The Absolved Read online

  “Would it kill us to splurge every once in a while?” she said. “I don’t understand why you insist we go without.”

  I couldn’t possibly tally the tens, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars, I’ve spent conceding to this rationale. Too often, I find myself worn down by this relationship of ours, forsaking what I know to be just, in the name of pleasing Rachel. Mostly I can reconcile this dishonorable behavior in the short-term, to ensure a peaceful domestic existence, but my fear is that I’ll get too accustomed to capitulating to her outlandish whims and notions, that when the time comes to make an important decision, I’ll simply act weak out of habit.

  Last night I was finally adamant about having my way. My steadfast position was incited by Rachel’s insistence on continuing to impose her Snow White charade on our family. It’s become an almost nightly ritual for us to reenact pivotal scenes from the story. At first, it bothered me very little, because I anticipated these role-playing games would lead to a rekindling of our sexual relationship. However, when this playacting failed to manifest the desired reawakening, my attitude soured. For weeks I’d been going about my obligations to play make-believe only reluctantly, and it’s showed in my flagging performances, which Rachel made sure I was entirely aware of, even going so far as to write up reviews of my work.

  The final straw was a two-thousand-word treatise delivered to my inbox, lampooning my portrayal of Sneezy Dwarf. In her criticism, Rachel wrote, “Henri’s abject failure to summon even one convincing dramatic depiction of hay-fever left his audience cold. Not even with the aid of snorting black pepper did he conjure up anything more than a couple of trifling sniffles and a runny nose. Perhaps his dark mood would have lent him better suited to be casted as Grumpy.”

  I commanded Emma to adjust the temperature to a much more reasonable seventy degrees, then hopped up and stripped off my sweater and threw it triumphantly to the ground. This small act of rebellion filled me with such pride that I felt like having a bit of a romp. Rachel, on the other hand, wanted nothing of it and rebuffed me at every turn. She didn’t respond to kisses on her neck or me tickling her back. Not even a firm but tender butt massage. Nothing. Eventually, I gave up and snuck away to the bathroom and gave myself a quick rub. When I got back to bed, she was in a labored sleep: tossing and turning, lots of short breaths, a bit of moaning, beads of sweat on her brow.

  I reached for her wrist and took her heart rate. It was racing. Just then, she emitted a loud, throaty cry, “Oh, Dylan, yes, please, yes!”

  Who the fuck is Dylan? I wondered. And then I remembered: he’s the fellow she was dating before I moved to San Francisco.

  On the nightstand sits a photograph of Rachel and me from when we first met. The picture’s been sitting there for years, but I can’t remember the last time I really looked at it. It’s foreign to me, to be honest. Rachel has undergone a complete transformation. Yes, I still recognize her as the same person who lies next to me in bed, but that’s only because I possess the keenest eye for details.

  Rachel has the slightest birthmark an inch from the corner of her left eye—less of a birthmark, really, and more like a spot of discolored skin. Yet this insignificant blemish is the only way I can see that the woman with it is my wife. Otherwise, the young pagan from the photo bears no resemblance to her. I’d almost entirely forgotten she had once been a goth, too—just like my high school crush and Taylor—skin so white, straight black hair, black lipstick, not a stitch of color in her wardrobe.

  When we met, just after I’d moved to San Francisco for my oncology fellowship at the university, I had just been dumped by then-girlfriend, Elizabeth, who had reluctantly followed me north from Los Angeles. Elizabeth hated what had become of the Bay Area. The geeks of Silicon Valley were repugnant, she said, with their tiresome obsessions to revolutionize the world. I grew weary of reminding her that San Francisco hadn’t been home to bohemian culture for many years.

  “San Francisco’s done,” I said. “L.A. is where the art is made now. San Francisco is strictly for commerce.”

