Nerve Damage (6 page)

“Time to get up,” Roy said.

No reaction.

“Your mom's probably—”

The phone rang again. Roy went into the big room. The early-morning sun, bright and silvery, made sparkles on
Delia,
nudging the Fourth of July dream into Roy's conscious mind. He picked up the phone.

“Mr. Valois? Richard Gold. I'll need information on Tom Parish.”

“One
r
,” said Roy. “Don't you check your messages?”

“I got that,” Gold said. “But I was hoping for a little more.”

“For Christ sake,” Roy said. “Is this the way your paper handles everything? Delia worked for the Hobbes Institute. Tom Parish was her boss. He recruited her, in fact.”

“From where?”

“The State Department,” Roy said. “But she hadn't been there more than a few months and I don't see how—”

“Did she have any military training?” Gold said.

“Military training?” Roy said. “Of course not. She was an economist—with a PhD from Georgetown and a job at the Hobbes Institute. Period.”

“It's not that simple,” Gold said. “The problem is—” Roy heard commotion in the background. “Hang on a second,” Gold said.

Roy hung on. He heard soft muffled sounds, then a little crash, as though a glass had fallen. After that, nothing. “Mr. Gold?” Fifteen or twenty seconds went by. Then came a click, followed by the dial tone. “What the hell?” he said.

Roy called back. Voice mail. “Forget the whole thing,” he said. “Write whatever you want.” What difference did it make?

Roy and Skippy met Skippy's mom in the parking
lot at Dunkin' Donuts. Skippy's mom sat in the passenger seat of a van with painted-over lettering on the side. The man behind the wheel was eating a pink glazed doughnut, the only color on a dark day.

“Who's that?” Roy said.

“The boyfriend,” said Skippy. “The new one.”

The new boyfriend had a bushy white mustache. Roy parked beside the van. Everybody looked at everybody but no one made a move. The new boyfriend also had strong jaw muscles. They bulged as he chewed on the doughnut. Roy got out of the pickup, walked over to Skippy's mom's door.

Her window slid down, about halfway. Roy could see nothing of Skippy in her face. “Hi,” he said. “I'm Roy.”

“Uh-huh,” said Skippy's mom.

“I'll be away on business for a few days,” Roy said. “It'll be a big help if Skippy could stay at my place, take care of things.”

Skippy's mom glanced at the boyfriend. Some sort of silent communication passed between them. Skippy's mom turned back to Roy. “You payin' him?” she said.

“Yes.”

She thought about that. The boyfriend's jaw muscles bulged. “How much?” Skippy's mom said.

“That's up to Skippy to tell you,” Roy said.

“Huh?” said the boyfriend.

Skippy's mom looked past Roy at Skippy, sitting in the pickup. He had earphones on, was gazing straight ahead, eyes blank.

“Yeah, okay,” said Skippy's mom. She gave Roy a hard stare. “But when he screws up don't come cryin' to me.”

The boyfriend polished off the rest of the doughnut.

“Like damages and so forth,” Skippy's mom added, but Roy was already walking away.

She raised her voice. “It's on you.”

Skippy heard that and slumped a little more.

 

Delia lay
in the cemetery behind the Congregational church. It was a place Roy never went, but he did before setting out for Baltimore. Some of the gravestones, closest to the church, dated from the 1600s. The newer ones stood on a slope rising toward the forest, Delia in the last row, next to the trees. She had a plain granite stone, dark gray, with nothing on it but her name and dates.

Roy found the stone covered with snow almost to the top. He remembered one winter as a kid in Maine when a snow fort had collapsed on him, and the buried-alive feeling that followed. Roy cleared the snow away—one-handed—down to the frozen turf. Some people in his position might have thought about being back together in the not-too-distant future.
Four months to a year
. But Roy just didn't believe it; not only that, he didn't think anyone else believed it either, not in their deepest parts. If you really believed a rosy afterlife with lovers and families back together was in the offing, believed it as fact, then what would be the point of getting so worked up about death? But everybody did, the fear of death somewhere in their minds from the moment they first found out about it, and the death of someone close was the worst thing that could ever happen.

