The Absolved Read online

  Besides incredible income inequality, the overwhelming popularity of sports has led to an array of additional socioeconomic problems. While gambling has been made completely illegal, it’s the most pressing social ill. Nearly thirty percent of the population loses their Basic Income checks each month in underground sports-betting rackets and in illegal casinos. Currently, there is a bill under debate in the Senate that would require all recipients of Basic Income to suffer through a fifteen-hour “Anti-Vice” seminar. This training theoretically would educate The Absolved on the dangers not only of gambling but also of alcohol, drugs, and salacious sexual behavior, too. Of course the bill stands no chance of passing. No member of The Absolved can stand the thought of sitting through such a sermon, and every politician knows that a vote for this bill will kill their chances for re-election.

  Still five stops from the stadium, the metro is packed. The bad breath and body odor have caused not the least duress, either. Everyone is in great spirits. Ten years ago, when The Wall came down, a surge of immigrants from Mexico and Central America poured across the border. Spanish is actually now the predominant language in more than fifty percent of California’s homes. And with this influx, many of the touchstones of Latin sports culture have also made their way to the States. The most welcome of these are the “sports songs” and “chants.” In perfect harmony, the entire metro is loudly singing one tune after the other. Julian knows every lyric, and sings in a delightful Spanish accent.

  At the stadium we shove our way through frenzied fans, no easy task. Ninety percent of the stadium is now first-come-first-serve seating, the result of a mandate three years ago to democratize the spectating experience. I look away for a single moment and Julian is lost. Terror floods my system. I shout his name, and in ten seconds there he is again, like he’d never gone. This brief instant of terror, I must confess, was more harrowing and life-affirming than a year of pleasure or one hundred years of boredom.

  The boy is holding a shiny silver coin—currency long since removed from circulation. He found it, and he now wants to return it to its owner. I deliver him a sharp warning about the perils of running away. I tell him the made-up story of a boy who was kidnapped in a park after wandering off while his mother was playing VR Ping-Pong in her gram, and how the boy was then tortured, raped, and as I’m about to say, “left for dead,” I see that Julian’s crying, and quickly change course, instead opting for, “And then he found his mom and they went out for cheeseburgers.”

  At our section, the usher scans my gram and leads us to our seats, just four rows behind home plate. These tickets cost roughly ten times as much as the general admission price, but it’s worth it. From here, you can smell the sweet scent of the turf and hear the crack of the bat like roaring thunder.

  A woman across the aisle is smiling and waving at me. I shoot her a cautious wave and grin. She says something to the man next to her and points my way. The man turns to me and stares. I pretend not to notice and look away immediately. A vendor passes by and I purchase two hot dogs, a beer, and a soda. I hand Julian his snacks and when I look up the woman and man are there beside me.

  “Can I help you?” I say.

  “Doctor, I’m Rebecca Pedrego, I was your patient, years ago. Remember me?”

  I look the woman up and down, combing my memory for some inkling of a recollection, but there is none.

  “Of course,” I say, “Rebecca! How wonderful to see you again. How are you?”

  “I’m doing so well … fantastic, really! I feel just great. And it’s all thanks to you!”

  “I’m so glad to hear it. That’s wonderful.”

  “I’d like you to meet my fiancé, Jeff.”

  The man offers his hand, and we shake vigorously.

  “It’s terrific to meet you,” Jeff says. “Rebecca has told me all about what an amazing doctor you are. You saved her life. I can’t thank you enough.”

  “Who’s this?” Rebecca asks, smiling at the boy.

  “This is my son, Julian.” To my dismay, already his face is covered in ketchup, mustard, and relish. “Julian, say hello to Rebecca and Jeff.” He nods indifferently and returns to devouring his food. “Please excuse my son’s manners,” I say. “He’s normally very cute and friendly.”

  “We don’t want to take up any more of your time,” Rebecca says. “Really wonderful seeing you. Enjoy the game.”

