Horace Afoot Page 10

  Should I go downstairs and be ready when he arrives? Or should I let him find me lying here? A peculiar sense of Samaritanism makes me think that I should let him come upon me. Give him the satisfaction of a rescue. A man on death’s doorstep, coming to the aid of otherwise hale and healthy me. It seems cruel to ask his help, but it also has the small ring of heroism to it. In a way, I’m doing him a favor.

  His car pulls up outside. Doors open and close. He knocks at the front door before opening it.

  “Up here,” I call out.

  “My God, what have you done to yourself?” Mohr stops short in the doorway, then moves in for a closer look. “You look absolutely. Roasted.”

  “I fell asleep outside.” I swing my legs over, and Mohr extends his hand to help me up. “I can manage,” I tell him and get to my feet without his help, which I suspect could topple him.

  “I’ve never seen anything like it,” he says.

  My chest, abdomen, and thighs are one soft, liquid blister, interrupted at the waist by my shorts. I touch fingertips to forehead and feel the same softness there.

  “Can you walk?”

  “It’s hard to bend my knees. The skin feels like it will crack.” I stand, dizzy from the effort, and maneuver stiffly past him.

  “Go slowly.”

  “I have no choice.”

  At the car, Mohr opens the door and winces in sympathy as I slowly fold myself into the front seat. We drive with the windows rolled up and the air vents closed. Any direct circulation hurts. Mohr rambles on about the difference between first- and second- and third-degree burns and goes over all the possible names for my condition with an almost prurient delight. Solar-mediated affliction. Sunburn. Sunstroke. Sun poisoning. At the emergency entrance he opens my door and goes inside to find an orderly. I get to the registration desk on my own and recognize the man behind it. He shows no sign of recognizing me, which gives me small satisfaction.

  I am taken to an examination room and told to wait. A few minutes later a nurse appears and asks a few yes-or-no questions. She slides a thermometer into my mouth, jots some notes on her clipboard, and in a modestly conciliatory tone says a doctor will be in to see me shortly. She leaves without removing the thermometer.

  I sit at the edge of the table and wait. The antiseptic smell, the extra-wide wooden door with a levered handle, the gleaming porcelain sink, the soap dispenser, scale, blood-pressure unit, poster from a drug company, everything nailed and tiled and stripped down to essentials. The austerity is appealing.

  The doctor arrives. He is young and overweight with a scrubbed, pasty-white sheen that looks ghostly under the fluorescent light and comic in contrast to my crimson.

  “Looks like someone forgot the sunblock,” he says with perfunctory cheer, slips the thermometer from my lips, and reads it. “Slight fever,” he remarks, shaking the glass stick and dropping it into a plastic tray next to the table. He tells me to take off the hospital gown, presses the skin on my thighs and chest, evaluates the blisters, jots notes as he goes along. “How long were you out there?” He stands back and puts one hand into his lab-coat pocket.

  “All day. I fell asleep.”

  “Any dizziness? Nausea?”

  “Earlier. Not so much now.”

  “Have you been drinking fluids?”

  “Water.”

  “Good. Keep it up.” He makes some notes. “I’m going to give you something to reduce the swelling. Prednisone, a steroid. It’ll help reduce the pain too.” He writes out a prescription and hands it to me. “You have a serious burn, and it will take several days to stabilize. In a few days the skin will begin to peel.”

  “I feel like I’m going to split open.”

  He wags his finger. “Don’t use any local anesthetic sprays or creams.”

  “Why not?”

  “False sense of security. The skin will be very tender for the next few days. When you’re numb you won’t know if you’ve hurt yourself, and you want the skin to heal, right? The pills will help with the pain. You’ll be fine in a couple of days.” He extends a hand and we shake.

  “Do you know Dr. Henley?” I ask on a sudden impulse.

  The doctor pauses at the door. “Henley?”

  “She’s a psychiatrist. I think she has an office here.”

