Playin' Guts Ball

By Charles Reisen

Secret husbands, extra wives

LSD jivin' at the army physical

dancing to a six-gun

the Toffs and Tarts party

robbing the dead

the lost girls of the sixties

burning the British embassy

the birth of monsters

on the run from the feds

summer love

exploding lawn ornaments

narcs gone native

the lost chance of the century

dodging a bullet

the pied piper and the beautiful virgins

the only place open when the pubs are closed

Dad's secret identity

the neuro-evolution of ecstasy

cigarettes over cadavers

pub brawls

the dancing detective

escape from the Fun Hog Ranch

blacks with guns in the student union hall

the secret salvation of Woodstock

felony murder

acid journeys of discovery

the "Man Gone Missing"

deadly desert canyons

the Battle of Chicago, 1968

fatal love letters.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Dec 21, 2003
• ISBN: 9781469721651

Charles Reisen

Charles Reisen grew up in New Jersey. He attended Cornell University and The Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland. He currently practices Neonatology in New Jersey where he resides with two sons and one wife.

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

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3 a.m., the phone was ringing in the dark, Carl fumbled with it. Dr. Horowitz is doing a stat C section and wants you there right away. No way out.

Brace your eyes, Eve. He patted his wife on the shoulder and switched on the light, slipped on clothes, grabbed keys and tooled up the E type Jag replica. Unlike the original, this could boast a roll bar, a shoulder harness and alternating headlight flashers that said get outta my way. It struck ticket fear in the hearts of insured motorists. The car flew through the dark suburban streets; the traffic lights were with him. He took the stairs two at a time in the hospital, running up to the nurses’ station in Labor and Delivery.

Have I time to change into scrubs?

No, just gown and go in. They need you.

The O.B. was holding the baby on the mother’s abdomen, and had not yet cut the umbilical cord. Carl ducked down to see from below the nurse’s elbow. The baby was floppy and blue, and the obstetrician was gagging him with a rubber suction bulb.

Could I have the patient please? Carl invited in the friendliest of tones. Step this way, please, uh, MISTER Baby. Welcome to Earth. The Mom and Dad might be awake and straining to hear every word behind the curtain. The nurse, draped with towels, caught the baby and dropped him gently on the warmer where eight hands patted him dry, and then slipped the bloody towels away. Fingers went up and down his ribs like a washboard bass, and flicked the soles of his feet to stimulate him.

Carl grabbed the umbilical cord to feel the pulses, and far apart they felt. Damn, he’d need luck to get back to bed at all. He shifted from the baby’s right to behind the baby’s left shoulder to hold the mask over the newborn’ s mouth and nose, and begin to pump the bag, watching for the chest to rise. He pushed the intern’s stethoscope bell over the apex of the baby’s heart, How’s the rate? he barked. Am I moving air? The intern, a Polish blond, nodded. How is the rate? He barked again, directing his attention to making sure the mask made a tight seal, and that the baby’s neck was exactly angled.

Don’t you want to intubate him? She asked.

Not yet, we’re moving air.

The heart rate’s up. The baby started to cry under the mask. Carl put his own stethoscope, the tiny one, on the baby’s chest. Umm, the lion sleeps tonight. Maybe. The baby didn’t sound like he was moving buckets of air in and out. Carl reached over gripped a loose fold of skin, pulling it up from a skinny thigh. It came up easily. Droopy drawers, he called the sign of weight loss in the womb. Big fat Mama, skinny baby, stat C-section—she probably blew up with pre-eclampsia: high blood pressure and a swollen, puffy body. The baby was skinny because the placenta had aged eighty years, scarring up under the pounding, forcing the baby to eat hand to mouth and breathe through a straw. That didn’t make the baby necessarily sick, just early, when they were delivered to relieve the danger to the mother’s life. Often the stress in the womb mimicked the approach of birth and fooled the lungs into maturing. Carl had to give the baby a chance not to buy a tube—to have his jaw pried open and a tube the size of a straw guided through his vocal cords, to rest in his airway. The other end of the tube would be hooked up to what was really a chimney bellows in the shape of an infant ventilator, squeezing gobs of air into his lungs under pressure.

