After the Plague (8 page)

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.