MICHAEL BYERS

From Long for This World

(reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin)

Ilse was the director of medical staffing at Kreutznaer General Hospital, across town from Henry's university, which meant basically she did a lot of hiring and firing, which was sometimes fun and sometimes not. Additionally, she was in charge of running the residents in and out, making sure no one too crazy was taken on, making sure they got paid and fed, that sort of thing. Minding the troops, she called it.

She had not been able to find work as a doctor when she had arrived in America, and once at Kreutznaer she had never gone back to practice—which meant she was not a doctor anymore really, except in title, and lately she had begun to wonder if this had been a mistake. She was good at her work, as her native bureaucratic talents had risen in her—she was a perfect beamte, meticulous and stern and selfless; she used a plain old glass-topped desk and brought her lunch in a bag, and therefore she was able to say, No, don't buy shrimp for the party, parties are for home, not for work, if people want to celebrate something let them do it down the street at the Garage Bar, not up here where the janitors have to come in afterward and clean up the cheese triangles. Instead, residents should have a nicely painted dormitory, and once in a while the sofa cushions should actually go to the cleaners so they don't smell like someone's head.

And without ever making an explicit point of it, she directed favor to blacks and Indians, the blacks especially, the men in their jackets looking very handsome and serious, some with symbols carved on their arms, the keloid scars raised like welding seams. Five hundred years from now, who would remember that people did this? Slavery had not been that long ago, and when she saw those scars she could not help but think of branding, and how defiant and brave the act seemed in that light, how praiseworthy! Recently she had touched one resident's arm and felt the hard ridge of his scar: a Greek letter, an omega. "Did that hurt?" she asked.

"Actually, I was pretty drunk," he answered sheepishly. "Didn't feel much until the next day, I guess."

"What does it mean?" Her accent, even faded as it was, identified her as a foreigner, so she was allowed to ask questions like this. Americans, polite people. "Is it religious?"

"It's my fraternity."

"Who did it?"

"My brothers. My fraternity brothers, I mean."

"In Austria we had societies. The International Relations Society, the Historical Society. No scars, but very serious, you know, because if you were too heavy a drinker you were left behind in the courses. Then you had to enter a trade school, which was worse than death."

"Probably got a better education than we did."

"Yes, but out of fear," she said. "In medical school we were expected to travel on outings together, to the library, to the park, for our enjoyment. But that was many years ago. Now it may be different. I was an orthopedist." Was; the word still stung.

"That's what I hear."

"Oh, I was, and then I was dragooned into this job, you know. They thought I was so bossy I might as well be put to use, in bossing the maximum number of people."

"Yeah, I like the way this place works. It's humane."

"Is it?" she asked gratefully.

"Yeah." He shrugged, began shifting away. "You actually let us get some sleep."

"It's only the stupid old men who want to make medicine an endurance contest for some reason. Like the twenty-four hours of Le Mans. Isn't it ridiculous?"

"I guess so."

"You're Dr. Edmonds?"

"Edwards," said the resident. "But pretty close. I'm impressed."

"Close but no cigar," she said. "No prize for that. I'm sorry Dr. Edwards."

"No, it's cool. Really."

"Dr. Edwards. Shame on me!"

"It's cool. You can't know everybody, there's like sixty new people every year."

"No, I'm very sorry," she insisted. "Edwards."

She did her best to wave the guilt away, from this and a hundred other little mistakes, because she was good at her work. Oh, she recited the facts to herself all the time. She gave time off for Kwanzaa, though she had her private doubts about it as a holiday. She sent black doctors into the local high schools. She made herself visible as a woman in charge, which she believed had some effect. And she was kind to people.

But it wasn't medicine. She had been doing research in Paris, and administrative work had seemed an acceptable temporary measure in America—she had not wanted to be too picky, not wanted Henry to support her—but she had not gone back to real doctoring, and now it was too late, and lately she had been growing unhappy with herself in a fairly serious way. She had not become the brilliant and capable doctor she should have been—not become herself, finally. At the end of the day her glass desk showed her fingerprints everywhere, but in the morning the surface was always clean again. She had been there eighteen years and she could be replaced in an afternoon, she felt. Too much longer at Kreutznaer, she feared, and she would lose herself altogether.

