Alice & Oliver

by Charles Bock

  Now she was here. The fourth floor’s rectangular maze funneled to a dimmed back area. Half-submerged in a worn comfy chair, swimming inside her pink ski hat and punkish sunglasses and pink fuzzy robe, Alice looked like alternative rock royalty, sullen, a bass-playing legend nodded out in her dressing room. A swollen baggie hovered over her, its catsup-thick plasma dripping into her veins. When she saw Oliver pulling at the blue separating curtain, her dormant form animated, a corner of her mouth rising. The arm that was not hooked up welcomed—a weak floppy wave that turned into request, as she reached for the Styrofoam cup.

  “You have it,” she managed. “Goodie.”

  Mango lassi. Sweet and thick and bubbling with foam, that tangy kick to cap its smoothness. How many times had she ordered it over the years? She couldn’t estimate. You don’t keep track. You sip, taste, feel its kick, appreciate, sip again.

  Now a protracted sip left a thin, fizzy mustache. She leaned back into the chair, made a contented sound. Oliver pulled out a Styrofoam container, unveiled some sort of black lentil tandoori mess. He kissed her on the cheek, reported how amazing the puree smelled. After she did her damage, he told her he was going to devour the rest. He plopped down his can of soda, her bottles of water; he started ripping open plasticware.

  He was about midway through a just-savory-enough chicken tikka when a voice pretended to knock on the curtain. Eisenstatt ducked sideways, entering almost in segments, slicked coif and head and neck not moving, torso lurching. The doctor took in the food. “That really smells good.”

  “Would you like some?” Alice dipped an untouched piece of naan into her sauce. “Or are we in trouble again?”

  Eisenstatt stared down at the offered flatbread. His expression contained amusement. “I came by to see how everything was going. Also to chat about parts of your treatment. Having said this, you’re right. I’m not pleased to see what you’re eating.”

  “They knew I was going to lunch.” Oliver gestured toward the hallway. “I asked if it was okay to bring food back. I talked to the nurse.”

  “She may have figured you meant the cafeteria.”

  Alice slurped her straw, purposefully drawing out the sound. “I’m just a sick and weak, blind invalid. But I’m confused, Doctor. Why would anyone choose of their own volition to eat at the hospital cafeteria?”

  Eisenstatt refused to give. “My concern is how well cooked the restaurant food might be, and what would come of that.”

  “Oh, I can see you think we’re daft.” Humor provided energy; she rode its charge, shifting into Fashion Voice: “Spend your weekend at the urgent care center when you could stay home? Procure food from somewhere besides our lovely hospital cafeteria?” Alice lifted the Styrofoam cup, an imaginary toast. “We’re just a couple of bon vivants. Libertines, is what they call us.”

  “If I didn’t give a fuck about her well-being,” Oliver said, “I would have gotten food from the cafeteria.”

  “Yes. Very entertaining, as always. But you know the deal: eating has been a problem. We have concerns about your nutrition. Your husband has been asking whether an endoscopy can diagnose if there’s a problem in your stomach.”

  “Another whodunit for you to solve,” Alice said, bone dry. “Hurrah.”

  “The way this hospital works.” Eisenstatt again refused the bait; his voice and manners remained restrained, even as he gripped the table ledge behind him. “An endoscopy gets scheduled six months in advance. Then your doctor calls and makes an official request to move it, and it gets moved to the same week. We are talking about a serious procedure. If endoscopies were innocuous, I’d say let’s try it. All I am asking: watch what you eat. Please. I’m also writing you a refill for Cthulesta.”

  From behind a curtain somebody was laughing at his own joke. A loudspeaker crackled, went silent.

  “Cthulesta,” Oliver repeated. “Again?”

  “Same routine. Take the nightly shot with a fatty meal. The fat allows the medicine to get digested and be absorbed. With any luck we’ll spur some white blood cell growth, increase production of your neutrophils, decrease odds of fungal infection—all good stuff.”

  “Ginseng is an antifungal preventative,” Alice said.

  “I don’t know if you knew this,” Oliver said, rubbing his chin, looking down, “but after her first consolidation, the bill for that same prescription was five grand. Our plan only covered fifty percent. Of course insurance denied the claim.”

  “Didn’t we submit a form?” Eisenstatt asked.

  “After I called two times. Then you got the payment codes backward.”

  “With a little luck, this will keep you out of the hospital,” Eisenstatt answered. “That’s what you want. It’s what I want.”

  “But you said my numbers are going up? I’m doing so well? Maybe I don’t need it?”

  Leaning against the wall behind him, the doctor crossed his right leg in front of his left, putting himself in an odd position, especially considering the man’s bulk. Now he tapped his pen against his opposite arm’s lab jacket sleeve, watching the flick and rebound. In certain moments, he seemed young, reminding Alice of an alone child.

