After the Plague

Killing Babies

When I got out of rehab for the second time, there were some legal complications, and the judge — an old jerk who looked like they’d just kicked him out of the Politburo — decided I needed a sponsor. There was a problem with some checks I’d been writing for a while there when all my resources were going up the glass tube, and since I didn’t have a record except for traffic infractions and a juvenile possession when I was fifteen, the court felt inclined to mercy. Was there anybody who could speak up for me, my attorney wondered, anybody financially responsible? Philip, I said, my brother Philip. He’s a doctor.

So Philip. He lived in Detroit, a place I’d never been to, a place where it gets cold in winter and the only palm trees are under glass in the botanical gardens. It would be a change, a real change. But a change is what I needed, and the judge liked the idea that he wouldn’t have to see me in Pasadena anymore and that I’d have a room in Philip’s house with Philip’s wife and my nephews, Josh and Jeff, and that I would be gainfully employed doing lab work at Philip’s obstetrical clinic for the princely sum of six dollars and twenty-five cents an hour.

So Philip. He met me at the airport, his thirty-eight-year-old face as trenched with anal-retentive misery as our father’s was in the year before he died. His hair was going, I saw that right away, and his glasses were too big for his head. And his shoes — he was wearing a pair of brown suede boatlike things that would have had people running for the exits at the Rainbow Club. I hadn’t seen him in six years, not since the funeral, that is, and I wouldn’t have even recognized him if it wasn’t for his eyes — they were just like mine, as blue and icy as a bottle of Aqua Velva. “Little brother,” he said, and he tried to gather a smile around the thin flaps of his lips while he stood there gaping at me like somebody who hadn’t come to the airport specifically to fetch his down-on-his-luck brother and was bewildered to discover him there.

“Philip,” I said, and I set down my two carry-on bags to pull him to me in a full-body, back-thumping, chest-to-chest embrace, as if I was glad to see him. But I wasn’t glad to see him. Not particularly. Philip was ten years older than me, and ten years is a lot when you’re a kid. By the time I knew his name he was in college, and when I was expressing myself with my father’s vintage Mustang, a Ziploc baggie of marijuana, and a can of high-gloss spray paint, he was in medical school. I’d never much liked him, and he felt about the same toward me, and as I embraced him there in the Detroit airport I wondered how that was going to play out over the course of the six months the judge had given me to stay out of trouble and make full restitution or serve the next six in jail.

“Have a good flight?” Philip asked when I was done embracing him.

I stood back from him a moment, the bags at my feet, and couldn’t help being honest with him; that’s just the way I am. “You look like shit, Philip,” I said. “You look like Dad just before he died — or maybe after he died.”

A woman with a big shining planetoid of a face stopped to give me a look, then hitched up her skirt and stamped on by in her heels. The carpeting smelled of chemicals. Outside the dirt-splotched windows was snow, a substance I’d had precious little experience of. “Don’t start, Rick,” Philip said. “I’m in no mood. Believe me.”

I shouldered my bags, stooped over a cigarette, and lit it just to irritate him. I was hoping he’d tell me there was a county ordinance against smoking in public places and that smoking was slow suicide, from a physician’s point of view, but he didn’t rise to the bait. He just stood there, looking harassed. “I’m not starting,” I said. “I’m just … I don’t know. I’m just concerned, that’s all. I mean, you look like shit. I’m your brother. Shouldn’t I be concerned?”

I thought he was going to start wondering aloud why I should be concerned about him, since I was the one on the run from an exasperated judicial system and twelve thousand and some-odd dollars in outstanding checks, but he surprised me. He just shrugged and shifted that lipless smile around a bit and said, “Maybe I’ve been working too hard.”

Philip lived on Washtenaw Street, in an upscale housing development called Washtenaw Acres, big houses set back from the street and clustered around a lake glistening with black ice under a weak sky and weaker sun. The trees were stripped and ugly, like dead sticks rammed into the ground, and the snow wasn’t what I’d expected. Somehow I’d thought it would be fluffy and soft, movie snow, big pillows of it cushioning the ground while kids whooshed through it on their sleds, but it wasn’t like that at all. It lay on the ground like a scab, clots of dirt and yellow weed showing through in mangy patches. Bleak, that’s what it was, but I told myself it was better than the Honor Rancho, a whole lot better, and as we pulled into the long sweeping driveway to Philip’s house I put everything I had into feeling optimistic.

Denise had put on weight. She was waiting for us inside the door that led from the three-car garage into the kitchen. I didn’t know her well enough to embrace her the way I’d embraced Philip, and I have to admit I was taken aback by the change in her — she was fat, there was nothing else to say about it — so I just filtered out the squeals of welcome and shook her hand as if it was something I’d found in the street. Besides which, the smell of dinner hit me square in the face, so overpowering it almost brought me to my knees. I hadn’t been in a real kitchen with a real dinner in the oven since I was a kid and my mother was alive, because after she died, and with Philip away, it was just my father and me, and we tended to go out a lot, especially on Sundays.

“You hungry?” Denise asked while we did an awkward little dance around the gleaming island of stainless steel and tile in the middle of the kitchen. “I’ll bet you’re starved,” she said, “after all that bachelor cooking and the airplane food. And look at you — you’re shivering. He’s shivering, Philip.”

