Hard Knocks

by Ruby Lang

  The woman calling from the Declan Quail Show said the publicity from going on TV would help Helen’s cause, but as far as Helen knew, no one ever watched Declan Quail. She threw herself anew into researching clinical trials and experimental Parkinson’s drugs. Writing about concussion in athletes had been a temporary aberration, some misguided hope of being able to do something besides beat her fists on an unyielding wall.

  Adam had been a temporary aberration.

  A temporary aberration that nonetheless had made her step back and try to calm herself.

  She told the woman that she had to see patients, and she spent some time evaluating a woman for migraine. She wrote up some notes and put in a call to a pharmacy. When she finally emerged to the waiting room, Sarah bounced up to her. “Joanie says some TV producer wants to talk to you.”

  A few patients swung their gazes her way. “Let’s not talk about this now,” Helen said. She grabbed a file.

  “You’re a slender girl,” said Mrs. Martens. “You’ll look just right on the television. They say it adds twenty pounds, you know.”

  Helen helped Mrs. Martens with her walker and ushered her into the office.

  “How is the new medication working out?” Helen asked.

  “Why do they want you to be on TV?”

  “I wrote something about chronic traumatic encephalopathy,” said Helen, hoping the words would stymie Mrs. Martens.

  “Never heard of it,” Mrs. Martens said. “You have to make sure they don’t put too much makeup on you. Nowadays with the big screens and the HD, you really need to be careful about the foundation. Make sure they blend it into your neck.”

  The rest of the day did not get much better.

  “You should go on! Think of the free publicity for the practice,” said Sarah. “You should wear a t-shirt with our address.”

  “I can coach you on how to speak and how to act,” offered Joanie.

  “And although I promised to butt out of your life, and everyone else’s,” said Petra, “I can offer opinions if you want some.”

  There was a plea in Petra’s eyes that said that she really, really wanted to be asked for opinions.

  “You could become, like, our resident medical talking head,” Sarah enthused. “You could get your own segment on the Declan Quail Show. You could bring me on to chat about the rate of C-sections in the greater Portland area.”

  “Why does everyone’s brain turn to mush when we start talking about appearing on TV? It’s a local show that no one watches!” Helen asked.

  She very deliberately slung her yoga mat over her shoulder in order to hint to her friends that she was leaving.

  “First hockey makes you stupid, then TV finishes you off,” Sarah said. “That could be another topic for your segment!”

  Office hours were over. Helen had been hoping to avoid her friends, but they clearly had things to say to her. They were clustered around the doorway of her office.

  “I don’t have a segment. I’m not going on the show. For that matter, I didn’t think about hockey for more than twenty years. I plan to avoid it for the next twenty,” she said, putting on her coat.

  “I don’t think hockey is the problem,” Petra said, making air quotes.

  “Butt out, Petra,” Helen said.

  “You’re Canadian,” said Sarah. “You aren’t meant to leave hockey alone. Besides, you have to go on the show. You can’t disappear on the subject. Then the hockey goons will win.”

  “There’s so much in that comment, I can’t even begin to unpack it. I thought you were opposed to bans,” said Helen.

  “I am. But I am also a person who believes firmly in the beauty and sanctity of debate. And publicity. I believe in publicity.”

  “I’m not the best representative of the practice,” said Helen. “Joanie’s got his number. You call Declan Quail. You be on the show.”

  She grabbed her bag and her yoga mat and went toward her door. Sarah still blocked her.

  Helen sighed. “If you must know the truth, I don’t really feel like defending my stance anymore.”

  “Wow, you’re wussing out. I never thought you’d do that,” Sarah said. “Besides, no one ever watches that show anyway.”

  “Reverse psychology isn’t going to work on me.”

  “Do you really think concussion in athletes is preventable?”

  “Yes.”

  Sarah asked, “Aren’t you concerned about the players?”

  Petra added, “You know, those hard-bodied men who are going to be wandering around confused and crazed in the future, no one to tuck in their messy hockey jerseys, no one to soothe their sculpted brows.”