  When I became a doctor, I harbored grand notions about what a difference I’d make, and all of the people I’d help, and all of the generous contributions I’d bestow on the world. But the truth is, the benevolence quickly gets overshadowed by the stress, the hardship, the heartbreak, and, most of all, the bureaucracy. It’s hard to fathom the hours I’ve wasted in meetings, discussing cost-saving efforts, tedious administrative requirements, and ways to improve organizational efficiency. I’d estimate that as much as half of a doctor’s time is spent occupied with this type of work rather than with patients. And now I can’t even remember this person I managed to save.

  The game begins inauspiciously when in the first inning the Braves’ Manuel Ortega hits a three-run homer. A man sitting directly behind us jumps up to shout expletives at the pitcher and spills his beer on my shoulder. Not wanting to incite a scene, I stay quiet. Julian, however, well aware of my resentment, is laughing.

  “Cool it,” I say. “It’s not funny.”

  Over the next few innings, the man behind us drinks many more beers, and his outbursts grow louder and more profane. Come the fourth inning, when the Giants’ shortstop makes an error, he screams, “You useless motherfucker, get on the next boat back to Cuba!”

  “Yeah,” Julian shouts, shockingly, “get back on the boat, motherfucker!”

  “You can’t say that kind of thing!” I tell him. “You know better than that!”

  Julian bows his head in what I think is shame but realize is an effort to hide his laughter. I’m so enraged that I jump to my feet and holler in the man’s face.

  “Can’t you see I’m here with my son?” I say. “Shut your damn mouth!”

  As soon as I’ve said it, I realize my mistake. The man is a monster. Crude tattoos cover his neck. He outweighs me by at least fifty pounds. The crazed look in his eyes reminds me of the devil in some sixteenth-century Renaissance painting. The blow that strikes my face sends me careening over the person in the row below me, where I land in a woman’s lap and flip the cold, coagulated cheese and jalapenos of her nachos all over my face and arms.

  A circle of people has gathered round, Rebecca, Jeff, and Julian among them. Jeff tries to help me, but I’m too weak to stand. The lunatic who punched me, I see, is surrounded by security. I’m astonished to see how carefully they are handling him.

  “Get that psychopath the fuck out of here!” I say.

  I don’t know how or why, really, but the next thing I know I’m being dragged kicking and screaming from the stadium by two burly security men.

  “It’s okay, Dad,” Julian tells me on the ride home. “He was just too much for you.”

  Alone in my bathroom at last, I stand before the mirror virtually unrecognizable. The left side of my face is bloodied and battered. But far more alarmingly, I’ve aged a decade, I realize, maybe even two, since the last time I took a good, hard look at myself. This isn’t the first time something like this has occurred. From seventeen to twenty-seven, I looked exactly the same—fixed for a decade. Then one morning I woke up changed. My face was fifteen years older, the same face I’ve had until today, when I changed again, for the worse, to a man in “middle age.” That’s how aging works for some people. It’s not a steady, meandering river, changing by small degrees, virtually unnoticeable. Rather, it’s more like a death plummet that happens all at once. Now that I’ve undergone this metamorphosis, it’s my great hope that this weary expression will last me until I’m sixty.

  I lurch from the bathroom as heroically as I can to find Rachel is waiting in the hall.

  “My God, what’s happened to yo
u?”

  “We had a small incident at the game today.”

  “You look awful.”

  “It’s not so bad.”

  Rachel slings my arm around her shoulders, supporting my weight, and together we ease our way to the bedroom. It’s been so long since I’ve been nurtured by Rachel that I allow this charade without objection. More than this, I join it. I feign prolonged, low, inarticulate groans—giving life to and emphasizing an imaginary suffering that seems really to please her.

  She unties my shoes and removes them, pulls off my shirt, and wriggles me from my pants.

  “I’m going to take really good care of you,” she says.

  Before I know it, she’s taken me in her mouth. Watching her work on me, I’m equal parts aroused and confused. I can’t recall the last time we shared this sort of sexual encounter. The foreignness of the act colors the exchange with strangeness and regret. Quickly, then, she slips off her skirt and underwear and sets down on me with propulsive hips.

