Читать книгу Rocket City - Cathryn Alpert - Страница 4

Her lipstick tasted like rhubarb. This was all Figman remembered of the woman, this small detail and a question she had asked: "Why is it people go to New York to be discovered? Shouldn't a place like that be where people go to disappear?" Figman smiled into the woman's soft shoulder; he was not a man to bed down with dummies. "If you want to be discovered," she said, "go to Idaho."

But he didn't go to Idaho; he went to New Mexico. One western state seemed as good a graveyard as the next, and New Mexico was where his Aion dropped its axle. In Artesia, to be exact— a nothing little town between Carlsbad and Roswell, two other nothing towns, only bigger. How he'd ended up here he couldn't figure, nor at what point his course had gone astray. Dying, thought Figman, must inspire wanderlust.

But wanderlust alone could not explain what had drawn Figman to this bleak outpost. Perhaps it was luck; more likely it was destiny. Figman questioned, at times, his belief in destiny, but of this one thing he was certain: Nothing ever happened without a reason. If his car had delivered him here, then here was where Figman was meant to be. At least until he had his new axle.

Figman ordered a taco at the Burrito Box and waited for Ewell P. Durham to fix his Aion. If Artesia held anything, it held possibility. He knew only one detail about this place: The Man Who Fell to Earth had been filmed here. Figman could see why. Its landscape was lunar: dust, oil fields, endless horizon. Some moon cows in the distance. Artesia. Its name implied water. He was a fan of irony.

Figman guessed he had a year or two at best before the sickness overtook him. Time would become more precious as his symptoms worsened, but a solid year of work could lead to fame, and fame (albeit posthumous) was what he'd come looking for. He finished his taco and ordered up another. It was good he still had an appetite.

He'd begin his painting as soon as his car ran well enough to get him to Dodge City. Or Amarillo. He felt confident he'd find someplace where the air was clean and the light shone just right on his easel. Durango, perhaps, or some little town on the outskirts of Abilene. Grease from his taco rolled into his shirt sleeve. Trucks rumbled by on the highway. Figman gazed down Artesia's dusty strip of asphalt and wondered where it would eventually lead him.

Louis T. Figman was a man who, like planets in retrograde, had to go east to find West. Born in San Fernando, he'd grown up in Sepulveda, a city of concrete and neon, rusted sheet metal and yellow-brown haze. Its heat and its noisy grind of traffic belied any hint that nature had ever visited the Valley; early in his life, Figman vowed he would someday leave it.

Some thirty years later, fate served up the opportunity. "On death's doorstep," he explained to his boss, flailing instantly in the backwash of his own pretension. Patterson chuckled, then handed him some papers and told him to go talk to Rosemary in Human Resources. The man's look said, "Coward— nobody dies before forty." But Figman had always acknowledged the truth in cliché. Death's doorstep. It was a threshold. He liked that idea.

In Artesia, Figman finished his second taco, then spent the next eleven weeks waiting for parts to arrive from Germany. He took a room at the Starlite Motel, biding his time in contemplation of how he would make a name for himself and where (Texas? Montana? Utah?—No, not Utah.), all the while weighing the possibility that his doctor may have been right: Perhaps he was not dying— at least not yet. Though still violent, his headaches had become less frequent, and the blob in the corner of his vision had all but disappeared. As his health had improved, his general outlook had grown noticeably brighter. So after nearly three months of waiting for death and/or Germany, Figman concluded 1) Germany was faster, and

2) his stay in Artesia had been beneficial in some way.

Perhaps it was something in the water (for there was water in Artesia), or in the makeup of its atmosphere. He liked the smell of the place. Oil. Cattle. The creosote scent of its snow. The townsfolk were friendly; the prices, cheap. If he played his cards right (a cliché he never should have used, as he hated card games), his money might stretch two — perhaps three— years. Thus, Figman concluded that in Artesia he was not at all on death's doorstep but merely on death's windowsill. He took a house out on the highway.

The house was owned by a widow named Verdie Hooks. She had lived in it for almost three decades but now rented it out to supplement her income. At least that was the story she'd told Figman, who suspected the house simply held too many memories. He'd worked with widows; he'd even dated one once. She'd been a frail young woman who drank herb tea, took endless bubble baths, and often wept for no apparent reason.