  Helen pressed her lips together. “Yes. I admit, as a medical professional, I am concerned.”

  About one sculpted brow in particular.

  Petra said, “You know, Adam Magnus wrote a rebuttal piece for a sports blog. I have an alert set up for his name now.” She pulled out her phone and read,

  We could wrap ourselves in layers of rubber, but inevitably someone will find out they have a latex allergy.

  That is so true. Latex allergy is no joke.”

  Sarah peeked over Petra’s shoulder. “Oh, and this:

  careful about clutching those pearls—you could end up strangling yourself.

  You know, he’s kind of clever in a goofy way, which is more than I can say for your editorial.”

  “Oh, that’s ... I don’t need to hear any more.” Helen felt a little hurt by Adam’s words. She didn’t even own pearls, let alone clutch them. And as for her friends’ comments, well of course her editorial wasn’t funny. Head injury was no joking matter! That was the point of the whole damn article. Helen shifted her yoga mat. “You were mad at him the other night at Stream, Petra.”

  “Well, you were both a little unreasonable,” said Sarah.

  “Have you been discussing me?”

  “Duh.”

  She moved to sit behind Helen’s desk.

  “So let’s plan strategy: Magnus is the quarry,” Sarah said, tenting her fingers. “Obviously, you have to take him down to save him. Like a biologist with a giant tranquilizer gun.” She put her feet on Helen’s desk.

  “Adam is not some dumb beast who I could take down easily. He could hold his own against anybody. Besides, like I said, I’ve sort of changed my mind a little.”

  Joanie, who’d been lingering near the doorway, spoke, “So go on, say your piece, say that you’ve changed your mind about some things. It’s a chance to publicly alter your story. And get us free PR.”

  “I could do that,” Helen mused. “I could temper what I said.”

  “TV hates temperance,” Sarah snapped. She got up and into Helen’s face. “Go hard, or go home.”

  • • •

  TV was one thing, but radio—local public radio—was classy, wasn’t it? She agreed to a radio interview partly to appease her coworkers and partly because it somehow felt safe—safer. There were advantages to it, too. She didn’t have to wear a pantsuit or fiddle with her hair—her usual work uniform of a skirt and button-down was fine. She didn’t have to sit on her hands, although she still had to be careful that she didn’t knock over the bottle of water they’d given her.

  Really. She was fine.

  Lynn Murtelle, host of the Lynn Murtelle Show, gave her a vague smile and wave, as if she were sending Helen off on an ocean liner and they weren’t crammed together in a small, cluttered studio.

  Helen looked through her notes and cleared her throat as quietly as she could, whispering into her shoulder to test out her voice. She’d thought more about vocal fry in the last ten hours than ever before in her life.

  Shuffling through her notes, she tried to banish her nervousness. It was important for her to be careful, dispassionate, scientific. Also, she didn’t want to hurt Adam—not more than she had already. Maybe she could make it clear during the interview that the arena didn’t matter to her at all, that the team and their competence or lack of it certainly wasn’t
in question. She was just a neurologist trying to protect brains.

  Dispassionate, she repeated to herself. Fair. And not a word about the stupid arena.

  The light came on, and Lynn Murtelle began to talk with her head crooked so that she didn’t have to look at Helen. She began her opening spiel about the show and then began to talk about concussion.

  The introduction, Helen realized, was almost her whole editorial, word for word.

  Not that Helen had it memorized or anything.

  “Of course, Dr. Frobisher’s editorial comes at an important juncture during the debate about Molotov’s arena,” Murtelle was saying.

  “I don’t really have any opinions either way about the arena,” Helen interrupted. “For me, it was really about the medical reality of concussion.”

  Good job not mentioning the a-word, doofus.

  “Yes, well that’s what your side of the arena debate is saying,” Murtelle noted.

  Maybe Helen shouldn’t have interrupted because ten minutes in, the interview didn’t really seem to be going that well, especially when they opened up the show to callers.

