Dear Dad,
Even before I begin this letter, I’m afraid of what might happen to it. I have observed you over the years and seen how you make little distinction between what’s private and personal and what’s not. I have watched you repeatedly betray the confidence of your former friends over dinner in some restaurant by converting their sometimes painful affairs into witty stories with which you entertain others. I don’t know why you do this, but I do know, because I have seen it happen over and over again, that when the energy drops at one of those dinners, and the chatter starts to fade, you will dredge up and say anything just to pick things up again. I beg you to make an exception this one time with this letter. Don’t tell others about it, not even Mom. Don’t quote me, don’t paraphrase me to others. Please. If we can have nothing else that’s strictly private, just between the two of us, then let this letter serve as our one and only private event. I will continue this letter as an act of faith that you will respect my wish and not betray me as you have done so often in the past. So, with that out of the way, let me begin again:
Dear Dad,
I have not been keeping track of time, but both of us are aware, I’m sure, that for years now, a paralysis of some kind has set in between us. I’m not sure when it started, because it’s taken me this long just to accept the fact of its existence. No, we’re not drifting apart, to use a phrase my friends use when talking about their own parents. It would be better if we were, because then the possibility would exist that eventually I would drift far enough from you to no longer feel the pain of proximity without contact.
But we’re not drifting, Dad. There is no motion of any kind. There is only the sad spectacle of a father and a son frozen in time.
I have thought about this a lot and in my opinion it has nothing to do with the fact that, biologically speaking, you’re not my real father. The issue here, Dad, is not blood and biology. What’s missing between us is something that should exist between any two human beings who have known each other as long as we have. There either was, or I chose to believe there was, an unspoken promise which I took to heart when I was very young. It was a promise of wonderful things to come. Some test awaited me, or a series of tests, and if I successfully negotiated them, that would eventually lead to a loving relationship between us. In a way, I’ve had a very happy childhood because I believed so blindly in the promise of things to come.
I am now neither young enough anymore to go on believing blindly, nor old and cynical enough to dismiss the possibility of your love and move on to other things.
Tell me the truth, Dad. Please, if you know the truth, tell it to me.
To learn the truth, that I can never have what I want from you, would probably be very painful, but not nearly as debilitating as this wondering and waiting. I’m held in check, Dad. While I wait for your love, close ties with others are held in abeyance. Lovely girls come and go, friends come and go, love comes and goes and I never ask it to stay because I’m waiting for you.
At the risk of oversimplifying the situation, let me remind you that what I need from you is not all that much. You need not fear that I want to take over your life, or that I have some dark, forbidding agenda.
Until you sensed that I had no use for it anymore, you were always willing to be with me in public. To take me to a play or premiere or sneak preview or some other public event, and then afterwards, with others, to dine in some restaurant where the event we had just attended became the event again. I die in public as if upon a stage. I play the part of a public son bodly.
Let me, not always, but every now and then, let me be the event. Please understand that I have no specific scene in mind that I want to play with you. It’s the very absence of a scene I yearn for. My daydreams of being alone with you are all of an inconsequential sharing of time, of basking in ease and inadvertence.
I know I’m taking a chance by writing this letter. I don’t know you well, Dad, but I do know you well enough to know that you might find it easier to sever all ties with me rather than address the issues in this letter: If you must do that, then you must. It will be better than the position in which the two of us find ourselves in now, where we languish like two chess pieces of an abandoned game.
Your loving son,
Billy.
PS. I hope you don’t find this postscript patronizing but please, if nothing else, get yourself some health insurance. For my peace of mind, if not yours.
It was neither warm nor cold. The sun was shining, but something in the air prevented it from being a sunny day.
Folded New York Times under my arm, my son’s letter in the inside pocket of my sport coat, I waited on the corner of Eighty-sixth and Broadway for a cab.
A brand-new yellow cab lunged to pick me up. It could not have been newer or yellower. I put out my cigarette, got in, and we headed downtown.