The obstetrician confirmed the story and introduced him to the parents, too frightened to take in a long chalk talk on preemie babies and their immature, stiff lungs.

We’ll need to watch him over the next twelve hours. He may need a baby sized ventilator till his lungs unstiffen. We’ll put tubes in his belly button vessels, and run the IV’s through them. They’ll have monitors and little stopcocks attached to draw blood from, so we won’t need to use many needles. We have all the equipment and help we could want. I don’t know if he’ll need the vent because he can breathe on his own now, but these babies usually get tired. When was the baby supposed to be born?

October 2nd.

If all goes well, the baby will probably go home by that date.

Carl gave instructions to the resident to do a sepsis work-up and to give the baby antibiotics. He explained the procedures as the nurse brought the baby to the mother, still blowing oxygen in his face. Carl took the baby and pressed his face gently into his mother’s cheek Look at that, they’re definitely bonded! Then he was patting the parents’ shoulders while rolling his eyes at the anesthesiologist, and left. He wanted to look in on two of his micro-preemies, the under two pound babies back in the intensive care unit. They kept walking up three stairs, then falling back two, or four, or out cold like a drunk, on their backs. The unit was high-tech Star Trek, a dozen monitors beeping away, little babies in clear plastic barrels, with glowing band-aids and tangles of wires and tubes around them.

Just breathe, he urged them, just eat. The tiny tubes trickled milk down their mouths, pumped from the breasts of their anxious mothers. The DuBois twins, nicknamed Blanche one and Blanche two, were still on nasal prongs. Blanche Honey, you got to learn to breathe for yo’self, you can’t rely on the kindness of strangers. Over there, you boys now, you boys, you get bigger and learn to suck now and I’ll put your face in a treat you won’t get for another 18 years or so. Around here you suck is a compliment. Don’t suck, and you go home with tube in your stomach, munchkin. So shape up, you babies. Front and center. Drop and give me 10. I need baby Marines and I get you poor excuses for newborns, but we’ll make fat pink babies of you lot yet!

Baby boy Keogh was coming through the door in a transport incubator and was put on a scale. 1270 grams, he’s way too big to throw back, Carl teased the baby’s father gently. Nurses went swiftly to work, covering his body with monitor leads, including one with a white wire leading to a pink glow under the band-aid on his big toe. It displayed the baby’s blood oxygen saturation, or sat from second to second. The baby was kept pink by using oxygen blown onto his face, but his ribs were protruding with every breath, one per second. His little nostrils flared along, every single time.

Carl looked at him. No damn luck at all. Premature white boys do the worst. The weight loss and stress, which had failed to help his lungs mature, now counted against him. All right, we’ll be doing the lines; he nodded, as the residents measured the baby for umbilical line insertion.

He’s up to 60 percent Oxygen in a hood now. The residents drew the admission bloods and sent off a blood gas test. By the time the printer sprang to life with results, Baby Boy Keogh needed 80 percent; Carl was already flipping the dials on the vent and choosing between the residents. Each of them wanted the opportunity to perform the delicate task of slipping the tube into the trachea. As the babies invariably dived, that is, gagged, and dropped their heart rate and oxygen saturation, the doc only had a few seconds to insert the blade, pull the slippery tongue straight up and forwards, and watch the little white cords come into view. Carl’s job depended upon his ability to slip the tube through the cords on any size baby, from a pound up, night or day, drunk or sober. If you couldn’t do that, it didn’t matter how many journals you’d read; without an airway, you didn’t have any baby. The baby’s father wanted to watch the intubation, and needed gentle dissuading.

Mr. Keogh, y’ever see that sign when you drop your car at the mechanic’s? If you bring your own parts, twenty dollars extra, if you watch, fifty dollars extra, if you help, one hundred dollars extra." Mr. Keogh grinned and asked to be pointed back to the delivery room.

