Playland Electromagic

By Kit Zeno

Kit Zeno, MD, bedeviled by corroding trends shaking money-driven medicine and compelled by a messianic belief in his moral superiority, opens a Pandora’s box of confused empathy. Ready to rebel against established practices, he embarks on a bizarre, touching, sometimes funny and ultimately law-breaking adventure.

The recurring irony of the doctor’s self-pitying pursuit of personal wealth and the breakup of his own family stand in stark contrast to his Good Samaritan image. Finally, ever receding dreams of true love and redemption open a path into another dimension deep in a mythical New England wood.

Kit Zeno, MD, lives and practices medicine in Massachusetts. Playland Electromagic is his first novel.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu Publishing Services
• Release date: Aug 29, 2014
• ISBN: 9781483413983

Book preview

76

CHAPTER 1

T he frantic announcement blasted over the hospital PA system just as I was finishing evening rounds and about to call Beryl and the kids. A diabetic teenager had just been carried into the emergency room by her parents, practically dead on arrival. On pure instinct, I turned around and headed for the back door. My shift was technically over. But the urgency in the operator’s voice left precious little room for mulling over as to which came first, family or duty. It was a high-velocity moment, and moral qualms of such cruel grandeur weren’t meant to be part of the picture. In my line of work, more often than I wanted to admit, fickle chance and capricious circumstance called the shots. The faithful slavishly toed the line.

And just like that, in one fell swoop, the sweet prospect of a direly needed family dinner, exactingly and desperately arranged by me as a last-ditch marriage rescue operation, was to turn into a heart-pounding all-nighter in the roiling bedlam otherwise known as ER.

I paused for a fleeting moment, barely able to gasp out my muddled apologies to Beryl, who listened in stony silence, then spiraled down the stairwell into a chaotic scene to find the lone ER doc swamped by a multiple motor vehicle accident. The girl’s barely registering vital signs, shouted breathlessly by a young nurse, set the stage for a terrifying scenario. Even in the best of hands, diabetic comas happen to be downright scary affairs. Worse than that, the heartrending story of the young woman lying on the gurney that night with the sunken eyes and the barely moving chest went beyond her mere battle with diabetes. As told by her stricken parents, she had played the cat-and-mouse game with her disease once before, binging on sugars in order to get thinner than thin, barely coming out alive. Kids resort to all sorts of desperate things, but that was one death-defying act I had never encountered before. Yet another young teen, I rued, traveling solo and dying to be liked.

As I stared into the ashen face, the young woman’s dismal psychodrama exorcised blame and brought the case closer to my heart. The cranky cynicism of the exhausted survivalist in me seemed to suddenly vanish. What started out routinely enough as an outcome of fickle chance and capricious circustance was once again tossing me square into the lap of a hard truth steeped in its own cruel grandeur. With little or no warning, the feeble doctor in me was coming face-to-face with the famously imponderable law of the suffering body, under whose dominion all other laws of the universe were to be declared null and void. And we, both sufferers and healers, had to become its true and obedient servants.

It took the better part of five hours fine-tuning blood chemistries before the color on the girl’s face started to fill in again. When she finally came to, she stared at me with the serenely mystified look of those who had seen the other side then smiled instinctively the way an infant does for the first time. Her parents, an older couple seared by anguish, tried to calm down after the havoc of the first few minutes and then paced back and forth silently, holding hands the whole time. The good nurse who worked the case with me, a thirty-something brunette with quick eyes and sure hands, finally lifted her head up and resumed humming the Whitney Houston tune she’d started her shift with.

By the time I was walking out of the ER at five o’clock in the morning, the kid, who hours ago had been on death’s door, was sitting up primping away. Another miracle of modern medicine, I marveled self-mockingly. But like any other battle-hardened doctor, I knew better than to pat myself on the back. There were going to be plenty of next times with absolutely no guarantees my luck would hold. Plenty of missed family dinners too. And one loss was all it would take to wipe out a thousand previous wins. It was a savage job. And I loved it.

Outside, the early September morning air had a frosty feel to it. The eastern sky, as fiercely blue as the day the Twin Towers came down two years ago to the day, pierced the eyes, suddenly sickening and ominous. Weighted down by sleeplessness, I wobbled to my car while trying to block the vision. But all I was able to do was replace the memory of the horrid event with the relatively minor horror of my own life. A missed family dinner was only a paragraph out of a weighty tome. That was the end of the chilly summer of 2003, the year my marriage to Beryl was entering its final ice age.

