I motor slowly past the trudging, bescroffled, pre-Parkinsonian Bud Sloat, just crossing Willow in the mist, head down in his Irish topper and sad toupé, heading toward the back lot of the CVS and Seminary Street, where his lamporium sits next door to the Coldwell Banker. I have a thought to shove open the passenger door and haul him in out of the rain, put a better end to things between us. He’s possibly as death-daunted as I am (even assholes get the willies). A moment of unfelt fellowship might be just the ticket to save us from a bad afternoon. But Bud’s intent on missing the puddles and saving his saddle oxfords, his hands down in his topcoat pockets, and in any case he’s the sort of jerk who thinks every unrecognized vehicle contains someone inferior and worthy of disdain. I couldn’t stand the look on his face. In any case, I have nothing I could even lie about to make him feel better.
Though Bud’s question about the real estate business has set off belated silent alarms, and I feel a sudden cringe up near my diaphragm, brought on by the thought that real estate might be my niche the way undertaking’s Lloyd’s and Bud’s is lamps. A strangled voice within me croaks, Nooo, nooo-no-no, no. I should know that voice, since I’ve heard it before—and recently.
Tell a dream, lose a reader, the master said (I do my best to forget mine). But you can’t un-know what you know, as attractive as that might be.
In two consecutive weeks now, I’ve twice dreamed that I wake up in the middle of my prostate procedure just as the BBs—which in the dream are actually hot—go rolling down a lighted slot into my butt, a slot that looks like a pinball-machine gutter that Psimos, dressed in tails, has moved into the OR. In another one, I’m shooting baskets in a smelly old wire-windowed gym and I simply can’t miss—except the score on the big black-and-white scoreboard doesn’t change from 0–0. In a third, I somehow know jujitsu and am boisterously throwing little brown men around in a room full of mattresses. In another, I keep walking into a CVS like the one on Seminary, asking the pharmacist for a refill of my placebos. And in still another, I wake up and realize I’m forty-five, and wonder how I managed to fritter so much of my life away. And there are others.
Life-lived-over-again dreams, these are—no question; and the little no, no, no anti-Permanent Period voice, an alarm bespeaking a sharp downturn in outlook, for which I have God’s own plenty of excuses these days. When you start looking for reasons for why you feel bad, you need to stand back from the closet door.
However, one of the pure benefits of the Permanent Period—when you’re as nose-down and invisible to yourself as an actualized unchangeable non-becomer, as snugged into life as a planning-board member—is that you realize you can’t completely fuck everything up anymore, since so much of your life is on the books already. You’ve survived it. Cancer itself doesn’t really make you fear the future and what might happen, it actually makes you (at least it’s made me) not as worried as you were before you had it. It might make you concerned about lousing up an individual day or wasting an afternoon (like this one), but not your whole life. I try to impart this hopeful view to oldsters who wander down to the Shore in their blue Chrysler New Yorkers to “look at houses,” but then get squirrelly about making a mistake, and end up scampering home to Ogdensburg and Lake Compounce, thinking that what I’ve told them is nothing but a sales pitch and I won’t be around when the shit train pulls in and the house market bottoms out just as their adjustable mortgage starts to steeple (I certainly won’t). But once I’ve explained that it’s seashore property I’m showing them and God isn’t making any more of it, and you can get your money out any day of the week, I just want to say: Hey! Look! Take the plunge. Live once. You’re on the short end of this stick. He isn’t making any more of you, either.
What I usually see, though, is nervous, smirking, irritable superiority (like Bud Sloat’s) that’s convinced there’s something out there that I could never know about—or else I wouldn’t be a know-nothing real estate agent—but that they goddamn well know all about. Most humankind doesn’t want to give up thinking they can fuck up the whole works by taking the wrong step, by shoving the black checker over onto that wrong red square. It makes them feel powerful to believe they own something to be cautious about. These people make terrible clients and can waste weeks of your time. I’ve developed a radar for them. But in fairness to these reluctant home-seekers—their chins on their chests the way Bud’s is today—and who’re thinking more positively about having that aluminum siding installed instead of paying for a whole new place, or about buying that new pop-up camper or checking fares on Carnival Lines (however they can throw some money away, but not too much): There are legitimate downsides to the Permanent Period. Permanence can be scary. Even though it solves the problem of tiresome becoming, it can also erode optimism, render possibility small and remote, and make any of us feel that while we can’t fuck up much of anything anymore, there really isn’t much to fuck up because nothing matters a gnat’s nuts; and that down deep inside we’ve finally become just an organism that for some reason can still make noise, but not much more than that.
