Part 1:
The Body
-
“Is that him?”
It was a loaded question. The shape laying under the thin, white, industrial sheet had, at one point, been my little brother. Was it my brother anymore? I stared, thinking hard.
The brother I remembered didn’t really have pale skin or blue chapped lips. His pupils tended to move and dance, and his chest – it would rise and fall regularly as his lungs would inflate with air.
I reached out to touch my not-brother, but was verbally stopped before skin could touch skin.
“Don’t touch him.”
I looked up at the bull in the blue suit. He had a handlebar moustache with a small bit of red on it. He was sweating hard, despite the cool temperature of the room. There was even a freezer door open, and he still had the audacity to sweat. I briefly considered telling him off, calling him a bad word, but I held it in. Instead, I drew my hand back.
“Is that him?” He repeated.
I sighed. “If it is, you’re certainly not giving me a whole lot of time to wrap my brain around what I’m seeing, officer.”
“Not for nothing, son, but I have places I need to be.”
I rolled my eyes. The whole processes of taking down his badge number and filing a complaint didn’t appeal to me very much. I looked back down at the cooling board, and tried to remember the last time I had seen my little brother alive.
He had been talking to me, machine gun style, about some girl and a guy named Alvin that he was going to spend the night with. Alvin, the second grade wonder.
Did you know he skipped first grade? He’s way smarter than I am. I hope we’re in the same class next year.
Way smarter than you’ll ever get to be, kiddo.
I looked back up at the cop, who had begun to impatiently tap his foot.
“What if it is?”
“Then you say it is. You sign a paper. You leave, I leave, your brother gets cut on and put in the ground.”
“Any idea how this happened?”
The bull sighed. “Found him in Lake Cheswick.”
“Someone drown him?”
“Hell if I know. Autopsy should tell us what happened.”
I stared at the cop. “Go. This is him. Enjoy your fried circles in the car.”
“Audacity, son, will get you nowhere.”
“You’ve got powdered sugar on your lapel, not ground in to the fabric yet, which means it hasn’t been on you that long. You’ve got a mark around your finger from where you were twirling your keys on the way into the building – it’s too cold out for your key ring not to leave a mark - and on that goofy mop you call a moustache – there’s a slight bit of jam. Donuts. Car. Go.”
He stared at me for a second, reaching up and cleaning the bit of jam from his face. “You gotta go first. I have to sign you out.”
“Then you’re going to have to stay while I look at my brother.”
-
The day after his funeral, I found myself staring at the mirror.
“This is you, Dabney. These are your sad eyes. This is your thinning hair. You’re 20. Your brother is dead – dead. You have no family. You have nothing anymore.”
My eyes danced electric as I tried to focus. I brought my hands down on the sink to steady myself, and averted my gaze. The white porcelain.
“This is a sink, Dabney. It holds the water that spills from the faucet. This is your watch, Dabney. You’re running late for work.”
I turned and left the bathroom, stepping out of the perfect, clean, sterile world, into my small, cramped apartment. There were boxes stacked up to head height, but as I walked past the futon that doubled as my bed, I paused. I could move into the bedroom that my ex-little brother had used.
He was my ward and he ended up dead.
-
The morning was frigid, the air escaping my lips in a fine vapor. I moved down three flights of stairs, to the bottom of a small walkway where my beat up chariot sat. I moved myself into the driver’s seat and started the car, staring over.
In the shotgun was a first grade reader and a Goosebumps book. On my way out of the complex, I flung both of them out the window. If the school needed them back, they could bill me.
I tried not to think during the drive, to keep myself as neutral as possible. The situation hadn’t numbed me – I had been desensitized to things like this a while ago.
Cold rain. Cold night. Warm blood.
I just kept trying to make myself feel something other than anger. Not any myself – there was nothing I could have done. By the time I knew he wasn’t at Alvin’s, he was at the bottom of Cheswick, hanging loose among the shale and limestone. I know Alvin lived near Cheswick.
