She returned to the first e-mail, the one warning Dr. Martin to vacate the premises. She looked at it for the better part of an hour. Her hands balled into fists, her jaw tight enough to prompt a headache. She felt her muscles twitch.
Finally, she hit reply and wrote:
Dean Thomas,
I am sorry that our relationship has so deteriorated. I also do not appreciate your threats. It seems odd to me that you would be so antagonistic to one of your educators. That attitude is such a far cry from your solicitous attitude toward corporate funders, including those pharmaceutical interests trying to buy access to our budding clinicians. Wearing my doctor hat, I diagnose you with a serious case of hypocrisy.
It had been no secret that the dean had been accused of fund-raising with abandon, giving rise to ethical questions at the medical school. The mayor and many in the city loved the dean for having overseen the massive expansion of a high-tech campus. But many on the campus saw her for what she was, someone awaiting a CEO position at Genentech or a competitor and in line for a massive payday. The last thing she needed was an enemy like Dr. Martin. Jackie decided to make her knife thrust a tad less subtle.
Dean Thomas, I did your bidding in Africa, trying to save lives, and you repay me by stripping me of my ability to educate the doctors of the next generation. I hope you will reconsider your hasty threats or I will not hesitate to share my experiences as someone who has been thrown under the bus to serve outside interests.
Sincerely,
Jackie hit send and then deleted the initial e-mail from the dean. Dr. Martin, perhaps, would never see this correspondence. She doubted he was a dogged user of e-mail anyway. She felt euphoric. She’d gotten off her perch of indecision and given a boost to the man who had once saved her life.
Of course, she couldn’t know that Dr. Martin was the one who asked in the first place for some administrative leave. She couldn’t know the emotionally dark place he’d inhabited, or why. She pictured a defeated version of this great man, her distant crush and savior who, if she was honest with herself, she craved to be seen as his equal, someone who saw her, understood her, wouldn’t put her into a terrible position. Now left to sleep on his couch at the office? And even that being taken from him?
She stared into the dark for a long time, pondering, exploring her feelings, taking her time with an idea, rolling it around in her brain—until she felt a surge of certainty.
She slipped out the back door of the apartment building and took an Uber in pouring rain to UCSF on Parnassus. This was the old medical-school campus in San Francisco’s inner sunset neighborhood, and right near Haight and Ashbury. Much of the medical enterprise had moved down to Mission Bay, where the lecture halls were, but the main adult emergency room and hospital remained on Parnassus. So did some of the faculty and adjunct offices, infectious disease among them, and for good reason: often, when an infectious disease specialist was needed, he or she was needed in the hospital to consult with a virulent and unusual case.
Jackie took the elevator to the fifth floor in the elevator adjoining the main hospital. The setting was a far cry from the majestic new campus. This was drab and boxy, merely functional. She was looking for number 503 and figured that she’d found it when she saw from a distance down the hallway the doorway in the corner, the proverbial corner office that Lyle deserved. Colorful papers and patient reminders were carefully taped to the doorway. But that one was marked 501 and had a sign for DR. JEN SANCHEZ. The department’s darling, Jackie knew. She was the one with the sweet digs.
Jackie turned to the left, and ten feet down she found 502, right beside the echoing stairwell, and clearly a little box. Jackie felt a pang for Dr. Martin at this inglorious place; he deserved so much better.
It was so much worse when she pushed open the door.
Twenty-Nine
The smell. She recoiled. She wondered if it was disease. Was this the odor of bacteria consuming a human body? No, she quickly realized, it was the stench of ancient pizza. From the looks of the remains in the open box on the table in the small entry room, a meat lover’s special. She repressed a gag.
“Dr. Martin?”
There was just enough light from the hallway behind her, and a sliver of moon from a window across the tiny office to illuminate the mess of food remains, scattered papers, and was that a camping stove? And the light also showed the way to an opening to a second room.
She shuffled by the desk and thought, Let him be okay.
For all Jackie’s awareness, her great skills at piecing together the world, she would not have sensed how strange it was for her to be here, how impulsive. She was grasping at straws. The Google thing, Denny, the man in the car, they’d tapped into that core part of her that was emotionally flummoxed, off balance, so much less composed than she showed the world. Now she was on the verge of coming undone altogether, torn apart with uncertainty. But that’s not what she told herself. She thought, as she walked into the open doorway of the second room, Now I know what to do. I can help this man who needs my help.
There he was, in a heap. On the couch, an arm draped to the side with his hand near a half-empty bottle of clear alcohol and a piece of paper.
“Dr. Martin?”
“I’m retired. Call me Lyle,” he muttered. He didn’t bother to look up.
“Lyle?”
“Retired,” he muttered again. “Honorifics no longer applicable.”
She turned on the light. The office reminded her of the austere habitat of a shrink she once visited: a chair, coffee table, and the couch where Lyle was flopped facedown. On the table, several empty bottles and what appeared to be a half-eaten burrito.
“Uhhhh!” Lyle made an anguished sound like a vampire consumed by sunlight.
She turned it off. She didn’t want to see him like this; he didn’t deserve to be seen like this. What remained were silhouettes.
“I’ll clean it myself,” he said. “Please. Go away.”
“I’m not the cleaning crew.”
“It’ll be a new career path for me.”
“Let me get you some water.”
She glanced around for a bottle or cup. She couldn’t make out much. Some of the books on the built-in shelves had been scattered to the floor, like someone had casually pulled them off. On the table, she could make out a plastic cup. She picked it up and sniffed the contents and shivered with disgust. Cheap swill.
“Are you hungry?”
No answer. She couldn’t imagine what had dragged him to this abyss. She also knew, in her gut, she knew, that she couldn’t ask him outright. That wasn’t how these things worked. Not with the proud and brilliant. She knew because she wouldn’t respond to direct questions, either. She’d been low. She understood Dr. Martin, and he probably would understand her.
“May I take a liberty?” she said, and she sat.
“Have a seat.” He laughed, some odd private joke because she was already sitting. He was half mad, at least half, she thought.
“You are a great man.”
Lyle turned his head, slightly, curiously, like a bird hearing a sound, such that he could make out her edges through the hair. She wondered if he imagined her as an apparition or dream.
“Are you good or evil?” he asked.
“What happened in Africa?” she asked.