard if he wanted to keep warm. He finished the rest of his coffee, sat the empty cup on the ground, then lit a cigarette. He offered one to Billy, and this time the man accepted. They sat in silence for a few moments, smoking and watching cars pass by on the street, some of the drivers pulling into Fill ’Er Up to get gas or pick up some items inside. Joe noticed that Billy’s hands shook as he smoked, and there was something about the way they trembled that didn’t look like it was due to the cold, or at least, not only the cold. As far as Joe knew, the guy wasn’t into alcohol or drugs, so he wasn’t going through withdrawal. Joe hoped he wasn’t coming down with something.
“How was your day?” Billy asked after a bit.
“Not very productive.”
“Where did you try? You know what they say, it’s all about location, location, location.”
Joe thought about lying, but he didn’t see any point to it. Pride—foolish pride, anyway—was useless on the street. “I didn’t try. I just walked around town most of the day, moving from one place to another. Thinking.”
Billy took a last drag on his cigarette, dropped it to the ground, and crushed it out beneath the sole of his running shoe. He then turned to Joe. “I know it’s hard, man. I’ve been homeless for almost four years now, and it still ain’t easy for me to ask folks for money. But sometimes we have to do things we don’t like to survive, you know? You can’t let your pride get in the way. It’s like a Buddhist thing. You have to die to the self in order to reach enlightenment.”
Joe had no idea what the man was talking about, but he understood the basic sentiment.
“Sometimes it feels like pride’s the only thing I got left.” Joe finished his cigarette and crushed it out.
He’d had a good job working for the county, driving a snow plow in the winter and doing road work in the summer. He liked being outdoors—he wasn’t the sit-behind-a-desk type—and he liked feeling that the work he did helped make people’s lives a little easier. Then the lousy economy forced the county to make some budget cuts, and Joe was laid off. A week later his wife filed for divorce, took their little girl, and moved to her mother’s in Ash Creek. He hadn’t been able to afford a lawyer, so Sheila ended up with sole custody of their daughter, and he’d ended up paying both child and spousal support. He’d looked for other work—every damned day he looked—but no one was hiring. Eventually his unemployment ran out, the bank foreclosed on his home, he lost his car, and the next thing he knew, he became a resident of the street. He told himself it was temporary, just until he could get back on his proverbial feet. That had been four m
onths ago, and he was still here, a victim not of booze, drugs, or mental illness—just plain old lousy luck. He’d adjusted as best he could, but the one thing he hadn’t been able to accept was asking strangers for money. It was one thing to be homeless, but it was another thing to be a beggar. Not that he’d ever use that word in front of Billy. He’d been on the street too long to make judgments about what others did to survive. He had no idea what the man’s story was and how he’d ended up living like this. That kind of personal information was kept to one’s self on the street, shared only with the closest of confidants. But whatever Billy’s story was, Joe knew the man had one. Everyone did.
“Tell you what,” Billy said, “I managed to score a few dollars today. How about we head on over to the Foxhole for a couple slices of pie? My treat.”
“I appreciate what you’re trying to do, but I don’t need cheering up. Besides, if I have a hard time taking charity from strangers, what makes you think I’ll have an easier time taking it from you?”
Billy grinned. “You got to start somewhere, right? C’mon.” He took hold of Joe’s upper arm and stood. Joe allowed the man to lift him to his feet.
“Well... it has been a while since I’ve had a good piece of pie.”
Billy clapped him on the back. “There you go!”
The two men started walking in the direction of the diner, taking alleys for short cuts. Not only did alleys save time, but you could find some good stuff in them. Discarded or lost objects you might be able to sell for a couple bucks, even cast-off clothing sometimes. Sure, alleys could be dark and intimidating, and they didn’t smell all that good, but they were useful, and when you were homeless, that was all that mattered.
