Mr. Chalé.
Had driven a bus. Prepared brunch for his sons every Sunday after church, then dispatched them to various DIY projects around the house: rehinging doors, replacing bricks, restoring wood, repainting trim. When he passed (diabetes), the sons inherited the house. The older one said unfortunately the discount was null, effective immediately, given the cost of the funeral next week, to which “Quaker” was invited with “Foola” and the kids. The younger one — the handsome one, his late father’s favorite; a charmer and a drug dealer, unbeknownst to his father — took Kweku to the side at said funeral, a modest funeral, to say in a soft, almost soothing bass murmur, that given their respective lines of work — respectable work, not so different, his and Kweku’s, they both sold “feeling better”—if Kweku could access any meaningful quantities of opiate, a new discount might be arranged.
Now the house was in ruins. A ruin, thought Kweku. Like a temple on a roadside, cracked pillars, heaped trash. Less a lasting commemoration of the efforts of the worshippers than a comment on the uselessness of effort itself. A face missing teeth among similar faces. A falling-apart monument to Charlie’s life’s work: lover, husband, father, bus driver turned homeowner, turned widower, turned statistic (diabetic, black, bested by brunch).
How did we live here? Kweku wondered. All six? And in back, where even sunlight looked dirty somehow? He didn’t know. A car honked. He glanced back. Was blocking traffic. Glanced back at the house, which seemed to say to him: go. He didn’t want to go where he was going, to go forward, but he couldn’t stop moving or stay here or come back. He nodded to the house and pulled out into traffic. In the rearview bricks missing. (He never saw it again.)
• • •
He drove to the Law Offices of Kleinman & Kleinman and parked just a little ways down from the door. It was a free-standing building with a massive front window, the windowsill crowded with overgrown plants. The receptionist, in her sixties, sat facing this window peering idly through the ferns at the road now and then. While still typing. Always typing. She never stopped typing. Her varicosed fingers like robots gone wild.
Kweku had noticed that when he parked outside the window she would peer through the thicket and recognize his car. This gave her just enough lead time to have at the ready that pitying look when he walked through the door. He hated that look. Not the frown-smile of sympathy nor the knit-brow of empathy but the eye-squint of pity. As if by squinting she could make him appear a little less pathetic, soften the edges, blur the details of his face and his fate. Biting her lip as with worry — while still typing. Not that worried.
The pitter-patter rainfall of fingers on keys.
He walked up the sidewalk and entered the building. A bell jingled thinly as he opened the door. “Me again,” he said, as she looked up and squinted.
“You again,” she said with the bitten-lipped smile. “Marty’s waiting to see you.”
Kweku tried to breathe easy. Marty was never in early, liked to make people wait. If he was waiting for Kweku then something was wrong. The cameraman appeared and began setting up his shot. A Well-Respected Doctor receives Horrible News. “All right then.”
“Very well then.”
“So, I’ll just…?”
“Go in, yes.”
“Of course.” Stalling. “Thank you.”
Still typing. “Good luck.”
• • •
Marty didn’t bother with pitying looks. “Listen to me, brother. We fought the good fight.” Frazzled hippie turned attorney, one of the best in Massachusetts, six foot five, massive shoulders, massive belly, massive hair. Had hopped the Green Tortoise to Harvard Law from Humboldt County as the embers of the Movement went from glowing-orange to ashen-gray, etc. A lawyer’s lawyer. Put his feet on the desk. Crossed his hands behind his head, his great shock of silver coils. “You’ve spent hundreds… of thousands… of dollars… trying to fight this. They’re not backing down, man. It’s eating you alive.”
Kweku laughed mirthlessly. Not them, her, the family, but it, nameless, faceless. The monster.
The machine.
• • •
It was what he’d called the hospital when he first got to Hopkins, so awestruck had he been by how well the thing worked. By how shiny, how brilliant, how clean and well ordered, how white-and-bright-chrome, how machinelike it was. He loved it. Loved ironing his clothes in the mornings on a towel on the table by the tub, sink, and stove, his white coat, the short coat worn by students. Loved walking, still wide-eyed with wonder, into the belly of the beast.
He’d step off the elevator and stop for a moment to hear the machine-sounds: clicking, beeping, humming, hush. To breathe the machine-smells: pungent, metallic, disinfectant. To think machine-thoughts: clean, cut, find, pluck, sew, snip. He felt like an astronaut wearing astronaut-white landed recently and unexpectedly on an alien ship. Newly fluent in the language but still foreign to the locals. And later like a convert to the alien race.
Later, in Boston, when he’d finished his training, when he’d actually become a doctor, well regarded at that, he’d stride through the white and chrome halls at Beth Israel feeling part of the machine now and stronger for it. It was a feeling he never dared share with his colleagues, who’d take his pride in the hospital for lack of pride in himself: that he still felt so special, even superior, for being there. For being part of the machinery, when the machine was so strong. In control. The net effect of the show, the audiovisuals, the squeaky clean of the OR, nurse-slippers squeaking on floors, was to communicate controclass="underline" over every form of messiness, over human emotion, human weakness, dirtiness, sickness, complications. It was the reason, he thought, they built churches so big and investment banks so impressive. To dazzle the faithful. Arrogance by association. The machine was in control. And so he was in control who belonged to it.
• • •
Then the machine turned against him, charged, swallowed him whole, mashed him up, and spat him out of some spout in the back.
• • •
“It was wrongful dismissal,” he said without feeling, his thousandth time saying it.
And Marty’s thousandth and first: “This we know,” pitching a tent of his fingers on the hill of his belly. “We just can’t prove it.” Heavy sigh. “God knows that I want to. God knows that I’ve tried to. You’re an incredible doctor, an incredible man.” He tapped an unwieldy pile of files with his foot. “Have you actually read any of these character references?”
“I have not.”
“You can practice wherever.”
“I was wrongfully dismissed. I should be practicing there—” Kweku heard himself and stopped. He sounded like a teenager, a recently dumped girlfriend still desperate to be back in her tormentor’s arms.
Marty cleared his throat. “Net net. They threw the kitchen sink at us. Shit. You were there. There was too much at stake. With the clout of the Cabots, they had to do something, so they let you go, right? But you took them to task. Then they couldn’t just say, ‘Yeah, okay, we fucked up, we threw you under the bus.’ Though they did. ’Cause you’re black. Right? ’Cause then it becomes: is Beth Israel racist? And this being Boston that question is… booooom!” A sound and a gesture to imply an explosion. “All these hospitals are connected. It’ll be hard to work here. But it’s a big fucking country. Move the kids to California…” and continued, but vaguely, halfhearted, by rote.