He tells the thing to Steve, an anesthesiologist, as they're changing clothes in the locker room. He's unsure why he's telling a colleague at all, but especially an anesthesiologist. The locker room; it's called that for a reason--all the lockers--but it's asinine nonetheless. Actors have greenrooms. Wouldn't you think doctors would warrant more than a goddamn high school label for their private area? Doctors grab coffee, steal minutes to eat bagels and bullshit with other doctors; tell anesthesiologists things they should not--in locker rooms.
"I told them, Steve, the whole spiel. I tied it in with the risk probabilities, the outside chances, the five percent language on the 'permission to treat' form they signed. I said, 'Mr. and Mrs. Whatever,' I said, 'I know that losing a child is hard--the hardest thing in the world--but I think you made the right decision.' I told them to call me if they needed to talk. Shit, I hope they don't call."
"Home number? Or your service?" Steve asks.
"Here at the hospital. Anyway, I don't know, see? I have no clue what it feels like to have a kid with congenital heart defects. I wouldn't be able to guess. When it croaks, does the father feel like his innards are shredded without anesthesia--or is it numbness like OD'ing on morphine? Or worse, or not as bad, or different altogether?"
Dick is still holding his right shoe. Completely dressed, and here he sits for--how long? five, ten minutes--talking to Steve the mother-loving anesthesiologist about real doctor stuff with an untied Nike in his hand, strings dangling. Steve stares at him, mouth slightly open, shirt half-buttoned. An older doctor, a seasoned surgeon, would not be noticing Steve.
"You're being too hard on yourself, Dick. Go home and sleep it off. You lost one. You'll save another." Steve closes his locker and leaves without finishing off the buttons.
Dick puts the shoe on, ties it, and walks outside to his bicycle. Did he close his locker? Fuck his locker. What's in it? Scrubs. Candy bars. He weaves between parking dummies on his way to the road. He hopes he has closed his locker and locked it. Somebody will steal his candy.
At the top of the hill, in front of Trinity Episcopal Church, he changes gears. Dick is in that gear that makes him feel he's contributing to the Earth's rotation with every lusty, satisfying downward heave. His big thighs, hard with years of this since his residency days, don't register the intensity of it, but soon he's passing cars.
His bike has purpose, beyond the benefit to his physique. This is the unequivocal zone, the part of his day that musters all prior parts into a line by descending order of importance; or makes all things irrelevant which are not now indicative of absolutes like stop or go; diesel fumes or brake dust; pedaling life or stale morgue death. Is he about to weep? Oh, Christ on the cross, he hopes not. He remembers his third year of medical school better than he recalls breakfast this morning.
Dr. Allen Rothschild saying, "You will not know, until the first one dies. Nobody knows if he can take that. If you're lucky, it will happen early."
It hadn't though, had it? He'd seen trauma vics bite it, but half their chest and most of their blood was on the street somewhere. They were dead before anyone called the ambulance. He'd seen seventy and eighty-year-olds with worn-out tickers and Pall Mall lungs give it up on a heart monitor, their children and grandchildren watching, blubbering. In such cases, a physician was requisite only to officiate the passing, so to speak. Dick had assisted surgeons he privately blamed for killing people. Yet, he had made it this far without ever having to seriously examine his own skill as a healer, a human mechanic, absent the shortcomings of technology, and the mistakes of other men. When people teetered precariously between being and ending, did he throw them a line, or did he throw them a twenty-five thousand dollar bloody send-off? But that smooth skinned little boy with the blue, trusting eyes? Christ! He can't even remember his name.
Dr. Rothschild asks, "What use has a surgeon for names? They can be charts, successes, and failures. Or, they can be friends; in which case, quit and go home."
Dick's home. They had bought it, Dick and Margaret (Maggie at Junior League functions) four years ago. A two story Georgian townhouse, and on the night of the closing they had sat on the carpet getting drunk in the elitist, regal emptiness of it. Margaret, drinking champagne from the bottle, had lamented that the only thing was, you know, some people did not consider a townhouse a real house.
"An honest-to-God house," she'd said. The night of the closing she'd said this.