This you need to save yourself from, or else the slide off the transom of life’s pleasure boat becomes irresistible and probably a good idea.
3
Stopped at the red light at Franklin and Pleasant Valley, my Suburban interior musty-damp and my feet warming with the defroster on high, the outside day has turned gloomy. Wind gusts against the hanging traffic light, making it yaw and twist and sway. Rain sheets the street. My car thermometer says the outside temp’s dropped to thirty-six, and lights have prickled on inside houses. Haddamites are getting indoors, holding hats to heads. Pilgrims in the Square are packing it in. It’s 1:00 p.m.
Something to eat and somewhere to piss are now high priorities, and I turn down Pleasant Valley toward Haddam Doctors Hospital, which has become my best-choice solo-luncheon venue since I moved away—in spite of its being the sad setting of my son’s final hours so long ago. It’s odd, I’ll admit, to eat lunch in a hospital. But it’s no stranger than paying your light bill at the Grand Union, or buying your new septic tank from the burial-vault dealer. Form needn’t always follow function. Plus, it’s not strange at all if you can get a decent meal in the process.
Decades ago, when I arrived in Haddam, you could grab a first-rate cheese steak in a little chrome and glass, plastic-booth diner lined with framed sports glossies and presided over by muttering old townies who wouldn’t speak to you because you were an outsider. And there was still a below-street-level, red-walled Italian joint serving manicotti and fresh bluefish, where they’d let you read your paper, fill you up, then get you out for cheap. Cops ate there, as did seminary profs, ancient librarians and the storied old HHS baseball coach who’d had a cup of coffee with the Red Sox once, and who’d sneak over in his blue-and-white uniform for a double vodka and a smoke before afternoon practice.
I loved it here then. The town had the ambling, impersonal, middling pleasantness of an old commercial traveler in no real hurry to get anywhere. All of which has gone. Now either you’re forced into mega-expensive “dining” or to standing in a line behind hostile moms in designer sweats pushing strollers into the Garden of Eatin’ Health Depot and who’re fidgeting over whether the Roman ceviche contains fish on the endangered list or if the coffee’s from a country on the Global Oppression Hot 100. By the time you get your food, you’re pretty much ready to start a fistfight—plus, you’re not hungry anymore.
At Haddam Doctors, by contrast, strangers are always welcome, parking’s easy in the visitors lot and it’s cafeteria-style, so no waiting. There’s no soul-less plastic ware. Everything’s spotless, tables cleaned antibacterially in record time. The long apple-green dining hall has an attractive commissary busy-ness bespeaking serious people with serious things in mind. And the food’s cooked and served by big, smiling, no-nonsense, pillowy black women in pink rayon dresses, who can make a meat loaf so it’s better cold than hot, and who always slip a little ham bone into the limas so you ge
t back to your car with a feeling you’ve just had a human, not an institutional, experience. The cooks’ husbands all eat there—always the sure sign.
At lunch, you often share your table with some elderly gentleman with a wife in for tests, or a worried young couple whose child’s there for back straightening, or just some ordinary citizen like me grabbing a plate lunch before hitting it again. Restrained but understanding smiles are all that’s ever shared. (“We’ve all got our woes, why blab ’em?”) Nobody opens up or vents (you might complain to some poor soul worse off than you). White-smocked M.D.’s and crisp-capped nurses sit together by the windows, chatting while patient families eye them hopefully, wondering if he’s the one and if they could interrupt for just one question about Grampa Basil’s EKG. Only they don’t. Stately decorum reigns. Occasionally, there’s an outburst of strange laughter, followed by a few Turkish words from the blue-trousered floor orderlies that break through the tinkle and plink of eating and surviving. Otherwise, all is as you’d want it. (Oddly, there’s no such positive ambience at Mayo—only an earth-tone, ergonomically-designed food court where patients stare wanly at other patients and pick at their green Jell-O.)