  “Yes. Loretta Henley. Ask at the desk. They’ll tell you where her office is.”

  I slide off the examination table, realizing as my feet hit the floor that I’m without shoes.

  Dr. Henley is leaving her office when I arrive on the third floor with Mohr in tow. She seems startled. “My goodness. What happened to you?”

  “I fell asleep in the sun yesterday.”

  “Has someone looked at you yet?”

  I tell her I was just looked at, but her attention seems distracted by Mohr, who is standing inconspicuously just behind me. The institutional glow of the hospital corridor emphasizes his sickly pallor. Henley is trying and failing to recognize him, and Mohr is embarrassed by the attention. “This is Mr. Mohr. He drove me here.”

  They exchange nods. Henley seems flustered, turns back to me. “Is there something I can do for you?” she asks.

  “I would like to know what happened with the woman.”

  She shifts her handbag from one shoulder to the other. I can see that she is formulating her complete response on the spot. I’ve caught her off guard, and the results are evident in a complicated professional calculus that is registering in the shifting of her eyes. At last she opens the door to her office and invites me in, saying to Mohr, “Please excuse us for a minute.”

  “I’ll be downstairs,” Mohr wheezes.

  The office is a bland mixture of clinical institutional bookishness, a suggestion of esoteric knowledge that, I suppose, is comforting to some. It strikes me as pathetic, the last place I would turn for sustenance or help. I’d rather go befuddled and bewildered through life, crack up, and jump than be diagnosed with reference to a book called Modern Synopsis of Comprehensive Textbook of Psychiatry IV.

  Dr. Henley puts her bag down and seats herself behind her desk before speaking. She gestures for me to sit, but I tell her I’m a little sore and would prefer to stand.

  “I can’t tell you anything for a number of reasons,” she begins. “But it was thoughtful of you to ask.”

  “So she remembered who she was after all.”

  “Yes. Two days after we went to the police station her memory returned. As you can imagine, the whole experience has been extremely traumatic for her.”

  “Can you tell me her name?”

  “I’m afraid not.”

  “Why not?”

  “Privacy.”

  “I don’t want to know the details. I would just like to know who she is. I’m curious.”

  The doctor eyes me for a moment as though evaluating my claim.

  “Look. I don’t have any ulterior motives, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

  “Frankly, I wasn’t. Until you mentioned it.” She cuts in with a note of lawyerly psychology in her voice. A brief face-off ensues, with the doctor seated behind her desk trying to read my motives with a look of sanctimonious professionalism on her face that sickens me. This was a bad idea. I can hear the textbook aphorisms tripping around inside her well-coiffed head like so many little marbles.

  I open the door to leave. “Sorry I bothered you.” For a moment I consider asking her to convey my best wishes to the woman. But I change my mind and close the door on any further imputations.

  On the way home Mohr stops at a pharmacy to fill the prescription the doctor has written for me. I wait in the car while he goes inside. It is midafternoon. The heat shimmers off the hood of the car. It feels like it is rising from me too, up into the atmosphere to mix with all the exhausted energy in the universe. The psychiatrist’s response still has me bundled up, as if I had been accused. I should have resisted the impulse to know more.

  Mohr has left the car running and the air conditioner on. For my benefit. I
adjust the air flow away from me, glance at the cars parked all around, each incubating driver and passengers like its own soft guts. The image of driver as organ becomes more vivid still in an accident, when bloody goo is spattered inside the massive steel exoskeleton. I entertain a theory of the adaptive evolution of the internal combustion engine wherein the automobile can be said to have evolved by adapting itself in a symbiotic manner to human needs. Has there ever been an instance of such rapid evolutionary success anywhere else in nature? The Machina, a new taxonomic classification.

  Mohr returns at last, collapsing into the drivers’ seat with a sigh of exhaustion. “God, it’s hot,” he wheezes and hands over a small white bag containing the prescription. He reaches into his shirt pocket and takes out a box of Vicks menthol drops, fishes one out with a bony forefinger, and offers the box to me. “They’re the only thing. That soothes my. Throat.” A menthol smell wafts through the car.

