Kristopher Jansma - Why We Came to the City

“Picking them up for my nana,” Sara lied. She didn’t quite know why she felt the need to lie — she didn’t even call her grandmother nana, and she lived in Marblehead, two hundred miles away. “Don’t ask me why, but she loves these things.”

The man cringed, cutely. “There’s a café near here that makes wheatgrass shakes. I’m totally addicted. I’m there three times a day. Drinking grass, for God’s sake!”

Sara laughed because his teeth were tinged a faint wintergreen color, and his breath smelled faintly like a lawn mower.

“Picking up?” the pharmacist asked her, a round-faced Polynesian woman with black, unmoving, implacable eyes. BETTIE, said her ID badge.

Bettie , Sara thought miserably. “Bettie!” she said cheerfully, “Could you ring these up for me?”

Bettie’s face was immovable, as it had been the Thursday before, as it had been the Thursday before that. “If you’re not picking up a prescription, then you have to take your purchase to the front.”

Sara spoke sweetly, though under her breath she cursed all the Betties that ever were. “They’re a little backed up right now, and my — my nana, really needs these.”

She wasn’t beyond pulling out the cancer card when it might help in this type of situation — the cancer card had gotten her into it, after all. But she didn’t want the nice bicycle man to know she’d lied about her nana.

“Doctor Von Hatter? Your total comes to thirty-four fifty with the Big Apple discount card.”

But the bicycle man made no move to take his bag from Bettie. “Why don’t you help this nice young lady first? There’s no one else waiting.”

Sara smiled appreciatively, but Bettie just stared at the doctor. “Thirty-four dollars and fifty cents.”

“Charles always rings me up back here,” Sara insisted.

“Charles isn’t here on Thursdays.”

“Yes, but — look. I pick up prescriptions here twice a week for Irene Richmond. You remember me? Prednicen-M? Zofran? Vicoprofen? The one percent hydrocortisone cream?”

Bettie stretched a hand toward her. “If you have an authorization to pick up for Richmond, I can check to see if she’s due for a refill.”

Sara knew Irene wasn’t due for a refill on anything until Sunday.

“This is ridiculous,” the old man said. “There’s no one on line here but me. Zofran and Prednicen? Why don’t you help this young lady so she can take care of her nana?”

Bettie shook her head. “She’s not special. She can take her purchases to the front.”

Even as the bicycler continued to try to reason with the pharmacist, those three words stuck in Sara’s side like tiny prickers. For she was special, and had always believed it. She was more punctual, and she was better prepared. Driven harder and by purer purpose. Kinder to others and more loyal. Always recycling and never littering. Better behaved and never hypocritical. Harder working at the office, tipping more generously, and possessing of a thousand pardons.

And yet she couldn’t save Irene just by trying hardest or being best. Because no one was immune to tragedy. No matter how respectfully Sara lived, death could not respect her in return. She, Irene, all of them were susceptible to collapse, regardless of preparations or punctuality or propriety. None of them were special.

Doctor bicycle man was getting angry now. He’d seemed so nice, and now here was this rage bubbling up. Even he was just another angry person in this claustrophobic fucking city—

Like her. She was furious all the time now. At Dr. Zarrani, who had seemed so on top of things initially but was now proving hard to reach and sounding hapless in the face of the usual treatments failing. At Luther, for allowing one of the city’s greatest newspapers to become a purveyor of garbage, and at the people who preferred escaping into garbage to caring about real news. At herself, for editing said garbage as if it mattered how uncluttered its sentences were. At Jacob, for refusing to settle down and forever distracting himself from the beautiful poetry she knew he could write if he would allow even a sliver of joy into his worldview. And even at Irene, for her completely unacceptable, irrational, disrespectful, nonsensical, whatever-may-come attitude toward absolutely everything in her life, right down to dying—

And there, standing at the back of a Duane Reade while a spandex-clad septuagenarian argued with an apple-faced pharmacist, Sara first realized that Irene was going to die.

She wasn’t getting better, no matter how many pills Sara crushed, no matter how rigidly she held to the color-coded schedule, no matter how she arranged the cells in the Excel spreadsheet. Their final tally was always the same: Irene was dying — and fast —and to Sara, knowing this was like seeing the line at the bottom of the bill. The balance, to be paid in full, for all the disappointments listed above.

“Never mind,” Sara said, picking up her bag back again from the counter. The bicycle doctor looked as if he were going to try to convince her to stand her ground against this abuse of power — but Sara’s ever-patient smile disarmed him, “Really, no problem.”

For I am not special , she thought, as she turned her back on Bettie, who was again asking the doctor for the $34.50 he owed for the prescription co-pay. Sara passed back up the Makeup, Travel Size Shampoo, Children’s Toy aisle toward the front of the store, and she even intended to do just as she’d said — wait in the line in the front like everybody else. But her feet guided her instead toward the door. She slipped the Internet coupon into the tote bag and pulled out her sunglasses. A stock boy paused as he dutifully unloaded tubes of toothpaste from a gray box onto the shelves. Did he know what she was about to do? She smiled at him and — so easy — he smiled back and stepped out of her way.

She walked directly out the front door, not pausing to look back when the little door alarm went off. The harried cashier in the front, dealing with the still-long line, didn’t look up, and neither did the stock boy. Her heart pounded; she felt wonderfully dizzy. There was sidewalk beneath her feet, and she felt like herself again. At the corner she had to pause for the WALK signal to come on. She’d never stolen so much as a Chapstick in her entire life. The tote-bag straps strained against her clenched fingers, yet it seemed to weigh nothing at all.

It was only three more blocks to William’s apartment, but something caught her eye: an M5 bus going downtown to South Street/Whitehall Station. Before she quite knew what they were doing, her feet angled away from their initial target and carried her to the bus doors just before they sighed shut. She pulled off her sunglasses so as not to seem rude when she smiled at the driver. She set the bag down on the ground and pulled her wallet out while he closed the doors and began accelerating out into the spotty traffic along Fifth Avenue.

“Oh!” she said, as she looked into the wrong pocket in the wallet. “Oh no! My card fell out!” And she looked up at the driver; it took him barely a heartbeat to reassure her. He handed her a little pamphlet from the side panel. “Go on in. It’s okay, miss. If it was a monthly, you just call this number, and they’ll replace it.”

“Thank you so much.” She felt a snug sensation, low in her throat. The driver was pleased to help a damsel in distress, and she was pleased to have pleased him, and also pleased not to have paid for the ride.

She sat down and looked out the window, past her reflection at the city rushing by. Windows reaching up into the stratosphere. Tunnels under the pavement, ferrying trains at breakneck speeds. And everywhere in between people walking every which way, wanting every which thing, all living and dying in some mysterious measure. Sara closed her eyes and shut the city out. Her phone buzzed in her pocket, but she didn’t answer it. Either it was Irene, or George, wondering where she was. I don’t know, Sara thought. When she’d get back. I don’t know. Where the medicine was. How to measure the urine or how to get the gunk out of the tube. I don’t know. The phone stopped buzzing. Sara didn’t check the message. Letting go of that last thing she thought was under her control was a high like no other. Realizing it never was. That nobody ever had control over anything.