By ten thirty Friday morning, I’m bouncing off the walls. I’m supposed to hear from Dr. Sanderson today with my biopsy results. So why the hell hasn’t he called? If it were good news, I would think he’d have called already, only too happy to release me from the purgatory of my suspense. Bad news, though, he might wait to tell me, wait until he had a chunk of free time so as to answer my questions and discuss treatment. No one likes to deliver bad news. Maybe over the years he’s developed a routine wherein he makes all his happy calls immediately and leaves the tough ones for the end of the day, after he’s seen all his patients. Only then does he plop down into the rich leather chair behind his mahogany desk, take a measured shot from the bottle of single malt discreetly stored in a file drawer to bolster his resolve, and begin making the bad calls. He’s a middleman too, all that stands between the lab results and the patient, and even though it’s not his fault, it’s still his problem. We’re always quick to make the good calls, to tell a client his goods have shipped ahead of schedule, or that we were able to work out a production issue. But when it comes to bad news, we’ll procrastinate as long as possible and then hope like hell to get their voice mail. I am Sanderson’s Craig Hodges, my cancerous cells the wrong-colored swooshes, and even though it’s not his fault, he still knows it won’t be a pleasant conversation.
Fuck. I have cancer. I know it.
I’ve already dialed the doctor’s office a half dozen times, only to hang up before the first ring. I am terrified of upsetting some delicate cosmic balance, as if the act of calling itself might somehow influence the outcome. No. The thing to do is to wait here, all Zen-like, remain calm, and wait for the call to come. But my sweaty back, my clammy hands, and my shaking legs are the antithesis of Zen, so I get out of bed and head for the shower. Under the insulating spray, I run the scenarios, scripting conversations with Hope and Tamara in which I reveal my illness to them. Hope cries and hugs me, and then gets on the phone with her family, pausing for a brief, heartfelt cry with her mother before getting down to business, insisting that her father locate the top specialists in the field and use his connections to get us seen immediately, her chin bravely set as she takes charge. Tamara fights back tears and then throws herself into my arms, releasing all of her pent-up passion in an endless kiss, and then wordlessly leads me to her bedroom with no greater agenda than to consummate our unspoken emotions in the face of my impending life-and-death struggle. And then, only after an hour or two of sweetly urgent lovemaking, does she let the tears come, burying her face in my chest as we lie hopelessly entangled in a damp, naked embrace.
And the thought of it arouses me in a way that no subsequent thoughts can diminish, and what the hell, I do have to kill time, right? Either way, I say to myself as I step out of the shower a few minutes later, you are one sick fuck.
At eleven thirty, I cave and call the doctor’s office from the kitchen. Jed and Norm are in the living room, watching CNN. “Hello,” I say pleasantly to the receptionist, as if her goodwill might help my case. “Can I speak with Dr. Sanderson?”
“Who is this calling, please?” She speaks in a deep voice with a Russian accent, her words formed with the careful precision of a neophyte.
“This is Zachary King. I was in earlier this week for a cystoscopy.”
“The doctor is not available now,” she says.
“Can you tell me when he will be?”
“Monday.”
“Monday?” I say. “I’m supposed to speak to him today.”
“He is not in today.”
“Well, is he at the hospital or something? Can we page him?”
“The doctor is off for the weekend,” she says. “Dr. Post is on call. Would you like I should page Dr. Post?”
I can feel the seeds of panic germinating in my belly. “Listen,” I say. “What’s your name?”
The receptionist is taken aback. “Irina,” she says.
“Irina,” I say. “The results of my biopsy are supposed to be in today. I don’t know if I was supposed to call him or he was supposed to call me, but I’m supposed to hear today. Will those results be sent to Dr. Post?”
“No,” Irina says. “They come here.”
“Do you know if they’ve come in yet?”
“Only the doctor opens the lab results.”
“Which is why I would really appreciate it if you would page Dr. Sanderson.”
“He has no pager,” she says. “He is not on call this weekend.”
“Surely, though, you must know how to get in touch with him.”
“He is out until Monday,” she says firmly.
“Let me be clear on this,” I say. “You’re telling me that I have to sit here all weekend and wonder if I have cancer because you won’t make a simple phone call?”
“The doctor will call you the moment he has your test results.”
“But the test results are there,” I practically shout at her. “Someone just needs to call the lab, or open the envelope, or something.”
