Lie Still (16 page)

Mimi referred to the whole thing, naturally, as The Inquisition, though she expected complete exoneration of her judgment and skills.

Via Cynthia Blachly, I had been able to keep track, at least loosely, of whom the committee had interviewed and what records they had pulled. I shared my intelligence with
mi cap-itana
during our dinner dates.

The list of faculty and staff numbered around fourteen, but all were thoroughly predictable names and at least moderately predictable in what they might have to say.

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The list of patient records, though, was more enigmatic.

There were about thirty names, less than a fourth of which Mimi recognized. It looked as if all had been to the OR

sometime in the preceding five years, all in the care of a neurosurgeon. Some for spine surgery, some for head bleeds, some for tumors, some for aneurysms. I assumed they were looking for some equivalent cases to compare to Dr. Lyle’s.

To Mimi, who lived within that context, it looked scatter-shot. “They’re fishing,” she told me. “They have nothing.

Nothing.” The siege state was lifting. We drank wine.

She acquired, in slowly emerging victorious, a quasi-magnetic field, the aura of strength of a warrior queen van-quishing the dreaded Hun. She became impervious to all the usual small aggravations of the clinic and the OR that would have tripped her agitation switch in more normal times. One minute she smiled beatifically at her office assistant’s bungling a message and the next sat sipping coffee in the nurses’ lounge, chatting amicably with two young and virginal scrub techs while awaiting the decision of an obstruc-tionist anesthesiologist on a potential case cancellation. This was, to me, a new woman.

Fortunately, her ionic charge extended to the bedroom, and on one occasion her office. Among other things, she re-discovered her infantile oral fixation, regularly suggesting some manner of a reciprocal devouring.

Eventually she was told the final letter would be in everyone’s hands on that coming Friday. She got a wink with the message. In anticipation of the Parting of the Clouds, she said we were going to take a weekend away. She told me we were going to a mountain cabin because, she said, juniper-scented mountain air and pine burning in a fireplace made her feel romantic. She told me to sell my soul if I needed to, but I had to get someone to cover my call. I got it arranged without summoning Lucifer, though it took a three-way deal that would have made a professional baseball manager proud.

I thought Mimi and I had done everything there was to do, but I was young, naive, and decidedly wrong.

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115

Friday came, and with it, the promised letter. The summation of findings read more like a citation than a review of an investigation. She was, naturally, ecstatic. We closed up shop that afternoon as quickly as we could and made plans, within earshot of the clinic staff, to meet Monday morning for rounds.

By three-thirty Dr. Lyle had signed out her two inpatients to the neurosurgeon on call for the weekend; early even for her. We left separately, as we always did. I went home to pack a few things, and then to her condo. She was nearly through a beer when I got there. She insisted I catch up and then, as if throwing sand in the face of Death, our everyday rival, we popped two for the road.

She threw me the keys to her Mercedes and said, “Go east, young man.”

“Where to?”

“It’s a secret hideaway. I should be blindfolding you and packing you in the trunk but you seem trustworthy. Can I trust you?”

“Completely. Besides, I don’t get out of the hospital much, much less out of town. I won’t know where the hell we are.”

She pointed us east on the Superstition Freeway through the suburbs, then we continued on Highway 60, climbing scrubby hills onto scrubby plateaus. I asked if we were headed to Sedona. She said no, Sedona was the other direction and just over-photographed cliffs and overpriced restaurants. She said nothing more. The highway signs, though, gave decreasing distances to towns named Superior and Globe.

We talked mostly shop-related stuff: my academic record, which general and vascular surgeons I respected, weird experiences in the ICUs,
The House of God
—a thoroughly cynical account of one man’s internship, it was every resident’s bible for bad attitude—and who, among the hospital folk, was thought to be fucking whom. She started pumping me about which nurses or classmates I had slept with, but I was mum. I recognized that she cared much less about my amorous past 116

DAVID FARRIS

than testing my will to keep my mouth shut. Besides, I wasn’t about to open up. This was for fun, not for keeps.

In the middle of nowhere, it seemed to me, she started watching the side of the road. “What are you looking for?”

“It’s coming up. Now. Slow down, slow down,” she said.

Then, “There. Just past that Tonto National Forest sign.

About a hundred yards. There. Turn there.”

