The Art of Forgetting (28 page)

              “Why, what’s wrong?”

              “What day did you drop off the mouse?” Lloyd thought about it for a couple of seconds and told him the date. “I’ll call you back, Lloyd.”

              Lloyd hung up the phone with a sinking feeling. If there was one thing that put him on edge, it was to have to rely on others for anything of importance. It wasn’t that he didn’t trust others – he just trusted himself more. And when it came down to brass tacks, no one could understand his situation, so why should he trust anyone? A minute later, his phone rang.
That was quick
, Lloyd thought. But it wasn’t Kowalski. It was Martin Bender, asking him to drop by his office.

              The door to Martin Bender’s office had always been open to Lloyd. Even as a resident when he acted as Lloyd’s faculty advisor, Uncle Marty was probably the only attending towards whom Lloyd didn’t feel a vague resentment.

              Bender was sitting at his desk which was cluttered with piles of books. He was typing on his computer keyboard, his reading glasses propped near the tip of his nose. He looked up and smiled at Lloyd and waved at a chair with a gyrating hand gesture. One couldn’t help thinking he was hiding a jar of candy in a desk drawer, and just maybe, if you were good, he’d give you a handful on your way out.

              “You wanted to see me?” Lloyd said. He picked up a third edition of Perrin’s Atlas of Neuropathology, inspected its pale blue cover, then set it back down on the desk next to a well-worn copy of Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams.

              Bender chuckled. “You say that as if I’m some feudal lord who has just summoned one of his subjects.”

              Lloyd wiped his brow. “Sorry, I have so much going on.”

              “That’s precisely why I wanted to talk to you.” Bender leaned forward and rested his arms on the desk. “I’m worried about you. You don’t look well.”

              “I’d feel better if I wasn’t treated like some criminal by my own department.”

              “No one’s treating you like –”

              “Then why was my research blocked?”

              “It’s just a temporary measure. You hit a snag. It’s time to let the smoke clear, reassess the situation when you’re head’s not so hot. Set forth in a new direction, perhaps.”

              “A new direction?”

              Bender raised his shoulders and puckered his lips. “Why not? You have such a promising future. A change of pace might be good for you. As things stand now, I’m worried you’ll do something rash.”

              “Who, me?” Lloyd said. A yellow, plastic book marker sticking out of the atlas of neuropathology caught Lloyd’s eye.

              “Lloyd, did I ever tell you the story of my father’s tattoo?”

              “I don’t believe so.”

              “No, I expect I wouldn’t have.” Bender tossed his reading glasses on his desk and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “It’s not something I share with many people.” He pressed his palms together and straightened his spine. “My family came here from Germany, shortly after the war. I was little more than an infant, taking my first baby steps. I have no memory of Germany at all. Father was a physician too. He was offered a research position at the University of Chicago in the department of Pathology where he worked until he retired.

              “He quickly settled into his new life. In the summer he enjoyed bringing the family to a cabin on Lake Geneva. He wasn’t much of an outdoorsman but he was quite an avid swimmer. If I close my eyes, I can still see him running the length of the wooden boat dock, diving right into the icy water. Must have reminded him a little of the old country.

              “One day, I might have been seven or eight years old, he fell asleep on a beach towel after a swim. He was shirtless in the warm sun and his arms were folded up behind his head. For some reason I was drawn to him (perhaps I wasn’t accustomed to seeing him sleeping) and then I just couldn’t take my eyes off of an oddly dissonant feature of his body. In his left armpit was a small tattoo, in plain dark letters, all capitals: the name, ‘MABEL.’

              “Now, my father was a most disciplined man, so imagine my surprise at seeing any tattoo on his body, not to mention the name of a woman who was not my mother.” Bender laughed wheezily.

              “I must have stood there for some time staring at that tattoo when I glanced at his face and saw his eyes were open. For a while he said nothing. He just glared at me with his steely blue eyes. I almost wet myself on the spot.
What are you looking at?
  I don’t know if he actually spoke the words or if he just asked me with those eyes of his. Anyway, I asked him, who’s Mabel?  ‘An infatuation of my youth,’ he said. Then he lowered his arms as if I’d seen quite enough and pretended to go back to sleep. The subject was permanently closed.

              “You see, that changed everything for me. The thought of my father being with another woman, of my mother having to live with the reminder of this Mabel every day… well, it was far too much for me to comprehend.

              “Many years later, my father lay in a hospital bed dying of lung cancer. He had developed septicemia and was delirious with fever. I began to sponge him down; first his forehead, then his neck, his chest and finally his armpits. And there was the vile tattoo!” Bender jutted out his lower lip and clicked his teeth together. “But something had changed.” He bent forward. “You see, the letters M, E and L had taken on a ghastly greenish hue while the A and the B stood out dark and bold as I had remembered them.

              “For some reason I began to feel lightheaded. My chest tightened and I found it hard to breathe. I called the nurse and asked her to finish drying and dressing my father because I just couldn’t. I felt a horrible chill and by now my whole body was trembling. I just had to get out of that room. My subconscious was telling me there was something very, very wrong. But what?

              “I ran down the stairs, burst out of the hospital and stood on the sidewalk, still shaking. A man wearing an overcoat over a hospital gown offered me a cigarette, and though I had never smoked a day in my life, I gladly accepted it. The man saw my hands were shaking, so he lit it for me and I happily filled my lungs with the very poison that was killing my father upstairs.”

              “I wonder what Freud would say about that,” Lloyd said.