Pompeio, the resident from Italy, skillfully put the laryngoscope blade in the baby’s mouth. Holding the shaft between his thumb and forefinger, he pressed down with his pinkie on the baby’s windpipe. I see the cords… He slipped the tube into the baby’s mouth, and pulled back the wire guide. I saw it go through! He’s an easy tube. The nurse fixed a stiff rubber bag on the tube and squeezed it while Carl checked for breath sounds, putting his own tiny stethoscope head on the baby’s chest to hear air moving, but only on the right side. He slowly lifted the tube back out of the mouth until he heard air rushing through the left. Now it was in a good position, and the breath sounds were much louder over his tiny chest than they were over his stomach. The tube was definitely in his airway, not his esophagus. So why was he trying to die?

75, 73, 71, 70, heart rate’ s a hundred, 95, 80 read the nurse. The sat is 68. A helluva year, thought Carl, but a terrible sat.

Okay, yank the tube. Bag him up with the mask.

I know it was in, I saw it go through!

I think so too, Pompeio, but meanwhile this kid is circling the drain. You can have another try. The baby’s heart rate was up, and the kid was pink again, with sats in the 90s. Pompeio repeated the intubation, Carl repeated his examination of the baby, and the baby repeated the dive. They pulled the tube again, put the mask over the baby’s face and pumped him up once more. Initially, the baby did not respond to the bagging, and nurses had to move up to alarming pressures at 100 percent oxygen.

Get x-ray up here fast, get the transilluminator over here, and give me the scope. The transilluminator was a small high intensity focused light on a long gooseneck. A collapsed lung would neatly light up one side like a dull pink neon sign. Lights out! He applied the light to each side of the baby’s chest, but the glow stayed only in the skin next to the lamp. Lights back on. We don’t have a pneumo. Okay, mix up the Surfactant now. He got behind baby’s head, took the handle of the scope and flipped down the blade. With a glance at the baby’s sat meter, he placed it in, pulled up the tongue and saw the vocal cords, shooting the tube between them when they separated to take a breath. The baby again took a deep dive, with the nurse calling out numbers like a bell tolling. "Put him on the vent now, breath rate of 50, 100 percent oxygen, pressures of 25 over 5. Carl checked the vent pressure with his thumb over the hose aperture, watching the needle go up to but not past 25. Pressure was a very expensive way to keep these little lung sacs open. If they burst, the transilluminator would light up both sides of baby Keogh’s chest. He connected the vent hose to the baby’s tube, and listened, calmly, turning up the rate, managing to keep the baby’s oxygen levels half again above those in the womb.

"Dr. Wagner, would you like to be sure the tube is in place before we take the x-ray? Magdalena was practicing intern year diplomacy, expressing her fear that the kid was so rocky because the tube was out, or never was in the right place.

Dobcha, he agreed with his one word of Polish. Good, he had taught them: you trust your mother, but you cut the cards. He put the scope in the kid again, and one after another they all put their chins on his shoulder and their cheeks against his. Magdalena had trouble seeing with her left eye very well, and spilled her long blond hair all over him as she pressed in against him. You see it now, in the cords, not the esophagus? She gave thumbs up, and took her chin off his shoulder. He took the scope from the baby’s mouth, and looked suspiciously at Magdalena; "You know gang, she only wants to do that when I intubate. She pulled her mane away, but a few strands were tangled with his stethoscope, and they had to move away together as the technician swung the x-ray camera over the baby She was waxing indignant as she removed the golden strands, but when she could lift her head up, she was blushing, to the amusement of Pompeio and the nurses. They returned to the bedside as soon as the x-ray was done, checking the ventilator settings and the sat meter.

