This, too, made him want to laugh out loud. The United States Postal Service meant illicit drugs, poisons, or bomb-making liquids. He knew that carefully chosen words were far more threatening.
Sometimes, he told himself, the best jokes are those you alone can hear. The three letters were now in the hands of one of the busiest postal processing systems in the United States-and one of the most reliable. He wanted to howl out loud with anticipation, bay at some distant moon hidden by Grand Central’s cavernous roof. His pulse raced with excitement. The din of the trains and people around him slipped away, and he was abruptly enveloped in a warm, delicious silence of his own creation. It was like descending into azure-clear Caribbean waters and floating, watching shafts of light slice through the enveloping blue world.
Like the diver he imagined himself to be, he exhaled slowly, feeling himself rise inexorably toward the surface.
He thought:
And so it begins.
Then he let himself be swept forward with the rest of the anonymous masses onto a jam-packed commuter train. He did not care where it was going, because wherever it stopped wasn’t his real destination.
2
The Three Reds
The day that she became Red One had already been a difficult one for Doctor Karen Jayson.
First thing in the morning she’d had to tell a middle-aged woman that her test results showed she had ovarian cancer; midday she’d received a call from a local emergency room that one of her longtime patients had been severely injured in an auto accident; at the same time she was forced to hospitalize another patient with a crippling kidney stone that couldn’t be managed with routine pain medication. Then she had to spend nearly an hour on the phone with an insurance company executive justifying her decision. Patients in her waiting room had backed up, everything from routine physicals to strep throat and flu, which each sufferer had blissfully spread to everyone else waiting in various states of frustration and illness.
And then, late in the afternoon of what she thought was already a relentlessly bad day, she was called to the hospice wing at Shady Grove Retirement Home-a nearby place that was neither in a grove nor particularly shady-to attend the final moments of a man she barely knew. The man was in his early nineties, with not much more than a sunken-chest-and-gaunt-eyes wisp of him left, but he had clung to life with pit-bull tenacity. Karen had seen many people die over the course of her professional life; as an internist with a subspecialty in geriatrics, this was inevitable. But even so, she could never get accustomed to it. Standing at the man’s bedside doing nothing other than adjusting the IV Demerol drip, it roiled her emotions. She wished the hospice nurses hadn’t called her, had managed the death on their own.
But they had, and she’d responded, and there she was.
The room seemed stark and cold, though the heat was blasting through old-fashioned radiators. It was shadowy and dark, as if death could enter more easily into a dimly lit room. A few machines, a shuttered window, an old metal bedside lamp, some tangled, dingy white sheets, and a faint odor of waste were all that surrounded the old man. There was not even a cheap but colorful painting on any of the flat white walls to fracture the atmosphere in the bleak room. It was not a good place to die.
She thought: Poets be damned, there’s nothing even slightly romantic or elegiac about dying, especially in a nursing home that has seen better days.
“He’s gone,” the attending nurse said.
Karen had heard the same things in the final few seconds: a slow release of breath, like the last bit of air leaking from a balloon, followed by the high-pitched alarm from the heart monitor familiar to anyone who’d ever watched a doctor drama on television. She reached over and turned the machine off after watching the flat, lime-green electronic line for a moment, thinking that the routine of death had none of the cinematic tension people imagined it to have. It was often just a fading away, like banks of lights in a huge auditorium being shut down after a crowd has dispersed, until only darkness is left behind. She sighed, told herself that even this image was too poetic, and let habit overtake her. She placed her fingers against the old man’s throat, searching for a pulse in his carotid artery. His skin seemed paper-thin beneath her hand, and she had the odd thought that even the softest, gentlest touch would leave telltale scars on his neck.
“Time of death, four forty-four,” she said.
There was something mathematically satisfying in that series of numbers, like squares placed inside each other, fitting together perfectly. She examined the old man’s DNR form and then looked over at the nurse, who had begun to unhook wire leads from the man’s chest. “When you finish Mister”-she glanced at the DNR form again-“… Wilson’s paperwork, will you bring it around for me to sign?”
Karen was a little ashamed that she stumbled over the old man’s name. Death should not be so anonymous, she thought. The old man’s face looked-as she expected-peaceful. Death and clichés, she thought, simply go together. She wondered, for a moment, precisely who Mister Wilson was. Lots of hopes, dreams, memories, experiences disappearing at four forty-four. What had he seen of life? Family? School? War? Love? Sadness? Joy? There was nothing in the room in his last moments that said anything about who he was. For a moment, Karen felt a surge of anger over death’s arriving alongside anonymity. The hospice nurse must have sensed it, because she interrupted the creeping silence.
“It’s sad,” the nurse said. “Mister Wilson was a lovely old man. Do you know he liked bagpipe music, of all things? But he wasn’t a Scot. I think he came from the Midwest somewhere. Like Iowa or Idaho. Go figure.”
Karen imagined there had to be a story behind that love, but now it was lost. “Any family I should be calling?” she asked.
The nurse shook her head, but answered, “I’ll have to double-check his admission forms. I know we didn’t call anyone when he came in to hospice.”
The nurse had already passed from one routine-helping someone who had reached his nineties pass from this life to the next-to her subsequent responsibility, which was properly processing death bureaucratically.
“I think I’ll go outside for a moment while you get the paperwork together.”
The nurse nodded her head slightly. She was familiar with Doctor Jayson’s postmortem order of business: sneaking a cigarette in the far corner of the nursing home’s parking lot where the doctor believed no one could see her, which wasn’t actually the case. After this solitary break, the doctor would head back inside to the main office, where she kept a desk solely for filling out Medicare and Medicaid forms and signing off on the inevitable conclusion to stays in the home, the state-mandated death certificate. The home was several blocks away from the square redbrick medical building where Karen practiced internal medicine alongside a dozen other doctors competent in everything from psychiatry to cardiology.
The nurse knew that Karen would smoke precisely one-half of a cigarette before coming back inside to complete Mister Wilson’s paperwork. In the pack of Marlboros that Karen thought she had hidden in her top desk drawer, and which all the staff at the hospice wing were aware of, the doctor had carefully and painstakingly measured each smoke and marked the midway point with a red pen. The nurse also knew that regardless of the weather, Karen would not bother with a coat, even if it was pouring rain or freezing cold in western Massachusetts. The nurse imagined that this lack of concession to the vagaries of the weather was the penance the doctor paid for continuing to be addicted to a disgusting habit she fully knew would kill her before too long and one that was held in total contempt by virtually everyone in the health care business the doctor was a part of.