I turned the Mercedes down a gravel road, made a right, took a left fork or two, up a hill, around a bend, off gravel onto dust, and kept going, climbing into some desiccated badlands. We crossed a cattle grate. The terrain had become noticeably dryer; prickly pear instead of oaks, and some sage. Just as we lost sight of the sun over the ridgeline, we eased onto a barely-there trail, through a thicket of mountain junipers. We bounced another quarter mile down into a canyon, around a hairpin, to an honest-to-God adobe house tucked into the middle of a long grove of cottonwoods.

Mimi explained, as we were unpacking the car, that the house was probably eighty years old, at least the walls—the roof had burned eight years prior in a range fire. It was part of a privately owned inholding on what was otherwise National Forest property. She had operated on its owner, a com-mercial banker from Tempe. He had been able to buy it about ten years earlier from an aging recluse who had wanted to move to the California gold country because he’d read that, with gold over four hundred dollars an ounce, people were starting to destroy the rivers again to make money. The banker patient, grateful to Dr. Lyle for removing the pain from his neck and apparently prone to fits of bad judgment, told Mimi about his secret getaway and half offered her occasional use of it. She had gratefully accepted, I’m sure to his surprise.

“Can you start a fire?” she asked.

“Eagle Boy Scout! Goddamn right.” The beers had soaked in.

“You and Ed Adams. Fucking Boy Scouts.”

“Learned to swear at my first summer camp. Eleven fucking years old. And start fires. Lashings, too.”

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117

“What are lashings?”

“Wrap thrice, frap twice. Long twine, two small logs or poles. Lashings are the wraps and knots you use to tie them together. Make things.”

“That could prove useful,” she said with a come-fuck-me look. She poured us each a double shot of gin and disappeared into the bedroom while I lit a fire and unpacked the deli picnic she’d brought. Mimi reemerged in a long yellow silk robe, lace-topped stockings, and slippers with modest heels. Her hair was down. I consciously swallowed.

She tossed a small package to me. Professionally gift wrapped in a manly pattern of deep brown and silver. “I thought you needed this,” was all she said. Inside was a beautiful sterling silver belt buckle, cast into a bear’s face in an oval shape. I was gushy: “Wow. This is really beautiful.

I’ve never seen anything quite like it.”

“I thought you would like it. It’s made by a Hopi man I’ve known for years. He does a lot of unusual stuff. Part shaman, part silversmith. He told me the face is that of a bear spirit that came to his aid when he was on his first vision quest. The bear became his ‘guide,’ helped him find his right path. He’s so full of that voodoo stuff. I put the receipt under the cotton in the box if you want to go look for something else.”

“No. No. I like this.”

We ate and drank. The alcohol and Mimi’s self-presentation put my hormonal state on spin cycle. We kissed a lot more than usual. She looked at me carefully between kisses, as if she thought she recognized me but couldn’t find my name. She suddenly got up and began rummaging in her duffel. She produced a leather sack with a drawstring and carefully laid its contents on the low table beside the couch: a long glass smoking pipe, smudged from prior use but wrapped in tissue, a long thin chemist’s pipette, a shallow glass dish like a huge watch lens, some small glass vials and jars, matches, and a bottle of Pharmacists’ Ether.

“Ever freebase?” she asked without looking at me.

I hesitated. “I don’t think so.”

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“You’d know if you had.” She went to the kitchen cupboard for a box of baking soda and filled a jar half full of water. She mixed the water, baking soda, some of the ether, and the contents of one of the vials and shook. She lectured:

“You remember ether extractions in organic chemistry?” I must have looked blank. “You dissolve an organic salt in water, add acid or base, depending on the organic compound you’re after, then add a lipophilic, hydrophobic, immiscible liquid, preferably a highly volatile one . . .”

“Like ether,” I interjected.

“Like ether. Shake and bake.” She smiled, bit her lip, and shook her concoction with self-conscious glee. “Draw off the lipid layer, evaporate the carrier, the ether, and you’re left with the free organic acid or base, which, in this case, is cocaine base.”

“I knew that year of organic chemistry had to be good for something,” I said.

“Oh, it is. It is.” She was demonstrating the drawing-off part by now. She laid the ether on the glass dish in successive dribbles with the pipette, then gently blew across the top of the liquid. The layer of ether visibly shrank away and a small semisolid white mass accumulated on the glass. She blew until it appeared to be dry. “You want all of the ether gone,” she said. “We’ll be playing with matches in a minute.

