Earth Angel (43 page)

The door opened behind me and Carson Ford stuck his head in. “I forgot to tell you. There is a way out of this room. You interested—or
would you rather go out in a blaze of glory? Don’t answer too quickly. Remember what Kierkegaard said: ‘The tyrant dies and
his rule is over; the martyr dies and his rule begins.’ Kinda makes Jesus sound
like the Energizer bunny. Still, it’s pretty tempting, isn’t it?”

Ragged flames chewed through the carpeting and were snapping at the paint on the wall. The metal shelving groaned from the
heat. The room was swampy with smoke. I coughed, each cough sounded like “David.”

“I’m listening,” I said.

“Alrighty, here’s your clue, contestant number one. You have about two minutes to solve it: ‘Sometimes nothing can be a pretty
cool hand.’ ” He gave me a sad stare. “Figure it out and you live, thrown back into the media whirlpool, pecked to death by
ducks. Ignore it and you’ll die a martyr, canonized for trying to stop me. Worshiped far and near for your bravery. Your choice.”
He slammed the door closed and the lock slid into place. “You know what’s funny,” he hollered from the other side of the door.
“I don’t even like movies that much.”

I
RAN TO THE DOOR AGAIN AND YANKED AND KICKED AT IT AGAIN
. IT would be like him to leave it unlocked just so the papers would say I’d died in an unlocked room, which would make me
either stupid or suicidal.

Flames scurried through the shag carpet like fiery mice. He must have laid a crosshatch of fuses because it burned in a checkerboard
pattern, flaming lines crisscrossing each other as they raced maniacally for the walls. A thick gray smoke cloud formed against
the ceiling growing fatter and fatter, lower and lower. My eyes burned and watered. I took tiny breaths, but each one scorched
my lungs.

I ran around the room, jumping over the flaming lines, pounding at the walls again, desperate to find the way out Carson had
promised. I pulled the desk away, hoping for a trap door under it. Nothing. I climbed up on the desk and started pushing at
the ceiling, but it too was solid cement.

I grabbed the desk chair and rolled it over to the door. I gripped the back rest and, like a parent swinging a child by the
arms, I swung the chair into the door with all my strength. Again! And again! I walloped the door a dozen
times. A wheel flew off the chair. But no effect on the door. My pant leg caught fire again and once again I tore off my sweatshirt
and spanked it out. My ankle and shin were raw with burn blisters.

A great wracking coughing fit hit me and I gagged trying to breathe. Air wouldn’t come and my stomach started spasming. I
vomited my swordfish and asparagus which sizzled in the flames. The smoke cloud was now low enough to touch my hair.

Sometimes nothing can be a pretty cool hand.

Too easy. From
Cool Hand Luke
. Paul Newman is playing poker with the convicts he’s been thrown in with. He keeps raising the bet higher and higher until
everyone else drops out and Newman rakes in the winnings. George Kennedy, the head of the convicts, turns over Newman’s cards
in frustration and anger and says, “He had nothing!” And Newman grins and says, “Yeah, well, sometimes nothing can be a pretty
cool hand.” That’s when Kennedy gives Newman his nickname, Cool Hand Luke, and Luke begins a series of escapes that makes
him first a savior to the men, then—even more powerful—a dead martyr. Is that what Carson meant? The way out was death. I
would live as a martyr.

No. He wouldn’t have said I had a choice then.

The light bulb from the desk lamp exploded, startling me. It was the same sound I’d heard that day in the clinic, only it
had turned out to be Tim’s gunfire. The flames were breaking out of their checkerboard pattern and beginning to merge in fiery
patches, some already knee high. Smoke billowed above me like the sooty hem of heaven. Time was short. I had one minute or
less to figure out what Paul Newman’s line had to do with me escaping.

The reason Luke won the hand was because he didn’t care whether he won or lost.

What the hell did that mean? I
cared
! I wanted to see David again. I wanted to bitch at my mother. I wanted
Carol to fuss over me and complain about the men she dated. I wanted to yell at Blue for drinking from my water on the nightstand.

I couldn’t catch my breath. Each inhalation felt hot and gravelly. I wheezed and gagged. I thought of my kitten Shaft gasping
for air, dying on my pillow. I wished a cool hand would soothe my forehead.

Sometimes nothing can be a pretty cool hand. I didn’t know what it meant. Finally, even my ridiculous knowledge of trivia
had failed me. There was nothing I knew or could do to save myself. I was as useless as that day in the clinic, standing there
in the disguise of a healer but unable to help Tim or anybody. I began to cry, but the thick smoke choked off my wailing gasps.
I couldn’t even weep at my own death.

