Althea and Oliver (15 page)

Oliver's memories of his father—Mack, she had called him, short for McKinley, even though his first name was Charles—have faded to a corduroy jacket that smelled like tobacco, being pushed high on a playground swing, onions and garlic sizzling in a pan on the stove. There was a dog then, too, an enormous mountain dog named Jeremiah that loved to knock Oliver over and lick his face to pieces. Mack and that dog went everywhere together.

Mack is still real to Nicky. Even after ten years, her memories of him are vivid enough to haunt or amuse her, depending on her mood. And Oliver feels guilty sometimes. With so little to remember, there is not much to miss, and Nicky grieves alone for the husband and father Oliver wouldn't know if he saw him now. And sometimes he's angry that she hoards her memories, that she hasn't kept Mack alive more for Oliver, the last tiny piece of him that's left. In the end, the guilt and anger are always fleeting, because it's pointless. Nicky is Nicky and Mack is gone; the dog ran away after he died; Oliver grew up without a father and doesn't know life any other way.

“Am I anything like him?” he asks.

“You're everything like him,” Nicky says softly, tipping the carafe over her cup and finding it empty.

He stares at the waterfall behind her. Right after Mack died and the McKinleys were halved, down the street Althea's mother was packing her bags, cleaving her own family. At six years old, a pair of twins was born. The other day at the coffee shop, the cashier looked past Oliver before taking his order, waiting for Althea to appear. She'd never seen them apart. There's no picture of Althea in his duffel bag, none of her sketches pressed between the pages of his notebooks. No one in New York will even know that she exists.

“I just don't want you to end up like Mrs. Parker, sweeping the sidewalk in some ugly housecoat,” he says.

“What if it's a vintage housecoat?” she says, flagging down the waiter and holding up the empty carafe, indicating she's ready for another. “What if it's something really kicky?”

• • •

The doctor is wearing too much hair product. He's too tall, too young, and too handsome, and immediately Oliver is distrustful. Oliver likes a doctor with a robust head of white hair and tortoiseshell glasses, the easy, comfortable trappings of seniority. This guy looks less like a doctor than like an actor hired to play one. Nicky waits outside while Dr. Curls gives Oliver a thorough physical.

“So, you came all the way from North Carolina?”

“That's right,” Oliver says.

“How do you like it down there?”

“It's fine. I guess I don't really have much to compare it to.” He squints as the doctor shines a light in his eyes.

“First time in New York?”

“For me, yeah.”

“Your mom's been here before?”

“My mom used to live here. In Alphabet City.” It's a new low, leaning on his mother's past for credibility.

Dr. Curls makes a brief, Muppet-like noise to indicate that he's impressed. “So you're, what, a senior in high school?”

“Yeah.”

Blowing on his stethoscope, the doctor reaches under Oliver's paper gown to listen to his heartbeat, then moves the stethoscope to Oliver's back. “Take a deep breath.”

When he's finished with the exam, the doctor sits on the rolling stool and looks up at Oliver, perched on the table with his bare legs dangling. “So, how many of these sleep episodes have you had so far?”

“Three.”

“And what do you remember about the events leading up to the first one?”

“I'm not sure I understand what you mean.”

“Most KLS patients experience some sort of incident before their first episode. It could be an injury, maybe a head trauma or just a night of heavy drinking. Anything like that happen?”

“I guess you could say there was an incident,” he tells Dr. Curls, recalling the night of the Jell-O wrestling party. “Beer. Stress. Sleep deprivation.”

“All right,” says the doctor. “What do you say you go change and then we have a seat in my office and talk to your mom about what happens now?”

• • •

Oliver's given his own hospital room, modified to accommodate the length of his stay. There's a twin bed, a nightstand with a gooseneck reading lamp, a small wooden dresser missing several of its drawer pulls, a plain desk with various profanities etched into its surface, and a chair. The desk reminds Oliver of his first days at elementary school, being assigned his seat and seeing the work of the previous occupants, how shocking the expletives seemed at first but how staring at them day after day took away their power to unnerve him. He has his own bathroom with a shower, no tub, a plastic shower curtain instead of a glass door. There are various pieces of medical equipment next to the bed. Every night before he goes to sleep, a nurse comes in to tether him to these monitors and machines; in the morning, a different nurse comes in and unhooks him, followed by the doctors.

