Prelude to a Scream (26 page)

“So what's the point?”

“Well, they finally had to let him go.”

“Why?”

“The staff had noticed long since that this doctor would cannulate at the drop of a hat. But, finally, well, this girl came in with a broken arm, see…”

“What would you cannulate for a broken.… Oh. I get it. While setting the arm, he somehow worked in a little cannulation.”

“Not a little, a lot. He replaced a few inches of her left renal artery with a few inches of plastic hose.”

“He opened the girl up? He operated on her?”

“That's right.”

“For a broken arm?”

“Right again.”

“That's insane!”

“Exactly.”

“So what'd they do to this guy?”

Iris shrugged. “Let him go.”

“What? They fired him?”

“They fired him.”

“They didn't bury him alive in some scorpion-infested pile of stones two hundred miles inland from Abu Dhabi?”

Iris half laughed, half frowned. “No way. This is a surgeon we're talking about. Surgeons are to the medical profession as jet pilots are to the Israeli Air Force: from the cradle their destiny is to serve the Greater Good. Allowances for deviation in character are liberal. They're special.”

“What do you mean, ‘this is a surgeon'? This is a criminal, too. What he did to that girl… They should cannulate on him and see how he likes it.”

Iris shrugged. “It's easy to see you haven't spent much time around hospitals.”

“As little as possible, which is too much already. Enough to make me want to spend the rest of my life somewhere else.”

“Anyway, this guy from Glasgow,” Iris said matter-of-factly, “they just put him out to pasture. Farmed him out to some golf condo with a pension. If he kicked about it, they would have been forced to suspend his license to practice in the UK.”

“You mean they
didn't
suspend it?”

“No way.”

“Christ…”

She folded her hands together, as if in prayer. “You know what a
fasces
is?”

“What are you, some kind of on-line dictionary?”

“No. I just pick up a lot of Latin and Greek in my profession, and Corrigan does the rest with his etymological software. Then there's the
Chronicle
crossword. I do that every day. It's better than the one in the
Times
…”

“Don't forget the Italian deli connection.”

She smiled. “Italian used to be Latin, about 2,000 years ago.”

Stanley shifted uneasily in the canvas seat of the wheelchair. “Yeah. Sure it did.”

“Although these days,” she pointed out, “Rumanian is the closest living language to that spoken by the Caesars and Catullus. Kind of like how what they speak on Ocracoke Island, off the coast of North Carolina, is closer to what Shakespeare spoke than what's currently heard in England.” Iris used the Spanish pronunciation of Shakespeare, Shock-eh-spe-ahr-ray. “Isolation is the usual explanation. Both Ocracoke and Rumania are relatively isolated from the flow of modern history, see, and —.”

“Hey, hey, hey!” said Stanley, waving both hands as if warding off a hornet. “What's this got to do with insane doctors?”

Iris stopped mid-sentence, frowned, then nodded her head once, a second time, then a third, like a waitress recounting forks for a dinner party. “Oh,” she said suddenly. “
Fasces
. Well.” She folded her hands again. “Bundle of sticks gathered together. Symbol of Roman strength. You remember the parable. Take out one of the sticks, it breaks over your knee with ease. Two sticks, same deal but a little more difficult. A few of the sticks, much more difficult to break them. Take all of the sticks together and call them, let's say, the Glaswegian Medical Association, and try to break it over your knee with a sudden downward motion — whammo,” she mimicked this, “— broken knee.”

Stanley nodded.

“Put another way,” she added, ‘“United We Stand, Divided We Fall'.”

“You're saying that doctors stick together.”

“Like migrating pelicans.”

“So,” said Stanley, who could cling to a subject with the best of them, especially when that subject concerned his health, “cannulation is a reality. If the ana— anasto—.”

“Anastomosis.”

“What you said, if the vein is frayed or badly trimmed or whatever, they can cut back the damage and cannulate to a new organ, or wherever.”

“Exactly.”

“I see. But we're running up a bill, here, aren't we?”

“Yes.”

“And there's only one way to determine if the site will be easy or difficult or feasible at all, which is to go in and look?”

“That's right.”

Stanley thought about this a moment. “Might as well have a kidney on hand when you go in, then. Along with some can… cannula?”

“It would be a good idea.”

After a silence Iris said, “This can't be very pleasant for you to talk about.”

“Are you kidding?” said Stanley. “It's fascinating, my beautiful caregiver. It's like watching a snake that's been run over by a car but remains unkilled. And—get this—inside that snake's head is
my brain
.”

“Oh, please!” she exclaimed. And she suddenly knelt beside the wheelchair and concealed her face against his chest. “If there're two things I hate in this world,” she said into his shirt, “it's snakes and kites.”

