The smell. She recoiled. She wondered if it was disease. Was this the odor of bacteria consuming a human body? No, she quickly realized, it was the stench of ancient pizza. From the looks of the remains in the open box on the table in the small entry room, a meat lover’s special. She repressed a gag.
“Dr. Martin?”
There was just enough light from the hallway behind her, and a sliver of moon from a window across the tiny office to illuminate the mess of food remains, scattered papers, and was that a camping stove? And the light also showed the way to an opening to a second room.
She shuffled by the desk and thought, Let him be okay.
For all Jackie’s awareness, her great skills at piecing together the world, she would not have sensed how strange it was for her to be here, how impulsive. She was grasping at straws. The Google thing, Denny, the man in the car, they’d tapped into that core part of her that was emotionally flummoxed, off balance, so much less composed than she showed the world. Now she was on the verge of coming undone altogether, torn apart with uncertainty. But that’s not what she told herself. She thought, as she walked into the open doorway of the second room, Now I know what to do. I can help this man who needs my help.
There he was, in a heap. On the couch, an arm draped to the side with his hand near a half-empty bottle of clear alcohol and a piece of paper.
“Dr. Martin?”
“I’m retired. Call me Lyle,” he muttered. He didn’t bother to look up.
“Lyle?”
“Retired,” he muttered again. “Honorifics no longer applicable.”
She turned on the light. The office reminded her of the austere habitat of a shrink she once visited: a chair, coffee table, and the couch where Lyle was flopped facedown. On the table, several empty bottles and what appeared to be a half-eaten burrito.
“Uhhhh!” Lyle made an anguished sound like a vampire consumed by sunlight.
She turned it off. She didn’t want to see him like this; he didn’t deserve to be seen like this. What remained were silhouettes.
“I’ll clean it myself,” he said. “Please. Go away.”
“I’m not the cleaning crew.”
“It’ll be a new career path for me.”
“Let me get you some water.”
She glanced around for a bottle or cup. She couldn’t make out much. Some of the books on the built-in shelves had been scattered to the floor, like someone had casually pulled them off. On the table, she could make out a plastic cup. She picked it up and sniffed the contents and shivered with disgust. Cheap swill.
“Are you hungry?”
No answer. She couldn’t imagine what had dragged him to this abyss. She also knew, in her gut, she knew, that she couldn’t ask him outright. That wasn’t how these things worked. Not with the proud and brilliant. She knew because she wouldn’t respond to direct questions, either. She’d been low. She understood Dr. Martin, and he probably would understand her.
“May I take a liberty?” she said, and she sat.
“Have a seat.” He laughed, some odd private joke because she was already sitting. He was half mad, at least half, she thought.
“You are a great man.”
Lyle turned his head, slightly, curiously, like a bird hearing a sound, such that he could make out her edges through the hair. She wondered if he imagined her as an apparition or dream.
“Are you good or evil?” he asked.
“What happened in Africa?” she asked.
“Africa?”
“Tanzania?”
“How do you know about that? Am I dreaming?”
He was obviously drunk and exhausted, but she wasn’t sure he could be quite that out of it to not know whether he was dreaming. His question almost sounded metaphorical, like Is this all a dream? She went with it. “Yes.”
“To dream, the impossible dream. . . .” he sang, and then said, “Well, then let me tell a story.”
“You tell beautiful stories.”
“Once upon a time, there was a man who decided to be an infectious disease doctor and he had this idealistic vision that he could take on viruses and disease and find cures and then you know what would happen?”
“The world would be a better place.”
“He’d get laid.”
She laughed.
“Don Quixote tilting at viruses,” he continued, slurring. “Holding them off from attacking all the people he was protecting, including the princess. Year after year, he tilted, and the viruses kept coming and that was interesting and good work, tilting or not. And then the young doctor, who wasn’t so young anymore, heard something behind him. He turned to see all the people he arrogantly told himself he was defending from the viruses.”
Lyle looked down at the bottle standing on the carpet and tipped the vodka back and forth idly. Then he picked up the piece of paper and clutched it.
“They were killing each other,” he finally said. “Shooting, maiming, terrorizing, drinking and driving, stealing each other’s land, finding tax loopholes and racking up speeding tickets, building narco empires, filing lawsuits and countersuits, cloaking themselves as decent and moral and, all the while, doing more damage than any virus. Just one big difference.”
“Dr. Martin?”
He roared, “At least the virus declared itself: I am here to kill. I will consume you. It was forthright with its intentions. It was true. Not the people. Not the princess!”
Another long pause.
“People, they put you in the worst positions, y’know.” He sighed. “Anyhow,” he said, facedown, harder to hear now, “the doctor had picked the wrong side. Obviously. So he retired and decided, just now, that he might become a janitor.”
With that, Dr. Martin seemed to make one last effort to raise his head. He shrugged, out of energy, nothing left to say. He fell back down and started to snore.
Jackie felt momentarily dazed and realized she’d been holding her breath. The moment had captivated her. It had, in a certain manner, seduced her. She felt such kinship and intimacy.
Whatever fantasy she’d had before that she and Dr. Martin were on the same page had now been multiplied, practically exponentially. What a man.
