|
On weekdays Ellen never cooks, they grab take-out or have frozen pizzas. One of the great realizations of married life turns out to be that you still eat frozen pizzas. Adam had always envisioned something more regal, more Kennedy-esque; stately dinners at a candle-lit mahogany table. They did get a mahogany table, but they usually take plates to the couch in the living room and watch the evening news as they eat. Cooking just seems quaint, an old-fashioned use of time. Ellen enjoys the process of making a meal, but insists on reserving at least two hours for the preparations. She only takes this kind of time when dinner guests are coming.
From an armchair in the study Adam can hear Ellen in the kitchen, narrating her own puttering. Beneath the clang of dishes and splashes of water in the sink her half-whispering voice describes movements in a sort of kitchen play-by-play. “Half a cup, just like that.” “Back to the counter, crushing herbs.” If she notices you listening, she stops.
Adam closes his eyes and feels the seeping pleasure of the week's fatigue slipping away. The noises from the kitchen register with the minor importance of distant news, a babbling at the edge of consciousness. He has not napped in ages. During the week he feels too guilty, and on weekends he still feels too guilty. Just eight years out of law school, he already has too many clients, too much work. Ellen practically drugged him with three rum-and-cokes as he listened to the Cubs game this afternoon. But by the end of the 8th inning the Cubs are not losing, and he is actually close to sleeping.
When Adam wakes up his mouth is cottony dry and the sun is close to setting. He goes to kitchen for a glass of water and Ellen tells him the dinner guests are friends of hers involved with social work on the South Side of Chicago. He notices a familiar pre-socializing tension in her voice; she wants the evening to go well and gets nervy beforehand. He quickly slips his arms around her waist in a long hug by the sink. The glass of wine in her hand almost drops to the floor and she gives a gasp of surprise as he kisses her neck.
Her dinners emerge from a series of peripheral adjustments. Chilling wine and mixing spices, crushing garlic and chopping vegetables. There's never a central task, just a perpetual sense of minor bustling. She continues briefing him on the dinner guests, Mark and Sarah Anderson. They work with the housing projects and last month they ate canned beans and peanut butter sandwiches for almost two weeks after they gave their food budget to a woman with hungry kids. They have a history of foolish kindness. Letting drunks and bums sleep in their apartment on cold nights and then getting furniture stolen and smashed. Giving away clothing and food and friends' money to help people they hardly know. He watches Ellen squeeze a lemon into a blue plastic bowl.
Tahoma">“So should we be serving them cans of tomato soup and dollar loaves of white bread tonight?”
She frowns at his joke, squeezes more lemon.
“They enjoy a good meal. There's nothing holier-than-thou about them.”
“So they aren't Christians?”
“Not that I know of.”
She feigns some indignation at his assumption, though he knows she shares it.
“Because that could make sense.”
“Sarah definitely was not a Christian in college. We had a bet to see who could get laid in the campus chapel first.”
“Right.”
“Aren't you going to ask me who won?”
“Who won?”
“She did.”
Before dinner is served both couples sit in the living room and talk over toasted squares of bread and mozzarella that Ellen brings out on a warm tray from the kitchen. Adam searches the pair for signs of noble shabbiness. Mark wears a faded green and white plaid shirt with jeans and a corduroy jacket. Sarah wears a red sweater and jeans. They could be graduate students, reading philosophy in a cramped apartment and making love on a mattress bought with student loans. Mark is slender and has a talent for gestural drama. He makes minor movements very interesting, the adjusting of glasses or chewing of an appetizer become implausibly captivating. He speaks quietly, leaning backward in a plush velour armchair in the living room. They have arranged a quartet of chairs in a semi-circle, with Ellen coming and going from the kitchen despite sporadic protests that she sit down and join them. Just one more thing, she keeps saying. “So Adam, how long have you and Ellen been in Chicago?”
Adam finds hearing his own name spoken vaguely unsettling. Mark's voice is neutral and tired, engagingly detached.
