Assorted Fire Events: Stories

THE REACTION

LATE IN the afternoon Sloan thought he was having an allergic reaction, anaphylaxis, an instantaneous — in medical terms, although it might take twenty minutes to begin — violent reaction of the body’s defenses against the allergen; all-out attack, was how he thought of it, an immediate overdrive of the bodily functions causing severe muscular constriction — including, of course, the muscles around the throat. He’d been reading in the journals about such reactions. In truth, what he was really experiencing at that moment was ulcers in his throat, a reaction to a pain medication he was taking, containing a few similar symptomatic indicators. A whole different matter. Common stuff. No big deal. Just lower the dose or change over to Advil. It took him only a few seconds to make the proper diagnosis.

Twilight bled over the trees in his backyard. In the orchard, past the stone wall, a dog was barking, the bark wrapped in silence because the road through the trees — normally a busy hiss at this hour — was closed to traffic. His neighbor, Congers, was having his house moved; the old monstrosity lumbered down the center of the street, scraping the upper reaches of trees, at four miles an hour, the paper reported the next day, but Sloan figured it must’ve been three miles an hour because it took more than two hours to get the house to the new lot, which was six miles away. (There was a photo in the paper that showed the house in the center of the road, with an accompanying article that made the move sound glorious and profound, an attempt to salvage the past, when in truth it was an act of greed.) Congers was selling seventy-five acres of prime orchard land that had been deeded to his ancestors by George in, along with six hundred fruit-yielding trees, stone terracing, a rickety farm stand, several outbuildings, a hand-operated cider press that had been in service for over a hundred years, and a view of the valley down to the river — all this was to be subdivided into clumps of high-income housing for senior citizens. The orchard embraced the south and east side of Sloan’s five-acre parcel, financed by years of commuting the hundred-mile round trip to a hospital in the city. That practice had gone on for thirty years. Now he was running a small office just up the road, covering about two hundred patients, barely making it with the large insurance premiums, not making a profit at all, often living for months off early withdrawals on his retirement fund.

At the moment of panic, seated in a leather armchair, facing a view of dying trees falling against each other at odd, disjointed angles, he was thinking about Congers, who the morning before had come in for an exam, a complete physical, the works (to make sure he was able to handle the stress of the house-moving project), and had stood before him — as a million others had before — with his aged body, his flabby pectorals hanging limp, and his gullet, thick and long; not to mention the wide-ranging liver spots on forearms and hands.

You’re fit as a fiddle, he told Congers. Nothing at all to worry about. For a ninety-year-old you are in supreme shape, indeed. Except, perhaps — well, just perhaps, it’s not exactly certain, but I do see some indications — from what you’ve told me — that there might be a gallstone problem. As you inform me you’re having troubles digesting fish …

Sloan found it hard to divide the moment when he was first feeling the ulcer in his throat from his sudden awareness of the silence on the road.

It was a profound moment, indeed, he told Jenny, during dinner that evening, sitting at one of the restaurant’s outside tables.

And why was that?

Well, it was because I was thinking of Congers, or at least I think I was thinking about him, and his house was being moved, and at the same time I was feeling this sensation in my throat, and, I have to admit, beginning to panic, wondering if the pistachio I’d eaten — one of those red ones — had caused a reaction.

And the house was being moved.

Right, right, yeah, the house was being moved. My view was being destroyed. And our property was starting to lose its value.

So maybe that sparked the thought of Congers coming in for his physical.

You see, you see it’s the fact that I told him about the gallstone. It’s probably nothing. I mean nothing just because he can’t digest fats. Who can? He was at the Cape and ate one of those, you know, those fried fish dinners — little plaid red and white cardboard dish — and he felt funny, those are his words; typical, nothing exactly specific in that is there? Can’t tell you the hundreds of times I hear someone come in with a big complaint, but when I ask them to tell me what exactly feels funny, they can’t nail it. It’s just, something feels funny. I feel funny. Just funny. We all feel funny, I want to tell them. We all feel really, really funny.