Figman's new house was modest by anyone's standards: a living room, kitchen, two small bedrooms, and a single bath. Its doorways consisted of arches through which one room led to the next without benefit of hallways, a look that reminded Figman of the stucco bungalows of thirties Hollywood. Just ten yards beyond his kitchen window stood Verdie's grotesque pink and green trailer. He wondered whether a row of trees might help to disguise it.

At first, Figman worried that having his landlady living so close might impinge upon his privacy. But Verdie Hooks seemed reasonable— not high-strung like some women in menopause. "I'm fifty-two," she told him, the gold in the back of her mouth flashing. "A full deck." Figman had assumed she was at least ten years older. Her skin had that baked look that women sometimes acquire spending too many hours poolside. Small-boned and skinny, she had heavy lids and an overbite. She reminded Figman of a turtle.

When the Pontelle sisters finally vacated the house, they left their keys for Figman in the mailbox. He picked them up on a Thursday morning in early February. Snow had fallen the night before, and the metal mailbox door had frozen shut. Standing out on the edge of the highway, he hit the top of the contraption with his fist, then yanked the door open. Inside, he found two sets of house keys and a letter to Verdie from a hospital in Denver.

At once, Figman realized that his house and Verdie's trailer shared a single mailbox. He thought about the mail he was likely to receive and the likelihood of his landlady sorting through it, a prospect that made him feel uneasy. He'd be receiving nothing to be ashamed of: mostly letters from his mother and a flier or two. But mail was a private matter. Years earlier, he'd broken up with a girlfriend who'd opened a shoe-store advertisement addressed to him. Though she'd claimed she was only curious about the dates of an upcoming sale, Figman had seen her action as an indication of character. First store fliers, then MasterCard bills. Next, she'd be opening his paychecks.

Figman's new house was dirtier than he remembered. The carpet was soiled and mildew grew in the bathtub. White rectangles dotted the walls where pictures had hung from the now-yellowed plaster. In the closets, the smell of mothballs; throughout, the sour-sweet stench of menthol cigarettes. Burn holes pocked the sofa and armchair. The draperies, torn and sagging from bent, paint-chipped rods, lent testimony to years of closely guarded privacy. In the kitchen, the olive-green linoleum bore layers of accumulated food and dirt buffed to a dull patina by what had to have been an infantry of shoes. Scuff marks, black and heavy, suggested the former presence of a man. Dust was everywhere.

Figman hated dust. Before unloading his possessions, he set out to the local grocery. But Bulldog Superette, where he usually shopped, was clean out of Windex. Abandoning his cart half full, he headed over to Lester's E-Z Mart on Main Street. Lester's had plenty of Windex. Also rags, sponges, brushes, brooms, bleach, cleansers, floor wax, a mop and bucket, rug shampoo, a sewing kit, air freshener, and Lysol. At the checkout counter he added two jars of aloe to the stockpile in his basket.

"You from California?" asked the checker. Figman glanced up from his magazine at the woman standing before him. She was heart-stopping beautiful: pale complected with thick auburn hair pulled loosely into a ponytail. She looked about twenty. "Well?" she said, punching numbers faster than Figman could think. The badge over her breast said, "Oma."

He'd forgotten her question. "I shop here," he said.

"Hmm," said the woman. She had the most sensuous lips Figman had ever seen: pouty and full, with corners that turned sweetly upward. He looked for a wedding ring. There wasn't one.

"I live here, too," said Figman. "Do you live here? Of course you do. That was stupid."

Oma stopped her number punching and turned to face him. One of her eyes was blue; the other, violet, an anomaly that made her face all the more alluring. A shame, thought Figman, for such beauty to be squandered on a pit-town like Artesia. And then Oma smiled, a devastating smile, and the blob in his field of vision materialized.

Figman's headaches took a predictable course. First the blob, quivering, then a twenty-minute respite before agony set in. When the pain came, it came suddenly. Vomit-inducing and continual, it lasted five hours and no medicine could touch it. Figman had long since given up searching for a remedy. He'd tried them all at one time or another— Ergomar, codeine, Percocet, as well as other drugs whose names he could no longer remember— all to no apparent effect. Now, he simply endured his pain. It was a trial, he figured, something Zen and challenging and necessary to the evolution of his soul. A final test before dying. Dr. Feldstein had told him it was migraine.

