by WD Clarke
—Don’t have the time today, sorry, he said as Buddy’s bulk plunged with a ‘Woof!’ a full eight inches into the disarming plushness of the oversized patient’s chair.
—That’s ok, Eddy, Buddy said, smiling a capacious, toothy smile and rocking side-to-side on his haunches by way of settling in.
Buddy was the only person (besides the Midge) who would, or could, conceivably call Dr. Ed ‘Eddy’. And it was something of a stretch even for Buddy, although Buddy himself was quite unaware of just how much of a stretch it was. Buddy’s forward momentum through his own life was fuelled by a strongly-willed innocence, by a stubborn refusal to see anything but The Good in others, particularly in those he counted, rightly or wrongly, as his friends. And so Buddy’s version of Dr. Ed had to be called Eddy, for Buddy rightly or wrongly saw a different man seated across the desk from him than most everyone else, the man across the desk included. For better or worse, the Dr. Ed who Buddy saw was a still-17-year-old boy, an Eddy who even Dr. Ed himself could hardly remember (and certainly had no interest in), an Eddy who still hadn’t even really encountered, let alone fathomed, words like ‘loss’, ‘despair’ or ‘betrayal’.
—That’s ok, really, he repeated, when Dr. Ed remained in awkward silence. Really.
Dr. Ed opened up Buddy’s manila medical file, a clear signal that he had ‘flicked’ his ‘switch’, and that the session had begun.
—How has your exercise program been coming along? he said.
—Still swimming 3 times a week, well, 2 to 3 times anyhow, but you know me.
—You’re still….
—Still the same ol’ Buddy.
—That you are. And you’re watching what you eat?
—I’m watching alright, I’m watching myself eat. Both men laughed briefly.
—It’s not a pretty sight, either, Buddy added. As well you know!
Dr. Ed smiled wanly, but said nothing.
—Seriously now, Eddy, I have something to confess to you.
—Yes? said Dr. Ed, noticeably straightening his already Royal Military College-esque posture.
—You’re not going to like this.
—Buddy, speaking as your doctor now, of course, it’s not my position to ‘like’ or ‘dislike’. I’m here to observe, assess, diagnose, treat, and, to a certain extent, advise you. ‘Like’ is not a part of my … function here; ‘like’ doesn’t enter into it—ever, at all.
Buddy had sat in this chair oh, 6 or 7 times since he started on the Alba trial, and was quite used to his friend ‘speaking like a doctor’, but today Dr. Ed appeared to be, if that were at all possible, even more doctor-like.
—Ok, anyway, you know what I mean, I mean, in your terms, that you are going to analyse what I’m about to reveal to you, and you will ‘thoughtfully’ conclude that my decision was rather … unwise.
—Reveal what, which decision, Buddy?
—The one I’m trying to tell you about.
—Just tell me.
—It’s not that easy.
—C’mon, it’s just me: Dr. Ed.
—I’m a bit … scared to, Eddy.
Dr. Ed frowned, just a little. Normally, Dr. Ed did not mind at all if patients expressed their ‘emotions’, so long as they kept it short & sweet and didn’t wallow around in them for minutes on end. But Buddy was different, a bit of a special case; Buddy was a ‘friend’.
—You’re afraid to tell me? he said. Or you’re just afraid, period?
—No, well, yes, that is, a little. But I mean I’m afraid of the decision, of my decision, itself.
—Of its consequences?
—Yes.
—Tell me about the decision, Buddy.
—Well, it’s a 2-part decision. The one flows from the other, or both flow into each other, I’m not sure exactly, it’s a bit of a chicken-and-egg thing.
—Then start with the chicken.
—I’ll start with the how do you say … clinical aspect first. No, I won’t, I’ll start with the personal, the personal side of it.
—Fair enough.
—We’ve been friends for a long time, Eddy.
—That’s right, yes.
—And I want you to know that I appreciate everything you’ve done for me, which is a lot. And we both know that part of my … ‘problem’, for want of a better….