The interior of the cab was overheated. There were two large, dangling car deodorizers in the back, one on my left and one on my right. They were green and shaped like Christmas trees, dispensing a sickening pine scent.
I rolled down the window.
The traffic moved slowly but steadily. I loved motion. I loved the feeling that I was getting somewhere.
I crossed my legs and thought once again about Billy’s letter. I had already thought about it Monday, and yesterday, but in the fatherly mood that I was in, nothing was too good for my son. Not even putting in overtime and thinking about his letter three days in a row.
His letter truly moved me when I received it on Monday. I was moved by it off and on for almost the entire day. On Tuesday, I decided to do something about it, and the issue I chose to address in his letter was in his postscript to me.
He was worried about my having no health insurance. If I got health insurance, I reasoned, I could then call him and tell him not to worry. I could tell him that I had become insured again because he had advised me to do it. The way I saw it, he would feel flattered that I had taken his advice. The two of us could then have a nice chat on the phone about the whole thing and, in the process, disregard everything in his letter that had preceded it.
Therefore, yesterday, first thing in the morning, I called my new accountant, Jerry Fry, and told him to get me reinstated with Fidelity Health, my former carrier. Jerry congratulated me on coming to my senses finally. I told him I was doing it for my son, whom, as he knew, I loved very much. He congratulated me on my fatherly feelings and told me to leave it all to him.
“Leave it to me, Saul,” he said, “You’ll be all set by tomorrow.”
Today, I would call Jerry from my office or he would call me from his office, and another one of life’s little problems would be resolved. I considered several opening lines to Billy when I called him tonight and opted for “Billy? It’s Dad. Guess what, Big Guy? I’m covered again …”
I lit a cigarette.
“No smoking,” the driver said. There was an edge to his voice, as if he had warned me once before not to smoke. “I have asthma,” he added with authority.
I took one last, quick puff and put out the cigarette in the shiny new ashtray.
Judging by the number of cab drivers who suddenly claimed to have asthma or some other respiratory disease, one might easily assume that the large cab companies had made it company policy to hire only the hard of breathing. Even Afghan and Pakistani drivers, who spoke not a word of English and had no idea where Lincoln Center was located, knew how to say, “No smoking. I have asthma.”
My driver looked like a combination lumberjack and linebacker for the Chicago Bears. He took up three-quarters of the space in the front of the brand-new Peugeot he was driving. The windshield, had it been just a little smaller and just a little bit more curved, could have been a pair of goggles he was wearing.
There was something festive about this cab ride. It was my farewell tour as The Uninsured Man. In honor of which, I decided to befriend the hulk who was driving me.
“What kind of asthma do you have?” I asked him. I knew he was lying, by the sound of his voice. There was always a melody to the sound of lies, which I recognized as a tune I sang myself.
He pondered the question.
“What do you mean, what kind?” He checked me out in the rearview mirror. “What kind of asthmas are there?”
“I don’t know. You’re the one who’s got it.”
“It’s just asthma,” he said, rolling his big shoulders. “Regular asthma. Haven’t you ever heard of people with asthma?”
“Yes, I have.”
“Well, that’s what I’ve got. Asthma. I smell smoke and bingo!” He snapped his fingers. “I get an attack just like that.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, and it’s no joke, believe you me.”
I nodded as if I did.
“What’s it like?” I couldn’t resist asking him.
“What’s what like?”
“To have an attack.”
“Of asthma?”
“Yes.”
“It’s terrible. Positively terrible,” he said, wagging his head slowly.
He had a neck like a Sunday pot roast. When he wagged his head, a nature show on PBS flashed through my mind. The grizzly bear from the wilds of Montana, wearing a radio collar. Now relocated and retrained and driving a cab in Manhattan.
It was a pleasure to be driven by him. I couldn’t smoke in the cab, but I much preferred to be deprived of my cigarette by an out-and-out liar like himself than by an impersonal city ordinance sign. I was predisposed toward liars. Being a congenital liar myself, I took to others with the same affliction. There were no longer any truths I had in common with others. Lies were my last link to my fellow man. In lies, at least, all men were brothers.
