She kisses his widow’s peak on her way out and reminds him about dinner with the Clausens, whoever they might be, God bless them and their tchatkes. Perversely, McClarty actually likes this instant new life. Just subtract narcotics & vodka and stir. He feels like a character actor who, given a cameo in a sitcom, finds himself written into the series as a regular. He moved to this southeastern city less than a year ago, after graduating from rehab in Atlanta, and lived in an apartment without furniture until he moved in with Terri.
McClarty met her at a Mexican restaurant three months ago and was charmed by her air of independence and unshakable self-assurance. She leaned across the bar and said, “Fresh jalapenos are a lot better. They have them, but you have to ask.” She waved her peach-colored nails at the bartender. “Carlos, bring the gentleman some fresh peppers.” Then she turned back to her conversation with a girlfriend, her mission apparently complete.
A few minutes later, sipping his Perrier, McClarty couldn’t help overhearing her say to her girlfriend, “Ask before you go down on him, silly. Not after.”
McClarty admires Terri’s ruthless efficiency. Basically she has it all wired. She owns a clothing store, drives an Acura, has breasts shaped like mangoes around an implanted core of saline. Not silicone, she announced virtuously, the first night he touched them. If asked she can review the merits of the top plastic surgeons in town. “Dr. Milton’s really lost it,” she’ll say. “Since he started fucking his secretary and going to Aspen his brow lifts are getting scary. He cuts way too much and makes everybody look either frightened or surprised.” At forty, with his own history of psychological reconstruction, McClarty doesn’t hold a few nips and tucks against a girl. Particularly when the results are so exceptionally pleasing to the eye.
“You’re a doctor?” Instead of saying yes, but just barely, he nodded. Perched as she was on a stool that first night, her breasts seemed to rise on the swell of this information. Checking her out when he first sat down, Dr. Kevin McClarty thought she looked like someone who would be dating a pro athlete, or a guy with a new Ferrari who owned a chain of fitness centers. She was almost certainly a little too brassy and provocative to be the consort of a doctor, which was one of the things that excited Kevin about her; making love to her, he felt simultaneously that he was slumming and sleeping above his economic station. Best of all, she was in the program, too. When he heard her order a virgin margarita he decided to go for it. A week after the jalapenos, he moved in with her.
The uniformed guard says, “Good morning, Dr. McClarty,” as he drives out the gate on his way to work. After all these years he gets a kick out of hearing the honorific attached to his own name. He grew up even more in awe of doctors than most mortals because his mother, a nurse, told him that his father was one, though she refused all further entreaties for information. Raised in the bottom half of a narrow, chilly duplex in Evanston, Illinois, he still doesn’t quite believe in the reality of this new life — the sunshine, the walled and gated community, the smiling guard who calls him Doctor. Perversely, he believes in the dream, which is far more realistic than all this blue sky and imperturbable aluminum siding. He doesn’t tell Terri, though. He never tells her about the dreams.
Driving to his office he thinks about Terri’s breasts. They’re splendid, of course. But he finds it curious that she will tell nearly anybody that they are, as we say, surgically enhanced. Last time he was in the dating pool back in the Pleistocene era, he never encountered anything but natural mammary glands. Then he got married and, suddenly, ten years later he’s back in circulation and every woman he meets has gorgeous tits but whenever he reaches for them he hears: “Maybe I should mention that, they’re, you know…” And inevitably, later: “Listen, you’re a doctor, do you think, I mean, there’s been a lot of negative publicity and stuff…” It got so he avoided saying he was a doctor, not knowing whether they were genuinely interested or just hoping to get an opinion on this weird lump under the arm, right here, see? Well, actually you do know. Despite all the years of medical school and all the sleepless hours of his internship, he never really believed he was a doctor, he felt like a pretender, although he eventually discovered that he felt like less of a pretender on 20 milligrams of Seconal.
The weather, according to the radio, is hot and hotting up. Kevin has the windows up and the climate control at 68. High between 95 to 98. Which is about as predictable as “Stairway to Heaven” on Rock 101, the station that plays all “Stairway,” only “Stairway,” twenty-four hours a day — a song which one of the MD junkies in rehab insisted was about dope, but to a junkie everything is about dope. Now the song makes McClarty think of Terri marching righteously on her Stairmaster.
After a lifetime in Chicago he likes the hot summers and temperate winters, and he likes the ur-American suburban sprawl of franchises and housing developments with an affection all the greater for being self-conscious. As a bright, fatherless child he’d always felt alien and isolated; later as a doctor he felt even further removed from the general populace — it’s like being a cop — which alienation was only enhanced when he also became a drug addict and defacto criminal. He wanted to be part of the stream, an unconscious member of the larger community, but all the morphine in the pharmacy couldn’t produce the desired result. When he first came out of rehab, after years of escalating numbness, the sight of a Burger King or a familiar television show could bring him to tears, could make him feel, for the first time, like a real American.
He turns into the drive marked MIDSTATE CORRECTION FACILITY. It’s no accident that you can’t see the buildings from the road. With homes worth half a million within a quarter mile, construction was discreet. No hearings, since the land belonged to the State, which was happy to skip the expense of a new prison and instead board its high-security criminals with the corporation that employs Dr. Kevin McClarty. He drives along the east flank of chain-link fence and triple-coiled concertina wire.
These guards, too, greet him by name and title when he signs in. Through the bullet-proof plexi he sees the enlarged photo of an AirNike sneaker a visitor just happened to be wearing when he hit the metal detector, its sole sliced open to show a .25-caliber Beretta nesting snug as a fetus in the exposed cavity. Hey, it musta come from the factory that way, man, like those screws and syringes and shit that got inside the Pepsi cans. I ain’t never seen that piece before. What is that shit, a 25? I wouldn’t be caught dead with no 25, man, you can stop a roach with that fucking popgun.
Dr. McClarty is buzzed through the first door, and, once it closes behind him, through the second. Inside he can sense it, the malevolent funk of the prison air, the dread ambience of the dream. The varnished concrete floor of the long white hall is as shiny as ice.
Emma, the fat nurse, buzzes him into the medical ward.
“How many signed up today?” he asks.
“Twelve so far.”
McClarty retreats to his office, where Donny, the head nurse, is talking on the phone. “I surely do appreciate that… Thank you kindly…” Donny’s perennially sunny manner stands out even in this region of pandemic cheerfulness. He says good morning with the accent on the first syllable, then runs down coming attractions. “A kid beat up in D last night. He’s waiting. And you know Peters from K block, the diabetic who’s been bitching about the kitchen food? Saying the food’s running his blood sugar up? Well, this morning they searched his cell and found three bags of cookies, a Goo Goo Cluster and two Moon Pies under the bed. I think maybe we should tell the commissary to stop selling him this junk. Yesterday his blood sugar was four hundred.”