—I prefer ‘condition’, actually.
—Right, yes, ‘condition’ is better, definitely. Well, part of it is, was due to my lack of, um, success, that is with the ladies, currently I mean.
—You would ‘feel’ more fulfilled in a long-term relationship.
—In any relationship.
—Yes.
—But yes, long-term, I hope.
—You hope.
—Eddy, I … I, I’m going to ask Nurse Sloggett to marry me.
—Yes? I.
—I?
—I didn’t know that you … two … were, were involved.
—We’re not.
—I see … now, don’t you ‘think’, perhaps….
—I know what you’re going to say, Eddy, first things first, I know, I know, Lord knows I know.
—But still. You.
—Everything’s interrelated just now. Inter-, inter-twined is the word I’m looking for. I’ve always been ready, no, set to share my life with someone, Eddy, but, and you’ve got to hear me out here, but I’ve never quite gotten around to getting out of the starting blocks, and right now, right now I’m fairly certain, certain as I ever get at any rate, certain that that someone who I’ve been always ready for, well, that they, I mean she, is ready, ready to share her life with me.
—But, but what makes you so, so certain, Buddy, that it’s Nurse Sloggett, that she’s the one?
—Do you know her first name, Eddy?
—Of course. It’s, wait a minute, it’s….
—It’s Agnes.
—Of course.
—The same as.
—Yes.
—Agnes, your Agnes.
—I don’t have an Agnes, Buddy. I have a wife. You know my wife, don’t you?
—Don’t get so touchy. You’re s’posed to be helping me, remember? By your Agnes I mean Agnes from way back when.
—Back when. What’s that got to do with Nurse Sloggett and you?
—Well, she was at the restaurant last Saturday.
—And?
—And we got to talking.
—Yes?
—And she said to call her by her first name, Agnes.
—And that’s all?
—No, well, she also talked about her late husband.
—Frank. Ran a chip truck down by the lake.
—That’s right. Well, she said Frank’s been gone 2 years now, and she still hasn’t been out on a date.
—Which is common, of course.
—Yes, well, she’s going out on a date with me, Eddy!
—A date, ok, but a proposal of marriage? Aren’t you just … ?
—Jumping to conclusions? Aren’t you?
—Explain it to me, then.
—Then listen. We were talking, we were talking about her husband, and I was saying how much the whole team missed him, and what a great skater he was—untouchable, when he wanted to be—when just like that, she, how else can I put this, she fell into my arms.
—Wha … ?
—No, lis-ten. It just happened. When I said what a great man he was, she said she wished she’d gone in his place, or at least with him, and that she wanted, when the time came, to be buried in the same grave.
—What did you say?
—I said I understood how she could love someone that much, but that I hoped that ‘that time’ was not coming anytime soon.
—And you asked her out?
—No, she asked me out—as a friend.
—I don’t….
—We saw a movie Saturday Night, something called Steel My Heart.
—How was it? said Dr. Ed, by way of wondering what to say next.
&nbs
p; —Good. Solidly entertaining. She said she’d like to do it again sometime, and kissed me on the cheek, and I said how about next Friday.
—Tomorrow.
—Right, and she said why don’t I cook you dinner, and I said I’d love to be cooked for. And….
—And.
—And she said, it’s a date. It’s a date, Eddy!
Buddy got up, slapped Dr. Ed on the back, looked at his watch, moved toward the door. Dr. Ed, taking Buddy’s lead, stole a glance at his own watch as well.
—Yes, time is pressing in on us a bit, he said.
—Well, I haefta go do a few errands….
—Hold on, I want to get this one thing clear. Did I hear right, or did you not say that on the basis of her suggesting cooking you dinner tomorrow, that you’re going to ask her to marry you?
Buddy took two steps back toward Dr. Ed’s desk, his broad smile vanishing momentarily as he did so. He became suddenly as earnest as a temperance crusader.
