Nerve Damage by Peter Abrahams Page A

was about to smile, take the next step, when she added:
    â€œI’m Jennifer, but friends call me Jen.”
    That ended it right there. The rest was awkwardness, confusion, distance.
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    Up in his room, Roy scrolled through the numbers on his cell phone until he came to Jen’s. She’d be in Keystone now—maybe, with the time difference, still on the mountain, getting in one last run; she loved being the last one down. Sometimes in the moguls she made a whooping sound. Roy gazed at her number, came close to dialing it, so close that he knew one night he would. He deleted it instead.
    Roy awoke in the night, very hot, the sheets soaked with sweat. He took a cold shower and remade the bed with fresh sheets. Outside his window, a full moon hung in the sky, seemingly very near, its surface details sharp. A huge rock, forever circling overhead: there was something unsettling about it, at least tonight. Roy got back in bed and just lay there, eyes open, mind full of black thoughts, refusing to come to order, the good mood long gone. Then, out of nowhere, came the memory of an image he’d sometimes used as a little boy to get himself to sleep, a practice he’d totally forgotten. The image: an igloo in a wild blizzard, and inside Roy, sitting calm and cross-legged before a cozy fire. He could see it now, all the component parts at once—blizzard, igloo inside and out, the fire from little Roy’s point of view, little Roy himself from an external point of view—in a way no person ever sees anything, whole and complete. And a perfect peace slowly enfolded him. Roy slept.
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    He felt good in the morning, opened the drawer of the bedside table even before getting up, took out the phone books—Baltimore, D.C., metropolitan counties in Maryland and Virginia. He found many Parishes, including fifteen Thomases, two Toms and eleven T’s. There were also four Paul Habibs and eight P’s. He began with a Thomas Parish on Crestview Lane in Silver Spring.
    â€œHello,” he said. “I’m looking for a Tom Parish who used to work the Hobbes Institute, and maybe still does.”
    â€œHuh?” said a woman; she sounded very old.
    â€œTom Parish,” Roy said. “Who worked for the Hobbes Institute.”
    â€œYou’ll have to speak up.”
    Roy tried again, louder.
    â€œMy husband Tom?” she said. “But he’s been dead for three years.”
    â€œI’m sorry,” Roy said.
    â€œWhat was that?”
    He raised his voice again. “I’m sorry. But did he ever work for the Hobbes Institute?”
    â€œWhy, Tom worked at GE for thirty years. Is this about the pension?”
    Roy refined his technique as he ran through the Thomas Parishes and into the Toms. He got two disconnected numbers, one endless ring, three answering machines, and the answer no expressed in different ways. By the time he reached the T’s he was on the road, headed for the hospital, a list of the remaining possibilities in his hand. He finished upin the waiting room, made a sublist of callbacks—the four nonresponding Thomases plus three nonresponding T’s.
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    â€œAnd how’s Roy today?” Netty said, taking three more vials of blood.
    â€œGood. Any lab results yet?”
    â€œDr. Chu will see you before you go,” Netty said. “Then you’re not due back for twenty-one days.”
    â€œHow come?”
    â€œThree days on, three weeks off—that’s the routine,” Netty said. “I’m sure Dr. Chu told you.”
    â€œNot that I remember.”
    â€œSo much to take in all at once,” Netty said, fastening on the blood pressure cuff.
    Pulse: seventy-three.
    Blood pressure: one twenty-five over ninety.
    â€œThose are up,” Roy said.
    Netty checked the chart. “Always higher in a doctor’s office.”
    â€œBut I was in a doctor’s office yesterday.”
    â€œLet’s get you