The Fool Press
How To Live Forever
Copyright 2011 by Barry Burnett
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by The Fool Press
Smashwords
Edition
November 2011
Chapters 1-10 originally appeared as ‘Vol. 1’ in Smashwords,
February 2011
A modestly different eBook edition was first published in April 2011, and in print in November, 2011
The
Fool Press ISBN 978-0-9796043-1-1
The Fool Press
Hermosa Beach, California
thefoolpress@gmail.com
Printed in the United States of America
Dear Reader:
This is a work of fiction. The Boulder depicted is a blended Boulder of the two-odd decades I’ve lived here, an impression no more accurate than any dream. Names, characters, places and incidents are either products of this author’s imagination or used fictitiously – especially the characters, whose resemblance to anyone, living or dead, is entirely accidental. Hopefully, the advice they spout is sound, if sometimes contradictory, and should be weighed against one’s own experience, as any reader or patient must always do.
Additional Smashwords Copyright Note:
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
Also by Barry Burnett
Resonance
Thrilling
Romance
The Mortalist
Dr. Lucky and Other Stories
For these and more, please visit
howtoliveforever.com
How
To
Live
Forever
Chapter 1
Where There’s Smoke, There’s Ire
- or -
Intrapustular Fidelopenia
Head in hands, elbows on knees, David Black looked out between his fingers. Beyond them lay a warm evening in late spring – new leaves and new flowers, the sun behind the mountains, an infinitely deep blue sky. High within it, a single band of cloud glowed with a copper-colored radiance that traveled down between the low brick buildings, the telephone wires and the still-dark streetlights to burnish the concrete at his feet.
A good day, he thought, to die.
“Oh, come on...” said the executioner.
David squinted sideways, over his thumb. “Did I say that aloud?”
“Sit up, will you?” Ozvaldo Garcia, MBA, CPA – and, for one year and counting, AA – brushed pastry crumbs from a drum-tight suit vest and sighed. Then added, as the gleam from his titanium laptop’s screen bounced off his gold Rolex, “It’s only money.”
David appreciated the sentiment, sort of. About as much as the venue Oz had picked to deal the fatal blow.
His oldest friend – and now business consultant – had snagged a prime sidewalk table at the Triad, Boulder’s oldest, calmest Buddhist coffeehouse. It was the unofficial spiritual epicenter of a town that guarded itself against any kind of carnage, be it physical, emotional, or financial. Inside and out, the place was dense with self-medicated students, mutually therapeutic sets of midlife women, and philosophically if reluctantly aging men. Together, they generated a sort of metaphysical chitchat, a murmur set to the distant bonging of recorded temple bells and punctuated by the hiss of the espresso machine inside the open bank of windows just behind them. In other words, it was not the kind of place a thirty-two-year-old doctor would choose to lose it. No matter what, or who, he’d just lost.
David unfolded broad shoulders, raked his dark hair into a modicum of respectability, and rolled up the sleeves of his shirt, the fine faded denim softened by another long day at his office. Fear battled hope, a hopeless hope that fought on for a final few seconds before he throttled it and said, “Okay, I’m ready.”
“You sure? Really, really sure?”
“Oz...”
Oz cast a brief and supplicating glance up to that glowing cloud and swung his laptop around. The screen displayed a month-by-month spreadsheet, the dwindling earnings in black, the definitely not-dwindling losses in red.
“A solo family practice...” Oz began, full cheeks sagging in economic sorrow. “A thing of the past, and this is why.” He tapped a well-manicured finger on the screen. “No one to split the rent, no underpaid staff to hound the insurance companies, plus the breaks you give, the free care... You might be keeping your patients alive, but the practice is beyond resuscitation. Time to let it go, David: it’s dead.”
David’s eyes dropped from the hemorrhaging columns to the exsanguinating sums below them, following Oz’s finger to the biggest saddest spurter, the übertotal of his totaled medical career, on the far right.
“First Sheyoni,” David said softly, “now this.” Sheyoni who’d told him she was tired of being married, at a small round table just inside. Had she brought him here for the same reason, to be surrounded by the subdued and muffling crowd? Probably – like Oz, Sheyoni knew what was best for him. Or said she did, and he believed her. A clean break: no kids, no pain, no tears allowed.
“You let her have the house,” Oz said. “A lot of guys wouldn’t have done that.” A level look. “A lot of guys might have noticed it was their only asset.”
Perfect, David thought. Generous and stupid. But of course he’d signed it over; it was the right thing to do. As Sheyoni had pointed out, she had given their marriage a full four years – now she needed to fly free, needed it in her most genuine, core, neglected-but-finally-flowering self. Then she’d clasped his hands and reassured him, with that special kindness Oz somehow missed, that their persistently reduced lifestyle had nothing, absolutely nothing to do with her decision.
He gripped the sides of the razor-thin laptop in his large hands and, as the keyboard flexed and popped and Oz began to look a little nervous, stared at the numbers, hard. What had he done with her gift of years? Heedlessly buried himself in taking care of patients – patients who were, when it all came down to dust, only strangers. Heedlessly trusted that if he simply did the right thing, his and Sheyoni’s life would work out fine. Heedlessly, completely, utterly, failed.
Oz might act like his practice was just another tanking business, but it was all he had left. Since Sheyoni’s announcement it had come to stand for everything – his life, his hopes, his otherwise broken dreams. They said you couldn’t feel the axman’s blade when it hit your neck, but this hurt.
Three miles to the south, where the highway from Denver crests a grassy rise and the wide valley that corrals Boulder is first visible, Junie Blanche spotted a reflective green sign for a lookout point. Still not quite one-hundred-percent ready to commit to her new home, she pulled her venerable Pontiac convertible into the exit lane and stepped on its stuttering brakes, barely stopping before the front tires rolled over the far edge of the parking strip. Unwinding her fingers from the steering wheel she’d gripped for the last fifteen hundred miles, Junie ran them through the cocoa channels between the tiny pigtails that bobbed around her head, then cranked the tattered top open and considered the lake of lights below her.
