The Global War on Morris by Steve Israel Read Free Book Online Page A

night before.
    She stared at the dull yellow brick walls of her office building. The morning was gray. The first drops of a light rain pinged at her windshield. The radio blared Billy Joel’s “Uptown Girl”—one of Victoria’s favorites and, she was known to say, her “theme song.” She would raise her palms outward, gyrate her shoulders, contort her face, and sing. Now, all she could do was echo the words half-heartedly.
    Some uptown girl she was. Even with two tickets to a luxury skybox at Shea Stadium to see the Mets play the Astros, she had spent the night alone, without a date, without a friend, cross-leggedon her couch, wrapped in a pink terry-cloth robe, dipping into a bag of microwave popcorn and watching the one movie that she always reserved for such nights: Sleepless in Seattle .
    Tom Hanks and Jerry D’Amico. Contrast and compare.
    Hanks: suave, sensitive, inquisitive.
    Jerry: “I don’t watch chick flicks.”
    No one was able to go with her to the game. No boyfriends to speak of (“I’m not ready for the dating scene so soon after Jerry ruined my life.”). Not Dr. Kirleski (“I’m sorry, Victoria. Mrs. Kirleski is dragging me to one of her charity medical dinners.”). Even Morris Feldstein turned her down . I mean, Morris Feldstein! What could he have going on? Nice guy, but I mean, c’mon. You stick two Mets tickets in my face, I practically beg you to take me, and you say no? What is that?
    Which is why she spent the night with Tom Hanks.
    The lobby to Dr. Kirleski’s office was empty and dark. A single window, facing the street, provided as much light as a porthole in a prison cell. Magazines were strewn on coffee tables; their six-month-old pages tattered by the germ-infested fingers of patients. Mismatched couches and fabric chairs were propped against the walls. And those walls! Those walls had always annoyed Victoria. It was Dr. Kirleski’s idea to plaster them with meditative landscapes, which he thought would lull his patients into a relaxed state, as if staring at a Sonoran Desert sunrise would make it more pleasant to have a stick scraped against the enflamed recesses of a strep throat. The scenic montage was interrupted with dire skull-and-crossbones warnings from the Centers for Disease Control. There, above a couch, was a photograph of turquoise waves lapping against an untouched Caribbean beach, then the dazzling greenery of an Amazon rain forest, then a startling display of skin-rash patterns associated with Lyme disease.
    A small television was mounted on a corner shelf. She turned it on with a remote to see footage of President Bush and somegeeky-looking guy who was about the become head of the CIA. She turned it off.
    Every time you turn on the TV they scare you half to death , she thought. With the color-coded warnings and Iraq and Afghanistan and car bombs. Who needs it?
    She plunked her purse on the desk behind the glass partition. Prepared to sit, she heard rattling sounds coming from Dr. Kirleski’s rear office—the familiar opening and closing of drawers and the shuffling of papers. There he goes , she thought, looking for something that’s probably right in front of him . A brilliant diagnostician, they said of him. Just not able to identify his own nose. She marched through a darkened corridor, past Exam Rooms 1, 2, and 3, past the heavy metal cabinets where years of chicken-scratch records were filed and medical samples were stored. She entered Dr. Kirleski’s tiny office. He sat behind his desk with a perplexed expression, scratching the few white wisps of hair left on his scalp.
    â€œOh, Victoria. Good. Have you seen the file on Mrs. Johanson?”
    She approached the desk and picked the file from under the morning New York Times . “Aaaaahhh,” he said, as if he were opening wide for his own throat exam. “Thank you, Victoria. You’re a lifesaver.”
    â€œSure,