What did it mean, goddamn it!

Nothing. Nothing can be a pretty cool hand. What is nothing?

Since Tim’s death I’d been running around trying to
do
, trying to force people to be happier, only to end up screwing things up for them and myself. But I hadn’t been doing it
so much for them as for myself. Maybe that’s why things went wrong. Perhaps I should have just done nothing. Allowed myself—and
everybody else—to heal at their own pace, in their own way. I should have done the hardest thing there is to do—nothing.

Do nothing.

I walked through the flames back to the hardwood chair. The fire burned in a circle around the chair, but it still hadn’t
yet made its way there. Probably Carson Ford had treated the carpet around the chair so it wouldn’t burn for a while. I sat
in the chair. I did nothing.

And the flames slowly closed in around me. And the smoke grew denser and more bitter to breathe. I slumped in the chair and
laughed and cried and coughed. I started coughing so violently that I peed my pants. Maybe I’d been
wrong about this one. Nothing was starting to feel like a pretty stupid hand.

Hand? Nothing can be a pretty cool
hand.

I looked at the bandage on my hand, thick white gauze covering the whole back of my hand. Carson’s clumsy bandage. Could anyone
that smart be that clumsy? I began tearing at the adhesive tape, clawing it off and some of my skin with it. I peeled back
several layers of gauze and there it was, nestled lightly on a cloud of gauze.

A brand-new key.

Amen, Baby

T
HE BOY WOULDN’T STOP TALKING
.

“…then the guys from Earth escape and kill a whole bunch of these aliens, stealing a mess of crytonian, which they need to
boost their rockets to hyperspace and get back to the space station.”

I flashed the light of the otoscope into his left ear. Everything looked normal for a thirteen-year-old, including some waxy
buildup.

“…So they use their ship’s lasers to blast through the planet’s crust and go straight down about, uh, fifty miles, I think.
And what do they run into? Guess!”

I walked around the other side and shined my light into his right ear. His mother had said he’d been complaining of sudden
hearing loss since waking up this morning. Ah, there was the problem.

“Come on, Dr. Gottlieb, guess what they ran into.”

“Mole people? Huge black eyes and teeth the size of baseball cards.”

“Nope. But that’s pretty cool, too. They ran into this whole civilization of these lizardlike people. Only these guys didn’t
have eyes or noses or mouths. They breathed
and ate through their
skin
! And it was dark, so instead of eyes, they felt different shapes and stuff with sonar, like bats. It was so neat.”

I walked over to the drawer and pulled out the Hoffman forceps. Jeffrey had been talking nonstop since his mother brought
him into the room. Usually the parents stay for the examination, but Jeffrey thought he was too old to have his mother standing
there, so she decided to wait outside. I had a feeling she was happy for the quiet.

“Are you sure you haven’t read this, Dr. Gottlieb?” Jeffrey said. “It’s like a bestseller. Everybody I know has read it. It’s
gonna be a movie.”

“I don’t read much science fiction, Jeffrey. The last one I read was when I was in high school.
Stranger in a Strange Land
by Robert Heinlein. Have you read it?”

“Uh-huh,” he said, but in a way that indicated he hadn’t.

I bent over his ear and poised the forceps. “You have to remain very still, Jeffrey. A few wires in your brain became disconnected
and I’ve got to twist them back together.”

He laughed. “Yeah, right. Like the Terminator.”

“Ever hear of the Moody Blues, Jeffrey?”

“Is it that race of aliens without emotions because they were radiated by us when we sent a faulty nuclear reactor into space
to explode?”

“No, they’re a British rock ‘n’ roll group. They’ve been around for a while, like the Rolling Stones. Ever hear ‘Nights in
White Satin,’ maybe on an oldies station?” He started to shake his head, which I quickly held still. “Well, ask your mom about
them. Anyway, a few years ago, they were performing a concert in Connecticut when their lead singer had a sudden loss of hearing,
just like you.”

“Really? How come?”

“Okay, Jeffrey, hold real still here…” I carefully inserted the forceps and pulled out the culprit: a dead Japanese beetle.

“Holy shit!” Jeffrey whelped when he saw the little body on the end of my tweezers. He nearly fell off the table.

“The medic at the concert extracted a large bug from his aural cavity. Just like this one.”