A new start, she thought, and as new starts go, completely new starts, this landscape easily fit the bill. The cliffs that rose toward the broken spine of the Divide, the indigo sky that framed one side-lit copper band of cloud – all of it as beautiful as the glossy brochure the University of Colorado had sent her. As beautiful as she’d expected, but also unexpectedly unsettling.
Junie found herself longing for the pancake landscape, flat and urban, she’d spent the better part of an academic year scraping Mississippi River mud from – a landscape she’d abandoned the instant she received the University’s offer of a graduate placement and a functioning, mud-free lab. A ruthless choice, her mother said, a comment Junie’s watching younger siblings did not have to echo. But her mom had made plenty of ruthless choices – evicting a faithless husband and whipping five too-smart but too-poor children through New Orleans’s struggling public schools – and Junie’s family was now safe and dry, folded in the embrace of countless cousins in the city’s Seventh Ward. And as her professor had known when he sent out his pleas to save a favorite student, Tulane’s former molecular biology lab wasn’t going to rise up from those saturated ashes soon.
Colorado’s offer had been one of those post-Katrina gestures that really could change a life, at least for this impoverished near-PhD. A lifeline, and maybe a lifeline she’d been reaching for all along, a chance to fly free into an unfamiliar world. She’d read the letter, looked at the brochure’s deceptively welcoming peaks, packed her bags and hardly looked back. Or wanted to, until this minute. Now, all she could do was put her chin on the steering wheel and watch the strange Western scene blur and blend, the first bright stars above and the mercury-vapor lights sparking on below, all softening to something as soft-edged as a Delta memory, distorted by the melting pools – Could those be tears, the first since her faithless father walked the walk? – that swelled and threatened to overflow each latticework of lashes before she could bring herself to wipe those tears – Yes, tears – away.
After David’s bout of self-loathing had subsided, he registered the rainbow-hued distortions from his iron grip on Oz’s computer screen and gingerly eased it closed.
“Maybe...” he began, “Someone else could make it work.”
“Someone else?” Oz’s eyebrows went up.
“Another doctor,” David said, ignoring that skeptical look. “Someone with different... priorities. Someone who could, you know, bend things here and there.”
“Bend things?” The eyebrows went up further, heading towards Oz’s almost convincing comb-over.
“Sure,” David tried. He’d thought bending things was Oz’s specialty. “I mean, the patients are great—”
“When they pay their bills—”
“And the inventory,” David tried again. “The vaccine stock, for instance. That could be worth, well, thousands, right? If I found the right doctor, someone with some business sense—”
“The kind you’ve never listened to?”
David stopped and glared. “Anyway...”
“Yes?” A beatific smile lit Oz’s face.
He took an even breath. “Well, I thought I could sell it, and...”
David hadn’t been completely blind; he had a back-up plan, or kind of. Face burning, he took a folded printout – a listing for a small but ocean-going sailboat – from his pocket. An errant gust rattled the spindly sidewalk tree in front of them, and David felt a sudden chill. Oz plucked the paper from his fingers and read the details below the photo, then shook his head and pointed to the numbers on the screen.
“Even a crummy one?” David asked. “I could stay close to shore.”
Oz shook his head again. “Remember what you said last week, when you weren’t telling me how everything would turn out fine? How in the worst case, however unlikely, your patients had to have a two-month warning? I’d like to make it easier on you, but things didn’t work out fine, the worse case wasn’t unlikely, and it’ll take every penny from those vaccines – which I’ve already figured in, by the way – to buy that time.”
David looked down to the espresso that sat cold and forlorn in front of him. So much for a clean getaway. Raising the tiny cup to dry lips, he drained it, but the bitterness brought no relief.
“I never expected more than a living wage,” he said, “but everybody, Sheyoni more than anyone, acted like we could have anything. Even you, telling me I’d gotten a license to steal.”
“You did get one.”
“It’s not all about money, Oz.”
Oz snapped the computer shut and drummed his fingers on the top. “Really.”
David didn’t like it, but Oz was right. “It’s almost funny... a doctor who isn’t worth a secondhand sailboat.”
“A family doctor,” Oz said. “A doctor who spends too much time with patients.”
“I didn’t hear you complain.”
Oz shrugged. “Too busy squealing from that rectal. But I would have, if you’d showed me your books sooner. You’re inefficient; you can’t help yourself, whether your patients pay or not. And that – plus those exams, big guy – is why we love you.”
“Some people think a good doc should be broke, or nearly,” Oz added. “Not only you family practice types, but all of them.” He scratched reflectively at his beard, a close-trimmed carpet above a starched collar. “If healing’s a religion – the white coats, the secret Latin words and all of it – maybe you’re supposed to offer it up.” Oz pulled a cigarette from the open pack in his monogrammed shirt pocket, then paused, catching David’s look.
“What I’m supposed to do,” David said, “is convince you not to do that.”
“See? Like I was saying: you can’t help helping.” Twisting onto one buttock, Oz rummaged for his lighter.
“I wouldn’t be doing my job if I didn’t, as your friend or as your doctor. Health starts with stopping those.” David was warming to the task, to any task that would take his mind off his disasters, recent or impending. “The cholesterol meds, the blood pressure, those extra fifty pounds? None of it comes close.”
“I can skip it all? Great!”
“No, of course not: life is short, too short... make it longer any way you can. Cigarettes kill more than half of smokers; smoking outweighs everything.”
“Excuse me,” Oz said, cradling the heavy gold lighter in his palm. “Didn’t you say that about the drinking?”
“That was then – this is you killing yourself now.” He’d found Oz lying at the bottom of his wine cellar steps, drooling sweet nothings into the empty mouth of a Mouton-Rothschild ’45. David had cleaned him up and pointed him towards rehab, but maybe he should have hammered Oz on every one of his bad habits. He could have pushed Oz harder, but no, that wasn’t his style. Oz had him nailed: he was a helper, filling other people’s needs, and look where that had gotten him... broke and divorced. On the other hand, between David’s light touch and Oz’s chagrin at siphoning the cornerstone of his investment-grade wine portfolio, Oz had quit drinking. Not only that, but he’d yet to light that cigarette, and almost looked like he was ready to listen.