“I’m sorry, Mr. King. There is nothing I can do.”
I bang the phone down and let out a frustrated scream. “Zack?” Norm calls from the living room. “You okay?”
I join him and Jed on the couch and tell them what’s going on. “That’s bullshit,” Norm says, instantly getting to his feet. “Let’s go.”
“Where?” I say.
“To the doctor’s office.”
“What for?”
“I’m much more persuasive in person,” Norm says, tucking in his shirt.
“What are you going to do?”
“What I always do,” he says. “Kick ass and take names.”
I open my mouth to object, only to realize that I have no objection to offer. Norm’s blind obstinacy has proven to be highly effective over the last few days, and I can’t really see a downside to harnessing that energy to work on my behalf. I can sit back and let him take care of things. I’ve heard stories where fathers actually do that for their sons as a matter of course.
We’re almost at the door when we hear the television go off. I turn around to find Jed climbing off the couch. He shrugs self-consciously, then grins at me, last night’s awkward encounter forgotten for the time being. “Just give me a minute to get dressed,” he says.
The three of us walk into the grim, leaden silence indigenous to waiting rooms, not one silence but a collection of separate silences, the patients there to see other doctors in the practice peering discreetly over their Newsweeks and Peoples to charily mark our arrival before retreating back into their contrived oblivion. Irina turns out to be a large, middle-aged woman with sad Slavic eyes, a bearded mole on her leathery cheek, and a fierce expression etched into her features, maybe from years of squinting into the stinging wind of bitter Soviet winters. But nothing in Irina’s considerable experience has prepared her for the likes of Norm, who shatters the quiet of the reception area like a boulder dropped into a pond, spouting nonsensical legal jargon with a convincing ferocity.
“The doctor is off until Monday,” Irina tells him, raising her unibrow menacingly. Her desk is festooned with photos and crayon tracings of little hands from grandchildren who are probably scared to death of her.
“Listen to me carefully,” he says, leaning over the large desk to get in her face. “If you can’t get Dr. Sanderson on the phone in the next five minutes, there will be severe legal ramifications. Do you want to be responsible for that?”
“Move back from the desk, please,” Irina says, standing up irately.
Norm looks her right in the eye and lowers his voice. “Your personal space is not what’s important right now. Dr. Sanderson’s weekend is not what’s important right now. You see this man over here?” He points to me, and I nod a sheepish greeting, self-conscious about my role in what is certain to escalate into another Norm-produced freak show. “This man hasn’t slept in a week because he’s waiting for test results, results that he was promised today. If he has to spend one more night than necessary under this severe emotional distress because Dr. Sanderson dropped the ball, we will consider it to be gross negligence on the part of this office. Do you understand where I’m going with this?”
“This is not for me!” Irina hisses back to him. “I cannot help you.”
“Then pick up the phone and call someone who can,” Norm says sternly.
“You must stop making this disturbance!”
“Sweetheart, this is nothing,” Norm says in grave, confidential tones. “I’m just getting warmed up.”
“I cannot to reach him,” Irina insists agitatedly.
In the hallway behind the reception desk, a door opens and Camille, the PA who handled me on my last visit, emerges from one of the examination rooms. She peers out to see the cause of the ruckus and then, seeing Norm and Irina locked in battle, frowns slightly before heading back down the hall. “Hello,” says Jed quietly. “Who’s that?”
“It’s the PA,” I tell him.
“She’s a cutie.”
“Go for it,” I say sarcastically.
“Do you remember her name?”
I flash him an incredulous look. “What?” he says defensively.
“Nothing,” I say. “Camille.”
“Camille,” he repeats. “Thanks. Now, can you create a diversion?”
I look pointedly at Norm, who has managed to yank the telephone receiver off Irina’s desk and is holding it out of her reach so that she can’t answer the incoming calls that are ringing on two or three different lines. She’s leaning over the desk, cursing in her native tongue as she grabs desperately for the receiver, but he spins in a lazy circle, holding the phone over his head while entangling himself in the cord as the waiting patients look on in horror at the unfolding drama. “Done,” I say.
In a flash, Jed disappears down the hall, leaving me to stand alone in the center of the waiting room. “Norm,” I say, stepping in like a referee. “Give her back the phone.”
“I’ll give it back,” he says, unwilling to break eye contact with the receptionist. “As soon as she tells me she’s going to call the doctor.”