“Let me tell you a story,” she whispered. He was out cold now.
“Once upon a time there was a girl. I bet you can guess, that girl was me!” She laughed slightly at her own silly little joke. Then she cleared her throat and swallowed quickly. “Her parents fought and fought and fought. Her dad drank and cheated and her mom drank and yelled and hit and probably cheated, too.”
You’re a son of a bitch, Alan. A philandering Son. Of. A. Bitch.
More like Husband of a Bitch.
You’re blaming me?
“The little girl sat on the back of the couch watching through the sliding glass window. She could see it coming. But she didn’t move. The little girl, me, I . . . I saw my mom take two bold steps forward. I still couldn’t move. People say these things happen in slow motion, but it’s not so. It’s so fast that you can’t stop it. It only feels like slow motion looking back on it. She shoved him just . . . just at the right angle, I guess. The wrong angle. His slipped and he fell against the glass wall. It was cheap, fractured, breaking, then broken. My dad teetered there. That was slower. I could see it. I couldn’t move. She pushed him again.”
Jackie had her hands balled along the sides of her cheeks. She rocked. Silence for nearly five minutes. She counted. She looked up.
“My dad was an asshole philanderer but I’m not sure he deserved to bounce off the cement from eight stories up. In fact, I can say now assuredly that my mother wasn’t supposed to be judge and jury, conflict of interest and all that. The trouble is, you can’t really know that in the moment. She couldn’t. Maybe I should have. I had the gift to intervene and there I stood.”
She was more composed now. She started talking a bit more philosophically, what it was like to walk through a world where people saw what they want to see and not what really is, people lost in their perspectives and devices, buried in their escapes and perversions, whereas a gifted few could truly see and hear. She told him about the various people who wanted to use her, had used her. She told him not to pity her.
She dropped her head. “You deserve complete honesty, Dr. Martin.” She paused and swallowed. “My sister, I had a sister, her name was Marissa. Two years younger. She was there that day. We went to live with my grandmother.”
Jackie explained that she and Marissa were close. Marissa went away for college, to Cornell.
“She said she couldn’t be around me all the time, that I was too intense. But, obviously, she was wrestling with demons—who wouldn’t, after our childhood—and she had to get away. I could take the blame. I loved her, dearly. We talked all the time,” Jackie said. She swallowed. “In her sophomore year, she jumped from a bridge and killed herself.”
A tear slipped from Jackie’s right eye.
“I’d talked to her hours before. I knew she was in trouble. But I did nothing. I couldn’t stop it.” She simultaneously laughed and cried and threw up her hands. “My self-pity has grown tiresome.”
When she stood, she walked over to Lyle, pulled the piece of paper from his hand, and turned him on his back. She wondered for a moment whether he might be better off dead, as she’d wondered of herself a few times in her life. She propped a pillow under his head so that he might sleep comfortably.
“I am better now, Lyle. Thanks to you. You saved me, turned my life around.” She told him a story about how she’d gone to Nepal, a tattered soul with a backpack. She’d gotten the monkey scratch, and then came the earthquake. At the chaotic airstrip, she lay down and let fate take over, expecting to die in the hot wind. But fate brought her Lyle, who was in the area building a pop-up clinic to help with a cholera outbreak. That day, of course, he was dealing with chaos at the airstrip, tending to various wounded.
“I’m sure I was just another warm body to you,” Jackie said. She stroked his hair. She pictured the scene, the hot air blowing dust, people running, a doctor like a superhero seemingly unfazed. He knelt beside her, examined the monkey scratch on her left forearm, asked a few questions. I’m not worth saving, she recalled telling him. I’m unhinged, if you want to know the truth. Better off gone.
“Nonsense,” he had muttered. He looked up from her at a square, red-painted building with a wall curving in from earthquake damage. It stood to the right of the airstrip’s “parking lot,” which was a dirt area free of brush, and the so-called terminal, where Jackie sat, which consisted of a cement roof held up by pillars, without sides. The whole operation could’ve passed in the States for a half-built bus station.
Weakly, Jackie had watched Lyle walk to the red-painted building. As Lyle had gotten close to the building, Jackie saw him get intercepted by a uniformed man rushing by. They had a brief exchange.
“No, no. Too dangerous!” the man had said. Jackie thought she heard the word collapse. Then she watched Lyle ignore the man, walk to the building, open a cellar door beside the collapsing wall and descend stairs. He had returned five minutes later, covered in dust. He’d found the vaccine, administered it, told her she now had three days to get to Kathmandu for a second one, but could even make it a week. He told her she’d be fine and then went on to help someone else.
Now, back in the office, she stroked his hair again. She stared at him. “I’m so glad you did,” she said.
Then she knelt beside him and she put her lips onto his lips. She felt his warmth and let her tongue slip into the crevice of his mouth and tasted his sour breath and felt sharp arousal. She pulled back.
“You are a great man. The world needs you. I need you,” she repeated. “And I am here for you, as you were for me. You will rise.”
Walking down the stairwell, she let herself look at the piece of paper that Lyle had been clutching. It was the result of a medical test. She took a moment to make sense of it. But then it was clear. Dr. Lyle Martin was infertile. He could never conceive a child.