And so, as a thoroughly sober Oz glanced at his watch but gave up center stage with an unusual degree of equanimity, David kept on delivering the message. Doing the right thing, the helping thing, pushing along the information, not too hard but lots of it. Starting with everybody’s greatest mortal risk, heart disease, which most people didn’t realize was more than doubled by smoking, not to mention...
Junie’s eyes had dried and the night had grown darker – those far peaks etched with a fine gold line that made them even sharper – by the time another vehicle crunched to a stop on the gravel beside her. The rumbling engine died, leaving a ticking silence, the rare car rushing along the unseen highway, and a rusted red pickup, huge and flecked with mud, that was almost as low-rent and sketchy as her ride. Without moving her head, she counted two unshaven males. They were white, of course, white and gaping at the same falling night and complex topography spread out in front of their parking space.
Then the nearest slowly turned, with a lopsided grin, and leered down at her. Worse, that looming leer was completely unimpeded, with nothing more than her convertible’s raised windows and the rapidly cooling night air to separate her bare mahogany shoulders from whatever they did to strangers, strangers of color, in this vertiginous Western place.
Carefully, but casually, Junie put the car in reverse, and managing to only spin her nearly treadless wheels a little, slumped down so as not to present too clear a target during her anxious exit.
Wayne and Jeremiah turned to watch her go, watched the fishtail swerve before she hit the on-ramp’s pavement and the sudden acceleration after. As Wayne’s hand clasped Jeremiah’s, rough warm palm to rough warm palm, both sympathized with that rapidly receding driver, feeling the same bright eagerness to get on with their new lives – to love in a Western city that accepted all lovers, or so they’d heard, and even had cool black people who drove interesting cars.
Oz listened as David waded on to the perils of emphysema, doing his best to look like he was paying attention. The oxygen, the drowning phlegm... Whatever. Oz would quit the instant he was ready, something he’d been sure of since his first sweet pre-teen inhalation two decades ago – so sure that it was beneath his dignity to try. But he knew David was finding solace in the meddling that was medical care, and that David needed solace now.
For another moment, perhaps two. Then he had to bring him back on point. Because Oz had big plans for David, and this evening’s event, or something very much like it, had been headed David’s way for decades, ever since Oz’s boyhood pal decided that doing the Right Thing would be his guiding light. Not the Smart Thing; not the thing you really wanted to do but were only calling the Right Thing; but the single course of action that would both satisfy all ethical criteria and please absolutely everyone, alive or dead – an impossible presumption that David, nonetheless, had often managed to pull off.
Throughout their shared adolescence, Oz had tried to demonstrate that David’s approach might be too simple, that bad could be good and often truly excellent. But all his attempts, from the school-lunch Ponzi schemes to the after-hours liberation of a certain church’s sacramental wine, hadn’t make a mark. Behind David’s beneficence, defeating Oz’s efforts, lay the pernicious moral influence of David’s parents.
Oz had known them well; in fact he’d loved them, if only for living next door. Their kindly presence – a white-haired Unitarian pastor married to a junior college professor – had proved a useful counterpoint to his own father, who’d been unfortunately inclined to limber up his belt for anything less than an A-minus. While David’s A’s came easy, and his choices easier: always the Right Thing. Too easily, Oz thought. Maybe David had needed Oz’s father as much as Oz had needed David’s.
Then, as Oz labored and David floated through college, that vague humanitarian dad had died – an early stroke from his nonjudgmental Lord, a classic Western sun-filled funeral, and David’s mother collecting cash donations for their church’s African orphanage where she planned to teach English, soon. Oz’s gruff paterfamilias had taken David aside, telling him he needed to be practical, now more than ever, practical despite the tears. After David made it into medical school, Oz’s father thought David had heard him, but Oz knew David hadn’t. Medicine, primary care, an absurdly small and self-sacrificing practice: his friend might have been working hard but he was still cruising on moral autopilot. The Right Thing, no questions asked.
And now, finally, a chance for his friend to grow up. David’s fall from his unthinking, impractical grace had taken this particular alignment of ill-favored stars: Sheyoni finally serving a purpose by softening him up, and then, right on cue, a set of wickedly bad spreadsheet numbers.
Could, Oz asked himself, he have pulled this evening’s financial punch? He’d been disgustingly soft-headed enough to try, but even with the mitigating influence of this meeting’s venue (civilized, if a mite too Boulderesque), the surprisingly well-crafted coffee (an oxymoronic decaf espresso for David vs. a triple-hit caramel-vanilla latte for yours truly), and his careful selection of two organic (but all butter) scones, the boy was going down hard.
David was headed for a triumphant rollout of truly horrible lung cancer factoids when Oz, whose eyelids seemed to be inexplicably losing a fight with gravity, flicked the tooled molybdenum wheel of his lighter, dragged in the gold-blue tip of flame, and said, “Stop, already – I’ve heard the lecture. Maybe I don’t want to live forever.”
“But I want you to.”
“Why?” Oz asked, exhaling a cloud of smoke. “So you can keep torturing me?
“Um... yes,” David answered. For every dirtball Oz had tossed over the fence between their backyards, and especially for talking David into stealing the Unitarians’ Judeo-Christian kosher wine, a pseudo-sin that still brought a wincing cringe. “Definitely yes.”
“Cute.” Oz polished off David’s scone, then looked up. “What about your other patients? Do you want them all to live forever?”
“Sure I do. As forever as they can.” David’s knee was jostled by one of the pedestrians streaming by on the sidewalk.
“Do you tell them that? That forever is what you’re aiming for?” A certain calculating light was illuminating Oz’s features, a light David had long since learned to be wary of.
“Of course not.” He tucked his offending legs closer in. “It would sound... it wouldn’t be right.”
“Why not?” Oz leaned forward. “More hope than they can stand? Think they can’t handle it?”
David studied him. “Is this to take my mind off your smoking?” Oz’s personal campfire, the pale white column twisting upwards, lost between the streetlight and the now-dark sky. David almost wanted one himself.
“Just answer the question.”
