The Normals

by David Gilbert

  "Hey."

  "Hello."

  Billy opens the backseat door, tosses in his suitcase.

  The man behind the wheel is in his early sixties. He wears green scrubs and a lab coat like they're pajamas for an insomniac. He spins around, faces Billy. Smallish and lean, he has a nose suited for tunneling. "Big, huh?" he says. "It's brand new. The Rio Grande, the biggest thing on the road that's not commercially registered."

  "Billy Schine," Honeysack interrupts, "this is Dr. Nathanael Marx."

  "Hi."

  Dr. Marx bangs a U-turn and the fat tires hop toward high speed. "This monster's got driver's side airbags, side, top, front, same with the passenger side, same with the backseat. If we wreck, this thing becomes inflated, and if we do wreck, whoever wrecks us will be much worse. Trust me, I've seen it. Oh man, have I seen it. Try seeing what happens when an Accord goes against a Suburban and you'll understand that it's war out there and you've got to keep up with the arms race. I agree, it's absurd. But would I rather treat broken glass to the face or a decapitation? Hmm, let me think."

  Dr. Marx barely slows for the security station. Though no music is playing, he drumsolos the steering wheel and brakes with the beat of a bossa nova bass line. He seems to dance with the road. Honeysack, on the other hand, waits for the band to strike up the air bags. "I like to drive," Dr. Marx explains. "I love to drive. As a kid I dreamed of sports cars, especially in med school. The doctors drove all the hot cars in my town. Doctors had the wheels. That was the day when doctors were considered rich. Ooh, a doctor, he must be rich. Funny now. But when you regularly witness what eighty miles per hour does to a Porsche, well, you start shopping for a tank." Dr. Marx catches Billy in the rearview mirror. "Hey man, I'm a fan of reckless abandon," he says. "I just don't want to be stupid about it."

  Honeysack turns to Billy. "This man's a legend in the trauma field."

  Dr. Marx flinches. "Was, maybe."

  "He helped develop the ABCDEs for EMTs."

  "Big efing deal."

  "And pushed the use of backboards for possible neck and spinal cord injuries."

  "Now you're dating me."

  "Backboards were not standard before this man."

  "Not like they call it the Marx board," Dr. Marx says.

  "And the Ambu bag," Honeysack mentions.

  "It's not like Ringer's IV solution, or the Swan-Ganz catheter, two pricks I knew. I once met Hank Heimlich at a convention, before he was Heimlich of Heimlich maneuver fame. Nice guy. Nothing special but nice. Now look at him. His name is in every restaurant. I can't eat a good piece of steak without feeling a bit envious."

  Up ahead, a car is pulled over on the side of the road. Dr. Marx decelerates and leans forward. He seems ready for the call immemorial, Is there a doctor in the house? His eyes are on constant high alert, never fearful but prepared, and while his intentions are noble—Must save lives!—his sharp rodent face has an uncomfortable blood lust. Sadly, the pulled-over car has only a flat tire.

  "Trauma," Dr. Marx says, "is a young man's game. And look at our young man in the backseat," he says of Billy. "Our brave young man willing to step forward with us. Cryopreservation is where the world of medicine is going. And the three of us right here, riding in this Rio Grande—feel it, feel it. Do you feel it, guys?" Dr. Marx rolls down his window so the wind can join the conversation. "We are cruising on the forefront regardless of how history might remember us."

  Honeysack opens his window a few inches and allows the wind slight coaxing.

  "So," Dr. Marx asks Billy, "do you have your suicide note?"

  "Uhm, yeah."

  "Would you mind if I took a look?"

  "I guess not." Billy hands it over. "It's still pretty rough," he says.

  "I'm sure it's fine." Dr. Marx unfolds the piece of paper. "I'm sorry," he reads while driving, a multitasker of the road. "I'm so so very sorry. That's it, huh? A bit terse, don't you think? I'm sorry, I'm so so very sorry. The very works well. But I'd like more, just a bit more, to give a sense of your mental state. Why you're sorry? Who you're sorry towards? That kind of thing. More depth, more emotion. I'd like to see more of you, instead of just sorry. Your call, but think about it. There's still time. But definitely sign your name, just your first name. That's essential. Anyway, no big deal, you're not going to die, not today. And I've been thinking a coronary occlusion might be the best way to go, the most reasonable explanation." Dr. Marx hands back the note.

  "So you don't even need this?" Billy asks.

  "No, we do, just in case. And in my opinion the note needs a bit more But hey, I'm not a writer."

  "Neither am I," Billy says.

  "I had you pegged for the writerly type. You went to Yale, right?"