She looked up and added, “Since the end of the Reagan Administration, it's just the two.”

She buried her face against his chest again.

This unexpected levity put Stanley's dour self-concern at a disadvantage. He still had a coffee cup in one hand and the envelope in the other. After some hesitation he placed them both on the roof beside the chair, and tentatively put his arms around Iris' shoulders.

“You're shivering. Are you cold?”

Abruptly she turned her head against his shoulder, so he could look down at her face. Tears glistened along her cheeks, like twin freshets over a moonlit glacier.

“No,” she said. “Yes. I'm cold.”

“You're crying, too,” he said. “That joke wasn't that bad.”

She buried her face against his shoulder again. “No I'm not.”

“I thought nurses could handle this stuff,” Stanley said uncertainly. “I mean, who else could I ask about —.”

“Look.” She raised her face and looked into his eyes.

“Yes?”

“Can we go to bed now?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“It's been a month since I've seen you naked.”

“So?”

“So your scar is healing by the minute.”

“Why don't you love me for my personality?”

She shook her head. “Better you should be thinking,
I
am scarred, therefore I am
.”

He smiled and touched her hair. “It's only been three days since I've seen you at all, Ms. Considine. And I —.”

“Three days? Stanley, it's six.”

“Okay. Six.”

“You're avoiding me.”

“No way.”

“Go on,” she said. “Protest.”

“I'm busy.”

“Say it.”

“Very busy.”

She shook her head and opened her mouth, so that he could see the tip of her tongue playing along her teeth as she carefully pronounced the word. “I want you naked. Say it.”

“N-n..,” he said.

“Come on,” she coaxed.

“Naked,” he said.

“That's it,” she whispered, taking his head between her two hands and kissing him on the mouth. “Naked.”

“Naked,” he said into her mouth.

She held his face so that their eyes were a few inches apart. “Now can we go to bed?”

Her eyes were beautiful. The fully risen moon hung to the east of them, as brilliant and big as a spotlight in a boxcar, as big as moons get in a night sky. Its light suffused her hair with an opalescent aura. Her fingertips pressed against his temples. It was not like she was asking him to join the army or give blood or submit to a flexible sigmoidoscopy. Besides, scarlingualists aren't that numerous. It's hard for them to find each other. It's not like it is with, say, the San Joaquin tarantula, the male of which goes looking for the female every October, and she's out there waiting for him, or another tarantula like him, and that's that. Scarlingus is not that simple. The code is not that formalized. Not so biologically preordained. Not so Calvinistic. He was barely breathing. His mouth was dry. He was interested. He was caving in.

The door to the staircase grated open.

Chapter Ninteen

E
VEN AS
S
TANLEY STRUGGLED NOT TO UTTER THE WORD “CYBERSPACE”
instead of “I love you,” the door at the head of the staircase threw a trapezoid of light across the rooftop gravel, and Felix Choy stepped into it. Fong followed him.

Given a place sturdy enough to hang him from—an A-frame, say, of the type generally used for removing engines from Caterpillar tractors—you might stretch Felix Choy to five foot six in gravity boots. There was some hope that his weight had topped out at 250 pounds when he turned fifteen years old, but that was only a few weeks ago and time would tell. He wore unlaced thick-tongued high-topped $250 air-cushioned sneakers (a dollar per pound, he liked to say), impeccably custom-seamed jeans fabricated in an uncle's 100-machine sweatshop, a snakeskin for a belt with a Pentium chip and its socket for a buckle, a bright red wool warm-up jacket with leather sleeves and a patch on one shoulder that read
Voice
=
Data
and a campaign button on the other shoulder that read
Hackers for Choice
. Underneath the jacket he wore a Hawaiian shirt, also custom-tailored, in emerald, mauve, white and black, with pink buttons, its mutant pineapples faded, possibly, by cathode rays. He also wore fingerless chamois batting gloves, their forgotten logos a souvenir of some over-capitalized Silicon Valley startup's one-season foray into B-league softball.

Altogether, Felix Choy affected the essence of the cyber-sartorial.

The warmup jacket had a fur collar, too.

An elegant piece of carry-on Bangkok pigskin, tanned to the color of perfectly fried onion cake, hung from a lambskin strap looped over a fleece pad on his shoulder. Day or night, as ever, Felix wore a $150 pair of Porsche sunglasses, to the wearer of which everything appears in a hepatic or post-nuclear ochre. On the inside of his left wrist gleamed a $32,000 Seiko analog wristwatch that, along with the correct time, could explain everything non-cybernetic (less and less) in terms of its registered owner's mother's biorhythms—password-protected, of course—guaranteed impervious to amniotic fluid.