During the day he's free to hang out with the other KLS patients in a common room not unlike that of a mental ward—cigarette-scarred couches, a TV, clipboard-wielding nurses on the periphery. The study is composed solely of teenage boys, the most common sufferers of Kleine-Levin Syndrome. A tutor comes in the afternoons to help them with their schoolwork, but beyond that their days are devoid of any structure. As a result, the lounge has taken on the atmosphere of a fraternity house, a keg party without the beer. For months or years these boys have been the only ones in their towns or cities—“or even states,” boasts the boy from Alaska with the shiny black hair—who could lay claim to this disease. Now there are more than a dozen of them, comrades thrown together, constantly sprawled out in the lounge, legs flung over the arms of their chairs or holding one another's feet for sit-ups, bonding hastily in a semi-simian manner. Having spent his formative years primarily in the company of Nicky and Althea, Oliver is ill at ease in such a heavily male environment. The public ball-scratching, the incessant discussion of bodily functions, the flippant assessments of the female nurses—he is poorly versed in these fraternal machinations. Most of the time, he stays in his room, breezing through the AP physics assignments from school, reading graphic novels and
A Brief History of Time
and listening to
Parklife
on his Discman.

But every couple of days an orderly comes in to change the paper-thin sheets and wipe down the walls of the shower, and Oliver slips out to let him work. Then he has no choice but to join the others in their makeshift living room, unless he wants to mill around the nurses' station, which they've made clear they don't particularly like, or sit on the floor outside his room waiting for the orderly to finish, which makes Oliver feel like he's rushing the guy unfairly.

So when the knock on the door comes one afternoon as Oliver is about to start a history assignment, he gathers his books and pencils and walks down the luminous white hallway toward the sound of adolescent boys competing to be heard over the television.

Oliver sinks into an institutional blue chair by the dirt-streaked window with a decent view of the busy avenue below. The other guys are draped across the furniture in flip-flops and track pants, jeans and heather-gray sweatshirts with the names of their high school football teams or concert shirts from stadium tours, major American cities listed on the back. As he always does, Oliver looks around for a Minty Fresh or even a Coby, someone with a Mohawk or a homemade shirt or too many zippers on his pants, someone with bloodshot eyes, generally looking not entirely aboveboard. The lounge has the unpleasant feel of a locker room before gym class. Oliver opens his book across his lap and tries to concentrate. A dozen stories down he can see two women huddled together against the wind, one with bright pink hair, the other holding her IV stand close to keep it from rolling away. Oliver wonders if this is standard practice at hospitals in New York City, to let the patients outside for regular cigarette breaks.

“Anybody seen CT?” one kid asks. In the manner of a traveling carnival that has picked up misfits across the country as employees, the boys in the study refer to one another by their state names and abbreviations. This works out better for some than others. The boy from Alaska is known affectionately as AK-47; poor Kentucky is mocked ruthlessly for carrying the name of a popular lubricant.

“Where the hell have you been? CT went down yesterday morning.” AK-47 seems to have prevailed as the unexpected alpha male. He has the best seat on the couch as well as control of the remote.

Surreptitiously surveying the group, Oliver confirms their ranks have dwindled. There are only about eight boys left; the rest have succumbed to KLS sleep episodes. Confined to their rooms, they are under constant surveillance by the cameras mounted everywhere, and rumors circulate constantly about who did what in the semipsychotic state familiar to them all. The only boy actually from New York fell out practically as soon as they first took his blood pressure; for this he was dubbed a “pussy” by the rest of the crew. The remaining eight have proved to be hardier than anticipated.

“He was going to lend me his Sega,” the first boy says.

“Go in there and take it,” AK-47 says, shrugging. “He can't use it now.”

