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.
ROCKET CITY
For breakfast they ate the melons. Enoch carved them up with Marilee's knife and made fruit salad inside one of the hollowed-out rinds. They sat Indian style in the New Mexico sand, eating the slimy chunks of flesh with their fingers. Juice ran down their arms and dripped off their elbows.
They had spent the night in Marilee's Dart, parked in a turnaround on Dog Canyon Road, about ten miles south of Alamogordo. The night had been an exercise in frustration. Enoch had taken the front seat because he was smaller. He'd laid his crutches lengthwise in the footwell, fashioned a pillow out of his backpack, and promptly fallen asleep. Marilee, who had moved her suitcase into the trunk, curled up with a sweater in the back. Her five-foot-ten-inch frame was longer than the width of the car's interior and her knees buckled out over the seat's edge. Restless for most of the night, she'd listened to the rhythmic murmur of Enoch's snoring. When Larry snored, he heaved and rasped; Marilee would have to nudge him into a new position in an often futile attempt to get him to stop. But Enoch's snoring was soft and steady, like an engine idling. Eventually, it lulled her into an uneasy sleep, during which she had a number of disturbing dreams. In the only one she could remember, she was in her mother's backyard eating honeysuckle off the vines that grew over the tall back fence. Perched on top of a clothesline pole, she pulled the long pistils from their blooms and sucked the sweet nectar. She was content, thinking about what she would make Larry for dinner, when a bee flew into her mouth.
Marilee awakened with a start. She sat upright, disoriented, still able to recall the unnerving sensation of the insect buzzing against her tongue and cheeks. For a moment, she didn't remember why she had slept in her car or that there was a dwarf in her front seat. She peeked over the headrest; Enoch was still sleeping. A tiny rivulet of drool flowed from the corner of his mouth onto the blue upholstery.
Marilee looked out the window at her immediate surroundings. They had parked near the Oliver Lee General Store, a small wooden structure that looked new, yet recently abandoned. Its windows were boarded up. A sign read, "No cash left overnight." Rusty wagon wheels leaned against a tall picket fence. Marilee checked the clock on her dashboard; it was half past eight. Even with the windows cracked, the air inside the car had become stifling. She cranked down her window and squinted into the bright sunlight. The desert shimmered. A few puffs of clouds dotted the sky.
A camper rolled by them, kicking up clouds of brown dust behind it. Enoch mumbled. His face looked sullen in the light of day. Skin moist. Eyelids puffy. Cheeks covered with heavy black stubble. He could have been a character right out of one of her forgotten dreams. She nudged his shoulder. "Good morning," she said tentatively.
"Hmmph," he answered back. He sat up, looked at her, and grinned. Marilee smiled back, a queasy smile. Gathering his crutches from the footwell, Enoch flung open his door and stepped out into the bright morning. Marilee climbed out of the car after him, her back stiff from sleeping most of the night in one position.
"Gotta pee," said Enoch. He hobbled around to the rear of the building, cutting between a cistern and a windmill that appeared to have come off an assembly line. Marilee leaned against the trunk of her car and shielded her eyes from the glare. The place looked desolate: On the western horizon, plains stretched clear to the Organ Mountains. Behind her, the sheer, near-vertical cliffs of the Sacramentos stood in shadow. To the north, a few ramshackle houses hovered under a pale sky. South, toward El Paso, two faintly visible structures— huge and shaped like inverted Mayan temples— rose up from the desert floor. Marilee had no idea what they could be.
As soon as Enoch returned, they carved and ate the melons. "What's next?" he asked, toweling the juice from his stubby arms with a spare shirt from his backpack.