I was, and no denying it.

“You can’t run around in a T-shirt and leather jacket and expect to survive a Michigan winter — it might be all right for L.A. maybe, but not here.” She turned to Philip, who’d been standing there as if someone had crept up on him and nailed his shoes to the floor. “Philip, haven’t you got a parka for Rick? How about that blue one with the red lining you never wear anymore? And a pair of gloves, for God’s sake. Get him a pair of gloves, will you?” She came back to me then, all smiles: “We can’t have our California boy getting frostbite now, can we?”

Philip agreed that we couldn’t, and we all stood there smiling at one another till I said, “Isn’t anybody going to offer me a drink?”

Then it was my nephews — red-faced howling babies in dirty yellow diapers the last time I’d seen them, at the funeral that had left me an orphan at twenty-three, little fists glomming onto the cold cuts while drool descended toward the dip — but here they were, eight and six, edging up to me in high-tops and oversized sweatshirts while I threw back my brother’s scotch. “Hey,” I said, grinning till I thought my head would burst, “remember me? I’m your Uncle Rick.”

They didn’t remember me — how could they? — but they brightened at the sight of the two yellow bags of M&M’s peanut candies I’d thought to pick up at the airport newsstand. Josh, the eight-year-old, took the candy gingerly from my hand, while his brother looked on to see if I was going to sprout fangs and start puking up black vomit. We were all sitting around the living room, very clean, very Home & Garden, getting acquainted. Philip and Denise held on to their drinks as if they were afraid somebody was going to steal them. We were all grinning. “What’s that on your eyebrow?” Josh said.

I reached up and fingered the thin gold loop. “It’s a ring,” I said. “You know, like an earring, only it’s in my eyebrow.”

No one said anything for a long moment. Jeff, the younger one, looked as if he was going to start crying. “Why?” Josh said finally, and Philip laughed and I couldn’t help myself — I laughed too. It was all right. Everything was all right. Philip was my brother and Denise was my sister-in-law and these kids with their wide-open faces and miniature Guess jeans were my nephews. I shrugged, laughing still. “Because it’s cool,” I said, and I didn’t even mind the look Philip gave me.

Later, after I’d actually crawled into the top bunk and read the kids a Dr. Seuss story that set off all sorts of bells in my head, Philip and Denise and I discussed my future over coffee and homemade cinnamon rolls. My immediate future, that is — as in tomorrow morning, 8 A.M., at the clinic. I was going to be an entry-level drudge despite my three years of college, my musical background and family connections, rinsing out test tubes and sweeping the floors and disposing of whatever was left in the stainless-steel trays when my brother and his colleagues finished with their “procedures.”

“All right,” I said. “Fine. I’ve got no problem with that.”

Denise had tucked her legs up under her on the couch. She was wearing a striped caftan that could have sheltered armies. “Philip had a black man on full time, just till a week ago, nicest man you’d ever want to meet — and bright too, very bright — but he, uh, didn’t feel …”

Philip’s voice came out of the shadows at the end of the couch, picking up where she’d left off. “He went on to something better,” he said, regarding me steadily through the clear walls of his glasses. “I’m afraid the work isn’t all that mentally demanding — or stimulating, for that matter — but, you know, little brother, it’s a start, and, well—”

“Yeah, I know,” I said, “beggars can’t be choosers.” I wanted to add to that, to maybe soften it a bit — I didn’t want him to get the idea I wasn’t grateful, because I was — but I never got the opportunity. Just then the phone rang. I looked up at the sound — it wasn’t a ring exactly, more like a bleat, eh-eh-eh-eh-eh—and saw that my brother and his wife were staring into each other’s eyes in shock, as if a bomb had just gone off. Nobody moved. I counted two more rings before Denise said, “I wonder who that could be at this hour?” and Philip, my brother with the receding hairline and the too-big glasses and his own eponymous clinic in suburban Detroit, said, “Forget it, ignore it, it’s nobody.”

And that was strange, because we sat there in silence and listened to that phone ring over and over — twenty times, twenty times at least — until whoever it was on the other end finally gave up. Another minute ticked by, the silence howling in our ears, and then Philip stood, looked at his watch, and said, “What do you think — time to turn in?”

I wasn’t stupid, not particularly — no stupider than anybody else, anyway — and I was no criminal, either. I’d just drifted into a kind of thick sludge of hopelessness after I dropped out of school for a band I put my whole being into, a band that disintegrated within the year, and one thing led to another. Jobs came and went. I spent a lot of time on the couch, channel-surfing and thumbing through books that used to mean something to me. I found women and lost them. And I learned that a line up your nose is a dilettante’s thing, wasteful and extravagant. I started smoking, two or three nights a week, and then it was five or six nights a week, and then it was every day, all day, and why not? That was how I felt. Sure. And now I was in Michigan, starting over.

Anyway, it wouldn’t have taken a genius to understand why my brother and his wife had let that phone ring — not after Philip and I swung into the parking lot behind the clinic at seven forty-five the next morning. I wasn’t even awake, really — it was four forty-five West Coast time, an hour that gave me a headache even to imagine, much less live through. Beyond the misted-up windows, everything was gloom, a kind of frozen fog hanging in air the color of lemon ice. The trees, I saw, hadn’t sprouted leaves overnight. Every curb was a repository of frozen trash.

