The Three Fates of Henrik Nordmark: A Novel (11 page)

More likely Henrik’s predicament arose from the idea that by reading to these old people, he might actually become virtuous and, as a byproduct, unique. That the end of his journey was finally within arm’s reach frightened him to his core. Henrik couldn’t shake the feeling that if he lifted a single page, the world would collapse around him.

Through sheer force of will, Henrik read another sentence out loud. An audible sigh of relief sounded from the gathering of grandmas and grandpas who had been watching this bald man stare at the book in silence for nearly two minutes. Henrik read a second sentence but only got through the first three words before Roland began wailing out loud on the other side of the room. A couple of nurses headed over to make sure he was okay and a crowd of old ladies formed around him. Henrik tried to peer past the women and get a good look at who was crying but he couldn’t see Roland through the assembly line of concerned faces. He grew instantly jealous of the attention the young man was receiving. Sympathy and compassion were much more inviting than suffering through this shoddy recital. Had Henrik not grown so excited at the thought of crying, thus negating his tears just minutes ago, it would have been him surrounded by the gaggle of women. Henrik stood up and slammed the book down on the chair.

“I’ll be right back,” he said and headed straight to the bathroom to have a bowel movement.

From a crack in the open doorway, Alfred and Billy Bones watched Henrik walk down the hallway and enter the public lavatory. Quickly, they shut the door and reported their findings to Conrad. The leader of the assassins twirled the ends of his moustache with fingers covered in black leather gloves.

“Gentlemen, I think we’ve been discovered,” Conrad said.

“That’s impossible,” Alfred mouthed without making a sound.

“How do you think he found us?” Billy Bones said.

“I’m not quite sure,” Conrad said loudly enough for his counterpart to hear. “But I think we have to take his arrival at our home very seriously. This man isn’t just your run-of-the-mill ordinary spy. He appears to be some sort of genius secret agent. I’m afraid we are all in grave danger.”

“What should we do?”

Conrad threw his cape over one shoulder. “We must take his surfacing at our residence as a direct threat. He is a wily one, I assure you. For him to sit in our dining hall calmly reading a book and not even glance in our direction takes nerves of steel. The crossbow is out of the question now. This kind of spy is trained to dodge arrows and bullets. We have to break out the heavy artillery. Get me the briefcase.”

Alfred ran across the room and pulled the briefcase from the back of the closet. He brought it over to Conrad and opened the case in front of his fearless leader. Conrad placed his hands on the objects inside and felt around for one item in particular. He found it in the far left corner.

“I need a volunteer,” he said.

Neither Billy Bones nor Alfred spoke up.

Conrad shook his head. “You both know that I would do this if I could see but I damn well can’t. Now one of you needs to show some courage and take a little initiative here.”

Billy Bones and Alfred remained quiet, their eyes fixed on the floor.

“Fine,” Conrad lost his temper a little. “This is how we’ll do it. I’m going to count to three and we’ll all say
Not it
. The last person to say
Not it
gets the assignment. Any objections?”

Alfred screamed a vigorous objection but it got caught in his windpipe and never escaped his mouth.

“One, two, three,
Not it!
” Conrad said.

Alfred tried to yell but couldn’t make a sound.

Billy Bones had forgotten entirely what they were talking about and was picturing the nurse’s soft, round breasts in his mind. He thought perhaps he could barter a better deal and use only
$1,500
of his bounty money to see them.

“Bones!” Conrad forgot to fake his English accent. “Yell
Not it!
”

“Not it!
” Billy Bones screamed.

Conrad turned to Alfred with a reluctant frown. His accent returned with renewed vigor. “I’m afraid, old friend, that the assignment falls on you.”

Irritably, Alfred snatched the object out of Conrad’s hand.

Conrad laid out some simple instructions. “You pull the pin out from the top in order to activate it. Then so long as you’re holding it, nothing will happen. But as soon as you let it go, you have only six seconds to get away or you risk facing certain death.”

Alfred nodded.

He was squeezing it tightly in his right hand when for some inexplicable reason unknown even to him, Billy Bones reached over and pulled out the pin. Conrad heard the click as the pin dislodged and frantically tried to grab it back out of Billy’s hand but couldn’t see well enough to find it. Meanwhile Alfred closed his eyes and hoped not to die. Six excruciating seconds passed and nothing happened. They were still alive. Both Conrad and Alfred breathed a sigh of relief. Billy Bones stood to the side with a look of general confusion on his face.