Surf’s up! The nurse passed him a syringe of what looked like milk. Carl screwed it onto a side opening of the tube, and pushed the protein and lipid mix into the tube in one stroke, timing it so that the vent pushed it down into the baby for him. After a few minutes, the sat numbers were budging, and over thirty minutes, he slowly turned up the pressure to twenty-seven, thirty, thirty three, stopping at each setting until the improvement flattened out. At thirty-five, the hoses were jumping from the load.

This kid’s lungs are stiffer than the plastic hoses. Here I am, riding the tiger again, thought Carl. Everyone expects a kid this old to live, and I’m the one’s gotta be damn sure it happens. This is what they pay me the small bucks for.

Finally, the oxygen sat numbers were approaching the realm of the living, and the hoses were no longer jumping quite so much from the pressure strokes. The surfactant must be working.

Welcome to Earth, he intoned, as he shook the baby’s hand. Now, get a life!

Pompeio and Magdalena had gloved and gowned, and were hunched over the baby’s abdomen, painting the belly brown with sterile swabs and teasing out the vein and two arteries in the stump of the umbilical cord. The vein was easy, it usually had a huge clot in it, but the arteries were muscular coils slightly thinner than spaghetti. Each had a tiny round dot of blood on the cut surface, locating the entrance to the hollow lumen. Into this opening they planned to insert nineteen centimeters of a soft plastic catheter. Like shoving spaghetti into macaroni anchored in jelly, the gelatinous mix inside the umbilical cord that had kept the vessels from kinking for the past thirty-one weeks. Pompeio started with a tiny pointed plastic shoehorn, a few millimeters long and resembling a bent toothpick, resting on the red dot atop of one artery. He started to bear down with the little dilator, and Carl chided him, reminding him it’s a hollow tube, Pompeio. Think of another; go on, in the range of human anatomy, quite a bit bigger. You have to consider their reaction to being out in the open, and let the spasm of contraction subside, or no catheter, nothin’ gets admitted anywhere. You gotta sit there and talk nice to it, Pompeio; you can’t just march up, grab it with a pinch, and stick it in. We’re not in Italy! Pompeio grinned as Carl continued: when that vessel and your dilator have had a little time to get acquainted, you sneak the inside tip of your forceps down the shoehorn, grab the vessel wall between that and your outside tip. Now you have the lumen under control. Then gently put that catheter tip between the shoehorn and the wall and let it rest there till it opens up further down.

Pompeio did as directed, but when he got the tip in, he immediately tried to insert to the next centimeter mark, and the tube curled above the stump and under his fingers. Typical Italian man said Magdalena, always in a hurry, tac-tac! I wouldn’t go out with you!

Forget it Maggie, I’m married.

You don’t have to tell me, I can see your technique!

Carl went down to get the x-ray, as the housestaff were still in sterile gowns. He held it up to the light where they sat, so they could read it first. The whole chest on the x-ray was only the size of a grapefruit.

White-out! said Magdalena, looking up at the lungs, completely opaque with millions of collapsed air sacs merging into a haze. This kid is a very sick little chicken. We have the catheter in to nineteen, Dr. Wagner.

My partner is going to ride the tiger all weekend, thought Carl. She’ll be racing in here if his lung pops to put a tube into his chest. "Okay, call for another x-ray to check the catheter position. Have you sent the next set of gases? You’d better tie him down, he teased the nurse who was arranging the baby’s restraints. If he comes loose on those pressures, he’ll fly around the room like a balloon let go. Anything else on the board in labor and delivery? Is Placenta Airlines circling for a descent? This is your captain speaking. We’re at station two plus two. If you look out the left and right windows, you’ll see the obturator nerves. We’ll experience some turbulence passing through the cervix, so stay in your seat. Hell, it’s too late to go home now."

The baby needed a final pressure of thirty-seven, a rate of seventy breaths per minute, and one hundred percent oxygen. He would buy this help for three to six days or so before he started making his own surfactant, and begin weaning from the vent. The monitors bipped and beeped, the leads and lines ran over his body, eyes covered in patches, bathed in a purple glow. This hospital should be in Italy, there would be a bar in the basement.