Whoever organized the study had the foresight to ensure the television would get ESPN. The Winston Cup Series is airing live from Atlanta. Garth has a secret love of NASCAR; Althea and Oliver had sometimes found him standing at the end of a neighbor's driveway, having an animated conversation with someone he barely knew about the Bodine Brothers or the controversial finish at the 1991 Banquet Frozen Foods 300. Althea speculated that Garth couldn't find other professors willing to proclaim their allegiance to this proud Southern tradition, so he resorted to pacing up and down Magnolia Street waiting for his male neighbors to come outside and check their mail, and then he would pounce.

“What is this shit?” NJ asks. “I want to watch football.”

“It's the NAPA 500,” Oliver says. “It's the final competition of the NASCAR season.”

“Like the Super Bowl?”

“Sure.”

“You from NC, right?” Kentucky asks hopefully, perhaps seeking a kindred spirit in a fellow Southerner. He's wearing a Browning baseball cap; if they were to team up, Oliver gives it about two hours until New Jersey starts cracking jokes about KY and NC polishing their rifles together.

“Wilmington,” Oliver says, going back to his history book.

A willowy nurse walks into the lounge. She has curly blonde hair and slim hands, and Oliver loves her simply because she is the only nurse, male or female, who isn't wearing orthopedic shoes. Pointing her digital thermometer at the boys like a weapon, she orders them to line up against the wall.

“Again?” New Jersey says.

“Just do it,” says the nurse.

No one's temperature has spiked enough to indicate he might be getting close to having a KLS episode. The nurse's eyebrows furrow slightly with poorly hidden consternation.

“Maybe we're just not trying hard enough,” AK-47 says. “Maybe we should all go back to our rooms and count sheep.”

Oliver smiles at the nurse when she inserts the plastic tip into his ear. He does not envy her this job; over her shoulder, he can see the rest of the boys ogling her admittedly perfect ass. “You should really be handing out poisoned apples. I hear they work every time.”

“Sooner or later,” she says, not without some glee. “Sooner or later.”

Predictably, she has barely left the room when the others begin talking about what they would like to do to her, given ten minutes and access to the broom closet.

“I'm telling you,” says another boy—Minnesota, perhaps, based on the accent—“if she comes into my room after I go down, I can't be held responsible for my actions.”

“Dude, you told us you came on to your sister once when you were sick. Do you want to be held responsible for that action?” AK-47 says.

Minnesota pouts. “Whatever.”

“I wandered into my neighbor's house and ate everything in their fridge,” Kentucky says.

“Oh, who
hasn't
?” says New Jersey dismissively.

“Yeah, except on Thunder Road or wherever the fuck you live, people probably don't sleep with their shotguns and get hard-ons at the prospect of killing an intruder,” Kentucky says. That gets a snicker, and he sits back, temporarily secure in his beta male status.

“At least here no one will freak out if I take a shit on my bed,” another guy says. “It's been known to happen.”

This revelation prompts AK-47 to launch into a protracted tale that combines elements of all the others—a neighbor's house, fecal matter, and an unwanted sexual advance directed at a wildly inappropriate recipient.

The orderly who was cleaning Oliver's room earlier appears in the hallway, diligently circling the floor with a filthy mop and water. Gathering his books, Oliver retreats from the common room.

“NC, where you going?” Kentucky calls after him.

Oliver mumbles something about needing to study.

• • •

That night, Oliver gets into bed and waits, reading
The Big Fat Kill
by the light of the gooseneck lamp. There's a quick rap on the door and a nurse enters. It's not the blonde nurse, but an older woman with extremely thin eyebrows and graying brown hair pinned into a wispy bun.

“You ready?” she says. He may not like her shoes, but he appreciates her businesslike approach.

“Bring it on,” he says. It comes out more serious-sounding than he intended.

She straps a blue band around his chest and another around his abdomen; these are supposed to monitor his breathing while he sleeps. When she bends over him to glue the electrodes to his temples, he can smell Twizzlers on her breath. From here, he can tell she has no eyebrows at all, that she's just drawn on these slender lines where her eyebrows should be. The adhesive from the electrodes is cold and sticky in his hair. She wraps an oximeter around his index finger, a strip that looks like a Band-Aid but actually monitors the oxygen levels in his blood.