  “Logically, what you’re saying is reasonable,” he began. “A normal person recovering conceivably would not be at risk. But it’s normally not someone walking down the street who’s battling leukemia and is likely to get a fungal infection. When you’re neutropenic, or coming out of this state, it’s comparatively common to have fungal pneumonia as a side effect.”

  Oliver waited for the doctor to finish, raised his hand. “When we went into the emergency room that first time, Alice”—he hesitated—“they diagnosed you with pneumonia. Could that have been—”

  “We don’t know that it was fungal pneumonia,” she said.

  “Do we know it wasn’t?”

  “That’s how every single thing is going to be from now on?” Alice’s voice simmered, but did not boil. “We can’t say anything with certainty, but you should still do every single thing we tell you? Then afterward, you hand me a business card, tell me to go wait in the corner like a good little girl. I still die, but this way I die knowing I did everything I was supposed to?”

  Finishing, she exhaled and looked down, inward, and if there was a bit of smugness to her—as if she did not need their responses, was not interested in their answers—then there was also satisfaction: a woman who had answers of her own.

  The end of print party

  DURING JUNIOR YEAR, a professor turned mentor needed help on some sample pieces. She made a simple request after class, and invited Alice to join that proud lineage of Competent Students More Than Eager to Be Worked to the Bone. It was a new world for her, and during those first weeks, as she hunched over a design table in an immaculate Chelsea studio, Alice felt as if she’d been given keys to a special castle wing, heretofore off-limits, that she’d long dreamed of entering. Soon enough, however, she learned that these keys opened doors to oddly quiet rooms, where her weekends would pass, working back-to-back ten-hour days, all but chained to those designing tables and sewing machines. Still, her temp gig evolved, becoming a full-fledged apprenticeship. Alice fleshed out lines for struggling and overextended houses. She figured out the logistics of a knockoff version of a trendy pantsuit that everyone needed. She learned to find the poetry in silhouettes and lines and draped patterns. For her efforts, she received next to nothing—though the day rate, to a twenty-year-old, seemed as extravagant as those gilded buildings alongside Central Park West.

  But the way her industry worked was a lot like the city itself: either you owned or you kept renting; either you moved up the food chain—impressing a creative director, getting a shot as a designer yourself, gathering commissions and backers and starting your own line—or you hit your apex and started down the other side. The assignments stacked up, and at some point in between all those deli salads, Alice turned twenty-seven. Her love of clothing and fashion was no longer so glowy, her creative energies too often fel
t summoned from her body like those last bits of toothpaste, rolled from the tube. She was still working the same brutal hours for that same day rate. It no longer felt glamorous. She still didn’t have any insurance or benefits, still felt herself sprinting to keep from being crushed beneath the hamster wheel of city life. All the while, over her shoulder, in her rearview, newly hatched and eager former hers kept coming, more than ready to push the present her aside. Alice found herself feeling a nostalgic closeness toward her mother. Passing any child opened an ache in the pit of her stomach.

  Coming off a string of first dates so astonishingly banal they weren’t even worth relaying to friends, she was working some freelance job or another, taking smoking breaks with Kira, a youngish, also-going-nowhere designer from Milan. There hadn’t been any reason not to bond, not to drink together after work. Sometimes this meant spending time with Kira’s friends—journalists from Uzbekistan with disdainful sneers, grad students from Paris who enjoyed dancing around the highest flames of their parents’ stacks of burning money. Kira invited Alice to a “kind of theme party.” She couldn’t quite articulate the theme, but that hardly mattered. Tilda was supposed to be Alice’s sidekick, but at the last minute booked extra work on some kind of slasher flick. If Alice wasn’t turning cartwheels about going alone, she figured that if pretentious expats were good for anything, it would be a house party.

  She was rocking a pixie cut at the time, her dirty blond hair a swirling patchwork ragbag, all firehouse streaks and lollipop highlights, a look she liked to think of as both psychedelic and elfin. That fall was slow in arriving, caught in that amalgam stretch where walking in the shade caused chilliness, but the bright sky was warm enough for a girl to get away with her favorite sleeveless black sweater—especially if she’d inlaid its scooping collar with ceramic pears and strawberries. Alice had run with her instincts, piling her neck with junk necklaces: beads sized like lug nuts and elephant eyes. The common complaint of friends was that she tried too hard, made her tastes too obvious. Why not make it work for her? She put on a few mobster pinkie rings, squeezed on a pair of velvet pants of fairy-tale purple. Giving herself her final once-over examination in the full-length, she saw the shiny fabric hugging her tush and thighs in a way that, huzzah huzzah, did not make her want to vomit. The curved ingress of her skin, robust and pure, flashed in that space just beneath the bottom of her sweater.

  Kira’s handwriting had been perfect as a polite child’s, and Alice followed her directions to an almost inhabitable stretch of Williamsburg, civilization only in the sense that it boasted its own twenty-four-hour deli. After she’d been buzzed in to the Uzbek funeral home, but before entering the mourners’ lobby, Alice took the instructed hard left and entered a long rectangular room, the first section of what would show itself to be a railroad flat.