  Elizabeth spent all of her waking hours sullen. That is, until one day, per my suggestion, she sat for an Ayahuasca ceremony with a celebrity Peruvian shaman, where she met Dylan, the CFO of a wildly successful tech company called Big Daddy’s Helper, a service that wealthy people use to handle all their gift buying obligations. The company had recently gone public, making Dylan wildly rich. Within days, Elizabeth moved out of my hovel and up to the Marina with Dylan, where he’d bought a new condo for just over eight million dollars.

  Being young and foolish, I was devastated. A metaphysical crisis of the worst variety. I had lost the love of a woman whose profoundly tender affection I’d considered unassailable, and I suffered terribly. My friends all insisted that I was simply jealous, but that wasn’t so. Jealousy is ultimately an optimistic emotion—one still believes he’ll win out in the end. What I had was so much worse. No longer loved, I stopped loving myself. Jealousy is nothing compared to that.

  For weeks, I kept to a strict stalking routine. It was the only way to alleviate my pain. It was on one of these ignoble expeditions, at the beach on a perfect summer’s day, that I met Rachel. I had posed as an amateur treasure hunter—walking up and down the beach with my metal detector collecting bottle caps and small change. My ex and Dylan were in the semi-finals of a volleyball tournament. They were closing in on match-point, and I had my binoculars out, hoping to witness the demise of their successful run. It was then I noticed Rachel. She was sitting on a towel, wearing a floppy black hat to shield her face. Regardless of her efforts to mask her identity, I recognized her immediately from the hours I had spent pouring through Dylan’s hologram images. Rachel held two small dolls, a male and a female, both dressed in swim attire, and was ritualistically stabbing at their eyes, chests, and genitals with pins. I was made so curious by this strange woman that I abandoned my interest in the volleyball match and introduced myself, which to my surprise enraged her. I had interrupted the most critical part of the voodoo curse she was casting on our exes, and thus allowed them to claim victory in their match. We spent the rest of the day bonding over our misfortunes.

  “In life, we fall in love and then we fall out of it. Only fools are surprised and indignant about it.”

  I wondered how she reconciled this profound wisdom with her interest in the occult.

  “I’ve been doing a lot of thinking,” she said, “and I’ve concluded that the study of witchcraft is the key to my recovery.”

  It occurred to me then that it’s always the people who are most likely to act purely on impulse, who never do much consideration of anything, who always begin their spiels with “I’ve been doing a lot of thinking.” In that grand moment of impetuousness, I knew that I had met the next great love of my life.

  Rachel was startled and confused when I shook her awake.

  “You were having a nightmare!”

  “I was not. I was sleeping peacefully.”

  “You were practically howling!”

  “I’m going back to sleep now. Please don’t disturb me again.”

  She fluffed her pillow, rolled over, made as much distance between her and myself in the bed as possible, and fell back into slumber.

  17

  Now it’s 6:30 a.m., and I’ve been woken by Rachel screaming from the back door in the kitchen.

  “What’s happened?” I ask, having bolted down the stairs in only my boxers.

  “Julian’s allowed Val Miller to escape!”

  Val Miller is the Corgi-Jack Russell mutt we rescued from the shelter. He’s well-trained but has an unfortunate propensity for killing rodents and birds and bringing them into the house.

  In Wonder Woman pajamas, Julian’s sulking in the living room. His hair is disheveled, his little cheeks are puffy, and his eyes are red-rimmed.

  “What happened, my boy?”

  “I woke up hungry but didn’t want to wake Mommy, so I went downstairs to eat cereal, and Val Miller was sittin
g by the front door, begging, and so I let him outside into the yard, and then I followed him out, and he ran straight to the gate, and he started barking, and he really wanted to go out and play, and I wanted Val Miller to have fun, so I opened the gate and then he just started running. I chased after him, but he’s much faster than I am, and when I called out his name, he didn’t care at all, and he just kept going.”

  “Dogs don’t always know what’s good for them. That’s why they have us to look after them.”

  “What are we going to do?”

  “Val Miller has a GPS chip. We can track him down.”