I pulled in to my parking space at the medical office, and shut my car off.
I slammed my hands against the steering wheel three times, my fists balled tight.
Three was all I could afford. I was, after all, running late.
-
My boss, Sharon, told me that if I needed some time off, that I could have some time off, and I told her that I needed money more than I needed sanity, because I would much rather be indoors and insane than freezing and insane.
I pushed the cart of medical charts through the file room, stopping ever foot or so to pull a chart from the cart and put it back on the shelf or pull a chart from the shelf an put it on the cart.
I flipped through some of them, reading what each patient had, what was making them ill, or in a rare case, what was killing them slowly. Every patient had the same kind of cancer – life. There was no cure. In the end, it would kill you. As much as the doctors tried to prolong it, it would ebb away at your spirit, your mind, your body, until you were nothing but a pile of ashes.
It was a charade. People would come in sick and leave sick and the doctors would pat themselves on the back like they had done a good job, like they had turned water into wine. The medical field was a joke, and the doctors were the jesters telling it, pleasing all the kings and queens that walked through. It’s hospice care.
The end result is the same. The only thing they do is take the pain away as long as they can.
Sharon rounded the corner into the file room. I pretended not to hear her come in. I liked it when she called my name.
“Dabney?”
I turned my head, casting a glance behind me. “Hey.”
“You can go. HR told me I could go ahead and take whatever time you needed out of your emergency time off. They said this qualified.”
“I guess that’s good news for me, then.”
Sharon nodded. She was a short drink, about fifty pounds overweight. She had long blonde hair that fell around her shoulders like anvils. No matter what she tried to do with it, it stayed static, stuck to her head like a terrible wig. When she nodded, it was like someone was holding her scalp in place while her face moved.
“Stop by and tell Beth your leaving. She didn’t know you were even here.”
I could feel myself smile, but I made myself stop.
“Oh, yeah?”
Sharon nodded again, scalp held by the firm hand of gravity.
-
Dr. Beth Berkley. We hired her on after we hired on Dr. Schulz, because he wasn’t bringing in any patients. Dr. Schulz was a devout man of faith and spent one out of every four years in the US practicing medicine. He spent three out of every four in another country, underprivileged, spreading the word of God and helping converts toss away their symptoms.
Dr. Schulz was nice enough. He pushed 50, but looked so much younger – and he had a shy streak that only added to the youthful illusion, making him more like a schoolboy than a grown man. As far as I can remember, he’s always had all kinds of problems working the computers. Technology ages so much.
“It’s like I was in a coma,” he told me one time, when he was first hired on. “A strange thing to go away for three years, come back and then... Then there’s this. You know? And it’s like I’ve gone backwards, really. Because the stuff we use out there – out in the underdeveloped world – is second hand stuff from ten years ago, maybe more. I’m at such a handicap,” he said, putting his hand on my shoulder.
“I’ll bet.”
He was a peculiar man and his introverted nature did little to draw patients in.
Dr. Beth, on the other hand, was a firecracker. She was a young doctor, only six years my senior, and what I heard from Sharon was that we were getting her cheap. Dirt cheap. She was cheerful enough that when she started seeing the sick ones, they talked about how nice she was. How open she was. And, if her patient was a man, how often she wore skirts.
I lumbered into her office, not bothering to knock because the door was open. She wasn’t in her chair, so I moved and sat down, kicking my feet back and resting my hands behind my head. This is what it would be like if I were a doctor, if I weren’t a file boy.
I saw the shadow of Brad walk by the door. He was our transcriptionist – send the tapes out with him, they would come back blank, but he would have the contents spilled over on to paper. One day turn around. Highly efficient. Chiseled jaw, too. Made me sad that I didn’t have one, a little jealous.
I pulled the hood up on my sweatshirt, and looked into the dark shield I had created. I saw my ex-little brother’s face. He was staring at me, cold, clammy.
His eyes shot open, and I looked right at him. My gaze did not falter.
His mouth opened and water rushed out.
