“Africa?”
“Tanzania?”
“How do you know about that? Am I dreaming?”
He was obviously drunk and exhausted, but she wasn’t sure he could be quite that out of it to not know whether he was dreaming. His question almost sounded metaphorical, like Is this all a dream? She went with it. “Yes.”
“To dream, the impossible dream…” he sang, and then said, “Well, then let me tell a story.”
“You tell beautiful stories.”
“Once upon a time, there was a man who decided to be an infectious disease doctor and he had this idealistic vision that he could take on viruses and disease and find cures and then you know what would happen?”
“The world would be a better place.”
“He’d get laid.”
She laughed.
“Don Quixote tilting at viruses,” he continued, slurring. “Holding them off from attacking all the people he was protecting, including the princess. Year after year, he tilted, and the viruses kept coming and that was interesting and good work, tilting or not. And then the young doctor, who wasn’t so young anymore, heard something behind him. He turned to see all the people he arrogantly told himself he was defending from the viruses.”
Lyle looked down at the bottle standing on the carpet and tipped the vodka back and forth idly. Then he picked up the piece of paper and clutched it.
“They were killing each other,” he finally said. “Shooting, maiming, terrorizing, drinking and driving, stealing each other’s land, finding tax loopholes and racking up speeding tickets, building narco empires, filing lawsuits and countersuits, cloaking themselves as decent and moral and, all the while, doing more damage than any virus. Just one big difference.”
“Dr. Martin?”
He roared, “At least the virus declared itself: I am here to kill. I will consume you. It was forthright with its intentions. It was true. Not the people. Not the princess!”
Another long pause.
“People, they put you in the worst positions, y’know.” He sighed. “Anyhow,” he said, facedown, harder to hear now, “the doctor had picked the wrong side. Obviously. So he retired and decided, just now, that he might become a janitor.”
With that, Dr. Martin seemed to make one last effort to raise his head. He shrugged, out of energy, nothing left to say. He fell back down and started to snore.
Jackie felt momentarily dazed and realized she’d been holding her breath. The moment had captivated her. It had, in a certain manner, seduced her. She felt such kinship and intimacy.
Whatever fantasy she’d had before that she and Dr. Martin were on the same page had now been multiplied, practically exponentially. What a man.
“Let me tell you a story,” she whispered. He was out cold now.
“Once upon a time there was a girl. I bet you can guess, that girl was me!” She laughed slightly at her own silly little joke. Then she cleared her throat and swallowed quickly. “Her parents fought and fought and fought. Her dad drank and cheated and her mom drank and yelled and hit and probably cheated, too.”
You’re a son of a bitch, Alan. A philandering Son. Of. A. Bitch.
More like Husband of a Bitch.
You’re blaming me?
“The little girl sat on the back of the couch watching through the sliding glass window. She could see it coming. But she didn’t move. The little girl, me, I… I saw my mom take two bold steps forward. I still couldn’t move. People say these things happen in slow motion, but it’s not so. It’s so fast that you can’t stop it. It only feels like slow motion looking back on it. She shoved him just… just at the right angle, I guess. The wrong angle. His slipped and he fell against the glass wall. It was cheap, fractured, breaking, then broken. My dad teetered there. That was slower. I could see it. I couldn’t move. She pushed him again.”
Jackie had her hands balled along the sides of her cheeks. She rocked. Silence for nearly five minutes. She counted. She looked up.
“My dad was an asshole philanderer but I’m not sure he deserved to bounce off the cement from eight stories up. In fact, I can say now assuredly that my mother wasn’t supposed to be judge and jury, conflict of interest and all that. The trouble is, you can’t really know that in the moment. She couldn’t. Maybe I should have. I had the gift to intervene and there I stood.”
She was more composed now. She started talking a bit more philosophically, what it was like to walk through a world where people saw what they want to see and not what really is, people lost in their perspectives and devices, buried in their escapes and perversions, whereas a gifted few could truly see and hear. She told him about the various people who wanted to use her, had used her. She told him not to pity her.
She dropped her head. “You deserve complete honesty, Dr. Martin.” She paused and swallowed. “My sister, I had a sister, her name was Marissa. Two years younger. She was there that day. We went to live with my grandmother.”
Jackie explained that she and Marissa were close. Marissa went away for college, to Cornell.
“She said she couldn’t be around me all the time, that I was too intense. But, obviously, she was wrestling with demons—who wouldn’t, after our childhood—and she had to get away. I could take the blame. I loved her, dearly. We talked all the time,” Jackie said. She swallowed. “In her sophomore year, she jumped from a bridge and killed herself.”
A tear slipped from Jackie’s right eye.
“I’d talked to her hours before. I knew she was in trouble. But I did nothing. I couldn’t stop it.” She simultaneously laughed and cried and threw up her hands. “My self-pity has grown tiresome.”
When she stood, she walked over to Lyle, pulled the piece of paper from his hand, and turned him on his back. She wondered for a moment whether he might be better off dead, as she’d wondered of herself a few times in her life. She propped a pillow under his head so that he might sleep comfortably.
“I am better now, Lyle. Thanks to you. You saved me, turned my life around.” She told him a story about how she’d gone to Nepal, a tattered soul with a backpack. She’d gotten the monkey scratch, and then came the earthquake. At the chaotic airstrip, she lay down and let fate take over, expecting to die in the hot wind. But fate brought her Lyle, who was in the area building a pop-up clinic to help with a cholera outbreak. That day, of course, he was dealing with chaos at the airstrip, tending to various wounded.
“I’m sure I was just another warm body to you,” Jackie said. She stroked his hair. She pictured the scene, the hot air blowing dust, people running, a doctor like a superhero seemingly unfazed. He knelt beside her, examined the monkey scratch on her left forearm, asked a few questions. I’m not worth saving, she recalled telling him. I’m unhinged, if you want to know the truth. Better off gone.
“Nonsense,” he had muttered. He looked up from her at a square, red-painted building with a wall curving in from earthquake damage. It stood to the right of the airstrip’s “parking lot,” which was a dirt area free of brush, and the so-called terminal, where Jackie sat, which consisted of a cement roof held up by pillars, without sides. The whole operation could’ve passed in the States for a half-built bus station.
Weakly, Jackie had watched Lyle walk to the red-painted building. As Lyle had gotten close to the building, Jackie saw him get intercepted by a uniformed man rushing by. They had a brief exchange.
“No, no. Too dangerous!” the man had said. Jackie thought she heard the word collapse. Then she watched Lyle ignore the man, walk to the building, open a cellar door beside the collapsing wall and descend stairs. He had returned five minutes later, covered in dust. He’d found the vaccine, administered it, told her she now had three days to get to Kathmandu for a second one, but could even make it a week. He told her she’d be fine and then went on to help someone else.