Back at our matchbox-size, white, colonial hidden deep in the woods of Wesford, the girls were still asleep and Beryl, who had not spoken to me for days, stood in the kitchen stroking golden locks down bronzed shoulders and gazing out the window indifferently. No need for cold stares or clipped sentences of regret. The hard-talking, proud woman could not just come out and say it. Borrowing a page out of the fifties was definitely not a lifelong bargain for her. She did lay down her career for the sake of the kids, but only on a temporary basis, it seemed. Not consigned to it for life. Her muted features growing dourer with each day spoke volumes. Confusion and guilt were bound to come next. Beryl abhorred ambivalence, yet she could not break free from its grip. With age and midlife turbulence came even heavier and darker thoughts. Life’s intentions were about as conspicuous as black ice on a winter’s road. The pill and the battle for sexual freedom were a cakewalk in comparison to what had to happen next. The huge, monstrous question hanging in the air. How does a woman walk away from motherhood? The unbreakable chain holding womankind down to the ground for eons! How?

It was a confusing and absurd situation, but for the cynics among us, so is the very meaning of life. What complicated matters a bit more was the fact that I happened to be a cynic of the sentimental variety. And when it came to hard truths and tough decisions, I often waffled and played referee. Beryl, on the other hand, struggled in a yes/no universe. By her own grisly description, our relationship was in an advanced stage of decay and there was nothing I could do or say that would make any difference. And contrary to her feminist pride, as if designed to confound, any conversation, no matter how unrelated, would always end with her gritty reminder that Leslee Bogarden, my improbable orthopedist pal from nearby Actontown, would be standing between us forever. At which point, we would both stare at each other like voiceless aliens in a cosmic vacuum.

I whispered good-morning to the sleeping girls and headed out on the path American workaholics take every day in their tortured quest for salvation through toil. In minutes, my trusted Accord smoked its way to my office at the strip mall in the commercial center of town, where I kept shop as the town’s solo pediatrician.

Ronie Baddock, the thirty-something woman who ran my office, greeted me with her usual sincere but joyless smile. Then, realizing I was a survivor of yet another sleepless night, she grimaced in pain, an expression that graced her grief-prone features all too easily. Next to my octogenarian mother who lives two oceans away, Ronie happened to be the only person in the world, I thought, that truly cared for me. Slender and tall with straight, hay-color hair down to her shoulders and a dried-up long face prone to very few bouts of happiness, she was a self-declared underachiever with no regrets. Whether she was a sad sack or just an egoless pothead was not always easy to tell. But deep down, one could tell, her locked heart yearned for limitless love. Any mention of that and the shine would come back on her face enough to make her forget an unhappy marriage and a childless life.

Mrs. Falco called first thing this morning. She had a tough night with the baby. She sounded scared. I almost sent her to the ER, Ronie said reluctantly. And Mr. Herdman showed up ten minutes early for his appointment. He looks kind of upset, she continued, face down. Oh, and that lady from some nonprofit called again, Mrs. Thisbe Wellcome. Kind of Lily Tomlin annoyingly chirpy, like she just won Megabucks, Ronie added with a little twist of envy in her wispy voice.

I walked into my office—a small room with a window facing scraggy woods, walls layered with kids’ hand-drawn art, and an unruly desk piled ceiling high with tons of paper work, return calls, messages to big-shot doctors in Boston, and worst of all, heaps of reminders about failed attempts to locate mental health services for my young patients. I looked around in a mini state of despair. I always wanted to run, but it wasn’t in me. Even so, like any other proper slave-to-work man, I made sure a flight to freedom vehicle sat idling in the parking lot of my subconscious, fully loaded with the delusional myths of the escape. Some kind of an antidote against the long day into night drudgery always awaiting me. With medicine being such a business nowadays, one learned quite fast. It was either sink or swim. It was doc eat doc. Churn a ton of business for the fat cats at managed care and the big pharma moguls so they can throw you back a bone or two. All and everything in the name of money. The big money. Because that is what it has come to.

Medicine, if not already, will become the most gigantic business around. Bigger than oil. Larger than IT. Up there with the military. A true dawning of a new heroic age. Where doctors are no more Mr. Nice Guys but emerging demigods rushing into the fight for the ultimate prize. With winners and losers. Saviors and villains. Heroes and evildoers. As for tinier players like myself? By the hour, the war was inching titillatingly closer. We could hear the booms and behold the billowing smoke of the gathering battle over the horizon. The last of the Good Samaritan resisters were running for the hills. Ranks were being cleansed. A white coat apocalypse was in the offing. Out in plush conference rooms in Maui and Orlando, there was already talk of victory banquets.

Joe Herdman, tall as a weather-beaten conifer, stepped into my office and sat quietly, barely managing a muffled good-morning. The Herdmans had two children. The older one, fourteen-year-old Monica, petite and cute, an A/B student on a good day, by her father’s reckoning led a lighter-than-air existence tiptoeing around rap music, good looks, and an undying desire to be popular. The younger one, Jethro, a boy of nine, was diagnosed with verbal apraxia, a fancy way of saying the poor kid was very slow to talk. Doctors do this a lot. Come up with fancy names for things they know nothing about. The cruel fact was that the Herdman boy’s brain was not wired the right way and the little man, smart enough otherwise, walked around scowl-faced and downcast, painfully aware of the horrific injustice.

