Come Out Tonight (6 page)

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*

I’m not much of a swinger, really.
 
You’ve got to believe me when I say I never saw that Heather Kuznitz babe before.
 
I don’t know what she was going on about.
  
I must have a double somewhere named Edward.
 
It sure wasn’t me at that Pacha place carrying on under the strobe lights.

Hey, I was born in
Queens
.
 
My parents still live there: Mona and Jack Jackman.
  
They’ve been living there for the last thirty years in this little brick house off of
Hillside Avenue
.
 
They’re probably the only white, non-immigrants in the whole borough.
 
The area used to be Jewish, Polish, Irish, Italian.
 
Now it’s West Indian, Arab, African-American.
 
Yeah, and it looks a lot better now.
 
The current residents really cleaned it up. Property values are zooming. Come to think of it, that’s probably why Mom and Dad stayed.

So, I’ve got this older brother and a sister, but both of them got smart early and moved away.
 
Mom didn’t like it one bit when I decided to move out, too.
 
She pleaded with me to stay a little longer.
 
Don’t leave me, too, Harry, she said.
 
My name is Henry, but she calls me Harry; don’t ask me why.
 
I told her she still had Dad.
 
I was thirty, for crying out loud, and it was time for me to leave.
  
But Mom didn’t take it lying down.
 
She never takes anything lying down.
 
She still calls me every day.
 
Fact is, I just filter the calls and call her back when I feel like it.
 
It works for me.

I used to think that when I moved into
Manhattan
and got my own apartment, I’d be going to clubs and bars, picking up girls, livin’
la vida loco
.
 
 
But I got that out of my system pretty fast.
 
Mom had made me go to pharmacy school, but I stayed just long enough to get a technician’s certificate.
 
I didn’t know what to do with myself, but I got the job at Duane Reade right off the bat.
 
Carl, this tall, heavyset dude with Michael Jackson hair, and I hit it off at the interview.
 
Then I found this run-down walk-up eight blocks away, and I just settled in.
 
I mean, I was still going to bars, picking up girls and in general sowing all those wild oats I never got to sow when I lived with my parents in Queens, but with AIDS and SARS and Herpes these days, you can’t be too careful, you know? So, six months later when I met Sherry jogging in
Central Park
, and realized she was the one, that was the end of the wild oats.
 
I wanted her to move in, but she said she wasn’t ready.
 
She wasn’t one of those girls who just wants to get married and have kids. She was thirty and had already had one major breakthrough in her research.

Yeah, I suppose I should mention that Sherry works at Vandenberg Institute for Medical Research, this world-famous midtown establishment that does research for research’s sake.
  
If you’re brilliant enough to get a job there, you can pick whatever you want to study.
 
You can work on photosynthesis in algae or the embryology of snails, or why the sky is blue, and get paid big bucks for doing it.
 

Four years ago, Sherry and this guy Ryan set up a lab researching the effects of alcohol on the brain.
 
No one knew how alcohol made you drunk.
 
They used to think it acted on the whole brain, but Sherry showed that alcohol acted only on certain sleep receptors in the brain.
 
Now, alcohol didn’t always set off those receptors. Sometimes yes, sometimes no.
 
Trying to find out why, they lucked onto the chemical formula of this new drug.
 
They synthesized it, and boy did it set off those receptors.
 
What they had found was a whole new class of hypnotic sleep medication!
 
It was such a big deal, that some pharma company got into it and licensed it, and it went on to sell a cool hundred million scrips a year!
 
Somnolux the name was.
 
Too bad the Institute kept the rights to it.
 
You get the privilege of working for this world-class research institute without scrounging around for grant money, Sherry says, in exchange for losing the rights to your own discoveries.
 
Sounds good until you actually discover something....

Anyway, the whole point of this is that she wanted to be a big shot, and now she was, and she wasn’t going to give that up for me.
 
She liked me, she said.
 
She liked me a lot.
 
But she didn’t want to tie herself down just yet.
 
Besides, lately, she said, I had been really irritable.
 
All she had to do is look at me wrong, and I pretty much jumped down her throat.
 
Really, I don’t know what she’s talking about.
 
I’m a pretty mellow guy.
 
She must be referring to the time I found her and that guy from work in her apartment two months ago.
 
I kind of flew off the handle.
 
I know that, and I’m not proud of it, but there you are.
 
I love her, and I don’t want to share.
 
She did try to talk about it with me - she told me he didn’t mean anything to her - that it was just a problem with work - but I wouldn’t listen. Since then, I guess I’ve been kind of moping.
 
So, maybe she’s right.
 
Still, I’m a pretty easy guy to get along with, if you don’t push my buttons.

But now I’m wondering if all that good stuff is down the tubes. I mean, I don’t know when Sherry’s going to come out of it.
  
Sometimes I could swear that her eyes follow me around the room, she smiles at me when she sees me come in, or she cries when she sees me getting ready to leave.
 
She must recognize my voice, I tell myself, because she opens her eyes when she hears it.
 
It’s at those times I’m slapping all the nurses on the back, telling them it’s just a matter of time before Sherry Pollack is back!
 
