A Perfect Stranger

by Roxana Robinson

  There was nowhere on the right to stop; the metal fence was unrelenting. Roger put on his blinker and turned abruptly left, cutting across the traffic, into the muffler repair parking lot. Jumping from the car, he ran back up the hill. Across the road, he could see the blind man yank his dog from the fence again. At the top of the hill a truck rounded the curve. Roger ran heavily across the road in front of it, his heart answering the thundering approach of the truck. He ran clumsily up the culvert, pebbles loose beneath his feet, toward the blind man.

  “Hello,” Roger said loudly. “Can I help you?” Roger was breathing hard. The truck was nearly on top of them.

  The blind man swiveled to face him. “I’m fine, thanks,” he declared.

  “You’re in a dangerous place,” Roger said. “Let me give you a lift.” The truck pounded past, rocking them both, blasting them with its hot smoky stink. “Where are you going?”

  “Middletown,” the blind man said, smiling at the air. He was in his forties, his hair graying. He looked not prosperous but respectable. He acted as though there were no traffic drowning out his voice, buffeting his body.

  “That’s where I’m going,” Roger said. “I’ll take you.”

  “No, thanks, I’m all right,” the man said. “My dog is pretty well-trained. She knows what she’s doing. We’re fine.” The dog, a small golden retriever, stood unhappily, her head low. The cars rushed past them, loud and rhythmic.

  What were the rules of courtesy, with the blind? You were meant to act as though they were perfectly competent: which they were, weren’t they? Leading their own lives. It was rude, patronizing, to act as though they could not cope with things, as though you knew better.

  Roger stood facing the traffic. Because of the curve at the top of the hill, drivers could not see them until they were on top of them. The cars hurtled past, the wind from each one rocking the two men. The murderous roar mocked their fragile armor of skin, flesh, bones.

  He thought of the blurred oval of light on the slanting bedroom ceiling, the silence of the dark house. What if you did know better?

  Roger took the man’s elbow, gently—he didn’t want him now to pull away, stumbling into the road.

  “You’re not safe here,” Roger told him.

  He was ready for the man to resist, to pull back from his grip, but the man did not. Instead he stood with his arm in Roger’s grasp, saying nothing, his head slightly cocked, as though he were listening for something. The lack of resistance came as a shock, somehow painful: maybe this was what people wanted.

  “I’m going to hold up my hand to stop the traffic,” Roger told him, “and we’ll walk across the road together. Then I’ll drive you wherever you want.”

  The blind man did not move, and Roger watched the approaching cars for another gap. He was calm, as he’d been earlier, waiting on the highway. He was waiting for another hiatus in the lethal flow, the moment in which he would save their lives. When it came he would seize it, step out boldly, his hand held high to stop the deadly current.

  He would save the three of them: the blind stranger, gazing aimlessly at the sky; himself, playing the endless loop inside his brain. The dog too, silky, dark-eyed, plumy-tailed, waiting sweetly to see what would be done with her life.

  The Treatment

  Here is what I do each morning. As soon as I wake up, barefoot and still in my nightgown, as though I’m on the way to my lover, I go downstairs to the darkened kitchen. I’m alone in the house: my husband leaves early, my daughter is away in college. I don’t bother to turn on the lights, I go straight to the refrigerator and open the door to its icy glare. From it I take out a chilled golden globe, the size of a small orange. It’s made of firm and springy plastic—solid, with some heft. The pearly outer sheathing is translucent, obscuring the glowing interior and giving it a muffled shimmer. I set the globe, with its neat coil of attached tubing, on the kitchen counter. For the next three hours it will lie there, slowly warming, so that when the fluid inside enters my vein it will not be cold and torpid but swift and potent. What’s inside the radiant globe is Rocephin, a powerful antibiotic, which will cure me.