Figman paid cash for his groceries and left the store quickly. His house was five miles south of town, on the highway to Carlsbad. If he drove about eighty, he'd make it home in time to close his bedroom draperies and take refuge under the covers. As he slipped his key into his car's ignition, he thought of Oma. Her mystifying eyes. Her tragic smile. Her smile was tragic because her two front teeth were broken into an inverted V that hinted boyfriend or father— some male with an attitude. She was otherwise perfection. The blob grew bigger.

The next day, in misery's afterglow, Figman scoured his house from one end to the other. It took him ten hours (twice the duration of his headache) and seemed, somehow, its logical extension. When in late afternoon he grew hungry, he drove into town for a quick bite at Eileen's Tac Olé. He picked up a copy of Men's Health at Batie's, then hurried back home to unpack his Aion.

At thirty-nine, Louis T. Figman was a man who owned little. Dying, and in need of what little redemption he could cultivate, he'd sold his house in Encino and most of his possessions. What he couldn't sell, he'd given to his gardener. He'd packed only clothes, his cassette player and tapes, some business files, and a box of personal articles. In El Paso, he'd picked up a book on oil painting. It was big and heavy and filled with pictures. He'd read the book cover to cover while waiting for his axle.

Ceremoniously, he placed the book on the highest shelf in his living room. It looked small up there, and appropriately lonely. Figman saw it as a metaphor. If art (and subsequent fame) were to become his sole purpose, he'd need to eliminate all life's other distractions. Painting would have to become his everything. Such singular devotion might even sustain him longer than fate intended, a happy thought that drew Figman to his refrigerator.

Uncapping a bottle of Dos Equis, he sat down at his kitchen table and thought seriously about his future. He would need to be mindful of his drinking; artists, he knew, had trouble with alcohol. At night only, he promised himself, once his day's work had been completed. Leaning back in his chair, Figman hit the light switch by the doorway and let his eyes adjust to the darkness. He kicked his feet up on the wooden table whose crevices and gouges, just that morning, had been filled with years of accumulated dust and grime. Outside, clouds threatened; Figman wondered whether Artesia might be in for another snow. A light came on in Verdie's trailer, illuminating her three ugly windows, two small half-circles and a center rectangle. It looked like a face staring back at him. First thing tomorrow, he vowed, he would buy kitchen curtains before setting about the business of becoming famous.

What Figman failed to realize was that he'd already had his fifteen minutes. They had started ticking one Friday morning in early spring on his way to work at Goetschke Life and Casualty. An adjuster in Accidental Death and Dismemberment, he had always prided himself on his ability to remain emotionally detached from his claimants, no matter how sad or grisly their predicament. AD&D was a heavy business, a job not everyone in the company could handle. It took a person like Figman— spiritual but not religious— to reach beyond the immediacy of life's tragedies and grasp the bottom line.

Traffic on the Ventura Freeway crept dismally through a heavy downpour. In nasty weather, it sometimes took Figman an extra forty minutes to get to work as slick roads played havoc with bald tires and engines stalled in the fast lane. Red taillights were all he could make out for miles ahead; behind him, the watery blur of headlights through rain. Cars jerked forward like the staccato movement of a symphony: Start, stop. Start, stop. Stop, stop, stop. Occasionally, they'd get up to speed, then come to a dead halt within seconds. Frequently, they sat idle for minutes. There was no logic to the traffic in L.A.

Bored more than annoyed by his delay, Figman pondered the Flechteau claim. He would have to be tougher next time he visited Flechteau at his home and not allow himself to be affected by the sight of the man's stub. His stub came into view whenever Flechteau's blanket slipped from his lap, an event that seemed regularly to coincide with Figman's explanation of limits of liability. He could have sworn, once, he'd even seen Flechteau give it a little shove when it had gotten hung up on the brake of his electric wheelchair. Then Flechteau, who'd been a pole setter for the phone company before his accident, asked Figman if he wouldn't mind helping him with his fallen blanket. This ploy ensured that Figman got a closer look at Flechteau's injury, a horrible sight with its whitish bulge where his severed femur pressed against his taut red skin, and its one remaining stitch, all black and waxy, which never seemed to fall off or be absorbed into his scar as normal stitches are absorbed but protruded from his wound like the single black hair that protruded from Jeff Goldblum's back in The Fly, a hair so thick and resilient that Geena Davis had to snip it off with kitchen shears. It was this terrible stitch that Figman was thinking about when the Pinto full of Mexicans cut directly in front of him and came to a halt just thirty feet from his windshield.

