Emily crossed her arms. Charlie was a psycho. She loved it. “Dare you to put that on your head.”
With an expert flip of the wrist, the noodle fwapped on top of Charlie’s glowing scalp and stuck there. “What do I get?”
Lucky probably, she didn’t say. “Nothing for just for that, but if you keep it there when the waitress comes back I’ll let you buy me an ice cream cone later.”
“That’s easy,” he said. “But only on the condition that you get two scoops and let me pick the flavors.”
“Why, sir,” she fluttered, “I hardly know you.”
The waitress materialized. A jade dragon clawed her red silk dress, climbing around her thigh and threatening her breasts with embroidered incineration. She tilted her face toward Charlie.
“You know you got a noodle stuck to ya’ head?”
THEY STROLLED ALONG the waterfront down by the Bowery. The liquid patter of the river and the distant moan of a tug’s horn lapped against them. The tang of fertile mud and algae pushed through on a warm breeze, and the thud and cry from juke boxes and boozy crowds dopplered in and out as they moved past the bars. Emily crunched the last bite of her ice cream cone and licked the edge of her hand. Charlie handed her a napkin. She smiled, “Thanks.”
“What’d you think? Good?”
“Wonderful,” she said and shook her head. “Pistachio and strawberry, I never would have come up with that one.”
“It’s all in the stacking,” he said. “You put the strawberry scoop on top and it’s actually poisonous.”
“Really,” she said. “Now, see, I never would have known that.”
“And you’re from the Dairy State and everything, damn.”
A chill rolled over Emily’s bare shoulders. She linked her arm through Charlie’s and leaned in. His biceps were tight. “Did you know that margarine was illegal in Wisconsin for a while in the 80’s?”
Charlie glanced over his shoulder at her. “You’re kidding me.” Had he come off cool enough there? Her smell and the warmth from her skin was driving him nuts. “C’mon, seriously?”
“Seriously. Janesville’s about forty minutes north of the border and my Dad used to catch margarine smugglers coming in from Illinois.”
“You lie.”
“Nope. Margarine runners would come through with bricks of the stuff hidden in their trunks. Daddy stopped a guy once with a trunk full of cocaine and margarine.”
A blast of light and noise fanned out at them as they walked past the Coyote Ugly Bar. A young man in a double breasted pin stripe staggered out. He got his balance and stood there a moment with his hands on his hips, something of deep consequence on his mind. After a moment, he nodded and vomited all over his feet…which were bare.
“Yeesh,” Emily said.
Charlie slid into a silky Frank Sinatra, “New York, New Yooooorrrrk.”
The drunk added, “Hurk!” and treated them to the sound of splashing and muscle spasms as they moved on.
“Aren’t you glad I suggested we come down here after dinner?” he said.
“You’re a planner.”
“That’s me. So, the margarine was under the coke? Wow.”
“Dad had tons of freaky stories.”
“Bet he did. All the weirdest shit happens to cops.”
“I’ll bet you’ve got a few weird ones.”
“Ah, yes, the ER provides a never-ending stream of quality entertainment. Ask me how many times I’ve seen members of the citizenry waddle in complaining that they’ve had an accident with a hamster.”
“No.”
“Good choice.”
“How’d you end up wanting to be a nurse, anyway?” Emily asked. “Kind of an unusual profession for men. Not that I think it should be. I just wonder how your life led you around to it.”
“You sound like people when they talk about gays,” Charlie ribbed. “That whole ending qualifier deal: Not that there’s anything wrong with that.”
“Bite me.”
Oh, would he ever like to. Just a nibble right behind her ear would do nicely, thank you.
“Seriously, now,” she said. “I’m interested. Knowing how people came to their professions can tell you a lot about them.”
Charlie chuckled and kicked a piece of loose asphalt. It skittered over the pavement and thunked into the shadows. “You ever watch M.A.S.H.?” he said. “Hawkeye, BJ, Hot Lips?”
“Sure.”
“You remember there were at least a couple of episodes where one of the doctors ended up having to go up to the front lines, to some forward medical position or something?”