So you told him? So what? She touched her hair, just in the back, neatened it up. Freshly cut. Still brunette but patchy gray along the ends.

Yeah, but you see, normally I wouldn’t have told him, just no point in it. Tests have to be done, and someone his age, normally I wouldn’t bother unless there were more indications, aside from having trouble with fats, and so on … but I come right out and say, Sit up Frank, sit a moment, and let me check, do you want a drink of water? I give him a drink from the sink and tell him not to worry, but he looks, well, Jenny, I have to say I could tell he was worried because tough as he is, tough as nails, he’s a worrier when it comes to his health (Probably why the old guy’s hanging in so long. Living alone in that monstrosity.) So I tell him, Look, Frank, I’m concerned about this fish dinner — it’s an indication perhaps that we have a gallstone problem, and who knows what else. I give him a prod, I make him lie back on the table and, well, poke the hell out of him, both sides, thump him all the way up, back, not for any good reason, see, but to make him, well, I don’t know, to make him think …

Jenny held her glass up and waved it. The point, the point, she said.

The point is I have to wonder if I was telling him, you know, just to get him, to throw him off.

He touched his tie, fat tight knot, stripes white and red.

To get him to maybe postpone moving that house, so we could get those lawyers from what is it? Save the Earth? Preserve the Land? You know, the folks who go around buying land and then just let it grow to meadow or second-growth forest, or swamp. Just to give them a couple of days. Because that restraining order, the one the land group, the one about the river basin and all that, might’ve come through. He’d still be there. And the house still being there might sway the judge. You know. The house hadn’t been moved, yet, and the whole thing is still in process, judge might just throw it out. Judge Janson, is it? Janson’s old blood, tied to Congers, believe me; blood going back to old King George himself, right? He comes to me for a physical. The man knows the whole county. Says Janson, I know we’re different, politically, but when it comes to my health I trust you like you’re one of our own.

Along the curbside a motorcycle was parked; two getting off in leather jackets.

Is that Janet? she says, her voice catching. It couldn’t be Janet. Could it be Janet?

For a moment they watch the girl remove her helmet, speckled azure with a heavy dark visor to cover her face, slowly lifting it off, shaking a waterfall of black locks around her shoulders. How did she tuck so much hair up there in the helmet? They both wonder. Then they think: that’s not our beloved Janet, our daughter, who is lost to the elements, general wildness, not too wild, but always on the move and going from one place to the other. Our Janet.

Sloan took a deep long sip of his drink, and then another and then a quick little one and decided there would be no point in going further with the topic. Not that he wanted to shield his wife from the truth; just keep some balance between what was in his mind and what he spoke aloud. He didn’t tell her the following: that there had been that afternoon a small sliver of time between when he felt his throat begin to constrict and when he made the proper diagnosis (of the ulcer resulting most likely from the pain medication he was on for his joints); that in that small fraction of time he had panicked (looking out through the trees, falling every which way) and a void had opened up, a wide space revealing what might eventually yawn into a crevice and, with oncoming years, become an immense chasm: a loss of his abilities at making a brisk, proper, correct diagnosis, a careful balance of professional opinion with the symptoms available. In that panic came, he felt, what can only be called (as he sat drinking his vodka) the first slippage in his talents. Beneath him, life was giving way. Night was descending. The waitress came up and cleared the plates and offered up several desserts: cream puffs, cocoa mousse, ice cream cake. It went unsaid. The fear that he was reaching the end of his long career; the deep welling sense of loss he had when he felt his throat at that moment. His utter confusion over the whole thing.

Between them the silence contained his throat problems, Congers’s house moving, the parcel of land that was being sold, and Janet. Janet stood unspoken between them. The dew point was rising. The glasses of ice water were dappled with sweat. Sloan ran his finger along the side of his glass, tracing a small cursive s, and looked past his wife to the street. Behind them the Hudson palisades rose weighty against the back of the restaurant. The river, down past the other side of the street, moved with the grand solemnity of incoming tidal currents.

