Daphne_A Novel Read online

  “You know what you should do? Get yourself a pet. Get your mind off work. Make you relax a little, think about another life.” A reasonable enough suggestion, but I bridled at the hint of scolding in it. “I’ve got a cat,” Sherman offered. “A Sphynx. Prince Hairy. He has FAS, feline aging syndrome. He ages at three times the normal rate. He looks like a purse of bones, and he can’t eat a thing except tuna from the blender.”

  Of course, the wounded caring for the wounded. “Sounds like a lot of work.”

  “Are you kidding? He takes care of me.”

  We finished stacking the desks and stood there, at a loss for what else to say.

  “Anything new with the site?” I asked, pointing at Sherman’s wrist.

  He wore a red rubberized bracelet with the URL of the website he ran. A lot of the group wore them. If they had a bad episode out in public, went down and weren’t getting up, then hopefully someone would check the bracelet and look up the condition. I kept a card in my wallet but otherwise didn’t go around advertising my frailty.

  “You haven’t been visiting the forums?” Sherman said.

  The discussions and testimonials on the site were just too depressing. You had to consider that those who made it to group were well enough to actually leave the house. We all tended to be homebodies, but a lot of people with the condition were virtual shut-ins, even worse than Sherman. Too much out in the world to startle, upset, sadden, disgust, or thrill them to risk just traipsing outside on a sunny day or a cheerful whim.

  “I’d get too obsessive. I can’t think about the disease every hour of the day.”

  Disease. Sherman didn’t like it when anyone called it that. But now he just sighed and nodded his head. Or maybe bobbed it. It was hard to tell the difference.

  MY CAR SERVICE was waiting outside. As we wound back down to the Mission, the late afternoon sun slanted gauzily over the candy-floss Victorians, and the golden dome of City Hall shone like a crown. It was one of those glorious days that pop up even midwinter in California: bedheaded couples in hoodies and canvas sneakers reclining in the park, the concerned faces of joggers striving through the gathering twilight, everything burnished and glowing. “Us midwesterners have a hard time adjusting to paradise,” Brook warned me before I moved out here. But I’d loved this tiny motherboard of a city immediately. Three years ago, the entire economy collapsed, but in San Francisco everything just kept going up. On the streets, there would be fewer and fewer addicts and lunatics, more and more kids with perfect haircuts and four-thousand-dollar bikes. Fewer rehab clinics and community centers, more half-occupied, investor-friendly, live/work lofts. Fewer mad outbursts and fevered rants, more calm luxury and detached bemusement. Less abject despair, more bored anxiety. Besides an earthquake, you almost always knew what was coming here—sunny, seventy degrees, seven days a week, and a new brunch place every month. Throw in some decent public transport, and San Francisco was the perfect place for a headbobber—this one anyway—to survive.

  As the Panhandle flitted by, I checked my phone. No messages, just the one I’d been typing to Brook. I mean Christ I WANT to but really . . . I deleted it, typed instead: Darn have to work late Thursday thanks anyway have fun say hi to the DJs have fun for me.

  FIVE

  ALARM, COFFEE, SHOWER, OATMEAL. BLOUSE, BLAZER, a pair of low-heel boots—I needed to feel even taller walking out the door on a Monday. I turned onto Mission, and there he was, the torso. This time, he only froze me in my tracks. He tapped himself forward with his wheelchair’s joystick. “Hey, pretty girl, got a twenty for me?”

  “Twenty bucks?” I got out. “That’s am-bitious.”

  “It’s for surgery. I need some surgery.”

  I couldn’t help sweeping my eyes over him: tiny hands and feet, withered narrow waist, sunken chest, greasy blond hair drooping in his eyes—if I looked him in the eyes, it was maybe a little easier. “How far is a twenty getting you for surgery?”

  “Twenty bucks closer than I am now.”

  I got a glimpse of the track marks just above his waxy white elbows. “I don’t know, that a sound investment?”

  He grinned wolfishly. “Safer than stocks these days.”

  I fumbled in my purse, managed to dig out a five, bent over carefully, dropped it in his cup, and somehow—maybe the release from guilt—this unlocked my legs. “Call me Jeff,” he said. “For next time you make a deposit in my fund.”