“It's sort of become our adopted hometown, we're from the east coast but we met here about 5 years ago.”
He wants to leave it at that, but Ellen takes over the narrative from the kitchen. She goes through the medium-length version of how they met, mentioning the specific course at the law school but neglecting to describe the color and material of clothing they were wearing when they met. Mark listens without any sort of affect. He almost looks bored. Sarah parts her lips, smiles, raises her eyebrows, and makes small sounds of acknowledgment to ease the story along. Ellen comes back from the kitchen and says to Mark,
“Chicago's just a beautiful city, really.”
“Parts of it are.
“I know working with the projects must give you a different view of things.”
Ellen's voice is conciliatory, preempting dissonance.
“Maybe not a different view, but certainly a broader view of the same picture.”
“Well from what I hear things have been improving over the last few years. Maybe we have you two to thank for that?”
“You have your isolated success stories, and the media tends to cover those. But I don't know that anyone needs to be thanked for providing basic services that the rest of us take for granted. That for me is not cause for gratitude; it's just the foundation.”
Mark's voice remains neutral, unaccusing, just imparting the facts. Adam almost wants him to get self-righteous and sanctimonious, to make himself more easily dismissed.
“Remind me what sort of social policy work you do?”
“Our main focus right now is health care. We're a small nonprofit that provides support to families and statistics to large nonprofits and government groups. Basically we try to get people food, doctors, jobs, counseling, whatever they need.”
The sun is almost down as they move to the table and eat strips of lemon-battered steak with Italian salad and chilled white wine. Talk drifts and turns. Ellen's cooking, the Cubs, the surprising goodness of both today. Adam feels genuine admiration for the couple, but it's tinged with a sort moral envy, a petty desire to impeach their motives. They show no scorn for the posh apartment, no reluctance to eat the fresh steak or risotto bought at an absurdly expensive natural foods store. But he still feels a faint sense of reproach, an implied unpleasantness behind the sentences.
Mark seems very familiar somehow, and Adam finally remembers seeing him on TV late one night. It was an interview on the public access channel about human rights and his work in Chicago. At various points during the exchanges you could hear people talking into the mics behind the camera, not realizing their voices were being broadcast along with the interview. Once a man carrying a metal folding table walked across the back of the studio and got right onto the middle of the screen before he realized they were filming live. Mark had a wry amused expression during the haphazard show and after the table incident Adam remembers Mark saying to the embarrassed host, ‘maybe he needs some help with that table?'
Just before the peach cobbler and vanilla ice cream the conversation gets back to the Henry Horner homes and other Chicago projects. Ellen asks something along the lines of what's it really like there, sounding luridly fascinated, a kid peeping into a sordid tent at the carnival. Mark replies patiently.
“Well take healthcare, that's what we've been looking at lately. It's virtually non-existent. Maybe one out of ten families is on a plan. The rest rely on improvised cures and faith, hot tea and prayers. Let me tell you a true story. One day this plumber goes to work in a project building for a family with a sick daughter. The girl's mom is expecting a doctor when he knocks on the door. She's called a service that makes house visits and is waiting for the doctor. So she opens the door and sees a plumber in blue denim overalls holding a steel toolbox, and brings him in to look at her daughter. He tries to explain to her that he's a plumber, answering a call to this building. But the kid's mom is upset, close to breaking down, and she presses him until he says he'll see what he can do. Basically this woman needs to believe that he fixes kids, not toilets. The real doctor never shows, and he can't disappoint her So he finds some Tylenol in a medicine cabinet and tells the girl a little story, then prescribes lots of sleep and fluids. A few days later she stops coughing, goes back to school. Word starts to spread and at first he's reluctant, but after a couple of months he's making house-calls throughout the projects. He does sick kids, pets, grandparents, drug-lords, pimps; the whole spectrum. He still carries his plumber's tools and when someone opens their door he asks, ‘what kind of shit today?' He's become this small-time legend, a healer of the slums. He's known on the streets now, somebody people wave to. Our agency stumbled on him doing door-to-door surveys on health care. This name kept coming up and gradually we pieced things together. The guy has become placebo personified, gone from plumber to ghetto doctor and folk hero. His effectiveness and lack of training are irrelevant; it's the power of a man with a plunger and wrenches showing up to fix your health. People have made him something.”