But what was bringing Joe Herdman to my office that morning was not one of poor little Jethro’s twisted behaviors but his nagging doubts about Monica’s character and the never-ending tug of war between father and daughter. His broad, skeletal shoulders hung heavy and his eyes, made deeper by angular features, a bit like Jethro’s, betrayed a man’s bitter realization he was leading a vain life. He started from where our conversation ended a few weeks back when he got teary and asked to be excused.

"Honestly, doc, someone listening will think of me as a child hater. Plain and simple. A man unfit to be a father. Period. Raising Monica has been real hell for me. Real hell. God knows I tried. Since day one. Iris is a martyr, as you might have guessed. She is a true good mother. Period. The woman metabolizes pain better than anyone I know. I tell her, ‘Look at this kid. She is going on fifteen now. It’s like her body composition is made out of one hundred percent pure Styrofoam.’ I forgot the last time she ever said thank-you. For all we give her!

And then I turn it around wondering if it’s just me who’s the selfish one. Kids are just one huge sacrifice, and maybe I don’t want to come to grips with that. Maybe I am the self-consumed, egotistical bastard who should not have had kids in the first place. The goddamn Willy Loman of software engineers, if you know what I mean. Blind to the fact I keep giving the world what they have no use for. Worse than salesmen, I am afraid, we computer engineers have probably lost our entire ability to connect. No pun intended. Our brains are so damn digitized, doc. All frozen up inside. Keep churning out data. Not love. The definition simply escapes us. In place of introspection, we practice endoscopy. His features stretched even more as though to create a larger screen for the theater of pain and disenchantment.

He had narrow, dimming eyes, and I couldn’t make out their depth. But he sounded honest. He breathed out a deep sigh and, not one to wallow in ambivalence for too long, put on a new face, and continued.

But a parent’s main job remains the same: to provide for their kids. Period. And yet some people say that’s just not enough. Go figure!

For a moment, I wished I were the guy playing the doctor in the movie version of Peyton Place able to come up with a simple, clean-cut, morally unequivocal verdict. But the brooding face of Jimmy Dean popped into my head and American Graffiti and Saturday Night Fever and all the other endless teendom movies since, that time and again tried to bring out the conflicts and all the angst and addled joy of growing up in America.

Joe Herdman happened to be an MIT graduate and a hotshot software engineer so I felt a bit unsure whether opening up with a heavy literary reference would be a good idea. But the Willy Loman mention gave me an opening.

"Speaking of Willy Loman, come to think of it, when was the last time you read King Lear? You know, the play?" I asked impulsively, avoiding his eyes.

After a brief pause and a stare into space, Mr. Herdman looked lost in time. Then smiling dreamily, he replied softly. I read about it. Frankly, it would be a lie if I told you I remember ever watching or reading it from front to back. The old king and his daughters? You suggest I read that? Maybe I should, he concluded at a loss, studying his palms. Maybe I should.

I had no idea what fit of cruelty made me bring the ghastly story of the old king into the conversation. What was I trying to tell the poor man? That the human condition was a nearly incurable chronic case?

CHAPTER 2

M y brother Marco, two years older than I, died when he was five or six, taken by a fatal genetic disease that runs through the family. Way back then, on the sweet shores of the Mediterranean, I remember how for the longest time it seemed to me Marco was dying every single day of his life, his suffering always carried aloft by my storytelling father’s nutty optimism and my mother’s cataclysm of doomed love. And yet now I do not remember feeling the pain. Or the fear. Or even being part of it. Cruelly, I went about my life, chomping on whatever little joy came my way, scraps of happiness here and there good enough to keep me going. No memories of any guilt or remorse haunted my childhood. Marco was dying, but I never let that play out in my heart or realized the horrible times my parents were going through. Blocked it out, I guess.

That’s what specialists say kids do to survive. Even at that young age, I must have been an expert in memory suppression. Now every time I look back, it’s like entering a dark, scary place full of dusty, old books, one of them telling the story of Marco’s death. With that comes the fear. Even if I ever found the book, I wouldn’t dare open it but pass by it. My mind would race back to the early sixties then make a beeline for the little happy book with all those glowing pictures of the small truck pulling into town, parking in the middle of the church square with a man hanging a white sheet just when the stars were coming out, turning his magic light machine on to show a half-naked man talking to the monkeys. Funny, I shuddered at the thought, remembering a grainy Tarzan movie more vividly than my own brother’s death. Once more, my toy master brain played me like a puppet.