“Or am I missing something?” Roy said aloud.

Had he and Delia ever discussed this? Not really. He tried to imagine what she'd say now, and couldn't.

“I looked up Dr. Chu on the Internet,” Roy said. A brilliant guy, with degrees from the best schools and scientific prizes from three countries.

Brilliant guys are a dime a dozen. The question is—can he do it?

That thought came to him in Delia's voice, so clear she might have said it aloud. In fact, he couldn't swear she hadn't said it aloud, not on any sensory basis. It stunned him. Roy crouched in front of the gravestone, a wind rising in the trees.

 

He got through
the funeral all right: hearing the news—everything about that call from Tom Parish still completely unfaded in his mind—had been the big blow. The Institute flew the body back from Venezuela, in an ornate white coffin she would have hated. Lots of people came to the service—old college friends, art-world people, hockey people, Washington people, including Tom Parish—none of whom Roy saw anymore, except for Krishna and the hockey guys. Tom told a funny story about Delia squeezing a donation out of some tinpot dictator. A guitarist sitting on a stool by the grave site played “For All We Know”—one of Delia's favorites, especially the Billie Holiday version. Not long after came that first spadeful of earth, landing with a soft thump on the coffin. Roy had flinched at the sound. No one said anything about the baby inside her: still a secret between Roy, Delia and the obstetrician.

 

The wind
picked up. Snow started to fall, hard little pellets that stung Roy's face. He rose, walked out of the graveyard, her voice still fresh.
The question is
—
can he do it?

Roy drove his pickup to the gas station at the southern edge of town, pulled up at the pumps. He filled the tank, was replacing the nozzle when he noticed the car on the other side: a Subaru wagon, packed top to bottom, with two big ski carriers on the roof. Roy looked up, and their eyes met, his and Jen's.

She looked great, the kind of woman who, unknown, he would have wanted to know—in some former period of his life, of course. A snowflake clung to one of her eyelashes; her skin glowed like it was a sunny day.

“Hi, Roy.”

“Hi.”

“I'm off,” she said.

What if Dr. Chu really could do it? Roy's heart started beating very fast; he thought of saying
Don't forget about me, don't even sign a lease, everything may change,
but got a grip and simply nodded.

Jen glanced over at the pickup, saw the suitcase sitting on the front seat. Some over-the-top romantic thought ran through her mind—he could see it—like
Is he coming with me?

“Business trip,” Roy said quickly, heading off any meeting between those unspoken thoughts, his and hers.

Jen smiled. “You're a businessman now?”

Roy felt his face redden. “Taking a quick tour of scrap yards,” he said.

“Working on something new?”

“Just an idea.”

“You always have good ideas.”

“I don't know about that.”

They looked at each other.

“Feeling all right, Roy?”

“Great.”

“Arm okay?”

He waved it in the air to show just how okay; that hurt.

Cars pulled in behind them. She came forward, kissed him on the cheek.

“Drive safe.”

“You too.”

Roy followed her as far as the interstate. Jen tapped her brakes goodbye as she took the ramp. He kept going.

 

“Before we get started,”
said Dr. Chu, “I have something to show you.”

Dr. Chu came around his desk, opening a folder. His office had rice-paper blinds and simple wood furniture, reminded Roy of a yoga retreat he'd tried a year or so after Delia's death, lasting less than a day. Dr. Chu took a photograph from the folder, showed it to Roy: a picture of Dr. Chu, wearing shorts, a T-shirt and flip-flops, standing next to one of the
Neanderthal
sculptures with a big grin on his face. Roy noticed a palm tree in the background: Number Twelve, on the campus of the University of Miami.

“Two years ago,” said Dr. Chu. “The annual conference.”

“What annual conference?” said Roy.

“The International Association for Mesothelioma Research,” said Dr. Chu. “Of which I am the founder, in fact. But my point was how our paths seem to have crossed previously in this way.”