“Now go get him, old chap,” Conrad said. He ushered Alfred toward the door and shut it behind him.

Alfred headed down the hallway toward the washroom — a live grenade in his hand.

The inside of the lavatory was a palace. The stall Henrik typically used at work was a filthy eggshell white with all manner of graffiti on the walls. Each time Henrik sat down to relieve himself during his break, he would stare directly at a lyric some surprisingly eloquent degenerate had scribbled on the back of the door —

Oh vile feces

Drop swift and whole

Flee this cold, dark cell

Henrik always felt rushed at work.

In contrast, the stall Henrik selected in the retirement home was nearly three quarters the size of his whole apartment. Built specifically for the residents with osteoporosis, it featured several handrails, an emergency button and a full reading section flourishing with books, magazines and a stack of old newspapers. Henrik settled in comfortably and was having quite an agreeable bowel movement when he reached down and selected an old faded newspaper from the bottom of the pile. On the front page was disgraced American senator Larry Craig. Henrik read that the senator had recently been arrested for and pled guilty to the crime of
cottaging
, which, Henrik would learn, was soliciting anonymous gay sexual activity in public bathrooms. Senator Craig was now telling everyone who would listen that he wasn’t guilty and that he was a victim of police entrapment. Henrik didn’t believe him. But he did read on about the details of
cottaging
. Apparently it involves making a great deal of eye contact in an airport lavatory before committing offenses against God in a stall meant for bodily functions. Sometimes it’s initiated by the tapping of one’s foot in the stall next to another person trying to complete their bowel function.

Henrik felt quite sorry for the senator’s wife, who now had to go to fancy dinners and
PTA
meetings with everyone staring at her and knowing deep down that her husband was a hypocrite and a pervert. But he didn’t feel strongly either way about what the senator did in airport bathrooms. Mostly, Henrik was concerned that a public restroom was an unhygienic place to have sexual activity of any kind. In fact, when Henrik sat down on this very toilet, his penis had made incidental contact with the seat and he was now worried that he might develop some sort of rash. This fear of getting a rash was starting to affect the quality and duration of his bowel movement when the lavatory door creaked open.

Alfred entered the washroom and was carrying the live grenade with the utmost care. He took twelve dreadfully tentative steps until he reached Henrik’s stall.

Henrik sat on his toilet seat and grumbled to himself, knowing it would be much more difficult and embarrassing to finish with someone else in the room. He set the newspaper down and covered his ears with his hands so he wouldn’t hear the other gentleman and could pretend he was alone. To Henrik’s abject horror, the man peered through the crack in his stall and then entered the booth next to him. This was not good. There were plenty of other stalls he could have selected.

Henrik knew exactly what was going on.

“Hello?” he said.

The man didn’t reply. Inside Henrik’s brain, alarm bells rang.

Little did Henrik know that on the other side of the divider, Alfred was feverishly trying to get Henrik to identify himself. He hadn’t been able to see Henrik through the crack in the stall door and wasn’t about to dump a live grenade on someone without at least establishing their identity first. Alfred continued to demand that the man say his name but no sound actually escaped his lips. He attempted to stand up on the toilet and peer into the next stall but his rickety old legs shook terribly and catastrophe almost struck as he nearly dropped the live grenade. Unable to think of anything else, Alfred tapped his foot on the floor to get Henrik’s attention.

Henrik’s brain nearly exploded in shock. Furiously, he tore off a wad of toilet paper and wiped his bottom as fast as he could.

From the other side, a frustrated Alfred reached underneath the divider and was about to drop the grenade when Henrik snatched it out of his hand. Henrik clenched the grenade tightly, frightened to his core, but not sure what the hell this thing was. He had to assume, from all the empirical evidence at his disposal — the attempted eye contact through the door, the foot tapping and the offering of a peculiar gift — that this metal object was some sort of bizarre device used in sexual gratification.

The moment he released the grenade, Alfred turned and ran from the bathroom as fast as his old legs would take him. The lavatory door opened and shut with a resonant thud. Alone again, Henrik zipped up with one hand and looked at the metal object in the other. Part of him was curious as to what the hell he was supposed to do with this thing. The other part (perhaps fifteen percent of him) was a little wounded that the man left so quickly without further attempts to woo him.