Adam loves the story. He wants it to remain a story, self-contained, but waits for Mark to draw a moral from it and shape it into a stimulus, an argument against inaction.
“It shows something about the strength of people, their perseverance, but it also shows what happens to a specific set of people who live in appalling conditions, and this is something we can change.”
People are talking, but Adam looks out the living room window and sees the shaded roofscape at dusk; antennas and satellite dishes, pigeon coops and pools. The Chicago neighborhood cooling as daylight fades. He can't help thinking of his own small involvement with someone on the South Side. He took the red line of the EL south of downtown maybe a week ago and the people on the train gradually became more uniform in color. By the end of the line he was the only white person left on the train. He was doing pro bono work for a law firm on the South Side of the city and had to meet a client for pizza to discuss how to downplay a charge. His client was a seventeen-year-old boy who had gotten into Northwestern on an academic scholarship. Two months before he graduated from high school he was charged with armed robbery of a convenience store. Adam rode the train in casual work clothes, just slacks and a blue dress shirt, but he still felt slightly absurd among the old sweatshirts and stained jeans, the empty plastic bags of chips on the floor. A self-appointed minister got on the train after all the white people had gotten off and started preaching, flecks of spit shooting from his mouth. Adam stared out the window, willing himself not be incorporated into a sermon by a razzed prophet chanting about Jesus and fatigue. He tries to think of a way to mention this, to tell the story of his work with this young man, the hour they spent discussing the charges and talking about his hope to still go to college, the fact that they'll meet again next week. It's the only pro bono work he has done, and he feels eager to mention it, maybe even embellish a bit and invent a friendship with his client. But he can't find a way to make it slip casually into the stream of conversation, which is now darting between peach cobbler recipes and nostalgia for college.
As they are getting coats and moving toward the door Mark asks him about work at the law firm. The term tax-deductible donation comes up, and Adam realizes the story about the plumber was just a subtle prelude to a request for money, that maybe the whole evening has been converging on this point. He tells Mark that they should meet in a few weeks after he has looked over this month's budget at the firm and talk more about the possibilities. They shake hands all around and say goodnight. An incredibly light rain is falling over the city as they tidy the kitchen, make love, and fall asleep.
For his next train ride into the South Side, Adam brings a book of medieval religious philosophy. It's austere and demanding enough to absorb his attention for most of the ride, though he notices the same darkening of skin as a function of distance from downtown. It's impossible not to notice. He makes a point of noticing other things, the beauty of the day, sunlight on red brick, glints and reflections from the distant glass and steel of skyscrapers downtown. By the end of the train ride he thinks the existence of God has been proved, but he isn't really tracking the argument for the last few pages. A couple is fighting on the train, a young man in a giant yellow jersey is standing over a small woman with a stroller and shouting.
“Why you do me like that? Why you do me like that?”
He feels less worried about the woman than concerned that the man will do something physical that will make his intervention necessary. He looks around at the other men on the train, gauging the potentials for joint action. But they seem unanimously indifferent, sunk in their private boredoms and despair. The couple gets off one stop before him, the woman stoic, silently pushing the stroller onto the train platform as the man follows behind, berating her.
“You think you got a baby now you can do me like that? HUH?”
As the train pulls away he sees the man push her suddenly from behind. She falls to her knees by the stroller and he spreads his arms wide and holds them in the air, menacing over her. After a moment she gets up shakily, moving slow, keeping her body between him and the stroller.
