All I Did Was Shoot My Man

28

I’d never before taken the stairs from Bug’s underground electronic grotto to his first-floor apartment. I knew that Bug owned the apartment above his intelligence laboratory; that he had all mail and deliveries come in and out of there.

I walked up the stairs with sliding panels closing behind me as I went. Finally I came to a slender door. From there I entered into a bright living room that had a large window looking down on Charles Street.

There was a young white woman and an Asian man walking hand in hand on the other side of the block. She wore a pink miniskirt and he blue jeans overalls.

“Leonid,” a woman said from behind and to the left.

I turned to see Helen Bancroft, my wife’s personal physician for at least twenty-five years.

She was taller than I, but not by much, and gray- instead of raven-haired as she was when we first met. Back then her hair was long and lustrous. Now it was short, more revealing of her face and smile.

“Helen?”

She smiled and said, “Would you come into the kitchen?”

“Maybe if you tell me what you’re doing here,” I said.

Helen was slender and smart. She wore a gray pantsuit and an orange blouse with a necklace made from leafy and nacreous ceramic charms. Her hands were small and delicate. Her eyes were brown, but one of their ancestors might have been salmon.

“Your wife called me,” she said.

“When?”

“Yesterday. She said that you were running a fever and didn’t want to take time to see a doctor. She told me that I’d be called by a woman named Zephyra when she knew that you’d be in your office. I had agreed to make a house call. You know, Katrina and I go way back.”

“That doesn’t explain how you got here.”

“This morning, half an hour ago, Zephyra called and told me that you’d be in Mr. Bateman’s apartment. She said that she knew my office was only a few blocks away. She’s a smart woman.

“Now will you come with me into the kitchen?”

She had me strip down to my underwear and sit on a sheet of wax paper that she spread out on the dining table. I sat upright and then laid back, got on my side and let her use her rubber gloves to inspect my prostate. She took my temperature, of course.

“What is it?” I asked.

“One-oh-two-point-one. You should be in bed.”

“Not that you’re wrong, Doctor,” I said, “but bed is the last place I should be.”

She looked into my eyes, down my throat, shone a light in my ears, and felt around my abdominal area.

“Does anybody live in this apartment?” she asked toward the end of all those studies.

“Not physically,” I said. “What’s wrong with me, Doc?”

“It’s hard to say. You definitely have a fever. It’s either a low-grade virus or infection or, more likely, a virus that has become an infection that settled in an organ or gland. The left side of your neck is a little swollen. You need bed rest.”

“Not unless you think the cure is more important than the life of the patient.”

This statement brought mild alarm into the doctor’s eyes.

“I’ve brought a new general antibiotic.” From her bag she retrieved a little glass bottle filled with tiny purple pills. “If you take one of these three times a day, preferably with meals, that should knock out any infection.”

“How many days?”

“Ten, to be safe.”

She went to the cabinet and brought out a glass that she filled in the sink.

Bringing the tumbler back to me, she asked, “Have you eaten recently?”

“Not too long ago.”

“Then take three of these to start with. It will bring down that fever and keep you going. After that take them three times a day.”

“It’s been a long time, Helen,” I said after downing the Lilliputian tablets.

“Yes, it has.”

“What, twenty years?”

“Maybe more.”

“How’s my wife doing?”

A shadow passed over the physician’s intelligent face.

“I’m worried about Katrina,” she said.

“Is she sick?”

“I think she’s depressed. It’s unethical for me to be discussing this with you but the reason I agreed to this unorthodox meeting is partly because I wanted to tell you what I felt.”

“She needs medicine?”

“She needs help. A therapist, a psychopharmacologist... something.”

“Huh.” I was pulling up my pants.

“Will you talk to her, Leonid?”

“What do you think it is?”

“Menopause has started. Many times women go through depression at the change. They feel like they are no longer women. Some women believe that there’s no place in this man’s world for a female who is barren.”

Standing there, buttoning my shirt and looking at my wife’s friend and doctor, I thought about the barren apartment in which we stood, about the millions of terabytes of secret information that roiled below us — knowledge that could bring down corporations and do more damage to governments than ten thousand daisy cutter bombs.

Then I considered my wife. I felt that I had to be in that room, at that moment, after fever and fear and death. If one of those elements was missing I wouldn’t have stumbled onto the words I spoke.

“You know, Katrina doesn’t let you in, Helen,” I said. “She thinks she does. She gets an idea in her head and she looks at you and imagines that you’re thinking the same thing — or that you aren’t. But what you think and what you say does not, cannot, mean a thing to her. The idea is already there.”

Dr. Bancroft winced as if jabbed with one of her own scalpels. She nodded and said, “But you know her better than anyone, Leonid. You have to try to get through to her.”