“Like a Battalion Aid station or something.”
“Yeah,” he smiled and shook his head. She knew M.A.SH., too. “They had this one actor who played a front line medic. Brought him in for a couple of episodes. He was tall and skinny and wore those round wire frame glasses.”
Emily squinted. “Yeah, I think I know who you mean. Always said things that were really dry and sarcastic right when they were getting shelled all to hell and back, right?”
“You got ‘im.”
“So, you saw this character on TV as a kid and his bravery or whatever inspired you?”
“Not at all,” Charlie said. “When I was fifteen my mom and I were having our weekly night out. We’ve been doing that as long as I can remember.”
Emily flushed. It should have been one of those oh, that’s so sweet moments, but it wasn’t. She didn’t get to have a mother at all. How come he got to go out to dinner with his mother once a week and she didn’t? It was childish and angry, she knew that. After perhaps a second of silence she managed, “That’s nice that you do that.”
Charlie glanced at her, but went on. “So, we’re having dinner and this guy a couple of tables over starts choking. Really bad, too. He just stood up and clutched his throat, eyes bugging out. When someone chokes there’s not a lot of noise, except for the dinnerware flying off the table when they shoot out of their chair.” He paused. “I’ve got this super detailed memory of the whole thing, right down to my mom dropping her fork—there was a little piece of broccoli on it. She goes ‘That man,’ and then just stares. Everyone in the place, even the waiters, were just staring. Nobody did anything.”
“You saved him, didn’t you.”
“Yeah,” Charlie said with a wonder. “I did. I went to go give him the Heimlich and tripped over his half roasted chicken. Ended up head-butting the guy right in the middle of the back so hard it dislodged the food.” He laughed. “Big hero.”
Emily laughed too, but said, “I don’t get the M.A.S.H. connection.”
“Oh,” he said. “The choking guy was that actor.”
Emily chuckled. “So, what, you got the saving people’s lives bug from that and the rest is history?”
“Yeah, pretty much.” He shrugged. “Just mix a hatred for school in with the desire to help people and you got a nurse instead of a doctor. Couldn’t deal with medical school and this seemed like the easiest alternative.”
“And you like it?”
“Very much,” he said, his voice calm and deep.
They stopped at a cross walk. New York night traffic flowed by, an electrified amber gel. Charlie turned toward Emily. “You know,” he said, “I don’t even know what you do.”
“Well, I don’t really do anything.” She was about to explain when she noticed the look on his face. “What?”
“You’re hand’s shaking.” His voice dropped. “I mean really boogeying.”
Emily didn’t feel anything. She lifted her left hand but it was just as it always had been—unremarkable, the nails a little spruced up with light pink polish for her date, but other than that its normal five-headed self.
“The other one.”
Emily looked down at her right hand and gasped. It was jouncing around on the end of her wrist like a cicada caught in a spider web. “Jesus,” she said. “What?”
“You okay?” Charlie asked. “How do you feel?”
/> Emily was still staring at her hand. “Uh, fine?”
“How’s your throat? How’s your breathing?”
She looked up at him. “What’s wrong with me?”
“Could be a food allergy, but they usually manifest much sooner. You allergic to pistachio nuts or anything like that?”
“Nope.” In spite of the weirdness with her hand a smile bent her lips. “You think the noodles might really have been parasitic mind worms?”
Charlie smiled back but he was all business. “What about a head injury. You fall down or get in an accident or anything recently? Or, how about epilepsy?”
“No and no.” Emily’s face started to burn. “This sucks. What the hell is up with this?”
“Don’t worry too much about it. You’re still speaking clearly, and you don’t feel faint or anything right?”
“Yeah, I’m fine.” She sighed, “What a rotten way to make an impression.”
“Please,” Charlie laughed, “you knocked me on my butt when you walked into the ER the other night. First impression’s already made.”
She looked back at her hand. It was slowing. Just cut it out, she thought and for a wonder it did just that.