  I continued on, lurching only a little. On the next block, a neon sign for a body shop flickered out of the fog. Its P was fizzling out. ERFECT DETAILING. My bonus curse: to only notice the flawed and the damaged.

  BART to Caltrain to the company shuttle. We made our circuit of MedEval’s campus, rolling greens and bucolic ponds, before arriving at my lab, concrete and razor wire. Hidalgo, one of my technicians, was outside on a smoke break. He wore a black and orange Giants cap and chunky red headphones, his head slowly nodding to blaring heavy metal. As I reached for my ID to swipe in, he looked up, quickly dropped his cigarette, and ground it out. I caught a whiff. Shit, pot. I didn’t blame him—whatever got him through another day. Still, if anyone else caught him . . .

  “You good to clean out the pens this morning?”

  “Yeah, I’m good.”

  I hesitated. “Hidalgo, you look pretty beat.” I knew he had a two-year-old daughter and that she was sick, something about her not being able to swallow, and that he worked a second job to pay for all her doctors. But what exactly was wrong, the finer details of his worries, I didn’t pry into. His privacy, my insulation. “Listen,” I said cautiously. “I’ll get Staci to do the pens.”

  “Nah, I’m cool.”

  I swiped inside, went past the bio-waste bins, through the second and third security doors, and into the lab and its familiar dull, high-pitched yipping. Staci, my other tech, waved from behind the glass and mimed putting her latex-gloved fingers in her ears. Pin, my veterinary surgeon, was at her desk, earbuds in, hunched over a stack of charts. Byron, my researcher and failed PhD, looked up, squinted like he was trying to squeeze me out of existence. “What do we have today?” I asked him, like every other Monday. “Fancy coffee or shitty coffee?”

  “I believe it’s ‘shitty.’ But you could send Hidalgo out.”

  “Hidalgo’s on break.” One dog was barking full-tilt, and it was rattling my skull. “And he has actual work to do.”

  “Know what they’d give that dog where Pin’s from?” Byron said, with what he thought of as irascible mischief. “A nice marinade.”

  “Christ.” It was all part of the tiresome script, but I couldn’t help an eye-flutter. “At least your jokes never get any better.”

  I went over to the scrub station, washed up, pulled on a white Tyvek clean suit, and stepped into the air shower. Tiny jets buffeted me. They weren’t cold, but I felt iced over, imprisoned. Cattails, willows, cattails, willows. Finally, the inner door sighed open.

  The pens gave off a meaty, damp smell overlaid with bleachy anti-flea shampoo. Yips and barks volleyed around the room. As I went down the aisles, inspecting, some dogs perked up, poked their noses through the wire, sniffed eagerly at me. Some were busy gnawing on bones, squeaking toys. Some drowsed in their beds. A few, new arrivals, shivered with fear or confusion. God, what we asked of these dogs. Sometimes I couldn’t even . . . I came to a little salt-and-pepper terrier barking his head off, Staci trying to quiet him.

  “Good boy, Oscar. Come on, boy. Shush now.” She brought out the treats. “It’s not like I’ve been stuffing him,” she said. “He’s just freaking.”

  I flipped through the dog’s folder. I didn’t prohibit my team from naming them. I didn’t encourage it either. The scheduling page said Pin was implanting R39466 with one of the new pacemakers the next day.

  “Oscar, quiet now,” Staci said desperately. “Shhhhhh.”

  I saw that the door to the operating room was open and went over and shut it. Oscar stopped barking.

  “How does he know?” St
aci said. “He only got here last Thursday. We haven’t even done a surgery yet. Maybe he smelled something he didn’t like in there? Or the other dogs were talking.” Staci smiled bravely, as if someone had just broken her heart. The girl wore her feelings like bangles; they glinted and jangled. MedEval had a program that subsidized vet school for lab techs after two years on the job. I shouldn’t have hired Staci, but in the interview she’d kept on about “her dream,” and I didn’t want to be the one to trample it.

  “Don’t overuse the treats,” I told her now and headed back to the air shower.

  “Sorry, Daphne,” Staci called out, “could you take a quick look at Biscuit?”

  I let her lead me over to his pen. A medium, tan-and-white beagle, not unlike half of the other dogs bred for lab use. He refused to eat wet food, only biscuits, the reason the techs had given him his name. But now he wasn’t eating biscuits either.