Figman liked Mexicans. He saw them as a proud, ancient people who had as much right to California as did he (if not more). On principle, Figman refused to refer to them in politically correct terms such as Hispanics or Latinos. They were Mexicans, an identity in which he believed they should take pride. He loved their food, their art, the lyricism of their language. Velasquez, his gardener in Encino, he'd hired solely because of the majesty of his name. Figman had first seen it on a business card left inside his mailbox:

Alejandro Arturo Cuevas de Velasquez

Lawns Trees Shrubs

There was history in that name. Conquistadores. Proud Aztecs defending their cities. In his childhood living room in Sepulveda, Figman's mother had kept a book about Aztecs on the coffee table. In it were pictures of golden cities, exotic parrots, and men in armor on horseback. Alejandro Arturo Cuevas de Velasquez. It was right out of the index.

There was history, too, in the name Figman, but not the kind one reads about in coffee-table books. The name spoke of tallithim and mezuzahs and dark shops in the back streets of Eastern Europe. His first name, Louis, had been his great-grandfather's, and while he liked the name intrinsically, people frequently mispronounced it as Louie. Occasionally, someone would shorten it to Lou, a choice that made Figman wonder if they didn't see him as some crotch-scratching lug with a plumber's wrench.

Since mid-childhood, Figman had gone simply by the name Figman. It stemmed from an age (around ten or eleven) when boys referred to each other by surname alone. Later, when his buddies reverted to their given names (around the same time they discovered girls), Figman opted to remain just Figman. It seemed easier that way. Still, he wished he'd been blessed with a name like Alejandro.

Alejandro Arturo Cuevas de Velasquez was, however, nothing like the moniker that announced him to the mailbox owners of Encino. Fat as a potato bug, he had a fondness for cheap tequila and expensive women. His face, brown and gnarly, reminded Figman of a gourd he'd seen hanging from a fruit stand on Olvera Street. Fine black hair grew down from his sideburns, a maddening fuzz that Velasquez refused to shave despite Figman's gift one Christmas of an electric razor.

Velasquez managed to sustain himself in the Encino community until he was caught fooling around with Sugar Tildeman, the wife of a well-known sitcom producer— something to do with jute net and a garden hose, a scene Figman could hardly imagine. Bernie Tildeman subsequently sent a letter to the entire neighborhood asking anyone who employed Velasquez to fire him. Several of Figman's neighbors complied, having had scripts or daughters in the man's office at one time. Figman, however, who had neither script nor daughter and who hated all things Hollywood, could hardly bear to see a man named Alejandro Arturo Cuevas de Velasquez lose a good-paying job. Furthermore, he found it a miscarriage of justice for some big-shot producer to use his power and influence to exact revenge on the weak and downtrodden of California, a populace whose ancestors had once owned the very land Tildeman now paid men like Velasquez to fertilize and weed.

Letter in hand, Figman watched as a shirtless Velasquez squatted in his flower bed. "Velasquez," Figman called from his dining room window. The gardener went about his pruning. Figman opened his French doors and stepped out onto his patio. The bricks felt cold beneath his bare feet. "Señor," he called, but still the man did not answer. In the driveway, Velasquez's primer-gray pickup blared music, something up-tempo and decidedly Mexican. Velasquez rocked on his heels to its catchy rhythm.

Approaching him from behind, Figman placed his hand on his gardener's back, brown and soft as a rotting pumpkin. The man twitched and gazed up at him. "Velasquez, have you seen this?" Figman leaned over to show him the letter.

With his shirtsleeve, the gardener wiped at his great winter squash of a face. "Qué?" he asked. His breath smelled faintly of tequila.

"Have you seen this letter? From that asshole, Tildeman?" Figman hoped that by calling Tildeman an asshole, he would let Velasquez know he was not about to be fired.

Velasquez smiled briefly (perhaps remembering Sugar), then frowned, his thick brows melding into a Frida Kahlo winged line. The down on his cheeks held beads of sweat. "No read," he said, waving his hands in that universal gesture meaning Don't talk to me about this. Figman had no way of knowing whether the man was telling him he hadn't read the letter, didn't want to, or didn't possess the ability. Velasquez muttered something in Spanish and resumed his pruning, a little more urgently than before. Returning to the house, Figman swore he would do two things: He would ask his friends to find work for Velasquez, and he would one day look up Sugar.