Philip and I had been making small talk on the way into town, very small talk, out of consideration for the way I was feeling. Denise had given me coffee, which was about all I could take at that hour, but Philip had gobbled a big bowl of bran flakes and sunflower seeds with skim milk, and the boys, shy around me all over again, spooned up Lucky Charms and Frosted Flakes in silence. I came out of my daze the minute the tires hit the concrete apron separating the private property of the lot from the public space of the street: there were people there, a whole shadowy mass of shoulders and hats and steaming faces that converged on us with a shout. At first I didn’t know what was going on — I thought I was trapped in a bad movie, Night of the Living Dead or Zombies on Parade. The faces were barking at us, teeth bared, eyes sunk back in their heads, hot breath boiling from their throats. “Murderers!” they were shouting. “Nazis!” “Baby-killers!”

We inched our way across the sidewalk and into the lot, working through the mass of them as if we were on a narrow lane in a dense forest, and Philip gave me a look that explained it all, from the lines in his face to Denise’s fat to the phone that rang in the middle of the night no matter how many times he changed the number. This was war. I climbed out of the car with my heart hammering, and as the cold knife of the air cut into me I looked back to where they stood clustered at the gate, lumpish and solid, people you’d see anywhere. They were singing now. Some hymn, some self-righteous churchy Jesus-thumping hymn that bludgeoned the traffic noise and the deep-frozen air with the force of a weapon. I didn’t have time to sort it out, but I could feel the slow burn of anger and humiliation coming up in me. Philip’s hand was on my arm. “Come on,” he said. “We’ve got work to do, little brother.”

That day, the first day, was a real trial. Yes, I was turning over a new leaf, and yes, I was determined to succeed and thankful to my brother and the judge and the great giving, forgiving society I belonged to, but this was more than I’d bargained for. I had no illusions about the job — I knew it would be dull and diminishing, and I knew life with Philip and Denise would be one long snooze — but I wasn’t used to being called a baby-killer. Liar, thief, crackhead — those were names I’d answered to at one time or another. Murderer was something else.

My brother wouldn’t talk about it. He was busy. Wired. Hurtling around the clinic like a gymnast on the parallel bars. By nine I’d met his two associates (another doctor and a counsellor, both female, both unattractive); his receptionist; Nurses Tsing and Hempfield; and Fred. Fred was a big rabbity-looking guy in his early thirties with a pale reddish mustache and hair of the same color climbing up out of his head in all directions. He had the official title of “technician,” though the most technical things I saw him do were drawing blood and divining urine for signs of pregnancy, clap, or worse. None of them — not my brother, the nurses, the counsellor, or even Fred — wanted to discuss what was going on at the far end of the parking lot and on the sidewalk out front. The zombies with the signs — yes, signs, I could see them out the window, ABORTION KILLS and SAVE THE PREBORNS and I WILL ADOPT YOUR BABY — were of no more concern to them than mosquitoes in June or a sniffle in December. Or at least that was how they acted.

I tried to draw Fred out on the subject as we sat together at lunch in the back room. We were surrounded by shadowy things in jars of formalin, gleaming stainless-steel sinks, racks of test tubes, reference books, cardboard boxes full of drug samples and syringes and gauze pads and all the rest of the clinic’s paraphernalia. “So what do you think of all this, Fred?” I said, gesturing toward the window with the ham-and-Swiss on rye Denise had made me in the dark hours of the morning.

Fred was hunched over a newspaper, doing the acrostic puzzle and sucking on his teeth. His lunch consisted of a microwave chili-and-cheese burrito and a quart of root beer. He gave me a quizzical look.

“The protesters, I mean. The Jesus-thumpers out there. Is it like this all the time?” And then I added a little joke, so he wouldn’t think I was intimidated: “Or did I just get lucky?”

“Who, them?” Fred did something with his nose and his upper teeth, something rabbity, as if he were tasting the air. “They’re nobody. They’re nothing.”

“Yeah?” I said, hoping for more, hoping for some details, some explanation, something to assuage the creeping sense of guilt and shame that had been building in me all morning. Those people had pigeonholed me before I’d even set foot in the door, and that hurt. They were wrong. I was no baby-killer — I was just the little brother of a big brother, trying to make a new start. And Philip was no baby-killer, either — he was a guy doing his job, that was all. Shit, somebody had to do it. Up to this point I guess I’d never really given the issue much thought — my girlfriends, when there were girlfriends, had taken care of the preventative end of things on their own, and we never really discussed it — but my feeling was that there were too many babies in the world already, too many adults, too many suet-faced Jesus-thumping jerks ready to point the finger, and didn’t any of these people have better things to do? Like a job, for instance? But Fred wasn’t much help. He just sighed, nibbled at the wilted stem of his burrito, and said, “You get used to it.”

I wondered about that as the afternoon crept by, and then my mind went numb from jet lag and the general wash of misery and I let my body take over. I scrubbed out empty jars and test tubes with Clorox, labelled and filed the full ones on the racks that lined the walls, stood at Fred’s elbow and watched as he squeezed drops of urine onto strips of litmus paper and made notations in a ledger. My white lab coat got progressively dirtier. Every once in a while I’d come to and catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror over the sinks, the mad scientist exposed, the baby-killer, the rinser of test tubes and secreter of urine, and have an ironic little laugh at my own expense. And then it started to get dark, Fred vanished, and I was introduced to mop and squeegee. It was around then, when I just happened to be taking a cigarette break by the only window in the room, that I caught a glimpse of one of our last tardy patients of the day hurrying up the sidewalk elbow to elbow with a grim middle-aged woman whose face screamed I am her mother!

