Monster Page 7

The workday didn't go well for Nick. Or rather, it seemed slip away when he wasn't paying attention, his mind totally focused on his nocturnal wandering the night before. He couldn't remember moving from the bed and was certain he had lain down in the bed next to Sarah, albeit somewhat angrily. Worse, he felt as if he hadn't slept at all and now was constantly visiting the coffee pot to refill his mug. Maybe he hadn't sleepwalked. Perhaps he had gone to the closet after brushing his teeth, pulled a blanket out and made a place on the couch. Maybe he had only gone to the bedroom to get a pillow. He was only mostly sure that he had gone to sleep in the bed. Mostly, but he could remember pulling back the covers and sliding under them, rolling away from Sarah so that his back was toward her.

  Maybe he didn't remember that at all, he wondered. Maybe he dreamed that after getting a pillow off the bed. He had been having enough strange dreams the last couple of weeks to make him unsure if a glitch like this in his memory were possible. After all, the moment in question right on the cusp of consciousness, easy to transpose reality to dream and vice versa. And there was the beer to consider. But he hadn't been that angry: In nearly two years of living with her, and quite a few white-hot arguments, he had never not gone to bed next to her.

  He turned his chair and stared outside into the drizzle falling from the low clouds which obscured the tops of the higher buildings in town. Outside, people muddled along beneath umbrellas, girded in raincoats and galoshes, everyone eager to slip into the glass and metal and stone buildings from where they could ignore the world until late afternoon. He took a long pull on his coffee and stood up so that he could stare directly down onto the people making their way on the sidewalk bordering his building. Did any of them ever not pay attention and accidentally duck into the main lobby of the paper’s building, stare absently at Marsha as she sat at her desk behind the battery of phone lines, and wonder what had caused them to make such turn? Marsha would have just looked at them and smiled until they corrected themselves a moment later and pushed back through the doors into the world.

  He winced as the mild pain in his side flared up quickly, trailing a thin line of warmth along the edge of his right hip somewhere just below the surface of the skin. He massaged it for a moment and the pain turned to dull stiffness and spread out into a larger, barely noticeable warm tingling. There was definitely something going on within the sheath of skin that housed his consciousness, and he wasn't sure which was responsible for the turmoil, his brain or his body. He took another sip of coffee and stared up into the bottom of the cloud layer hundreds of feet in the air. Wisps of cloud trailed downward, dangling like tendrils from a jellyfish. The phone on his desk trilled and he moved away from the window.

  "Nick Case."

  "Hi." It was Sarah, her voice low and soft.

  "Hey, how are you?"

  "Fine, how are you?"

  Nick shrugged and sipped some more coffee. "Tired. I feel like I didn't sleep at all last night."

  There was a short pause on the other end. "Are you sure you didn't sleep on the couch on purpose last night?" she asked, her voice non-threatening.

  "Yeah, I'm sure," Nick said, still not sure if he was. "I guess I just sleep-walked for the first time in my life."

  "Well, I'm sorry about the argument."

  "Don't worry about it, it was nothing."

  "Yeah, sort of, but... I don't know. I mean, you ended up on the couch after it. Are you sure everything is all right?"

  "Yes, listen, we're fine. I don't know what's going on with me. Just stress, I guess."

  "Okay, well I'll see you back at home."

  Nick nodded. "Yeah, same time as always."

  "I love you," Sarah said softly through the phone into his ear.

  "You, too," Nick said, looking around at the other desks to see if anybody was near. He said goodbye and hung up and noticed John picking his way around the desks and heading toward his. Nick sat back and waited for him to arrive.

  John held up an envelope in his hand and looked down at him. "God, Nick, you look tired. Were you out all night?"

  Nick shook his head. "No, just haven't been getting much good sleep lately. I think I'm going to have to give in to napping soon."

  John smiled. "Well, I've got something here for you."

  Nick groaned inside. Those words were the bane of every reporter's ears, certain to bring on some editor's pet peeve project that was of little interest to anyone except the story's subject and the man assigning it, and often not even the story's subject. Nick made a small frown and waited.

  "Since you've been taking such an interest in this art business, and since we don't really have an arts reporter for this kind of thing, I've decided maybe it could be something you could use," John said, pulling a card out of the envelope and opening it. "This Thursday there's a gallery opening for some painter over in Regent Square and it seems to be right up your alley."

  Nick raised his eyebrows. "A gallery opening?"

  "Yeah, I don't know if there's much of a story in it, but you could go and check it out, see what's there," John said putting the card down on Nick's desk. "If anything, you might just jam some details into the 'Who's on the Town' column for Saturday's paper. Plus, like I said, there might be somebody there who knows something about your stolen paintings."

  Nick picked up the card and skimmed it, cocktails, hors d'oerves, the paintings of Josh Sammers, 7 p.m. until 11 p.m.

  "It says formal. I hope that doesn't mean black tie," Nick said looking up.

  John shrugged. "If it does, get a tux and bring in the receipt." John turned and started to walk away, stopped, and turned on his heel. "That's rent a tux, not buy one."

  Nick smiled and rubbed his hip slowly.