“It’s terrible, huh?” I asked. I didn’t want the subject to die, the lying to end.
“To have an attack of asthma?”
“Yes.”
“It’s more than terrible. Believe you me, mister, you don’t want to know.”
“That bad, huh?”
He looked at me again in the rearview mirror and asked, a little suspiciously, “You ever have asthma yourself?”
“No.”
My answer reassured him.
“It’s terrible. Horrible. Positively horrible.” He was getting expansive, feeling his oats. “It’s like … like being held underwater in a public swimming pool. That’s what it’s like. You ever been held underwater in a public swimming pool?”
“That’s what it’s like. Only worse.”
“Worse?”
“Yes, worse. Because with asthma you can’t come up for air. See. Because when you come up for air, there’s no air. There’s only more asthma.”
“Sounds pretty bad, all right.”
“Bad, nothing. It’s positively horrible.”
“How long have you been an asthmatic?”
“Been what?” He sounded suspicious again.
“Asthma. How long have you had asthma?”
“Oh,” he nodded. “Since birth.”
“That long?”
“Yes. Runs in the family.”
He changed lanes constantly, but his bulk obscured the steering wheel from my view. From where I sat, he looked like he was steering with his shoulders, lurching left, lurching right, throwing the Peugeot around like a toy.
“Do you have any other diseases?”
“No, just asthma. I thought I had something else, but it turned out I didn’t. Why do you ask? You a doctor or something?”
“Of sorts.”
“Oh, yeah?” He got suspicious again. “What kind of a doctor are you?”
“A movie doctor,” I told him, and I tapped my temple with a finger when I saw him looking at me again in the mirror. “If you have bad movies in your head, I fix them up.”
He thought about this for a bit and then came up with the answer.
“A shrink? Is that what you are, a shrink?”
“Yes,” I lied, out of courtesy for all the lies he had shared with me.
“You’re in the right city, that’s for sure. No shortage of sick individuals in this burg. I see all kinds.”
“I bet you do.”
“People walking around the city with cornflakes for brains. You make eye contact with the wrong guy and you’re dead.”
He stopped the cab in front of the building where I had my office.
“Nice talking to you,” I told him and gave him a big tip.
“Thanks a lot, Doc.”
I sit at my desk and smoke, reading the New York Times. An old floor lamp with an enormous shade, reminiscent of hats worn by Edwardian ladies, is my primary source of light. There is track lighting overhead, but I never use it.
On my desk is a typewriter, a large black Remington, a screenplay I’m supposed to be rewriting, a telephone, an answering machine, and a large ashtray.
To my left, facing south, is a window with venetian blinds looking out on West Fifty-seventh Street. There is a large air conditioner in the window. It’s on “high” at the moment. I like the sound it makes. I chose this particular model for the sound it made. At the height of our marriage, Dianah and I used to rent a house in Easthampton for the summer. It was close to the ocean and at night, through the open window, I could hear the ocean waves attacking the beach. It’s not quite the same thing but close to the sound my air conditioner is making now.
To my right is a bookcase, with books I’ve kept since my college days. My comp lit collection.
In the southeast corner of my office is a pyramid of cardboard boxes. Inside the boxes are my word processor, printer, and two years’ supply of printing paper.
In a sudden fit of passion to keep up with the times, I purchased the word processor a little over five years ago. While I waited for it to arrive, I proselytized the virtues of having a word processor to one and all. I convinced Guido that he simply had to get one himself. And he did. When mine finally arrived, the accompanying owner’s manual in three languages filled me with despair. The more I read it, the more I despaired. A few days later, I put everything, including the owner’s manual, back into the cardboard boxes and moved them to the southeast corner of my office, where they still reside. At the time of my purchase, the equipment was on the cutting edge of technology. It is now, for both me and its manufacturer, a relic from the past.
I light another cigarette and turn another page of the Times.