“Then no, I don’t think they can’t... I mean, I think they can handle it,” David said. “Hope’s a good thing; most studies of the dying show that. Believing in your future might make you live longer – long enough to see that future. Unless it’s false hope, which is, well, false.”
“Never mind that. You never know for sure, do you?”
“Yeah... I guess.”
“That’s it – guesswork. Doing the best you can. That and what you said, the power of belief. Positive belief – like positive thinking. That’s good, right there. And if you believe... Can you let yourself believe, David?”
“Believe in what?” David asked, cautiously.
“Believe in their belief, the chance to be well, to try to live forever. Help them believe it, keep them believing in it – which, like you said, keeps them ticking.”
“Wait a second.” David sat up straight. “I didn’t say that, not exactly.”
Oz’s eyes moved to the perforated metal tabletop, crowded with empty cups and plates and David’s printout. “Most of all...” he began, as one immaculate cuff eased towards the color-saturated paper, “...you should believe in... this!” Oz thrust the image out, a white bow breaking azure waves.
David pushed back, tilting his chair. “Would you stop? The boat was just an idea, a bad idea. What I really want... what I really want is...” The front legs of his chair wavered above the concrete.
“The boat, David. You showed me the boat – you came up with it. Something you want, which is good. Something fun, something for you.”
“What about the numbers?” David said, chair slamming down. “The ones that never lie.”
“You already said it, about my drinking: ‘That was then.’ This is now; we’re moving on to the future, the very near future.”
“I could never earn—”
“Never say never, David. Leave that to your business manager.”
“I don’t have a—”
“Your new business manager.” Oz spread his arms, the printout dangling from one hand, while the other – the hand so nonchalantly holding the cigarette – hovered dangerously close to the frizzy gray ponytail of the eternohippie at the adjacent table.
“No,” David said. “No, no, no. Even if I could support myself, I can’t pay for you. I only asked you to look at the books.” The owner of the ponytail waved the smoke away with a dismissive flap of an age-spotted hand, another weary vote in the struggle between the various camps who claimed the outdoor tables, between the nicotine-addicted, the self-styled boulevardiers, and those who only wished to sit beneath the dome of sky.
“Relax,” Oz said, holding the pose. “I’ll work for a percentage.” He peered at David’s open collar; David tried to close it over the orange prayer string Sheyoni liked him to wear, but too late. Oz cocked an eyebrow. “You’re already an alterna-guy; make it an alterna-clinic. An alterna-longevity-clinic.”
Tiny yellow sparks began to climb the gray hairs beside the cigarette’s burning tip as Oz, oblivious, added, “Build it up – really build it up, and—”
David grabbed Oz’s wrist, hauled it back, and the mini-flames self-extinguished. “You know I’m into all of that, from Ayurveda to the Zone. But another clinic, here in Boulder?”
“They’re no competition – patients trust you. You care enough to lose money; a doctor with a difference.”
Oz tugged to free his arm but David didn’t notice. He was strong for no good reason, just built that way, tall and strong. And frowning, as he thought, What if I did?
“David...” Oz crooned, still pulling, “Let go...” At the next table, the ponytail’s companion was informing the aging hipster of his hair’s near-death experience. Oz tugged again, harder, saying, “Come on, David – if you don’t want to change, you don’t have to.”
Could I change? David wondered. Be more than a helper, always doing what was needed, and actually do what I want? He looked down, focused on Oz’s cigarette, and thought: Why not? Then snatched it from between two pudgy fingers and – for once without a thought to who saw him – inhaled deeply.
Oz looked surprised, but no more than the ponytail, who’d turned to find David sucking on the smoking gun.
David’s eyes grew wide as he registered who it was – a patient, Don Gilmore. At which point the smoke hit, or maybe the last traces of that burning hair, and he doubled over coughing.
Oz, rubbing his wrist, took in the situation and leapt to damage control, explaining how David was... grief-stricken – That was it! – grief-stricken and out of control, his wife having just been diagnosed – Oh, this was good – with the worst of rare diseases. Keeping his voice down, he leaned back toward the singed victim, confidential. “Intra-something,” he said, then hesitated. Did Sheyoni deserve it? Actually, Oz decided, she did.
“...Intrapustular...” he elaborated, and with another flash of inspiration, “...Intrapustular Fidelopenia.” An instant neologism that rather neatly wrapped it up, and David was thankfully coughing too loud to overhear.
Oz’s inspiration was a series of rumors that had been only rumors, at least until a coarse aside from a business client, a prominent local guru-slash-Lothario who’d boasted of privately instructing Sheyoni in his special high-contact partner-meditation technique – Kuntolingua, Oz seemed to recall, or something even ruder. In any case, Oz had made an executive decision to hold off on telling David, and now that Sheyoni had made her move, it looked like he wouldn’t have to.
Fidelity, then, melded to penia, another rude-sounding term that actually meant, if Oz remembered his prep school Latin, ‘extreme deficiency of.'
He went on to add the disgusting but entertaining details necessary to flesh out any mortal illness – suppurating fistulas, that sort of thing – and finished with a searching, commiserating stare. As expected, the ponytail’s outrage had been replaced by the simple desire to believe. It was a quality that, since Oz had first talked anyone into anything – Had it been David? Sneaking into church that night? – he’d grown deeply fond of in others. After the last polish, Oz lowered his head in silence, feeling particularly proud.
Meanwhile, the pedestrians kept streaming – one of them being Sheyoni, naturally, in radiant health as always. David saw her coming and hunched down further, peeking through the upstream tables at knee-level. She wore bright white running shoes fresh from their recycled-fiber box, a filmy nylon trekking shirt that had never seen a trek, and stretch biking shorts that hadn’t cycled a bike, stationary or not. Those shining Lycra-compressed curves, the sculptured columns of her legs... even now, he couldn’t tear his fool eyes off her.
Luckily, she turned to cross Pearl Street, missing him completely.
But Sheyoni hadn’t; she couldn’t miss him in a crowd, even bent away and avoiding her. Part her guilt, she knew, part his pure physical presence, and part a fondness, residual but undeniable, for the big idiot. Why hadn’t it worked? After all, they were both beautiful enough, the kind of healthy New Age couple that everyone envied, turning their heads to follow her – and him, of course, her thirty-something doctor-cum-accessory.
