The door beside the desk buzzed, opened, and a short black woman in a white coat came out.
“Mr. Morgan?”
He took off his reading glasses, folded them and put them in a shirt pocket, and got up, his knees aching. He dropped the magazine on his seat. She held the door open, and he followed her down a hall to a treatment room.
“You can hang your coat there,” she said, and he took the leather off, hung it on a peg on the back of the door. She weighed him on a scale, took his blood pressure, pulse, and temperature, noted them on a clipboard chart. She told him the doctor would be with him shortly, closed the door, and left him alone.
He sat on the treatment table, paper crinkling under him, looked around. There was a cutaway chart on one wall showing the progression of heart disease, cholesterol buildup in the arteries. Another had the seven warning signs of Type 1 diabetes.
After a few minutes, the door opened and a tall, skinny white man came in. Midthirties, short blond hair, glasses.
“I’m Dr. Kinzler.” He put out his hand. Morgan shook it. “Dr. Rosman at the clinic sent over your file this morning.”
He picked up Morgan’s chart from the counter, looked at it, flipped pages.
“You saw Dr. Rosman last week?” he said without looking up.
“Tuesday.” It was the first he’d spoken.
“You know you’re down five pounds from then?”
Morgan shook his head. He was worried it would be more.
“Vitals are fine, temperature normal.” He set the chart down. “Any pain?”
Morgan touched the right side of his stomach. “Here, sometimes.”
Kinzler felt there, probed gently.
“Liver size seems normal,” he said, “but we’ll run some more blood work.”
He slid the chestpiece of his stethoscope up beneath Morgan’s sweater, the metal cold, asked him to breathe deep. He did the same in back, between his shoulder blades.
“How long with the pain?” he said.
“Three, four weeks. Bad the last week or two.”
“You taking anything for it?”
“Vicodin when I need it. Try not to take it unless I have to.”
“Good.”
He made notes on the chart and then stepped back and leaned against the counter, clipboard held in crossed arms.
“So you know about the other test results, the second biopsy?” he said. “Dr. Rosman discussed them with you?”
“A little.”
“Goblet cell carcinoid is fairly rare. It only strikes one in about a hundred thousand people. And it can be fairly unpredictable. We don’t know a lot about it yet, but there are some relatively standard ways of treating it. You’re…” He looked at the clipboard. “Fifty-seven?”
“Fifty-eight. Next month.”
“You’re in good shape for your age. Fit. That’ll help. But a lot of this-and what we decide to do-will depend on how early we caught it. That’s why we’ll do a full set of blood work today. Then we can discuss how to proceed. Have you had an MRI or CAT scan?”
Morgan shook his head.
“You have insurance?”
“No.”
“Medicare, Medicaid, anything?”
“No.”
“That’s an issue. There’s a range of treatments that might be required, once we figure out which way to go.”
“I can get the money. I’ll do what I need to do.”
“What line of work are you in, Mr. Morgan?”
He shifted on the table. “Handyman, construction, whatever I can get.”
“Construction, huh? Union?”
“No.”
“Pension?”
Morgan shook his head.
“There’s various things you can apply for,” Kinzler said. “Social aid, some elder programs you might be able to get in on. All of it’s worth looking into. You’re likely eligible for Medicaid as well.”
“I’ll pay what I have to pay.”
“You seem confident.”
Morgan shrugged.
“Either way,” Kinzler said, “we can’t waste much time. We have to be proactive with these types of cancers. They removed the appendix when?”
“August.”
“So it probably took at least a couple weeks for the initial biopsy results to come back. Did you have any symptoms before that?”
“No. I had the pain, I went to the clinic. They sent me to the hospital.”
“That’s one of the ways goblet cell presents,” Kinzler said. “Or at least one of the ways we catch it. Routine appendectomies, and if they find a tumor in the removed organ, bingo. There you are.”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m saying early is better. And we might be fairly early here, which is good news. Depending on how far it’s gotten, where it’s spread, surgery may be an option as well. We go in, take out as many of the tumors as we find. Afterward, we put you on a maintenance diet of chemo, maybe radiation, if it looks like it’ll be effective. Then we test you regularly, see if they come back.”
The woman came back in, carrying a kit she opened on the counter.
Kinzler put out his hand. “Doris will draw some blood. We’ll get back to you when we know more.”
“That’s it?”
“For now.” He kept his hand out until Morgan shook it. “At least a few days before we know anything. Then we’ll set you up for a scan. You’re not going anywhere, right?”
“No,” Morgan said. The woman had a plastic syringe out, cartridges, a blue rubber strap.
“I’ll leave you in good hands, then, Mr. Morgan. We’ll speak soon.” He shut the door behind him.
The woman tugged at the left sleeve of his pullover. He rolled it up, and she tied the strap around his upper arm and swabbed the crook of his elbow with an alcohol pad. When he made a fist, the veins rose in his forearm. She laid the needle tip on the thickest one, and he winced as the steel slid in.
An empty plastic cartridge went into the syringe. She pressed it home, and he watched dark red blood swirl into the tube, slowly fill it. His blood. His life.
He waited in the doorway of a beauty supply shop, its metal grille covered with graffiti. Eleven P.M. and only a handful of cars had passed in the half hour he’d been there. In the distance, the Prudential Building rose over the skyline like a floodlit tombstone. No matter where you went in the city, it was always in sight.
He watched the big black Chevy Suburban come down the street slow. Tinted windows, silver rims and spinners. He stepped out of the doorway, and the Suburban swung to the curb, the rear passenger door opening. He got in, and C-Love pulled the door shut behind him.
The Suburban had been customized with two facing bench seats. Mikey-Mike sat in the rear one, arms up on the seatback. Morgan slid onto the other, facing him. C-Love settled in beside him, close to the door. They pulled away from the curb, hip-hop throbbing low from hidden speakers.
Mikey wore a Michael Jordan jersey, an Adidas headband, and warm-up pants and jacket, but he was pushing three fifty, and Morgan doubted if he’d seen a basketball court in twenty years. There was a thick rope of gold around his neck. To Morgan, it was all foolish gangsta bling that said Drug dealer. Lock my ass up.
Morgan wore his leather, the Beretta tucked into his belt in back. He looked behind him, saw the Coleman twins, Dante at the wheel, DeWayne riding shotgun, a hundred pounds heavier than his brother, with a lazy left eye. He was a month out of Rahway at most. He looked at Morgan without expression.
“Yo, DeWayne,” Mikey said. “Turn that shit down.”
The music faded to a dull thumping Morgan could feel through the seat. He looked out the window. They drove past City Hall with its gold-leaf dome, marble steps, barricades in front.
“That was good work you put in,” Mikey said.
“True that,” C-Love said. “Showed those niggas the error of their ways.”