That next week, next month, she’ll be right back in her lab, discovering something new.

And then there were the other times: the times I was sure Sherry’s going to lie there for the rest of her natural life, nurses turning her body every few hours so she doesn’t get bed sores, tubes coming out of every possible orifice, moaning but not talking, eyes open but not seeing.
 
A human vegetable.
 
OhmyGod!
 
Don’t let me even think of that.

*
   
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I came into Sherry’s hospital room to see a guy bending over her bed, talking to her.
 
Not a doctor: he was wearing a sports jacket and tie.
 
As I entered, he turned around.
 
It was that guy from Vandenberg.
 
Ryan: the guy who always seemed to be hanging around her, whispering in her ear, coming onto her.
 
I glared at him.

“What are you doing here?”
 
I said to him now, not so nicely.

The guy extended his hand. “Ryan O’Donnell, in case you’ve forgotten,” he said.

“Henry Jackman, in case you did,” I answered, not extending my hand in return.

He dropped his hand.
 
“Came to see Sherry,” he said.

“Vandenberg wants to know if she’s dead and they can stop paying her insurance bills?”

He looked at me in surprise.
 
“I wanted to know how she is.”

“Well, now you know.”

“Isn’t there any change?”

“No.”

He looked incredulous.
 
“No change in three months?”

“She opened her eyes,” I said.
  

“Really?
 
That’s wonderful,” Ryan said, leaning over the bed to gaze into Sherry’s sleeping face.

“But that’s all.
 
She’s not conscious.”

He straightened up.
 
“But how can...?”

“PVS,” I said as cryptically as I could.

“What?”

“Persistent vegetative state.” I gave him the definition.
 
“Persistent and irreversible condition of unconsciousness.”

“Irreversible!
 
Did the doctor say that?”

I paused, making him wait for my answer.
 
“The doctor said if she didn’t wake up by three months, she probably wouldn’t.”

“Probably,” the guy said.

“Most likely,” I said.

The guy took one last look at Sherry lying there with a tube through her nose, and a catheter coming out of her ass, put his hand over his mouth as if he was going to puke, then said, “Excuse me,” and hurried out.
 

Good riddance, I thought.
 
I walked over to the bedside and just stood there. Sherry was in sleep mode, her eyes closed.
 
If it weren’t for the tubes, you might imagine she had just dozed off.
 
Well, tonight it was three months.
 
Okay, three months minus eleven hours.
 
Give or take a few hours, anyway: she had been lying there for hours the night of her attack.
 

The doctors said that she still had no volitional movement, no change in cognitive status.
 
All her movements, they said, were reflexive, random.
 
She might withdraw her hand or foot from a painful stimulus, even vocalize if you pinched her, but it wasn’t higher order behavior. The smiles weren’t smiles.
 
“It doesn’t look good,” Dr. Mehta had said, “but let’s wait for three months.”
 
And here it was three months.

Well, I wasn’t giving up yet.
 
She still had eleven hours.
 
“Sherry!” I called. Her eyes snapped open.
 
I could swear they focused on my face for a half a minute before they closed again.
 
“Startle reflex,” the doctor might say, but I wouldn’t know.
 

There was a noise at the doorway.
 
Sherry moaned, and I turned around.
 
It was the Vandenberg guy.
  
“Thought you were gone,” I said.

“Just needed to get a little air,” the guy said, coming up to Sherry’s bed.

The two of us gazed at her in silence.
 

“She was quite a girl,” the Vandenberg guy said.

“Is,” I said.
 
He nodded.
 
We gazed some more.

“You know, she wouldn’t go to bed with me,” he said after awhile.

I stared at him.
 
“What?”

“She said she couldn’t, because she was in love with you.”

That was the first I heard of that.
 

“She talked a lot about you, Henry.
 
For one, she said you had no ambition.” He laughed. “That kind of got to her.
 
She liked men who were going someplace.
 
Like me.”

“But she wasn’t in love with you,” I said, my voice returning.

“No,’ he said.
 
“I guess not.”
 
He continued to stare at Sherry, as if, maybe, she might contradict him.
 
“But she told me other things about you,” he added.

“What the hell was she talking to you for?”

“Hey, we were always talking.
 
Mostly about our research, but other things, too....She said you wanted her to move in with you, but she was afraid. ”

“Afraid?
 
Sherry?”
  
Then after a moment, I asked, “Afraid of what?”
 

“You,” he said.
 
“She was afraid of you.”

“Afraid of me?
 
That’s ridiculous.
 
What else did she say?”

He shrugged.
 
“She wouldn’t say.
 
Then she just stopped talking about you altogether.”

I looked at Sherry.
 
Sherry, I wanted to say.
  
Tell me you didn’t say that.
 
Say something, Sherry.
 
Instead, I turned to him and said, “You’re lying.”
    

“Why would I lie?” the Vandenberg guy said, and walked out.

Yeah, why would he lie?
 
I hardly knew the guy.
 
All I could think about was the time her cell rang late one night.
 
I remember her scrounging around in her purse till she found it.