On my way to morning rounds and within sight of the hospital, traffic around the old state penitentiary thickened to a standstill. Marco’s pale face, as I reconstructed it forty or so years later, sweet and blameless, swirled around Mary O’Connor’s all-too-real, frail visage. Above the treetops, next to the smoke stacks of the prison’s power station, I could make out Mary’s own jailhouse up on the fourth floor of the Concordia Hospital’s Fracas wing, where the little six-year-old lifer endured before the end. I searched for Marco some more, tried to make out his features faded by time and oblivion, bring him closer to me, but his face strangely became an oscillating construct right on top of Mary O ‘Connor’s leukemia-ravaged features. On the car radio, America was going to war again. Thousands would die. The radio churned out the big picture, cosmic struggles, trying in vain to drown out my heart’s clutter, like a very short-acting anesthetic. A terse phone call from the covering hospitalist briefed me on Mary’s latest bone marrow report. Practicing a preventive kind of amnesia, I pushed on to the hospital gate, trying to stamp out future memories of Mary’s last chapter as it was about to unfold. Same thing I did with Marco—I shivered.

I parked the car in the small lot behind the hospital birthing center and, along with a warbler’s song coming from the flowering cherry tree above, was greeted by the titters of two preschoolers. They were bounding around the car seat of their newborn sibling as Mom and Dad, faces beaming, were piling pillows, blankets, and bunches of flowers in the back of the van. Dad was videotaping with one hand now the baby, now the wan face of the proud mom, then the giggling faces and the bundle in the bucket, while the bird warbled madly about newfound loves and happiness undying. I stood back, levitating momentarily on the aura of this absolute happiness, inhaling deeply to take in the aroma of bliss and keep it there for many long moments. But quickly the bird flitted into silence, the van rolled down the road, and the picture grew darker as I looked up at the fourth-floor window with the drawn shutters. A blinding sun devoured all shadows, and up there alone in the abysmal glare stood Mary’s window.

For an instant, I thought I saw Jack O’Connor, Mary’s father, slip into the building then scurry up the stairwell for his morning visit. Sometimes with his three little boys in toe, sometimes alone, he would wander the hallways for a while as if to gather the courage. Then he would furtively fly by Mary’s door, whispering obsessive prayers before quickly escaping to the playroom area, another scanning look: the fish tank, the walls with the children’s art, dashing strokes, Mary’s work always there, some of it a bit faded but beautiful and bold and as imaginative as ever.

I crossed the threshold into the hospital world, making sure my immune face was firmly on, the alternate face I always kept in reserve for all the hard moments. Mary O’Connor’s room was at the far end of the fourth floor, two doors before the playroom. Nobody ever said it out loud, but Room 414 was the death room, specially equipped and outfitted with all kinds of comforting things for both the kids and their parents.

Mary’s last bone marrow transplant seemed to be taking, but a massive stroke out of nowhere struck the little fighter and now the only thing we could offer her were the riches of Room 414. We tried to numb her pains using a morphine drip. We brought play therapists and clowns, videogames, and Disney characters. But Mary was not buying any of it. With sunset eyes, she would stare at us forlornly, ever mystified by the grownups’ strange power to fool themselves that nothing was really going on and that the light was not about to go out. During rounds every morning, the once quick-stepping Mary, even in her crippled state, or perhaps because of it, just by the way she studied us all, nurses, doctors, techs, her stumbling parents, so intensely, so pityingly, it seemed to me she packed enough existential wisdom to shame a whole bunch of heavy-duty life theorists. And invariably, what would follow next was the lament. I mourned for the great loss. On her handsome face lay the ruins and an ancient history of an alluring beauty, now brutalized by our miracle drugs, head robbed of the copper curls, broad, freckled cheeks hollowed out, the emerald fading away in her large, Irish eyes.

As I walked into the ward, a shuddering premonition filled the air. Mom O’Connell was holed up in Mary’s darkened room all morning. Dad dropped the boys at the playroom and disappeared into the gloomy chamber. Shades down. Wary nurses on tiptoe. Shoulders holding hanged heads in reverence to the unknowable.

In front of the door to her room, my courage failed and I walked past it toward the playroom. Golden foliage colors of the October morn wrapped around the circular structure and shafts of light crisscrossed through palatial windows as callous blue jays outside shrieked maniacally of the joys to come. And there, in the gathering heat of the toy-cluttered sunroom, I spied the three little kids alone, totally immersed in the life-giving magic of play. They were Mary’s three younger brothers: Danny and Tommy, the three-year-old identical twins, and John, the four-year-old. John came up with the idea with a soft, tentative voice.

Tommy will play the dead first, he proposed haltingly, aware he was stepping into forbidden ground. Tommy, always the accommodating one, succumbed to the idea without much questioning. In his three short years, he came to realize that dead people lie flat, motionless on their backs. So he assumed the position, trying—quite well for his age—to grace his face with the unperturbed serenity of the dead. Then he closed his eyes. John tidied up the hands in a more pious X over the chest while Danny stood by solemnly.

You are supposed to pray now, John prompted Danny, gently shoving him closer to the dead Tommy. The idea was that Danny’s entreaties would bring the little boy back from the dead.