  He lay on his stomach, muzzle on his forelegs, ears over paws. I could just see the shaved strip of fur and zigzag of stitches where his access tube poked out. He was a defibrillator dog. Once a week, we induced cardiac arrest and used the device to start his heart again—what the ICDs were built for, after all. I tapped lightly on Biscuit’s cage. He slowly opened his eyes, peered up at me with what seemed enormous effort.

  “He looks like he’s frowning,” Staci said.

  “Dogs don’t frown or smile. Eyes, ears, that’s their body language.”

  “I know. He’s just not happy about his ICD. He might be allergic. We could give him a coated device. Or maybe it’s an infection.”

  We cared for the dogs, tried to make their lives comfortable and meaningful. It was just that, after the first few rounds, some withered. It might have been better for the team, better for the dogs, to have sacrificed Biscuit then. But Staci nudged me, her smile quivering. “I can recheck all the settings,” she said, “see if it’s calibrated?”

  “All right, fine. Run another check and give Byron the output.”

  When she turned back to the other dogs, I slipped Biscuit a couple of treats. He sniffed one cautiously and slowly, very slowly, began to eat.

  At my desk, I tried to find a rhythm, clicking between the compiler, the debugger, and email. The higher-ups were always emailing me about the budget. It was the reason, I understood, they’d brought me over from hardware in the first place—my “discipline.” I’d done my bachelor’s in com-sci, my master’s in electrical engineering, and even in school my peers considered me aloof and analytical. Getting hit on by every awkward boy certainly helps that. But I found coding and hardware—refining a design, tightening thresholds, tolerances—gratifying, soothing. Medical devices weren’t like an iPod or a phone, filled with old, junk code, disposable. They had to be built and programmed to last twenty years on one battery and never once crash—the elegance, the purity of a well-made device. MedEval circulated a newsletter each month with testimonials from heart patients surviving because of our work. I still read it front to back.

  When the higher-ups asked me to run the lab, they’d intimated it’d only be for a year or two and then they’d be grooming me for upper management. The position came with a substantial pay bump; I’d been able to buy my apartment. And, I don’t know, on some level I’d thought it might be good practice. If I could train myself, intellectually, to see ten beagles hanging in the slings that calm them pre-surgery and respond as if it were merely routine, then maybe nothing out in the wide world could fell me either. But almost three years had gone by, without a murmur of promotion out of here, and I still took a long walk whenever Pin and Staci were prepping for implants.

  An alert sounded on my computer. The pen I’d been twiddling between my fingers dropped to the desk. Daph, how are you today? read the chat window.

  Fine good just another Monday

  But, honey, really, how are you today?

  Why what’s today I’m fine really what’s up?

  Dad’s birthday. He would’ve been sixty. Hit me harder than I thought it would.

  Mom please it’s been twenty-four years Before I hit ENTER, I deleted this and typed instead: Thinking of you hoping everything’s all right with you today

  Remember the year we went to La Petit Maison? He let you blow out the candles on his cake and you singed your hair. God, the smell! They almost cleared the restaurant.

  Don’t remember that I was only five what were we even doing at a nice restaurant? Sorry I forgot would’ve called but so swamped right now

  You used to mark these dates in your diary. Maybe you were too conscientious about it actually.

  Haven’t kept diary in a decade at least

  Why not try it again? Could be a healthy release for you?

  Dear Diary remember when my mother stole you to spy on me?

  That was when I was sixteen, in the months after my diagnosis, when I was first beginning “treatment.” Dr. Bell had suggested I keep the diary, though he saw it more of a record book, a ledger, raw data for his research: my symptoms, my thoughts, my feelings, my feelings about my feelings, my thoughts about my feelings about my feelings . . . Of course my mother couldn’t resist.

  Here I am, thinking about your dad again. Arcadia isn’t paying me to mope around all day!

  No problem mom I’m here listening real busy but I’m here

  I’d learned to step carefully around her grief. At twenty-nine, I was the age she was when she lost him. She raised me alone, then had to share the nightmare of my peculiar vulnerability. For my mother, strength had become reinforcing yourself for the worst yet to come. My leaving home for college and then San Francisco knocked the tremble back into her stoicism. Even now, the little we talked on the phone, I could hear a stifled sob.