Dick had asked her, "Is that right? And these people who would not consider my townhouse a house, they are who? Waste management engineers with lawns and lawn mowers to push around? They are trash men, Maggie, fucking trash men, and furniture salesmen, and cheesy insurance peddlers who can't afford a place in town. An honest-to-God half a million dollars."
Then he filled his mouth with Guinness and spit it in her face, and on the white turtleneck tube-top covering her breasts. She had recoiled initially, but then she just sat there wiping and blinking it out of her eyes, her nose all scrunched up. It was drying already when she had started crying. Her little shoulders jumped slightly and shuddered. Sour beer spittle was barely distinguishable from the scattered pretty freckles there, except in a measure of dignity, womanhood, taken before and after. The tears made tracks outlined in muddy brown down her cheeks and neck.
He helped her clean it off with toilet paper, the only thing in the place, and they fucked on the carpet--the first time in the new house. Or townhouse, she insisted on calling it from thence, always the careful qualification. But there had been no way to get it out of her hair. She smelled of stout, forty-weight beer, as they humped. She hated beer, and considered herself above it. Dick caught whiffs of it now and then as they panted and fingered and pinched each other, and he had laughed.
She is asleep now, upstairs. Margaret, the sweet-tasting, simple woman he married, will not be Maggie until preened, bejeweled, and self-bestowed with all the ostentation his career afforded her. Dick puts his bike on his shoulder and walks with it across the hardwood floor littered with ancient Persian patterns to the washroom in back where he hangs it on the wall. He kicks his Nikes off in there as well. He takes off his Auburn sweatshirt and tosses it in the direction of the clothes hamper, or where he would have put the thing had anybody asked him.
He is naked from the waist up, his bottom half clothed in tight khakis and socks. He pauses at the hall mirror. He is chiseled, and graceful, and six feet tall. Not the classic picture of a 32-year-old cardio-thoracic surgeon at all; but the picture of this one, and no other. Dick is something to look at, but he has lately grown bored of looking at himself.
He stands at the fridge now. The door is open and there is Coke. No. Juice. No. Beer. No. Water in a pitcher with a filter on top. Maybe. Yes. He goes to the cabinet for a glass, and there is a cat between his legs. Its name is Jim, or Boots, or Spot, or didn't matter because cats will not come when you call their names. But he has a thought. He pours his first glass of water and drinks it immediately. He pours his second and carries it into the living room. He sits in the leather chair adjacent the couch, his reading chair. He places his glass on the table and turns on the lamp. The cat is beside the chair now.
He thinks of Mr. and Mrs. Whatever. What was their name? Their son was a Timmy? no Tommy Whatever. Dick briefly wonders did the closing surgical assistant sew the boy's chest with skill, or did she use big Frankenstein sutures? Her in a hurry to get home, or get a nap; and this being dead little Tommy Whatever.
Dick places his hand atop the cat's back. The animal thinks it's being petted. It inflates its chest. Dick waits. It exhales and he places his finger on one side of the rib cage, his thumb on the other. He does not squeeze, so the cat is not alarmed. He holds his finger and thumb steady and waits again. Inhale, shallower this time, exhale, and Dick closes the distance between thumb and finger. The cat gets spooked and tries to dart. Inhale, exhale, thumb and finger close enough now so the animal cannot draw the breath to screech. It digs little razor claws into the carpet, down to the jute backing. Some of them snag there and break off. Its head flails side to side, trying desperately to lay teeth into the vice at its ribs, because this is what animals do. The cat does not plead. It cannot. It boils over with rage and frustration. It thrashes. It shivers. It pees and shits a perfect little ball simultaneously. Then Dick can no longer feel its heartbeat. It is silent and still forever with big eyes and a gaping mouth. Dick leaves it beside his chair. He cannot tolerate the smell of cat urine.
On his way up the stairs, Dick thinks about the death of the animal. Does he feel like he wants to lash out, like Mrs. Whatever? No, not especially. He opens the hall door to the master bath. Does he feel the solemnity of soul, the profound devastation behind Mr. Whatever's single, long, insufferable tear? Nuh-uh. He smears Crest on his toothbrush, and he thinks he already knows why.