—Oh, no, he said. I’m not going to ask her tomorrow. I’m just telling you all this, in confidence I might add, because I want you to know, that’s all.
—You want me to know because….
—Because you’re my friend, Edward, I want you to know. I want you to know that I know, that I just know, that, that she’s the one, that’s all. Do you know what I mean?
—I do, Dr. Ed said, realising as he did so that while ‘Eddy’ might know what Buddy meant, he most certainly did not. I do, he said. Really.
—I better go, said Buddy.
—Wait a minute. You said that you had 2 things to say, didn’t you?
—Oh, yeah, I wanted to talk to you about the Alba.
—How’s the past week been?
—Really good, actually, except—
—Except?
—Well, I’ve never felt more confident or on top of things, since I’ve been on it. But, um, Ed, how long does it stay in your system?
—After you’ve stopped taking it, you mean?
—Yes.
—It’s half-life is about two weeks, and generally speaking, that’s how long it’s expected that you’ll experience an effect, after taking your last dosage. Why? You haven’t interrupted the treatment plan, have you?
—Well that’s about right then.
—Buddy?
—I want to pop the question to Agnes a week Saturday.
—What’s going on, Buddy?
Buddy began backing once more towards the door to the waiting room. —I’m off it, Ed. I know I’m better on it, but it makes me different, and I want to be me. For her. I want her to know the real me. With all the blemishes and bruises, but all the trimmings too. Sorry about this. He put his hand on the doorknob.
—I think we should discuss this fur—
—Time’s up, doc, gotta go. Don’t worry. We’ll talk. Wish me luck. Tomorrow. Bye!
16
Unusual Levels of Activity
As Requested, Dr. Ed’s ‘son’, the Temp receptionist, brought him the local paper, as well as an egg salad sandwich on whole wheat from the ‘side out’ vending truck, whose prices were lower and whose egg salad contained, the rumour went, the promise of slightly more egg (and correspondingly less mayo) than that of the ‘out front’ vending truck. But the egg salad actually turned out to be ‘faked’ (must have meant flaked) ‘white tuna’ (or a few grammes thereof), slathered in white goo, on bread so white it could have been considered Aryan. Well, at least the boy had gotten him a chocolate bar. But no, it was not a chocolate bar, but a candy bar. The wrapper promised more than it (or any other candy bar) could possibly deliver: sumptuous, scrumptiously rich, fudgy nougat surrounding a sinful, caramelly centre, which, after being rolled in golden, peanutty nuggets, all got slathered in a thick, chocolatey coating that would tempt your taste buds into outright concupiscence. The confection was called Infidelity (the bar that dares speak its name). Dr. Ed tossed it onto his desk, unwrapped his sandwich, sat down, flipped on the computer, and scanned the front page of the paper. Huh?
A ball of starch-clad mayonnaise, caught in mid swallow, bolted back up to the top of Dr. Ed’s throat. Body Found was the main headline. Unidentified female discovered at Logan cemetery. Huh. Jesus. But no, it couldn’t be. 10 to 1 she’d gone Xmas shopping, to the City. 10 to 1, I betcha. He called home again, and again the answering machine picked up the call. Dr. Ed left his second message of the day:
—Uh, dear, it’s, it’s your husband. Just wondering where you are, if everything’s all right. It’s … 11:20. I’ll be home at … I’ll call before I leave, later this afternoon.
Then, once more, Dr. Ed successfully ‘flicked’ his ‘switch’, and promptly forgot, or sent into cold storage, his irrational extrapolation from the scant facts of the newspaper article. There was, admittedly, a good chance that she was already home, but not lifting up the receiver: his wife would usually have returned his messages on the same day, but she never answered the phone when there was a good show on. A ‘good’ show’ could be defined as either a soap opera, a talk show, or (even better, and perhaps marking television’s leap into the so-called postmodern era, in which everything is a copy of an imitation of nothing more than a shadow) a talk show about soap operas, or talk shows.