  I take out a lozenge and pop it into my mouth. Mohr backs out of the parking space slowly, piloting the station wagon as if it were a large tanker. We drive through town without speaking, savoring our menthol lozenges, eyes on the road ahead.

  “Thank you for all your help,” I tell him as he pulls up in front of my house several minutes later.

  He waves his hand to dismiss my gratitude. “Now you take. Care of yourself. And follow the doctor’s instructions.” He exhales his mentholated words as I ease myself out of the car and into the furnacelike heat of the afternoon. Mohr leans across the seat. He shuffles the triangular lozenge about in his mouth. It clacks against his teeth. “I’ll call you. In a few days. To talk about the. Wilkington project.”

  I nod, thank him, and close the car door. My neighbor is washing his pickup truck in his driveway. I walk gingerly up the path to my front door, feeling his eyes on me as he lathers the oversized hood. When I reach the door I wave to Mohr, who is idling at the curb, waiting for me to get inside. He waves back, and I enter the house feeling as though I’ve returned from a long and futile expedition.

  The steroid works. As I lie in bed I can feel the swelling go down, almost like air from a balloon. By early evening I feel well enough to try some phone calls.

  “Horace here.”

  “Hi Horace. How’s it hanging?”

  “You sound cheerful.”

  “It’s called alliteration. When you, like, begin each word with the same letter?”

  “What’s it like?”

  “Alliteration?”

  “No. Being happy.”

  “Being happy?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, it’s hard to say. A little like alliteration, maybe. Who is this, anyway?”

  “Horace.”

  “Do I know you?”

  “No. But it doesn’t matter.”

  “How come you called? Is this a prank? It is a prank. I knew it!”

  “You can call it that if you want.”

  “I bet I know you, too. I recognize the voice.”

  “We were talking about happiness. Let’s continue.”

  “You’re in Mrs. Jepson’s geometry class. The guy with the red-framed glasses.”

  “No. That’s not me. Let’s talk about happiness.”

  “Happiness? I don’t want to.”

  “You don’t want to talk about happiness?”

  “Not until I know who you are.”

  “I told you. My name is Horace.”

  “Are you recording this? You are, aren’t you? C’mon, tell me.”

  “Tell me what you think happiness is first.”

  “Okay, let’s see. God, this feels really stupid. I can’t do it. It’s too weird. Is your name really Horace?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then why don’t you go first? Yeah, you go first!”

  “How about this, then: happiness is the absence of wants.”

  “You read that somewhere.”

  “You’re right, I did read it. Do you agree with it?”

  “It makes sense, I guess.”

  “It does?”

  “Yeah, because it’s like, if you don’t want anything it’s because you already have everything you ever wanted, and so you’re happy. Like last week? I wanted to get my hair streaked, but my mom said no, and so I babysat three nights and saved the money and went and did it and now I’m, like, happy as horseshit!”

  I can’t bear the girl’s exuberance. I prefer afflicted teenagers, ones with a little pathos about them. It’s the best time of life for it. Their pathos is virginal, hormonally driven, and has a histrionic element to it, in contrast to adult pathos, which is just tedious and generally has its source in some form of emotional dry rot.

  I put the phone back under the bed and lie awake looking up at the ceiling. The steroids work their wonders. Time passes in a chorus of insect sounds filtering through the trees. As the first morning birds begin to sing, I turn off the lamp and drift off to sleep.

  Seventeen inches of snow have fallen on Oblivion, and the airport is closed. Snow is still falling. A large plow clears the tarmac around a single airplane tethered to the terminal like a captured bird. The ground crew works to keep it free of snow and ice. An enormous orange truck works the runway. The snow arcs high into the air in a dense, finely powdered mist. The plow races back and forth, scraping away the accumulation. Thick flakes muffle all sight and sound, and the speeding plow seems to be doing its work in slow motion. I walk along the perimeter fence that encircles the vast white silence of the airfield.