  When you are not ill, when you are well, you think about yourself in a particular way. You take being well for granted: that is who you are. You are a person like that, someone who does not have to think about her body. It is a luxury, not having to think about your body, but since you have always possessed it, you aren’t aware that it’s a luxury. When you think about sick people, you think of them as different from you, set apart in some unspecified way: they are Other. They are in that other place, beyond a mysterious divide. They have become different from you, branded somehow, in a way you don’t consider much. Even if you do consider it you can’t get very far. Why are other people sick? Why are you not? There are no reasons, there is no logic. Things are the way they are. In some interior subliminal place you believe that you deserve your health. The person you are, it seems, deserves to be healthy, just as the person you are seems to deserve two legs, a nose. I had two legs, a nose, my health.

  Ten days ago the line was first introduced into my vein. I lay on a narrow examining table at the doctor’s office, waiting while the nurse laid out her instruments. She was pleasant and perky, rather glamorous, with long blond hair and gleaming red fingernails. I lay perfectly still. I was prepared for everything, anything: nothing she did would distress me. This was the initiation ceremony, the start of the healing. It was frightening, but I welcomed it, whatever terror it held. I was embracing the source of my fear. The treatment would be my salvation.

  The nurse pulled up my sleeve and exposed the white skin on the inside of my elbow, the sacrificial site. She cleaned it and laid it down, bare, before the row of instruments. She took up a length of tubing, like a long transparent snake. Casually she measured this against me—from elbow to shoulder, across the top of my chest, and then down to just above my heart. Here the mouth of the snake will dangle for six weeks.

  When the nurse was ready to begin, she paused and looked up at my face. “You’re going to feel a pinch,” she warned.

  I nodded. I knew that pinch was code for “pain.” The nurse looked back down, and I turned my head away. I watched the square white tiles in the ceiling while she worked, piercing my skin, violating my body. I could feel her movements. I didn’t look.

  “I hate when it spurts,” I heard her say crossly. “Now it’s all over the rug.”

  I said nothing, I didn’t turn to look. No part of the treatment would trouble me: this was what would save me. I watched the grid of cross-hatching on the tiles while she slid the snake into the vein and sent it up the length of my upper arm, through the widening veins across the top of my chest, and down to the great thunderous vessel directly above my poor heart, deep in its hidden fastness, now invaded and violated. I said nothing. This would save me.

  Taking pills three times a day means nothing. Anyone can do it, people do it all the time. There are no implications. It means only that you are correcting something, an aberration. Having a plastic tube inserted into your bloodstream, dangling over your heart, is different. This is a violation of your deepest recesses. This moves you into a darker place, more dangerous. This means you are ill, and helpless.

  After three months, the oral antibiotics stopped working, and I went back to my doctor. We sat in his office, which is pleasantly cluttered in a domestic way. There’s a bright hooked rug on the floor, a tall standing bookshelf, and a big ficus tree with glossy leaves in front of the window. There is no desk; Doctor Kennicott sits in a brown plaid wing chair. When he wants to write a prescription, he sets a polished wooden board across his lap.

  Doctor Kennicott is a quiet man with a kindly manner, slightly bohemian. He has mournful brown eyes and shaggy graying hair and sideburns. He wears a white lab coat, khaki pants, and black leather running shoes. That day he sat in the wing chair, and I sat in a smaller chair across from him.

  “My neck is stiff again,” I said. “I can’
t turn my head any further than this.” And there was more. As I talked, Dr. Kennicott frowned sympathetically, his mournful eyes attentive. His elbows were set on the arms of the chair, his fingers steepled just under his chin. When I finished, Doctor Kennicott nodded slowly.

  “That often happens,” he announced.

  This puzzled and disappointed me: then why had we used that treatment? I’d never been to a doctor who had prescribed something which often, he knew, didn’t work. I’d never been to a doctor who didn’t just fix what was wrong.

  “Then what do we do now?” I asked.

  Dr. Kennicott pushed out his lips thoughtfully. “I’d suggest moving on to intravenous antibiotics.”

  “No,” I said at once.

  I knew about the intravenous treatment, he’d mentioned it before. I didn’t want it. It was too serious, too alarming. I told him it wasn’t justified: I wasn’t that ill. I was basically healthy, I told him. Other people have this disease and are treated for it and recover completely. That happened to my daughter, and she was treated for it at once, and now she seems fine. I am basically fine, I told him.