It was so real. I felt like I was about to be hit with a deluge. I kicked off the desk, ripping the hood from my face, panting.
Beth was staring at me from the open door. She ****ed her head to the side like a curious pug, and closed the door behind her.
“You okay, Dabney?”
I shook my head. “No. Not really.”
Beth pulled her hand up to her face, pushing her fair hair behind her ear. She sat on the edge of her desk, crossing her legs, looking at me. Her blue eyes seemed to cut into me like diamonds. It hurt when she looked at me like that.
“Anything you want to talk about?”
I shook my head. “Not especially, no. Just, I won’t be coming in to work for a while. I have to sort some things out.”
“Oh. Is this about...”
“Yeah. Word spreads fast, doesn’t it?”
She stood, and walked over to the chair. “It’s not your fault, what happened.”
“I know,” I said, looking up at her. “I don’t blame myself.”
“Good.”
“I mean, I know I’m not responsible.”
“If you stay in your apartment all the time, you’re just going to drive yourself crazy, Dabney.”
“Yeah. I don’t plan on spending too much time there.”
“Where are you going to be?”
“Finding out what happened to him.”
“Your brother?”
I nodded. “I had the coroner’s report sent over. They said, blunt force trauma to the ribs, neck, and head, but he drowned. That was the official cause of death. They said he fell while he was walking past Cheswick and sank.”
“And you don’t think that’s what happened?”
“I’m a city urchin,” I said. “The bulls, they don’t care what happens to me or people like me. I’m not saying that’s not what happened. But if it isn’t, I’ll find out.”
“And then what?”
I shrugged. “I’ll figure it out as I go, I guess.”
I pushed the chair back, and stood. “Thanks for listening,” I said, patting her on the shoulder.
“Anytime. I like what goes on up there.”
I didn’t smile, but I could have.
“Oh, and before you go, Dr. Schulz wants to talk to you.”
“Yeah, that’s not happening,” I said quietly, zipping up my red sweatshirt and heading out the door.
The Body
-
“Is that him?”
It was a loaded question. The shape laying under the thin, white, industrial sheet had, at one point, been my little brother. Was it my brother anymore? I stared, thinking hard.
The brother I remembered didn’t really have pale skin or blue chapped lips. His pupils tended to move and dance, and his chest – it would rise and fall regularly as his lungs would inflate with air.
I reached out to touch my not-brother, but was verbally stopped before skin could touch skin.
“Don’t touch him.”
I looked up at the bull in the blue suit. He had a handlebar moustache with a small bit of red on it. He was sweating hard, despite the cool temperature of the room. There was even a freezer door open, and he still had the audacity to sweat. I briefly considered telling him off, calling him a bad word, but I held it in. Instead, I drew my hand back.
“Is that him?” He repeated.
I sighed. “If it is, you’re certainly not giving me a whole lot of time to wrap my brain around what I’m seeing, officer.”
“Not for nothing, son, but I have places I need to be.”
I rolled my eyes. The whole processes of taking down his badge number and filing a complaint didn’t appeal to me very much. I looked back down at the cooling board, and tried to remember the last time I had seen my little brother alive.
He had been talking to me, machine gun style, about some girl and a guy named Alvin that he was going to spend the night with. Alvin, the second grade wonder.
Did you know he skipped first grade? He’s way smarter than I am. I hope we’re in the same class next year.
Way smarter than you’ll ever get to be, kiddo.
I looked back up at the cop, who had begun to impatiently tap his foot.
“What if it is?”
“Then you say it is. You sign a paper. You leave, I leave, your brother gets cut on and put in the ground.”
“Any idea how this happened?”
The bull sighed. “Found him in Lake Cheswick.”
“Someone drown him?”
“Hell if I know. Autopsy should tell us what happened.”
I stared at the cop. “Go. This is him. Enjoy your fried circles in the car.”
“Audacity, son, will get you nowhere.”