Back when she’d been with Erazhim, the print-maker, he had always chided her about the self-referentiality of her art, how by merely re-presenting (for example) the feminine form sans destabilizing ironic commentary, she was indulging in a de facto capitulation to hegemonic, bourgeois, patriarchal culture—to its fetishistic celebration of the voluntarist subjectivity of the utility-maximising individual, and by extension to the entire phallogocentric military-industrial complex.
The phallo-what? She didn’t have a clue what he was going on about (and, she guessed correctly, neither did he). So she ignored it. But she liked the sound of that term ‘self-referential’; it stuck with her. And, she realized later, she had always liked things that somehow referred back to themselves. Pictures of women lingering tellingly in front of mirrors, idly gazing into the looking-glasses of their own saucer-sized pupils. Escher’s portrait of those eponymising, self-inscribing, symmetrical hands. Silly love songs about silly love songs. Poems about the poet’s obsession with the poem’s lack of obsession with the poet. Even the self-help fad of re-birthing, and the subsequent re-parenting of the inner child, even that had something to be said for it, something life-affirming, something that ‘life’ with Erazhim did not have. When she finally left him, when she started seeing Dr. Ed, she gave up trying to create order ‘out there’, in bronze, marble or whatever, sensing the obvious superiority of taking care of her ‘inner’ life for the first time. Art was merely the expression of a kind of failure in life, and, if you sat and ‘thought’ it over for a second or two, who needed that?
Dr. Ed put down the receiver, moved his keyboard closer to the edge of his desk, typed mail at the Unix command prompt (his terminal was part of a small network built and maintained expressly for his department by their corporate partners, Eumeta, and which included both gopher and wais servers), which brought up the pine mailer. His mail account listed 32 new messages, 27 of which were from the psyched [email protected]. One of the remaining 4 was a cfp (call for papers) for the 2nd annual Personality Architectonics Conference, which was to be held in Helsinki. In February. Not too bloody likely! Dr. Ed ‘thought’.
There was also an email from his mother, addressing him, as Buddy did, as Eddy, and reminding him that he had forgotten, yet again, his father’s birthday, on the 6th, Monday. He should call, she went on; his father wasn’t upset or anything, he’d just like to hear from his ‘Number 1 Son’, that’s all. It was always nice to hear from him, why couldn’t it just be a bit more often, so please do call sometime. Etc., etc….
Dr. Ed shot her a typically terse note back, indicating (tangentially) that he was sorry, promising (without actually promising) that he would call, soon if not precisely tonight, and hurriedly explaining that he
had a lot on his plate, on his ‘mind’, just now, and that Max was ‘poorly’. He signed off simply, ‘ED’, in block capitals.
The penultimate message was from Major Mark Plumtree CSR, [email protected]. It was from yesterday afternoon, 21:00 gmt. 16:00 est, hmm? How Major Mark Plumtree CSR had gotten Dr. Ed’s email address was a mystery to Dr. Ed, but what Major Mark Plumtree CSR wanted was not. It was as plain as day: he wanted, nay, demanded a meeting with Dr. Ed that very afternoon! He had been trying to reach Dr. Ed all morning, but Dr. Ed’s incompetant sic receptionist had kept putting him off! Missy was obviously, terribly erratic, not to mention much worse than before. And someting sic, obviously, must be done about it.
Dr. Ed was about to call his ‘son’ the ‘receptionist’ on the intercom, to make sure that in no way was Major Mark Plumtree to be given an appointment that afternoon (Missy had a rescheduled appointment for the following morning, after all), when his ‘son’ called him.
—Yes?
—Uh, dad?
—Uhhh, that’s Dr. Ed, Theodore.
—Ok, sir, but I’m Ted.
—I know Theodore, I know. Now what do you want?
—Not all that much, sir, I mean not personally, myself I mean.
—But you rang me.
—Yes, uh, there’s someone on line 1 for you.
—Deal with them. No, wait, tell me: who?
—A Rick something, from Colonial Credit.