All this (and more) raced through Figman's mind as his Aion bore down on the idling Pinto. He knew about these swoop-and-squat scams. Aaron Litvak usually handled them and had explained to Figman how they worked. An economy car crammed with Mexicans (How many were in the Pinto? Eight? Ten, maybe?) would swerve in front of a car or truck and slam on its brakes, guaranteeing injury to all of its occupants. The Mexicans, illegal, illiterate, and desperate for money, would each be paid one thousand dollars by some con artist who would subsequently file insurance claims on all their behalfs. Usually, the con man would pose as an employer or relative; less often as one of the so-called victims. The injured would then be expected to limp back to Mexico one thousand dollars richer, while the fraud-mongering scumbag hung around to collect the big money. There were variations to this game, but this, basically, was how it was played. Figman knew it to be a dangerous business. Sometimes people were killed in these "accidents," and sometimes the dead weren't Mexican.

Knowing these facts did not make it any easier on Figman as his car sped, seemingly in slow motion, toward the motionless Pinto. He checked his rearview mirror for a possible route of escape, but traffic on both sides of him was moving faster than he. A lane change now might cause a series of accidents as cars swerved consecutively to move out of each other's way. The truck directly behind him was traveling slowly and at a reasonable distance, leaving Figman no choice but to remain in his lane where he was certain to hit the Pinto.

Lifting his foot off the accelerator, Figman moved it over into the space above his brake pedal. His muscles clenched. Litvak had told him never to clench in an accident. It was reflex, he knew, but one to be fought with every brain cell he could call to action. The dead branch snaps in the hurricane. In rear-enders, drunks and druggies walk free, while the sober man bites the big one. It had happened in the Triggs claim. Randy Triggs, high on Old Crow and sinsemilla, had skidded fender first into the back of a late-model Lincoln. Two children on their way home from nursery school had burned to death, while Triggs suffered only a scalp wound.

The thought of flesh burning made Figman realize, for the first time, that the car into whose rear he was directly headed was a PINTO. What year was it? '69? '70? Had its fuel tank been converted? He might never know.

His own first car had been a Pinto, a gift from his mother upon his having graduated high school. He'd sold it years ago, as soon as he'd learned about the problem with its fuel tank. Figman was a man who took few chances in life. Now, absurdly, he appeared to be on a collision course with his own destiny. He thought of Oedipus on the road to Thebes. He thought of Laertes. He clenched tighter, still running on instinct and adrenaline. It was hard fighting instinct, a point he vowed he would take up with Litvak if he lived to see him. As his foot slammed down on the brake pedal, he felt his torso strain against his seat belt. The rear of the Pinto grew ominously larger. Rain fell harder. Water sheeted off his windshield faster than his windshield wipers could sweep it away, obscuring completely the blur of cars in front of him so that the only thing Figman's brain could process in the micro-moment before impact were his car's headlights making sense of the Pinto's bumper sticker: FATE HAPPENS. And indeed it did, for here was a concept whose synchronicitous irony caused every muscle in his body to relax, a second and wholly unexpected reflex that Figman later came to realize had both saved his life and bought him a morsel of fame.

The nightly news called it a miracle. Six Mexicans had been killed in the explosion, and here was this guy, Figman (an insurance adjuster of all things), with nothing more than a cut finger. His Aion had been totaled, its front, rear, and passenger sides crushed like an empty beer can. The Pinto (a '71 as it turned out) was unrecognizable, melted, as footage showed, into a 911 roadside call box. From his hospital bed, Figman explained to one reporter after another how he'd watched in horror as the car full of Mexicans had balled into flames. His Aion (whose left front brakes had locked, thus twisting his trajectory) had deflected off the Pinto's left rear bumper, first jerking right, then spinning one hundred eighty degrees in the opposite direction while skidding backward and sideways across three lanes of traffic. California lane change. Amazingly, no other vehicles had been in his way.

