Alix Ohlin - Signs and Wonders

I answered the door one night in December to find him standing on the doorstep, swaying a little. Over one shoulder was a blue backpack he always had with him, and sometimes I wondered if it contained all his worldly possessions.

“Yo,” he said. “I don’t think we’ve met.”

“We have, actually. More than once.”

“It was a joke, Doctor Tom.”

“Oh,” I said. He was just as deadpan as his sister. “Come on in. Steph’s cooking.”

When she saw him coming into the kitchen her face lit up, nothing deadpan about that. She was always happy when he came, no matter what condition he was in. For the first few minutes, we were so distracted by the commotion of cooking and getting all the food on the table that we didn’t notice how high he was. But then I realized he wasn’t eating, just holding up his fork and looking at it, as if inspecting it for cleanliness. He seemed transfixed. After a while the two of us watched in silence.

Finally he noticed, and put it down. “It’s beautiful, you know?” he said.

“It’s Mom and Dad’s old set,” Stephanie said. She passed me some garlic bread, nudging me to hand the basket to Alan. She wanted him to get something into his stomach.

“No, I mean forks in general,” Alan said musingly. “There’s this perfection to them. You know what word I’ve always liked? Tines. The tines of a fork. It sounds so perfect, like little chimes. Like a trinity. Like a trinity of chimes.”

“Oh, kiddo,” Stephanie said. “What did you take?”

Alan smiled at her. He was the most affable addict I’d ever met. “I feel good,” he said. “I got a little help from Ludo.”

This was a guy from Allentown who’d served in Alan’s unit. They hung around together a lot, though they often fought, Ludo driving off and leaving him stranded at a bar, or a McDonald’s at midnight, or a truck stop in Ohio, halfway through some road trip they’d cooked up and then abandoned.

I could see he wasn’t going to eat anything, and Stephanie’s eagerness for him to be there like a normal person was tearing at my heart. “How about you lie down for a bit?” I said.

He smiled at me, his green eyes warm. “That’s not a terrible idea, sir,” he said. He settled himself on the couch, and in a couple minutes we could hear him snoring. At first Stephanie just sat there, staring down at her spaghetti, tears glimmering in her eyes. But I reminded her she didn’t want to get sick, that she had to keep her strength up, and she nodded and lifted her fork. She was sensible like that.

After dinner, I did the dishes while Stephanie made up the spare room for Alan, then crashed in front of the TV. To my surprise, when I went back there to check on him, he was awake. The bedside lamp was on and he was reading one of her Cosmos.

“Guess what?” he said when he saw me. “The female body has a hundred pleasure receptors.”

“Must be nice,” I said.

“Seriously,” he said. “I know maybe three.”

“Yeah.” This wasn’t a topic I was interested in pursuing. “You need anything?”

“Where’s Steph?”

“Sleeping. She’s had a long day.”

“I hear you,” he said. “I hear you.” He was sitting propped up against the pillows, his legs straight out in front of him. With his shoes still on you couldn’t tell which one was the prosthetic foot. He saw me looking.

“You’re a doctor. Tell me why it’s the one that’s gone that hurts.”

“The nerve endings,” I said. “They call it ghost pain. The OxyContin should help.”

He snorted. “I’m not going to lie to you, OxyContin’s like baby aspirin to me at this point.”

I didn’t know what to say to this. “How’s the physical therapy going?”

“How do you think?” He closed his eyes, and a small smile played across his face. “I was in this tank once, me and Ludo,” he said. “We were going through this patch of desert when we heard all this artillery, it sounded real heavy. And then it just stopped. Ludo tells me to stick my head out and see what’s going on. I say no way, I’m gonna get killed. We argue about it for a while. Finally I say okay and stick my head out the top. I look around and I can’t see a damn thing. Not one single person for miles. All I see is this brown desert. After a while, none of it makes sense to me. You know how if you look at a word too long, you can’t tell if it’s a real word? I couldn’t even tell the difference between the sand and the sky. Finally Ludo pulls me back down. The weird thing is, we never did hear anything about combat engagement that day. Nobody ever said one word about it.”

“Was that where you got hurt?” I said.

“No,” he said. “That was somewhere else.”

He was so quiet after that I figured he’d fallen asleep. I was about to switch off the light when he finally spoke. “You got anything on you, Doctor Tom?”

“Sorry.”

“Don’t hold out on me,” he said. He opened his eyes and there was no affability there, no sweetness at all. “Don’t you fucking hold out.”

I could see how much he hated me. For being a doctor, for fucking his sister. For having both my feet, for waking each day without pain. “I don’t have anything,” I said, and left.

Steph kept inviting him over for dinner. I think she hoped that the more time he spent with her, in her calm, organized orbit, the more it would rub off on him. Or maybe she was just hoping to keep him decently fed. When invited, he always showed up, always toting that backpack, mostly sober, sometimes not. Once I woke up at midnight and went to the bathroom only to find him passed out next to the sink. I poured cold water over his head to wake him up. He came around slowly, shaking his head, and grabbed at me. He’d lost weight, and he was scrawny, but his arms were strong and ropy with muscle. I went through his backpack. He had five different medications in there but all the vials were empty. Other than the meds, there was nothing in the backpack except a dog-eared copy of Sports Illustrated and wallet with a Costco card in it.

“Please get the fuck off me,” he said, pushing me away.

“How much did you take?”

“I couldn’t sleep.”

“Did you throw up?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Do it now.”

“I’m sleepy now, man.”

“Do it now, or I’ll have to take you in and pump your stomach.”

“Okay,” he said, “Okay.” He stuck his fingers down his throat until he gagged. He seemed practiced at it. I sat with him for an hour or so, leaning next to him against the wall and making him drink water, until I felt like he was all right.

Midnight, Tuesday. It was February, an icy night with the roads as slick as rinks, when we got the call from St. Luke’s. Someone had found Alan behind a bar. It seemed possible he’d been there an entire day and night before he was discovered. The temperature hadn’t been above freezing for a week. By the time we got to the hospital, he was awake. The skin on his face was peeling, his lips cracked and bloody.

“Hey, kiddo,” Stephanie said. As she leaned over him, covering his hand with hers, he bared his teeth at her like an animal.

“Leave me the fuck alone,” he said.

Stephanie had just worked a double shift. Exhausted, she started to cry. “Alan,” she said.

I touched her arm. “Why don’t you take a minute?”

She hung her head. She didn’t want to leave him, but she was about to lose it. She nodded, resigned. “I’m going to call Mom and Dad,” she told him. “I’ll be right back.”

As soon as she was gone his mood seemed to clear, and he grinned at me. The dimple in his cheek was still there when he smiled, incongruous against the chapped skin. I’d never seen him like this, his moods so all over the place.