They meet for pizza at a place a few blocks from the train stop. He gets two large slices of pepperoni and finds a booth near the back. They are supposed to talk today about court, the procedure, how to behave, what to say, what they want to happen. It was a first offense, and his teachers had only glowing things to say about him. Basically the crime was an aberration; it didn't make sense. After a few minutes his client walks in wearing a hooded violet Northwestern sweatshirt and blue jeans, his green backpack from school still slung over one shoulder. He looks at the file to remind himself of the client's first name: Alex. They shake hands, more of a slap that Adam tries to convert into a shake. The boy slides into the red plastic seat of the booth, pushing his bag ahead of him.
“Thanks for the pizza.”
At their last meeting Alex seemed scared, and was stand-offish. Today there is an anxious tension, a sense of skepticism contained.
“No problem, I figured pepperoni was a safe bet.”
“Yeah, that's good.”
Adam starts a talk about the court date and the kid shakes large quantities of crushed spicy peppers and Parmesan cheese onto his slice of pizza. He eats carefully and slowly, listening to the spiel with an attention that makes Adam self-consciousness. A look like, this is not quite bullshit but it's getting close.
“Basically I just wanted to familiarize you with some of the terminology today, talk about how we should present the case.”
Alex keeps giving him this look, and halfway through his piece of pizza he says.
“Aren't you gonna ask me what happened, why I did it?”
“If you want to tell me, I want to hear. Whatever you say can stay at this table.”
The kid points at his chest, the white lettering of the college name flowing across his shirt.
“This gets me a lot of shit. People knew I was going up to Evanston, getting tours and offers from them. So then the principal decides it's a good idea to bring me up in front of the whole school at this assembly and tell everybody how well I'm doing, and that kids should be more like me.”
He picks some pepper flakes from his plate and sticks them on the tip of his tongue.
“The day of the assembly, some kids tried to push me around after school. You know, like if you so smart why don't you teach us something, that sort of stuff. Anyway I go home with some bruises and my mom's all freaked out, wants to get me a doctor. So the plumber comes over.”
He pauses, realizing that this should confuse Adam.
“Well he's sort of a doctor too, and he fixes me up a little. Then later that night I run into the same kids outside my building and they've got a gun. They tell me to come with them, so I gotta go. We walk to this 7-11 and stand outside and they push the gun at me and are like, go in there and get us the money in the register or we'll shoot you. So what am I gonna do?”
He looks straight at Adam and waits for an answer to a question Adam took as rhetorical.
“I guess there wasn't much choice, Alex.”
Adam thinks his words sound forced and too formal, but Alex keeps talking, working into the flow of his narrative.
“You're damn right there wasn't. I've seen and heard them shooting each other since I was a kid. We got a saying that bullets like the mail; comes in the afternoon about 3. See the mail never comes on time either, that's part of the joke. It comes eventually, but you never know when.”
Adam knows the rest of the story from the police reports and film footage he has researched. The whole episode was caught on hidden camera. Alex standing by the Cheetos rack with a gun under his t-shirt, hovering and indecisive, seemingly choosing between a bag of spicy hot Cheetos and an attempt at armed robbery. The clerk spotted the gun right away and had called the cops long before Alex made a clumsy rush at the counter and demanded all the money in the register. Adam knows that they have two witnesses who could confirm the presence of a group of teenage boys standing outside the store at the time of the crime, so Alex's account of his motive seems plausible.
“Had these kids bothered you before?”
“They never gave me too hard a time, but I'm not outside much. They let me go home and do my thing.”
“Which was studying?”
Alex chews, swallows, sips from his water glass that is full of cherry coke.
“Yeah, read sometimes, or I help my mom out.”
“So this was the first time they had assaulted you?”
“I been in some fights before, but not with guns.”
“Well I'm glad you told me about that Alex, that will help us in court.”
Alex takes a big bite and chews, shaking his head no. A faint sheen of sweat is starting to bead and run high on his forehead.
“No, see I can't go to court. That's why I wanted to meet with you and explain. I know you're taking your spare time to come help me out here and I appreciate that, but I can't go to court. I can't go to court and say all this stuff or something bad'll happen. You said what I told you would stay at this table, right?”