When his Aion struck the center divider, Figman's head jerked right, then left, hitting hard against the door frame. But he didn't black out or even bleed. He sat for a moment behind his steering wheel, astonished to find himself alive. The right front end of his Aion had been shoved up into its engine, its hood bent up like a steeple. Its rear suspension and trunk had accordioned into the back seat. The only section of Figman's Aion left undamaged was the place where he sat, dumbstruck and shaken. Through his shattered windshield, he saw smoke rising from the burning Pinto — black, thick, and stifling. He wondered, then, if he were dead and undergoing one of those out-of-body experiences he'd read about in his doctor's waiting room. But his chest hurt and his heart pounded. Glass chunks fell from his shoulders and hair. His legs felt weak and soon there was this fellow at his driver' s-side window, banging on it with the palm of his hand, shouting at him, frantic, asking him if he was okay. Figman's window had stuck and his door had jammed; it took the Jaws of Life to pry it open. When lifted, an hour later, from his Aion's wreckage, he cut his knuckle on a piece of metal.

"Let's see it," said the cameraman beside his hospital bed.

Figman held up his middle finger.

By the time he was released from Valley Memorial, Figman had given no less than a dozen bedside interviews. His doctors, doubtful that a person could come through such carnage unscathed, had detained him twenty-four hours for observation, a day that, despite the dull pounding in his head, had proven to be the most exciting Figman could remember. It had been a day filled with lighting equipment, minicams, and pert young reporters scribbling furiously on notepads. That evening, he had dedicated himself to the nightly news, clicking avidly from one channel to the next, searching for his own sound bites. By eleven o'clock, the TV had called him a miracle so many times that his roommate, Bigler, suffering from bleeding ulcers and an irritable bowel, told him to turn the fucking thing off. Figman did as the man requested. He slept fitfully, not because of the day's excitement (for by this time he was truly exhausted) but because Bigler snored like a walrus. The next morning, the Los Angeles Times featured his picture on its front page. There he was, beneath the headline MODERN-DAY MIRACLE: Louis Figman in his hospital gown, giving all of L.A. the finger.

The following Monday, when he returned to work, Figman found himself a hero. By his fellow adjusters, his survival was seen not at all as a miracle but rather as proof that most accident claims were bogus, a conclusion that reinforced their strongest suspicions and boosted, temporarily, the gross profits of the company. Patterson patted him on the back and invited him into his office. Once seated, his boss leaned conspiratorially over his desk and informed Figman of the company's intention to file suit against the Ford Motor Company. This it planned to do not only on Figman's behalf but on behalf of all six of the dead Mexicans (once they had been forensically identified). An aggressive stance at this point, explained Patterson, would preempt a move on someone else's part as well as mitigate whatever liability their own company might incur. Not coincidentally, this might help garner publicity for Goetschke Life and Casualty. Mr. Goetschke himself was determined to smoke out the sleazebag behind the scam and publicly expose him as the scum-sucking dirtball they all knew him to be.

But in truth, there had been no swoop-and-squat scam. Instead of having been pawns in some elaborate scheme, the six dead Mexicans turned out to have been a crew of office janitors coming off the night shift. With their Speedy-Kleen van in the shop with a blown fuel pump, they'd collec tively had the misfortune to have let Luis Rivera drive them home in his Pinto. In all likelihood, Luis Rivera, blind in one eye and unlicensed, had never even seen Figman's Aion.

This revelation, carried on Tuesday night's local news, threw Figman into anguished self-reflection: Had he done everything in his power to avoid the accident? If he'd known these men were janitors and not instruments of some insidious plot to defraud his insurance company, might he have reacted differently? Was it racist of him to even ask himself such things? Yes, no, and probably, he concluded. Still, these and other questions gnawed at his conscience. Why had he been chosen to survive and not the six Mexicans, all of whom had wives and children? What kind of world allowed six hard-working family men to burn to death in an automobile whose potentially fatal design flaws had been known all along to its manufacturer? What kind of God, if there were a God, would allow such evil and inequity?

Later that same night, Figman had his first in a series of violent headaches. It frightened him, with its vision distortion and excruciating pain. When, the following Friday, he suffered a similar attack, Figman put in a call to Dr. Feldstein. In the next two weeks, he endured four more of these episodes; by the time of his appointment in mid-April, Figman had convinced himself he was not quite the miracle the media had made him out to be.

Feldstein put him through a month of testing and found nothing. At a loss for any other explanation, he diagnosed Figman's problem as chronic migraine. The doctor gave him a list of foods to avoid, wrote him prescriptions for Ergomar and Vicodin, and sent him home to manage his pain.