Henrik poked his head out of the bathroom stall to make sure there was no one there. Ever since he saw the tapping foot, he’d felt an urge to flee the retirement home. The window on the far wall was much too high and far too small for him to reach or squeeze through. He would have to make a break for it out the lavatory door. Henrik placed his hand on the door handle, cautiously hoping that there was no horny old man on the other side. He opened the door and peered a single eyeball into the hallway. It was empty save for a little old lady walking by herself toward the women’s washroom. Henrik summoned all his courage and stepped into the corridor. He put one foot in front of the other and marched down the hallway.

The elderly woman stopped him.

“Are you going to finish reading to us?” she said.

“No,” Henrik said.

“Well, did you bring us anything from the outside? Some news perhaps?” She leaned in close and lowered her voice. “They don’t like us to leave, you know. The reaper is always right around the corner.”

Henrik paused, considered saying something nice and then did the exact opposite.

“I brought you this present,” Henrik said as he handed her the live grenade. He snickered a little to himself, wondering if the old lady would know what to do with the strange sex object.

The old woman took the grenade in her hands. Her heart jumped into her throat when she realized what it was. Only she couldn’t hand it back to Henrik. He was already circling the end of the hallway. She dropped the grenade in a panic.

Henrik stormed toward the front doors, past the stage area where a few of the more senile residents were still waiting for him to finish his performance. As he passed the receptionist, she asked him whether he was still going to read to the old folks. Henrik told her that this place was full of
cottaging
perverts and thank you but no, he wasn’t going to read
Moby Dick
to a bunch of perverts. She tried to say something else but Henrik put his hands up to his ears and mumbled loudly so he couldn’t hear.

sixteen

It was a good thing he had his hands over his ears.

They mostly muffled the sound of an old woman exploding in the hallway behind him.

Henrik left the retirement home and stepped straight into a taxicab. He paid no heed to the thunderous explosion behind him. For all he knew, a minor earthquake might have shaken the ground or perhaps three morbidly obese pensioners had fallen out of their lawn chairs at the exact same time. Henrik didn’t care. He wanted to get out of there as fast as he could. He told the driver to take him to the nearest hospital. The driver sped off down the street and Henrik finally put some distance between himself and those
cottaging
old people.

He couldn’t relax, however. Henrik now felt there was something really wrong with his penis. It had touched the toilet seat back in the bathroom and while the actual contact was quite brief and were Henrik to be forced to describe the convergence of skin and plastic, he most likely would have used the phrase
a slight grazing
, he nonetheless was growing more and more worried with each passing second. He could still feel where his penis had touched the seat. This wasn’t normal. Henrik could not typically feel the presence of his penis. He tried feeling the presence of his shins and his elbows without actually touching them in order to gauge whether or not he was going crazy. Much to his dismay, he could feel neither his shins nor his elbows. Nor could he sense anything in the toes he had just clipped that afternoon. From the evidence at hand — the strange sensation on his penis and the lack of sensation on the rest of his body — Henrik self-diagnosed that he’d received some manner of venereal disease from the toilet seat.

He entered the hospital emergency room and braced himself for the carnage. The last time Henrik visited the
ER
, he encountered dozens of people crowded into the waiting room, each and every one of them sneezing or coughing, wheezing or oozing, displaying visible wounds or hunched over in some manner of terrible pain. It was a scene very much like the congested employment office, only with the walking wounded huddled in corners, with pestilence and disease lingering in the air. Henrik was surprised — shocked, rather — to see just three patients in the emergency room waiting area, a young woman with her daughter and a middle-aged lady sitting across from them. He walked up to the front desk where a nurse was wearing a set of purple hospital pajamas.

“I’d like to see a doctor, please.”

“What does this pertain to?”

“Pardon me?” Henrik said.

“What’s the nature of your illness?”

“I’d really rather speak to the doctor,” he said.

The nurse in the purple pajamas told Henrik it would take up to forty-five minutes and that he should have a seat in the waiting room. Henrik walked over and sat down among the others. Whether it was to suppress his rapidly increasing anxiety or just to break the empty silence in the room, Henrik felt an urge to talk to his fellow patients.

“What are you in for?” he said to the middle-aged woman.

She looked up from her Sudoku. “Gallstones mainly.”

