T. Boyle - T.C. Boyle Stories II - Volume II

—

That day, the first day, was a real trial. Yes, I was turning over a new leaf, and yes, I was determined to succeed and thankful to my brother and the judge and the great giving, forgiving society I belonged to, but this was more than I’d bargained for. I had no illusions about the job — I knew it would be dull and diminishing, and I knew life with Philip and Denise would be one long snooze — but I wasn’t used to being called a baby-killer. Liar, thief, crackhead — those were names I’d answered to at one time or another. Murderer was something else.

My brother wouldn’t talk about it. He was busy. Wired. Hurtling around the clinic like a gymnast on the parallel bars. By nine I’d met his two associates (another doctor and a counsellor, both female, both unattractive); his receptionist; Nurses Tsing and Hempfield; and Fred. Fred was a big rabbity-looking guy in his early thirties with a pale reddish mustache and hair of the same color climbing up out of his head in all directions. He had the official title of “technician,” though the most technical things I saw him do were drawing blood and divining urine for signs of pregnancy, clap, or worse. None of them — not my brother, the nurses, the counsellor, or even Fred — wanted to discuss what was going on at the far end of the parking lot and on the sidewalk out front. The zombies with the signs — yes, signs, I could see them out the window, ABORTION KILLS and SAVE THE PREBORNS and I WILL ADOPT YOUR BABY — were of no more concern to them than mosquitoes in June or a sniffle in December. Or at least that was how they acted.

I tried to draw Fred out on the subject as we sat together at lunch in the back room. We were surrounded by shadowy things in jars of formalin, gleaming stainless-steel sinks, racks of test tubes, reference books, cardboard boxes full of drug samples and syringes and gauze pads and all the rest of the clinic’s paraphernalia. “So what do you think of all this, Fred?” I said, gesturing toward the window with the ham-and-Swiss on rye Denise had made me in the dark hours of the morning.

Fred was hunched over a newspaper, doing the acrostic puzzle and sucking on his teeth. His lunch consisted of a microwave chili-and-cheese burrito and a quart of root beer. He gave me a quizzical look.

“The protesters, I mean. The Jesus-thumpers out there. Is it like this all the time?” And then I added a little joke, so he wouldn’t think I was intimidated: “Or did I just get lucky?”

“Who, them?” Fred did something with his nose and his upper teeth, something rabbity, as if he were tasting the air. “They’re nobody. They’re nothing.”

“Yeah?” I said, hoping for more, hoping for some details, some explanation, something to assuage the creeping sense of guilt and shame that had been building in me all morning. Those people had pigeonholed me before I’d even set foot in the door, and that hurt. They were wrong. I was no baby-killer — I was just the little brother of a big brother, trying to make a new start. And Philip was no baby-killer either — he was a guy doing his job, that was all. Shit, somebody had to do it. Up to this point I guess I’d never really given the issue much thought — my girlfriends, when there were girlfriends, had taken care of the preventative end of things on their own, and we never really discussed it — but my feeling was that there were too many babies in the world already, too many adults, too many suet-faced Jesus-thumping jerks ready to point the finger, and didn’t any of these people have better things to do? Like a job, for instance? But Fred wasn’t much help. He just sighed, nibbled at the wilted stem of his burrito, and said, “You get used to it.”

I wondered about that as the afternoon crept by, and then my mind went numb from jet lag and the general wash of misery and I let my body take over. I scrubbed out empty jars and test tubes with Clorox, labeled and filed the full ones on the racks that lined the walls, stood at Fred’s elbow and watched as he squeezed drops of urine onto strips of litmus paper and made notations in a ledger. My white lab coat got progressively dirtier. Every once in a while I’d come to and catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror over the sinks, the mad scientist exposed, the baby-killer, the rinser of test tubes and secreter of urine, and have an ironic little laugh at my own expense. And then it started to get dark, Fred vanished, and I was introduced to mop and squeegee. It was around then, when I just happened to be taking a cigarette break by the only window in the room, that I caught a glimpse of one of our last tardy patients of the day hurrying up the sidewalk elbow to elbow with a grim middle-aged woman whose face screamed I am her mother!

The girl was sixteen, seventeen maybe, a pale face, pale as a bulb, and nothing showing on her, at least not with the big white doughboy parka she was wearing. She looked scared, her little mouth clamped tight, her eyes fixed on her feet. She was wearing black leggings that seemed to sprout from the folds of the parka and a pair of furry white ankle boots that were like house slippers. I watched her glide through the dead world on the flowing stalks of her legs, a spoiled pouty chalk-cheeked sweetness to her face, and it moved something in me, something long buried beneath a mountain of grainy little yellow-white rocks. Maybe she was just coming in for an examination, I thought, maybe that was it. Or she’d just become sexually active — or was thinking of it — and her mother was one step ahead of her. Either way, that was what I wanted to believe. With this girl, with her quick fluid step and downcast eyes and all the hope and misery they implied, I didn’t want to think of “procedures.”

They’d almost reached the building when the zombies began to stir. From where I was standing I couldn’t see the front of the building, and the Jesus-thumpers had already begun to fade out of my consciousness, dim as it was. But they came crashing back into the picture now, right there at the corner of the building, shoulders and heads and placards, and one in particular. A shadow that separated itself from the mass and was instantly transformed into a hulking bearded zealot with snapping teeth and eyes like hard-boiled eggs. He came right up to the girl and her mother, rushing at them like a torpedo, and you could see how they shied away from him and how his head raged back on his shoulders, and then they ducked past the corner of the building and out of my line of sight.

I was stunned. This wasn’t right, I was thinking, and I didn’t want to get angry or depressed or emotional — keep on an even keel, that’s what they tell you in rehab — but I couldn’t help snuffing the cigarette and stepping quietly out into the hallway that ran the length of the building and gave me an unobstructed view of the front door. I moved forward almost against my will, my feet like toy cars on a track, and I hadn’t got halfway down the hall before the door opened on the dwindling day and the dead sticks of the trees, and suddenly there she was, pale in a pale coat and her face two shades paler. We exchanged a look. I don’t know what she saw in my eyes — weakness, hunger, fear — but I know what I saw in hers, and it was so poignant and so everlastingly sad I knew I’d never have another moment’s rest till I took hold of it.

—

In the car on the way home Philip was so relaxed I wondered if he wasn’t prescribing something for himself. Here was the antithesis of the ice man who’d picked me up at the airport, watched me eat pork chops, read to his children and brush my teeth in the guest bathroom, and then thrown me to the wolves at the clinic. “Sorry about all that commotion this morning,” he said, glancing at me in the glowing cubicle of the car. “I would have warned you, but you can never tell when they’re going to pull something like that.”