And it is not good to burn your face off.”

She scraped up enough to half fill the bottom of the pipe bowl, then put the pipe in my mouth. She said, “When this melts, inhale slowly and don’t stop until it’s gone. Hold it as long as you can, then we’ll kiss and you can exhale into my lungs. We waste none of this stuff.” She struck a match and held it under the bowl.

I did just what she prescribed. Even as I held my breath I felt a rush of pleasure ride into my head like nothing I’d ever felt before. As I leaned to kiss her and exhale into her lungs, I was trying to remember exactly what orgasms felt like so I could compare the two. After a minute she blew out the exhausted vapors. She smiled at me and waited for a reaction. I grinned broadly and lay back into one of the big chairs.

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119

She scraped another pipeful, lit it for herself, held her breath for an unbelievably long time, then motioned me to kiss her. She blew softly into my lungs. I held the stuff until I thought I must surely pass out, at which point I let out an explosive breath. Mimi laughed.

“So this is pure cocaine,” I said.

“No, dear, it’s been stepped on. Cut with lidocaine and mannitol and all kinds of crap. Some of it comes out with the base. If it’s really pure you get better crystals when it dries out. With all the shit in it you get goo.”

“Can’t you get hospital stuff?”

“Are you crazy?”

“I heard people talk about it. Pure and cheap.”

“Yes, it’s pure and cheap. You sign it out of the narc cabinet, all full of reassurances to anyone willing to listen about it still being the best at what it does for the schmo with the broken nose, but someone gets the idea that
maybe
you’re keeping the leftovers and rumors go around. Whether they can prove them or not, rumors, if they’re true, are deadly.

No, you’re better off never even ordering the stuff up. Even for legitimate use. Then, no rumors.”

With the lecture, she gave me another bowl and I was spinningly euphoric. She repeated her own dose, then sat on the couch with a dreamy-eyed look of self-satisfaction. She was watching me. I kept closing my eyes, smiling, opening my eyes to look at her, and smiling again.

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll bite. What are you thinking?”

She smiled and closed her eyes. “I like fantasies,” she said.

“Sounds good to me. Am I in any of them?”

“Oh yes,” she said. “In fact, I was just now trying to decide if I want you on the top or on the bottom.”

I half laughed. “Of what? Or whom, maybe I should say.”

“I won’t tell you his name.”

“His?”

“Oh yes, his. As long as I’ve been sexual I’ve wanted to watch two of my lovers have a go at each other.”

“Me and another of your boyfriends.”

“An ex. And the one I have in mind was also a doctor. An 120

DAVID FARRIS

orthopedist I met at a spine convention. More than a few years ago but not at all forgotten. Tall and blonde with liquid eyes and the greatest ass God ever put on a man.”

“Good, then I’ll be on top,” I said with sarcasm.

“Mmmm. For a while, I suppose. You’re not homophobic, are you?”

“Not particularly. But I’m not too homophilic either.”

“Well, this is my fantasy.”

“Am I drunk in this fantasy? I really hope I’m drunk.”

“You can be even higher than you are right now.”

I smiled. “Whatever became of this tall, light, and well-rounded stud of yours?” I asked.

She sighed. “Time. Distance. You know.”

“You ever see him?”

“Actually he was in town last year. He called. I was all excited to get together until I found out he had gotten married.

I guess he wanted to cheat. I told him to fuck off.”

“And now you think he and I should fuck each other.”

“As long as I get to watch. And direct. All’s fair in fantasy, Malcolm.”

I just shook my head. “I don’t think I’ve ever been that drunk,” I said, “and I’ve been pretty drunk.” She smiled and closed her eyes. Then, making sure I was watching, she slowly slid her hand all the way down her lower abdomen and just kept going. I sat and watched and drank it up and smiled.

Mimi’s manual display was certainly enticing but before long I was mentally wandering, trying to remember the nerve pathways involved in the microvascular control of blood flow to the genitalia. But I was still smiling. The coca euphoria I’d read about was real, though after the first rush, not as intense as I’d expected. I realized my mind was running around, playful, happy, unconcerned. More than anything else I felt a carefree invincibility.