  After work the next day, Nick drove over to a doctor's office near his apartment. He had spent the bulk of the previous afternoon calling through the list of physicians in the yellow pages until he had found one who was able to take him the next day. When he walked into the office lobby he was disappointed. The ad for Dr. Joel Thurber had indicated he was a general practitioner with the most modern diagnosing equipment and dealt in all manner of common problems with hyper-technical names. The office, though, was a dozen plastic-with-metal-frame chairs pushed up against a wall opposite a television, a few scattered magazines dealing with movie and television actors, a steel door with a magnetic lock and an empty receptionist's booth.

  Nick walked across the empty lobby and stood at the counter, looking inside where, in other doctor's offices, a crew of a half-dozen white-smocked women would have been filing, copying and entering data into computers. Here, there were several empty desks, several rows of steel filing cabinets, and a lone, shut-down computer. No people. No sign that the office was ever used. No noise emanated from anywhere but his own chest. Nick loosened his tie and looked around the lobby behind him for some indication that he had not inadvertently come after hours, walked a quick circle on the pile carpet, and leaned against the admitting counter. He stuck his head through the opening and cocked his ear toward the back of the room. Nothing. He backed away from the counter and read the variety of computer-printed signs taped to the wall next to the receptionists counter: "No Drugs Kept on Premises; No Cash Kept on Premises; No Checks, Cash only when services are rendered. Master Card and Visa accepted." He scratched the back of his neck and turned to leave.

  "Can I help you?" a deep voice asked from behind him before he had taken his first step. Nick turned and saw a tall, thin man with tightly cropped hair walking toward the receptionist's counter. He was wearing gray slacks, a white short-sleeved dress shirt, and black loafers.

  "I'm not after hours, am I?" Nick asked.

  The man shook his head. "No, you seem to be the first one. Do you have an appointment?"

  Nick nodded. "Yeah, Nick Case for six-thirty."

  The man stopped at the counter, picked a clipboard off the wall and ran his finger down it. He nodded and looked up at Nick.

  "Okay. Insurance card" he said, taking it from
Nick and glancing at it quickly. "That's going to be forty dollars."

  Nick pulled two twenties out of his wallet and put them on the counter. "I guess there's no staff in the evening?"

  The man nodded. "I'm not usually busy enough on the evening I'm open."

  "I guess you're Dr. Thurber?"

  The man nodded and took the money off the desk, opened a drawer Nick couldn't see, and put the money in it. "Did you bring any paperwork for your insurance company?"

  Nick shook his head.

  "Well, I'll give you a receipt and then you can have them send me whatever paperwork is necessary for you to get reimbursed from them," Dr. Thurber said, scribbling across a receipt and ripping a copy of for Nick. "I'll meet you over at the door."

  Nick stared around at the bare room as he stood next to the door, waiting for the metal click that would unlock it. This was a strange doctor's office, more reminiscent of something he would expect to find in a depressed inner-city neighborhood and not a working class one. He wondered if he should ask for his money back and call one of his friends and find out who they saw. Maybe he should see Sarah's doctor. There was a sudden click and the door opened inward to reveal Dr. Thurber, now wearing a white smock, standing on the other side of the threshold. Dr. Thurber motioned for Nick to follow and they walked down a short hall into a bright examining room.

  Dr. Thurber said nothing and quickly took Nick's pulse, blood pressure, listened to his heart and lungs, and then stood back from Nick.

  "Well, you should probably quit smoking, but what did you come here for today?"

  Nick touched his side where the lump was. "Well, the other week or so, my girlfriend noticed this lump. I don't think it's anything, I think it's always been there. I mean, I can't remember it not being there, so I just told her that I thought it was just a lump of fat that stored there by my body. She thought it might be something so I figured I'd come in and get it checked," Nick said, wondering if he had spoken too quickly.

  Dr. Thurber told Nick to lift up his shirt and pull down his pants so he could see the lump. Thurber pressed it, tapped it, felt it and then stood back and looked at it from a couple of feet away.

  "Okay, you can tuck your shirt back in," the doctor said.

  Nick leaned back against the examining table.

  "Well, that's exactly what it is," Dr. Thurber said and backed up.

  "What, exactly?"

  "A lump of fat," the doctor said, picking up a file and writing in it as he talked, detailing for Nick the technical nature of the phenomenon. "They're not all that uncommon, actually, and they're not cancerous. Not normally, anyway, and yours is nothing to worry about."

  "What do you mean 'not normally'."

  The doctor kept writing and looked up. "Well, in about 99.99 percent of these, there's nothing to worry about, it's just an anomalously placed fat deposit your body has stored. In some people, and it's very rare, they can turn cancerous. But you'd notice that right away because it would become firm and start growing.

  "Yours is soft and pliant, so it's nothing to worry about. But, if you ever notice that it's growing -- and you'll definitely notice -- you need to go to a specialist right away and have it taken care of," Dr. Thurber said.

  Nick nodded and sighed inwardly.

  "Is there anything else?"

  Nick shook his head.

  "Well, if there is, come on in and I'll take a look at it. Until then, you should think about quitting smoking."

  Nick nodded and followed the doctor back through the hallway and out the steel door. He walked through the empty lobby and out into the street, looked at his watch and frowned. At four dollars a minute, Dr. Thurber was doing pretty well.

  EIGHT