  Maybe ten people standing around, fig-leaf groups, their buzzing energetic, even hopeful. The only illumination was across the otherwise dark room, a blue glow from a pair of large terminal consoles—the types of screens you consulted in airports to find out whether you were going to make a connecting flight. Near the consoles, people were leaning over, writing. Soon it became apparent that to head into the railroad flat’s larger living space—where the real party was under way—you needed some sort of name tag. Maybe that was what people were writing? Alice started searching for a sticker when Kira shouted her name, and rushed over with her flatmate, a louche woman whose name Alice never remembered.

  House music drifted in from the other room, the real party. Someone was showing his friends a name tag, receiving a scrum of laughter or applause. Though Alice was a bit intimidated by them, both women looked genuinely happy to see her: Kira’s arms opening for a big hug, the French woman following up, swooping in with an air kiss.

  Maybe it was simple relief: Alice knew someone here. Maybe it was receiving any shred of kindness. But likely there was something else. These weren’t her best friends, but their openness made her glad to be here, glad to see them.

  In the voice of a Vichy collaborator, the louche woman turned, shouting an order to someone: “Oh, do her. You must.”

  Alice saw a stout man responding, approaching dutifully. Trailing behind him, not looking happy at all to be there, was another boy.

  “You have a name tag?” Kira asked her. “If you’re not into doing the code, it’s fine. Just write a number.”

  Before Alice had time to ask what she meant, Kira and the louche girl and the first guy were bantering in French, back and forth at a speed that Alice’s broken command of the language couldn’t follow.

  “They’re supposed to ask if you want to learn to write your name in code.”

  The other one. A bush of brown curly hair. He continued, “That’s the grand theme.”

  “You mean an even better theme than keeping all the alcohol in the back room until your guests fill out applications?”

  He took her in, seeming surprised by her wit. Eyes with an intense depth calculated, and their math added up to losing a fight against his oncoming smile. Now he sidled next to her. Digging through his pocket, he pulled out a ballpoint. “Enjoy. Don’t let me keep you.”

  A cursory search discovered there weren’t any nearby stickers or name tags to write on. But what Alice did turn up was equally interesting: the counter was covered with pages of textbooks, novels, paperback romances, different book sizes, crazy languages. They’d been lacquered, shellacked, or maybe varnished. Alice showed this to her new compadre. He refused to be amused.

  “Oh, give it up,” she goaded.

  Running her hand over the counter, she felt roughness, bumps, creased edges, different layers of hardened paper. “Don’t they look like musty relics? All just found in Granddad’s library. I think the reflection of screen glow’s an especially nice touch.”

  “That’s kind of the idea, right?”

  Alice followed his lead, looked through the jumbled bodies, saw the large font, scrolling wide letters: RINT PARTY END OF PRINT PARTY END…

  She didn’t get its meaning; meanwhile the boy had started talking again, but in a new way, faster and more invested—as if Alice had met some kind of standard, one that released his internal spigot. Alice wondered if he was going to provide his name. Unlike everyone in the fashion world, Bushytop definitely gave off a hetero vibe, and was not in any way uncute.

  He was apologizing, saying this whole thing was his fault, in a way. His buddy Ruggles—the dapper asshole with his arm around that French harpy—had been on him to take a break from work and school. Dragged him to some poker night with the Expats. Which, honestly, had been a trip: great smells from the pots atop the stove distracting you from your middling hands; different spendy crackers and good cheese making the rounds; more than a few glasses of a nice red to boot. Seven-card stud was the game, but with showers of wild cards, crazy amounts, like where you passed the second and fourth cards of your hand to the immediate right. During one of the snack breaks, he’d answered a question about what one in graduate school for computer science did.

  Alice looked doubtful, but encouraged him to go on.

  The boy answered the Expats with an explanation of virtual realities, the possibility of creating—inside one’s computer—a reality and life and system that you kind of lived, but simultaneously, along with your life in the outside world. Oliver told Alice this virtual life could also be three-dimensional, meaning it would include commerce, entertainment, and sex, of course. A complete parallel reality. Or at least a supplementary one. “Like, it can filter into the real one. You’d start to pay your bills through computers, who knows, even go shopping on them—”

  “I could certainly do without salespeople.” Alice laughed. “But buying a dress without seeing it on?” Her eyes rolled. “Let me know how that turns out for you.”

  “Right.” He looked chagrined. “The thing, nobody knows what they’ll come up with. But it is going to become more ingrained. And what I do—”

  “That’s the coding?�
�� Alice asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Meaning you what?”

  “Okay, so, if you want the computer to do the shit we’re talking about, you better be able to communicate with it, right? So think of the codes as languages. English. Urdu. I was telling your friends here, there’s not even a question that speaking these languages, having conversations where you can direct the computer and create the programs it runs, it’s more important to our future than anything on some fucking page.” He waited. “Yeah. Your buddies bought it as much as you. So much they decided, Hey, why not celebrate the end of the written word?”