She pretended not to see David, which was completely painless and got her out of another difficult conversation with her soon-to-be ex-husband. Sheyoni found that pretending nearly always worked, though her last spiritual advisor, a mature and amazingly virile yogi who’d instructed her in the deepest possible Kundalini energy release, had told her it was emotionally corrosive, and she always trusted her advisors. In fact, she had vowed on the spot – kneeling naked on the hand-woven rug inside his candlelit shtupa – that she would never pretend anything again, with the possible exception of orgasms that didn’t specifically involve him. And she would stop pretending, Sheyoni decided, as she tossed her white-blond mane to screen out the last turning glimpse of David. Genuine, absolute honesty, starting... tomorrow.
The street was empty, blocked off for tomorrow’s art fair, vendors setting up their carts and tents. Between them stood a pair of shaggy permanent campers, down from the mountains for a day of variable musicianship and begging, who’d just spotted an apparently abandoned aluminum keg that sat on the yellow line bisecting the open asphalt.
Sheyoni hesitated on the curb, planning her way around them. She felt a certain heat behind her, a faint pressure gathering just above her root charka – her favorite chakra, the source of sexual energy at the base of her spine. It had to be David, watching her. It was a warmth not all that different from the campers’ attention, two foreign but predictable stares that were a constant part of the world that swirled around her.
David, those two campers, even her talented ex-guru... men. They didn’t know how hard it was – none of them, her mother always said, knew the work it took to keep them happy. All they wanted was what she offered them, never looking deeper, never looking for the deep true self that had to be down there somewhere. Or was it? Beneath the beauty, beneath the poise, beneath the work – was there something deep and true and down there, something deeper than the reverberating brass bell her former Kundaliner had bonged so thoroughly and well? Sheyoni frowned as she stood in the open street, a frown that could not be seen by David, and was furthermore unnoticed by the campers as they perused points south and souther.
Perfectly balanced, perfectly frozen in mid-stride on the balls of two perfect feet, the pristine white rubber tread of each shoe barely caressing the grit of the cement sidewalk and stone curb beneath, Sheyoni felt the cool evening air between her fingers, the heat of David’s glance and the heat of the rest of the swirling world and decided that, for the moment, the answer to that deep down question did not matter, no more than pretending or promises or whatever it had taken to get her to this radiantly poised but about-to-move-forward moment. And then she did move forward, stepping off the curb and onto the asphalt, pretending David wasn’t staring and those two crude gentlemen weren’t either, picking up speed and breezing straight between them, their backpedaling forms signaling the vendor who was setting up a vegan soymeat corn-dog stand to collect his undefended keg of organic brew. Sheyoni didn’t notice; she was headed away from her old life and towards her new one, a life in which the brand new non-man friend who ran the Womyn’s Bookstore around the corner was waiting.
David watched her cross the street, let go a final wheeze and ground the cigarette stub into the concrete between his feet, saving Oz and all the passive victims near and far.
Who, he asked himself, was he kidding? He’d never been a smoker, or a sailor or anything more adventurous than a kid who wanted to do the right thing, something rarely adventurous at all.
He peeked up at Don Gilmore, to find him gazing back with a goopy sympathy he knew he’d have to deal with later. David tried an innocent smile, and Don seemed to buy it. Patients, David thought. The truth was, he liked helping them, liked knowing their lives and making a difference, liked it because he liked them. The way Sheyoni said she still liked him – liked him – and probably a lot more.
He’d had it with boats and fantasies; of course he couldn’t change his life – that was for people like Sheyoni, or Oz with all his plans. Change, of course, was happily including him in its proceedings, but for now he managed to forget that, forget her and his practice and the bills he couldn’t pay, by concentrating on one more small right thing, in this case pinching up the cooling ashes and dutifully smudging the rest away, erasing the evidence of his transgression with a natural latex sole. While somewhere in the Magic 8-Ball depths of David’s really rather blocky head, a certain question still shimmered, in letters so faint and submerged that he was currently unaware of them – but a question that could still be read, by any fictionally interested visitor who might descend into that murky realm of cognition and possibility:
What if I did?
Chapter 2
Sheyoni’s Revenge
- or -
Semiholistic Continuosis
Early the next morning, a warm Saturday sun shone over the low hills and low roofs of the neighborhood due east of the hospital, blinding David as he walked up to the depression-era duplex that housed his office. Passing into shadow, he stumbled on the wheelchair ramp he’d hammered together for his patients, managing to recover, amazingly unsplintered, by the time he swung the front door open. Its brass bell brightly announced his entrance, and the office’s only employee – other than himself – looked up with an equally bright smile.
After the nanosecond pause it took Sheyoni to process who she was smiling at, the bright smile froze, as did the flawless face around it. Following a longer and noticeably darker interval, she asked, in a painfully even voice, “Why did he say he’s sorry?”
That look, he thought. The same as when they closed up yesterday, grilling him to make sure he’d mailed the final papers.
“Who?” David asked, voice dangerously close to cracking. The concept of the friendly divorce was seeming less viable every... well, every nanosecond.
“Don Gilmore – while I was doing his vitals. In room one.”
Gilmore. Here. And whatever story Oz had spun while David coughed and choked. “I... um...”
“You told him.”
“No – I wouldn’t. I promised. Closest friends only, right? You called Aspen and told Sharon. So I got to tell Oz.”
“Oz. Fantastic. Maybe he told him.”
Sometimes, David decided, it’s best to shrug and move on down the hallway. Even if the glare that follows you chars two small holes in the back of your second-favorite denim shirt.
Sheyoni squinted after him, then went about her business – at first still wondering, but soon planning the freedoms of her new life: a new job, new friends, a studio for the art project that, she was confident, would bubble up into her receptive consciousness soon. This morning’s schedule was almost as empty as the waiting room; she rolled her chair back from the Formica counter, slipped out of her hand stitched green felt vegan flats, lay her hands in her lap and closed her eyes. Emptiness was exactly what she was after, and – no matter what a snarky blowhard like Oz might think – emptiness was not easy to achieve.