  As I search, I conjure up a list of lies to tell Julian in case this fiasco with Val Miller goes awry. One can’t simply tell a child, “Julian, you’ve made a grievous mistake, and because of that, your dog is dead.” No, that would be ridiculous. Children are anxious little creatures and a few helpful lies can help ease their cares. Truth, I’ve come to see, is a scandal that children must be protected from at all times.

  For ten minutes, Val Miller moves toward the park where we take him to play fetch and he can run with other dogs. Then, a block away, he stops at a dumpster behind a bad Chinese restaurant, where he wolfs down a plate of discarded lo mein. Of course the little sneak is wily and escapes. I track him to an elementary school and from there to the city’s one remaining mom-and-pop hardware store and then to a laundromat. Finally, another mile down the road, in front of the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, now hosting an Edgar Degas exhibition, I nab him for good. “What a cultured beast I’ve made of you,” I say as I toss him in the car.

  When we return home, Julian throws his arms around the dog and promises Rachel and me that from now on he’ll take much better care of him.

  18

  The solar-powered grid is down. This happens two or three times a year when the pollution is so thick it shields the sun. On most occasions, it isn’t a problem, because the battery back-up power kicks in. However, this too has failed, the batteries having overheated. Nearly the entire hospital has shut down.

  Dr. Hines and Serena are in crisis mode. Not only is the hospital losing valuable revenue by not administering costly procedures, but insurance rates are sure to skyrocket after paying out all of the lawsuits that stem from the accidental deaths caused by the blackout.

  I decide to take a stroll. The long corridors of the hospital are surprisingly enjoyable with all of the harsh fluorescent lighting turned off. If it weren’t for it being filled with the sick and dying, the hospital would be a perfectly pleasant place to spend a day.

  I walk through the Coronary Care Unit where patients suffering from heart attacks, unstable angina, and cardiac dysrhythmia require continuous monitoring and treatment. Now, instead of being monitored by machines, each patient has been assigned a human to look after them. I observe a young tech struggling to check a sleeping patient’s heart rate. He’s just about to declare the man dead when I come to his aid, showing him exactly where on the inside of the wrist he needs to place his fingers to locate the pulse.

  I end up on the third floor, in the Burn Center, a place I’ve always managed to avoid. Even during residency, when I was supposed to do a two-month rotation there, I refused to step foot in the unit, paying a heavy bribe to the attending physician to escape it. The grotesqueness of the victims’ injuries is just too much for my delicate sensibilities. The floor is blanketed in darkness, yet still I can’t risk exposure to the sight of charred flesh. I wrap my necktie around my face like a blindfold and navigate on instinct.

  Down in the Emergency Room, I spot Lydia in a folding chair with a blood-soaked towel pressed against her head.

  “What happened?” I ask.

  “I had an accident.”

  “Can I take a look?” Lydia lifts the towel, exposing a deep gash, surrounded by what is unmistakably the imprint of Karl’s massive horseshoe. “You need to get this stitched up immediately!”

  “They’ve kept me waiting here for hours!”

  “But you could bleed out.”

  “The machine that does the stitching is down until the power comes back on.”

  “I see.”

  “Doesn’t anyone still do this work by hand?”

  “Not for many years now.”

  “I’m begging you,” Lydia says, “help me!”

  In a cabinet in an empty room I find the necessary supplies and wash my hands. Cleaning Lydia’s wound, my gag reflex is triggered, and I nearly vomit. “There is the nothing that is there, and the nothing that is not there,” I repeat to myself. I stick the needle carefully into her skin, and begin my stitches. Doubtless my work is shoddy. I haven’t sewn so much as a patch onto a pair of jeans in nearly twenty years.

  “This really hurts, Henri!” Lydia cries. “Aren’t you supposed to numb the area first?”

  Embarrassed, I inject her head with a syringe full of Lidocaine.

  “Are you going to tell me how this happened?” I ask.

  “I’d rather not,” she says.

  “Doctor patient confidentiality applies.”

  “It’s too humiliating for words.”

