Читать книгу The Ambidextrist - Peter Rock - Страница 8

TWO

QUESTIONS

The next morning, Scott still wears his greenish-blue jacket. Some smooth cross between leather and vinyl, it looks like it belongs to a marching band uniform, with wooden buttons the size of fingers fit through loops, all down the front, and epaulets of dirty gold twine resting on his thin shoulders. His jeans are tight, faded at the knees, seams split a few inches to make room for his cowboy boots. His hair, combed but not quite clean, hangs almost to his collar; his face, shaved smooth, is thin and pale, his squinting eyes set close together. He smiles at Lisa Roberts, relentlessly, and his teeth shine so white and even, so at odds with the rest of him, that they do not seem real.

“Thirty years old,” Lisa says, shuffling through papers. “One hundred and thirty pounds. Has there been any fluctuation in your weight?”

They are sitting in her narrow office, their knees inches apart, her desk taking up half the room. Scott slides the soles of his boots along the carpet, sharp toes pointing right at her, then pulls the boots back before they touch her foot. He folds his left leg over his right one. Lisa is no doctor, yet she wears a white coat with her name embroidered in red above the pocket. He feels her eyes on him, looking him over, sizing him up. A magnetic paper clip holder stands on her desk, surrounded by all the dried-up pens she set aside before finding the one she uses now, writing on a clipboard. In the window behind her, a tiny airplane, hardly moving, climbs into the sky.

“Has your weight been steady?” she says.

“I know what fluctuation means,” Scott says. “And no, no fluctuation, none that I know of. Not that I spend a lot of time weighing myself.” As he speaks, he gestures with his hands; blue and pink feathers swing from a roach clip attached to his jacket’s collar.

“You say you’ve been in Philadelphia three months,” Lisa says. “What brought you here?”

Scott can tell by how she is sitting, how she leans away, that she is uneasy, that she wishes she was the one close to the door.

“You have family here?” she says. “Planned to meet someone?”

“I heard it’s a serious city,” he says, “so I wanted to try it out. I mean, there might be bigger ones—hell, there are bigger ones—but there aren’t any that are more serious.” He looks up at the acoustic tile in the ceiling, the fluorescent light flickering at him. That answer is the truth, partly; it is also true that he plans to meet someone, a woman, though he does not yet know who she is.

Out the window, the city spreads itself. The office they sit in is on the ninth floor of the university hospital, and he can see buildings, full of people, people driving in cars and walking in the streets below, disappearing under trees. Wires and signs fill the air.

“And your last employer was Kenny Rogers?” Lisa Roberts says.

“That’s true, technically. I been all over, since then.”

“Have you ever been convicted of a criminal offense?”

“No, I have not. Did you want to hear more about Kenny?”

“We have a lot of questions, here,” Lisa Roberts says.

“Shoot, then.”

“Do you believe you get enough exercise?”

“I stay in shape,” he says. “Jujitsu. That’s a martial art.”

“Yes,” she says. “What would you say is your best characteristic?”

“Perspicacity,” he says. “That means being real clear-sighted, if you didn’t know. Real acute.”

“And what would you say is your greatest weakness?”

“I’m pretty gullible,” he says. “I can really get taken in.”

That is a lie, but he’s found it works sometimes, opens people up a little. He wonders if perhaps being gullible is the opposite of perspicacity, and if that is what Lisa Roberts is writing now. He tries to read her face for some reaction, for some indication—they always say there are no right or wrong answers, but that isn’t true. Looking at her, he bets she is ten years older than he is, that she takes a shower every day. She wears dark tights, without any runs he can see; perhaps her toes poke through, inside her shoes, or the skin of her heel shows. A framed picture of a man with thick sideburns rests on the back of her desk, and frames hold two little girls, on either side. The same girl, Scott decides, at different ages.

“Gullible,” Lisa says, writing it down. “Have you ever taken medication for depression?”

“No.”

“Ever considered suicide?”

“Never.”

“Do you feel others are better, smarter, and better-looking than you?”

“I reckon they’re out there,” he says, “but I try not to think about them too much.”

“Are you satisfied with your current state of sexual activity?”

“Just how personal is this going to get?” Scott says. He is not answered, and he pauses, trying to figure how to slow the questions, so he can get some purchase on the situation.

“No,” he says softly. “I’m not. Now what would you say is your best characteristic?”

“Sorry,” Lisa Roberts says. “We don’t have time for that. I ask the questions, you answer them.”

“Feel a little rude, just talking about myself the whole time.”

“Well, this isn’t exactly a social conversation.”

He shrugs, as if to say he knew that. He wants to tell her not to underestimate, not to disrespect him, but she’s already resumed her questioning.

“Does it often seem,” she says, “that objects or shadows are really people or animals, or that noises are actually peoples’ voices?”

“No,” he says.

“When you look at a person, or yourself in the mirror, have you ever seen the face change right before your eyes?”

Scott leans close, his eyes on her, then eases himself back again.

“Are you the same person who asked me that last question?” he says.

“Yes,” she says, and begins writing.

“Easy there,” he says. “I was only joking with you—I never see anything like that.”

“Seriousness is necessary,” Lisa Roberts says. “We need to be certain of a few things, so when we administer the tests to you we can compare the results to those of our schizophrenic patients. You’re part of what we call the ‘normal control group.’”

“Not yet, I’m not,” he says. “First I got to answer the questions, and you still got to check my piss, my urine, and all that.”

“Right,” she says.