The rent on my office is exorbitant. The trade-off is that my office is located at an exorbitant address. I recently renewed my lease for two more years. When the new lease goes into effect, my rent will almost double to keep up with the rising exorbitance of the location. Money’s not the problem. I can afford it. My problem is that I no longer need an office. I have more than enough empty rooms in my apartment where I can do my rewriting.
A nostalgia for my rotten marriage comes over me. I don’t so much miss living with Dianah as miss having a Dianah to leave five days a week in the morning. To have a Dianah for a wife not only made going to the office in the morning a matter of some urgency, it made being in the office itself a constantly pleasant reminder that I was not at home.
When I left Dianah, I no longer had a motive for being in my office. It was no longer a refuge, it was just an office.
More about Romania in the Times. The students who made the revolution and toppled the old regime don’t know how to make a new government. The people who know how to make a new government are the people from the old regime who were overthrown by the students. Those very people are now coming back to power in Romania. The students feel betrayed.
I feel for them. I find many analogies in the turmoil in Romania to my own life. Poor students. If they think they feel betrayed now, wait until they grow up and start betraying themselves. It gets bad when you have only yourself left to topple for life to get better.
I turn a page.
The homeless are becoming a nuisance. There are more and more of them. It’s a new decade and there is a new impatience with this old problem.
Racism is on the rise on college campuses. Hate crimes are on the rise. I read the story carefully and make a mental note to remember it as a useful topic to interpose between myself and my son when I call him tonight. Should things get tense in our conversation after I tell him the good news about my health insurance, I could go right to it.
“Oh, by the way, Billy, I’ve been meaning to ask you something. There are all these stories in the paper about the rise of racism on college campuses. What, in your opinion, is causing this to happen? Do you have any idea?”
I take a short break from the Times and regard the screenplay I’m supposed to be rewriting. It’s almost an historic occasion. I have rewriter’s block. I’ve never had it before, but this particular screenplay has given it to me.
The problem with the screenplay I’m supposed to be rewriting is that I rewrote it once already. That was three years ago. It had another title then, and it was with another studio. At that time, the problem with it was that it had no plot. It had a cast of characters larger than a high school graduation class but no story. So I got rid of all kinds of people and gave it a story line. It then moved on to be rewritten several more times by other rewriters. Now it’s back on my desk with a whole new set of problems. Now it’s all plot and no characters. In the intervening years, its plot has not only thickened, it has congealed. It has become the La Brea Tar Pits of plots. Our hero, his friends, his enemies, his love interest are all trapped in the tar pits, but you can’t tell one from the other. My job is to fix the problem and give our hero and his love interest a sense of humor.
I consider the possibility, as I regard the 118-page screenplay on my desk, that in the near future rewriting one screenplay will provide a lifetime of work for a team of rewriters like myself, the way the building of a single Gothic cathedral did for generations of medieval craftsmen.
The telephone rings. I snap out of my trance. I rub my hands, anticipating a call from Jerry Fry, who will inform me that Fidelity Health has taken me back into its family of insured Americans.
I pick up the phone.
It’s Guido. Calling to tell me that he will have to cancel our lunch at the Tea Room this Friday. He’s going to LA on business. Guido Ventura, my last friend, is a talent agent.
We chat. He tells me about the clients he has lost and the clients he has gained and the new client he hopes to snare in LA, and implies that the arithmetic is in his favor. I could remind him that the clients he has lost he once considered irreplaceable and that the clients he has gained, including this client he hopes to snare in LA, he once found beneath contempt. But I don’t. He is my very last friend and I don’t want to lose him. And besides, since I tend to balance my books using the same moral arithmetic he employs, who am I to talk? So I concur with his results and wish him happy hunting in LA.
I light another cigarette and, while waiting for Jerry to call, continue my journey through the New York Times.
The Arts and Leisure section. Theater reviews. Movie reviews. Music reviews. Book reviews. TV reviews. I read them all. There’s a tone that emerges, the tone of Arts in review, which is like a wonderful gin and tonic to me, or what a gin and tonic used to be. I can no longer get drunk, but this tone makes me high.
I think about Billy’s letter while I read the paper, but my thoughts are now in tune with the tone in the Times.