Janet, he began, softly.

No, she said. Let’s not go there. Not now. Please.

The mention of her name conjured up an image of his daughter standing on the corner of 4th and Bowery, the violet light-wash of sky overhead, pale and delicate with long shoulders and hair that seemed perpetually wind-tangled, deep, dark brown against the paleness of her face. With this, he recalled the fine little shells of her ears along her head and her hair, as a child, flaring with static as he ran the brush along the full length, taking care not to press the bristles down too hard — her bony little body taking the weight of his brush strokes, hips without a waist, straight on both sides, holding herself prim and firm.

He raised two fingers against each other to summon a second vodka, this one with a smidgen of tonic.

Another man came in for an appointment that afternoon with a pain in the gut, which Sloan immediately thought — pushing his index finger deep into the right spot — was most likely a seed stuck in his diverticuli, a sesame seed, or a poppy seed that had gone its way down the intestine only to lodge in the one of the little extended bypasses (he’d questioned the man long about his eating habits, not finding seeds, except perhaps a buttered roll he had eaten — he wasn’t sure — for lunch a couple of days ago in a deli off 42nd, that might or might not have had poppies); the man’s pain wasn’t acute, but a dull throbbing with small peaks of acute, hard to quantify … and he’d said to wait a day or two and then, if the pain continued, they’d have to go in to explore — putting, as he spoke, one hand on the patient’s shoulder. Sloan wasn’t a touchy-feely doctor, but he felt it was important to impart at least one physical contact per visit, to translate his concern for the well-being and general health of each patient into something solid, a handshake that lingered a moment, a touch of the shoulder (as with this patient), even a rub of the knee in the right cases; for the really old, close patients, those who had been coming in regularly and to whom he had a rapport built on bad colds and broken bones and cancers treated and cured, rectums with fissures, scrotums with lumps, backs with humplike formations, jaw infections spreading in the brain cavity, stress fractures and torn tendons from gamesmanship — to these souls he often gave a departing hug, or a hug in greeting and a departing hug; and to his close friends, male and female, he thought, at the café, taking a second very quick sip of his vodka (hardly a bit of tonic in this one), he did give a kiss, on the lips or cheek, or both. As with his daughter the last time they met for dinner, he had given her a handshake, a pat on the shoulder, a hug, and a kiss on the cheek, and then the forehead; then, crying, he kissed the very center of her forehead where he used to put his lips freely when she was a small child (and so on and so forth), and then he kissed her lips, a real kiss, firm forward pressure lasting a few seconds, and imparted on her his words of advice, his warnings to take care, his hope that she would find some secure place in this world and, if need be, call on him for any kind of help she might need.

But really, I suppose we must not avoid it, she was saying, regarding Janet, the word, the name itself. There had been an immeasurable silence when the waitress delivered the drink. Silence between sips. The girl with the motorcycle helmet was back, putting her hair up with both hands, her elbows cocked in the air; her boyfriend, or friend, was beside her in a long black leather coat, helping; he had two rubber bands around his wrists, and he clutched the mane of hair, the girl’s hands helping, too, and drew a rubber band down his hand and into her hair, twisting it around, doubling it, and then doing it again until that spot was tight; then he folded the ponytail in half and slid a second rubber band down (her hands all the while padding, adjusting the formation, entwining with his hands), until the whole arrangement was ready, and he lowered the helmet gently onto her head — both hands holding it from the sides — making small adjustments in the lowering process as he moved it down. She lifted her foot slightly in what seemed to be the beginning of an arabesque (many ballerinas lived up in the palisades, with large windows giving way to a view of the Hudson, the lights of Westchester, and from some vantages, the city itself). Helmeted, framed by the safety device, her face divine and pure in the candlelight thrown up from the tables, the girl turned and kissed the man, who in turn put his open hands around the thin bottom of her jaw and held her for a moment. He then straddled the bike, kicked up the kickstand, which gave way to the heavy sway of metal beneath him and made his arms stand out strongly on the handles. He gave it a firm jounce. The engine roaring (and it did roar, ear-popping mufflerless roar), she got on and hooked up her legs and, slickly, despite the noise, almost as if in silence, they cut out into the road and were gone, lost forever, the two of them, rest assured, never to be seen again by Sloan or his wife, who hadn’t watched a bit of this scene, her back to it, and was still talking about Janet (what might or might not happen to her), stating emphatically that they must not put aside their pains; that pain must be dealt with head-on, her voice a bit drunk, that it was very important that he, Sloan, face the fact that their daughter might be a junkie (as if he hadn’t), and also face Congers, go tell him to his face how you’re feeling, gallstone be damned. The whole while he — not hearing much of what she was saying — kept his eyes down the street, on the place where the taillight of the motorcycle had slid away into the dark.