Henrik nodded.

“Also, there’s this itch I have on my elbow.” She set her puzzle book on her lap and pulled her sleeve up to reveal the raw, red area she’d been scratching. “Also,” she said quietly, “it might be my diet, but lately my digestive tract has been a disaster. It’s like a fireworks display that you never see coming. There’s been a few close calls recently. A couple of races to the finish line.” She proceeded to tell Henrik a story about a disastrous attempt to find a washroom at a local gardening store.

Henrik stood up as the woman was untying her shoe to show him a gangrenous nail and sat down beside the little girl in the adjacent row. Five minutes passed in silence. Henrik’s sense of urgency was still escalating exponentially by the minute when he noticed something out of the corner of his eye. This little girl, no more than five years old and forty pounds soaking wet, had some sort of pox on her skin. A series of boils had manifested on her cheeks, arms and hands. The smaller inflammations were relegated to her face while the larger ones had assembled along her forearms. Henrik didn’t know what it was — measles, smallpox, the Egyptian plague — but it was starting to scare the hell out of him.

Just then an agonized scream sounded. Henrik peered down the hallway to see a man in a Dunkin’ Donuts uniform lying in a hospital bed with an arrow sticking out of his chest. The man kept yelling. From what Henrik could discern, the Dunkin’ Donuts employee had been waiting for hours for a specialist to remove the arrow and was incensed that others were receiving attention while he had yet to meet with the specialist.

A female doctor told him to be quiet, shut a curtain around him and walked over to the waiting room. She looked down at her clipboard.

“Mr. Nordmark? Please come with me.”

Henrik stood up and followed the doctor. She placed him on a bed next to the angry man.

“I’m Dr. Simmers,” she said. “Now what seems to be the problem today?”

Henrik wasn’t sure quite where to start. He took a deep breath and informed her that (A) he was really impressed with the speed at which the medical system in this country operated and (B) he had just received a venereal disease from a toilet in a retirement home. By the slight but discernable way the doctor rolled her eyes, Henrik suspected she thought he was making up the sensation in order to show her his genitals. She must have thought he was some kind of pervert. Henrik said, “If you want to meet a pervert, go back to the old folks’ home. That’s where all the perverts are.”

The doctor gave him a stunned look.

Perhaps, Henrik thought, I misread her eye roll.

The doctor hesitated, like she was deciding whether or not to send Henrik on his way, then gave him a light blue hospital gown and told him to get undressed. She closed the curtain on the way out. Henrik slipped out of his uniform and into the hospital gown. It barely fit around his stomach girth and he had to hold it closed at the back to avoid revealing his buttocks.

While the doctor was gone, the injured man in the next section continued to yell. He even threatened to sue. A second patient who had intentionally digested a fork and a spoon in a desperate bid for attention was sitting two beds over. She yelled that she’d had enough of the Dunkin’ Donuts employee’s whining and that he only wanted to sue because he made minimum wage and he wanted to get rich without actually having to work for the money.

Finally the female doctor came back. She told them both to keep it down or she’d call security, then closed the curtain around Henrik, put on a pair of plastic gloves and took a look at his penis. After a lightning-fast assessment, she told him there was absolutely no rash to be seen.

“Is there anything else?” she said.

Henrik was about to shake his head no, but instead gave his current condition a great deal of thought. Perhaps there was something else wrong with him. Perhaps there’d always been something terribly wrong with his body but he’d grown so accustomed to the feeling of being gravely ill that he didn’t even realize he was sick. Henrik asked the doctor to perform a full physical examination. She told him she didn’t have time for that and he’d have to make an appointment with his general practitioner. The way she rolled her eyes when she answered told Henrik that she still suspected him of egregious perversity.

She was about to leave so Henrik told her lately he’d been feeling an overwhelming compulsion to wash his hands at least seventeen times a day.

“There’s nothing wrong with that,” she said. “In fact, you should wash your hands every possible chance you get. Wash them twenty or thirty times a day.”

“Really?” he said. “Is that healthy?”

“Of course it is. Clean hands are very healthy.”

“But wouldn’t a lifetime of compulsive hand-washing affect my mental health?”

The doctor shrugged her shoulders.

“Is there anything else?”

