Trouble Read online

  Congratulations on your residency, Superman! Mind writing me a letter of recommendation?

  Reports of his jaunt through the trauma bay rapidly built into a vivid mythology involving his rear and other standout features of his nakedness. The comic possibilities were simply endless.

  Superdick!

  Supercock!

  He felt as though he’d been forced to run for office on a platform of

  SUPERDOC BATTLES

  SICKO W/ KNIFE

  Damage done, he resolved to take it in stride. When people called him Clark he stuck his arms out and whistled the wind. He hummed the theme song and pretended to tear his shirt off with flexitudinous panache. The nurses prodded his biceps. They remarked on his tight pants. He said Wouldn’t you like to find out?

  People he hadn’t heard from in years e-mailed him best wishes and awkwardly put admiration. A girl from his high school doubted he remembered her (he didn’t) but wanted to know if he could get together for coffee (he couldn’t).

  His friend Vik, rotating through medicine up at HUM, sent him a large bouquet of flowers with a card reading your lucky these arent for your funeral you idiot.

  On Wednesday, his sister called.

  “What were you thinking.”

  “I wasn’t.”

  “You could’ve been stabbed.” Sometimes she sounded so much like his mother that it gave him the chills.

  “I know,” he said.

  “Aren’t you upset? Why don’t you sound upset.”

  “Of course I’m upset.”

  “Then why don’t you sound upset?”

  “I’m exhausted,” he said. Which was true. It was now Thursday, and he’d been at St. Aggie’s six days in a row, sixteen hours a day. His superiors hadn’t explicitly ordered him to make up the missed day, but tacit expectations bore down on him like Scripture. He’d worked Saturday, Sunday, Monday. Tuesday he had call until midnight, and today he had to come in for a seminar on post-op care. He was a zombie, but anything was better than going home to the apartment—empty once Lance had left for the night—to be hounded by silence and insomnia. Irrelevancies channeling nightmares: the hiss of a braking bus, so much like a man’s dying sough.

  “The reporter got everything wrong. He made you older than you are.”

  “I don’t know where he got any of that information. Not from me.”

  “He said you’re from Manhattan.”

  “I am.”

  “Not originally,” she said. “He implies that you’re native.”

  “Yeah. I know. He’s wrong, isn’t it terrible.”

  “Don’t be passive-aggressive, Jonah-face.”

  He scrunched his eyes. “Sorry.”

  “It’s okay, I still love you.”

  “Thanks, Katie.”

  “You go back to work. Wait, want to hear something funny? I broke the news to Gretchen today that Mommy’s going to have another baby. I told her, you know how Mommy has a brother. And I pointed to your picture. Guess what she said.”

  He scratched at his patient’s chart. “I give up.”

  “‘Unka Jonah.’ I thought that was very advanced.”

  He smiled. “You know what, it really is.”

  “Of course, I don’t think she’s grasped the implications of having a sibling. At some point I expect the mother of all tantrums. Okay, that’s it. Go back to work. Loveyou. Oh—and Jonah? Please don’t get stabbed.”

  One upside of the Post article was that it clarified for him what had happened that night. Judging by how disfigured his own biography was, Jonah figured that about twenty percent of the story was accurate.

  The “crazed attacker” was Ramon “Raymond” Iniguez, thirty-eight, an ex-teacher and resident of the Beacon House, a Hell’s Kitchen facility for the mentally ill. His brother, a musician from the Bronx, declined comment. His victim, Eve Jones, thirty-one, taught dance therapy at the Beacon. The police believed that Iniguez had followed Jones after work, and while they declined to speculate about his ultimate intent, the heroic timing of etc., etc.

  Whatever mockery he faced as a result of Christopher Yip’s hyperbolic reportage paled next to his relief at learning that Eve Jones had been treated for her injuries and released the following morning.

  Iniguez’s funeral was scheduled for Saturday, August 28.

  His inset picture—inky, creased—didn’t match the one in Jonah’s mind, although Jonah hadn’t been in the best position to make a full study at the time of their introduction. The Raymond Iniguez in the photo was clean-shaven, wearing a necktie and a Yankees cap and an easy, goofy expression that made Jonah queasy. In his mind he attempted to retouch the face, replace the smile with a snarl, dry out the plump cheeks and leave them raw-boned. Eventually, he tore that section of the page out.