I now appreciate his letter on a whole other level. His command of the English language. His mature style for one so young. His ability to explore emotional territory without becoming overly sentimental. His easy alliteration. His vivid imagery.
The more I praise his letter to myself, the more the point and the purpose of it fade.
This is a new disease I have picked up. I don’t know what to call it. It could either be called an objectivity disease or a subjectivity disease, depending upon how you look at it.
The symptoms are always the same.
Despite my nauseating preoccupation with myself, that self seems to slip away rather easily. Try as I might, I am unable to remain subjective about anything for very long. An hour or so, a day or so, a couple of days at best, and my subjectivity leaves me and I move on to begin observing the event in question from some other point of view.
I don’t do it on purpose. My mind simply moves on and starts to orbit the event.
The event can be a person, an idea, an issue, a heartbreaking letter from my son. It doesn’t matter what it is, the fact is, it’s only mine, truly mine, subjectively mine, for a little while. And then I start to orbit. I circle the issue, the idea, the letter, the telephone call. I see it from many different angles, various points of view. I do this until I become almost totally objective. Meaning that I can no longer experience how I felt about the letter, the telephone call, the idea, the issue, in the first place. Meaning that I can no longer summon any subjective emotions about the event one way or another. Meaning that it no longer has any meaning for me.
I turn a page.
The telephone rings.
Jerry, I think.
“Hello, sweetheart.”
It’s Dianah.
I tell her that I can’t talk to her now because I’m expecting an important phone call. She laughs and sighs. She laughs and sighs all in one sound. The only woman, the only man, woman, or child I know who can do that.
“Oh, Saul,” she laughs and sighs.
I have never heard the sound of my own name used against me so effectively.
“I’m not kidding, Dianah,” I say, trying to be firm but friendly, “I have an important business call I’m expecting, so if you wouldn’t mind …”
She cuts me off.
“Maybe this is it, sweetheart. Maybe I’m the call you’ve been waiting for.”
“I hate to be rude, Dianah, but …”
She cuts me off again.
“Oh, I know,” she says. She is speaking in italics now. “It’s pure hell for you to have to be rude.”
Her words, if printed on a page, would require several fonts to do it justice. The months of painstaking labor that it took for the monks in the Middle Ages to create a single illuminated letter, Dianah can conjure into existence in an instant with the sound of her voice.
We go on in our adversarial way. Me telling her that I can’t talk, she telling me in sounds more than words what she thinks of me. I try to resist, but eventually I become enraptured by the brilliance of her performance. She’s in wonderful voice today. I could be listening to Hildegard Behrens doing Wagner and not my wife, Dianah, doing me in on the telephone.
Finally, she tells me what it was she wanted to tell me when she called.
“I’ve given away all your father’s clothes to this church group that was making a collection for the homeless. I warned you I would do it if you didn’t come to pick them up and so I’ve done it. Somebody around here has to keep their word and we both know, don’t we, darling, that it’s not going to be you. Ciao, darling. You have yourself a wonderful day, all right?”
She hangs up.
While I smoke and wait for Jerry to call me, I grow more and more certain that it was a disastrous mistake on my part to have ever left Arnold, my former accountant.
I was very fond of Arnold. An accountant from the old, almost Dickensian school. He even looked like an accountant. His father, I was sure, had been an accountant. Gaunt, pale, overworked, nearsighted. Unlike Jerry Fry, with his tan. There is something suspicious about an accountant with a year-round tan, who keeps a tennis racquet in his office.
I could have kept Arnold and told Dianah to get a new accountant but, as a way of easing the strain of separation and providing some continuity in her life, I decided to be generous and get a new accountant myself. So she kept Arnold and continuity, and I got Jerry. With his tennis racquet.
I’ve only had Jerry for a little over a year and already I’m uninsured.