~

She might have gone to her father, but he had been dead for years. . . .

So it was to her mother that she was forced to go now—a poor replacement, in Ilse's mind. Her mother's condominium had a little pink tacked-on balcony, where in the late afternoons the old lady could sit in one of her white plastic chairs and look out over the water, drinking her day's single cup of resinous coffee and counting the clouds. The balcony, sixty feet above the sidewalk, did not seem entirely stable to Ilse; the railings were narrow and could be made to shiver under her hand. But her mother, at ninety-five pounds, could never generate enough momentum to crash through the railing, and at any rate the five-story drop to the pavement would have been softened by the green awnings of Il Cioppino. And Freda, Ilse had no doubt, would not be killed by such a fall, only annoyed at the indignity.

"Of course it's really the children who suffer," her mother told her. "I know it's a cliché, but that's who suffers when a marriage begins to disintegrate."

"Mama, it's not disintegrating in the slightest. That's not what I'm talking about, I'm talking about my job."

"So you say! Henry has always struck me as a man who lives almost entirely inside his head, even more than most men. He feels he can because you allow him to." Now ninety, Freda had not slowed much, just become smaller, more sinewy, like a carrot left in the back of the refrigerator. "Your children don't deserve a romantic for a mother, they deserve someone with a harder head."

"Like you?"

"I would be very suited to being their mother, but that boy would try to tie me up and put me in a closet."

"Darren's very sweet and serious. He would never."

"Ha! He's a menace."

"Mama, he's fourteen! He goes to school all day and does homework all night."

"If he had a job," her mother stated, "he wouldn't be such a menace."

Ten years ago downtown property had been cheap and plentiful, and if her mother had wanted to she could have bought heroin within a block of Nordstrom's, and First Avenue had been a series of blind, boarded-up shop fronts and sinister pawnshops that had sold musical instruments, power tools, and pistols from behind bulletproof glass. The last remains of the old frontier town had been still visible then, in 1989, and her mother's instinct for the genuine and her attraction to the marginally unpleasant had drawn her here. But money had done its relentless polishing, as it had done almost everywhere, and Freda was unhappy about it, or pretended to be; her neighborhood had gentrified around her, to her displeasure. "I'm sure you think this is all wonderful, but it won't last, it's all based on imaginary things. I hope you're not involved in all this"—she gestured—"froth."

"We don't really have any money, Mama."

"You have to have some money. You don't work for free. Henry doesn't. You have a house."

"But we live there. It's not an investment."

"Maybe, maybe not." Freda shrugged in her plastic chair on the suspended balcony; her white sweatshirt rose stiffly around her, like a pastry shell. "Nothing is ever firm," she said, settling her coffee cup into its white saucer.

"Some things are."

"The other problem is that you married him so quickly!"

"Oh, Mama, I'm sorry I said anything. We're very well suited."

"Well suited!" She laughed. "You would have married anyone with a plane ticket."

"I would not have."

"When you come to me with trouble, I try to give you the best advice I can, and if it's not to your liking, I don't know why you come at all."

"You haven't given me a single word of advice! You've just insulted me about fifteen times."

"Your mother can say things to you," said Freda, "that no one else will dare."

"Oh, please. You're trying to be funny or something."

"Funny," her mother repeated. She fixed Ilse with a fierce, mocking look; then, with a single swift gesture, she tossed the empty white coffee cup over the rail. Its arc was not high, and it dropped harmlessly into the middle of the street below, where it shattered like a star on the asphalt. A few people looked around to see what might have caused the noise, but the two women were high enough off the ground to be inconspicuous. "That was just a cup," she said, wagging the empty saucer on her lap like a discus. "In a minute I'm going to throw this at that man with the accordion. Speaking of husbands, he proposed to me yesterday. Maybe you would like me to get his attention for you."

Ilse had to laugh. "Mama, you're crazy."

"He did ask me. I gave him the evil eye."

"You can't throw anything that far."

"I can. I've hit that man who plays the paper trumpet with the monkey on his head. They don't hurt anyone, they're very cheap dishes."

"You're trying to make a point of some kind."

"I am not trying to make a point of any kind," Freda said lightly. "I'm just doing what I want to do. I'm old enough and rich enough to do that."