She was about to leave again when Henrik felt himself on the verge of panic.
There must be something wrong with me
, he thought.
There must be some vile affliction that I have that people will want to hear about and discuss
. He thought of the greatest first baseman of all time, Lou Gehrig, and what a lucky bastard he’d been to have a disease named after him. Henrik started complaining of random ailments in his ankles, nostrils and buttocks in a desperate search for something, anything to make the doctor stay. He was enjoying the attention. And, more importantly, if he strained his eyes hard enough, he could almost see down her blouse.

The doctor seemed irritated. She looked Henrik straight in the eye and said that what he had was a simple case of hypochondria. She accused him of making up illnesses and told him it was a really common thing to do.

“Common?” Henrik said.

“Yes,” she said, trying to make him feel better but in fact making him feel infinitely worse. “It’s a very typical condition. Many people have it. Ordinary people without any real afflictions believe they must have something wrong with them, and some people actually develop psychosomatic symptoms that mimic the condition they believe they have. But don’t worry,” she said, “You’ll be just fine. You’re not going to die.”

Henrik listened as she spoke but didn’t hear anything about not dying or not worrying. The only words he heard were common and typical and ordinary.

In the distance, the emergency room doors burst open and an elderly woman was wheeled into the hospital on a gurney. She’d lost both her arms and a great deal of her torso in an explosion. One of the orderlies referred to her as a goner, which caused her grandson, who was trailing behind the gurney, to let out a grief-stricken cry. Henrik looked through the curtain and recognized him as the young man who struggled with the fifteenth-floor security guards as he was escorted from his office building. It appeared the young man’s day had gotten much worse as he now had a partially decapitated grandmother to deal with. Henrik’s doctor, the grandson and the blown-up grandmother rounded the corner into another room and suddenly it fell very quiet.

Henrik reflected on the doctor’s words. Eventually he came to the realization that there was nothing at all wrong with his penis or the rest of him. He stripped out of his hospital gown and was putting on his security guard uniform when a woman poked her head in. It was Bonnie, the woman Henrik bumped into in the marketplace, inadvertently making her the winner of four million dollars. Henrik didn’t recognize her at all but she immediately recognized him.

Bonnie tried to play it cool. If this bald man found out about the switched tickets, he might alert the lottery officials and she could very well lose her still-unclaimed grand prize.

“Have you seen a man with an arrow wound?” she said. “He’s probably wearing a Dunkin’ Donuts uniform.”

“I’m right here,” Clyde said from the other side of the sheet.

Henrik pointed to his right.

Bonnie smiled and entered the next partition. Her husband Clyde was lying on the bed in obvious pain. Bonnie walked over and tried to kiss him. Clyde rebuked her affections and turned his head the other way.

“What’s wrong?” she said.

“What’s wrong? I got shot in the chest with an arrow four hours ago and you’ve finally just shown up at the hospital now.
That’s
what’s wrong.”

“I was working,” Bonnie said.

Her irritability did not sit well with Clyde. He himself was quite irate.

“You still should have come as soon as you heard.”

“I couldn’t leave my job,” she said. “There was no one to cover for me and the doctor told me on the phone that you weren’t going to die. I don’t know what you’re so angry about.”

“Screw your job!”

Bonnie stepped forward and slapped her husband across the face. It was the first time she’d ever hit him.

“I don’t know why you can’t support my work,” she said. “My parents support me. They come to my work at least once a week. Even our priest joined them a few times. You’re the only one who has anything bad to say about my job.”

Clyde could smell cigarettes on Bonnie’s skin and a hint of vodka on her breath. He grew even angrier.

“Why did you have to tell the guy next to me that I work at Dunkin’ Donuts?”

“Because you do work at Dunkin’ Donuts, you jackass! You shouldn’t be ashamed of your job.”

“You only tell people I work at Dunkin’ Donuts because you want them to know I earn minimum wage and I can’t support us.”

“That’s not it at all,” she said. “I asked that guy if he’d seen a man wearing a Dunkin’ Donuts uniform because
you’re wearing a fucking Dunkin’ Donuts uniform
. If you were wearing a suit, I would have asked him if he saw a man in a suit.”

“But I’m not wearing a suit!”

“No,” Bonnie rolled her tongue along the inside of her cheek. “You’re not wearing a suit, are you?”

Henrik had fully pulled on his clothes and was listening through the curtain, hearing the argument escalate. These two had grown so incensed that their voices rose with every word.