  The doctor said nothing while I explained this. He said nothing when I stopped. He sat in the wing chair, his hands steepled under his chin. He watched me quietly, waiting for me to understand. Finally I stopped and looked at him, alarm dawning.

  To understand that you are seriously ill is to cross over into a different country. You are apart from other people now. Something separates you from them, something you cannot change. The realization is like a fall from a great height. You are silenced: there is no recourse. You cannot help yourself. Your body has failed you, and you are helpless. You must change your expectations of all things. You must put yourself in the hands of the healers. They may fail.

  When I understood this I fell silent. I was in a new place. Things were not as I had thought; arguing with the doctor was of little use.

  There’s reason to think the spirochetes have been in my bloodstream for ten years, for who knows how long. They have set up their malign outposts throughout my body. They’re in the nervous system, the muscles, the connective tissue inside my joints, my spinal cord. They have stiffened my neck and my shoulders. They have turned my muscles leaden and my limbs resistant, so that when I move it feels as though I am struggling against an invisible network of tightening bonds. The spirochetes may, too, have infiltrated my deepest and most interior spaces, the tender private whorls inside my cranial basin. This idea, though, is so frightening that I don’t allow myself to think about it. I don’t permit myself to slide into that well of terror, I can’t afford to.

  The treatment also frightens me, but I can’t afford that fear either. I’ve given myself up to this, like a postulant giving up her soul to God. I’m allying myself with this larger power. The treatment will be my salvation. I can’t afford to believe otherwise.

  This morning, when the moment for the infusion arrives, I go back to the kitchen from my study. I’m dressed now, in jeans and a sweater: I work at home, getting my doctorate in early childhood development. I’ve finished the coursework and am writing my dissertation, which means that I don’t have to explain to anyone why I’m now spending every morning at home, unavailable to the world, engaged in a private and fearsome activity.

  At the sink I wash my hands with a liquid antimicrobial soap, a surgical scrub. It has a thin acrid smell, and afterward my skin feels raw and scraped. This is proper, this is part of the ritual: I am preparing myself for the ceremonial chamber. My gestures now are careful and precise. From my big box of medical supplies, from my ziplock plastic bags, I take out three blunt-nosed syringes. The two white-capped ones hold saline solution, which will be injected first and last, to clean the tubing. The yellow-capped syringe holds heparin, a mild anticoagulant. This goes in after the Rocephin, so that the blood idling in the tubing between treatments will not form clots. I lay all these things out beside the globe. The instruments are ready.

  I pull up the sweater on my left arm. Clasped along my elbow is a white elastic fishnet sleeve, open-ended, that holds the apparatus tight against my skin. I slide this off, letting a translucent line of tubing uncoil downward into the air. One end of this is taped flat to my skin in a serpentine loop before it disappears into my flesh. The other end, interrupted by a small transparent junction box, ends in a blue valve. This is called a clave, and it is shaped like the head of a lizard, narrowing and blunt-nosed. I open a foil-wrapped packet holding an antiseptic swab, and its sharp alcohol odor blooms in the air, powerful and sobering. With a little bad luck, any germ I encounter at this moment will be transported directly to my heart.

  Carefully I swab off the flat metal surface of the clave. Holding it aloft, sterile, in one hand, with the other I unscrew a white-capped syringe. I push its threaded nose into the clave, forcing the surface downward. Inside the clave are matching grooves, and the threaded syringe screws neatly, perfectly, into the protected tunnel within the clave. On the line of tubing is a triangular cock, and I slide the line from the narrow vise end, where it has been clamped shut, to the wide end. The line to my vein is now open.

  I press down on the plunger. The loaded syringe holds two and a half milliliters of saline solution. I watch the transparent presence creep down the coil until the tube vanishes within the surface of my skin, and the liquid enters my body. I can feel its cold arrival in my vein. Slowly I depress the plunger until I reach the flattened air bubble at the bottom of the shaft. I unscrew the syringe and set it down. Still holding the clave in the air, I unscrew the small angel-winged cap on the Rocephin line and set its transparent nose into the opening of the clave. Like the syringe, it fits neatly into its tunneled grooves. This connection feels smooth and satisfying, and I am gratified by this, as though technical perfection means the treatment will work like this, in just this beautifully engineered way.