“You’ve got powdered sugar on your lapel, not ground in to the fabric yet, which means it hasn’t been on you that long. You’ve got a mark around your finger from where you were twirling your keys on the way into the building – it’s too cold out for your key ring not to leave a mark - and on that goofy mop you call a moustache – there’s a slight bit of jam. Donuts. Car. Go.”
He stared at me for a second, reaching up and cleaning the bit of jam from his face. “You gotta go first. I have to sign you out.”
“Then you’re going to have to stay while I look at my brother.”
-
The day after his funeral, I found myself staring at the mirror.
“This is you, Dabney. These are your sad eyes. This is your thinning hair. You’re 20. Your brother is dead – dead. You have no family. You have nothing anymore.”
My eyes danced electric as I tried to focus. I brought my hands down on the sink to steady myself, and averted my gaze. The white porcelain.
“This is a sink, Dabney. It holds the water that spills from the faucet. This is your watch, Dabney. You’re running late for work.”
I turned and left the bathroom, stepping out of the perfect, clean, sterile world, into my small, cramped apartment. There were boxes stacked up to head height, but as I walked past the futon that doubled as my bed, I paused. I could move into the bedroom that my ex-little brother had used.
He was my ward and he ended up dead.
-
The morning was frigid, the air escaping my lips in a fine vapor. I moved down three flights of stairs, to the bottom of a small walkway where my beat up chariot sat. I moved myself into the driver’s seat and started the car, staring over.
In the shotgun was a first grade reader and a Goosebumps book. On my way out of the complex, I flung both of them out the window. If the school needed them back, they could bill me.
I tried not to think during the drive, to keep myself as neutral as possible. The situation hadn’t numbed me – I had been desensitized to things like this a while ago.
Cold rain. Cold night. Warm blood.
I just kept trying to make myself feel something other than anger. Not any myself – there was nothing I could have done. By the time I knew he wasn’t at Alvin’s, he was at the bottom of Cheswick, hanging loose among the shale and limestone. I know Alvin lived near Cheswick.
I pulled in to my parking space at the medical office, and shut my car off.
I slammed my hands against the steering wheel three times, my fists balled tight.
Three was all I could afford. I was, after all, running late.
-
My boss, Sharon, told me that if I needed some time off, that I could have some time off, and I told her that I needed money more than I needed sanity, because I would much rather be indoors and insane than freezing and insane.
I pushed the cart of medical charts through the file room, stopping ever foot or so to pull a chart from the cart and put it back on the shelf or pull a chart from the shelf an put it on the cart.
I flipped through some of them, reading what each patient had, what was making them ill, or in a rare case, what was killing them slowly. Every patient had the same kind of cancer – life. There was no cure. In the end, it would kill you. As much as the doctors tried to prolong it, it would ebb away at your spirit, your mind, your body, until you were nothing but a pile of ashes.
It was a charade. People would come in sick and leave sick and the doctors would pat themselves on the back like they had done a good job, like they had turned water into wine. The medical field was a joke, and the doctors were the jesters telling it, pleasing all the kings and queens that walked through. It’s hospice care.
The end result is the same. The only thing they do is take the pain away as long as they can.
Sharon rounded the corner into the file room. I pretended not to hear her come in. I liked it when she called my name.
“Dabney?”
I turned my head, casting a glance behind me. “Hey.”
“You can go. HR told me I could go ahead and take whatever time you needed out of your emergency time off. They said this qualified.”
“I guess that’s good news for me, then.”
Sharon nodded. She was a short drink, about fifty pounds overweight. She had long blonde hair that fell around her shoulders like anvils. No matter what she tried to do with it, it stayed static, stuck to her head like a terrible wig. When she nodded, it was like someone was holding her scalp in place while her face moved.
“Stop by and tell Beth your leaving. She didn’t know you were even here.”
I could feel myself smile, but I made myself stop.
“Oh, yeah?”
Sharon nodded again, scalp held by the firm hand of gravity.