There... Waiting... Waiting... Nope. Nothing, but she knew something would come in time. She let her lashes slowly part and gazed, untroubled, at the random collection of patient charts scattered across the work area. It would come, just as the impulse to file those charts would arrive at its own sweet speed. A project that would be... rewarding. Something... creative. And more than that: something... moldable. After all, she’d always planned to be a sculptor. Her small but capable hands flexed, fingers digging into air. Like clay... like the clay she would have learned to master, if her art professor – all those private evening tutorials! – hadn’t had something else in mind. Like clay, but warmer: like flesh, and this time it wasn’t going to be hers.
Hers... Nancy, her new friend at the Womyn’s Bookstore, was also a masseuse. Flesh, like clay. Sheyoni’s hands grew even warmer. She pursed her lips, now entirely thawed, closed her eyes again and, this time, opened every sensory pathway to her brain, from her deliciously unsheathed toes, ascending to the root chakra that her previous guru (or perhaps the one before) had liked to call her Magic Zone, to climb up every perfectly-aligned vertebrae of her spine. And then back down once more, pausing here and there to feel for the slightest tingle. Nothing, again. As expected, really: Nancy, and the rest of her and Nancy’s half of the human genome, wasn’t Sheyoni’s thing at all. Anyway, she was going to be the sculptor now.
And it was going to be a human art project, definitely. She pursed her lips, generously allowing the extra few seconds of deep thought that a project this significant deserved. A type of project, she realized, that wasn’t entirely new. She’d molded herself into this job, for instance, dressed up and lived her art every day. And tried to mold David, but David was David, stubborn with ideals that sounded good but turned out dreary – just look at this place! That lumpy couch was ancient when they’d bought it, and while none of David’s patients had actually gotten stuck in the corduroy depths of the brokeback recliner, plenty had come close. Ditto the rest of the former living room, the shag carpeting that smelled like spilled formula, and especially the plywood reception desk, which she certainly wasn’t going to repaint, not before she escaped this sad beige hole.
A few more months, she’d promised him, a few more months in exchange for the house. While she waited for that new project to materialize. Someone like David, only more... rewarding.
Oh, well. Perhaps a distraction – perhaps Sharon, a quick call to dish the dirt on Aspen. Where there was lots to dig, beneath the last melting patch of snow, beneath the last emerging lawn of that mountain town’s late spring. And with the dirt, came secrets, connections, even introductions. Perhaps, if Sharon had already taken care of Sharon, she’d gone on to dig up a warm, moldable, rewarding male project for Sheyoni as well. With a smile that was measurably less bright but this time natural, she slipped her perfect feet back into her luscious vegan shoes and tapped out Sharon’s number.
David stood in his office-consultation room, door securely closed. Hearing only silence, and then the muffled conversation of a phone call – Sheyoni, back at work. If not forgiven, he was at least temporarily forgotten. And still had five minutes on his ticking wall clock, five minutes before Don’s slot on the schedule, five minutes before he had to brace Sheyoni and the outer-office world again. Over on his crowded desk, a email icon flashed on the screen of a scratched white plastic iBook, but he chose to pay no attention, preferring to ruminate instead.
A holistic clinic... unbelievable.
Not only that the idea had come from Oz, whose health obsessions began and ended with the health-care marketplace (where holistic medicine’s slice came out to a nice, round Ozzy-ish hundred billion dollars), but that he, David, had allowed it to raise his pulse.
What if I did, indeed.
Though it actually was interesting – just not what he was trained to do. Like administer antibiotics for pneumonia and insulin for diabetes and all the other professionally-approved, agreed-upon, standard medical treatments, the ones that patients needed to struggle though their standard, deserved, agreed-upon four-score-and-maybe-even-ten. His job might not be too creative – after all, a doctor couldn’t pick which drug to give on a whim – but it was, perhaps more than any other occupation, the right thing to do. And even if he was sort of interested (in fact, a whole lot interested) in all that not-agreed-upon and not-exactly-necessary and unfortunately-unproven holistic stuff, he’d always regarded his interest as more a hobby. Not something that patients, who didn’t really need it, should be asked to pay for.
The icon was still flashing. With a sigh, David clicked the cursor and watched a single message slowly download. It was, surprise, from Oz, who had attached that final spreadsheet. Assuming a decent price for the vaccines and absolutely no new expenses, David could have the months his patients needed to find new doctors. Two months, Oz wrote, and that was it.
Great.
He printed it out, stared again at that red-ink row of losses, and stood for a moment with his forehead pressed against the cool painted plaster of the duplex’s former bedroom. The med-school loans, the rent, his patients who’d lost their insurance and their jobs...
He’d already started weekend hours. Today, for instance, but there had only been a couple of filled spaces on the otherwise unmarred schedule in front of Sheyoni. Short of dressing up like a generic doctor – his long white coat from med school and a stethoscope around his neck – and waving a sign out on the curb, there wasn’t much else he could do.
Oz might have been off base about the holistic thing, but he was never wrong with numbers. Two months, and then David would grant his practice what it really needed. The same as we all needed at the end: a death with quiet dignity, the ultimate Right Thing.
Cracking the door, he peeked down the carpeted hallway. Sheyoni was still chatting comfortably with a patient on the phone – she had that personal touch with them, as though each was a close, close friend. She’d really tried, he had to give her that. She’d turned herself into the perfect partner in his practice – an equal partner, working beside him, the perfect receptionist and perfect nurse, the last of which she had no training for but seemed to like the sound of. He should have told her that was nuts, that she didn’t need to fake it, that she’d been an artist and could be one again. He should, in fact, have pushed her out of his little medical world, pushed her onto her own path. But he knew that wouldn’t have worked, that she would have had to push herself. And now, unfortunately, she had. The thought of losing her... the weight of grief began to fill his heart again, grief and loss and failure.
Enough. The coast was clear. Hugging the wall down to the open door of exam room one, he grabbed Don’s chart and slipped quietly in.