No way, sighed a nurse, in tired disbelief.

He’s right, there are bars, nodded Pompeio.

"I’m going to bed. Look at all these white hairs! Medicine has done this to me! And I’m only twenty-nine!

And tomorrow you’re off to your twenty-fifth reunion, there’s a neat trick! You must have entered university shortly after being born. Bernie, the Irish nurse with the Cork accent sassed him.

It certainly felt like it. Yeah, we’ll leave after Grand Rounds tomorrow. He noticed Bernie was holding up a full unlabeled bottle of milk in each hand, just pumped from her own breasts for her baby at home. What were ye doin’, the donut in there? She nodded as he glared fiercely at each bottle, back and forth. And is that all ye could do?" He scowled, and then they both broke into broad grins.

He headed to the on-call room, singing Bob Dylan’s 110th dream: get born, keep warm,…get dressed, get blessed, try to be a success…twenty years in school n’ then they put you on the day shift…Look out kid, you’re gonna get hit… He disliked the anonymous on-call room, well furnished, but without windows, and over slept, getting into the rounds at about 8:10. The chairman of the department of pediatrics was missing from his seat, but his secretary was there, looking shocked to see Carl. She hustled right over to him.

You have to go up to Dr. Hillfelder’s office. They’re still having the meeting about the resident coverage. She hissed anxiously. Carl had forgotten the strangely timed summit on how Lawlorstown Hospital, former rivals, now stronger partners in a shotgun merger, had requisitioned all the residents next year for its own neonatal ICU. The chief resident should be there, but he had just seen Freddie wander into the rounds. What was going on? He stumbled up the stairs to the office of the department chairman. Why he did he have to deal with this pompous prick during Grand Rounds?

Carl had always flown under the radar since his coming, hoping to escape the onerous committees Hillfelder formed, which met at 7 a.m. at the glassy Titanic corporate center, miles away from the patients. He was always calling meetings, and delivering trivial corporate crap in ponderous tones. He had already driven some ace doctors and their large practices away from the system. There was another secretary there to wave him in.

Hillfelder sat at his desk, and Grossberg, another doc who had fled practice for what he thought was a safe administration job, was sitting to the side on a couch. There was an envelope on the desk, and Hillfelder was looking down at it, avoiding Carl’s eyes as he began to speak.

This is the hardest part of my job…

Cut it out, Carl sneered at him and thought, Christ, Bull Durham was on the tube just this week, this is the coach’s you’re being let-go speech. Carl opened the envelope: Your contract will not be renewed…effective immediately.

Your partner was in earlier, burbled Grossberg idiotically, as if she had coincidentally dropped by for coffee and Danish.

"So we’re both getting the chop, eh?

Grossbergs’ shoulders sagged with the unspoken admission. Carl turned to Hillfelder. There was a roaring in his ears. He had to fight to concentrate. These bastards were actually doing this, right now, to him.

Who is going to cover the NICU?

We decided to have the Lawlorstown group take over. They weren’t gonna give him a reason; they didn’t have to, one of their corporate power perks. Of course it was to save money, they could hire some kid just out of training for about half of what he made. He had worried about that, but had considered that the distances involved would piss off the obstetricians, they wouldn’t risk it and would go deliver their patients elsewhere.

Those guys…live too far away! Carl was shocked. He wouldn’t dare cover their hospital; he was at too great a distance from the emergencies. Obviously nobody was going to care about the very factor he had counted on to keep his job safe in the slow, ongoing merge and purge process. They were corporate Maoists; if the party said the distance was small, even the maps would shrink.

Take your personal stuff. We’ll ship your books home next week. Sign out your patients to Berkman, he’s over in your office. Carl was studying the severance check enclosed in the envelope. He fixed each of them in turn with an icy stare.

One months severance? Thanks, Big Spender. Luckily…I’m not poor. He turned at the door, as if to say farewell. Doctttorrrs… his voice rose sarcastically, then he strolled past the secretary and over to his office. Berkman, the hairy little gnome, was already sizing up the place for himself.

