Chuck Logan - Absolute Zero

Amy decided to immobilize the arm against his chest with the sheet. Broker helped her sit Earl up and tie the makeshift restraint. Then she gave him some Tylenol. Once the arm was secured they hauled him to his feet and walked him to the Jeep.

As they got in, Amy scanned the empty fields and pastures.

“What about the bird?”

“Maybe they come home when they get hungry,” Broker said.

After a solitary dinner in an overcrowded restaurant, Allen got away from people and drove toward his town house, deep in one of Timberry’s meandering cul-de-sacs.

His efficient two-bedroom row house was somebody’s idea of a New England design, clad in white clapboard and black trim. He had a garage, a basement, a deck, and a view. His association kept the outside tidy. He took care of the inside.

Untidy reminded him of his ex-wife, Sharon, who had remarried and moved to California. Like Annette Benning in American Beauty , Sharon sold real estate. Unlike Annette Benning, she had never cleaned a house in her life.

They had trudged dutifully together until the end of his residency at the Mayo Clinic.

At the clinic, residents were required to make rounds in starched white coats, suits, and a tie every day. The dress code bolstered Allen’s innate fastidiousness, and the more pressed and creased he was at the clinic the more aware he became of Sharon’s slovenly habits at home.

Thank God they never had kids.

But then, how could they? Buried alive in the heavy pleats of Sharon’s lovemaking, Allen had imagined his spermatozoa suffocated. She had possessed a certain sluggish beauty, if you enjoyed watching heavy whipping cream pour from a spout.

They’d been high school sweethearts. He had been deceived by the household Sharon grew up in, by its snug, scrubbed security. Only when it was too late, after he’d married her, did he realize that the order in that house was the work of Sharon’s mother, but none of the mother’s precision had rubbed off on the daughter. And this didn’t truly manifest until they had moved out of student housing into a town house in Rochester. One of his Mayo colleagues came over after a round of handball and spilled a beer on the scuffed kitchen linoleum. Immediately, he offered to clean it up. “I’ll get it,” he said to Sharon, “just show me where you keep the mop.”

“I don’t think we have one,” Sharon had said, in effect.

Allen aimed the garage-door clicker, opened the door, drove in, shut off his car, and closed the door behind him.

Thank you, Minnesota, for no-fault divorce.

He unlocked his door and went inside. Jolene had never visited his place. The last two women he’d dated-a lawyer and an investment banker-had given him the impression that his living quarters were too small. He’d already forgotten the personal details of both of them. He did remember that they were compulsively skinny, and the main difference between them was that the lawyer took Zoloft and the banker took Prozac.

Allen could imagine Jolene getting drunk in her past life and fucking her whole high school football team. He could not imagine her taking Prozac.

His town house had originally been chosen for its convenient location, a mile from the hospital and clinic. When he’d moved in two years ago, his deck overlooked wetlands and a woods. Now a golf course provided a deeper shade of sizzling chemical green.

He cared about the environment. He was not a flashy person, he reminded himself, as he walked through the comfortable two-bedroom unit. His furnishings were sparse and functional, well made but not extravagant.

He was not a bad person.

He was not shallow.

He’d made only one mistake in his life.

One.

And he was doing his best to learn from it.

He put a bag of popcorn in the microwave and set the timer. Cub Scout popcorn, sold door-to-door. Sure, here kid.

Not a bad person.

Not.

He left the kitchen, went into the bedroom, and selected a pair of freshly laundered blue scrubs from his dresser. Clothing kept turning up in his exercise bag and he kept forgetting to return it. When he was home alone and didn’t expect guests, like now, he wore them as lounging pajamas.

He put on the soft shirt and loose trousers, went back to the kitchen, transferred the popcorn from the microwave to a bowl, and went into the living room. The movie Garf had given him lay on the coffee table. Allen shook out the tape, inserted it in the VCR, and tapped the play button. While the leader played out, he turned The Blue Angel jacket over and read the tag line on the back. “A middle-aged professor is degraded and led to his destruction through his infatuation with a heartless cafe entertainer.”

Hmmm. He’d give it a try, to see if there was a point to Garf’s insolence. He settled back on the couch and began to eat his popcorn.

The movie was an early talky that creaked across the screen in seventy-year-old black and white. Dr. Immannuel Rath, a portly professor, fuddled his way through the pranks of his students and wound up following some of them to a seedy nightclub where Lola Lola, the Dietrich character, strutted her stuff.

Allen squirmed a little and licked the greasy popcorn residue from his fingers. Very funny. I’m supposed to be the socially maladroit academic being swallowed alive by the hot nightclub singer. Is that it, Garf?

But the character that stuck in his imagination was not the professor or the entertainer. As the doomed romance developed backstage in the nightclub, a clown wandered through the scenes with wistful eyebrows and a sad smile painted on his face. The clown’s purpose was to underscore Professor Rath’s folly. In fact, the professor, ruined by his love for the singer, joined the vagabond traveling troupe and wound up donning the clown costume himself.

The clown was the only character who knew what was going on.

The movie ended with a melodramatic death scene. Disgraced, Rath made his way back to the schoolhouse and collapsed on his old headmaster’s desk.

As the film rewound, Allen considered Garf’s intent; was it an ironic caution or a threat? Either way, it was a clue that more intelligence was cooking behind Garf’s blue eyes than Allen had previously assumed.

Garf had to go, of course. Milt was leery about underwriting Jolene as long as Garf was living under her roof.

And now it appeared that Garf was suggesting that Allen had to go. Allen smiled a tight little smile, got up, and experimented with a six-part silver box tango step. Garf underestimated him, of course. As had Hank.

Allen slid the movie back in its jacket, took the popcorn bowl to the kitchen, washed it, and put it in the cupboard. Then he spent half an hour going over his notes on tomorrow’s surgery schedule. Satisfied, he filed the notes back in his briefcase, brushed his teeth, flossed, washed his hands, and went to bed. As always, he fell immediately into a deep, dreamless sleep.

Allen woke punctually at 6:00 A.M., rolled out of bed, donned a wind suit and Nikes, stretched, drank a tall glass of water, and went on a five-mile run.

On his way back, at about mile four as he jogged past a long stand of fiery staghorn sumac, he had his revelation. It started with an awareness about the unself-conscious way his body was moving. For the first time in his life, outside of surgery, he felt fluid, as if his work brain had finally melted and now dripped warm and active down into the rest of his body.

The new perception was simple: the accidently-on-purpose-snuffing of Hank Sommer had not so much liberated Jolene as it had freed him. He, not Jolene, was more alive. Almost as if he sucked Hank’s ferocious life force out with a straw and digested it.