Don had been musing about Sheyoni, too, musing as he bent forward over the vinyl-cushioned edge of the exam table, reached toward his dangling left foot and drew up a baggy, soft-knit, earth-toned pant leg. The scene outside the coffeehouse had been strange, more than strange: his own doctor, smoking – tobacco! – and probably intoxicated, so distressed and distracted he’d accidentally burnt a divot in Don’s prize ponytail. But Don could understand – Sheyoni Black had Intrapustular Fidelopenia!
Wow.
The name itself sent a chill down his spine, further shrinking the neglected chakras that even a successful New-Age businessman like himself couldn’t really attend to. The literal meaning of her diagnosis might be professionally opaque, but it was fully double-barreled, each Latinate syllable so threatening, so impressive, so deeply intriguing to a concerned and sensitive soul like himself. Even worse – as his doctor’s colleague had kindly explained – her hidden disease would inevitably progress to eruptive IFP, the pustules first erupting through the surface of the delicate dermatologic regions that were most shielded from the sun, and then, in a fatal but mercifully brief course, absolutely everywhere.
And she looked so vibrant. So very, very, very alive.
Still clutching the bunched fabric in his fingers, he crossed his exposed leg over his other knee and looked down at the sagging muscles and sharp-edged shin of a fifty-nine-year-old calf. His doctor was a mess, but if it were him, would he be doing any better? Don liked to think so, though he knew his three ex-spouses – whose indisputable health was only surpassed by their vindictiveness – would not have agreed. And maybe they would have been correct. Any illness was frightening, and the older he got, the scarier each one became.
Deep in thought, Don examined every bump and wrinkle on his fragile dermis. To think that right now – right now! – the same pustules could be down there, growing...
David paused just inside the exam room door. Whatever imaginary illness Don Gilmore was obsessing over now, he was clearly too absorbed to have heard David enter. Which was fine, in fact a whole lot better than fielding questions about last night. He watched Don until his relief turned to boredom, then quietly cleared his throat; Don almost helicoptered off the table, whirling to face him and as he tried to whip a knit pant leg down.
David hardly blinked, just smiled benignly and pretended to review the chart. His hypochondriacal patient was way too tightly wound – the founder of a hemp clothing company that had grown way too big, and long given to wearing only his product, trying to look way relaxed when he way wasn’t. All while worrying about his health until he was too worried to do anything to improve it – like work on his blood pressure, a problem that was both the best evidence of Don’s approach to life (hypertension in every meaning of the word) and the thing most likely to end it.
Deciding that the best tactic was to completely ignore last evening, David held up the chart so Don could read it, and pointed to the blood pressure reading Sheyoni had penciled in.
“The top number’s lower,” Don offered.
“It’s definitely down, and that’s good. Less pressure surge, less blowouts. But the bottom number’s higher, and that’s the rest between the beats, when your arteries are supposed to take it easy. If they can’t, they just get tighter, narrower, stiffer.”
Don looked unhappy, and David glanced at the note from the previous visit. “There’s still the diuretic.”
His patient shook his head. “I said it last time – all drugs are poisons.”
“And you’re right... sort of. Most meds work by messing something up – in this case, how well your kidneys hold on to salt. But that’s so something else, in fact almost everything else, can work better.”
“The body is a perfect mechanism,” Don pronounced, tugging his pant leg further down to completely hide a mottled calf.
“Okay,” David said, trying not to remember the formaldehyde-reeking cadavers of med school, splayed wide beneath gloved hands. Then he did remember every blessedly healthy body, every sports physical and well child check, he’d examined since. “No argument there. But only... only in its native state.”
“Native. Exactly. As in, natural – perfectly natural.”
“The thing is,” David said, exasperation creeping in, “there’s a totally unnatural amount of salt in our diet. If you took a diuretic, it would force – I know how that sounds, but I’m just being honest – your kidneys to wash the salt out. You want to call that a poison? Fine. But it’s a poison to counteract a poisonous world, a poison to keep your arteries happy.”
Don sat, unpersuaded. At least he hadn’t mentioned last night... yet. With that small blessing, David moved on to the exam – listened to Don’s lungs and heart and looked in the back of his eyes, focusing his ophthalmoscope down to the ruby threads of blood flowing through the nearly-transparent arteries traversing each retina, happy to see no hypertensive damage... yet.
Don had seemed extra-nervous about the skin of his left calf, so David checked it extra-closely. And it was fine, just the usual age changes, though he probably shouldn’t have muttered that most of the spots were ‘senile keratoses’, a diagnosis that was accurate but unpleasant, popping Don’s eyes until he talked him down.
After that, he put his tools away and, fighting the slogging sense that he’d never overcome Don’s medical inertia, began to go over everything they’d covered last visit.
First, as always, was exercise, and Don said he’d started running again – six miles a week! Unfortunately, because he needed to travel (hemp being very big all over), he’d had to compress the whole week’s miles to one mini-marathon morning. Don told him how he’d run as fast as in his track-star twenties – but only for the first half-mile, and then his knees hurt so much he had to quit. But the swelling was down and he was going to try again... when he got back from his next trip or, he promised, as soon after that as humanly possible.
Right, David thought, and segued to diet, namely salt avoidance. The less Don took in, the less he’d have to flush out with a diuretic. Don said he was totally on top of that. On top of it, that was, at home – he was a committed, a totally committed vegetarian, and on the road it was all salty cheese and hotel salad dressing, and even a vegetarian had to eat.
Which left meditation, and while Don said he really, really appreciated David’s recommendation that he try it, a friend said if he didn’t perform the proper, straight-backed Buddhist posture for at least an hour twice daily, plus breath preparation and a nice stretch afterwards, he’d be wasting the time he didn’t have enough of anyway.
David sat on the stool beside the exam room’s tiny desk. He considered banging his head on the hardrock maple top but knew that really wasn’t professional, not banging his, or banging Don’s. Instead, he drummed his fingers on the chart and kept his expression blank. Getting someone to change, to really change, was so much tougher than prescribing a new pill. Just talking – teaching, even persuading – was rarely enough for that kind of heavy lifting. More was needed... something more intensive, maybe. He wasn’t sure; something... more.
