produced urine samples, labored mightily but without success to deliver a stool. He was exhausted.
'You are one hell of a case study,' said his doctor, and the voice pulled Augie back to the waking present: the hum of the air conditioning, hot light being sliced by narrow blinds, the waxy paper of the exam table crinkling under him, the smell of alcohol masking but not effacing the intimate aromas of sundry sorts of human goo. 'Rest awhile if you like. I'll come back for you later.'
Nina Silver was waiting in the consultation room. She sat on the edge of a green leather chair and stifled an urge to straighten the frames of the gold-sealed diplomas and purple-bordered certificates: paraphernalia of reassurance, fetishes of hope, pompous promises that things would probably turn out O.K., and if they didn't, well, at least everything humanly possible had been done. A silver pen stood next to a tortoiseshell box that held prescription slips. Behind the doctor's imposing chair was a pen-and-ink caricature of a fat woman bending over to receive a shot in the behind: No Norman Rockwell prints for Manny Rucker.
He bustled in, hands buried wrist-deep in his labcoat pockets, and started talking before he'd even reached his desk. 'Nina,' he said, 'your husband is an extremely stubborn man. He really should be dead about five different ways.'
She swallowed and slid backward in her seat. Her spine went soft and it took tremendous concentration, a gymnast's concentration, to hold herself erect. The doctor bounded around his desk, tossed a manila folder onto his green blotter, then dropped so heavily into his swiveling, rolling chair that the entire office seemed to quake around him. 'I'm not saying this to frighten you,' he resumed. 'I'm saying it because I'm impressed as hell. I'm amazed.
'Listen. We don't yet know everything that went on with him-we won't know that till the lab work is done, and even then a lot of it will be surmising, reconstructing. But here's the minimum we're up against.'
Rucker bore down on the arms of his throne until the springs creaked and the casters chattered against their Plexiglas platform. He exhaled noisily, then leaned forward, opened the folder, and spread his thick and hairy elbows on either side of it.
'Last time Augie was in here, he weighed a hundred seventy-four pounds, and he wasn't fat. He now weighs one sixteen. That kind of weight loss, the dehydration, the metabolic craziness, is very debilitating. His kidneys shut down for a while-the function seems to be returning, but we can't tell how badly they've been compromised. His stomach has shrunk up smaller than a fist, which means it's going to be a long, slow process getting the weight back on him. His spleen is enlarged, who knows why. That's another obstacle to recovery.'
The doctor paused for breath, and Nina felt herself starting to cry. She struggled not to, because doctors' offices make everyone feel like children being spoken to sternly but well-meaningly by a grownup, and, absurdly, pathetically, it seems important to be brave and well behaved. Still, she thought she could feel her own stomach shrinking up like a puddle in the sun, her own spleen swelling like a sodden sponge, her kidneys growing parched and brittle, tubes and passageways caving in like long-abandoned tunnels.
Manny Rucker noticed that her face was collapsing and decided not to acknowledge it. She was not the patient and there was nothing to be gained by coddling.
'He's had a concussion,' the doctor resumed. 'That's rather a vague concept, concussion is. It basically means he's been clunked on the head and something went kerblooey. We don't yet know if he's fully recovered his memory or where the gaps might be. We don't know if the loss might recur. Probably he's now at somewhat higher risk of Parkinson's and of stroke.'
Manny Rucker flipped shut the manila folder, and Nina Silver allowed herself to exhale. She thought she'd heard all she had to listen to. She was wrong.
'There's one other thing,' the doctor told her. 'He's had a heart attack.'
Nina's eyes went out of focus and settled vaguely on the buttocks of the fat woman awaiting her injection. 'Heart attack?'
'There's a pronounced irregularity in the EKG that wasn't there before,' said Rucker. 'It's clear evidence. Too much time has passed to gauge the severity from the blood enzymes. But there's no doubt that something happened.'
The room was falling away from Nina Silver, the angles between walls and floor and ceiling becoming jarring, oblique, and insane. Her other reunions with Augie, the ones in dreams, had never been so complicated, so fraught. 'He told me his chest ached, his arms, when he crawled into the dinghy.'
Rucker nodded. 'Very possibly he was having the attack while he was in the water. Truly amazing he didn't drown.'
There was a long silence. In the examination room, Augie Silver, all alone, was rousing himself from a catnap; his bony fingers clutched the edges of the table and he gamely strained to sit himself up without assistance. His wife was trying equally hard to ask a simple question. She opened her mouth three times before the words squeezed past her clenched throat.
'Will he die?'
Rucker folded his hands and skidded his huge chair a little closer to the desk. 'Eventually,' he said. 'But he hasn't died yet, and I'm not going to bet against him now. I think he'll recover, I think he's got a good shot at a normal life span. But he needs a very long and very total rest. He's got to get the weight back. If he can't do it at home, he's got to go to the hospital-'
'He doesn't want to do that.'
'He's made that clear,' said Rucker. 'That's why I'm making it a threat. He has to eat. He has to drink. And he has to be totally shielded from stress.'
Nina Silver straightened up, willed her mind to clear, and looked at Manny Rucker with a kind of defiance. She loved her husband. She would protect him, care for him, heal him. For this she didn't need diplomas, certificates, prescription pads. 'He'll be best off at home,' she said. Then her expression softened and she almost smiled. 'Besides, this is Key West. What kind of stress could there possibly be?'
16
What kind of stress?
For starters, the subtle subliminal stress of finding oneself the subject of rumors, whispers, the sort of breathless gossip that attends such odd occurrences as a slightly famous neighbor's return from the dead.
Nothing could be clearer than that Augie Silver was not yet ready for company, much less a full-scale reemergence into society. When Nina bundled her husband into their seldom-used old Saab and drove him to Manny Rucker's Fleming Street office, it was with the intention of getting him there and back again unseen.
But Key West is a small place, a sparse place, and little that belongs to it goes unnoticed. Politics, economics, world events go largely unnoticed, being the province of the chill, drear world north of mile marker five. Tourists go unnoticed, because they are not of the town and no one cares what happens to them or what they do; they pass through as undifferentiated parcels of sunburn and noise.
It is a very different thing among the few thousand people who are truly of the place, who are the place. Unconsciously and unfailingly, they recognize each other against the backdrop of faceless transients, they pick each other out as though by some invisible genetic marking. And the Silvers, husband and wife, were very much of the place, distinctive and familiar by dozens of small details: her square-cut jet-black hair; his archaic penchant for corduroy. His meandering Socratic walk; the French net shopping bag she used for groceries. Her gallery; his death. They were known.
So it was inevitable they'd be seen as they passed, even briefly, on such a busy sidewalk as that of Fleming one block up from Duval.
The first person to see them was Lindy Barnes, a checker at Fausto's market. She did a quick and bashful double take, and later told her colleagues across the cashiers' aisles that it had to be the husband, the painter you know, I mean he looked like an old dirtbag, stooped and sick, but really who else could it be?
The second person to see them was Claire Davidson, the head teller at the downtown branch of Keys Marine. She was not a chatterbox, but it was part of her job to recognize faces and remember names, and the real or apparent return of Augie Silver was not something she could quite keep to herself.
By the end of the business day, perhaps a hundred people had heard the rumor, and one of them was Freddy
