Terrence Holt - Internal Medicine - A Doctor's Stories

“Mr. Alston?”

The eyelids closed.

“Are you all right?”

The absurdity of the question felt like a slap in the face, but he gave no sign, and for a moment I felt a surge of anger: What else was I supposed to say?

“Is there anything. ”

I wasn’t sure what I wanted to know.

“Is there anything you want?” I finished lamely.

The eyes opened. A hand appeared from beneath the quilt and grabbed my arm. It pulled me down, the strength in it shocking, until I was close enough to smell the decay in his mouth. For a long moment he held me there, the eyes searching my face. Then he gave the slightest shake of his head and turned away. I wasn’t sure if he was answering my question or dismissing me, pronouncing judgment.

The two women both looked up as I reentered the room.

“How is he?” Linda asked, her studied cheeriness deflecting any questions. As I muttered something bland and noncommittal, I realized suddenly that Linda, for all the time I had spent in her company, was almost as much a blank to me as Mr. Alston. If I had noticed this before, I would have said this was her nursing training, the professional polish that kept her work from consuming her, but now I was unsure. Perhaps she seemed that way only to me. Perhaps I really understood nothing, nothing at all. I looked around the kitchen, and the room, for all its sunny cleanliness, seemed as inscrutable as if it were the work of an ancient civilization. In the portrait of Jesus, the bruise-colored sky looked sinister, Gethsemane just one more episode in an endless history of suffering. A history from which I wanted only to be excused.

“Thank you, Doctor,” Mrs. Alston said.

I could only stare at her.

“For coming,” she explained. She rose from the table, levering herself up to her full five-foot-one, and made her way over to me in a series of short, rolling steps. She slipped her warm, dry hand into mine and gave it a tremulous squeeze.

“Doctor,” she said quietly, and her voice had a note in it beyond sadness, an unmistakable tone of the reproach I always worry I will hear. “Doctor,” she said again, and squeezed my hand one more time, using it to turn me back toward the front room. We stood and looked together at Mr. Alston gazing out the window. She whispered, “Why didn’t you tell me that it would take so long?”

WEDNESDAY MORNING, AS I followed Linda to her car, she asked, “Ready for a trip to the bird museum?”

After a few moments, she asked again.

“You up for it this morning?”

“What?”

“The Turners,” she said, sounding a little exasperated. “Are you going to show up this time?”

The car swooned around a turn that tightened as it curved, and for a dizzying moment I thought we might skid, but Linda’s grip on the wheel didn’t shift; we hit the straight. In that moment I had experienced an inner equivalent of a near-skid: I saw the past week and a half of this rotation as they must have looked from some other perspective. I had been a shadow, a cardboard cutout, the mere image of a man, through the whole thing.

Linda was still looking at me.

“I don’t know,” I said.

THE GRAVEL PATCH IN front of the Turner house was occupied. Two cars — large, middle-aged sedans, one a tan Buick, the other a dark blue Olds — were parked nose-to-nose beside the old fruit tree, which in the past several days had pushed out plump buds frilled with pink. The sun was working on the last of the morning haze, heating everything to a silver shimmer. As we pulled onto the gravel and Linda killed the engine, I thought I heard the parrots screaming.

“Uh-oh,” Linda said quietly.

Above the voices of the birds a dark rumble rose, breaking into deep, staccato barks. For another moment I allowed myself to believe a dog had gotten in among the birds — a vivid flash of red, green, yellow swirling feathers flying, shrieks of outrage, inhuman voices shrieking “Bad dog! Bad dog!” The image was frightening enough: my heart hammering high in my chest, I stared at Linda for a cue.

Linda stood half out of the car, looking not toward the back of the house but over the tops of the parked cars toward the porch. The Buick blocked my view, but, even so, as I tried to follow Linda’s gaze I realized the sounds weren’t coming from the back of the house. And then what I thought was barking resolved into a man’s voice, shouting a single obscenity over and over, overwhelming a chorus of high-pitched protests that sounded now less like “Bad dog,” and more like “Praise God.” Or perhaps I was only forcing sense into what was actually inarticulate shrieking.

Certainly by the time Linda and I rounded the rear bumper of the Olds and stopped, separated by five or six yards from the knot of figures on Turner’s front porch, the sounds coming from the group had broken down entirely into shrieks and wails, broken repeatedly by Turner, who stood filling his doorway, red-faced, the muscles and veins of his neck standing out like the anatomy of Hell. Which was what he was saying now to the group of women surrounding him: You go to Hell! You go to Hell! He said this more times than I wanted to count, the words taking on an incantatory force, as if he expected his rage to blow an opening in the air.

He advanced, one straight-legged stagger, then another, the porch shuddering at each Hell! as his feet came down. The women were wearing, I realized, Sunday churchgoing dresses. Several of them clutched small Bibles at their chests, like shields against the assault; others held their hands to their ears and turned their faces sidelong away and down, their own mouths open in Os of dismay. The whole scene had a weirdly static quality, like a medieval landscape with figures, a saint or a prophet, a hostile mob. I waited for someone to pick up a stone.

Linda struck out for the porch, her backpack over one shoulder, passing through the knot of church ladies as though oblivious to them. She took the two steps in one stride to Turner’s side, her hand out to rest on his forearm.

He shied it off, staring pop-eyed at her as if unable to make sense of what he saw: a slight, pale figure in black leather amid the dark purple proprieties assaulting him. He blinked and turned back to the crowd, seeming to mouth one last invocation of Hell! but his voice made no sound. His mouth opening and closing would have been comical if the whole scene hadn’t been so entirely terrifying.

What have we walked in on? I started to turn away, in what should have been the prelude to a quick retreat. But Linda and the keys to the Honda were on the porch beside a red-faced lunatic, in the middle of a circle of strange women who seemed to be gathering themselves, now that Turner had fallen silent, for a new assault.

What have I gotten myself into? I got no answer. I tried a few tentative steps toward joining Linda on the porch. Not that her position seemed any more secure than mine: I only followed some avian instinct to flock in the face of danger. In the relative quiet, my footsteps were loud in the gravel; here and there heads turned.

Are you going to show up? Linda’s question came back to me with a different inflection. But before I could imagine how I might answer it differently, Linda’s voice — cool, neutral, smooth as water — broke what had become almost a silence: even the caged birds behind the house, I realized, had fallen still.

“Hey, Mr. Turner,” she said. “What’s going on?”

She might have intended this as an innocent question, but the church ladies, choosing to hear it as a general inquiry, sent up aggrieved cries, crows wheeling above a stubble field. The gabble conveyed nothing articulate, only a sense of outrage and violation, trailing off into a single woman’s voice muttering, “Thinks he knows who’s going to Hell. ”