But David, as usual, had given it a shot, throwing together all the lifestyle changes he could think of, in the hope that they would add up to an intervention large enough to drop his patient’s pressure. And they could, if Don would only do them... plus make him feel at least half as relaxed as his clothing looked.
The University had been remarkably generous, putting Junie up – for a single night – in a century-old red-brick pile of a ‘downtown’ hotel. But she’d been awake since dawn, when she’d cinched a complimentary but too-short bathrobe around her waist and, after carefully surveying for any other mammalian presence, snuck around the lobby’s creaking oak balcony for the unmanned and steaming coffee service across the way. Once there, she’d stood in caffeinating bliss beneath the Tiffany glass ceiling, her spidery fingers wrapped around the searing cup; dark brown steaming in white porcelain, dark brown legs sticking out of snow-white terrycloth. Until a distant, polite cough destroyed the moment, setting her searching right and left and finally down – to meet the night clerk’s eyes, deep in his cubby on the main level. Junie scuttled back, face burning, quick through the oak door as she pulled it shut behind her.
Since then she’d been working on her thesis, sitting at an ancient table that smelled of wax and dust, her computer screen glowing against a field of green-and-pink William Morris wallpaper. Waiting for the town to wake up around her, and surprised, but not really, when it didn’t. When her room grew warm with the sun, she opened the huge double-hung windows that faced the street, admitting actual birdsongs but not one lingering jazztown echo of late-night-to-early-morning music, or any other kind of sound that wasn’t unnaturally natural.
At nine, she gave up and stood at a screened window, spotting two idle college-student bellboys, a strangely un-idling line of yellow plug-in hybrid taxis, and a couple, kids in tow, heading purposefully towards some sort of gathering human action a few blocks down the street. Junie jumped into her clothes and soon learned from the room clerk – a shift-replacement, thank the Lord – about the nearby pedestrian mall that every visitor had to experience at least once.
Having given up on changing Don, at least today, David was letting him wind down.
“I appreciate your trying,” Don said. “And I’ll keep trying, too, keep coming in... every week I’m in town, anyway.” One hand was on his ponytail, absently calming himself, smoothing it down. “So we can talk about what I’m eating, and my running – there’s got to be a way to make that work – and of course the meditation thing, which you’re right, I really need to do, and I don’t care how much time my friend says it takes. I mean, I know you, and I trust you...” Don’s fingers wandered over a cigarette-sized depression in the hank of grey hair; a shadow of doubt crossed his face but quickly cleared. “...and I’m sure I could pull it together, with your help.”
Help and continuity, the ongoing human part of medicine, David thought. The part he was going to hate to walk away from. The thing that patients and doctors, at least primary care doctors, wanted: care that was safe, familiar, informed, trusted. Comfort for the journey, through life and illness to... well. Anyway, comfort and a guide.
“Though I know,” Don was saying, “how hard a time this has got to be for you.”
David was about to blurt out that Don didn’t know the half of it, when a familiar voice came through the open door, asking sweetly, “I’m sorry... ‘How hard a time’?”
Don turned a nice purplish hue, gaining the color rapidly draining from David’s face. Sheyoni swiveled from one to the other, then stepped to her standard position close beside the patient, a position that David had always thought a little too close.
Don exhaled, slowly, then turned to put a hand on her shoulder. “You don’t have to pretend, Sheyoni.”
What? David watched Sheyoni, who didn’t shrug Don’s hand off – may even, in fact, have been considering the future value of hemp clothing on the world market.
“Remember,” Don added, “no matter how much pain there is, how much suffering, you’ll always have...”
She followed his eyes to David. “Him?”
Don nodded. “Your own doctor. No matter where your... I might as well say it: no matter where your... disease... takes you.”
Holy crap, David thought, as Sheyoni’s expression froze over for the second time that morning.
“You know, your—”
“Don!” David barked, and Don turned to him, confused. “It’s... private.”
Sheyoni stood there, processing. “Thank you so much,” she said finally, taking Don’s hand from her shoulder and lowering it to his hemp-covered thigh, where she let her own hand linger, before adding, “We’ll just be a moment – I need to tear my doctor, my very special doctor, away.”
With a brittle smile, she backed from the room. David followed, closing the door behind him as he tracked her down the hallway, at the end of which she spun and hissed, “My disease?”
“I... I...” It was the best he could do.
His left arm cradled Don’s chart, with Oz’s spreadsheet on top and facing her. Spying it, she ripped both from his grasp – the once and future artist was no slouch when it came to recognizing the color red. “This is it?” She ran her eyes up and down the columns, tracking the negatives enough to get the trend. “Half of nothing?”
“Um...” Again, less than brilliant, but at least the waiting room was empty.
“That’s it – that is the absolute end.” Sheyoni slammed the chart on the reception counter, grabbed her jacket, tore the spreadsheet in half, and let the pieces flutter to the ground. “Go crazy,” she added, “You can have it all.” With a grim look and no trace of tears she grabbed her purse and stomped across the room.
David took a step after her, then stopped – she was gone. He watched the screen door slowly ratchet closed, her figure hazy and then sharp when she came around the front bay window, marching down the cement walkway to her car. When she reached the broken sidewalk, she turned and stood square with hands on hips, taking one last look. Bare blue sky behind her, a breeze that blew a few white-gold strands across her face, a sudden swelling in his heart. Could she see him? No, but he could see she wasn’t trying. Sheyoni was studying the building – the life they’d built, or tried to build, together. On her face, a look that said, not good enough. Not good enough at all.
The balloon in his chest deflated, leaving his heart small and dry and beating for no reason whatsoever.
Sheyoni walked across the faded grass to her Prius, slammed the tinny door, and – with less drama than she probably desired but a finality that could not be denied – floored the accelerator and electrically purred away. Behind the space she had occupied, over the low office buildings and the parking lots and the sun-washed hospital, towered the Flatirons, those rust-gray walls of stone that tell the Great Plains that the buck stops here, that its long flat rolling miles have come to an end.