The Duration (3 page)

Chickie was already a half-hour late. I called the number I had in my cell, but it went straight to voicemail and that was full anyway. I walked to the entrance to KMC and approached the information desk, where the nurse receptionist looked at me suspiciously. Light brown skin, a robust waistline, a tattoo peeking out from the collar of her shirt. Big hoops hanging from her ears, wrong side of 28 and 215. Which made two of us, except for the hoops. She had long lacquered nails that looked unlikely to pass muster in an operating room. Her name tag said “Lemon.”

“Hello, Lemon,” I said. “I'm supposed to be meeting someone. I think he was a patient here.”

She sort of rolled her face, as though skeptical of the very notion of meeting someone, and looked at her computer screen.

“What's the patient's name?”

“Chickie Benecik,” I said. “Philip Benecik.”

Nobody'd called him Philip in, like, the entirety of my existence. Even his mom called him Chickie.

Lemon kept looking at the screen.

“Your name?”

“Peter Johansson.” I gave her a smoldering look, the one I'd used to reel in Kelly, the one I used to put on at the foul line when there were cute girls in the stands.

“Sorry,” she said. “But you're not on our list. I can't give you any information about a patient. It's the law.”

“So he was a patient?”

Lemon looked annoyed.

“What I mean is if he was a patient, and he's not a patient anymore, then you can tell me that, right? That's legal. Trust me. I'm actually a lawyer myself.”

Feckless. But maybe charming in its fecklessness? I'd gotten by with it before.

Lemon seemed briefly willing to engage, the blinds of bureaucracy open an inch. Another nurse ambled by and gave me the evil eye, sort of impressively for someone wearing flower-print scrubs. Lemon glanced at her and harrumphed. Some history there.

“Come on, Lemon,” I said. “Don't let her come between us.”

Lemon rolled her eyes.

I laughed.

“I'm just messing,” I said, chuckling, looking at my watch. Not a threat until it's too late. I could do this all day. It's where I excelled. “When life gives me a lemon, you know what I do? I say thanks. I'm not trying to squash it, either. It's perfect just the way it is.”

Lemon returned to her computer screen, but she was smiling.

“This says he checked out two hours ago,” she said, and then, “What did you say your name was?”

“Pete Johansson.”

She reached down below her desk and came back with a manila envelope. Chickie's writing. Block letters.
Pete So Handsome
.

Her hoops swayed.

“This you?” she asked, raising her eyebrows sort of skeptically.

I took the envelope, held it up to the blinking hospital fluorescents, but the manila was thick and opaque. I considered not opening it. Sure, maybe there'd be something great inside, something that would make me feel less annoyed about having taken a vacation day to drive two and a half hours out of Boston just to be stood up in the entrance hall of KMC. But what were the odds? You gonna come through like that, envelope? Probably not. Once, looking to furnish our apartment via Craigslist in a style I liked to call “Victorian Indochine,” I bought an old wooden cabinet for $20 from a guy who cleaned postmortem estate basements. It was a radio cabinet with a bad paint job, but the top lifted straight up like a treasure chest and I had visions of turning it into a bar. When I was putting it into the apartment, Kelly noticed that one side of it was hollow, and after a little inspection it became clear that there was a hidden panel on that side, a space beneath the main panel that wasn't there on the other side. I knocked on it. I could see, under the paint, the places where small stays had been hammered in to hold the wood in place. I got excited. Who knows what might be in there? A map? Of course it was a map. Or a will. Or a gun, the gun used to shoot a good man in a cold cone of streetlight. I got a lot of mileage out of that panel during the cocktail parties we threw in those early days. Sometimes I'd come at the thing with a screwdriver and the guests would almost shriek. But I left it sealed up each time. Kelly said maybe I should just keep it that way since, odds were, the fantasy was sure to trump the reality. Sort of a bedrock principle of our relationship, come to think of it. But then football season came, and one weekend I got a little drunk watching the Patriots short-yardage themselves into another loss and decided that the time had come, and the screwdriver was at hand, and the paint chipped all over the floor, and when I finally pried the board back, the space behind it was empty. Kelly got the little vacuum and shook her head.

I ripped the envelope open, sighed like I wasn't interested, and felt around inside. I came out with a glossy brochure for a local health spa called Head-Connect at Fleur-de-Lys, the kind of brochure that's folded into thirds and available at the front desk. That was it.

I looked at Lemon.

“Head-Connect at Fleur-de-Lys,” I said.

Lemon just looked at me.

“You ever been there?”

She raised her eyebrows like I'd asked her to try a weird food or whether she'd ever been to Japan. A sort of protective revulsion, a do-not-want-what-I-haven't-got kind of thing.

“No, I have not,” she said.

Head-Connect was a four-figure-a-night place down in Gable, a mystery spa whose guests roamed vast lawns and were chauffeured through the county in white vans. I'd never been inside. Well, that wasn't totally true.

I turned the brochure over. Looked into the envelope again. It was empty.