Somewhere along the way, a fuckup occurred with my health insurance carrier, Fidelity Health. According to Jerry, although his office informed them of my change of billing address, some dippy secretary at Fidelity kept sending my premium-due notices to Arnold’s office, just as they had been doing for the last twenty years or so. And, according to Jerry, some dippy secretary at Arnold’s office kept sending them back to Fidelity, with a note saying that I was no longer with Arnold but without telling them who it was I was with now.
By the time the fuckup was discovered, my health insurance policy was canceled.
In all fairness to Jerry, as soon as the fuckup was discovered, he wanted to institute reinstatement procedures on the spot. The fault from then on was mine. It struck me as a novelty, an almost pleasant change of pace, to find myself uninsured. So I told Jerry to do nothing until he heard from me. I wanted, I told him, to consider my options.
“What’re you talking about?” Jerry wanted to know. “What options? Being uninsured is not an option.”
But the longer I remained uninsured, the better it felt. I had so many personal problems and diseases that were, I suspected, insoluble and incurable, that it was genuinely refreshing to have a problem that I could resolve whenever I felt like it. The quicker I resolved it, the quicker I would be back to having only problems that could not be resolved.
My problem also provided me with a temporary persona I enjoyed playing. The bravado, the overly sentimental fatalism of being the only uninsured man I knew. The cachet of not caring that I was. The opportunity it offered me to say things like: “So what if I’m not? Neither Alexander the Great, nor Alexander Hamilton, nor Thomas Jefferson, had health insurance.”
And there was something else as well. It seemed fitting and honest to be uninsured. In moments of rare clarity and blinding insight, which I usually had while taking a long shower, I saw that there was no insurance policy on earth for what was wrong with me. I didn’t know what was wrong with me, but I knew it wasn’t covered.
Had Billy not brought up the issue in the postscript to his letter, I might have let the whole thing slide indefinitely.
I light another cigarette and turn to the Business section in the Times. The power of the labor unions is weakening.
The telephone rings.
“Saul.”
It’s Jerry.
“Jerry,” I say.
“Got a minute?” says he.
“Sure,” say I.
There’s something about this opening that’s not to my liking, but I withhold judgment and listen.
Jerry starts by reviewing, once again, my whole insurance fuckup with Fidelity. It’s back to dippy secretaries doing dippy things. I try to stop him because I know the whole history, but Jerry insists on the review “as a matter of record,” as he calls it.
Serves me right, I think, for leaving Arnold. Jerry is just not a proper name for an accountant. Jerry is a name for an office boy who makes Xerox copies and runs out for sandwiches.
The gist of Jerry’s review “as a matter of record” is that his firm is not to blame for anything.
“Fine, fine,” I tell him. “Your firm is not to blame. I’m not interested in blaming anyone. I just want to be reinstated by Fidelity, that’s all.”
There is a pause and out of the pause comes Jerry’s voice.
“It’s too late now,” says he.
“What’s too late?” I almost scream.
“You waited too long,” he says and goes on. “Your grace period is over. You see, there was an administrative grace period for members in good standing during which time you could have been reinstated easily. During that time, although your policy was canceled, it was only canceled in an administrative way.”
“And now?” I ask.
“Now you have been canceled in a corporate way.”
I start to sweat. I reach for another cigarette and as I light it, I see that my hand is shaking. I don’t know what it means to be canceled in a corporate way, but the word “canceled” suddenly sounds different. I don’t know why, but it does. My whole cavalier attitude to having no insurance, my whole Byronic persona of being The Uninsured Man, my whole reason for wanting to be insured again as a way of reestablishing contact with my son—it all goes out the window. I am canceled! My God, I am canceled in a corporate way. Not my insurance policy. It somehow seems that it’s me, personally, who is being canceled. Me. Saul Karoo. The word “canceled” acquires an existential quality of being cast out, beyond the pale. What excommunication means to a lifelong Catholic, this canceled in a corporate way now means to me.
I am sweating like a horse.
“What?” I stammer. “What does that mean, Jerry?”
“It means that you can’t be reinstated with Fidelity without having a complete physical examination. And I know how you feel about that. And then, depending on the results of your physical, they’ll either take you back or reject you as being medically unqualified. You see, you’re starting from scratch with them.”