Figman dutifully followed his doctor's advice. He cut out chocolate, cheese, and all forms of alcohol. Still, he was neither relieved of his pain nor convinced he was not suffering the effects of some rare and deadly malady. An aneurysm, probably, buried so deep inside his brain no machine could detect it. An aneurysm pressing on his optic nerve, hence the blob in the corner of his vision. An aneurysm that one day would pop in side his skull like a ruptured garden hose and blind him, or leave him paralyzed or in a state so vegetative that beautiful young nurses would have to change his diapers and suction out his feeding tube. He knew car accidents could cause such things. The Braverman claim. And now the poor woman was dead, her three children in foster care. He'd been stingy with their settlement.

During the next two weeks, Figman's headaches worsened, increasing in both pain and frequency. By the second week of June, he had used up most of his year's sick leave. Desperate for a real diagnosis, he went to see Litvak's neurologist.

Dr. Julie Mercer was very beautiful, a detail his friend had failed to mention. She put Figman through all the same tests Feldstein had administered. For a second time he was X-rayed, sonogrammed, CAT scanned, and MRIed. Again, he was relieved of his blood and urine. As before, all test results came back negative.

In her examining room, Dr. Mercer scooted prettily on her little stool-on-wheels over to where Figman was sitting. She leaned in close to him and on her prescription pad wrote the name of an acupuncturist who specialized in herbal remedies, an action that caused Figman to abandon simultaneously all lust and a goodly measure of his little remaining hope.

Figman's headaches persisted into the summer. One Friday in early August, his boss called him into his office to question him about his all-too-frequent absences. Figman explained about his headaches, omitting the part about his aneurysm. Patterson glanced down at the work sheet on his desk and shook his head. It didn't look good, he said. The company couldn't function properly without full-time AD&D. Figman would have to find some way to come in to work more often. Figman promised Patterson he would make an effort. That was good, said Patterson; Figman could start by putting in overtime that evening. Figman had a date that evening, someone new, he explained to Patterson. His boss shook his head and wrote something on his work sheet. Figman told him he would cancel his date. That was good, said Patterson. He erased what he had written and looked up at Figman. He wasn't smiling. There was something else, he said. The families of the six dead Mexicans had cross-complained against the Ford Motor Company, Speedy-Kleen Janitorial, Goetschke Life and Casualty, and Louis T. Figman.

Figman drove home late with a pounding headache. The next morning, from his desk at work, Figman called the acupuncturist. She was not your usual loony in a turban. She looked normal, almost, an older woman with hair to her waist and sensible shoes. Her name was Mrs. Smith. She jabbed at Figman with short, thin needles, then left him alone for an hour. Her method was not painless. When his treatment was over, he handed her cash amounting to seventy-five dollars. She in return loaded him down with herbs, aloe, and a small bottle of viscous red fluid called Essence of Chicken. "For your color," she explained. It was important he drink it all.

Figman went home and boiled his herbs. The tea it made tasted bitter, but he drank it faithfully for a week. The aloe resembled distilled water; this, too, he downed in his healer's prescribed quantities. Essence of Chicken, however, remained in its bottle on his kitchen windowsill, too vile-looking for him to actually consider drinking. (What did one do with it, anyway? Take it straight? On the rocks? Nuke it and pour it over brown rice?)

A week after his first visit, he returned to Mrs. Smith. "You look better," she said, examining his tongue. "I can see it in your color." Figman didn't feel any better but was pleased in some small way to have been told that he did. He endured another puncturing, then carted home his herbs, aloe, and fresh bottle of Essence of Chicken. He added it to the one on his windowsill.

When his collection of bottles grew to six, Figman stopped going to Mrs. Smith. Her treatments were doing him no good. Her herbs tasted terrible (he could hardly swallow them now without gagging), and all that Essence of Chicken was costing him plenty. He doubted acupuncture could cure anything, let alone an aneurysm.

By the end of summer, when Figman went looking for Rosemary in Human Resources, he had come to suspect he didn't have an aneurysm at all, that the pain in his temples was not the result of his auto accident but of something worse and darkly inevitable. Throughout autumn, his suspicion grew larger. And by the time he sold his house and drove east in search of West, Figman knew without question he had finally developed the brain tumor he so richly deserved.