Roy had thought of that already: it gave him a bad feeling. “Dr. Honey says four months to a year,” he said.

Dr. Chu slid the photo back into the folder, moved around the desk, sat in his chair. “I know Dr. Honey,” he said. He gazed at Roy, his eyes not so friendly now; almost a different man from the tourist in the photo.
You want this guy on your side, you dope:
Delia's voice again, this time so clear she might have been in the room. Roy decided he preferred this unsmiling version of the man anyway and kept his mouth shut, waited for Dr. Chu to say more about Dr. Honey.

But Dr. Chu did not. Instead, he thought for a moment or two and then said, “I will outline my approach in the area of unresectable pleural mesothelioma. The common weakness of all current chemical and radiation treatments is their lack of curative result, a result that will almost certainly persist notwithstanding current work with pemetrexed/ cisplatin, pemetrexed/gemcitibane, gemcitibane/carboplatin with or without bevacizumab, flavopiridol with or without FR901228, or other compounds presently in trial phase. The reasons for this are various—
as the biology of cancer is even more various. My current phase one study in nonsurgical stage two and three is predicated on a neoadjuvant combination of tumor antigen and an angiogenesis inhibitor cocktail developed in my lab.”

Pemetrexed, gemcitibane, flavopiridol, neoadjuvant
—all these strange words, so unconnected to the language as he knew it: Roy began to lose the thread. Even ones he thought he knew, like
antigen,
now eluded him. The only one that stuck was
cocktail,
a very optimistic word. Sound flowed by, logical, persuasive, egotistical, but his mind turned to other things.
Can he do it?
Through the window Roy could see a distant scrap of blue, maybe Chesapeake Bay.

He grew aware of a change in Dr. Chu's tone, saw that the doctor was leaning forward. “…both to starve the cancer cells and turn them against each other at the same time, do you see?” he was saying. “To put it in the simplest terms, I am not interested in three extra months, four extra months, even a year or two.” His voice fell, as though he were imparting a secret. “I want more, much, much more.”

Roy nodded. He did, too.

Dr. Chu sat back.

“Questions?”

“How's the study going so far?” Roy said.

“Since it is a phase one study, very early, there are only five participants at this moment, four if we restrict the definition to only those still actually living,” Dr. Chu said. “I would categorize the current status of the study as promising.”

“Then I want in,” Roy said.

“We have not discussed potential side effects.” Dr. Chu went over potential side effects—rashes, nausea, hair loss, confusion, other things, none near as bad as death in four months to a year. “Questions?”

“No.”

Dr. Chu rose, picked up a stethoscope. “I will now listen to your chest.”

Roy raised his shirt, fumbling a little. Dr. Chu glanced at the cast on Roy's arm, said nothing. Dr. Chu placed the end of the stethoscope on
Roy's bare chest. His touch was light and gentle. He listened. Their faces were very close. Dr. Chu's eyes had an inward look; he might have been in a trance. Intelligence radiated off him; Roy could feel it. At that moment, he believed his insides were being examined by something more probing than any scanning machine.

Dr. Chu stepped back. “We begin first with a vitamin infusion, mostly B
₁₂
and folic acid.”

“When?” said Roy.

“If you'll go to the waiting room, the nurse will call you soon.”

“So I'm in?”

“You are in.”

He was in
. Was this a moment for handshaking? None ensued. He went to the waiting room.

 

Roy had
the waiting room to himself. He filled in forms. He drank from the watercooler. He studied a framed aerial photograph of the Great Wall of China. An hour went by. What did
soon
mean? He spent a few minutes on some magazines, all of the celebrity type, of no interest to him. Then he noticed a section of the
New York Times
in the wastebasket beside him. Roy fished it out.

Section D of a days-old paper, business and sports, with a coffee stain in the bottom right corner. Roy leafed through the business section—where sometimes there were stories from the art world, but not in this one—and moved on to the sports. But just before the sports came a page of obituaries. He scanned it, looking for Richard Gold's byline. And Richard Gold's name was there, although not as a byline, instead in a context that made him feel very strange.