While I Was Gone by Sue Miller Read Free Book Online

agreed that I’d start him on an IV injection right away, that she’d bring him in the next day and leave him for two shots, and that he’d be home then for the oral sequence. I explained to her that he was basically incontinent now and showed her how to express his bladder, instructed her on keeping him clean.
    They had a crate “somewhere in the house,” she said, and I told her Arthur would need to be confined except when she carried him outside.
    When she seemed comfortable that she knew what to do, I went into the hallway and prepared the steroid shot under the boarders’ watchful eyes. Jean Bennett was bent over Arthur’s head when I returned, and I felt the pang I always did at a client’s pain. I injected Arthur quickly—he was uncomplaining—and we agreed on a time for her to drop him off in the morning. I followed Jean to the front door and opened it for her. I followed her to her car, too, and held Arthur while she got her keys out. There was an old flowered bedspread in the back seat, and she set him gently on it. I told her to call if anything came up in the night.
    “I will,” she said. And then she shook her head again.
    “See you tomorrow,” she said finally.
    I nodded and went back to the office as she started the car.
    Inside, I slowed down. I felt numbed. I had two last patients, and ‘t then I told Beattie to go home, that I’d close up.
    Ned, the lanky high school student who cleaned the cages and fed the animals morning and evening, had come in and led the boarders out. Now he was bagging all the garbage and trash, wailing occasionally along with whatever was playing on his Walkman. I refiled the last charts, sprayed and wiped the examining table. I reviewed my list of routine surgeries for ‘t Wednesday. All the while I was thinking of Eli Mayhew, and of Dana and Larry and Duncan and me, and our lives in the house. Of the horrible way it had all ended. Did Jean Bennett know any of that? It seemed not.
    I tried again to call up Eli’s face. And thought suddenly of a moment at dinner one night when he was laughing and telling all of us about a dream he’d had in which he was a component of a machine-a machine whose function was to excrete small, square, metallic turds.
    We were laughing with him because we recognized Eli’s orderliness, his anality, in the dream, and this was kind of a joke among us, a joke he was playing to.
    We all had our roles in the house. The rest of us were bohemians of one sort or another, lefties, druggies, deviants, artistes. This, anyway, was how we understood ourselves. Eli was the only scientist, gone for long hours daily in the lab. We saw him—and he saw himself-as straight, as rigid. Unfairly, we poked fun at him, often in his presence. We imagined great things for ourselves, other things. For Eli, we imagined simply more of the same. And yet he seemed grateful to be among us. He sat, usually silently, listening as we floated our theories—about life, about art, about music, about politics. He watched as we flirted with each other, as we danced.
    And very occasionally he said something, he risked something, as he did that night, by playing the nerd.
    We had set candles out, as we often did for these group meals, scented candles whose sweet vanilla smell I can still recall. Friends were over, so there was a crowd, all the young faces circling the table in the mellow light. Sara was stoned—she usually was, from the time she arrived home from work—and Dana and Duncan had smoked some too. Eli’s dream made them shriek with laughter until their faces were red and wet with tears, until Sara had to stand and pace the room to calm down. Eli, meanwhile, elaborated, went on in his earnest, pressured voice, trying to keep the laughter going, even imitating the way his dream machine worked, his elbows squared up, his head sunk between his shoulders, weird mechanical noises emerging from him-“Kkkkkk, punk!
    Kkkkkk, punk!”—as he stiffly moved.
    I