The girl was sixteen, seventeen maybe, a pale face, pale as a bulb, and nothing showing on her, at least not with the big white doughboy parka she was wearing. She looked scared, her little mouth clamped tight, her eyes fixed on her feet. She was wearing black leggings that seemed to sprout from the folds of the parka and a pair of furry white ankle boots that were like house slippers. I watched her glide through the dead world on the flowing stalks of her legs, a spoiled pouty chalk-cheeked sweetness to her face, and it moved something in me, something long buried beneath a mountain of grainy little yellow-white rocks. Maybe she was just coming in for an examination, I thought, maybe that was it. Or she’d just become sexually active — or was thinking of it — and her mother was one step ahead of her. Either way, that was what I wanted to believe. With this girl, with her quick fluid step and downcast eyes and all the hope and misery they implied, I didn’t want to think of “procedures.”

They’d almost reached the building when the zombies began to stir. From where I was standing I couldn’t see the front of the building, and the Jesus-thumpers had already begun to fade out of my consciousness, dim as it was. But they came crashing back into the picture now, right there at the corner of the building, shoulders and heads and placards, and one in particular. A shadow that separated itself from the mass and was instantly transformed into a hulking bearded zealot with snapping teeth and eyes like hardboiled eggs. He came right up to the girl and her mother, rushing at them like a torpedo, and you could see how they shied away from him and how his head raged back on his shoulders, and then they ducked past the corner of the building and out of my line of sight.

I was stunned. This wasn’t right, I was thinking, and I didn’t want to get angry or depressed or emotional — keep on an even keel, that’s what they tell you in rehab — but I couldn’t help snuffing the cigarette and stepping quietly out into the hallway that ran the length of the building and gave me an unobstructed view of the front door. I moved forward almost against my will, my feet like toy cars on a track, and I hadn’t got halfway down the hall before the door opened on the dwindling day and the dead sticks of the trees, and suddenly there she was, pale in a pale coat and her face two shades paler. We exchanged a look. I don’t know what she saw in my eyes — weakness, hunger, fear — but I know what I saw in hers, and it was so poignant and so everlastingly sad I knew I’d never have another moment’s rest till I took hold of it.

In the car on the way home Philip was so relaxed I wondered if he wasn’t prescribing something for himself. Here was the antithesis of the ice man who’d picked me up at the airport, watched me eat pork chops, read to his children, and brush my teeth in the guest bathroom, and then thrown me to the wolves at the clinic. “Sorry about all that commotion this morning,” he said, glancing at me in the glowing cubicle of the car. “I would have warned you, but you can never tell when they’re going to pull something like that.”

“So it gets better, is that what you’re saying?”

“Not much,” he said. “There’s always a couple of them out there, the real hard-core nuts. But the whole crew of the walking dead like you saw today, that’s maybe only once a week. Unless they go on one of their campaigns, and I can’t figure out what provokes them — the weather, the tides in the lake, the phases of the moon — but then they go all out, theater in the street, schoolchildren, the works. They throw themselves under the wheels, handcuff themselves to the front door — it’s a real zoo.”

“But what about the cops? Can’t you get a restraining order or something?”

He shrugged, fiddled with the tape player — opera, he was listening to opera, a thin screech of it in the night — and turned to me again, his gloved hands rigid on the wheel. “The cops are a bunch of pro-lifers, and they have no objection to those people out there harassing my patients and abridging their civil rights, and even the women just coming in for an exam have to walk the gauntlet. It’s hell on business, believe me. And it’s dangerous too. They scare me, the real crazies, the ones that shoot people. You’ve heard of John Britton? David Gunn? George Tiller?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe. You’ve got to realize I’ve been out of touch for a while.”

“Shot down by people like the ones you saw out there today. Two of them died.”

I didn’t like hearing that. The thought of one of those nutballs attacking my brother, attacking me, was like throwing gasoline on a bed of hot coals. I’d never been one to turn the other cheek, and I didn’t feature martyrdom, not at all. I looked out on a blur of brake lights and the crust of ice that seemed to narrow the road into a funnel ahead of us. “Why don’t you shoot them first?” I said.

My brother’s voice was hard. “Sometimes I wish I could.”

We stopped to pick up a few things at the market, and then we were home, dinner stabbing at my salivary glands, the whole house warm and sugary with it, and Philip sat down to watch the news and have a scotch with me. Denise was right there at the door when we came in — and now we embraced, no problem, sister- and brother-in-law, one big happy family. She wanted to know how my day was, and before I could open my mouth, she was answering for me: “Not much of a challenge, huh? Pretty dull, right? Except for the crazies — they never fail to liven things up, do they? What Philip goes through, huh, Philip? Philip?”