Behind Felix came Fong, lugging two bags of groceries and a briefcase-style computer tool-kit that resembled the slim valise favored by uptown cocaine mules.

“Greetings, my white Anglo friend,” hollered Fong, adding in a stage-whisper, “self-righteous Protestant spawn of Nordic fish thieves and the all-acquisitive fur-bearing octopus of European culture.” He closed the access door with a backwards kick.

“Geez,” said Iris, not bothering to get out of Stanley's lap. “You are?”

“Are we interrupting anything?” said Fong eagerly, stopping within inches of the wheelchair. “And, if so, may we watch?”

When nobody said anything he added, “It's okay. Felix here, being a Buddha of the 10th grade, can work under any but the most non-electrical conditions.”

“Felix,” said Stanley, “this is Iris.”

Felix raised one corner of his mouth until it caused the baby-fat cheek above it to collide with the lower frame of the sunglasses.

“I'm Fong,” Fong reminded Iris politely. “We met at the hospital.” He rustled one of the grocery bags. “Care for a cherry Coke?”

“Sure,” said Iris. “Is it diet?”

Fong laughed.

Felix held out a beefy hand. Fong filled it with a 12-ounce can of Cherry Coke. Felix grunted. “Okay, okay” Fong said. He retrieved the can, popped its top, and put the can back in Choy's hand.

As Fong opened one for Iris, Felix took a sip and looked around. He walked to the edge of the roof, toward Berkeley, and looked over it. His bulk nearly obscured the lower half of the full moon. He strolled halfway back.

“Like standing on the edge of the world, huh Felix?” Fong prattled.

Felix said nothing.

“Huh, Felix?” Fong coaxed. “Here, Felix,” he added, as if calling a recalcitrant cat.

Felix considered the shack. The other three humans on the roof might just as well have been orphaned TV antennas.

Felix upended the Coke can and emptied it into his upturned mouth. Then he crushed the can in his pudgy fist and hooked the dripping wreckage over his head to Fong.

“A genius,” Fong said, catching the crushed can in the grocery bag, and not bothering to suppress a note of awe from his sarcasm.

“Good spot,” Felix said, in the unmistakable near-falsetto of a teenager. He unrasped and rerasped the Velcro strap on the back of one batting glove and said, “Chairs and a table, outside, facing the moonlight. Where's the phone?”

“Downstairs,” said Fong.

Felix made a face. “Pulse?”

Fong dialed circles in the air with his forefinger.

“Pulse. Well,” Felix sighed, “come on. I got to go to school tomorrow morning.”

“Too many absences this month already,” Fong said, as an aside to Stanley and Iris.

“You passing anything?” Stanley asked.

Choy flicked his hand sideways. “I pay guys.”

“First thing in the morning?” Iris looked at the little watch on the inside of her wrist. “It's not even nine o'clock.”

“I'm only fifteen,” said Felix, demurely shooting his cuff for a glance at the Seiko. “I need my sleep.”

“You should watch all that sugar,” suggested Iris, indicating the can of Coke. “Sugar makes kids crazy and gives them insomnia.”

“Real-time behavior,” said Felix, ripping and re-ripping his Velcro, “is deceptive.”

Carrying the tool-case, Fong led their way downstairs.

“Cyberspace,” Iris said, watching them go. “I'm sorry I confused you with them.”

Stanley grunted. “Fong is good; but, he says, Felix is better. Fong says Felix routinely visits NASA, BitNet, CompuServe, all the major banks, most government systems, telephone company satellites and credit databases, not to mention Lawrence-Livermore, White Sands, Los Alamos, the Institute for Advanced Studies, the Fermi Lab — and the Feds have never gotten near him. Not to mention DataBAsia.”

“Which is…?”

“A profound database concerning Asian martial arts films and hacker bulletins. Nobody knows who runs it, where it is, or how to access it.”

“Wow. I think.”

“Also, he flies cataclysmic Flight Simulator.”

“Oh boy,” said Iris, with some disdain, “skills for the millennium.”

“Level 10.”

“Are you certain that Flight Simulator is really going to come in handy?”

“Are you kidding? Just cooking the books for Hop Toy brings him in two hundred a week. Takes him about two hours on Saturday morning.”

“Is that why Fong carries his valise?”

“Fong carries his valise because they're friends. Fong respects Felix. Besides, Felix is too young to drive. He pays Fong a hundred a week plus mileage and burgers to drive him to school, his jobs, his tailor, the computer store, and like that.”

“Jobs? Plural?”