Danny thought for a minute, and then stared back at a loss.

Say something, John prodded again.

But I don’t know what to say. Mom and Dad never told me how to say this kind of prayer before.

Praying is when you ask god for a favor, and because god can do whatever he wants, he can make your wish come true, John explained in one breath.

Now Danny felt free to improvise. God, who can do whatever you want, please help Tommy not be dead anymore. Or he can stay dead, if he wants to, until it’s time to go. Then John and I can play for as long as we like, and he can show me how to play on the computer without Tommy bothering us.

As Danny was running out of breath, Tommy peeked with a half-opened eye, squinting to the side to catch John’s attention. I don’t want to play dead anymore. You don’t get to do anything, only just lay there and do nothing, he pouted.

John immediately put on his teacher’s cap. It’s fun being dead, he intoned. You know why? Because people like you when you are dead and say all kinds of good things about you. That you are not bad to anybody, just only teasing people, and that you are always behaving and doing all sorts of good things. And they even laugh at all the bad things you do. One dead kid once did some horrible thing and still his parents laughed so bad when they found out about it, they didn’t punish him or take his favorite toys away. They just laughed so hard and they wished he could still do some more bad things so they can laugh some more.

Tommy turned his stiffened neck toward John’s storytelling face with the minimal mobility allowed to the dead, straining under some vague paradox just emerging in his young noggin. He was thinking perhaps he could solve it with a bit more contorting of his facial features.

Can I be the dead one now? Danny jumped in unexpectedly, perhaps lured by the rewards.

Sure, Tommy obliged, springing off the carpeted floor, free now to stretch his squirming torso. Danny wanted to make sure about the terms of the agreement.

You promise if I do something bad you are not going to get mad at me, right? Remember I am dead, right?

Sure, sure. John giggled knowingly, cutting a crafty look at young Tommy who, by the frown on his round baby face, was not sure if he approved of the turn to the evil side of things.

John now tried to balance the situation. But dead people like to do good things most of the time.

Danny was not about to relent. But you said so. If I want to do bad things, that’s okay, right?

John, the tireless problem solver, a bit fuddled now, tried again to find a way out, not quite sure his words carried any convincing power. Okay, okay, he blurted impatiently. Okay, you can be bad, but Tommy can pray so God can make you good. And because prayer is magic, you are going to become good again.

Danny wasted no time. But still, if I don’t become good, nobody will get mad at me because I am dead, right?

John, about to abandon all hope, moved closer to the fish tank. There was silence now and the three little boys looked at each other like someone had just stolen all their toys and canceled all the plans to go to Disney. They turned to the fish tank and the three guppies staring at them enigmatically.

CHAPTER 3

A divorce is a world of its own with a history that it is impossible to undo. It can be a pitiful attempt to drop out and walk away in defeat or a sulfurous rupture with floods of resentment and betrayal, a poisoned universe continuing to expand forever.

With Beryl and me, it was called consensual. But the truth is she walked out on me. Plain and simple. When I fell in love with a lacy-souled angel, the risk of not always living up to bone-crushing expectations never occurred to me until the sky went dark. And when she told me, shards of heart-piercing crystal rained over me, swooping through the air softly and delicately but with a hawk’s precision, as she is about to rip the heart out of its victim. That’s how it felt for a moment, but truth be told, there was no cruelty involved or malice. Feather-fingered creatures the likes of Beryl are incapable of inflicting pain on anyone, no matter what. Even when they heartlessly leave behind a bumbling husband and two lost young kids.

I shouldn’t even be complaining now. She loved me deeply and truly like the medical hero she thought I was for quite a long while. Insisting I was this perfect, beautiful, invincible being. Kit Zeno, MD. The amalgam of the ancient Mediterranean bottom-scraping genius in whose veins run the briny blood of Greeks and Phoenicians, Jews and Romans, Crusaders and Saracens. A cut above life. A winner. And all I turned out to be was a paper tiger with an MD after his name. A medical ghetto prince who worked endless hours for a pittance in community health centers all over Boston and drove around in a beat-up Honda.

But money was not necessarily the only problem. It was also the total lack of grace as defined by her unforgiving sense of pride. Strangely, for a girl out of the prairie growing up in a humble home in small-town Iowa, the fourth daughter of Remus Orland, a plain-spoken bookkeeper, and Philomena, an apron-clad mom who divided her life between the church and the kitchen, Beryl behaved as if deep in her provenance lay hidden huge chunks of DNA coding for nobility. Dignified subsistence, it seemed to me, was not what she bargained for, and she kept no warm place in her heart for weak souls who dressed their failures in a bare-bones existence as a sign of some fake holier-than-thou. Until the very end, deep inside, I felt the two of us could have flown in formation for as long as we lived. I remember a New Year’s Day’s resolution we once toasted on our moneymaker’s motto: A business that doesn’t do well does no good.