“Here,” he said. “Let me see.” Charlie took her hand in his, turned it over. He pressed his thumb gently into the soft skin at her wrist. “Let me see your eyes for a sec’.” He put his hands on either side of her face and turned her this way and that. She was a little sorry when he let go. Having his face so close heated her from toes on up. Had it not been for the lingering embarrassment over her hand she would have kissed him right then. She looked into his eyes, at the flesh around them. He was going to have bombardier eyes when he aged. They shifted over her shoulder and grew large.
Emily turned to follow Charlie’s sight line and watched as a bicyclist zipped through a red light right in front of an SUV. The driver of the stationwagon-on-steroids yanked the wheel and stomped the brakes, saving the jerk on the bike, but sending the SUV into a roll. It flipped over with a sickening shear of metal on concrete and slid through the intersection. Emily could see the lights from the other cars and the street lamps reflected in the grill as the SUV barreled toward her and Charlie. It was like watching the chrome mouth of a dragon sweep in to devour them. Emily raised her hand to ward off the collision that would kill them both.
Two and a half tons of twisted metal halted with a bang three feet in front of them. It was as if an invisible cannon ball had punched into the SUV, canceling its forward momentum.
For the silent moment that descends after all car crashes, Charlie stood and gawked. A second later, his training kicked in and he raced over to the shattered driver’s window. He squatted down and pushed the deflated skin of the airbag out of the way.
Emily stood and stared. She blinked. She wasn’t seeing what she was seeing. No way. The rest of the world came back on-line around her—car horns, people shouting and scurrying. Charlie was saying something soothing to the driver. A flutter of motion caught the corner of her eye. Emily looked down at her hand, once again blurry with tremor. Again, she stilled it with a thought. Emily stepped up to the SUV. Steam bled from the grill. She lifted her palm and pressed it into the perfect handprint embossed in the metal.
~~~~~~~~
Chapter 10
DRUMMOND FINE STARED at the woman denting his seventeen-hundred dollar leather chair with her precision-enhanced ass and tried to imagine her dying. Just keeling over right there from a massive coronary, pitching out of the chair and puddling on the floor like a blow-up fuck doll with the air let out of it. Maybe her face would graze her hand when she hit and the cueball-sized diamond would slash right through her cheek implants. Even better, her porcelain teeth could shatter and shred through her collagen-puffed lips. This was Mrs. Janice Cooney: Agoraphobic.
Agoraphobia is Greek for “fear of the marketplace” and refers to anxiety associated with open spaces. Over the years, agoraphobia had come to stand for a mish-mash of fears. If the psychiatric community couldn’t come up with a specific reason for a patient’s fear, it got lumped under agoraphobia. It was like pronouncing a person as suffering from Affective Disorder just because they were depressed and the doctor couldn’t figure out the cause. Agoraphobia: bullshit. The only reason Janice Cooney kept coming to see him was because her husband thought she didn’t put out enough.
Mrs. Cooney was afraid to be penetrated by Mr. Cooney. Not for any good reason, like a direct fear of sexual intercourse (Coitophobia) or because Thomas Cooney had a two-headed penis or something. No, Janice Cooney didn’t like to spread her stair-mastered thighs because the idea of sex with her husband was kind of…
“Icky.”
“What do you mean when you say ‘icky’, Janice?”
She pursed her lips, pink, and squinted her lashes, black. “I don’t really know. It’s just that when he wants to fuck, I get all, I don’t know.”
Janice Cooney had been Drum’s Wednesday morning for the last three years. He pretended to make a note on his new PDA. He scrawled with the black plastic stylus. Frigid Bitch melted from the digital loop and swirl of his hand writing to FRIGID BITCH in angular font. One hundred and fifty-six hours. Six and a half days. He’d spent a week of his life listening to this empty canyon of a woman, wind whistling through the dry wash between her ears. On average he charged $220 an hour. Mr. Thomas Cooney had paid him $34,320 over the last three years to find a way to get his wife to stop feeling icky and maybe even take it up the ass one day. Considering what he now knew about the plastic-fantastic Janice, if Mr. Cooney had offered to pay Drum $34,320 to spend a week with his wife in a resort on a Caribbean island, he would have refused him… And then killed them both as a public service. Funny, the way things developed little by little. Like addiction and money. Appetite. Hatred.