“That’ll be clean.” He pulls at the roach clip on his jacket. “You might of noticed this, here—it’s just for decoration. Found it somewhere. I’m clean.” He almost stands to speak, thinking it might help her believe him. “I’m a perfect specimen—that’s why I do this. I mean, not that I turn any money down, but I want you all to learn something from it.”

“Are you nervous?” Lisa says.

“This is just a real different situation. It’s a little disorientating, all these questions.”

“That’s normal,” she says. “Feeling that way.”

“Then I’m off on the right foot.”

“Take this piece of paper, fold it once, and put it on the floor.”

Scott does so, then watches Lisa pick it up.

“I heard they’re going to take pictures of my brain,” he says. “While I’m thinking. Here’s a thing that’ll interest you to know—I’m ambidextrous. Right hand, left hand, that’s all the same to me. Could help the tests, what with the hemispheres of my brain and everything. It’d be like testing two people for the price of one. Right brain, left brain, all that business.”

“Do you play any musical instruments?” she says.

“No,” he says. “What would that tell you?”

“Just curious,” she says. “Your jacket made me wonder.”

“It would be easier,” he says, “if I knew which questions are part of the test and which ones aren’t.”

“Would that cause you to change your answers?”

“No,” Scott says, after a pause. “Forget it.”

“Now,” Lisa says. “How about some True/False questions?”

“True,” he says.

“Answer these questions as they apply to you,” she says, ignoring his joke. “My body parts, or my skin, sometimes seem strange and not belonging to me.”

“False.”

“People don’t always appreciate me.”

“True.”

“I see things or people around me that others do not see.”

“Maybe the connections between them,” he says.

“Pardon me?”

When Scott raises his hand to scratch his ear, the arm of his jacket slides roughly along his side and she wrinkles her nose at the raspy sound. She winces, as if he might strike her.

“False,” he says, feeling himself on the verge of a wrong answer.

“I’ve made some real mistakes in the people I’ve picked as friends.”

The questions keep coming, easier if he does not think too much about the reasons, all the times behind his answers. His only friends are those he’s met on the street, or in trials at the drug companies. They are only acquaintances, not friends to trust. The last person he trusted was Chrissie; the two of them hitchhiked all the way to Montana, made plans together. Red-headed, she was going to be his woman forever, he believed, and the two of them would live in a pale blue house, rising in the middle of the night to feed the baby, never tiring of each other. She always surprised him, and he trusted her beyond anything. Now he doesn’t even know where she is.

“Sometimes my temper explodes,” Lisa says.

“False,” Scott says, taking a moment to answer. “I got a real cool head.”

“I’m quiet when I first meet strangers.”

“True.”

“Most people would rather win than lose.”

“Obviously true,” he says.

“There are people that can read minds.”

“There’s some good guessers,” he says. “People who can see ahead, or they’ve been there before and they can guess. ‘Find out what happens before what happens happens’—that’s a motto I heard.”

“Is that a ‘False’?”

“Yes.”

In the pause between questions, he listens to the scratch of Lisa’s pen, crossing the boxes of his answers. Squinting, he can see the colors of the billboards, through the window, too distant to read. They cast rectangular shadows onto the highway; what must be cars disappear into the shadows, then emerge out their other sides. Clouds cast their own shadows, over buildings, their white reflections sliding across windows as the office towers rise, tall across the river. Looking at them, he wonders where he’ll sleep tonight. This morning, like the morning before, he awoke in an office building that is under construction; he descended two floors, to where the water is hooked up, and as he passed down the hall he suddenly realized that there were men through the open doorways. The men sat at desks, writing with pens, talking on phones, in rooms that had been empty only yesterday. Tonight, he’ll have to find a new place.

Since arriving in Philadelphia, he has slept in a vacant lot, behind an old couch with dirty stuffed animals perched in a line, staring out, some missing their plastic eyes; he has slept under an overpass, felt the vibrations of big trucks as they passed a foot above his head. He has spent nights on steam grates, next to men with icicles in their beards, all the frozen condensation—in the morning, he pulled down his pants and the grid showed on his skin, his bare ass scored like a piece of chicken.

“I think that about does it,” Lisa Roberts says. “I’m sure we’ll be in touch, probably sometime next week. All this information—the phone and address—is correct?”

“Right,” he says. “Only the phone’s not working. I can just drop by here, at the hospital.”

“You’d be paid every two weeks.”

“Whatever,” he says. “Maybe what you learn from me can help some people. The money’s no big deal.”

“That’s what they all say.”

Scott does not stand. He is ready to answer more questions—he wouldn’t mind answering them all day and night. It has been a long time since anyone paid him so much attention, took such an interest. He speaks as Lisa ruffles through the papers, putting them in order.

“I watched you when I came in,” he says. “Sizing me up—my hair and my coat and everything. What else do you want to know?”

“We’re done,” she says.

“Anything at all.”

“Next they’ll do the blood tests.”

“One more question,” he says. “I know you have one. You’re curious about me.”

“All right,” she says, snapping the metal jaw of the clipboard on the papers it holds. “Tell me this: do you always smile like that?”

“Try to,” he says. “You probably want to know why.”

“If it’s short.”

“Explanation’s real simple—it goes back to horses, and that’s a thing where I’ve had some experience. It’s so easy to spook a horse. It’s because of the shape of their eyes; they can be looking back, watching you while you’re riding, at the same time as they look around at where they’re going.” Scott holds a finger up at each side of his head, pointing in front of, then behind him. “If you’re smiling, that makes them relax and behave, since they think you’re a happy and kind person.”

“There’s no horses here,” Lisa Roberts says. Her clipboard is on the desk, the cap on her pen. She stands and opens the door.