  I’ve been out since early morning partaking in this drastic transformation of nature. In the snow the visible becomes invisible and the invisible visible. Layers of sediment fall in lapsed time, and the world is buried under a new geology. Dying in the snow must not be a bad way to go. I think of the photographs of frozen corpses littering the battlefields of the Bulge or of Stalingrad. Dead of cold and bullets, bodies disappear under the soft white blanket as though bid a peaceful good-night.

  The airport road has been freshly plowed. Traffic consists of a few four-wheel-drive jeeps, pickup trucks, and a large dump truck spreading sand and salt. I arrive at the terminal, legs heavy from walking. My snowsuit works well, locks in heat. I unzip it in the entrance. The automatic door opens, a blast of warm air and noise. I stomp my feet and enter the hive of bored and impatient activity. Stranded travelers pacing, chasing children, sprawling in heaps, wandering aimlessly between concessions, watching television monitors perched at angles around the terminal.

  “Are you from the Marriott?” a woman standing inside the terminal entrance asks.

  I shake my head.

  “They said they were sending a van out,” she explains as I pass by.

  I walk from one end of the terminal to the other. The airplane is going to Chicago, but O’Hare Airport is closed. The flight can’t take off until both airports are reopened.

  “Hey. You been outside?” As I pass by the airport bar a young, pink-faced drunk seated at the center of a group of other drinkers beckons to me. “Hey. Come here.” He leans out over the railing that cordons off the bar from the rest of the terminal. “He’s been outside,” the man exclaims to the group. “Hey! What’s it like out there?”

  “It’s snowing.”

  “Hey! No shit! It’s still fucking snowing. Come in here and have a drink, buddy. Hey! I was supposed to be in Hawaii eleven hours ago!”

  I continue on toward the end of the terminal. Heating up, I peel my arms out of the sleeves and roll the upper half of the snowsuit down to my waist, tying the arms so they don’t drag along the floor. At the end of the terminal is a door marked Authorized Personnel. I open it and walk to the end of the corridor, call the elevator. I enter and push the top button. The doors slide open again in the control tower, a large glass enclosure that looks out over the entire length of the airfield. I am standing on a platform behind a railing. Five or six people are seated in front of radar screens and telephones.

  “Can I help you?” a man calls to me. “This is a rest
ricted area. You’re not supposed to be here.”

  The view is mesmerizing. With snow falling all around, the control tower feels like Olympus, a glass-encased, tranquil sphere of enthroned gods. The silence is broken by pips and squeaks of radio, the clacking of computer keyboards, and quiet telephone conversations. On the tarmac below is the stranded airplane, sprawled like some supplicating beast, red lights blinking nervously at all extremities.

  “You’re not supposed to be here.” The man is coming up the stairs toward me.

  “I’ve always wanted to see what it’s like up here. Is it always so quiet?”

  The man stops at the top step, holding on to the railing. He is wearing a white shirt and tie, is thin, with bloodshot eyes set deeply into his head behind wire-rimmed glasses. I am standing in a small puddle of water that is dripping from my boots and suit. He reaches out to take my upper arm, but I step back. My evasion makes him tense. “I’ll show you out,” he says.

  “I’ve never been in a control tower before,” I tell him. “Is it always so peaceful?”

  The man casts a sidelong look at me. Another man has stood up from behind his console and is watching us. “Need help?” he asks.

  “It’s okay, I’m leaving,” I answer before my escort can respond. “The view is fantastic.”

  “Yes, it is,” he agrees perfunctorily.

  “And is it always so quiet?”

  He gives me another apprehensive glance, then rubs his eyes with thumb and forefinger. “It’s not quiet,” he says. “It’s closed.”

  “How much longer will it be closed?”