But no, that wasn't it. Ilse's father had certainly never been rich, and her mother's professional life had been halting at best since the forties. Freda had a pension from the Austrian government, but it did not amount to more than a few hundred dollars a month. She never asked Ilse for money, but she lived on very little; it was an old woman's spare and punctuated life: coffee, zeppelin bread, pears, chocolate. And wine, now and then. No; to destroy a cup like that, Ilse thought, was more than just bravado. It was, in effect, her mother's advice to her. Do whatever you want to do, she was saying. . . .

Would Ilse be capable of the same thing at eighty? Would she have the nerve to leave everything and move a world away, to be with Sandra or Darren in her unloved dotage? She didn't know. She did not have her mother's toughness—her sinew, her venom. Even now her mother's sudden grip was firm, painful, on her forearm. "Remember, a husband is not everything," Freda hissed into her ear. Here it came, the advice. "And remember, there is a life to be lived."

~

This was about as much help as Ilse could expect from her mother. But she did need to do something soon; her work seemed a sort of glacial, grinding, crushing, irresistible process from which one could never hope to escape, and like weather, or time, it had a plodding sameness-with-a-difference every month, every year. Certainly compared to Henry's research it was nearly meaningless. How nice it would be—how useful—to start a little private practice in a tiny office, somewhere in the Central District, where she could treat the poor! But the world had moved on, and she had chosen a path, the wrong one. She spent hours watching the workmen finishing the last of Safeco Field—tethered men in hardhats and boots fastening metal panels together three hundred feet in the air. Could she do that herself? No, probably not. So high, and nothing to hold on to.

Now, at the end of March, she had long since looked over next year's new residents, she was nicely under budget for the year, and the new projections weren't due for another six weeks, one of the many annual exercises in sternness and conciliation that she had come to hate. How many cardiac surgeons could they train? How many debt-burdened residents could she manage to turn into GPs against all odds? How much medicine could they afford to distribute to the poor, the insane, the aged, before the accountants began to get nervous? Not enough, not enough, no matter how hard she tried. . . .

The e-mail arrived, was answered; her secretary, Miriam, handed her the morning's little folders, which she efficiently dispatched; decisions were made, compromises borne. Like any life, she supposed, hers described itself by what lives it was not. She was not an itinerant doctor among the poor in Alabama. She was not an operagoer. . . . How long had it been since she had sensed that particular—how would you say it in English? Liftingness? That complicated, palpable sensation of life that had seemed to rise like a scent from the rooftops below her father's window? That nutritive, sunny air of possibility? "Sooner or later you forget about all that stuff," Freda had told her. "You stop worrying about being happy and just get on with things."

"But are you happy, Mama?"

"The question is not happiness but pleasure. I take pleasure from things. I am not happy as you speak of it. There is a difference."

"What do you take pleasure in?"

"Oh, things."

"Like what?"

"This and that. Things. Things. I have my secrets," her mother sniffed.

~

In the throes of this difficult mood she decided to buy herself a motor scooter. The ad was on one of the hospital bulletin boards, a sheet of paper with a photograph. She had owned one just like it, a Vespa 50SR, and driven by nostalgia and a kind of mounting desperation she removed the pin from the paper and took the flyer down—the bulletin boards were for official announcements only, after all—and made arrangements to see it.

The man who had placed the ad was in his forties, with a beefy British face and a hefty brown mustache, and was one of the building's cafeteria supervisors; they had met briefly once, years ago. Terrence. His Vespa, stowed on the bottom level of the hospital's parking garage, was an old white machine with a modish convex knee guard. "I just got it used last year," he told her as they stood above it. "Thought I'd use it to go to the grocery store. But. Rain and whatnot. Also you get on the bigger arterials and it just doesn't feel safe."

"I had one as a girl," she said. She sat astride it, eased it forward off the stand. "It's what you had instead of a car."

"Suits you."

"You think?"

"More than me." Wordlessly Terrence reached over and turned the little minnow of a key, and the Vespa rasped to life. In the concrete cavern of the underground garage the sound of the scooter echoed and was amplified, but otherwise it was the same sound as it had been the last time she had been on a scooter, years ago, in medical school, when she had been wearing a green skirt and telling herself she was at least a little bit in love with Gregor. Up and down the Stadtpark she had gone, wind in her face, almost convinced. The recollection was so immediate that she fumbled with the controls and the Vespa stalled.

