There's Something I Want You to Do

She laughed, and for a moment the doctor felt himself admiring her. “What a silly person you are,” she said. “Obscenity is not an argument. It is weak-minded. I had thought you would be more thoughtful. After all, you have a medical degree. You have not thought any of this through, not any of it, I can see that now. How shallow is the pool in which you swim. You are therefore self-deluded, cruel, and mean-spirited. I’m sorry to be so blunt, but we are in pain. Isn’t it ironic? Your name being Elijah? And you, a doctor?”

“Now you’re name-calling. I’m not a monster, and neither is my son. Perhaps you are the monster. It’s time for me to leave now. Time to go.”

“Is it time?” She glanced theatrically at her watch. “Perhaps I am a monster. But if I am, I’m a monster in the right army, and you’re in the wrong one.” She was still smiling eerily at him. The smile, fixed and meaningless, appeared to be surgically applied. Inside the walls of the house, the mice, perhaps on a salary, continued to play The Nutcracker. “The doctor is too busy to give us more than a few minutes of his precious time. So we must bid him farewell, Herb.” She turned toward her husband, who seemed to have been mummified in his La-Z-Boy chair.

Who was Herb? It was only at this moment that Elijah realized he had already forgotten the first names of the Lundgrens. They had introduced themselves, what seemed like years ago, but their first names had not stuck. He put on his hat and coat, which had been draped over the newel post, and without another word, walked out to his cold car, thinking that never in his entire life had he had a social encounter like this one, nor would he ever again.

—

The stars had a spectral clarity in the moonless sky; no wonder people thought of them as the lights emanating from the dead. Shaken, hungry, and sleepy, the doctor took several random right turns until he finally found himself where he wanted to be: on a dirt road between fallow fields with hardly a house in sight. He wanted to be lost, and he was. He turned on the car’s radio and turned it off again after hearing a few bars of atonal orchestral music. On the passenger seat rested a bag of Oreos, a box of Goldfish crackers, Cheetos, and Funyuns.

Rafe had trained in tae kwon do from the time he was a child. He had begged for lessons starting in second grade. The last time the doctor had seen Rafe sparring, the boy jumped so high that his father was startled; Rafe’s moves were perfectly coordinated, and his flexibility seemed impossible. When he did a front rising kick, his extended foot was higher than his face. And fast. He dominated his opponent with a complicated series of kicks, and then he leaped out of range before his opponent could land anything on him. He never retreated. Why was the doctor thinking of that particular match, now? The blank merciless expression on Mrs. Lundgren’s face had reminded the doctor of his son’s face in combat.

In the distance the doctor saw the blinking red light of a radio transmission tower.

When you got down to the heart of things, you found desolation. Even in the midst of joy, you would find it. But you would find joy everywhere too. His son took joy in combat and sometimes laughed in practice sessions. So complicated, the mixture of the two. The doctor reached for the Oreos and ate several. He had attained a new low, or was it a new high, in sleepiness. He felt like fighting the drowsiness, but the drowsiness welcomed him, as any narcotic does, taking him up and away.

Christmas is coming, the doctor thought, the geese are getting fat. A child’s rhyme from elementary school. Please put a penny in the old man’s hat. Why are the geese fat? Who feeds the geese? If you haven’t got a penny…what will do…the doctor heard a sound, without definition, and the road tilted a bit…

—

Then things were flying around him — the cell phone had escaped from his coat pocket and was airborne in front of him, as were various other items, including the bags of snack food and a clipboard from the front seat — and he heard the sound of crunching or of some huge animal chewing up the car as it rotated and fell down into a ditch, and Elijah, now thoroughly awake, felt his driver’s-side door open (how had that happened?), and he was ejected sideways, having forgotten to buckle his seat belt. Narcolepsy, he thought, with an odd diagnostic lucidity even as he came to rest on a little hill at the side of a field with, he instantly knew from the pain, a broken leg, a fractured tibia. He had always been a crack diagnostician, and even now on his back in the dirt, staring up at the night sky, cookie crumbs on his lips, his skills had not deserted him. How stupid pain is. From below the knee, thanks to the fracture, pain sent its dull, insistent message upstairs to the brain. Pain was like a siren. Pleasure never worked that way. The air had turned very cold.