  I sit down and lean back. Now I’m connected. The valves are open, the liquid has begun its journey into my body. The golden globe is pressurized, and for the next forty minutes, it will slowly contract, forcing the Rocephin steadily into my bloodstream.

  I close my eyes. My part in this is like prayer: I concentrate on what is taking place inside me, I visualize it. I see the golden tide beginning its silent warrior’s surge, past the heart and through the wide channels of the great arteries, the smaller ones of the arterioles, moving deep into the interior, into the narrow waterways of the capillaries. I see the golden tide moving into a still lagoon, deep in the interior. Calm water on pale sand. The movement is visible, a low relentless surge. Along the irregular shore a long ripple breaks in a narrow line of foam. There is a sighing hiss, a small seething commotion: the spirochetes, the tiny corkscrews of the disease, are sizzling in a frenzy of death. I hear them thrashing tinily, I see the surface of the water along the shore boil and churn as they jitter. They twist and sputter as it hits them, they are dying, dying in droves, dying by the millions, at the touch of the smooth golden surge.

  During my first week of the treatment I had the predicted reactions: high fever, chills and headaches, brief wild stabbing pains in all my joints. I’m told that all of this is the result of the spirochetes dying off. I believe this is true. The infusions are the Asian hordes sweeping across the wide plains, overwhelming our enemy. I lay in bed, sick with fever, feebly triumphant.

  Now the fever has stopped, and I’m better, but not well. I know I am ill. I feel as though I’m walking carefully, on some unreliable surface, not knowing what movement might cause a sudden terrifying crack and plunge. Yesterday I took the dogs out for a walk through the woods, down to the winter-dark pond and past it, up the hillside beyond. The woods are brown and mysterious now; the trees creak ponderously in the wind, and their gray filigree tops sway silently. The narrow path was soft underfoot. Walking along it, climbing the steep slope of the hill, I felt suddenly the delicate tangling grope of the snake inside my chest, a faint dry grappling sensation, just above my heart. When it happened m
y heart began to pound, panicky, shrinking from this dangerous alien presence. There was nowhere for me to go for help. It was I who gave permission for this. My brain believes it’s good; it’s my body that fears it. I tried to calm my heart: I refuse panic. Above me, the tops of the trees moved slowly, swaying against the gray sky.

  This morning, Saturday, my husband, Mark, comes into the kitchen when I’m getting ready to infuse. He’s been out in the village doing errands, and now he stands just inside the door, setting down packages. I know he sees my equipment laid out on the kitchen counter, but he keeps his eyes away from it, as though it were a naked body.

  “I couldn’t find the coffee you like,” he says, unzipping his parka. His voice seems loud and artificial.

  “That’s all right,” I say. “They have it at Sgaglio’s. I’ll get it tomorrow.”

  “I got everything else,” he says. His eyes now fix on mine, faintly accusatory, as though I’ve contaminated the kitchen.

  “Thanks,” I say, conciliatory.

  He ducks out into the mudroom, to hang up his coat. When he comes back in he shuts the heavy kitchen door hard.

  “You’re welcome,” he says. Still without looking at my syringes, his dark gaze fixed on mine until it shifts to the door, he heads for his study. Mark is a philosophy professor, and his mind moves either in great wheeling arcs or in little tiny circles, depending on your point of view. I hear him sit down in his study. Alone in the kitchen, I turn back to my instruments, but now the sight of them fills me with dread. They look diabolical, like something from a horror movie.

  When I’m ready, I tell myself that Mark was just uncomfortable, not horrified. Or abstracted, as he often is. I call in to him in his study, my voice playful.

  “I’m about to shoot up. Want to watch?” I ask hopefully. If he’ll be part of this, it will be less frightening, it will seem more normal—but he doesn’t want to watch.