She looked through me to Raoul and said, “There’s something you should see. Could be exciting.” The lack of inflection in her voice belied the content of her message.
Raoul got up. “Is it the new membrane, Helen?”
“Yes.”
“Wonderful.” He looked as if he were going to hug her then stopped suddenly, remembering my presence. Clearing his throat, he introduced us: “Alex, meet a fellow Ph.D., Dr. Helen Holroyd.”
We exchanged the most cursory of pleasantries. She edged closer to Raoul, a proprietary gleam in the beige eyes. He fought, unsuccessfully, to erase the naughty boy look from his face.
The two of them were trying so hard to look platonic that for the first time all day I felt like smiling. They were sleeping together and it was supposed to be a secret. Without a doubt everyone in the department knew about it.
“I’ve got to get going,” I said.
“Yes, I understand. Thank you for everything. I may call you to discuss this further. In the meantime, send your bill to my secretary.”
As I walked out the door they were gazing into each other’s eyes and discussing the wonders of osmotic equilibrium.
On the way out I stopped in the hospital cafeteria for a cup of coffee. It was after seven and the dining room was sparsely populated. A tall Mexican man wearing a hair net and blue scrubs ran a dry mop over the floor. A trio of nurses laughed and ate doughnuts. I lidded the coffee and was preparing to leave when movement fluttered in the corner of my eye.
It was Valcroix and he was waving me over. I walked to his table.
“Care to join me?”
“All right.” I put down my cup and took a chair facing him. The remains of a giant salad sat on his tray along with two glasses of water. He used his fork to move a tumbleweed of alfalfa sprouts around the bowl.
He’d traded his psychedelic sport shirt for a black Grateful Dead T-shirt and had tossed his white coat over the chair next to him. From up close I could see that the long hair was thinning on top. He needed a shave but his beard growth was sparse, spotting only the mustache and chin areas. The drooping face had been worked over by a bad cold; he sniffled, red-nosed and bleary-eyed.
“Any news on the Swopes?” he asked.
I was tired of telling the story but he’d been their doctor and deserved to know. I gave him a brief summary.
He listened with equanimity, no emotion registering in the hooded eyes. When I was finished he coughed and dabbed at his nose with a napkin.
“For some reason I feel an urge to proclaim my innocence to you,” he said.
“That’s hardly necessary,” I assured him. I drank some coffee and put it down quickly, having forgotten how awful it was.
His eyes took on a faraway look and for a moment I thought he was meditating, retreating to an internal world as he’d done during Raoul’s harangue. I found my attention wandering.
“I know Melendez-Lynch blames me for this. He’s blamed me for everything that’s gone wrong in the department since I began my fellowship. Was he that way when you worked with him?”
“Let’s just say it took a while to develop a good working relationship.”
He nodded solemnly, picked some strands from the ball of sprouts and chewed on them.
“Why do you think they ran away?” I asked him.
He shrugged. “I have no idea.”
“No insights at all?”
“None. Why should I have, any more than anyone else?”
“I was under the impression they related well to you.”
“Who told you that?”
“Raoul.”
“He wouldn’t recognize relating if it bit him in the ass.”
“He felt you’d developed especially good rapport with the mother.”
His hands were scrubbed and pink. They tightened around the salad fork.
“I was a nurse before I became a doctor,” he said.
“Interesting.”
“Is it?”
“Nurses are always complaining about their lack of status and money and threatening to quit and go to med school. You’re the first I’ve met who actually did it.”
“Nurses gripe because their lot in life is shit. But there are insights to be learned at the bottom of the ladder. Like the value of talking to patients and families. I did it as a nurse but now that I’m a doc it makes me a deviate. What’s pathetic is that it’s viewed as sufficiently deviant to be noticed. Rapport? Hell, no. I barely knew them. Sure I spoke to the mother. I was sticking her son every day with needles, puncturing his bone and sucking out marrow. How could I not speak to her?”
He gazed into the salad bowl.
“Melendez-Lynch can’t understand that, my wanting to come across as a human being instead of some white-coated technocrat. He didn’t bother to get to know the Swopes but it doesn’t occur to him that his remoteness has anything to do with their — defection. I extended myself, so I’m the goat.” He sniffed, wiped his nose, and drained one of the water glasses. “What’s the use of dissecting it? They’re gone.”
I remembered Milo’s conjecture about the abandoned car.
“They may be back,” I said.
“Be serious, man. They see themselves as having escaped to freedom. No way.”
“Freedom’s going to sour pretty quickly when the disease gets out of control.”