I was beat, but the scotch smoked through my veins, the kids came and sat beside me on the couch with their comics and coloring books, and I felt good, felt like part of the family and no complaints. Denise served a beef brisket with oven-roasted potatoes, carrots, and onions, a fresh green salad, and coconut creme pie for dessert. I was planning on turning in early, but I drifted into the boys’ room and took over the Winnie-the-Pooh chores from my brother because it was something I wanted to do. Later, it must have been about ten, I was stretched out on my own bed — and again I had to hand it to Denise, because the room was homey and private, done up with little knickknacks and embroidery work and whatnot — when my brother poked his head in the door. “So,” he said, mellow with the scotch and whatever else, “you feeling okay about everything?”

That touched me. It did. Here I’d come into the airport with a chip on my shoulder — I’d always been jealous of Philip, the great shining success my father measured me against — thinking my big brother was going to be an asshole and that assholery would rule the day, but it wasn’t like that at all. He was reaching out. He was a doctor. He knew about human foibles and addictions and he knew about his little brother, and he cared, he actually cared. “Yeah,” was all I could manage, but I hoped the quality of my voice conveyed a whole lot more than that.

“Good,” he said, framed in the light from the hallway, his sunken orbits and rucked face and flat, shining eyes giving him a look of wisdom and calm that reminded me of our father on his good days.

“That girl,” I said, inspired by the intimacy of the moment, “the last one that came in today?”

His expression changed. Now it was quizzical, distant, as if he were looking at me through the wrong end of a telescope. “What girl? What are you talking about?”

“The young-looking one in the white parka and furry boots? The last one. The last one in. I was just wondering if, uh, I mean, what her problem was — if she was, you know, coming in for a procedure or whatever…. ”

“Listen, Rick,” he said then, and his voice was back in the deep freeze, “I’m willing to give you a chance here, not only for Dad’s sake but for your own sake too. But there’s one thing I ask — stay away from the patients. And I’m not really asking.”

It was raining the next morning, a cold rain that congealed on the hood of the car and made a cold pudding of the sidewalk out front of the house. I wondered if the weather would discourage the Jesus-thumpers, but they were there, all right, in yellow rain slickers and green gum boots, sunk into their suffering with gratitude. Nobody rushed the car when we turned into the lot. They just stood there, eight of them, five men and three women, and looked hate at us. As we got out of the car, the frozen rain pelting us, I locked eyes across the lot with the bearded jerk who’d gone after the girl in the white parka. I waited till I was good and certain I had his attention, waited till he was about to shout out some hoarse Jesus-thumping accusation, and then I gave him the finger.

We were the first ones at the clinic, what with the icy roads, and as soon as my brother disappeared into the sanctum of his office I went straight to the receptionist’s desk and flipped back the page of the appointment book. The last entry, under four-thirty the previous day, was staring me in the face, neat block letters in blue metalpoint: “Sally Strunt,” it read, and there was a phone number jotted beneath the name. It took me exactly ten seconds, and then I was in the back room, innocently slipping into my lab coat. Sally Strunt, I whispered to myself, Sally Strunt, over and over. I’d never known anyone named Sally — it was an old-fashioned name, a hokey name, Dick and Jane and Sally, and because it was old-fashioned and because it was hokey it seemed perfect for a teenager in trouble in the grim sleety washed-out navel of the Midwest. This was no downtown Amber, no Crystal or Shanna — this was Detroit Sally, and that really appealed to me. I’d seen the face attached to the name, and the mother of that face. Sally, Sally, Sally. Her name sang through my head as I schmoozed with Fred and the nurses and went through the motions of the job that already felt as circumscribed and deadening as a prison sentence.

That night, after dinner, I excused myself and strolled six cold wintry blocks to the convenience store. I bought M&M’s for the boys, some white chocolate for Denise, and a liter of Black Cat malt liquor for myself. Then I dialled Sally’s number from the phone booth out front of the store.

A man answered, impatient, harassed. “Yeah?”

“Sally there?” I said.

“Who’s this?”

I took a stab at it: “Chris Ryan. From school?”

Static. Televised dialogue. The roar of Sally’s name and the sound of approaching feet and Sally’s approaching voice: “Who is it?” And then, into the receiver: “Hello?”

“Sally?” I said.

“Yes?” There was hope in that voice, eagerness. She wanted to hear from me — or from whoever. This wasn’t the voice of a girl concealing things. It was open, frank, friendly. I felt expansive suddenly, connected, felt as if everything was going to be all right, not only for me but for Sally too.

“You don’t know me,” I said quickly, “but I really admire you. I mean, your courage. I admire what you’re doing.”

“Who is this?”

“Chris,” I said. “Chris Ryan. I saw you yesterday, at the clinic, and I really admire you, but I just wanted to know if, uh, if you need anything.”

Her voice narrowed, thin as wire. “What are you talking about?”

“Sally,” I said, and I didn’t know what I was doing or what I was feeling, but I couldn’t help myself, “Sally, can I ask you something? Are you pregnant, or are you—?”

Click. She hung up on me. Just like that.

I was frozen through by the time I got back with the kids’ M&M’s and Denise’s white chocolate, and I’d finished off the beer on the way and flung the empty bottle up under a squat artificial-looking spruce on the neighbor’s lawn. I’d tried Sally twice more, after an interval of fifteen or twenty minutes, but her father answered the first time and when I dialled again the phone just rang and kept on ringing.

