Charles Bock - Alice & Oliver

“Instead of fighting being here”—she sniffed—“probably it would be helpful if I told myself, This is where I’m going to get better .”

Oliver ran a hand along Alice’s arm. “If New York magazine spent all that time staking out the Black Tide,” he said, “they must have found an answer about the crabs.”

His face was blank, waiting for a response, which confused her. She easily could have fallen apart. Instead Alice swallowed a laugh.

“I couldn’t get through this without you.” She wiped at the corners of her eyes. “You know that? You know, tu esta ?”

He kissed her hand. He whispered: “Tu esta.”

“Really though,” he said. “All those reporters? They had to find out something.”

—

What they found was that the three fresh, polite young people working behind the front desk were backed up to Duluth, and that the exam rooms were all occupied, and that whenever one of those doctors with the bright white lab coats and the expensive ties popped up from the back area, he’d grab a nurse for a quick consultation and scurry off somewhere else. One didn’t need a Ouija board to deduce it was going to be a while before Alice would get called for her bloods, let alone her appointment. She and Oliver filled the lag with hangman — Alice cruised in the first game thanks to blueberry (Oliver praising the word choice as excellent), to which Oliver responded with a feeble plop (Alice sussed it in a snap, a lonely oval marking her single misstep). Alice lifted and turned Doe around and smelled her rear. She wondered if they should try to hold out on changing the baby until they got into an examination room (one of those radioactive waste containers then could get put to good use, most likely). Oliver got up and used a hallway sink to wash his hands, as he’d been doing every nine minutes, even though he hadn’t touched anything since the last rinse except his own pen. He asked a nurse for some medical gloves and blew them up into balloons with protruding blue fingers. In New Hampshire this had worked to distract the baby, but here, the hypnotic effects wore off after a few minutes. In New Hampshire, Oliver and Alice had passed untold amounts of time lying together in her hospital bed and playing rummy; they would remember to bring cards from now on.

Between Oliver’s cleansing jaunts and parlor tricks, while he was getting his ass handed to him at hangman, he and Alice delighted in the sight of their little wonder charming everyone on the fourth floor’s eastern wing, and they further procrastinated about the diaper now sagging with a green slush that Oliver liked to call chana saag, and they reminisced about their shenanigans back in their room in New Hampshire, and they proclaimed themselves incredulous at having nostalgia for that insane time, and they proclaimed themselves thankful for even having the chance to look back, and they proclaimed themselves fortunate for this astounding relationship of theirs, having as much fun in that stupid room as they had, under such ridiculous conditions; and proclaimed they would get through this mess as well, they would survive and look back at all this. Alice also held up a spare issue of New York magazine she’d been leafing through in the waiting room. She told Oliver that the magazine’s spies had indeed learned about a special underground, speakeasy-era, trapdoor entrance to the Black Tide. Instead of printing the origins of those crabs, however, Alice reported, the journalists refused to reveal the answer.

“Hype for hype’s sake?” Oliver made a yanking motion. “The real issue’s whether the Black Tide purchased ad space from the magazine as a trade-off.”

“You honestly think anybody gives a rat’s rear if they flew those things in from Timbuktu?” Alice answered. “People want the mystery. It’s better that way.”

A man was limping — Alice had noticed him earlier, gnarled, with a small mountain rising from his right shoulder. He stopped in front of them. The gray skin covering his skull was stretched, all exterior layers of flesh having been burned away, so that it looked like the angles of his cheekbones threatened to break through. His eyes were freakish, hazel marbles sunken deep into their sockets. He focused on Doe. “What a beautiful, wondrous child you are,” he said. To Alice now: “She’s what — five months?”

“Six, yes.”

“You look at one at this age, it rushes up all the good memories from your own.”

The man said Alice looked superb, her attitude would make the difference. He thanked Oliver for his offer to scoot over on the couch but declined, explaining that couches were murder on his spine, he had a special ergonomic desk chair that he couldn’t sit in without discomfort. Volunteering his name as Cael, he asked which doctor Alice was seeing. “The staff here is excellent. They do everything they possibly can.”

Alice did her best to smile, but Cael picked up on her discomfort.

“Yeah. I know. I’m sorry. It’s a shitty thing being here. Six years now, on and off, I’m in twice a week from Syosset. They’ve done chemo. Radiation. Experimental drugs. Seed implants. Special magical beans.” He chuckled, grimaced. “Every time I was sure they’d got it. They tell you the treatment’s going well. You go into remission, start to get stronger, brick by brick, start to rebuild your life. Then something isn’t right. They do them tests. You get that call. Oh, the spot is back. The spot has spread. Stage four.” He caught himself. “You’re new, Jesus, the last thing you need is to be hearing my shit. I know better, I’m sorry—”

“Don’t be absurd.” Alice tried to smile, her stomach knotting on itself.

“It’ll be different for you, I can tell. You’ve got that beautiful child.”

His smile was trying to be generous, failing. This was a man who knew better than to keep talking, and could not stop himself. “Tumor’s wrapped itself around my kidneys. Who knew cancer could even do that? It’s ridiculous. You wish you could reason with it, explain that the more it grows the quicker that both of us are done. It can’t live and be a happy tumor without me. My only option left is this special surgery. Doc doesn’t even want to try. Honestly, I can’t blame the man. He’d have to remove one kidney, take out the part of the tumor that’s wrapped around that side of my body, and then use a vacuum to suck out the rest. He says surgery would kill me on the operating table. But if they don’t go in—”

Cael took a rolled paper from his back pocket, tapped it out in front of them. “I signed the waiver, absolved the hospital, whatever they want. With any luck today I can convince them…”

He was failing in his effort to be brave, and Alice felt her own failure as well. She breathed in, released outward. She willed herself still. Did her best to stare at this man, to meet him.

Cael swallowed. No longer smiling, his pupils black, fathomless.

REQUISITE KNOCKS ACTED as both interrogative ( Is it okay? ) and warning ( Because I’m coming in ). The oncologist made sure the door was shut behind him, and joined the already crowded room. Where Alice’s New Hampshire physician had looked as if he’d been ordered from a doctor’s catalogue, this new one, the doctor now taking over her care and treatment, seemed to have been ordered from a more expensive catalogue, one with a glossy sheen and higher price points. A bit taller than six feet and robust, with a thick black field of hair slickly parted to one side, looking lightly wet or gelled, Howard Eisenstatt, MD, was neither as old nor as musty as his name suggested. His face oblong and pale, with a thin layer of baby fat; small brown eyes deeply set and hard with intelligence, his nose long and thin.