  Eve Jones, on the other hand, squared up perfectly: wrapped in her enormous jacket, matchstick legs exceeding the frame, crime-scene tape in the foreground. Wide-eyed and needy. Seeing her confirmed his protective instinct and redoubled it. As wretched as he felt, he knew he had done the right thing. She was alive.

  And he noticed something else about her. Not that it mattered—although in a cosmic sense he was glad—not that it mattered; a person in trouble was a person in trouble, regardless of race or sex or creed; he was an equal-opportunity savior. But he noticed—had to notice—because he wasn’t blind, after all, and he was a normal human male, and anyway the fact was ineluctable: Eve Jones was very, very pretty.

  • 5 •

  SATURDAY, AUGUST 28, 2004.

  ON THE MORNING OF Raymond Iniguez’s funeral, Jonah walked to Union Square and took the crosstown . The car was deserted, overcooled, florid with ads for a language school in Queens that promised fluency in English and accent reduction within months. Models from “China,” “Ukraine,” and “Ghana” gave thumbs-up.

  If, instead of the , he had gotten on the , he could have ridden up to the Bronx funeral parlor where the service was being held. He’d looked it up, and had for a brief and self-indulgent moment considered going. But for what possible purpose? To stand in the back, waiting till the mourners noticed him and came to clobber him with trays of crudités? Not to mention what Belzer would say.

  You went where, kiddo?

  He had other obligations, anyhow.

  At Eighth Avenue he changed to the and went to Penn Station, where the Long Island Rail Road departed for Great Neck at 9:22 A.M. He had an off-peak ten-trip ticket with four remaining. Settling into a vacant car—few people went outbound before ten on a Saturday—he swung his bag onto his lap and took out books. After a few minutes, he settled his head against the window and closed his eyes.

  The train came in on time, but nobody was at the station to meet him, so he set out on foot. It was a mile and a half, and it hadn’t gotten hot yet.

  He passed Waldbaum’s supermarket, whose size always came as a jolt when he hadn’t been out of the City recently. A crafts fair had recently come and gone, its posters still nailed to the ample oaks that shaded and greened the streets. He touched the tops of mailboxes, some still wet with unburnt dew. Leaving the town center, he moved into a windless suburban silence unbroken save the flitting of finches and the yodeling of pets. Shingles and big cars; openness and shade and bosomy shrubs; a nice relief from Manhattan gray.

  By ten thirty A.M. he was on the front step of an off-white ranch-style house at the end of a leafy cul-de-sac. The front yard testified to good intentions gone awry: along one side of the walkway ran a row of mismatched flowers (lavender, petunias, ranunculi) in various states of decline, while the other side was lined only midway to the house, as though encouraging visitors to step off the chipped flagstone and tramp across the lawn, which grew high in places and not at all in others. Someone here had given up. Still, summer being summer—blooming sun, sweet charred smells—the overall effect was comfortably shabby rather than desolate. In winter it looked worse. Jonah knew.

  He had a key but knocked first.

  The
foyer was fusty and dim, with mangy orange carpeting and three soft-edged shafts of light streaming through the cutouts in the front door. In the living room, though, he noted fluffed pillows and lemony surfaces. They’d had the housekeeper in.

  He followed the sound of the TV to the back room, where a middle-aged man was passed out in the easy chair: sawing wood, his face leathery and rictal. He wore baggy boxer shorts and a faded T-shirt that said FLORIDA KEYS. A pair of smudged reading glasses bracketed the top of his head, and his fingers dangled inside an empty tumbler on the floor.

  His name was George Richter, and he was not related to Jonah by blood. Before Jonah started coming out to his house regularly, they had met in person twice: both times over celebratory dinners, both times more polite than honest. In some ways, Jonah knew a lot about him—how he looked asleep, for instance, or how he cried without tears—but in others, he was a complete stranger. Jonah didn’t know his middle name, didn’t know if George preferred the Beatles or the Stones. He didn’t know how or when George had developed an affinity for liquor—rye, of all things, especially Old Overholt. Had he always drunk too much? Jonah didn’t know. He wasn’t about to ask George. And the only other person who could answer these questions was in no state to do so.

