Mendocino and Other Stories Read Online Free PDF Page A

drown in. Then he woke up in the middle of the night one night late in the spring of their freshman year, and looked at her, and he realized it was he who had fallen into her, so deeply into her that he couldn't feel any boundaries. He was the doubter—he hated himself for it, but he tested her in mean, small ways, flirting with other girls, disappearing into silence for days at a time—but he never found the edge of what he was to her; he was contained by her in a way that frightened and exalted him.
    Now, fourteen years later, she was gone, and it wasn't so much that he was angry or depressed or even scared: he was adrift.
    DURING HARD TIMES Charlie found it helpful to formulate a philosophy of life, and the past fifteen days had yielded him a particularly effective one: Bob Dylan. What he perhaps liked best about it was that Dylan had so little appeal to women, meaning Linda. He was an anti sex symbol, or maybe an anti-sex symbol. That beard, she would say, shuddering.
That thumbnail.
    When he got home from Dr. Price's, Charlie put “Tangled Up in Blue” on the stereo, turned the volume high, and lay down on the living room rug. Dr. Price had prescribed yet another antiinflammatory drug, and Charlie had taken his dose, along with some codeine, and now waited for the customary queasy grogginess to overcome him. He knew that the new drug would help for a while, but that a few weeks after he stopped it the pain would balloon into his elbow again. The reason he had waited so long to find a doctor in San Francisco was that he was terrified of becoming addicted. Addicted to Dolobid—not a very hip way to go.
    The phone rang, and he turned off the stereo and answered it. It was Linda, her voice, and it made him ache.
    “How'd it go?” she said. “What'd he say?”
    She, Charlie thought. “I have to go back on Friday morning,” he said. “For an EMG.”
    “A what?”
    “Electro-something.” He paused; this was sure to displease her. “I'm not exactly sure what it is. I forgot to ask.”
    “You're so funny,” she said stiffly.
    “A real laughingstock.”
    “I'm sorry—I just don't see how you could forget to ask something like that.”
    “My arm hurt.”
    Linda was silent, and he tried to think of a way to save the conversation. “Sorry,” he said finally. “I'm all drugged up.”
    “Well, guess what? Kiro asked me to work on the clinic in Walnut Creek.”
    “Lin,” Charlie said, “that's great. We should celebrate. Or you should. Congratulations.”
    She was silent again, and then she said, in a bright, public voice, “I should get going but I'll talk to you soon, OK?”
    “OK,” Charlie said. “Okey dokey. Till then.”
    He said good-bye, hung up the phone, and turned the stereo back on. “Oh, shut up,” he said to Dylan, and he switched the receiver to the radio. He lay back on the rug. Something baroque was playing, and as the violins climbed higher and higher, winding around each other in ever tighter circles, Charlie thought of a string pulled taut, a single translucent nerve stretched end to end, fingertip to brain.
    AN EMG, IT turned out, was really two tests. Charlie lay on a padded table, his arm on a pillow at his side, and looked at the pair of imposing machines that would measure the velocity of his nerves and the electric activity in his muscles. He felt queasy.
    Dr. Price smiled at him. “We'll do the nerve velocity test first,” she said. “It may be a little uncomfortable.”
    “I've heard that line before.”
    Again she smiled at him. She adjusted the position of his forearm, then carefully taped a wire to it. “Ready?”
    “Wait,” Charlie said. “Is it a high voltage?” He tried to look as if he were kidding. “Could you accidentally give me too much?” Yuk, yuk.
    “Don't be scared,” she said. She was so close he could feel her breath on the bare skin of his upper arm. “The strongest shockyou could get from this thing wouldn't feel much worse than a sharp kick.”