“Right, don't worry about that.”
Adam gets two more large slices of pepperoni and explains that testifying is the only way for Alex to get the charges dismissed. He alludes to the possibility of physical protection for Alex, but when pressed he can't guarantee safety. Alex wants someone to walk his 12-year-old sister home from school every day; he wants someone else to stand in front of the kitchen window when his mom cooks. He doesn't mention protection for himself. Adam says he needs some time to think about the options, and they set up a meeting in another week. The sun is almost down as they walk outside together, the street noisy with crowded fuming buses and old cars stalled in the gloaming. Adam tries to say goodbye and walk to the train, but Alex just keeps walking next to him and says,
“I'm gonna walk you to the train.”
On the ride back into the city Adam looks out at the brick buildings and alleys rushing past in the deepening dusk. He can't focus on the book of philosophy. He used to read philosophy during law school; he would skip out of classes for half the semester and sharpen his mind with obscure arguments from 14th century scholars. Classmates would tease him but he graduated at the top of his class, 2nd in a class of 180 from the University of Chicago's law school. He catches himself thinking about his academic success at vulnerable moments, he summons the gleam of name and rank at telling times. Arguing over a minor traffic accident, enduring some small humiliation in court, or standing silently in a crowded cocktail party, temporarily excluded from conversation. In these moments he reassures himself with a catechism of clout, a monologing on his own impressiveness. Dartmouth undergrad, honors in history and political science, Chicago law, 2nd in a class of 180.
He notices himself doing this now and feels absurd and continues to do it anyway. He looks at an old woman bundled in a blue coat, too hot for the May evening, her head leaning against the dirty glass of the train window. She snores gently and starts each time the loudspeaker announces a stop, only to doze off before they reach the next one. To have to lord his achievements over her seems petty, his bywords for prestige don't signify. He gets these tired hostile stares from people on the train - the ones who aren't asleep or ignoring him - and he feels almost combative, angry behind a shield of privilege. He tries not to get drawn into some sophomoric debate with himself about the nature and causes of poverty, the relative merits of institutional and individual reform. It all feels rehearsed and removed, beside the point somehow. He wants to do something to help Alex.
The next day Mark calls. It's only been a week since dinner but he wants to meet for lunch. Adam is anxious to get out of the office; the highlight of his morning was the meltdown of an octogenarian in the lobby. She was convinced that her will was swindling her loved ones, though she herself had just dictated it a month ago. He takes the elevator down 13 floors and emerges a few blocks south of Michigan Avenue and heads for the lake. The color of the lake in the early afternoon is one of his favorite sights, the shimmer and dazzles of sunlight on water. When he gets anxious he savors these small splendors of the physical world, greedy for snatches of beauty like a smoker sucking down drags. He's worried at the prospect of dealing with the daughter of the octogenarian after lunch. He's also worried about things with Ellen; he's gone soft the last three times they tried to make love. The beginning is good and exciting, but then he just loses interest, and hardness. This is supposed to happen after forty years of marriage, not five.
He meets Mark and they get chicken Caesar salads and beers at a place on Madison Ave, just off the loop. They talk about work. The doors of the restaurant clang open and closed as they eat, letting in periodic gusts of clamor from the street. Adam vaguely wants things to get personal, but he can't just say, ‘So I hear your wife had sex in the campus chapel' or ‘Did you really eat beans for two weeks?' or ‘How do you stay hard till your wife comes?' These questions float in his head, unasked. He feels the same curiosity about Mark that he felt at dinner and wonders how his professional ethics translate into the quirks of friendships and love, the messiness of private life? He does mention the public access interview he saw on late night TV and Mark laughs, remembering the episode. Then Mark asks,
“So have you had a chance to go over budgets for the month?”
Adam admires the efficiency of the remark, the getting-down-to-business after ordering lunch and sharing a laugh.
“I have, and I think we can make a contribution.”