  Jonah gingerly extricated the tumbler and took it to the kitchen, where he rinsed it out and refilled it with cold water from a pitcher in the fridge. He put on a pot of coffee. While it brewed, he sorted through the considerable pile of unopened mail on the kitchen table. A half-finished New York Times crossword lay buried beneath credit-card mailers postmarked Delaware. Jonah found a bitten stub of pencil and filled in a few of the unsolved clues. As the pot began to bubble, the cat slunk in and licked his ankle.

  “Hello, Lazy.”

  He fixed a mug with Mocha Mix and three Equals, and returned to the back room. He put the coffee and the tumbler of water on a low table near the lonely treadmill. The TV was a Zenith with rabbit ears and a wood laminate shell. Jonah switched it off.

  George stirred. “Jonah. What time is it.”

  “About eleven.”

  “You didn’t tell me you were coming.”

  “I told you.”

  “I would’ve picked you up.” George rose and opened the curtains. Outside, the backyard flouted his neglect by flourishing. “I thought you were coming last week.”

  “I couldn’t come,” Jonah said. “I had to work, I e-mailed you.”

  The cat sidled against George’s bare shin, and he stooped to graze its head.

  “Hannah’s asleep?”

  George picked up the tumbler and swirled it, as if hoping to coax liquor out of its walls. When that failed, he abandoned it for the coffee. “Bad night. I didn’t get to sleep until five.”

  “Sorry to hear it,” Jonah said.

  George shrugged. “What’s new with you. Are you studying—what are you studying.”

  “Surgery.”

  George looked confused. “I thought it was neuroscience.”

  “Neurology. That was last month. This year I go through all the specialties.”

  “Rrrr. Rotations.”

  “Right.” He was waiting for a question about the accident, but evidently George didn’t know. Either that or he’d forgotten already, which was to be expected; he had a short memory for the inconveniences of others.

  George said, “Well, whatever you do, you’ll be terrific. You’re going to be a great doctor.”

  If anyone would know Jonah thought.

  They made breakfast. Jonah pointed out the old crossword to George, who threw it out and brought in the new one tucked under his arm. He sharpened a pencil and poured himself three fingers of booze, which Jonah regarded as a step toward scaling back. They sat in the living room and waited for Hannah to wake up, Jonah reading about fistulae and supplying George with answers.

  “A beaklike shape, seven letters, R-O-S.”

  “Rostrum.”

  “Rost…rum, exactamente. Thank you.”

  “My pleasure.” He knew all the obscure ones; puzzle writers repeated themselves, and med school had destroyed his useless-junk filter. Often he’d inadvertently memorize a fact, surprising himself later with its retrieval.

  He checked his watch at one o’clock. Right about now, Raymond Iniguez was disappearing into the earth.

  At two o’clock George said, “You maybe want to go peek in on her?”

  Jonah closed his book.

  Upstairs, he examined himself in the bathroom mirror. Hannah liked him to look as he had in college, and while he couldn’t halt the incremental effects of age—of late, he had begun to thicken in the jaw, like his father—he reordered himself as best he could, wetting his hair and moving his side part to the center. The results pleased him. Almost good enough to need his fake ID back.

  He knocked on her door and heard her turn beneath many strata of blankets. She was always cold. The technical term was neuroleptic-induced hypothermia.

  He called her name and, receiving no answer, entered.

  The smell of perfume swept over him. The dresser—where she normally kept an assortment of body sprays that claimed to mimic pricey eaux de toilette—was bare. Packaged products sometimes aroused her suspicions. If that happened before George could get to them, they invariably met a violent end.

