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

The light was fading. The sky hung low, like smoke. And then, in that instant, as if some god had snapped his fingers, the streetlights went on, sudden artificial burst of illumination exploding in the sky above them. All at once I felt myself moving, the switch turned on in me too, all the lights flaring in my head, burning bright, and I was out the door, up the corridor, and pushing through the double glass doors at the front entrance.

Something was blocking the doors — bodies, deadweight, the zombies piled up on the steps like corpses — and I had to force my way out. There were bodies everywhere, a minefield of flesh, people stretched out across the steps, obliterating the sidewalk and the curb in front of the clinic, immobilizing the cars in the street. I saw the punk from this morning, the teenage tough guy in his leather jacket, his back right up against the door, and beside him one of the dumpy women I’d flung him into. They didn’t learn, these people, they didn’t know. It was a game. A big joke. Call people baby-killers, sing about Jesus, pocketful of posies, and then the nice policeman carries you off to jail and Mommy and Daddy bail you out. I tried to kick them aside, lashing out with the steel toes of my boots till my breath was coming in gasps. “Sally!” I cried. “Sally, I’m coming!”

She was stalled at the corner of the building, standing rigid with her mother before the sea of bodies. “Jesus loves you!” somebody cried out and they all took it up till my voice was lost in the clamor, erased in the everlasting hiss of Jesus. “We’re going to come looking for you, brother,” the tough guy said then, looking up at me out of a pair of seething blue eyes. “You better watch your back.”

Sally was there. Jesus was there. Hands grabbed at me, snaked round my legs till I couldn’t move, till I was mired in flesh. The big man came out of nowhere, lithe on his feet, vaulting through the inert bodies like the shadow of something moving swiftly overhead, and he didn’t so much as graze me as he went by. I was on the third step down, held fast, the voices chanting, the signs waving, and I turned to watch him handcuff himself to the door and flash me a tight little smile of triumph.

“Sally!” I shouted. “Sally!” But she was already turning around, already turning her back to me, already lost in the crowd.

I looked down at my feet. A woman was clutching my right leg to her as if she’d given birth to it, her eyes as loopy as any crackhead’s. My left leg was in the grip of a balding guy who might have been a clerk in a hardware store and he was looking up at me like a toad I’d just squashed. “Jesus,” they hissed. “Jesus!”

The light was burning in my head, and it was all I needed. I reached into my pants and pulled out the gun. I could have anointed any one of them, but the woman was first. I bent to her where she lay on the unyielding concrete of the steps and touched that snubnose to her ear as tenderly as any man of healing. The noise of it shut down Jesus, shut him down cold. Into the silence, and it was the hardware man next. Then I swung round on Mr. Beard.

It was easy. It was nothing. Just like killing babies.

(1995)

At the lecture that night they learned that human life was expendable. Melanie had sat there in shocked silence — the silence of guilt, mortification and paranoia (what if someone should see her there in the crowd?) — while Dr. Toni Brinsley-Schneider, the Stanford bioethicist, had informed them that humans, like pigs, chickens and guppies, were replaceable. In the doctor’s view, the infirm, the mentally impaired, criminals, premature infants and the like were non-persons, whose burden society could no longer be expected to support, especially in light of our breeding success. “We’re hardly an endangered species,” she said with a grim laugh. “Did you know, all of you good and earnest people sitting here tonight, that we’ve just reached the population threshold of six billion?” She was cocked back from the lectern in a combative pose, her penurious little silver-rimmed reading glasses flinging fragments of light out into the audience. “Do any of you really want more condominiums, more shantytowns and favelas, more cars on the freeway, more group homes for the physically handicapped right around the corner from you? On your street? Next door?” She leveled her flashing gaze on them. “Well, do you?”

People shifted in their seats, a muted moist surge of sound that was like the timid lapping of waves on a distant shore. No one responded — this was a polite crowd, a liberal crowd dedicated to free expression, a university crowd, and besides, the question had been posed for effect only. They’d have their chance to draw blood during the Q&A.

Sean sat at attention beside Melanie, his face shining and smug. He was midway through the Ph.D. program in literary theory, and the theoreticians had hardened his heart: Dr. Brinsley-Schneider was merely confirming what he already knew. Melanie took his hand, but it wasn’t a warm hand, a hand expressive of comfort and love — it was more like something dug frozen from the earth. She hadn’t yet told him what she’d learned at two thirty-three that afternoon, special knowledge, a secret as magical and expansive as a loaf of bread rising in a pan. Another sort of doctor had brought her the news, a doctor very different from the pinched and angry-looking middle-aged woman at the podium, a young dark-haired sylph of a woman, almost a girl, with a wide beatific face and congratulatory eyes, dressed all in white like a figure out of a dream.

—

They walked to the car in silence, the mist off the ocean redrawing the silhouettes of the trees, the streetlights softly glowing. Sean wanted a burger — and maybe a beer — so they stopped off at a local bar and grill the students hadn’t discovered yet and she watched him eat and drink while the television over the bar replayed images of atrocities in the Balkans, the routine bombing of Iraq and the itinerary of the railroad killer. In between commercials for trucks that were apparently capable of scaling cliffs and fording rivers, they showed the killer’s face, a mug shot of a slightly built Latino with an interrupted mustache and two dead eyes buried like artifacts in his head. “You see that?” Sean said, nodding at the screen, the half-eaten burger clenched in one hand, the beer in the other. “That’s what Brinsley-Schneider and these people are talking about. You think this guy worries much about the sanctity of human life?”

Can we afford compassion? Melanie could hear the lecturer’s droning thin voice in the back of her head, and she saw the dour pale muffin of a face frozen in the spotlight when somebody in back shouted Nazi! “I don’t know why we have to go to these lectures anyway,” she said. “Last year’s series was so much more — do I want to say ‘uplifting’ here? Remember the woman who’d written that book about beekeeping? And the old professor — what was his name? — who talked about Yeats and Maud Gonne?”

“Stevenson Elliot Turner. He’s emeritus in the English Department.”

“Yeah,” she said, “that’s right, and why can’t we have more of that sort of thing? Tonight — I don’t know, she was so depressing. And so wrong.”

“Are you kidding me? Turner’s like the mummy’s ghost — that talk was stupefying. He was probably giving the same lecture in English 101 thirty years ago. At least Brinsley-Schneider’s controversial. At least she keeps you awake.”

Melanie wasn’t listening, and she didn’t want to argue — or debate, or discuss. She wanted to tell Sean — who wasn’t her husband, not yet, because they had to wait till he got his degree — that she was pregnant. But she couldn’t. She already knew what he would say, and it was right on the same page with Dr. Toni Brinsley-Schneider.