“That would be wonderful. Ellen told me you also do pro bono work with a firm based on the South Side? Maybe we work with some of the same people.”
“Actually I'm in the middle of a very interesting case right now.”
The word interesting makes the case sound purely academic, bleached of human import. Adam tells Mark the major details of Alex's case, omitting names and dates, but conveying the conflict between a full confession and safety.
“I think he needs to testify. Is this Alex Robbins? “
Mark pauses, senses that a reply is not forthcoming, and continues.
“I'm assuming it is; he's a special kid. A lot of people want to see him succeed. Why don't you come by my office and I'll show you a few things.”
They pay the bill and take a crowded midday train into the Bronzeville neighborhood of Chicago. Mark's office is on the second floor of a small white house that his nonprofit uses for all of their operations. There's a makeshift daycare, a library, and internet access on the first floor. The 2nd floor has offices. Mark's office is tiny, overflowing with papers and books. Pictures of Sarah and him with sunburns atop mountains and a degree from Swarthmore hang on the pale blue walls. A potted cactus sits on the side of his desk.
“Alex has been coming here since he was 13.”
Mark sits down in a wood chair behind the desk, then continues.
“He was close to dropping out of school, joining gangs, selling drugs. We got him interested in other stuff, gave him a good place to hang out after school, older kids for role models. He met girls from Northwestern who were volunteering here, and had such a huge crush on one of them he said that was where he wanted to go someday. This was Alex at 14.”
Mark retains an efficient tone; he tells the story without savoring the act of telling a story.
“Things went really well for him, considering. He stayed in school, studied like mad for his SATs, and got into Northwestern. The last few months he's been scarce, we knew something had happened because his mom came in and told us something had happened. But he was distancing himself, outgrowing us maybe or just embarrassed to face the staff here after the robbery charge.”
Mark rummages through a file and finds some photos of Alex. In a fairly recent one he holds a copy of Dickens' Great Expectations, in an older one a younger Alex stands between two college-aged girls, an arm around each of their shoulders and a big grin on his face. Another photo shows Alex asleep on a couch, his legs criss-crossed and spindly inside a pair of voluminous jeans. Mark explains that the heating systems in building in the projects are so sporadic that in the summer they often continue blasting heat into the apartment units. Alex slept at the center for most of a July one summer until his building finally turned the heat off. Mark shows him a paper Alex wrote for an English class on Edgar Allen Poe, a thank-you letter he wrote to the staff, other odds and ends from Alex's life at the community center. He reads the words and gets a deeper sense of him, an earnest quality in the prose that seems improbable for a teenage boy. Also a quick wit; he compares Poe's raven to Mayor Daley, knocking at the doors of the state legislature. He compares the raven to a drug lord, knocking down the doors of an addict who owes him money. He finishes reading and looks up at Mark, who's holding his glasses and polishing them on his shirt.
“I realize safety is a very real concern. I'd be willing to testify if Alex doesn't feel like he can, do you think that would help?”
Adam tells Mark this is a good idea, but the case will hinge on Alex's testimony. He makes a check out for a thousand dollars and leaves it with the secretary in the front office. As he leaves he tells Mark that he should come along to his next meeting with Alex.
They meet at the same pizza place the next week. From the moment Alex walks in the door Adam can tell something is wrong. Alex is breathing hard as he sits down, his white t-shirt is torn in two places, and he won't look Adam in the eye. He moves in jerks and starts, almost spills a glass of water. Adam wonders if he's having some sort of attack, asthma maybe. He doesn't have a book bag, and he's sweating too much. When Adam asks him if everything is okay, he says quickly
“Yeah, yeah, just tell me what you got to say.”
Adam wants Mark to arrive right away, to take charge of the situation and get Alex calmed down, but he had a meeting and would be a few minutes late. Adam goes to the counter and orders two slices, trusting vainly in the curative power of pizza, and brings it back to the table. Alex nods slightly in thanks and eats quickly, still jangled up from some unknown scuffle or fear. He won't tell Adam anything; he just fidgets in his seat and looks out the window at cars and people.