To get home they drove the back road that skirted Congers’s property — a road zoned to remain two lane and quaint because along it lived those who respected the idea of two lanes itself, a road that had been accused only recently of killing four teenage kids. (Sloan was working that night, doing rounds, when the emergency room burst into life and the boy — the youngest of the group — was brought in with his arm missing and only half his face there, still alive, gasping, convulsing.) On the way home the bursitis in his knees made even the slight pressure on the accelerator almost unbearable. Maybe that’s it, he thought. Maybe the evil thing about pain is that it makes us sensitive to the smallest nuances of movement; the urge of a toe-pressure on the rubber pad of the Volvo’s accelerator, nothing at all, a thing you do your whole life without thinking, suddenly acutely real and complex; maybe that was it. Maybe Janet herself, with all her sensitivities, felt such things and couldn’t bear them. He held this idea, taking the rolling turns, passing the crash sight (a chalk x on the tree trunk, which despite its having outlived the kids, the car impact, and countless rough winters, would have to be cut down; a small clump of wild buttercups and a cross (although two of the four dead had been Jewish)). He held the idea of someone living with an acute awareness of things like a foot working a car accelerator. He held the idea of fear, panic, and pain, too, combined as they were that afternoon when he felt the constriction in his throat. He held the idea that Janet might be an acute feeler, like those huge concave spaces carved out of the rain forest and strung with wires, collecting faint radio pulses from the very darkest, remotest reaches of the universe. He held the idea that perhaps it had been perfectly right to scare Congers about the gallbladder problem, to put the truth into his ears. And he held the idea that maybe it would be better from now on to no longer urge his patients into wellness along the smoothest lines, but rather to cut into them with the exact news of their ill-being. He held on to the idea of pain itself as the center of the world, the location of its gravitas. He held onto the idea that there was nothing he could do for Janet, his beloved daughter. Janet sliced headlong into the world heedless of what she was doing to it. They were passing the empty spot where Congers’s house had stood that morning, now a prone monolith of darkness darker than the earth — a dark rectangle of nothing — and starlit gnarls of trees and the terraced land that would, in a few months, hold compact knots of houses, units, stacked against each other, painted that strange dull blue-gray. He held on to these ideas as he pulled into the driveway, set the automatic door to rising, and then drove down beneath the house, into the garage smelling of freon from the freezer (they kept meat stocked for the whole year, vacuum packets of veal and chicken), oil and gas from the mower, the rubber of car and bike tires. Then, in the baffled silence of the door set in its rubber seal, he turned to his wife of forty years and put his hand out and felt along the inside of her fleshy waist, squeezing her into silence (for she had been talking to him the whole way about Drew, Janet’s current boyfriend, who had a tattoo on his arm and flew sailplanes in Cancún). He was raising his lips to her lips. The constrictions in his throat were coming again, the muscle there to drive the food down, to make a simple thing like a swallow happen. To get rid of the sensation, he was kissing his wife. The night was silent around them. There were, as one would expect, tears of frustration. There were soft murmurs of love. There was his hand along her spine. And a few minutes later, the automatic door light, on a delayed fuse, popped off, sending them into the easeful dark.