He made a nauseated face. “That’s disgusting. It’s like the Star Trek movie,
Wrath of Khan
, where they stick these insects into their ears and they eat into the brain and drive the person crazy. Did you see that?”

I shook my head. “I don’t watch many movies.”

He stuck his finger in his ear and swirled it around. “Any more of those suckers in there?”

After I explained to Jeffrey’s mother what had happened and that it was not that uncommon—nor did it in any way reflect on
the cleanliness of her house—I directed them to the front desk with their bill. Unknown to his mother, Jeffrey had the Japanese
beetle in a plastic bag in his pocket to show his friends later. The least I could do.

It was a slow night, so I headed back to the staff lounge to grab a soft drink from the refrigerator. Dr. Edgar Boswell, the
owner of the clinic and my boss, was sitting in the lounge with his feet on the table, reading
Cosmopolitan
. When I walked in he looked up and announced: “I’ve decided I’m really a lesbian trapped in a man’s body.”

I went to the refrigerator, grabbed my diet Coke. Three containers of nonfat strawberry yogurt sat on the top shelf. “Whose
yogurt?”

“Help yourself,” he said, turning a page.

“Are they yours, Edgar?”

“I’m a lesbian, Gottlieb, not a thief.”

I laughed and took the yogurt. Edgar Boswell owned the clinic and had hired me when most other clinics in the Santa Barbara
area had turned me down, mostly because of the publicity that came attached with me. Even though I had escaped from Carson
Ford and even though he had apparently disappeared from the area, people associated me with attracting maniacs. First, Tim,
then Carson. I was
just bad luck. The ones not hiring me were doctors, people of science, so they couched my rejection in more acceptable terminology.
But that’s what it came down to. Bad-luck cooties.

But Edgar Boswell had hired me and never spoke of either Tim or Carson Ford unless I did, which I did only once. A couple
of days ago Lt. Trump had come by to let me know that Boise, Idaho, had had two kidnappings similar to the ones in Santa Barbara.
Young girls, one ten, the other twelve. The kidnapper had sent audio cassettes to the cops. The cassettes contained snippets
of piano music, which they assumed were clues to where the next kidnapping would occur. They had music experts trying to decode
it, but nothing so far. “You know anything about music?” she asked me. “Nothing,” I answered. She nodded, relieved. “I told
them I’d ask.” And she left.

Actually, Darlene Trump and I had become pretty good friends. I admired her ambition and toughness; she claimed to admire
my sense of the absurd, though I wasn’t sure what that meant. She never did get that promotion she’d wanted so badly; they
hired someone outside the department, the ex-police chief from San Jose, who’d written a bestselling mystery novel. To commiserate,
I’d taken Darlene out to an expensive steak and seafood dinner on the pier. She ordered champagne. “I should have just blown
every male on the city council,” she announced loudly after a couple glasses. I’d also kept in touch with Carol. Once Carol
came up for a visit and Darlene, Carol, and I went horseback riding together until Darlene got a huge blister on her butt,
and we sat under a tree and ate a picnic lunch David and Rachel had made for us. That day was the first time I talked to someone
other than David about Tim and my own feelings of guilt and desperation. Tears seeped from Carol’s eyes as I told her about
the potassium chloride taped to the bottom of my sink, and
soon I felt them spilling from my own eyes. “Stop bawling or I’ll shoot both of you,” Darlene said, wiping tears from her
own eyes. “Did you know women cry five times more than men?” I said. “I thought it was women pee five times more than men,”
Carol said. “Speaking of which…” Darlene stood up and waddled toward the brush, rubbing her blistered butt as she walked.
And so once a month the three of us get together for a mild adventure. Next month Jackie is coming down to join us.

“I’m serious, Gottlieb,” Edgar said. “I think this whole lesbian thing is a breakthrough for me.”

“Is this some elaborate scheme to borrow my clothes, Edgar?” I said.

He snorted. “Your clothes? I said I was a lesbian, not a fashion suicide.”

I dug into the yogurt. Edgar was a handsome man in his mid-forties, tall and athletic, a local tennis legend. He was also
a born-again feminist. After years of life as what he called a “fuckist” (“I read that term in a Larry McMurtry book,” he’d
said. “And it was like a goddamn revelation. That was me!”), he decided he’d been exploiting women, not loving them, and became
a tireless champion for their rights. He gave money to feminist causes, spoke at local rallies, and discussed endlessly the
politics of sex. This could be one of the reasons business at his walk-in clinic was down. At first, I thought all his talk
was just another form of pickup chatter, but I’d come to believe he was sincere.