A. It's a cat.
B. He hates cats.
So, he feels what? He feels like pummeling the nasty little bastard with… With the Oxford English Dictionary, unabridged. Just thud down on its corpse over and over because it evacuated its bladder and bowels on the carpet. He spits in the sink and rinses his brush.
Dick takes off his socks and drops his pants on the bathroom floor. He drops his briefs. The door into their bedroom, opposite the side he entered the master bath, is still closed. There is a full-length mirror on this side of it. He looks at his cock. He isn't bored with that yet. It is pretty tonight; it hangs well. It moves a little as he thinks to it. The head undulates. Normally the bicycle seat and the tight briefs cause it to retract, to wrinkle. Tonight, it's almost like it's been hard. Recently. Dick smiles. He holds his genitals in one hand and closes his eyes. The nerve cluster near the head of his penis comes alive with a tingle. He sighs and opens the door.
Margaret is lumped beneath the down comforter, on her side of the bed. Dick eases under on his side and slides over to spoon behind his wife. She has on a thong and her bare cheeks are supple stimulation on his pelvis. His erection nuzzles its way between her legs. He drapes his big right arm over her slender frame, across her chest, beneath her breasts. He thinks, do I care for her? She moans in her sleep and pushes her ass into him.
Does he love her, like a parent would love a child? He thinks more of her than he does a cat, surely. But does he love her? She inhales with sleepy slowness, and exhales. Dick positions the vice jaw, made this time of his forearm and chest, perfectly around her rib cage and locks it at an unobtrusive width. Margaret inhales a tad shallower and, still asleep, exhales. He closes in a little more and holds like tempered steel. She is not much stronger than the cat, in that neither of them registers on his strength scale. Something triggers concern in the sleeping woman. She wiggles a little and cannot turn over. She exhales and he reduces the allowance of life a full inch this time. She moans in her sleep and he moans in her ear. He tightens the vice. Her lung capacity is cut to one tenth its norm. She starts to writhe. Her upper thighs grip his hard penis and twist, and ride. It feels nice.
Margaret's diaphragm spasms and a choked cough awakens her. She is conscious of two things at once, not knowing which to attend to first. There is a penis pressing on her labia majora, reaching for her clitoris. There is an arm clamped at her sternum, collapsing her lungs. She draws her left arm from under her body and slaps at the forearm restraining her.
She manages a choppy, "Di-ick?"
Dick releases her. She yawns, a reflex action of the diaphragm.
She says, "That's too tight, baby. I couldn't breath." She reaches down and rubs his penis. "Mmm. I like that."
After sex, she says, "Wow. What a nice surprise. What's got you so randy tonight?"
"I don't know, Hon." He's behind her again, his right hand still wandering about her body, his left hand tangled in her hair.
"You have a good day at the hospital?"
"Not any better than usual." His hand slides from her hip and traces a faded suture line toward her pubic hair. He bites her earlobe. She stops his hand at the base of the scar.
"Mmm. You better stop that before you bite off more than you can chew, cowboy. Lemme up." She pats his thigh. He takes his arm off her.
She gets up and starts toward the bathroom, yawning again. He rolls over to his side of the bed and finds his sleeping spot.
Dick hears Margaret douching in the bathroom. He says to the closed door, "Maybe it's time we talk about trying again." He waits, nothing. "You hear me?"
The toilet roils. She sticks her head out the door.
"Dick, baby. We don't have to do that now, huh? Let's talk about it this weekend. At brunch, I promise. She winks at him and she closes the door.
He hears the shower come on.
"Hey! Hey, hang on!"
The shower goes off. Margaret opens the door with a towel wrapped around her and sighs. She looks at him, eyebrows raised.
"Hon, I think your cat shit beside my chair. You might want to go check on it before you take your shower."
She walks down the stairs wearing the towel and Dick buries his face in the unbleached Egyptian cotton pillowcase and holds back a sob with his whole mind.
This is death fucking with you, he thinks. It is what it is. You can handle it. You will not let this be a problem.
§ § §
Marc Phillips is a 30-year-old displaced Texas writer.
He holds most dear the belief that the majority of our best literature is yet to be written, and some of it was sung by the hair bands of the 1980’s.
Marc can be contacted at: rms2@att.net.
This is his first published fiction.
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