and have a meeting in a few hours with someone who sent me a mysterious thumb drive warning me of danger.
“Grandma Lane?”
“Nathaniel.”
“Let’s get inside that head of yours.”
Dr. Laramer may prove a useful guide, even if getting his help entails provoking a few of my own demons.
Chapter 14
In Dr. Laramer’s office, a receptionist tells us the doctor has agreed to squeeze us in during his lunch hour. The receptionist has a hitch in his gaze that takes a second to identify as amblyopia, a subtle case of lazy eye that probably went undetected through his early childhood.
I take a seat next to Grandma.
“Lane, I wonder about the road not taken.”
“I used to do that, Nathaniel.”
“What?”
“Brood about the past.”
“You did?”
“You should try forgetting. It can be better.”
“How very lucid, Lane.” I smile at her.
“If you say so.”
“Can we talk about the man in blue?”
“Live in the present, Nathaniel.”
It’s a platitude. She’s gone again. I sigh.
“My untaken road went through a utility closet on the third floor of San Francisco General Hospital,” I say to Grandma in a low voice.
It was there I had spontaneous sex with Kristina Babcock, my bombshell medical-school mate.
In my second year, we were rotating through the psych ward. Our attention was consumed with “the Acrobat.” That was the moniker of Frederica Calhoun, a schizophrenic who believed she was the reincarnation of a 16th-century French acrobat. We’d walk into Frederica’s room and find her standing in some impossible position, or balancing a toothbrush on her head.
The question facing the attending physician was whether to force Frederica to take medications under court order. Weeks earlier, when off her medication, Frederica did a handstand on the ledge of an eighteen-story building, bringing a crowd and the fire brigade. But in our frequent conversations, she also was lucid, functional, thoughtful. She implored Kristina and me to argue for her freedom from meds that she said made her a “Gap-wearing, 21st- century automaton.”
The attending physician didn’t spend nearly as much time with Frederica. He recommended to a court she be forced to take medication.
“Is there a halfway house, or some alternative living situation that would give her a chance to live drug free?” I asked the doctor during our consultation outside the Acrobat’s room.
“She’s not capable,” he said. “Anything else?”
“It seems like she deserves a shot to be herself,” I pushed back.
“You do seem to really enjoy this rotation, Mr. Idle,” he responded. “I’m recommending you repeat it.”
On the way out, Kristina grabbed my hand and pulled me into a utility closet. “You’re the reincarnation of a sixteenth-century romantic,” she said. “You always side with the freaks.”
“I’m not cut out to play God or any other powerful administrator,” I said.
For the next two months, we fell towards love — great conversation, laughter, the real stuff. Then I turned on her. One night, I came to Kristina’s apartment for our first weekend away — Santa Cruz, a Van Morrison concert, a cheap motel, sex near — and possibly on — the beach. Seemingly, uncomplicated fun. To me, a demarcation line I wouldn’t cross. In fact, I wouldn’t even cross into her house. I stood in her doorway and, without prompting, coldly poured out my resolve. I told her I didn’t love her and never would.
It might not have been true. But Kristina was the embodiment of medical school, of a path towards a clear future. Rules, bureaucracy, checking off boxes and filling out paperwork, passion and patient care overwhelmed by monotony. A few months later, I broke up with my career, too.
I’d lucked into a prestigious summer job at the forensic clinic at Stanford. The day I was supposed to report, I was on a sleeper train in Rumania, having spontaneously decided to spend the summer traveling instead. When I returned to school for my last year, I was student non grata.
Meantime, Kristina started dating a studious and ambitious classmate named Pete Laramer. The pair were married by the time they graduated, and soon had three beautiful daughters.
Then, a year ago, I was walking with Grandma in Golden Gate Park when I ran into Kristina, Pete — Dr. Laramer — and the family. We had an awkward interaction in which Grandma, who in retrospect may have been suffering the very early stages of dementia, referred to me as Irving. As we parted, Dr. Laramer gave me his card.
“And that’s the story of how you got your neurologist,” I tell Grandma.
“I don’t understand what you’re saying.”
“As the kids say: I have commitment issues.”
“Oh.”
She’s silent for a second and says: “If you stay in one place, with one person, you will age no less quickly.”
I laugh. “Where do you come up with this stuff?”
“What?”
“Never mind, guru.” I lean in close. “Lane, I wish you’d tell me your secrets.”
“I’ll tell you a secret.”
“Let’s hear it.”
“Remember to burp the baby.”
She’s looking at the coffee table. A copy of
“I don’t have a baby yet, Grandma.”
She shrugs and picks up the magazine.
I fidget and find myself conspicuously avoiding the glance of an eighty-something woman lovingly cradling the hand of her oxygenated husband who suffers a nasty case of wildly overgrown ear hair.
I extract my phone. There are six missed calls — from the retirement home. Vince must be frantic and pissed. But he hasn’t left a message.
I call Pauline. “Mystery man,” she answers.
“What?”
“So what’s in your mystery package?”
“Mystery instructions.”
She doesn’t respond for a second.
“Pauline?”
“Hold on.”
She puts her hand over the phone but I can still hear her coughing to the extent it sounds like she might be sick.
“Upset stomach,” she says when she’s finished. “Late night followed by quintuple espresso. I’ve got to cut down my caffeine intake.”
Or her stress.
“Have you ever considered slowing down, maybe just in the middle of the night?”