We had plans, the two of us. I was bailing out of the community health center do-gooder life. Six years into a wayward, childless marriage, Beryl and I were finally resolving to build an estate. Create a dynasty. The stars were aligned for us to do well. All I needed was just a little longer. We moved from Cambridge to the Wesford wilds for a new beginning. She got a job in Waltham doing computer work. Starting a solo practice from scratch was taking a heavy toll on me, constantly short on time and money. Kids were slow to come and years were piling on.

It was hard to pinpoint the exact moment Beryl reached her tipping point. Looking back, even before the kids came, our path together was strewn with hints and innuendos having to do with Leslee Bogarden and my parallel life with her, as Beryl came to believe, despite my mouth-foaming denials.

Such was the case of Leslee Bogarden and me, the plain, nun-faced woman from South Dakota who started out as a Sisters of Mercy worker doing God’s mission in Chicago before turning to the deities of healing at the medical school in St. Louis. Our fated paths did not cross the usual way doctors meet—in a hospital cafeteria or at a medical conference—but through Yigal Hoch, a mutual friend who lived in a garret in Cambridge. Yigal was a prophet man who spoke loudly in haiku aphorisms and cottony parables, arms always spread out embracing new disciples, students, dreamers, and other chronic cases. The two of them had met back during their college years in the Windy City, and when Leslee made it to Boston for her ortho residency, she looked him up. Yigal, in his early forties and single, besides living to be the next Savior, was a well-known tormentor of any woman who happened to drift into his levitating life. And Leslee, who sensed that all too well, kept their friendship to strictly just that.

And for as long as we were to know each other, such was to be the case between Leslee and me. That is not to say that the moment I first met her at one of Yigal’s Labor Day wacky poetry mixers I did not fall in love with her on the spot. But plain Jane from the plains filled my heart with the other kind of love. The human kind. Minutes after exchanging names, I found myself sitting next to her, touching her hand to make a point, engaging in long eye contact that would have made even lovers uncomfortable, instantly warming up to whatever she was saying. And that’s when Beryl, with a newborn Ruby Jo in her arms and a clingy Cassie attached to her skirt, must have experienced the first pangs of rivalry.

The idea never entered my mind that Beryl, the love of my life, the I-beam of self-esteem, the uber-secure female, would have stooped to those hurtful lows and stay trapped inside the poisoned path for so long. That must have been the fatal error on my part. I thoughtlessly ignored the glaring fact that Beryl was the postpartum woman, the proud female who had just sacrificed her sexuality on the searing altar of maternity, vulnerable, unarmed. Inside her hormone-addled brain, telling a friend from a lover must have been next to impossible. For years to come, every time Leslee’s name would come up, I was to remain callously oblivious to that. But Beryl surely kept it fresh and indelible in her memory, a damning memento ready to flash it at me any time an argument would break out.

Finally, when all the possibilities were exhausted, we made a solid promise not to turn vengeful or wish any harm on the other. But deep at heart, I was hoping she would never, ever find her real prince to take my place. As far as I was concerned, that bit of spite was the other side of love, the key that could have kept the door open.

Not long after that, the stars must have spoken to her and Beryl walked. A newly divorced dentist, Thadd Marchand, from the next town over, where houses grew bigger and the lawns were greener, was part of the reason. I begged her to spare me the gruesome details and listened to the verdict as stoically as I could, hiding a crushed heart behind the face of manly stoniness. She kissed the kids tenderly, held my hands staring deeply into my eyes for a long moment, and then sighed three times before walking away like an angel who just paid us a brief but magical visit.

The kids looked a bit lost, but something kept their hearts from breaking. I was not sure what. Maybe their saving grace was coming from the weird mixture of steel-enforced glass they inherited from their departing mom and a bit of the bullheaded survival instinct coming out of my gnarly Mediterranean roots. Beryl assured them with many kisses I was the better provider under the circumstances and she would always be their loving mom, living only just a few houses down the street, and how moms sometimes had to figure out things for themselves and that it didn’t make an itty-bitty bit of a difference in how much they loved their kids. Cassie, the older one, doe-eyed and beautiful, always comely in her girly dress-ups, was a strange combination of dreamer and realist, a kid who lived in a make-believe world but mercifully endowed with very little soul sinking pride, a sure hallmark of a true survivor. At just a year younger, Ruby Jo, a complicated piece of machinery, smart as the Sphinx, always on the verge of picking fights with her mother but never actually doing so, a fierce prejudger of the world and a master of anything acrid in the whole of the English tongue, I was sure could stand up for herself.