“But I’ve been with them for over twenty years!”
“Not anymore you haven’t,” he tells me. “You’ve been purged. Canceled in a corporate way.”
There is a ringing in my ears and a pounding in my chest.
“But did you talk to them? Did you talk to Fidelity? Did you tell them it was just a fuckup by some dippy secretaries?”
“You can’t talk to Fidelity,” Jerry tells me as if he’s telling me one of the great truths of our time.
My breathing is now so loud it’s drowning out the sound of the air conditioner in my office. Jerry can hear me breathing and tries to calm me down.
“Saul, Saul,” he says, “listen to me. Nothing to worry about. This whole thing is a blessing in disguise. In my opinion, you never should have been with Fidelity in the first place. I don’t want to say anything against Arnold, but had I been advising you, I would have had you leave Fidelity a long time ago. I think we can do a lot better with some other insurance carrier. Wider coverage. Psychiatric and organ transplant included. Lower premiums even. We’re now in a position to shop around for the best deal. See what I mean?”
“Tell me, Jerry. What should I do?”
“I think you should forget about Fidelity and go with GenMed.”
“GenMed,” I scream. “What’s GenMed?”
“What’s GenMed?” Jerry can’t believe that I’ve never heard of GenMed. They’re only one of the top Fortune 500 companies, that’s all, he tells me. Have I seen what their stock has been doing lately, he wants to know.
I remember using his tone of incredulity myself. I was stunned to discover that a girl I was taking out on a date in college had never heard of Tolstoy. Never heard of Tolstoy, I lambasted the poor girl. Leo Tolstoy! Count Leo Tolstoy? GenMed was Jerry’s Tolstoy.
“So let’s say,” I say to Jerry while sweat is pouring down my face, “let’s say I do as you suggest and go with GenMed. What then? Do I have to have a complete physical for them, too?”
I’m positive that I can’t pass a complete physical. I can’t even pass water properly, not to mention a thorough physical exam.
“You do, yes,” Jerry tells me, “but it’s a lot more relaxed.”
“Relaxed,” I scream. “How so, Jerry?”
“You see,” says he, “with Fidelity, they have this list of doctors. You have to be checked out by a doctor who’s on their list, and these guys on their list have no flexibility. No sense of humor, if you know what I mean. With GenMed, on the other hand, we get to pick our own doctor. I know this great guy, Dr. Kolodny. Ever hear of him?”
“Kolodny?” I just can’t stop screaming. “No! What’s he, Hungarian or something?”
“He is, but that’s the least of his charms,” Jerry laughs. “The guy’s great. Very flexible. I use him all the time for cases like this. You see, with Kolodny you go in knowing ahead of time that he’s not going to find anything wrong with you. He does all the tests that they all do. He checks out your-blood pressure. He takes a blood sample and a urine sample. He attaches you to an electrocardiogram, but with Kolodny, you might as well be attached to a toaster oven for all the problems he’ll find. Know what I mean? If they hoisted Lenin out of his tomb in Red Square and shipped him to Kolodny for a physical, Lenin would pass with flying colors. It’s all very relaxed. You go in, you’re fine. Kolodny signs the forms. We send the forms to GenMed, along with your premium, and you’re back on cruise control. Covered from head to foot, psychiatric and organ transplant included. What do you say?”
“Can I think about it?” I scream.
“What’s there to think about?” Jerry wants to know.
He has me there. I suddenly can’t think of anything to think about.
So I agree.
“Great,” Jerry says. “I’ll have Janice make an appointment for you and we’ll get back to you. Or better yet, I’ll put you on hold and have Janice take care of it now. No sense in wasting time. Janice!” I hear him call his secretary and then I’m suddenly put on hold.
It was as if there were a vacuum in my head. Not just a vacuum in my mind, but a vacuum inside my head. As if there were no mind inside my head. A void. Nothing.
This wasn’t the first time that I’d been put on hold, but it was the first time that I’d sat there holding without having something to think about while on hold. I just couldn’t think of anything to think about. Or, more to the point, I seemed to have nothing with which to think.