  Where is this passion coming from? This facet of the relationship—long taken for dead—suddenly restored and filled with vigor. Of all things, it’s an act of violence against me that has set her off! This from a someone who has always professed an incredible antipathy toward brutality and bloodshed.

  Years ago, before Julian was born, Rachel and I shared a fifth-floor walk-up apartment in the Mission—the kind of building where homeless people broke in and shit in the halls. Bad as it was, I loved it. The place had character and history. The local liquor store didn’t sell any wine worth more than six dollars but sold cheap rum and forties by the case. The old man next door bragged he had once sold heroin to Jerry Garcia in the park down the street.

  Rachel and I used to host parties there. One night, the brother of a friend of Rachel’s was visiting from New York City—a private equity banker-type in town to meet with a start-up he was funding that manufactured robotic pets.

  “Just think,” he said, “all of the companionship of a dog, but you never have to clean up shit!”

  He’d snorted a gram of cocaine and drunk a dozen-or-so whiskeys in celebration of his impending fortune. Noticing he kept going in and out of our bedroom, Rachel asked me to check him out. Sure enough, the guy was digging through Rachel’s laundry hamper, sniffing her dirty panties and stuffing them in his pants, six or seven pair, judging by the bulges.

  “Give me back the underwear,” I told him, “and get the fuck out!”

  That’s when he rushed me. I threw a straight right punch to his face, but he got back up and gouged my eye. I managed a kick to his ribs, then two swift punches to his face and throat, by which time the rest of the party had streamed into the room. I expected Rachel to treat me like a hero when I explained what had happened. Instead, once the place was clear, she slumped to the floor of the closet and wept.

  “You’re a violent monster!”

  “But he attacked me.”

  “Of course he did, he felt trapped.”

  “You’re not making any sense.”

  “You’re nothing more than a bully!”

  Women are so much more complicated than men. I’m not sure anyone can really know a woman’s mind. In short, for them, one moment’s delight is another’s revulsion.

  Now Rachel’s squeezing and rubbing her tits as she grinds away. I brace myself against the headboard when her pace quickens, and she takes my hand to her mouth to greedily suck on my fingers. I brush her hair back to kiss her neck, and she slaps me hard on the face.

  “Be rough with me!” she demands.

  I squeeze her throat with steadily increasing force and watch her eyes roll back. She digs her fingernails into my back and drags them across my side. Jolted by the sensation of tearing flesh, I flip her onto her stomach and go at her from behind while she bucks and squirms. When she tries to climb up onto all four, I push her face into the mattress. It’s here, in complete submission, that she finally comes.

  “Tell me about the fight,” she says.

  “There was a drunk guy sitting behind us who kept shouting profanity. I told him to shut up because of Julian.”

  “Then?”

  “He punched me in the face.”

  A wild, tortured gleam appears in Rachel’s eyes. I’ve never seen her so enthralled. “Really? What did you do next?”

  “The guy was enormous. I flopped on the ground like a stuck pig.”

  Rachel rolls her eyes, and sighs loudly with disgust.

  “There was nothing I could do!” I say to her as she storms into the bathroom.

  A minute later, I hear her cursing me in the shower.

  12

  Serena has called a meeting with the top doctors in each division. She wants yet another discussion on cost-saving measures. Hardly a week goes by when she hasn’t conceived some new and dastardly way to increase profits and technologically usurp human workers. It’s no wonder she’s championed as the most celebrated leader in today’s medical business community.

  We doctors all dread these meetings, for fear Serena has innovated us out of our livelihoods, but we do look forward to the food. Always the connoisseur, Serena insists on softening her blows with first-rate cuisine. Three weeks ago, when the FDA approved an application that can identify any skin abnormality simply by evaluating an image, Serena laid off the hospital’s entire dermatology department, all from behind the guise of duck confit with lentils via Francis Mallmann’s new French bistro.