"Clutch is on the handlebar."

"Yes, I know." The soft-firm grip, the notched controls. She turned the key off. "I brought my checkbook."

"You actually want it? You getting it for your kid or something?"

"You said it suited me, yes? And I want it, so I'll take it."

"Seriously? Why?"

Because she was sad, because she regretted certain things about her life, because she had been young once? "For going to the grocery store. I don't know, exactly."

Together they loaded the thing sideways into her Honda's empty trunk. "You definitely want to watch it in the rain. Personally, I never drove it in the rain. Didn't like the feel of it. Tended to get squirrelly." He held up two palms. "All I need is a little more brain damage and that'd about do it for me. . . ."

Laid on its side in the back of the Honda, the Vespa had the skewed, upended look of a deer. Its two tall mirrors, like silvery antlers, poked out above the bumper. Where to store it? The driveway was a murderous slope, with a blind entrance to Hynes Street below, and their garage had become over the years a clutter of ladders and old boards and windows salvaged from a basement remodeling, plus rakes and shovels and bags of fertilizer and rusty cans of old paint, like a row of squat candles on a painted shelf, and long quivering lengths of baseboard trim, extra from when they'd had it specially milled in the first ambitious years of owning the house: junk upon junk. But the Vespa would fit in there, she thought, if she moved a few things aside, which, together with Henry, she did.

"What's the idea?" he asked.

"Oh, no idea, " she said. "I just think it's stupid to drive the car to the video store if it's only to carry back a video that weighs a pound. We're too lazy to walk. You used to ride a bicycle."

"Hey," he said, "you okay?"

"Me? I'm fine, la, la, la, Henry, you know. La, la, la. Oh, I don't know."

"Just so you don't kill yourself."

Gallantly, she said, "Maybe that's it. Maybe that's what I secretly want and my job is too slow to do the trick."

"So quit."

"We need the money, don't we?"

"Well, we use the money. How much was it?"

"Free. Almost free. Try it." She thrust the handlebars at him. Dear, sweet Henry! He didn't make fun of her, didn't press. He did not know how to ride it, and proved this right away by rolling down the driveway into the street and steering into the back of their parked Honda at two miles an hour. "Did you get whiplash?" she called, giggling, from the sidewalk.

"I think one of my eyeballs fell out," he said.

Darren—pale, adrift in the Saturday house—appeared at the top of the driveway. "Hey," he said, "is that yours?"

"It's your mother's."

"No way."

"Way," said Henry.

"There's this guy at school who got one of those dirt bikes? And he broke his leg in like eleven places and his leg turned out like an inch shorter than the other one." With a look of beady curiosity, Darren turned to her. "How much was it?"

"It was free," Henry said.

"Yeah, right. Can I try it?"

"No," said Ilse. But the press of nostalgic longing was at her back, and in the end she agreed to drive her son around the block, Darren sitting behind her and grasping her waist. Neither of them was wearing a helmet—what a terrible mother she was; really, it wasn't funny at all. But these were very quiet streets, not dangerous, and after turning the corner twice she said, relenting, "Okay, just once." He was young now, after all. They were in the empty middle of a flat block, no cars in sight. He missed the clutch a few times, accelerated too quickly, and nearly fell when he ran into a curb, but he got the hang of it soon enough.

"Now I can go rob banks," he said when he pulled up, idling, beside her. "I saw this thing about perfect crimes? Like how to commit a perfect murder?"

"You have to watch these things?"

"They said that for it to be perfect, you have to kill somebody you don't have any connection with, and they were talking about gloves and everything, and like use a gun and then throw it in the ocean, but you know what the perfect murder is? I thought of this myself. Like if you want to murder your wife? You just push her off a cliff." He revved the engine. "If there's no witnesses it's totally perfect. You don't have to worry about evidence or anything, and if there's a scratch or something on you, you can just say you were trying to catch her."

That plunge off the stadium's roof, she could feel it in her bones, suddenly. A dark sadness dropping through her gut. "But you're such a nice boy, darling, you would try to catch her," she said. To her surprise, she found herself close to tears. Oh, no, no, this would never do.  

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