  “We have someone special on the line.”

  That didn’t sound good.

  “His name is Adam Magnus, and he plays on the left wing for the Portland Wolves—”

  “Oregon Wolves,” Adam’s voice corrected.

  “No brain damage there, I see.” Lynn giggled, her voice suddenly becoming warm.

  The room filled with the sound of Adam’s chuckle, and Helen stewed. What was he doing listening to public radio? What was he doing calling into her show? What was he doing laughing at this woman’s terrible joke?

  “I wouldn’t say that,” Adam was teasing back. “This is radio so you can’t tell if I managed to tie my own shoes.”

  “Oh, I’m sure you could manage to find someone to tie your shoes anytime,” Lynn purred.

  The public radio host was flirting with Adam? How was it that Lynn Murtelle had more game than Helen? Was she really jealous of a fiftyish, sex kitten public radio personality?

  “Psychomotor retardation doesn’t often manifest right away,” Helen said.

  Well, that statement certainly caused some dead air.

  At least it jolted Lynn back into action. “Mr. Magnus, Dr. Frobisher, you two have engaged in a sort of war of words across media platforms recently,” she said.

  “Just a local newspaper editorial—” Helen started to object.

  “Blogs, Twitter,” Lynn said. “The group No Arena Now has been signal boosting it.”

  “Well, I don’t tweet.”

  “Mr. Magnus does.”

  “I have trouble following Twitter,” Helen said.

  “It takes a lot of concentration,” said Adam. “Besides, I have a few years before my psychomotor retardation makes it difficult.”

  Helen let that slide. “I just object to saying it’s a war of words across media platforms if it’s just small-time local media—er, no offense Lynn—and Adam’s the one chasing me around with quips and comments. If you hadn’t responded, then no would even be talking about it today.”

  “Oh, so you’ve read them.”

  “No, but someone I know said you were making jokes.”

  “Dr. Frobisher ...” Lynn said.

  “So you’re the only one who gets to be funny here?” Adam asked.

  “Mr. Magnus ...”

  “I wasn’t trying to be funny. There is not one funny goddamn word in my editorial. It’s all completely serious.”

  “No, there was one funny part where one neuron starts talking to another neuron and—”

  “Dr. Frobisher, Mr. Magnus, maybe we can—”

  “It’s an illustration of neurofibrillary tangle,” Helen said hotly. “It was not supposed to be funny.”

  Adam chuckled again. Chuckled. Since when did he chuckle like some sort of benign giant? If the radio listeners could see what sort of devastating assassin he looked like, then they’d be intimidated. She wanted to reach across the phone lines and thwack him on the head. Maybe give him a neurofibrillary tangle of his own.

  Lynn Murtelle had had enough of them. “Okay, let’s get this back on track,” the host said, steel in her voice. “Adam, maybe you could tell me a little bit about what fighting in a hockey game is like ...”

  By the end of the segment, Helen hadn’t covered half of her notes, Lynn Murtelle hated her, and Adam came off as reasonable and in control. She came off as ... well, probably as a shrew.

  “The nerve of him, calling into my show,” she fumed over the phone to Petra, as she walked around the parking lot near the radio station, looking for her car.

  “To be fair, it’s not your show, and you did call for the ban of his sport,” Petra said, mildly.

  “Not you, too. I can at least understand it from Sarah.”

  “Oh, no. Don’t lump me in with Sarah. I just mean that you can’t control what other people say about things you put in public—”

  “It was an editorial in a newspaper! Who the fuck reads the paper anymore, aside from public radio hosts?”

  “And really, frankly,” Petra continued, ignoring Helen, “when it comes to this, you can’t expect Adam Magnus to agree with you.”

  “I wish he would,” Helen muttered.

  “I’m sure there are other ways you could convince him.”

  “Petra.”

  “What? He likes you. You like him.”