  "Harvard," Honeysack corrects.

  "Harvard and Cornell in my car," Dr. Marx coos. "Not bad for a Rutgers man."

  "I'm going to need some more paper," Billy says.

  "Just pick it up from sorry."

  "You seem to be an expert on this," Billy says.

  "I was a doctor in Vietnam," he answers as if natural explanation.

  "Were there a lot of suicides over there?"

  "Hardly any. Nobody thought of killing themselves in the face of all that. Killing yourself would be a screw-you to the guys who died. But a lot of them wrote notes and hid them in their boots so if they were killed they had their last words on them. We doctors always found them, wrapped in plastic. Shrives, we called them, and they all read like apologies, like the bullets came from their own gun. Heartbreaking stuff, always full of love even when their insides were ripped to shreds. It's what got me into trauma, those notes, me trying to make them moot." Dr. Marx grips the steering wheel extra tight and seems to drive from the corner of his eye as if the road is only worthy of peripheral vision. "What an epic waste, but I guess we all know that, right." He turns toward Dr. Honeysack. "Vietnam was where I replanted my first finger, a wedding band disseverment."

  "Really?"

  "Yeah. A mechanic got his ring caught as he was falling and rip."

  "Nice."

  "It got written up."

  "I'm sure."

  "In 1969 a replant was news."

  Billy looks down at his note, uninspired. But he likes Gretchen's number tucked away on the reverse side, like a clue, like somebody might call her with the news and wonder why her phone number was on the note. Was it for love? they might ask. And she might drop the phone, imbued with no. Is the number even real? Billy thinks about borrowing a cell phone from one of the doctors but instead decides on uncertainty, not wanting to turn this possibility into a lie. He tears the number free from the note. Gretchen won't live here. No, she'll live tucked beside his wallet-sized map of lower Manhattan, those streets always confusing.

  "Hey, you didn't rip the thing apart, did you?" Dr. Marx asks.

  "No, just a corner." Billy signs Billy. "But what I've written stands. I'm not making any changes."

  "Hey, I get it. No edits from the likes of me." Dr. Marx says, his eyes speculating in the rearview mirror. "You're an artist."

  The next exit is downtown Albany. The skyline has a random arrangement of five or six good-sized buildings, twenty to thirty stories high. They resemble small-time businessmen determined to treat this town like a city, the government buildings screaming state capital a tad too loudly.

  "Look at this city," Dr. Marx says. "Not like Miami or New York, both places I worked. Did my fellowship in Detroit in the midseventies. I'll tell you, those nightshifts flew by with the gangs and the drug trade and the sudden advancement in street weaponry. Multiple stab wounds, gunshot wounds, ODs. Fourteen hours lasted as long as five minutes, then they'd tell you to get some sleep. Sleep? How about racquetball. And now I'm here, in Albany. I've given them one of the best Level One trauma centers in the whole country, and what have they given me? Car accidents. The occasional stabbing. Farm accidents. Heart attacks and aneurysms and little boys with little fractures in their little fingers. I tell you, we're
ready for war, not Albany. Thank God for my research. Honeysack?"

  Honeysack releases himself from his two inches of breeze. "Yeah."

  "Have you given Mr. Schine the forms?"

  "Oh, crap, yeah." Honeysack opens his briefcase.

  "Billy," Dr. Marx says, "these are standard-issue informed consent forms as well as not-so-standard liability forms and what I should—"

  "I'll just sign them," Billy says.

  "We should probably—"

  "I don't want to know anything. I don't want any information. I'm sick of being informed. I'm just going to stay ignorant and do what you guys tell me to do. Let that be it." Billy's voice is no longer cool with concept but trembling with reality.

  Honeysack hands over the forms, a bounded tome of no-fault.

  In the backseat of the SUV, Billy puts his name in twenty places, every signature a bit different, reflecting a bump or a swerve or a stop as well as the vagaries of penmanship and the quest for the perfectly realized William A. Schine, every signature a small release of air.

  The Albany Medical Center Hospital is a collection of additions spreading in every direction from a once impressive original structure of stone and Depression-era stout. The brick, granite, and slate seem on the verge of being eaten by the newer construction. A large glass box hovers behind the old clock tower. Rich couples—Ira and Libbey Flaxon, Jonah and Beatrice Hockner—pronounce themselves in competing wings. The emergency room has its own home, the C. Alan Lip ton Trauma Center, which is connected to the main building by a goiterlike atrium.