“As far as I can tell, between school and jobs, the kid is at it about fourteen hours a day. He's a type A — driven, single-minded, millionaire-by-the-age-of-twenty type of kid, Felix is.”

“Friends,” said Iris.

“It's symbiotic. Felix knows computers and Fong wants to learn. Fong's got the Firebird with the
Flammenwerfer
sound system, and Felix likes to ride and sing along.”

“Associates.”

Stanley shrugged. “Fong was dealing dope until Felix got a hold of him. Felix was taking taxis until he met Fong. It's a beautiful thing.”

“So what do these guys owe you?”

“They're related to little Tseng.”

“Tseng's the girl you rescued?”

Stanley shrugged again. “I was with her when we were both rescued.”

“If you're so modest about the recompense, why do you continue to take advantage of it?”

He leveled a gaze at her. “This question seems to be getting around.”

She looked at the moon. “As questions go, it's kind of an obvious one.”

“Wouldn't you?”

“Wouldn't I what?”

He indicated the view. “Take advantage.”

She leveled her gaze at him. “Depends on the reason.”

“How about life or death? Would that be good enough?”

She watched him for a moment, then looked away.

“That's my reason. Those organ-buzzards have left me no choice.”

“That's kind of changing the subject, but you mean you feel that you're left with no choice but to break the law?”

“Who's breaking the law?”

“If you aren't doing it yourself, you're going to get these two kids to do it for you. What are you going to do? Send them out for a new kidney?”

Stanley looked at the moon. It was getting smaller as it got higher. “I wish. If it were that easy, Hop Toy would have done it already.”

“You mean it's not possible?”

“How would I know? On one hand there's no doubt that it's somehow possible. On the other hand, it's not feasible — financially, I mean — for me to get a legitimate kidney. Hop Toy's a good guy. He's done plenty for me, and would do more. Tseng means everything to him. Because of her he's given me a home, a job, a truck to drive. If I'm hungry, day or night, his mother or his wife feeds me. They do my laundry, they let me use their phone, they get me the best hacker in the neighborhood and pay his expenses. But they don't have what it takes to procure and install an uninsured kidney. It's too expensive, and it's too complicated, it's very illegal, and, you might be interested to know, I'm not asking.”

“What do you mean, complicated?”

Stanley shifted uneasily.

“It's not the procedure that's complicated. It's the Hop Toy family's relationship to authority that's complicated.”

“Authority?”

“Yeah,” said Stanley. “Authority.”

She frowned.

Stanley sighed loudly. “IRS? Do I have to spell it out?”

“Oh. I get it. You mean if he suddenly comes up with too much money…”

Stanley nodded. “Little bells go off in big computers.” He waved his hand. “But, bottom line — Hop Toy has done plenty for me as it is.”

Iris touched his face. “Too bad we're not married. My insurance might have covered this…”

Stanley looked at her. “Married? I hardly know you.”

She replied softly, “The scope of the subjunctive.”

Stanley blinked. “Beg pardon?”

“Condition contrary to fact.”

“Ah…: Yes…?”

She shook her head. “I came across a couple of lines, once, on just that subject, by Tom Raworth. He's an English poet. Perhaps you know of him?”

“Yeah,” Stanley sighed wearily. Was there no end to this woman's discursiveness? “Perhaps I know of him.”

She smiled an inward smile, and quoted the lines.

each day

repeated

he lives

for ever

he thinks

alone

in the honey

comb o

the subjunctive

that riffle

of the deck

She ruffled his hair. “That didn't flood the noggin too badly, did it?”

Damn
, Stanley brooded.
This woman's smarter than I am
.

The metal door to the staircase opened with a crash and the light flooding out of the portal was eclipsed by the bulk of Felix, who stood aside for the much thinner frame of Fong, walking backwards to let a wire peel off a spool between his hands.

“What's this?” said Iris. “It looks like they're going to blow up the building.”

When Fong had cleared the door Felix kicked the wire into the corner of the threshold and closed the door on it.

Fong trailed wire off the whirling spool until he'd arrived by the arm of Stanley's wheelchair. Then he set the spool in a flower box on the windowsill and disappeared into the darkened shed. A few minutes later he reappeared with the bok choy crate that normally lived beneath the TV. He set it to the right of the door and went back inside.

Felix Choy stood the briefcase full of tools on the pea gravel beneath the spool and geraniums, turned his back on the shed and studied the layout. After a moment he moved the wooden crate a couple of feet toward Berkeley. He stepped back for a moment, shaded his eyes toward the moon, then stepped forward and adjusted the angle of the box.

“What's he doing?” Iris whispered, as if Felix were on stage.

“Shh,” said Fong, from the darkness beyond the door. “He's aligning the table for optimum Chih energy.”