“Is this where he's staying?” I asked, more to myself than Lemon.

“Mr. Johansson, I can't give you any information about a patient,” she said. “But the way he looked I doubt it.”

I walked back to the Escalade, head on a swivel but no sign of Chick. I sat in the front seat and sipped the dregs of my rest-stop coffee. I had to take a piss, but couldn't bring myself to go back in and ask Lemon for the restroom. Our relationship, I felt, had run its course. Once, during a particularly rough period in college, I tried to hit on a young nursing student at the school infirmary after a panicked screening for syphilis. I was clean—jeez!—but the nursing student still wasn't interested, and I'd learned not to press my luck with nurses. Plus, I didn't trust hospital restrooms. The number of hand-washing posters, the industrial disinfectants, they all hinted at some bad shit lurking in the grout.

I tossed the envelope in the passenger seat and headed down to Gable, the glory of the Knotsford-Gable Road, the same garish landmarks in reverse. I took the spur off 20 and headed over toward the Church-on-the-Hill, in whose parking lot, in a long-ago January, I used to make out with a high school girl named Rochelle Scalise. It was one of the few places around town that the local cops didn't patrol, and we'd cut the engine and drop the seats back and yeah, sure, it was next to a graveyard and like 14°F out, but my thinking at the time was something along the lines of that'd just make Rochelle hold me closer. When you're young, you're strategic. On the matter of tactics, however, I could never figure out how to get my hand under her bra. In retrospect, maybe winter wasn't the season for it. There's something quintessentially adolescent, I guess, something almost noble, about trying to feel up a girl in a cemetery parking lot with a hand that is like
this
close to frostbite. I could still remember the beckoning warmth of Rochelle's right breast as I stretched for it under the hem of her sweatshirt—the thing a small sun, a thermal reactor, a still-warm bagel. God bless her for letting me try too. She probably saved me a few fingers.

I pulled into the parking lot, just like old times, the same worn hedges, the same crumbling tablets. I guess not a lot changes in graveyards. I cut the engine and tried to figure out, having come all this way, what to do next. Option 1: turn off my cell phone, gas up, and be back in Boston in two hours, beating traffic if I left right then. Option 1 held some appeal.

Then there was Option 2. I picked up the envelope and shook its contents out onto the seat. The brochure came out and fluttered open like a bat. Something slipped from its folds and landed on the floor. I reached over and picked it up. It was a piece of medical scrip, folded three ways like the brochure itself. On it was a pencil sketch. The sketch was rough and not very good, but I probably could have figured out what it was if I studied it. So I didn't.

We'd sprung a fish from an abandoned mini-golf once. It was May 2002, after the annual Senior Appreciation Dinner. A quarter of our classmates skipped the dinner altogether, and another quarter left early. We'd stuck around for the presentation of the Senior Gift to Ms. J., the terrifying gnome who'd for years meted out discipline as our high school's vice principal. She was retiring that year, and our class had given her a fishing rod. No idea who had chosen the gift. It was hard to imagine knowing Ms. J. that well.

We were the good kids, relatively speaking.

Chickie was a sort of town ward—absent father, precocity, quirks. Forever showing up at your door with a ball just as you sat down to dinner, the kind of luck-struck kid who could, and did, pitch a no-hitter for Gable in a county pee-wee championship game when he was nine. After the Trivette stuff came out and his notoriety grew, Chickie started telling a story about how when he was a toddler, the daycare teachers took his class on a field trip to the bird sanctuary up on October Mountain and during a lunch break he'd taken a few wobbly steps down the trailhead they were picnicking at and into the path of a midsized brown bear. The teachers, not surprisingly, freaked out. One began yelling at the bear while the other tried to corral seven toddlers and shoo them back into the van. And the bear apparently got enraged and charged the one yelling teacher, knocking her down and bloodying her face pretty good, before returning to where Chickie stood and sort of nudging him deeper into the woods. And then they'd vanished for a half-hour. A pretty fucking frightful half-hour for those toddler teachers, I'd bet. Chick, according to Chick, was pretty calm about the whole thing, believing it to be theater, and folks surmised that the bear thought that he was a cub of sorts, a heartwarming attribution that did not stop the police from shooting it when they arrived. I suppose I don't need to add that most of this story was uncorroborated. Sometimes I'd ask him about it. I never got good answers. But it seemed like a story he wanted to tell, a story that wasn't another story, so we let him.

The rest of us didn't have near as much drama in our lives, real or imagined. We smoked our pot in the summer. We didn't sell drugs or come back from lunch break buzzing and Super Glue beer caps to the blackboard in Mr. Morris's social studies class. Unsie was an honors student and, our senior year, the best high school cross-country skier in the state. Jimmer had scored 1490 on the SATs without cracking so much as a practice test. He was heading somewhere big for college, somewhere with “Institute” in the name. MIT, RIT, RPI. Maybe it was Stanford. I was voted prom king, captain of the basketball team and most likely to succeed. It was a very small school.