  Dr. Marx pulls into a reserved parking space. He engages the emergency brake for no reason, Billy guesses, other than the satisfaction of gripping the handle and yanking up. He turns around and faces Billy. "Just follow me, the both of you, follow me and don't feel like you have to say anything. It should be pretty quiet in there and anybody who might ask questions won't be there. But if there's a school bus accident or if God has finally decided to strike down state politicians, well then, we'll have to let this opportunity pass and imagine what could've been." Dr. Marx stares right into Billy's eyes, not his nose or his forehead, but in the middle of the middle of the middle of his eyes where the pupil hides when confronted by the brightest light. "Okay, Billy, are you sure you want to do this? You can say no but say no right now and not in twenty minutes."

  "I want to do this," Billy says.

  Dr. Marx leans in closer. "I have one question for you and that question is why? And please don't say money. What are we giving you? Thirty thousand, right? That might sound like a lot of money, but trust me, it's not a lot of money. If it's just about the money, I'll give you the money. I will. I'll write you a check right now and you can walk away, if it's just about the money. I can't have it be just about the money, not what I'm about to do."

  "It's not just about the money," Billy says.

  "Then what?"

  "I want to do something that will advance human understanding."

  "That sounds like bullshit," Dr. Marx says.

  "It probably is," Billy admits. "But I want, I really want, something, I guess, something big, you know, something, something . . . " the word sticks in his head, nowhere near the explanation he wants to give, an explanation loaded with truth and beauty, with the dignity this moment deserves. But all he has is something. "I don't know what I'm saying. Why do I want to do this? Because it's something."

  Dr. Marx smiles. "Okay," he says and opens his door. "Let's go."

  The trauma center perks up with Dr. Marx's arrival, as though the man is carrying a bleeding girl. Everybody rushes up and says hello and nothing else. Small talk is the sole property of Dr. Marx. He stops the head nurse.

  "Hey Janice, what's up."

  "Slow slow slow. A broken kneecap," Janice says.

  "Skateboarder?"

  "Mountain biker."

  "Anything else?"

  "Uhm, kiddie stuff, pure PG-thirteen. Oh, Assemblyman Kesler."

  "What's it this time?"

  "Chest pains."

  Dr. Marx turns to Dr. Honeysack and Billy and grandly pronounces, "That's why we're here, gentleman, fifty million dollars for the phantom heart attacks of state officials." Then he slants toward Janice and allows her to publicly ingratiate herself in his presence. "Hey Janice, do me a favor and put a DND on trauma room five until further notice."

  "What's up?"

  "Nothing to concern you, but we need some privacy."

  "Okay."

  "If a head so much as peeks in I'll lop it off, swear to God," Dr. Marx says.

  Janice eyes Billy like he's a malpractice lawyer investigating some slight, and Billy, uncomfortable with this look, tries smiling though he fears his nerves and how they might work on his mouth, turning innocence into a rat's nest.

  Trauma room 5 is like any trauma room as seen on TV except for its temperature, which is cold, and its near silence, which is a protracted hum, and its smell, which is creepily clean, all of which merges into that first sense of winter when everybody notices their breath, if briefly, before moving on, ill-dressed for the change in weather. A clock is mounted on the wall, but this is a space that avoids time; casinolike, Billy thinks, the air similarly ruthless with its oxygen, as if hoping to suffocate the ghosts of losers. "Okay," Dr. Marx says, clapping his hands. "What we're going to do isn't very complicated. The hardest part is keeping the Sal-Gid solution an even temperature, at that essential forty-degree mark. Billy, what I've invented is a refrigerated rapid infuser IV system." Dr. Marx wheels forward a piece of equipment resembling a frozen drink dispenser with tubes where the cups would go. "This is it," he says, "in a nutshell."

  "Impressive," Billy says.

  "It has over thirteen patents pending," Honeysack tells him.

  "Oh."

  "The Swedes made it for me," Honeysack says.

  "Oh."

  "They do good work. The Sal-Gid is totally my own invention."

  "Oh."

  "The Sal-Gid is the true genius part," Honeysack says.

  "Oh."

  The three of them stand around awkwardly, like sex is to follow.

  "So what's next?" Billy asks.

  "You should probably strip down to your underwear," Dr. Marx says.

  "Okay."

  "Honeysack's doing the anesthesia."

  "I have some training in it," Honeysack informs Billy.

  "Whatever," Billy says, tossing his shirt and pants into the corner of the room. "I should go on the table?"

  Dr. Marx nods.