Christ, I thought the vultures circled at a respectable distance until the corpse stopped twitching. Come on, follow me, I’ll turn over the unit. He headed for the NICU, Berkman’s legs churning to keep up. Carl frog-marched him past each baby, presenting the cases in rapid fire, but low tones, so the nurses would not realize how angry he was. He walked up to Baby Boy Keogh, whose last gas was good. Well now, Berkman, you can Ride the Tiger all weekend. Just don’t go home; where you live is too far away for this kid. They passed the DuBois twins, and after he presented them without mentioning the nervous mom or the gunslinging dad, Carl’s tone changed a bit.

"You know, Berkman, I saw on the department brochure that you finished med school in Chile in ’75. You started under Allende and finished under Pinochet? You were there in the time of the coup, like that Jack Lemmon movie, Missing?

Yes that’s right, I was down there, trying to find myself. I knew all those people in the movie. I was in Santiago during the coup. Berkman seemed to warm at the chance to recount his brush with History.

Now that is strange, you finishing like nothing ever happened. I met Jewish Chilean kids in Jerusalem in ’75, thrown out of med school midway for politics, and fled for their lives, needing somewhere to finish. I put ’em on to my school in Dublin. You must remember how they pulled doctors out of the O.R.s and shot them in the stadium, and plastered them into the walls? Like your friend in Missing. Only you, a yanqui Jewish hippie kid, friend of the disappeared, get to bring home your diploma, no problem. Those Fascists were awfully kind to you; I just can’t think of why that might be.

Carl brought him up to where the nurses were having a coffee break.

Dr. Moll has a problem and won’t be covering this weekend. You know Dr. Berkman, those of you who also work over at Lawlorstown. For any problems that you have, do not hesitate to call him, night or day, he added lightly. I’m off to my 25th college reunion. Carl headed out of the NICU to his office. It was already packed up for the temporary office while the new mother-baby unit was under construction. The administration nerds had been firm with himself and Aurelia, pack it or lose it. It was clear why now.

The top of his desk got swept into a cardboard box, His personal files into another. He changed back into his clothes and headed down the long corridor to the doctor’s garage, past the administration office swarming with clipboard nurses and doctor-wannabes in corporate suits. As soon as they saw him cross the driveway to the garage, they burst out and raced up to the NICU, to break the news to the nurses and residents, who received the party line of things were good, things are going to be better with open-mouthed shock and tears. The nurses were on each other’s shoulders weeping, and the suits tried to comfort them with the news that a generous severance payment had been given.

Carl was doing his Frankenstein walk down to the car, lurching with a box under each arm, unshaven, the August heat turning his puffy face into a stiff mask. His teeth weren’t brushed, he couldn’t reach his shades, and was grateful just to get to the convertible and throw the boxes out of his aching arms. His knees slithered under the steering wheel; only a skinny ex-biker could drive this car, given the home built mechanicals and the extremely tight quarters. Finally out onto the busy roadway, he could relax as the car drove itself home.

Those sons of bitches…that shower of whores. Hillfelder, the filthy little gombeen, and Grossberg, that momser, had been lying to his face. Berkman, dodging him last spring at the convention. No wonder he shook off Carl’s offers to have dinner or go skiing together. He looked like a fuzzy wart in the brochure photo. Carl and Aurelia had trooped off to the corporate center, to have their photos taken at 8 a.m., had chosen their favorite shots for the brochure and then nothing appeared, only those of Berkman’s crew. Merge and purge. Some baby would die while Berkman was stuck on the highway, coming from too far away. He had been naive enough to think that patient safety would keep him in his foxhole. Hell, they should fear bad publicity about baby cases; mothers run like hell away.