But Beryl, oh Beryl, how truly above life you always seemed to be. With princess looks and a personality sprinkled with all the precious metals of the universe, you lived to unfurl your blooms with every morning sun, a rarest prairie flower, greens and reds on the outside and dark iridescences of your unfathomable soul on the inside. Beside you, life alighted on auras and scented emanations, staircases to heaven always bringing me up to the very first moment when the demon poet began to weave the tale of my longing. How I marveled at your bearing, prideful and regal, your stride as if on horseback surveying your realm, giving to others but only like a vessel on higher ground channeling your graces to the low-lying rest. But most of all, I always loved the fact you would forever remain unknowable. To me and to the rest of the world. To be a Beryl is to be unknowable. A maze made out of flowering rose bushes. A riddle spun by the flight of countless butterflies.

CHAPTER 4

I am surely not the first person to think that a fair God with the faintest understanding of his own creation should ordain that bad people, when they die, go straight to heaven. What are all the theories of good and evil, Darwinian to the core, if not a tool of weeding out all the undesirables? Weird geniuses, perverts, the criminally insane, disturbed souls, deviant natures, sociopaths, psychos—all of them pathetic citizens in a shadowy realm ruled by the iron fist of the law of the suffering body. Who in their right mind would ever freely choose such a horrendous life? The pious, naturally, would be all over this one in no time, choked in righteous indignation. Where is the moral code? The thing that makes us different from animals? Responsibility? Duty?

Before I answer that, I would invite them into my examining room, a visit that took place thirteen or so years ago, soon after I set up shop in Wesford, with little Andy Cosmo and his mom, Ruth Talbot. Sit there quietly and simply watch. Watch carefully. Little Andy, sitting in his mom’s lap waiting for me to give him his nine-month-old exam. A steady little face for a nine-month-old, piercing, gray wolf eyes methodically checking everything in the examining room, mostly me, my instruments, the furniture, medical magazines, my eyeglasses, ignoring the kids’ drawings on the walls and pictures of animals of all kinds. Andy did not care about animals or toys, except for the time it took him to determine their nature and function, maybe a few seconds. Then he would swiftly move on until something more interesting caught his attention, usually a person, a utile thing, a tool. Nine-month-olds’ brains are beginning to get flooded with anxiety chemicals. Awareness and anxiety go hand in hand. The droll smiles of the six-month-old are quickly replaced by taut little pouty faces cocking in apprehension and red alert. First the smile, then the dread—the great mystery of the birth of fear, the ever-hidden shaper of lives, the invisible molder of souls.

But not in the case of little Andrew Cosmo. His mom, Ruth—watered-down blue eyes, thin chinned and high browed—sits straight up from too much pride beaming at the beautiful angel she brought into this world, an object of her worship, a true miracle. He is taking steps already, he understands almost everything she tells him, and words are beginning to form quicker than she can count. The latest being a cute maybe.

Ruth is obsessed with genealogy. On Andy’s father’s side, Jan Cosmo, a Russian Jew of monstrous IQ, as she proclaims, whose own father was an artist of some renown. And on her side, her maternal grandfather, a Polish chemist who lived in France before he emigrated to the States in the twenties, and her maternal grandmother, the only surviving member of an old French family whose genome, no doubt, must have contained its share of aristocratic snippets. A miraculous genetic convergence, she proudly avers.

I look at the boy. He does not show much in the way of emotions, no fear, and no happiness to see me. He is simply nonplussed. The nurse gives him a shot. He takes it like a trooper, hastening swiftly from a mild grin to his usual aquiline perusal of the world around him. I show him a Sesame Street book but he prefers my latest medical journal. He fingers it unlike any other nine-month-old, turning the pages and systematically scanning all the pictures, figures, pharmaceutical ads, sometimes even returning to the previous page as if trying to understand something he did not quite get before.

His mom looks at me ecstatically. I told you so, she beams.

I demonstrate to him how a three-shell Russian doll opens up and I hide inside of it a small figurine. He unpeels one, two, three dolls, and presto! The figurine gets fished out. But again, despite all his mom’s celebratory outbursts, he stays calm and unimpressed with himself, no gleam of accomplishment in his eyes, no elation in response to the bravos. Sitting a nine-month-old baby in one’s lap is not part of a textbook exam, but I found I could scoop a lot of subtle information just by relieving the mother of the baby’s weight for a few seconds.

Andy looks at me first, then his mom. Instantly in his little mind, he reestablishes order and carries on as though nothing happened. The very bravest nine-month-old would first tighten up the eyebrows, contract the face much like a car racer slamming on the brakes inches from the precipice. Then I would feel a hot flare on his skin, his heart and breathing picking up speed and, most importantly, all this emotion would put a damper on his executive skills.

With Andy, I feel none of that. I draw a triangle and a circle on a piece of paper. I enunciate the words clearly and repeat them to him three times. I place his index finger on them, making the sounds of the word another two times. Then I draw each figure on separate pages of a notebook. On page five is a triangle; on page six a circle. I close the notebook and I say the word triangle loudly and clearly. The little fingers immediately go to work, and miraculously he turns one page after the other until he reaches page five with the triangle. He does not bother to point to the triangle, simply stares at the page like an avid pointer waiting for the next command. I stare at the little boy awestruck myself. And that’s when the shocking thought first went through my mind. Something I had never fathomed possible before.