  We signed off. She said stay safe, I said of course and love you. I closed the chat, tried to concentrate again. But my rhythm was in tatters. “Going to lunch,” I told Byron. “This data is still compiling. Log me out when it’s done?”

  He squinted at me, and I saw the contempt—that he should have to work under a woman, a young woman no less—he thought he hid behind that pinched look. And the disappointment. He’d been with MedEval thirteen years to my five; they perpetually passed him over to run the lab. “As long as I get to read your voluminous personal correspondence,” he said.

  “You know what?” I mumbled, my tongue suddenly thick. Smoke, cattails, smoke— Fuck it, I was lucky the words came out garbled. “Tru-ly, scr-ew you . . .”

  “I’m sorry,” Byron said, feigning confusion, “I don’t think I caught that.”

  Since he was in charge on the rare occasions I was out sick, the execs had made me tell Byron about the condition. He hadn’t told anyone else on the team, but he held his discretion over me like a guillotine about to drop. At least he never bothered to proffer his sympathy. He took too much pleasure in never letting me off the hook.

  SIX

  EVERY EVENING FOR THE REST OF THE WEEK—THE LAB quiet, dogs prepped for the night-shift techs—I went to the company gym and climbed and climbed stairs. On Friday, both the Caltrain and BART were jammed, but my exhausted thoughts stayed blurred, diffuse. At Balboa Park, a woman got on, crying into her phone. “The repo man come, took our things. My boys had to watch it all. They took they Xboxes and they DVDs. They took everything!” The other passengers stood stiffly, trying not to listen. I cranked my white noise, thought about my night: pajamas and slippers, grilled branzino and polenta, a half bottle of Riesling. The BART braked into 16th Street. I patiently pushed my way out onto the platform—and found myself in the middle of another crowd, all churning confusion and shouting, and my mind now scrambling to sieve it all out:

  Protestors, kids mostly, in their early twenties, canvas backpacks, Baja hoodies; a handful of middle-aged people in Patagonia zip pants and bucket hats, picket signs aloft; some tired-looking Filipino women in cleaning smocks just waiting for the train; journalists snapping photos, swiveling TV cameras; “Cops, pigs, murderers!”—chants echoing off the ar
ched ceiling—“Cops, pigs, murderers!” Among the crowd, white masks, white masks with black slashes for features, gaunt, sinister, black-mustached faces from every direction; the commuters jostling to break out, the chants growing louder, a spastic, muscular pulse of disorder cannonading around the low tunnel, I tasted fear, rough, metallic, like licking a pipe, my skull already buzzing, I reached for the businessman next to me, tried to hang on to him, he brushed me off with an indignant grunt—white smoke, picnic tables, white—protestors holding the train doors open, stopping it from leaving the station, BART employees in yellow vests trying to shunt everyone upstairs, someone barking through a megaphone, “No justice, no peace, disband the BART police!” I tried to make for the escalator, my legs weak, the crowd pushing me back, thinking I heard someone calling my name, “Daphne! Hey!” concentrating on smoke, the river, the willows, the train driver let out a deafening blast of his horn, the buzzing leaping up, bursting out of my skull, shooting down my spine, I started melting—jaw, neck, shoulders, arms, knees—only the tight-packed bodies holding me up, on the brink of puddling, and at the core of my panic, once again, the impulse to let go, just let it happen already, let them trample all over—

  “Daphne!” A hand reached out, grabbed my shoulder. I tried to shrug it off. Strangers mauling me when it’s happening just makes it worse. But then his face appeared before my fluttering eyes. His eyes close to mine, full of concern and astonishment. “It is you! Hey, you okay?!”

  “P-lease,” I said. “Get me . . . out of . . .”

  I don’t know if he understood, but he got an arm under mine. We made it through the turnstiles, to the escalator. “Keep going,” I mumbled. Aboveground, the plaza was boiling with people. I didn’t trust myself to get free of them. “Re-mem-ber where I . . . ?”

  He got me there, got me home. Maybe I would’ve been able to make it by myself. Then again, maybe I would’ve taken a header into the sidewalk. By the time we got to the Grove, I had my body back. But I kept a cautious hand on him.