I was canceled.
Canceled in a corporate way.
Everything was on hold. My thoughts. My plans. My memories. My breathing. I was holding my breath. There is no way of saying what I want to say without having it sound grandiose, so I might as well be grandiose and say it: My whole life seemed to be suddenly on hold.
I sat there, sweating and holding, and my sweat seemed to be pine-scented, as if my body had absorbed the sickening pine scent from those dangling dispensers in the cab and was now dispensing it on its own.
I had the earpiece of the telephone pressed so hard against my ear that the receiver, as if held there by a suction cup, could have stuck on its own without me holding on to it, but I held on. I was not connected to anyone, nor was I, strictly speaking, disconnected. I was on hold. I was on some whole new kind of hold. The telephone receiver I was holding and which, in turn, was holding me felt like a component of some elaborate life-support system to which I was connected. Circuits and cables and fiber optics extended from my office into offices and homes and dormitory rooms of everyone I had ever known. Into homes of people I was yet to know. I was on hold with Janice from Jerry’s office, but there was a growing dread that the next voice I heard would not necessarily be hers. It could be someone else. Anyone.
Some moment was upon me, whose nature and purpose I did not know, but it was mysterious and huge and approaching. Some moment containing something incontrovertible. Like the first moment or the last moment of conscious existence.
And this moment, or something within it, like the ghost of Hamlet’s father, would speak to me.
Until now, the danger of something real occurring, a thing I dreaded and avoided at all cost, had always been the danger of the real from without. The danger of something real happening to myself and my son, my friends, my father, my mother, my wife, the women I took to bed, anyone and everyone, but always someone on the outside. Now, however, it seemed that the danger of something real occurring was a danger from within.
It would speak to me from within myself. From a depth I never suspected I possessed. From some mind within my mind.
There was not a second to lose. If I heard that voice, my dread informed me, I would be lost. If I allowed the contact to be made with that thing deep within me, it would be a contact from which there would be no return.
In desperation and self-defense, I reached out for my New York Times and pulled it toward me. I opened it at random and started to read. I reread what I had already read, but that was fine. The spell, the stupor, if that’s what it was, was broken. My terror subsided. The empty ballast of my mind filled up with whatever fluids of information I needed to once again regain my equilibrium and lose contact with myself.
I lit a cigarette. I was no longer merely holding, I was smoking, I was reading the paper.
I turned the page.
In the Metro section of the Times, I found a little article I had somehow managed to miss the first time around. A teenage mother in the Bronx, carrying a baby in her arms. Both of them killed by stray bullets. Another case of random violence.
Freed to think again, I sat there at my desk, smoking and thinking about this strange new phenomenon of stray bullets and randomness.
More and more people were becoming random victims. Randomness was acquiring epidemic proportions. It was becoming a statistical category.
There was nothing in the article about the death of the teenage mother and her child to suggest any doubt that the cause of death was total randomness. For all I knew, there were now forensic experts who could examine the extracted bullets and scientifically prove that those bullets were genuine strays. Bullets without a motive.
Surely, I thought, if bullets can be included in this category, why not people. I myself, I thought, have probably played the role of a stray bullet and will probably play the role of a stray bullet again in somebody’s life. And they in mine. It seemed inevitable. The laws of probability were quite meticulous, but improbability obeyed no laws and was left to wander lawlessly through the world.
The telephone suddenly came to life. It was Janice from Jerry’s office. She mispronounced my name, as she always did. For some reason, she just couldn’t remember to include the “a” in Karoo and always called me Mr. Kroo.
“Mr. Kroo?”
“Yes, Janice.”
“Dr. Kolodny can see you next week. Is Tuesday all right with you?”
I told her that Tuesday was fine.
“How’s eleven fifteen for you?” she wanted to know.
Eleven fifteen was not just fine for me, it was perfect. It suggested a doctor who went through patients on an assembly-line basis. Complete physicals every fifteen minutes. This Kolodny, I thought, is my kind of guy.