James Sallis - Eye of the Cricket

"We were married, Richard and I. A long time ago. Neither of us much more than a kid then. I see you're surprised."

"All things considered, yes. I am."

"Well, so were we. What we had in common you could have put on a Post-it Note. God knows what we thought we were doing, or if we thought about it at all. It just kind of happened, there we were one day, my God, we're mamed. The biggest thing we shared was, back then we had the same taste in men-bad. And when I decided women were really what it was all about for me, we lost even that Though we held on awhile still. Had some romantic image of ourselves as outlaws, I think. United by that. Pushing at the barricades. It all seemed quite daring at the time."

Her beeper sounded and she stepped to a phone on the wall by the OR doors to respond, was back within the minute.

"Anyway," she said. "Richard says you're trying to find yourself?"

"Aren't we all."

"Frankly, I don't think most of us ever even notice we're missing."

"I appreciate your seeing me, Dr. Park," I said.

"Lola. And believe me, seeing you is a welcome break. I spent the last forty-six hours peering into compound fractures, gunshot wounds and eviscerations, gaping mouths, vacant eyes. Most of the rest of the time looking out the window, wondering at exactly what point it was that I dropped out of anything resembling a real life."

"Can I buy you a coffee? Breakfast, maybe?"

"Breakfast would be nice. It'll have to be the cafeteria, though. Nothing down there you can recognize on sight They have to put labels on it"

She reached down to push the button on the beeper clipped into her waistband. It gave off a single low-pitched squeal. She would do this repeatedly, in the middle of sentences, between gulps of coffee, the whole time we were together. I don't think she was even aware of it. This had become her connection to the world, her bridge. Instinctively she protected it.

"On into the belly of the whale, then. I warn you: you may want to leave a trail of bread crumbs. Or hack notches on the tunnel walls as we turn."

We took a phone booth-sized elevator to the third floor, crossed through an uneven, close passway ("That's the new part of the hospital back there," Lola told me, "now we're in the old") to a kind of enclosed platform where we had a choice of elevators, stairs or emergency exits, picked one from among thefirst and again went down, debarking into a narrow chamber.

Now we confronted a dozen or more steel doors, single, double, most askew in frames and lacking elemental hardware (screws, handle, hinge), none of them marked. We went through one, heard it slam and shudder into place behind us, into a maze of corridors where floors sloped ever downwaitl and clusters of pipes and conduits paced our descent overhead.

At last we emerged into a long, cavelike room aflood with artificial light.

People sat slumped over trays of meat-and-two-vegetables, sandwiches assembled days before, prepackaged cookies, bags of chips and candy, ice cream bars. Plastic glasses of iced tea with lemon slices like small rising suns on the horizons of their rims. Waxed-cardboard cups of coffee. People themselves looking waxlike, plastic, and not at all like rising suns.

"Half a star for atmosphere," Lola said, "but the food's even worse."

"Then the stories are true. There is a whole population living down here beneath the city."

As I watched, sipping coffee, Lola devoured three fried eggs over easy, two servings of hash browns and another of buttered grits, order of bacon, wheat toast. No inordinate fear of cholesterol here. But she wasn't an internist, after all; she was a surgeon, with that mentality. Surgeons are technicians, sprinters. Friend of mine calls them slashers. Whatever the problem is, you just hack it off or out, sew the hole shut. Your basic Republican solution.

Twice her beeper sounded, and she went to the phone on the wall by the cashier to answer.

Twice she came back, said No problem and went on eating.

Third time, she said, Break's over, I guess. Nothing gold can stay. Couple of street soldiers up there losing ground fast.

Think I might be able to find my way up and out without help?

Probably so.

"Richard said you'd want this. It's got your name and phone number inside the front cover. Only thing left behind in the room. I snagged it off Housekeeping's cart. On its way to the elephant's graveyard, otherwise."

Pulling it from her lab coat-pockets bulging with stethoscope, hemostats, treatment regimens, a ruler to lay along EKG tracings, prescription forms-she handed me the notebook I'd left with our mysterious departed patient. I glanced quickly through it. Page after page, top to bottom, margin to margin, in a neat, close hand. Written straight out with almost no corrections.

Her beeper sounded again. She punched the button, knocked back the last of her coffee and stood.

"Richard said it was important to you. No problem. Things can get lost in the shuffle around here. Hell, peopfe get lost in the shuffle around here."

"Thanks, Lola."

"For what?"

"For caring, I guess."

"Yeah. Well. I think I did at first, anyway. Now I talk to you down here, go back up there and save a life: what's the difference? I sew one guy's heart back together, another one's just going to roll in the door ten minutes later with an EMT'sfinger jammed into his ventricle."

"I'm not sure I believe that."

"That I don't care?"

I nodded.

"I'm sure you don't want to."

Her beeper sounded again. Insistent, shrill, this time. Simultaneously there came an overhead page: Stat to ER-2, stat to ER-2. Code blue. Code blue.

"We're all little Dutch boys, Lewis. And the dikes are giving way all around us."

She grinned.

"No pun intended."

Three calls that morning, beginning as I came in the door from the hospital, points on a line pulling together discontinuous events and years.

"Lewis, that you, man?"

Since I had never heaitl his voice before, I didn't recognize it.

"I'm out."

So I said something noncommittal.

"They threw me out. Whoa, I told them. Wait a minute, I wanta see my lawyer. You are your lawyer, they said. Hard to defeat that kind of logic."

"Zeke?"

"The same. Well, not the same, truth be told. Actually, quite different right now. Gola's the only home I can remember, you know? Damn there's a lot of stuff going on all the time out here. Traffic shooting by, people walking straight at you from ever' which direction, shouting at each other from two blocks away. Some kind of siren screaming past ever' couple minutes. Always like this, huh?"

"Pretty much."

"You |›eople could do with some peace and quiet"

"I'm sure we could. On the other hand, we can make a trip to the bathroom or eat a meal without getting a ground-down spoon handle shoved up our ribs."

"Lewis. Hey, I read the Times-Picayune first thing this morning, see 'bout the competition, find out what I'm getting myself into out here. Twenty-one murders in seven days, am I right? Way things look to me, most of the city, you so much as step out to get your mail you're taking your life in your hands."

"You're right."

"You know I am."

"And here you are now, out here with the rest and the best of us."

"Five hours, twenty-nine minutes and some-odd seconds. Very odd. Wearing this fine blue suit, hard shoes, worried look and the People of Louisiana's best wishes. Damn you got some fine women walking the streets. Good behavior, they told me back at Gola. Now, we both know better than that, don't we?"

"So what's going to happen to the paper?"

"Boy name of Hog taken it over. Worked with him some, boy could jus' be all right. Way past time for a change, everybody knew that. Last few years, you read the paper and you might as well be watching some rerun from nineteen sixty-two. Who the hell are these guys in leisure suits and these long-ass shirt collars up there, they look realto you? Old men ought to shut up once you done heard all their stories."