              Bender chuckled. He coughed in his hand, licked his lips, pressed them together. “I couldn’t understand why I had reacted in such a way at the sight of that damn tattoo. I tried to piece it together but there was just no logic to it. Still rattled, I headed back to my father’s hospital room and, as soon as I stepped in, my heart jumped to my throat. Isn’t it amazing how our brains can perceive things and process them before they become apparent in our conscious minds? Why, it was there in plain sight the whole time!

              “My father had just received a blood transfusion, you see, and draped on the IV pole was the empty bag. And guess what the label on the bag said?”

              In a soft voice Lloyd said, “AB.”

              Bender smiled wistfully. “You’re a clever lad, Lloyd. Very clever indeed. I sat there by his bedside and waited for hours until he was lucid. ‘What a devoted son,’ the nurses said.” Bender snorted. “I wanted to know the truth: the truth about my father, the truth of my family’s past, of my own identity.”

              Lloyd’s pulse quickened. He shifted in his seat.

              Bender resumed his yarn staring off to his side as if he could see the scene being played out on an imaginary screen. “When he awoke, I simply said, ‘Tell me about Mabel.’  He stared at me for a long time but his eyes no longer possessed that mystical power over me. A few minutes passed before he said, ‘I expect you already know what you wanted to know.’ But now I was the one glaring at him. So he nodded, said, ‘Very well,’ with his aristocratic German accent and proceeded to break my heart.”

              Bender locked eyes with Lloyd. “As a young medical officer during the war, the only failsafe route for advancement was to join the Nazi party. That was the youthful infatuation my father referred to that summer afternoon on the shores of Lake Geneva. Before long, he was granted admission to the Schutzstaffel: the SS. You see, it was customary for members of the SS to have their blood type tattooed in their armpit to facilitate the medical treatment of this elite team. A custom that backfired after the war ended as it helped the Allied forces identify them with ease.

              “My father thought he’d evade detection by having three more letters tattooed next to his blood type. He fooled no one. But at the internment camp where he worked as a medical officer, one of his superiors proved to be far smarter. You see, Josef Mengele refused to be marked and this allowed him to slip through the Allied dragnet and sail on to South America.

              “My father was sent to Nürnberg where he quickly turned informant out of a sense of sincere remorse. Much of what we know about Nazi medical atrocities came from the lips of my own dear Papá. He was so cooperative and deemed to possess such a valuable intellect that he was given a new identity, new papers, and was placed with a prestigious university post stateside.”

              Bender waved his hand in circles. “He wasn’t the only one. Most of our early space program was composed of former Nazis. So father immersed himself in proper medical research for the remainder of his life and even made important contributions to the understanding of metabolic diseases of the liver and the pathology of cirrhosis.

              “But on his death bed he still carried the cross for his part in some of the most unspeakable atrocities committed by mankind.” Bender paused, grazed his temple with the tips of his fingers. “The lung cancer may have killed his body, but it was regret that murdered his soul. As he lay there, shriveled and broken, he quoted Shakespeare to me: Macbeth, act two, scene two.
Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood clean from my hand?”

              Bender rubbed his palms together. He slouched in his chair and stared blankly across his desk.

              Lloyd stretched his legs, reached in his pocket and grasped his cigarette lighter. He ran his thumb across the engraved inscription. “I hope you’re not comparing my research to Nazi atrocities,” he said.

              “Of course not.”

              “Then why are you telling me all this?”

              “Take it as a cautionary tale. My father thought of himself as a good man. It was the pure pursuit of scientific discovery that pulled him astray, and then kept pulling and pulling…”

              “He was a Nazi.”

              Bender sighed and nodded.

              Lloyd looked at Bender and felt pity for him; not compassion but a hollow pity. And as his old mentor sat there quietly, hands clasped together on his lap, the pity bled into a feeling of scorn, not so much for the man but for what he stood: a frail timidity bordering on cowardice, an unflinching conformity to an archaic etiquette that stifled innovation, that crushed the likes of Lloyd under the weighty guise of a hypocritical compassion.

              “All I’m saying, Lloyd, is that this might be a good time to lay low for a while. Let things blow over. Dr. Lasko is a highly ambitious man. He’ll lash out at you if he thinks his authority is being challenged.” Lloyd said nothing. Bender inched forward on his chair and rested his hands on the desk. “I understand your lab was inspected by Dr. Norbert and Dr. Nguyen.”

             
So that’s what this meeting is all about
, Lloyd thought. “Yeah, they came by.”

              Bender nodded. “The preliminary report they submitted was rather positive on the whole,” he said.

              “They didn’t find our little instruments of torture?” Lloyd said.

              Bender stared at him quietly. He bore the detached, clinical expression that psychiatrists use to communicate that they are not impressed, in a non-judgmental way. “There was one issue, I’m sure you’re aware of. The issue of the contents of single vial of prions that seems unaccounted for.”

              Lloyd looked out of the office’s sole window for a moment. When he looked back across the desk, Uncle Marty was still staring at him. “I have three new little composers,” Lloyd said.

              Martin Bender was one of the few people who knew of Kaz’s penchant for naming his subjects after classical music composers. Lloyd watched with a certain smugness as Bender leaned forward, eyes blinking and muttered, “Wh-what?”

              “And they’re doing fine. The prions are safe. They always have been,” Lloyd said.

              Bender stroked his forehead with his palm. “Oh, Lloyd…  That’s not good.”

              “I know what I’m doing.”

              “You should have waited. Should have let the air clear. In a year or so, things might have been different.”

              “I’m not going to wait,” Lloyd said. “I’m pushing forward.”

              “Damn the torpedoes…”

              “That’s right.”

              Bender sighed heavily and seemed to regain a feeble smile. “Listen, Lloyd, back when my father –”