“Are you being followed, should we go somewhere else?”
“No, man. Just tell me your stuff.”
There's an edge of anger to his voice now. He looks Adam right in the eye and holds the stare, willing conflict into things. Adam looks down at his pizza, takes a bite slowly, lets the moment defuse.
“Well the first thing is that I invited a mutual friend of ours to meet us today. Mark Anderson.”
This calms him for a moment, stills his spiraling forces into a temporary lull.
“Mark's coming?”
He smiles.
“Mark's a good guy. But why is he coming here? I don't want him mixed up with this.”
Before Adam can reply a deep blast propels Alex into the back cushion of the booth, blood staining his white shirt in red splotches. The window to their left shatters and glass crackles across the table, the pizza, the cokes, the salt-and-pepper shakers and metal napkin holders. The noise of the gunshot is still in his ears and he hears Alex hiss through clenched teeth,
“Get down, man.”
Alex slouches deeper beneath the table in a slow crumpling motion. Adam is aware of a faint background commotion that would normally be deafening but now sounds like distant, babbling voices. He reaches out to Alex, tries to establish the location of the shot.
They are both half-crammed under the table. Alex groans and blood bubbles out of his mouth in a dark froth that looks like clotted raspberry juice. Alex groans again, and Adam hears the doors of the restaurant slam open and closed and the shrieks and stomps of people running, drinks and plates splitting and hitting the floor.
“Some kids are looking for me.”
Suddenly there is a second gunshot blast and the noise of glass shattering. Then the sound of rubber squealing and an engine gunning away on the street outside. The blood is soaking through Alex's t-shirt, and Adam sees the wound in too much detail. A serrated hole in the left upper chest, bits of white cotton blown inward and fused to his dark skin. Alex's head is lolling back against the seat, his body half-hidden under the table. His eyes are rolling back in his head.
“You're gonna be fine.”
Things are quiet for what might be a minute. Wheezing and whispers. Adam waits a little longer with his hand resting on the damp of Alex's arm, then rises and looks around the empty restaurant at toppled chairs and shattered glass. There are two holes in the back of the booth where he was just sitting. People start emerging gradually from under tables and behind the bar and from the back kitchen and when his head starts working, starts understanding his temporal relation to this scene, his very real involvement in it, he starts shouting,
“Somebody call a doctor!”
He moves Alex gingerly from under the table and a man helps him to spread Alex out on the dirty floor, sticky with spilled soft drinks and now with Alex's blood slowly pooling beneath him on the old concrete. He is wheezing, making strangled awful sounds with each breath. People gather in a small circle and look at him in a torpor of mute spectation. An old lady wearing a purple sun-hat is slumped in a stool, unhurt, but muttering over and over again “Oh my god” “Oh my god.” It's afternoon, cars are going past outside, the street is noisy and the light is soft. Adam looks down at his blue dress shirt, which Ellen just got back from the dry cleaners and it's covered in blood. He tries tilting Alex to the side slightly to ease his desperate sucking of air. But the movement makes him groan and gurgle, so Adam stops. He sounds like he is slowly suffocating on blood. Adam knows something needs to happen, he shouts again for a doctor, says soothing nonsense to Alex. He loses track of time, watching the agonized plea written in the boy's face. Mark shows up maybe ten minutes later. Alex has lost consciousness and a good-sized crowd has gathered and what might be an ambulance is audible in the distance. Mark pushes through the crowd and kneels over the boy's chest. Tears start forming in Mark's eyes as he listens for vital signs and starts giving directions to the crowd, asking for water and a rag to fashion some sort of belated tourniquet. The old woman is crying softly, the restaurant owner is muttering about who's gonna pay for all this damage to my place. Then a middle-aged man in blue denim overalls pushes his way solemnly through the crowd, holding a toilet plunger and a steel toolbox. People step aside as he moves forward, and he says quietly,
“It's okay, I'm a doctor.”
|