A week went by. I scrubbed out test tubes and jars that smelled powerfully of the urine of strange women and learned that Fred didn’t much care for Afro-Americans, Mexicans, Haitians, Cubans, Poles, or Hmong tribesmen. I tried Sally’s number three more times and each time I was rebuffed — threatened, actually — and I began to realize I was maybe just a bit out of line. Sally didn’t need me — she had her father and mother and maybe a gangling big-footed slam-dunking brother into the bargain — and every time I glanced through the blinds in the back room I saw another girl just like her. Still, I was feeling itchy and out of sorts despite all Denise and Philip and my nephews were doing for me, and I needed some sort of focus, a plan, something to make me feel good about myself. They’d warned us about this in rehab, and I knew this was the trickiest stage, the time when the backsliders start looking up their old friends and hanging out on the street corner. But I didn’t have any old friends, not in Detroit, anyway, and the street corner was about as inviting as the polar ice cap. On Saturday night I went out to a bar that looked as if it had been preserved under Plexiglas in a museum somewhere, and I came on to a couple of girls and drank too much and woke up the next morning with a headache.

Then it was Monday and I was sitting at the breakfast table with my brother and my two nephews and it was raining again. Sleeting, actually. I wanted to go back to bed. I toyed with the idea of telling Philip I was sick, but he’d probably insist on inserting the rectal thermometer himself. He sat across from me, expressionless, crunching away at his bran flakes and sunflower seeds, the newspaper spread out before him. Denise bustled around the kitchen, brewing coffee and shoving things into the microwave while the boys and I smeared Eggo waffles with butter and syrup. “So,” I said, addressing my nephews over the pitcher of pure Grade A maple syrup, “you know why the California kids have it all over the Midwestern kids when it comes to baseball?”

Josh looked up from his waffles; Jeff was still on dreamtime.

“Because of this,” I said, gesturing toward the dark windows and the drooling panes. “In L.A. now it’s probably seventy degrees, and when the kids wake up they can go straight out and play ball.”

“After school,” Josh corrected.

“Yeah,” I said. “Whatever. But that’s the reason your California and Arizona players dominate the big leagues.”

“The Tigers suck,” Josh said, and his brother glanced up to add his two cents. “They really suck,” he said.

It was then that I became aware of the background noise, a thin droning mewl from beyond the windows as if someone were drowning kittens in the street. Philip heard it then too, and the boys and Denise, and in the next moment we were all at the window. “Oh, shit,” Philip hissed. “Not again. Not today, of all days.”

“What?” I said. “What is it?” And then I saw, while my nephews melted away and Denise gritted her teeth and my brother swore: the zombies were out there at the edge of the lawn, a hundred of them at least. They were singing, locked arm in arm and swaying to the beat, stretched across the mouth of the driveway in a human chain.

Philip’s face was drawn tight. He told Denise to call the police, and then he turned to me. “Now you’re going to see something, little brother,” he said. “Now you’re going to see why I keep asking myself if I shouldn’t just close down the clinic and let the lunatics take over the asylum.”

The kitchen was gray, a weak, played-out light pasted on every surface. Sleet rattled the windows and the conjoined voices mewled away in praise of mercy and forgiveness. I was about to ask him why he didn’t do just that — close up and move someplace friendlier, someplace like California, for instance — but I already knew the answer. They could harass all the chalk-faced Sallys and thump all the Bibles they wanted, but my brother wasn’t going to bow down to them — and neither was I. I knew whose team I was on, and I knew what I had to do.

It took the police half an hour to show up. There were three squad cars and a bus with wire mesh over the windows, and the cops knew the routine. They’d been here before — how many times you could guess from the deadness in their eyes — and they’d arrested these very people, knew them by name. Philip and I waited in the house, watching the Today show at an uncomfortable volume, and the boys stayed in their room, already late for school. Finally, at quarter past eight, Philip and I shuffled out to the garage and climbed into the car. Philip’s face was like an old paper sack with eyes poked in it. I watched him hit the remote for the garage door and watched the door lift slowly on the scene.

There they were, right there on the street, the whole bug-eyed crew from the clinic, and ninety more. I saw squat, brooding mothers with babies, kids who should have been in school, old people who should have known better. They jerked their signs up and down and let out with a howl when the door cranked open, and though the cops had cleared them from the mouth of the drive they surged in now to fill the gap, the big Jesus-thumper with the beard right in front. The cops couldn’t hold them back, and before we’d got halfway down the drive they were all over us, pounding on the windows and throwing themselves down in the path of the car. My brother, like a jerk, like the holy fool who automatically turns the other cheek, stepped on the brake.

“Run them over,” I said, and all my breath was gone. “Run the fuckers over.”

Philip just sat there, hanging his head in frustration. The cops peeled them away, one by one, zipped on the plastic cuffs and hauled them off, but for every one they lifted out of the way another dove in to take his place. We couldn’t go forward, we couldn’t back up. “Your neighbor kills babies!” they were shouting. “Dr. Beaudry is a murderer!” “Kill the butchers, not the babies!” I tried to stay calm, tried to think about rehab and jail and the larger problems of my life, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t take this. I couldn’t.