  “I don’t anymore. And he certainly does not like me at all at this point. Why are we even talking about this? I doubt I’ll ever see him or hear from him again. Which is fine. I said my piece. Sort of. And that’s done. I am never, ever doing that again. Now where the fuck is my car?”

  CHAPTER NINE

  So, it turned out Helen was going on TV after all—a small-time community access program that nobody watched. Because she did still have pages of notes left to talk about and she hadn’t had a chance to get to some of her better arguments. People had warned her that Declan Quail of the Declan Quail Show wasn’t going to let her get a word in edgewise. He seemed to have an inflated sense of importance about his opinions and his program. The very same people had told her that no one ever watched the Declan Quail Show.

  Still, she’d maybe get a chance to say state her business without sounding like a fool. And Quail’s obscurity certainly didn’t stop Sarah and Joanie from endlessly coaching her. Joanie had brushed Helen’s brown locks until they shone and put some sort of product combination in them that made them resemble, in shape and texture, some particularly expensive vertical blinds. Joanie had also assembled an outfit for her, out of scraps of her, Helen’s, and Sarah’s wardrobes. She employed the costume department of her experimental theater group, which consisted of two racks of wispy scarves, some top hats, tutus, several boxes of eyeglasses, costume jewelry, and a pixyish dresser named Madge. Joanie and Madge decided to give Helen clip-on earrings and a chunky necklace, which Joanie insisted brought out gold flecks in Helen’s eyes. Helen couldn’t see it. Her eyes were brown. She had always liked them, and she didn’t think people needed to embellish in order to find them pretty. The dresser also insisted that Helen wear some sort of suit that seemed a size too small: Joanie told her it was sexier that way. She made up Helen’s face and told her to sit still and not use her hands, arms, and torso.

  It was very hard for her to keep her hands still.

  She felt like some Robo-Avenging Angel, given how stiffly she was supposed to move and how much hardware was clanking around her. She wondered how she’d managed to endure all those heavily costumed and made-up dance performances she’d participated in as a teen. She had been used to all of this paraphernalia at some point in her life, wearing strange shoes, having her hair held viciously in place with hairspray and a million steely pins. Maybe that’s what made it worse: She’d done it, she’d broken free of it, and she didn’t want to go back. She had left that life, and she was glad of it. Now she wore what she wanted, ate what she wanted, and le
ft her hair alone. And yes, it had been hard getting used to those freedoms—she still wasn’t sure she was used to it—but it was harder reconciling herself to the restrictions she felt tonight.

  So she sat in the tiny dressing room, fiddling with the necklace. Her hands needed something to do. Out of habit, she’d made patting motions at her hair, but withdrew without actually touching it. Joanie would probably kill Helen if anything happened to The Hair. (Although, she wasn’t sure if she could alter it even if she tried.) Joanie was also the only person who knew the secret to removing whatever had been done to it. Maybe some sort of turpentine or solvent was involved. She wondered briefly what would happen if her hair stayed like this for the rest of her life. Would it set off metal detectors?

  Oh, she was not nervous.

  She rehearsed what she would say. She would go through the effects of multiple impacts on the brain. She would talk about how the brains of players looked on CT scans and how they looked at autopsy. She would describe tissue riddled with Lewy bodies and how that resembled the brains of Parkinson’s patients. She would use examples. She would not venture opinions about stadiums, taxes, Russian billionaire NHL owners, or the Wolves hockey team and whether or not members of said team should be employed. If asked, she would say that she loved hockey, just not its violence.

  She would be stupendously boring—correction—she would be droning, monotonous Robo-Avenging Angel with a shield of imperturbable hair, stunning opponents into sleep by extolling facts about the brain. No mutant hero had ever been quite like her. None could possibly follow.

  There was a movement behind her. She looked up, way up, in the mirror, and her dreams of superhuman prowess fell to a gibbering death.

  Adam Magnus. In a suit. And a scarf—a jazzy scarf.

  His blue shirt brought out his eyes. Joanie would have admired his skill at wearing clothes. Helen preferred him without the clothing, but she could still appreciate this vision.