  Lydia struggles in the darkness to check her reflection in the mirror. The deep bruising is purple and swollen. When the wound heals, a large scar will remain. She sighs, defeated. I write a prescription for painkillers, and she thanks me for my help. Then, of course, just as we’re leaving, the power returns.

  19

  All of my efforts today have been as futile as loving a stripper—my return-on-investment is zilch. I’ve seen twenty-six patients, twenty-four of whom are octogenarians with no chance for recovery … only prolonged misery, only death. These poor people must view me as the executioner. All day long, I’ve done nothing but give them terrible news.

  It’s the great tragedy of the Western world that we refuse to meet death with courage and dignity. We debase ourselves, dragging our tongues across the ground, feeding on crumbs like pigeons in the park, only to beg our cruel master when our time comes for just one more day.

  I have a theory: these people who, for lack of a better term, have outlived their “usefulness,” are overwhelmed with boredom. When one is bored, a minute lasts an hour, an hour a day, and so on. These peoples’ lives have lasted one million years in their boredom. And the worst part of boredom? Fixation on death! In a different time, people worried about losing their grip on obligations, family and friends, possessions and passions, but now people simply obsess about those few hours or days of solitude before they breathe their last. In youth, one has a certain vision for oneself. One hopes to accomplish certain things. But for people whose lives are so far behind them that they’ve lost sight of who they are, all memory of what they might have achieved has slipped into oblivion—the dread of dying without knowing what one did with one’s life!

  Some days I’m able to go about without considering the toll this work is exacting on my psyche, but today I keep asking, Why am I doing this? My mood is the blackest of melancholy.

  My last patient is Mr. Toczauer. He’s a few days past his bone marrow transplant, and it’s still too early to definitively know the results. However, it doesn’t require a fortune teller to predict there’s no chance this man will one day spring from his sickbed and climb a mountain.

  I look at the Euthasol pill, study it—this orange-colored, football-shaped object, the size of an infant’s thumbnail—wondering how it is that something so diminutive could end something as great as a man’s suffering.

  Mr. Toczauer is watching a Mexican telenovela with the sound off. The subtitles are flashing across the screen at a dizzying pace. Despite the minimal effort it takes to operate a gram, he makes no attempt to change the program. Mrs. Toczauer pulls a make-up case from her purse and does a quick touchup. How much time has a person of her age wasted doing trivial things? I wonder. Then I remind myself not to judge so hastily. Perhaps there is something about this ritual I don’t understand. Maybe it’s the act of putting on makeup that best allows her to cle
ar her mind of distraction and think—perform her “best work,” as I like to say. In my musical days, I could work on a song for hours with no progress. Just me and my guitar, grinding it out, chord after chord, note after note, with no luck at all. And then I’d hop in the shower and pick up a bar of soap and instantly the song would reveal itself.

  The sight of this desperate woman moves me. Despite the shortcomings in logic she’s demonstrated regarding her husband’s care, she is the picture of devotion. But confusion has taken root in her eyes. Deep down, she must understand that there is such a thing as life without her husband, but, like metaphysics or quantum theory, the concept is so abstract she can’t fathom where to start.

  “How are you feeling today, Mr. Toczauer?”

  “Not so great, Doc,” he answers, struggling to smile.

  “He was doing so well in the two days after the transfusion,” his wife says, “but today all of the energy has gone right out of him.”

  “We gave your husband a very strong steroid to give him strength to help him cope with the toxicity of the chemo and to ensure he survives the transplant, but that usually wears off around day three or four.”

  “Can you give him more of that? He was really his old self there for a minute.”

  “It would cause his liver to fail.”

  “When will we know if the transplant worked?”

  “It’ll take weeks. Meantime, he’ll be susceptible to all variety of infections and viruses. We’ll have to be most vigilant.”

  “Doctor, can I ask you a personal question?” the wife asks.

  “I suppose.”.

  “Do you pray?”

  “No, I never have.”

  “But surely, in your line of work, calling on God could be of the utmost use.”

  “I find it best not to bother myself much with thoughts on God.”