Was little Andy going to be the one-of-a-kind exception to the terrible law of the suffering body? Was he?

CHAPTER 5

T he tortured grimace on my face betrayed the content of the sealed letter the officer of the court handed me seconds before. Ronie lowered her eyes to avoid mine and tried hard to make sure it was empathy and not pity that made her volunteer to run out for coffee and doughnuts. Too darn bad, I lamented. Too bad such a nasty turn of events had to come on the first day medical students from the Boston Medical School joined me for their outpatient rotation. Showing the budding doctors some of the tricks of the trade, besides being part of the Oath, let a measure of unalloyed joy enter a life of grating routine.

I squeezed the summons in my palm and walked into my office where the three medical students were waiting to meet me, and for a moment my gloom lifted enough for a furtive smile. The young, unspoiled souls, their innocence polished by a thousand good intentions, were greeted by the two warnings conspicuously hung in my office among the riot of children’s art.

NATURE LOVES TO HIDE.

TEXTBOOKS ARE FULL OF FACTS, BUT VERY FEW REALITIES.

We shook hands and I closed the door behind me nervously, not sure how to kick off our first encounter. A reality definitely not in the textbooks was hitting me square in the face. Lawyers and insurance companies were flexing their muscles. A little known combatant, I was caught in a skirmish out at the fringes of a wider war.

I could have pretended nothing was happening. I could have glossed over it. But a gut-eating urge to defend myself boiled over inside me. Nothing else mattered. My brain was busy reconstructing the facts of the case, how the plaintiff’s lawyers would attempt to weave a noose around my neck and how I should be ready with the right answers, shoot down all the arguments of any ambulance chaser, keep my cool, unleash the disarming look of the agent of good, then damn sure bring on everything and anything else I needed to convince the common man and woman on the jury that I did everything according to what lawyers call standard practices.

The three all-eyed, clean faces stared at me like giddy kids on a sunny Saturday morning gleefully eager for the first ball. I tried to respond in kind, but with every effort I made to elusively bury my shame and get on with it, the more I inched closer and closer into confession territory.

I’ve just been served. Sued, that is. I laid it on them like a ton of bricks. The parents of this eight-year-old girl with multiple congenital anomalies think Dr. Zeno missed something. All eyes went vertical, stunned and embarrassed. Then, as though to help me out, they settled into a state of awed apprehension at the sight of their gravely wounded hero.

It’ll be okay, I felt the need to reassure. They have no grounds. It’s painful and traumatic, but it’ll be okay. I am sure of it. I paused and waited, hoping for some analgesic effect.

Allegra, the young woman of the three from Wisconsin, a diminutive person with black hair, ivory skin, and big, forgiving eyes, nodded in agreement. Everything will be okay.

The two young men kept a more defensive posture for a bit longer. Then one of them, Aksham, a rail-thin man of East-Indian background with a sparse goatee and a benign half-smile, attempted to say something but quickly changed his mind. Will, the third student, a lumbering figure of backcountry geniality out of Oklahoma, sat higher onto his seat and dropped his arms by his sides as if getting ready to salute. Silence gave me an opening.

It’ll bother me for a few hours, a few days maybe, but as soon as the technical details are all taken care of, it’ll quickly become a thing of the past. It won’t stay with me for too long, unlike some other things, the things that stick with us for quite a bit longer, perhaps forever.

I paused again and waited. The postures relaxed, the faces mellowed, but the necks craned closer to me as the eyes got hungrier. I tried to explain.

The things that we carry inside of us forever, I went on calmly. Like, for example, the dreaded sin of contamination, I concluded with a twist of whimsy. I paused again for drama, took a deep breath, and symbolically dimmed the lights.

"It was years ago, back when I was a chief resident in New York City. I still remember the stifling air in the yeasty-smelling library and the sweaty presence of the previous occupant of the lowly cot at the far corner. I had slipped in for a precious few and minutes after falling asleep was unceremoniously rousted out by the brain-piercing siren of my beeper. The high that a string of sleepless nights generates before the final exhaustion sets in moved me on airy feet through the peroxide-smelling corridor toward the treatment room. And for a moment, a good moment I thought, a smug sense of power went through me, a hard bravado fueled by the dangling of the various medical implements around my waist and my stethoscope crisscrossing my chest bandoleer style. I tried hard to resist the nascent power of the doctor-as-god taking shape inside of me. But with each passing day, the sinful thought, the guilty pleasure was getting harder and harder to resist. What lay ahead for me in the treatment room was another chance to take one step closer to the exulted state of doctor as savior. The intern had failed and the resident as well. I was already cautioned by the nurse that the parents were a bundle of nerves and anger. I was the end of the line, the man