-
Dr. Beth Berkley. We hired her on after we hired on Dr. Schulz, because he wasn’t bringing in any patients. Dr. Schulz was a devout man of faith and spent one out of every four years in the US practicing medicine. He spent three out of every four in another country, underprivileged, spreading the word of God and helping converts toss away their symptoms.
Dr. Schulz was nice enough. He pushed 50, but looked so much younger – and he had a shy streak that only added to the youthful illusion, making him more like a schoolboy than a grown man. As far as I can remember, he’s always had all kinds of problems working the computers. Technology ages so much.
“It’s like I was in a coma,” he told me one time, when he was first hired on. “A strange thing to go away for three years, come back and then... Then there’s this. You know? And it’s like I’ve gone backwards, really. Because the stuff we use out there – out in the underdeveloped world – is second hand stuff from ten years ago, maybe more. I’m at such a handicap,” he said, putting his hand on my shoulder.
“I’ll bet.”
He was a peculiar man and his introverted nature did little to draw patients in.
Dr. Beth, on the other hand, was a firecracker. She was a young doctor, only six years my senior, and what I heard from Sharon was that we were getting her cheap. Dirt cheap. She was cheerful enough that when she started seeing the sick ones, they talked about how nice she was. How open she was. And, if her patient was a man, how often she wore skirts.
I lumbered into her office, not bothering to knock because the door was open. She wasn’t in her chair, so I moved and sat down, kicking my feet back and resting my hands behind my head. This is what it would be like if I were a doctor, if I weren’t a file boy.
I saw the shadow of Brad walk by the door. He was our transcriptionist – send the tapes out with him, they would come back blank, but he would have the contents spilled over on to paper. One day turn around. Highly efficient. Chiseled jaw, too. Made me sad that I didn’t have one, a little jealous.
I pulled the hood up on my sweatshirt, and looked into the dark shield I had created. I saw my ex-little brother’s face. He was staring at me, cold, clammy.
His eyes shot open, and I looked right at him. My gaze did not falter.
His mouth opened and water rushed out.
It was so real. I felt like I was about to be hit with a deluge. I kicked off the desk, ripping the hood from my face, panting.
Beth was staring at me from the open door. She ****ed her head to the side like a curious pug, and closed the door behind her.
“You okay, Dabney?”
I shook my head. “No. Not really.”
Beth pulled her hand up to her face, pushing her fair hair behind her ear. She sat on the edge of her desk, crossing her legs, looking at me. Her blue eyes seemed to cut into me like diamonds. It hurt when she looked at me like that.
“Anything you want to talk about?”
I shook my head. “Not especially, no. Just, I won’t be coming in to work for a while. I have to sort some things out.”
“Oh. Is this about...”
“Yeah. Word spreads fast, doesn’t it?”
She stood, and walked over to the chair. “It’s not your fault, what happened.”
“I know,” I said, looking up at her. “I don’t blame myself.”
“Good.”
“I mean, I know I’m not responsible.”
“If you stay in your apartment all the time, you’re just going to drive yourself crazy, Dabney.”
“Yeah. I don’t plan on spending too much time there.”
“Where are you going to be?”
“Finding out what happened to him.”
“Your brother?”
I nodded. “I had the coroner’s report sent over. They said, blunt force trauma to the ribs, neck, and head, but he drowned. That was the official cause of death. They said he fell while he was walking past Cheswick and sank.”
“And you don’t think that’s what happened?”
“I’m a city urchin,” I said. “The bulls, they don’t care what happens to me or people like me. I’m not saying that’s not what happened. But if it isn’t, I’ll find out.”
“And then what?”
I shrugged. “I’ll figure it out as I go, I guess.”
I pushed the chair back, and stood. “Thanks for listening,” I said, patting her on the shoulder.
“Anytime. I like what goes on up there.”
I didn’t smile, but I could have.
“Oh, and before you go, Dr. Schulz wants to talk to you.”
“Yeah, that’s not happening,” I said quietly, zipping up my red sweatshirt and heading out the door.
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