  Billy climbs aboard, stares up at the overhead lights: two round lamps side by side and jauntily cocked as though considering their subject with amusement. Billy alternates betweens arms at his side and arms crossed over his chest. Honeysack hooks him up to an EKG and over his shoulder, on a screen, his vitals sled a course in competing lines of life. IVs are started on his right arm and left ankle. "This isn't my stuff, not yet," Dr. Marx tells him. "This is just to get the catheters in place and push some fluids. We'll do my stuff when you're out."

  Billy nods. He's neither nervous nor calm. For thirty minutes, the doctors move about and check and prepare various things, while Billy lies where God knows how many people have died, and lived, were saved and put back together again. Billy senses invisible demons tugging on his shoulder blades and the balls of his feet. Above him, the bright light seems to chuckle. Billy breathes deeply. He starts shivering. His bladder tugs and he wonders if he should bother asking about the bathroom but decides to stay put. Should he mutter a just-in-case prayer? Undeniably, unfortunately, every time he thinks about God he sees the white beard and flowing white hair, the basso profundo voice enfolded in white light. His God is a big cliche. The cold puckers nipples and testicles. Dr. Marx's special blood-freeze machine hums what Billy swears is the opening bass line of "Summer Nights" from Grease, a song so easily mocked but damn catchy. Perhaps the Swedes put this into their design, a bit of karaoke for the dying. Ridiculous but Billy hears bleachers and picnic table
s. Dr. Marx leans over him. "Okay," he says. "We're ready if you are."

  "I'm good to go."

  "You can still change your mind."

  "I'm fine."

  "I'm going to strap you in, okay?"

  "Okay."

  The straps are good old-fashioned leather.

  Dr. Marx rests his hand on Billy's head. He's no longer a hummingbird of activity but a great blue heron. "We'll see you soon, okay?"

  "Okay."

  "Nothing is going to happen to you, I promise."

  "Okay."

  "Right now, you might as well be my son," he says.

  Before Billy can ask what exactly that means, Honeysack has slipped a mask over his mouth and nose and said, "Breathe in deeply and count backwards from twenty."

  Dr. Marx rolls his eyes.

  "What?" Honeysack asks.

  "Just once I'd like to hear a different instruction."

  "Like what?"

  "Like sing 'Happy Birthday' or something."

  "Fine. Don't count, sing 'Happy Birthday,'" Honeysack tells Billy.

  The breathed-in gas is a little bit sweet, like in your mouth cotton candy is being spun, and Billy starts singing—Summer lovin' had me a blast—along with Dr. Marx's invention, carrying through the tune—Summer lovin' happened so fast—Billy picturing the beach and the ocean—Met a girl crazy for me—and fun times under that pier as vacation gives you temporary respite—Met a boy cute as can be—from who you are back home, even as the lyrics fail you—Summer fun dance in the sun—and you try your best to fake your way through—Until up on those summer nights—hoping nobody will notice, and if they do, hoping they'll smile at the attempt and maybe join in on the Wella-wella-wella-umph.

  41

  WHITE LIGHT bruises into tender yellow, as if eyes have gripped too tightly and left behind evidence of a struggle. The morphine w must've been increased because the pain (before then a sound in the distance, an echo of your loudest harshest scream coming from who knows where) is now a fuzzy whisper relaying the gist of the last day into Billy's ears as he wakes up from a sleep of indeterminate time (five minutes, five hours?), impossibly thirsty. His tongue, his entire oral cavity, seems constructed from an old pink sponge, the sort his mother would never get around to throwing away, sponges having no definite death, only an eternal wake on the side of the sink. His breath must smell the same, addictively nasty. Waking up in this room is a small surprise, with the IV drip, the various life-monitoring devices, the intercom calling out messages for nurses—"Catheter for room two-oh-four"—the ceiling acoustic tile peering down Go ahead and wail. Every time Billy wakes up forgetting; every time he wakes up unsure why he's here. Nobody has explained anything. Obviously something has gone wrong with his chest. Every breath hurts, like his sternum is wrapped in barbed wire. And he's nauseous, not throw-up nauseous, but motion-sick nauseous, like a cabdriver is in his head. What does he remember? Bits. He remembers something down his throat. He remembers being wheeled on his back, the overhead lights flashing by like so many movies. He remembers Dr. Marx, garbed in monkish gown, staring over him, the muslin describing a smile. He remembers slipping, the sensation of slipping, of falling through what was once solid. He remembers dull activity, being prodded and pulled, being tended by an array of well-trained hands. He remembers, You'll be all right and He seems to be doing fine and Hello, Mr. Schine from faceless voices. He remembers being expertly lifted as the linens were changed. He remembers moaning. But these are just flashes, as substantial as fever dreams. Nothing is grounded. His bones seem to float beneath the skin, and his eyeballs could be helium-based.