Plus, in Haddam Doctors, if anyone gets his Swiss steak down the wrong pipe or swallows an ice cube or suffers a grand mal, there’s plenty of help—Heimlich masters, wall-mounted defibrillators and Thorazine injections in all the nurses’ pockets. Beginning with when Ralph was a patient and his mother and I lived in the hospital days and nights, the most untoward thing I’ve witnessed was a streaker, a banker I knew who’d suffered reversals in the S&L crisis and ended up in the psycho ward, from which he made a brief but spectacular break (eventually, he got on at another bank).
However, when I wheel in toward Visitor Lot A, just after one, I see that something not at all regular’s afoot at the hospital. The big, usually glassed-in front windows of the cafeteria—inside which the doctors and nurses usually sit—are at this moment being ply-boarded over, with yellow crime-scene tape stretched across. Several uniformed Haddam police and detectives wearing badges on cords around their necks are standing out in the sorry weather, writing notes on pads, taking pictures and generally reconnoitering the scene. Glass from the empty windows is strewn out on the damp grass, and tan wall bricks and aluminum splinters and cottony insulation have been spewed as far as the visitors lot. Police and fire department vehicles with flashers flashing are nosed at all angles around the doctors parking lot and the ER entrance, along with two panel trucks from network affiliates. A man and a woman with ATF stenciled on the backs of their windbreakers are conferring with a large man in a fireman’s white hard hat and fireman’s coat. Yellow-slickered police are carefully outlining bits of debris with spray paint, while others use surgical gloves and what look like forceps to tweeze evidence into plastic bags they drop into larger black garbage bags that other cops are holding.
Up the four storeys of the hospital, faces are at all the windows, peering down. Two policemen in black commando outfits and holding automatic weapons stand at the lip of the roof like prison guards, watching the proceedings below.
What’s happened here, I don’t know. It can’t be good. That I do know.
Suddenly, a clack-clack on my passenger-side window scares me out of my pants. A round, inquisitive woman’s face, with a blue plastic-covered cop hat pulled down to her eyebrows, hangs outside the glass, staring in at me. An oversized black flashlight barrel shows above the window frame, its hard metal rim touching the glass, its beam shining over my head. The face’s mouth moves, says something I can’t make out, then a hand with pudgy fingers makes a little circular roll-’er-down motion, which I instantly perform from my side, letting in a gust of cold.
“Hi,” the woman says from outside. She smiles so as not to seem officially menacing. “How’re we doing, sir?” Her question intends that I need to be doing fine and be eager to say so. Rain mist has dampened her shiny black hat bill and made her cheeks shiny.
“I’m great,” I say. “What’s happened here?”
“Can you state your business here for me today, sir?” She blinks. She’s a thick, pie-faced woman who looks forty but is probably twenty-five. Her teeth are small and white, and her lips thin and unhabituated to smiling except in official ways. She’s undoubtedly been a law enforcement major somewhere and had plenty of practice looking in car windows, though her aspect isn’t alarming, only definite. I’m not doing anything illegal—seeking lunch. Though also wanting pretty seriously to take a leak.
“I just came for lunch.” I smile as if I’d divulged a secret.
The policewoman’s smooth face doesn’t alter, just processes info. “This is a hospital, sir.” She glances up at Haddam Doctors four-storey tan-brick facade as if to make sure she’s right. On her yellow slicker a black name tag says Bohmer over a stamped-on black police badge. A microphone is Velcro’d to her left shoulder so she can talk and still hold a gun on you.
I know it’s a hospital, ma’am, I’m tempted to say; my son died in it. Instead, I chirp, “I know it’s a hospital, but the cafeteria’s a super place for lunch.”