Before I knew what I was doing I was out of the car. The first face I saw belonged to a kid of eighteen maybe, a tough guy with veins standing out in his neck and his leather jacket open to the sleet to show off a white T-shirt and a gold cross on a gold chain. He was right there, right in my face, shouting, “Jesus! Jesus!” and he looked genuinely surprised when I pitched into him with everything I had and shoved him back into a pair of dumpy women in matching scarves and earmuffs. I went right for the next guy — a little toadstool who looked as if he’d been locked in a closet for the last forty years — and flung him away from the car. I heard shouts, saw the cops wading through the crowd, and then I was staring into the face of the big guy, the king yahoo himself — Mr. Beard — and he was so close I knew what he’d had for breakfast. In all that chaos he just stood there rigid at the bumper of the car, giving me a big rich phony Jesus-loving smile that was as full of hate as anything I’d ever seen, and then he ducked down on one knee and handcuffed himself to the bumper.

That put me over the line. I wanted to make a martyr out of him, wanted to kick him to death right there, right in the driveway and with the whole world looking on, and who knows what would have happened if Philip hadn’t grabbed me from behind. “Rick!” he kept shouting. “Rick! Rick!” And then he wrestled me up the walk and into the house, Denise’s scared white face in the door, the mob howling for blood and then lurching right into another weepy, churchy song as if they were in a cathedral somewhere.

In the safety of the hallway, the door closed and locked behind us, my brother turned on me. “Are you crazy?” he shouted, and you would have thought I was the enemy. “You want to go back to jail? You want lawsuits? What were you thinking, anyway — are you stoned on something, is that it?”

I looked away from him, but I wanted to kill him too. It was beating in my veins, along with the Desoxyn I’d stolen from the clinic. I saw my nephews peeking out of their room down the hall. “You can’t let these people push you around,” I said.

“Look at me, Rick,” he said. “Look at me.”

I was dodging around on my feet, tight with it, and I lifted my eyes grudgingly. I felt like a kid all over again, Rick the shoplifter, the pothead, the fuckup.

“You’re just playing into their hands, don’t you see that? They want to provoke you, they want you to go after them. Then they put you back in jail and they get the headlines.” His voice broke. Denise tried to say something, but he shut her up with a wave of his hand. “You’re back on the drugs, aren’t you? What is it — cocaine? Pot? Something you lifted from the clinic?”

Outside I could hear them, “We Shall Overcome,” and it was a cruel parody — this wasn’t liberation, it was fascism. I said nothing.

“Listen, Rick, you’re an ex-con and you’ve got to remember that, every step you take. I mean, what did you think, you were protecting me out there?”

“Ex-con?” I said, amazed. “Is that what you think of me? I can’t believe you. I’m no ex-con. You’re thinking of somebody in the movies, some documentary you saw on PBS. I’m a guy who made a mistake, a little mistake, and I never hurt anybody. I’m your brother, remember?”

That was when Denise chimed in. “Philip,” she said, “come on, Philip. You’re just upset. We’re all upset.”

“You keep out of this,” he said, and he didn’t even turn to look at her. He just kept his Aqua Velva eyes on me. “Yeah,” he said finally, “you’re my brother, but you’re going to have to prove it to me.”

I can see now the Desoxyn was a mistake. It was exactly the sort of thing they’d warned us about. But it wasn’t coke and I just needed a lift, a buzz to work behind, and if he didn’t want me to be tempted, then why had he left the key to the drug cabinet right there in the conch-shell ashtray on the corner of his desk? Ex-con. I was hurt and I was angry and I stayed in my room till Philip knocked at the door an hour later to tell me the police had cleared the mob away. We drove to work in silence, Philip’s opera chewing away at my nerves like a hundred little sets of teeth.

Philip didn’t notice it, but there was something different about me when I climbed back into that car, something nobody could notice unless they had X-ray vision. I was armed. Tucked inside the waistband of my gray Levi’s, underneath the flap of my shirt where you couldn’t see it, was the hard black stump of a gun I’d bought from a girl named Corinne at a time when I was feeling especially paranoiac. I had money lying around the apartment then and people coming and going — nobody desperate, nobody I didn’t know or at least know through a friend — but it made me a little crazy. Corinne used to drop by once in a while with my roommate’s girlfriend, and she sold me the thing — a.38 Special — for three hundred bucks. She didn’t need it anymore, she said, and I didn’t want to know what that meant, so I bought it and kept it under my pillow. I’d only fired it once, up a canyon in Tujunga, but it made me feel better just to have it around. I’d forgotten all about it, actually, but when I got my things out of storage and shipped them to Philip’s house, there it was, hidden away in a box of CDs like some poisonous thing crouching under a rock.

What I was feeling is hard to explain. It had to do with Philip, sure — ex-con, that really hurt — and with Sally and the clinic and the whole Jesus-thumping circus. I didn’t know what I was going to do — nothing, I hoped — but I knew I wasn’t going to take any shit from anybody, and I knew Philip didn’t have it in him to protect himself, let alone Denise and the kids and all the knocked-up grieving teenage Sallys of the world. That was all. That was it. The extent of my thinking. I walked into the clinic that morning just as I had for the past week and a half, and nobody knew the difference.