Well, fuck it, it wasn’t his problem anymore, no more than the dropping insurance payments, Baby Keogh’s stiff lungs and spastic airway, the residents schedule, not his problem; his problem was replacing a dream job like this one without having to move from the old family manse. Do what, commute to New York? Probably. He had heard they never re-hired at Titanic Health Systems. Any other hospitals were either in the slums of Newark or the big one in the next suburb which was a baby mill, cranking out twins, triplets, and quads at borderline gestational ages by way of the fertility drugs. They were sent home before the blindness and spasticity and retardation became evident in them, just one, if the parents were lucky. Carl couldn’t work there on ethical grounds. It was no mercy, posing as the savior of a newborn fetus that looked more like a dog’s dinner. Screw it all, he’d think about that tomorrow. He could afford to, for a little while. He wasn’t poor; he had no mortgage and a quarter million in stocks, thanks to dumb luck when they sold the New York co-op before the crash of ’87 and bought stocks at the bottom of it. That, and the fear of extravagance. Doctors drove cabs in the depression, as his parents had cautioned him, lest he get too chuffed over his med school admission. Now it was his depression, he was laid off, not the guy next door.

Eve met him at the door with a big hug, all bright and sunny. He felt like dreck, but she looked great. With her arms around him she was still holding the Irish Voice, folded open at the classifieds, so he pretended he was reading a personal ad: MWF, 45, 5’3, 105, green eyed brunette, great legs. Your afternoon delight, NJ a plus. For a good time, call…"

You forgot to mention how my narrow little back makes my boobs look bigger.

Optical illusions, no extra charge. Objects on your retina may be smaller than they appear. This was natural for him, to be flaky and funny when he was overtired. She gave him half an hour before they had to leave, in which he managed a blast on the pipe, a decaf and cognac, and a shower. It would all help keep him asleep on the way to Ithaca; he would be a wreck if he stayed awake and let the anger brew. He put the seat back to the horizontal and was asleep five minutes after they left. The boys had their Walkman players on for a few hours of Z-100 radio on cassettes, so they could be way cool, way cool, way out of range. Eve woke him up four hours later as they turned into Clark’s driveway.

CHAPTER 2

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The early afternoon sun was already baking the quad when Carl and Eve saw the banner for the class of ’71, way over in the far corner, under the trees by Sibley Hall. They had to edge their way through a crowd around the University trustees on the Olin Library steps. Carl tapped Eve’s shoulder and pointed to the top of the steps, where a light skinned black man about his age was handing a huge cardboard check to the college president. They rolled eyes in unison and kept on going. There were already over a hundred or so when they reached the crowd and flopped down in the shade. Carl’s eyes came into focus; he waved to a strawberry blond, his distant cousin, Nancy, also his classmate. She strode over with a lanky fellow under a thatch of blond hair shot through with silver. Carl stood up, gave Nancy a buss on the cheek, looked at the new fellow briefly, and did a slow double take.

My God. Dana Ackerman. Dana, I’m Carl Wagner. He stood and offered his hand. Maybe you remember seeing Eve around?

Eve took her forearms away from her face and rose to her feet. As she did, Dana recognized her limbs moving, her hair, and then her eyes. Here she is in front of me, alive, real, real again. She was the star of his eyelid movies, both his junior and senior years. Dana was both jealous and resigned on the sidelines when Carl swept her up in May of ’71. He thought it was too late to approach her; besides, he was going to graduate in four weeks. There had always been someone in the way, usually male. He had had no classes with her, no pretext to pick her up, and it was long after freshman week when they all wore buttons and were grateful for patronage by an upperclassman.

Do you remember me? For four years I wore mirrored sunglasses, and a long riding duster.

And a beret, perched on the tree stump by the student union building, the Straight? The Lone Eagle of Paris? she gasped and clapped her hand to her mouth, then slowly away. That was you? That’s what I called you…well, only to my roommate! Of course I remember you! Wasn’t it cold up there for so long? What were you doing up there?

Setting a world record for striking a pose, I guess. Waiting for a glimpse of you, going to the Ivy room for lunch. I could count on seeing you then, and watch the perfect ankles and legs