  This morning there are ten of us, from cardiology, neurology, gastroenterology, radiology, pulmonology, and oncology, an exquisite spread of sushi from Kusakabe’s laid out before us. I can’t help but marvel at this rare feat of presentation, workmanship, and production. In contrast, Serena’s face is like an executioner’s—colorless and cold.

  “Dr. Kapoor,” Serena begins, “would you say you’re a man of principles?”

  Dr. Kapoor, a radiologist, sets his chopsticks down. “I’m very much a man of principles.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.” The room goes silent. No one, not even those with full mouths, continues to chew. “A man of principles is rooted and fixed,” Serena says, “unable to evolve. We need innovators, doctors willing to do away with tradition and move to the vanguard of modern medicine.”

  “But, if I may—” Dr. Kapoor says.

  “No, you may not, Doctor. The FDA has finally approved new software that can read scans twice as well for one-tenth the price. Your last day with us will be Friday.”

  “Dr. Zhang,” Serena says, as Dr. Kapoor shuffles silently away, “what has been the single most ubiquitous tool in medicine for the past two centuries?”

  The gastrologist scratches his bald head and squints his eyes. “A stethoscope?”

  “Precisely. Doctors have employed stethoscopes for over two hundred years. But were you aware how many doctors fail to accurately detect problems with a stethoscope? A recent study shows that seventy-five percent of doctors can’t so much as diagnose a heart murmur. This is why we’re doing away with this obsolete technology. We now have digitized stethoscopes whose mandatory use we are instituting as of this afternoon.”

  “How does that work?” Dr. Zhang asks.

  “They amplify, record, and digitize sound from bodies. A basic technician can now diagnose ninety-five percent of all ailments.”

  “What then will become of doctors?” Dr. Zhang says, reasonably.

  “We’ll find out very soon, won’t we?”

  Dr. Hines—fellow oncologist and nemesis, medical school dean, phony art snob, lackey to Serena—distributes a memo about the new stethoscopes and signals the caterers to clean up, including the food we haven’t eaten.

  13

  It’s a shame, really, how long it’s been since I picked up a book. As a child, I’d lose myself in the pages of Huck Finn for hours, but today the notion of parents fostering in their children an appreciation is unimaginable. To admit to writing poetry or dirtying your hands giving life to a sculpture, in fact, would invite a
hurricane of ridicule and scorn. Where efficiency and pragmatism are most highly prized, art is a consolation for those who can’t work. Software engineers and database administrators—these are the Michelangelos and Schuberts of the day!

  Not too long ago a prominent system’s engineer made headlines when he proclaimed, “We must resist the vulgar temptation of needing to bear our souls!” The public responded swiftly and decisively with adulation. The lone dissent was squeaked from a scorned professor of philosophy at Stanford. After he’d written on his hologram, now since removed, “Science is the enemy of the mind!” his tenure was revoked and he was institutionalized.

  Speaking of Mark Twain, he is supposed to have said, “The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco.” Well, those days of sweaters and jackets in August have gone the way of the buffalo. The sky is an ocean of bright blue, and the sun blazes so menacingly that most children and old folks must stay indoors. As for the rest, we’re red-faced, sweaty, and utterly defeated.

  I’m on my way to a rally for President Martinez while Rachel is hosting a women’s lunch at the house, the supposed purpose of which is to plan a fall fundraiser for Feed the Forgotten. Doubtless, I am skeptical. The last time these ladies got together they polished off a case of chardonnay and invited over the neighbor’s teenage son. The poor boy was stripped shirtless and forced to serve them finger sandwiches. “Harmless fun,” Rachel had slurred when I arrived home to witness the scene.

  Four years ago, when candidate Martinez made a campaign stop here, three hundred thousand people turned out. They had to make a last second change of venue to Golden Gate Park to accommodate the massive crowd. It was a scene like something I’ve only seen in a documentary film about Woodstock. People wore flowers in their hair, hugged strangers, and all over the city mass sing-alongs about folksy hope and change erupted as if it were everyday entertainment.