I cleaned the toilets, washed the windows, took out the trash. Some blood work came back from an outside lab — we only did urine — and Fred showed me how to read the results. I discussed the baseball strike with Nurse Tsing and the prospects of an early spring with Nurse Hempfield. At noon I went out to a deli and had a meatball wedge, two beers, and a breath mint. I debated dialling Sally just once more — maybe she was home from school, headachy, nauseous, morning sickness, whatever, and I could get past the brick wall she’d put up between us and talk to her, really talk to her for the first time — but when I got inside the phone booth, I just didn’t feel like it. As I walked back to the clinic I was wondering if she had a boyfriend or if it was just one of those casual encounters, blind date, back seat of the car — or rape, even. Or incest. Her father’s voice could have been the voice of a child abuser, easily — or who even knew if he was her father? Maybe he was the stepfather. Maybe he was a Humbert Humbert type. Maybe anything.

There were no protesters out front when I got back — they were all in jail — and that lightened my mood a bit. I even joked with Fred and caught myself whistling over my work. I forgot the morning, forgot the gun, forgot Pasadena and the life that was. Coffee kept me awake, coffee and Diet Coke, and I stayed away from the other stuff just to prove something to myself — and to Philip too. For a while there I even began to suffer from the delusion that everything was going to work out.

Then it was late, getting dark, and the day was almost done. I pictured the evening ahead — Denise’s cooking, Winnie-the-Pooh, my brother’s scotch, six windblown blocks to the store for a liter of Black Cat — and suddenly I felt like pulling out the gun and shooting myself right then and there. Uncle Rick, little brother, ex-con: who was I kidding? I would have been better off in jail.

I needed a cigarette. Badly. The need took me past the waiting room — four scared-looking women, one angry-looking man — through the lab, and into the back corner. The fluorescent lights hissed softly overhead. Fred was already gone. I stood at the window, staring into the nullity of the drawn blinds till the cigarette was a nub. My hands were trembling as I lit another from the butt end of the first, and I didn’t think about the raw-looking leftovers in the stainless-steel trays that were like nothing so much as skinned frogs, and I didn’t think about Sally or the fat-faced bearded son of a bitch shackling himself to the bumper, either. I tried hard to think nothing, to make it all a blank, and I was succeeding, I was, when for some reason — idle curiosity, boredom, fate — I separated two of the slats and peered out into the lot.

And there she was, just like that: Sally.

Sally in her virginal parka and fluffy boots, locked in her mother’s grip and fighting her way up the walk against a tide of chanting zombies — and I recognized them too, every one of them, the very ones who’d been dragged away from my brother’s door in the dark of the morning. Sally wasn’t coming in for an exam — there weren’t going to be any more exams. No, Sally meant business. You could see that in the set of her jaw and in the way she lowered her head and jabbed out her eyes like swords, and you could see it in every screaming line of her mother’s screaming face.

The light was fading. The sky hung low, like smoke. And then, in that instant, as if some god had snapped his fingers, the streetlights went on, a sudden artificial burst of illumination exploding in the sky above them. All at once I felt myself moving, the switch turned on in me too, all the lights flaring in my head, burning bright, and I was out the door, up the corridor, and pushing through the double glass doors at the front entrance.

Something was blocking the doors — bodies, deadweight, the zombies piled up on the steps like corpses — and I had to force my way out. There were bodies everywhere, a minefield of flesh, people stretched out across the steps, obliterating the sidewalk and the curb in front of the clinic, immobilizing the cars in the street. I saw the punk from this morning, the teenage tough guy in his leather jacket, his back right up against the door, and beside him one of the dumpy women I’d flung him into. They didn’t learn, these people, they didn’t know. It was a game. A big joke. Call people baby-killers, sing about Jesus, pocketful of posies, and then the nice policeman carries you off to jail and Mommy and Daddy bail you out. I tried to kick them aside, lashing out with the steel toes of my boots till my breath was coming in gasps. “Sally!” I cried. “Sally, I’m coming!”

She was stalled at the corner of the building, standing rigid with her mother before the sea of bodies. “Jesus loves you!” somebody cried out and they all took it up till my voice was lost in the clamor, erased in the everlasting hiss of Jesus. “We’re going to come looking for you, brother,” the tough guy said then, looking up at me out of a pair of seething blue eyes. “You better watch your back.”

Sally was there. Jesus was there. Hands grabbed at me, snaked round my legs till I couldn’t move, till I was mired in flesh. The big man came out of nowhere, lithe on his feet, vaulting through the inert bodies like the shadow of something moving swiftly overhead, and he didn’t so much as graze me as he went by. I was on the third step down, held fast, the voices chanting, the signs waving, and I turned to watch him handcuff himself to the door and flash me a tight little smile of triumph.

“Sally!” I shouted. “Sally!” But she was already turning around, already turning her back to me, already lost in the crowd.

I looked down at my feet. A woman was clutching my right leg to her as if she’d given birth to it, her eyes as loopy as any crack-head’s. My left leg was in the grip of a balding guy who might have been a clerk in a hardware store and he was looking up at me like a toad I’d just squashed. “Jesus,” they hissed. “Jesus!”

The light was burning in my head, and it was all I needed. I reached into my pants and pulled out the gun. I could have anointed any one of them, but the woman was first. I bent to her where she lay on the unyielding concrete of the steps and touched that snub-nose to her ear as tenderly as any man of healing. The noise of it shut down Jesus, shut him down cold. Into the silence, and it was the hardware man next. Then I swung round on Mr. Beard.

It was easy. It was nothing. Just like killing babies.