He said, “That’s absurd.”
“My biological father is from rural Florida. I’ve got a weird combination of third-world immune systems.”
He said, “May I see your medical degree?” Idiotically, I touched the pocket of my jacket, but he said, “No, you don’t have one. I do. What you are saying has no scientific facts.” He looked down at his computer and began rapidly typing. “What happened to you has a medical reason, it just hasn’t been found yet. Stay away from superstitions. I would suggest that you let good medical professionals collect the facts and let them give you answers. Calcutta and Miami immune systems have nothing to do with each other.”
“I didn’t say Miami, I said Florida. There’s a difference.”
“I know the difference,” he said. “And I would also strongly suggest you take a flu shot.” He asked me, “And you think you are depressed? Describe how you feel.” He squinted into the fluorescent lighting, prepared to analyze my answer.
How could I explain? I thought about my playlist, “Songs to Beat Depression.”
“You know how when you are listening to music?” I said. “Okay, on the shuffle function, it gives you random songs supposedly designed for you by your previous choices, right?”
“Of course. I know this.”
“And some days every song the computer sends me makes me feel great, like the best song I’ve ever felt. On other days, it shuffles songs. .” I shrugged my shoulders. “You know, every song makes you feel terrible, they’re all bummers. Then I realize it’s not the music, it’s me. I only listen to one song, basically. Only one song makes me feel good.”
“You listen to the same song over and over?”
“Kind of,” I said. “I just have this feeling everyone is happier than I am. I just want to feel like everyone else.”
“That’s exactly what everyone else says,” Dr. Ahuja said. He tapped the keyboard to go back over something. He nodded his head. “Okay, okay. . ” He tilted his chin at me. “Do you have any thoughts of suicide?”
Suicide? I thought.
Before I could answer, he held up his hand to stop me. “What was that in your mind?” He admonished me with his hand, “Stop! Free association only. The thing that popped in your mind. Close your eyes.”
I did. I backed my mind up and saw a cart full of cleaning supplies and I saw housekeeping women pushing the cart. I realized that it had always been the morning staff that found suicides.
I said to Dr. Ahuja, “Morning maids, hotel morning maids.”
His chair squeaked. “Interesting,” he said. “What are they mourning?”
“No, morning maids,” I said, “like housekeeping, like in hotels in the morning, cleaning. I don’t think that will make sense to you—”
“It makes sense to me,” he said.
“But morning maids is what I thought about. My mother and I live in an environment where everyone resents us.”
“Everyone resents you? Interesting. Okay, the question again, and I’ll let you answer it. Any thoughts of suicide?”
“No,” I said.
“Let me ask you this.” He touched his fingertips together beneath his nose. “Are you getting ready to go on a trip?”
“What?”
“A trip, travel?” he repeated.
“Always,” I said.
“See, I knew it. I can tell.” He smiled, pleased at himself. “Travel is very stressful.”
He swiveled in his chair and picked up a brown box from the floor, set it on his desk, took sample boxes out, and slid them across the desk to me. “This is going to help you,” he said. He explained this was a “new common help” people took, and explained the dosages, and told me to taper off the Rozaline. “This is newer, more effective, fewer side effects. This is my preference,” he said.
He waited. It was called Elapam. When I didn’t say anything right away, he pushed three more sample boxes to me. I finally said, “Sometimes I have trouble sleeping too.”
“My choice for my patients is somatropin.”
I turned the box of Elapam over. On the back were words and complicated chemical contents and warnings. Shaking the box, it rattled with tinfoil pill sleeves, and on the front of the box was a formless figure dancing, sexless and twirling with arms overhead, and I realized that the swirling at the feet was the drug company logo on the frame of his digital photo frame.
Dr. Ahuja was working at the computer, the mouse clicking faster. It took him about ten seconds to send the prescriptions to every pharmacy in the world.
“That’s it! Godspeed!” he said. “Enjoy your travels!”
I checked out with the woman who had been the nurse who’d weighed me and took my initial blood pressure, now sliding the translucent glass open and taking my credit card. All the magazines in the waiting room were business magazines, and she handed me the receipt for my visit, rather expensive for what he’d just done. It reminded me of the warning Van Raye had written in an essay in My Year of Quantum Weirdness: “Every doctor thinks he can be a businessman, and every businessman thinks he can be a lawyer, and every lawyer thinks he can be a writer, and every writer thinks he’s right about everything.”
CHAPTER 15
On Thursday, Elizabeth and I woke early for a trip to Chicago for her to attend the Host Resorts board meeting. Elizabeth’s standard procedure was to be through security two hours before our departure time. I wore a gray suit and a red tie, and when we sat down at our gate and I had just begun enjoying the Airport Zone, I glanced at our itinerary on my phone and was shocked to see that our flight had been rebooked through Birmingham. When had I done that?
I had some vague recollection of changing our flights, as if I had dreamed it, but yes, it was me, not the hacker. I’d changed our reservations after taking my sleeping pills, under the influence, and believed the violin could be in Birmingham, at this place called the Warehouse of Mishandled Luggage. Now I wasn’t so sure. We’d be wasting our time going.
On my phone, I found where the post-sleeping-pill me had searched for the Warehouse of Mishandled Luggage. There was strangely no website, only an address in Birmingham. Sitting in the gate area, I found a street view of the address and saw a standard-looking warehouse warped in the fish-eye perspective.
Elizabeth took out the CEO report and began rereading it using her speed-reading finger.
On my phone, I also discovered a text conversation with Dubourg, my cousin. I actually had typed these words:
There’s weird shit going on.
I was embarrassed and annoyed.
Something big has happened with Van Raye. Tell you tomorrow.
Tomorrow? I scrolled toward the end of the conversation. The conversation went on with Dubourg trying to figure out what I was trying to get at, trying to follow my explanation of ringing payphones, Elvis, and Elizabeth’s lost violin, and he’d said:
I can fly through ATL in AM.
Meet concourse C tomorrow.
The last balloon was time stamped this morning:
Im here.
I looked at my watch seeing that our rendezvous time was fifteen minutes ago, and quickly texted:
I’m here! On way!
“I’ve got to go walk some,” I said to Elizabeth, standing suddenly, lifting my attaché and putting the strap over my head. “Stretch my legs.”