They stare at each other for a long moment while the phone lines continue to ring, and then Irina collapses back into her chair, breathing heavily. “You are crazy, fat man,” she says, shaking her head in disbelief.
“I’m just a concerned father,” Norm says proudly.
A door opens behind her and a tall, bearish man in a white doctor’s coat emerges, looking annoyed. “Irina, why are all the phones ringing?”
“This crazy man won’t let me answer,” Irina says.
The doctor fixes us with an angry stare. “What the hell is going on here?” he demands in a booming voice.
Norm holds his ground. “It’s imperative that we get in touch with Dr. Sanderson immediately.”
“He’s off today. Irina can leave a message with his service.”
“I’m afraid that won’t be good enough.”
“Well, it’s going to have to be,” the doctor says threateningly. He’s an imposing man in a Paul Bunyan sort of way, thick necked and broad shouldered, with ruddy, freckled skin that glows red beneath his beard as his ire is raised.
“Can we speak privately?” Norm says, switching tacks.
“Do you have an appointment?”
“It’s okay, Norm,” I say, embarrassed. “Let’s just leave a message and get out of here.”
Norm turns around and faces the waiting patients. “My son Zack is supposed to receive the results of his biopsy today,” he announces to them. “As you might imagine, this has been a very tense week for all of us.” The doctor steps forward and lunges for Norm’s shoulder, but Norm spins away from him and steps into the center of the room. “But his doctor took the day off, and so we’ll have to spend all weekend wondering whether or not Zack might have bladder cancer. Can you imagine that? And all because no one in this office has the common decency to break protocol and make a simple phone call on our behalf.”
The patients look down into their laps, chagrined at being dragged out of their waiting cocoons and into this unseemly drama. The doctor’s face is now crimson, his fists clenched at his sides, and he looks ready to doff his white coat and jump Norm. For a moment, it truly appears as if the whole absurd situation is about to descend into actual violence, when Jed emerges from the inner offices.
“Forget it, Norm,” he calls out from behind the reception desk. “Let’s go.”
“What the hell are you doing back there?” the doctor sputters, spinning violently to face Jed.
“It’s okay, Doc,” Jed says. “Everything’s under control.”
“Who are you?”
Unlike Norm, Jed is as tall as the doctor and he steps right into his face, meeting his glare with a breezy indifference. “I’m the guy who’s going to make this problem go away.”
The doctor backs off and we head for the door, stopping only to yank Norm along with us when he launches into what sounds like the preamble to a lengthy apology to the waiting patients. On the elevator ride down, Jed proudly shows us a piece of paper torn off a prescription pad, on which Camille has scribbled the name of the country club in Westchester where, she is quite certain, Dr. Sanderson is trying to squeeze in as many rounds of golf as possible before winter.
“The Larchmont Country Club,” Norm reads. “I know the place.”
“Couldn’t we just call him?” I say, cringing at the thought of another incursion with Norm.
“She didn’t know his cell number,” Jed says.
“So what’s that?”
“Oh. That’s Camille’s number.”
“I thought it might be something important, the way she underlined it twice like that.”
Jed smiles and folds the paper into his pocket. “You see the things I do for you?”
I fold myself into the minuscule backseat of Jed’s convertible and Norm rides shotgun, which is unfortunate, because he somehow mistakes this necessary accommodation as an invitation to take Jed under his wing.
“What’d this car run you, sixty grand?” he asks.
“Norm,” I say.
“What? I’m just asking. He doesn’t have to answer.”
“It’s rude.”
“Why? We’re among friends.”
“Sixty-three,” Jed says, grinning at me in the rearview mirror.
Norm nods, affirmed. “And you haven’t worked in a few years, so my guess is you have more than a few million sitting in the bank.”
“I’m okay.”
“Okay,” Norm says. “So you’re a rich, good-looking guy, in the prime of your life. You can be doing anything you want, literally anything.”
Jed nods, no longer smiling.
“So why the hell are you sitting in your apartment all day watching television?”
“Norm!” I say. “Leave him alone.”
“If Jed wants me to shut up, all he has to do is say shut up, Norm.”
“Shut up, Norm,” Jed says.
“Oh, come on!” Norm says exasperatedly. “We’re men. We’re supposed to speak our minds. What’s with all the tiptoeing around here? You two amaze me with all this evasion and sensitivity, like a couple of uptight women. You want to know what I see?”
“No,” Jed and I say in unison.