“Janice,” he said, “tell me about the last time you and your husband made love.”
“Well, that would have been,” she pressed a finger to her lips, “gosh, it’s been a long time.” She rolled her eyes and tried to recall.
Drum could almost hear the howling breeze, see the tumble weeds. Truth be told, he knew why sex was icky for Janice. His success as a psychiatrist was due in large part to his gift. Drum could feel the exact emotional state of his client in response to questions even if that state was consciously repressed.
During his first session with Janice, Drum had explored some of the more common causes of sexual malfunction in women. Janice—helpful little monkey that she’d always been—had proven worthless in her direct response. She had been placid and blinking when he’d asked her about her childhood and any incidents that might have left psychic scar tissue. But when he asked her about her father, Janice’s emotional EKG had thrown a huge spike.
Drum supposed that if he were ever going cure Janice, he’d have to force her to confront the root causes of her fear. Problem was, he didn’t really care if she was ever cured. While he couldn’t stand her as a person, as a patient Mrs. Thomas Cooney was a cash cow. She’d even referred two of her friends to him. Ah, life was complicated and full of work. Like the effort it took not to lean forward in his chair and punch a hole in her chest right between those silicone chew-toys she called tits. Just wrap his fingers around her heart like five jointed pythons and squeeze.
Janice cleared her throat and grimaced.
A flicker of fear slipped out of her like a naughty toe under a restaurant table. Drum’s eyelids drooped for a moment. Janice cleared her throat again, harder. She swallowed.
“Are you feeling all right, Janice?”
“I, um,” she rubbed the upside-down triangle of skin at her collar and gave a sheepish smile. “Indigestion, I guess.”
Drum nodded. It was bullshit. Janice never had breakfast. He’d been listening to her stomach rumble for years. She hardly ever ate. There wasn’t anything under that aerobicized six pack to digest, badly or otherwise. Her discomfort and unease were marvelous, though—seeping out of her now, coating him
, cleaning the noise from his mind. “Would you like a glass of water?” he asked, hoping she would be too embarrassed to accept. God, wouldn’t it be great if she were really having a heart attack?
“No, Doctor Fine,” she said, sitting up straighter in her seat. “Really, I’m okay.”
Drum focused on a bead of sweat at her temple and thought about all the product it must have siphoned from her follicles as it rolled out of her hair. Could it be flammable? He could probably wring out Janet’s do and power a lawnmower engine with the results. He gripped the arms of his chair. Her fear was pulsing into him, crackling in the air. It spiked and pushed his head back. Drum’s vision whited-out for a moment and when it cleared, Janice was clutching her left breast. One of her press-on nails had broken off and lay on her lap like a tiny pink tombstone. She bit down on her lower lip, the lipstick staining her teeth—a whole row of tiny pink-tipped tombstones.
Drum sat forward in his chair. “Janice?”
Her eyes flew open, a horse stung by a hornet. She managed to get a breath as the tears gelled down her face. Her voice came shaky and sad, child-like: a drawn out, “Ooh, ow.” She sobbed once and pitched forward.
“Janice!”
Drum caught her as she fell out of her chair. He laid her on the carpet. “Janice! Janice!” Oh shit, the bitch was actually having a heart attack. And the terror it was causing was enormous, rolling through him like wave after wave of purest cocaine. It blanked his mind with Zen clarity. He’d never experienced anything this intense.
Janice’s breath came in shallow little rasps. Agony shook through her muscles and locked them. Drum leaned in through a sediment of anxiety, layers of intensifying fear the closer he came to her. He raised his left hand to touch her and realized it was shaking, really flapping around on his wrist. The right was fine, but the left was all over the place. He ignored it, his calm and clarity at their height. Drum whispered in her ear, “You’re dying, little Janice.” He reached between her thighs and palped with spastic fingers. “And your father’s waiting for you in the dark.”
Janice Cooney fell, the burning stone in her chest pulling her into the depths. She left a cloud of terror in the room and Drummond Fine inhaled it like fragrant smoke.