  She hadn’t redecorated since she was twelve. Posters of Janet Jackson and Johnny Depp had lost corners, disclosing swatches of unfaded wallpaper. Her Norton Anthologies; her yearbook. Scotch-taped pictures of high-school friends; the high-school softball team; the group photo taken with the governor the year they won the tri-state title. A graduation tassel thumbtacked to the door. Stacks of cassettes and drawers full of jerseys. Her trophies—too hard, too sharp—had long since been removed to the basement. By the bedside, near the ladybug phone, was a picture of her dead mother. The sole clue to a recent life was a Michigan pennant Jonah had put up last October.

  “Hannah.”

  She was a lump.

  “You awake?”

  A hand burrowed up through the sheets, followed by eyes like targets.

  “Can I come over to the bed?”

  She nodded.

  He sat by her side. “How you feeling?”

  She coughed. “Thirsty.” She dragged herself out of bed. She was wearing jeans and a wool sweater beneath a maroon terrycloth robe. Through a moth hole near her stomach he saw sallow, cheesy folds of skin. Her girth yo-yoed as a result of neuroleptic-induced weight gain.

  He didn’t try to touch her, but as they went downstairs, she laid a hand on his arm.

  “I’m not here,” she said.

  He didn’t know what to make of that. He said, “I am.”

  They sat in the kitchen, out of George’s earshot. She gave most of her breakfast to the cat, and Jonah asked if she wanted him to prepare something else. She shook her head. Her hair was approaching rat’s nest, so he offered to brush it out. When she didn’t refuse, he went back upstairs to fetch a wide-toothed comb and a bottle of baby oil.

  He sat behind her, talking softly, nothing serious, doing his best to make her smile. Her moods spun like a slot machine. Sedate, like today; or remote and confounded; or splintery and distrustful. He had learned to watch for subtle shifts.

  “You’re all tied up,” he said, loosening a tangle. He imagined her hair as neurons gone haywire, grown out of her skull, seeking shelter in the open air from her perpetually insurrecting mind. He straightened her out, made her sleek and ordered.

  By this point in his education he’d seen plenty of brains, handled them in anatomy and studied cross sections, and he knew that what afflicted her was generally thought of as neurochemical. Others disagreed, contending that in fact the problem was anatomic. Still others (fewer every year, as psychiatry grew progressively more biologized) called it psychosocial. And while everyone agreed that in her case it was undifferentiated and chronic and progressive, nobody seemed willing to come out and call it by its true name, horrible.

&nbs
p; “What do you like that’s on, these days? Survivor?”

  She shrugged. “No.”

  “What then.”

  “Emeril.”

  He laughed. “Next time I come, you can cook me dinner.”

  “I’ll make you fricassee,” she said, and smiled.

  There she was: Hannah. Lurking in there, peeping out every so often to wave. It manhandled his heart. He rushed to take advantage of her lucidity. “Knock-knock.”

  “Who’s there.”

  “Interrupting cow,” he said.

  “Interrupting c—”

  “Mooo.”

  She smiled.

  “Knock-knock,” he said.

  “Who’s there.”

  “Dyslexic interrupting cow.”

  “Dyslexic interrupting c—”

  “Ooom.”

  They laughed together.

  “My turn,” she said. “Knock-knock.”

  “Who’s there.”

  “Interrupting turtle.”

  “Interrupting tur—”

  Slowly she craned her head forward, as though emerging from a shell.

  “Knock-knock,” he said.

  “Wait, my turn,” she said.

  “Sorry,” he said. “I’m interrupting joke-teller.”

  “Knock-knock.”

  “Who’s there.”

  “Interrupting dyslexic turtle.”

  “Interrupting dyslexic tur—”

  And she retracted into her invisible shell.

  They had a good laugh over that. She’d taught him the routine, back in the day.

  “Tell me a joke?” she asked.

  All he could think of were dirty ones he’d overheard in the OR. He didn’t think she’d find them funny. “I’m sorta running dry,” he said.

  A mistake. She iced over again, pushing away the remains of her bagel. Lazy Susan tried to get at it, but Hannah set her on the floor and shooed her out.

  He began quickly to speak, to spool out tricks; did his best to amuse her and induce her to come back. She tugged skin from her lip with flawless apathy. She attacked a cuticle until it began to spot with blood. He felt an urge to shake her, and he certainly didn’t want to do that, so soon he shut up and they sat there doing nothing.