“I see two young men living in the most exciting city in the world. Your prospects are literally infinite, and yet you choose to sulk around in your million-dollar apartment, you frying your brain with television like it’s heroin, and you”—he points a thumb back at me—“perfecting the art of general discontentment, too scared to take any positive steps to change anything. I’ve never seen a sorrier sight than the two of you. It’s a goddamn waste, is what it is. You think you’ll be this age forever? Let me tell you something, old age is coming faster than you think. It’s a fucking locomotive, gathering speed.”
“I’m regrouping,” Jed says.
“You’re hiding,” Norm says, not unkindly. “Both of you are scared of I don’t know what. Your friend died, and that’s certainly tragic, but along with mourning him, you should have come to appreciate what a precious gift life is and what a crime it is to be wasting it. I mean, look at me, for Christ’s sake. My family despises me, I’m a drunk, I’ve worked over fifteen jobs in my life, and I’ve got less than ten grand in the bank to show for it. If anyone should be scared to live, it’s me. But I’m out there every day, suiting up and showing up, doing my best. Some days I might get somewhere and some days I might not, but I go to sleep every night knowing that tomorrow is another chance for my life to get better. And you know what? I sleep just fine. Like a fucking baby. I might need a pill to make my dick stand up, but the two of you need a pill for your souls.” Norm nods, pleased with his analogy. “Yep, that’s what this is. Erectile dysfunction of the soul.” He opens up the glove compartment and rummages through it. “You have a pen in here? I want to write that down. That was pretty damn good. I should trademark it or something.”
“Norm,” I say. “You’re one arrogant son of a bitch.”
“It’s okay,” Jed says thoughtfully. “He’s right.”
“No,” I say, overcome with a rage that materializes like a sudden storm. “Where do you get off, waltzing into people’s lives and psychoanalyzing them? If you’re such a wise man, why is your life such a wreck, huh?”
“It’s okay, Zack,” Jed says. “Leave him alone.”
“Come on, Norm,” I say, ignoring Jed. “How can you think you have any credibility at all? It’s just amazing to me that someone who has fucked up his life as thoroughly as you feels he can give any advice at all about living.”
Norm turns in his seat to face me. “Sometimes it takes a blind man to teach you how to see.”
“Oh my God!” I scream into the wind. “You and these fortune cookie expressions. That doesn’t even mean anything!”
“Cool it, Zack!” Jed says. On some level, it registers in me that the Lexus is picking up speed.
“It means that you can learn from my mistakes,” Norm says hotly. “The reason wisdom is meant to be imparted is because you acquire it only after it’s too late to apply to yourself.”
“That’s pretty fucking convenient,” I say. “You’re sixty years old without a damn thing to show for it, but it hasn’t been a thorough waste of life, because you’ve got your wisdom.”
“My life will never be a waste, Zack, thanks to my wonderful kids.”
“And has it ever occurred to you that your wonderful kids are all hopelessly fucked-up because of you?”
Norm nods somberly, his hair flapping crazily in the wind. “Not all,” he says mysteriously. “Not yet. That’s why I’m here.”
“To save us with your wisdom.”
“Shut up, Zack!” Jed shouts above the engine. I peer over his shoulder and see that we’re doing ninety-five on the West Side Highway.
“Slow down, Jed,” I say. But instead, he accelerates and starts weaving through cars on the parkway.
“Whoa,” Norm says, turning back to sit straight in his seat.
“Both of you need to shut the fuck up,” Jed says grimly. He pulls past an SUV and comes within inches of rear-ending a gray BMW before swerving onto the shoulder to pass it, the warning grooves deafeningly masticating the convertible’s tires. “Jed!” I scream.
“We’re here to help Zack find his doctor. So leave the other stuff alone for now, okay? You’re depressing the shit out of me.”
“Okay,” Norm says.
“Fine,” I say. “Just slow down, okay?”
Jed swerves off the shoulder and back onto the highway. The speedometer needle holds steady at one hundred miles per hour as we tear through the traffic, passing cars that appear parked as we flash by them. But instead of asking him to slow down again, we just sit back and give in to the speed, melding into our seats to become one with it. We barrel up the highway like a bullet, the engine’s howl drowned out by the screaming wind crashing over the windshield and battering our bodies as we cut through the atmosphere, three lost men allowing the cacophony of velocity to drown out, at least temporarily, the wounded raging of our own heads.