Chuck Logan - Absolute Zero

Then, after the temper subsided, he would be sweet. But he never apologized for the tantrums. The good and the bad alternated. There was no-Hank’s word-synthesis. No learning from experience.

Like she was trying to do.

Jolene felt the amputated craving for a cigarette. She shoved her hands in her pockets.

She and Earl had been born on the same day, the same hour, in the same hospital in Minneapolis. They had the same astrological pedigree. Mars conjunct Pluto. Biker stars, Earl called it. Deep, powerful urges for both good and evil. They were biker’s stars because Earl said the Hell’s Angel’s credo meant you had to know the difference between good and evil.

And choose the evil.

She knew all this because they’d had their charts done by Lana Pieri who lived down the block when they were high school sophomores in Robbinsdale. “This is some heavy shit,” Lana said. “You guys could go either way.”

“Or both ways at once,” Earl said, grinning.

There was this part of AA where you admit to God and one other person the exact nature of your wrongs, and she had told Hank how she’d had a part in killing a man once during her wild phase.

She knew about the jokes that Allen and Milt told about her and Earl being Bonnie and Clyde. Well, Allen and Milt were pretty perceptive guys. Because that freezing night outside of Bismarck, North Dakota, at that isolated convenience store with the one sorry gas pump out in front, that’s exactly who they were. Driving straight through from Minneapolis on no sleep and no food, a nickel bag of grass, two six-packs of Blatz, Earl’s guitar, an amp, and one suitcase.

They were hungry and broke, working mean drunk-dares back and forth inside a stolen ’89 Camaro. And it was so cold it made you crazy. Colder than Minnesota, if that was possible.

This time she was going in with the gun because she just wanted to get warm. So Earl handed her the gun he’d stolen from his uncle, a Colt.45 automatic, a big military keepsake that weighed as much as her mom’s klunky old handheld electric mixer.

So she went in and the guy behind the counter licked his lips and hitched his cowboy belt buckle up under his round cowboy beer belly and grinned at her like she was Sheena of the Prairie or something, for sure the best thing he ever saw come swinging into his graveyard shift. And she didn’t really enjoy the frog-eyed, dry-swallow gulp of sheer animal fear the big pistol produced on his startled face. And she understood exactly the problem with guns when instead of handing over the money from the till he reached right through his first fear and under the counter for a gun of his own.

The thing about guns was, if you took one of them out and pointed it at a person you better be ready to use it.

Which-bang-she did before he did, point-blank. Knocked him over into the racks of Skoal and Red Man chewing tobacco and beef jerky. Jolene didn’t see any blood but she remembered distinctly the gritty scuffed silver soles and the metal taps on the heels of his cowboy boots as the big slug knocked him for a flip.

“I killed him,” she explained to Earl who came running in as she was cleaning out the cash register.

“No, you didn’t, he’s still moving,” said Earl who took the pistol and sent her out to the car. And she could still remember how big and cold that night was, with the gas station lit up like a big candy machine under all those stars and how lonely those two last shots sounded, muffled behind the glass. She vowed she’d never go back to North Dakota, ever.

“I didn’t kill him,” she said.

“You didn’t kill him,” Earl said.

Jolene had hugged herself and shivered. “God, it’s cold.”

“Absolute zero,” Earl said. “At least it is for that guy back there.” Jolene had stared at him. And Earl had grinned. “The temperature at which everything stops-minus 273.15 degrees Centigrade. I got straight A’s in physics, remember.”

And they talked about it as they turned off the Interstate and drove a jigsaw down back roads north of Bismarck to Theodore Roosevelt State Park where they ate bologna sandwiches on the shore of Lake Sakakawea and counted out $135.74, which was what that clerk’s number amounted to when it came up.

They’d talked about God and if he were there and always watching, and would he hold it against them, and about karma coming around on them, which was different than God, but still definitely payback.

They’d finished their sandwiches and both agreed. They’d take their chances with God and karma over witnesses any day.

Allen, almost jaunty, swung a black satchel bag in his left hand. It was an old-fashioned doctor’s bag, and he was on the kind of professional errand that surgeons never perform. Certainly not these days.

He was making a house call.

The bunched clouds threatened rain and the air was the color of damp cardboard. But the day was easy on his eyes. Every needle in every soggy spruce tree punched up bright as miniature green neon.

Allen crossed the Timberry Trails Hospital staff parking lot and walked toward his car, thumbed his remote, and heard the door open with a snug chirp. It was a light-paperwork morning and he had offered to sit with Hank Sommer while Jolene went into St. Paul for her first office meeting with Milton Dane so they could restart their bumpy relationship and get Hank into a full-care nursing home.

Seat belt. Ignition. He tapped the CD console as he steered his three-year-old Saab out of the lot into the tangle of midmorning traffic. He hummed and moved his shoulders experimentally along with the earthy cross-rhythms of Ladysmith Black Mombazo.

He could learn to loosen up.

Yes, he could.

Toward the end of his surgical residency at the Mayo Clinic, Allen had a recurrent fantasy that he would go into the hospital one day, walk across the red line, and never return. The red line was a literal line painted across the corridor that marked the boundary between the germ-infested world of the patients and the blue, sterile, controlled world of surgery.

In this fantasy his life would be one long procedure, and when it was over he would have operated on everyone who’d ever lived.

Allen saves the world. The End.

Now he was amending his fantasy.

Allen saves Allen.

He identified his problem and appreciated the irony. In surgery he space-walked on a tether of pure clinical knowledge. He manipulated precision instruments to fix the broken parts of the people who lay motionless under his hands. But when he took off the blue clothing and stepped back across the red line he returned to earth and was warped by G’s. By the time he reached the sidewalk he was a fallen medical astronaut. He and the patients had traded places. On the street, he was the one anesthetized. Numb to the world.

Since Hank’s accident he was obsessed with learning how to leave his work brain in the OR and just go out and live. And he was on his way to take his daily dose of the risky treatment he had prescribed for himself.

In a few minutes he’d cleared the traffic lights and was streaking down a secondary road between fields of standing corn. Beyond the corn, the tree lines hovered in a damp Impressionist mist. The chlorophyl dipstick was way down, the carotene was up, and the leaf change was in full glory.

Then he rounded a turn and his pastoral vision disappeared as the Timberry development blob munched its way through the woods, vomiting out rib cages of blond timber and farting out concrete cul-de-sacs.

He had joined the Timberry Medical Group to escape this very congestion. He only had to park his car once a day. He could walk from the clinic to the hospital, and to the health club. Some docs he knew had to commute all over the whole Minneapolis/St. Paul metro to three of four different hospitals a day.