Officer Bohmer’s smile renounces a little of its definiteness and becomes amused and patronizing. She sees now that I’m one of those people, the ones who eat their lunch in the fucking hospital, who sit in libraries all day leafing through Popular Mechanics, World War II picture books and topless-native layouts in National Geographics. The ones who don’t fit. She’s rousted my type. We’re harmless when kept on a short leash.
“What happened inside there?” I ask again, and look toward the police goings-on, then back to Officer Bohmer, whose heifer eyes have fixed me again. Outside air is making my hands and cheeks cold. Her shoulder microphone crackles, but she doesn’t attend to it.
“Tell me again, sir, what your business here is,” she says in a buttoned-up way. She takes a peek through at the backseat, where I’ve got two Realty-Wise signs I’m taking to the office.
“I came for lunch. I’ve done it for years. The lunch is good. You should eat there.”
“Where do you live, sir?” Staring at my signs.
“Sea-Clift. I used to live here, though.”
Her eyes drift back to me. “You lived here in Haddam?”
“I sold real estate. I own my own company on the Shore. Realty-Wise.”
“And how long have you lived over there?”
“Eight years. About.”
“And you lived here before?”
“On Cleveland Street. And before that on Hoving Road.”
“And could I just have a look at your driver’s license?” Officer Bohmer is the picture of female resolve and patience. She glances up and over the hood of my Suburban, checking to see how quick her backup could arrive in case I produce a German Luger and not a billfold. “And your registration and proof of insurance.”
I get about retrieving these documents—first from my wallet, then, under Officer Bohmer’s interested eye, from the glove compartment, where a pistol would be if I had one.
She takes my documents in her pink digits, pinching the papers and getting them wet, looking up once to match my face to my picture. Then she hands them all back. More static crackles in her mike, a male voice says something that includes a number, and Officer Bohmer turns her chin to the little speaker and in a different, harder-edged voice snaps, “Negative on that. I’ll maintain a twenty.” The man’s voice replies something unintelligible but also authoritative, and the transmission is over. “Thanks, that’s great, Mr. Bascombe. Now I need you to turn ’er around and head on out again. Okay?”
“Can you tell me what happened over there?” I ask for the third time.
“Sir. A device detonated outside the cafeteria this morning.”
A device. “What kind of device? Anybody hurt?” I say this to Officer Bohmer’s raincoat belly.
“We’re trying to find out what happened, sir.”
In the blast area, I see police are huddling around something o
n the ground, and another uniformed officer is taking a photograph of it, the little digital camera held clumsily out in front of him.
Officer Bohmer’s slick yellow raincoat front and imposing black flashlight barrel are all I can see from inside as she steps back from my window and with the flash makes a tiny sweeping movement to indicate what she’d like to see my car do. “Just turn ’er around right here,” her police academy voice says again, “and take ’er right out the way you came.”
A gas leak is what I’m thinking. Some pressurized container for hospital use only, that got too close to a pilot light. Yet something that requires the ATF?
My tires squeeze and scrape as I make the tight turn-around in the hospital drive—a Suburban doesn’t change course easily. I take a look at the boarded cafeteria windows and the squads of police and firemen and hospital officials milling in the drizzle and the lights of their idling vehicles, the black-suited commandos standing roof guard just in case. The faces at the windows are all taking note of my car. “What’s he doing?” “Read the license number.” “Why are they letting him go?” “Who’s to blame? Who’s to blame? Who’s to blame?”
Officer Bohmer is now gone from sight as I “take ’er right out.” But another policeman in a yellow rain slicker and black cop’s hat is up ahead, stopping cars as they turn in and dispatching them elsewhere.
“Any idea who did this?” I say to this new man as I idle past. He is an older officer I know, or once did, a big Polack with heavy brows, a pale, smooth face and mirthful eyes—Sgt. Klemak, a Gotham PD veteran, escaped to the suburbs. He once gave me an unjustified yellow-light summons that set me back seventy bucks, but wouldn’t remember me now, which is just as well.
“We’re doing our best out here, sir!” Sgt. Klemak shouts over the traffic and rain hiss. He seems to be having fun doing his job.