Novel Treatments / alex and the moon go dancing 2
Alex walked into the Cardinale building and the relentless August heat stopped at the door where he was greeted by a gust of cold, everything inside silver, metal, and clean. The information secretary, a middle aged woman with bright red hair cut at an angle down to her chin and the palest complexion Alex had ever seen was sitting behind an immaculate stainless-steel desk in the middle of the lobby.
“Fill out these forms,” she told him as she retrieved a stack of papers from the bottom drawer of her desk. It was the same stack of papers every time, information the Dr. already had; insurance approvals, state medical history, allergies and income.
“I filled out these forms the last time I was here,” Alex told her politely but she did not respond. It was the same indifference every time.
“Right,” he said and sat down in a seat attached to a row of seats against the wall and filled in all of the necessary information. When he was done he signed his name at the bottom and walked back to her, slid the forms across the top of the desk. “All done,” he said.
She didn’t look up. “Take elevator “B2” up to the twenty-second floor,” she said. “Dr. Ambrose is in room 2212 today.”
“Thank you.”
It was a different floor. Last time Dr. Ambrose was on the eighteenth floor. The time before that he was on the twelfth. The time before that Alex couldn’t remember. He took the elevator up alone and walked down a short hallway to the door marked DOCTOR’S OFFICE and knocked three times before walking in. There was no one in the waiting room. No magazines on the table.
A door on the opposite wall drew open.
“Alex…”
“Yes.”
“Hi, my name is Angela. I’m Dr. Ambrose’s new assistant. We’ve been waiting for you.” She was young and not particularly attractive, but she stood there in the doorway with confidence and confidence is attractive in almost any animal. The woman before her was too frigid, constantly biting at her fingertips and mumbling her words if and when she was asked to speak.
“Come right this way,” Angela guided him.
Alex walked passed her and stopped suddenly to hand her the forms.
“Oh, we don’t need those, Alex. You’ve been here before.”
The walls in Doctor Ambrose’s office were painted a soothing white this time, a stark contrast to the auburn color he had just two weeks before, and it was still decorated with more than a dozen congratulatory plagues and diplomas from all kinds of pharmaceutical companies. They made Alex uncomfortable. He jumped slightly when Angela put her hand on his shoulder to show him where to sit down. She then moved gracefully behind the doctor’s large mahogany desk and flashed her pearly-white teeth at him. She leaned in slowly. “We have the results of your tests, Alex,” she said delicately.
The mind can’t help but wander, it returns to times of comfort to ease the transition into something darker, maybe, maybe bad news, maybe the end of the world. For Alex, his time of comfort was the day before his first attack, back in his bed with Maggie, whispering mostly illegitimate truths to each other, the void still shimmering in its corner unprovoked. It was the night Maggie spoke of a proposal, unconventional, of course, but not entirely out of her character.
Angela stared at him curiously. “Alex—”
His eyes were fixed on her, her cheaply colored hair, her dark eye shadow, her store-bought tan. She had a rough exterior, he could see it in her skin, her calculations, her decency, the impossibility of her understanding.
“Dr. Ambrose will be in shortly, Alex,” she told him. “But first, I have some questions for you, some basic information. Is that all right with you, Alex?”
“Yes,” he told her and squirmed about in his chair trying to find a comfortable position, “but I went through it all already. The last time I was here I—”
“Relax, Alex,” she said and revealed a notepad sitting under a stack of papers at the top of the desk. “You’re safe here.” She leaned back in the chair. “You’re thirty years old,” she began. “Correct?”
“Yes,” he said.
She made a mark on the page. “And do you exercise regularly?”
He took a deep breath and exhaled. “Yes.”
“Yes?”
He paused. “No.”
Another mark.
“Uh-huh. And do you get enough sleep?”
“No.”
“Alright, Alex,” she said, spiraling off to another spot on the page. “Are you sexually active?”
“Yes.”
“Do you take drugs?”
“What kind of drugs?”
“Is that a YES?”
“Yes,” he stumbled. “Sometimes,” he explained.
“Is there a history of depression in your family?”
“No.”
“I see,” she said. “And Alex, have you been having thoughts of suicide?”
“No.”
“No?”
“No,” he assured her.
“When was the last time you had an attack?”
“Twenty minutes ago. In your courtyard.”
She stopped and looked up at him inquisitively. “That was you?” she asked him.
Alex put it together in his head. “You were there?”
She flashed a quick insightful smile, nervous, she was there, she was there and she didn’t do anything to help him. She watched, like the rest of them, from a distance.
“Alex, do you believe in God?” she continued, suppressing an awkward grin.
“Excuse me?”
“God,” she repeated. “Do you believe in God?”
“I—I don’t know—”
“No answer,” she said while scribbling with her pen.
“Is this really all necessary?” he asked her. “I’ve been through all of this before and—”
“I’m afraid it is,” she cut him off. “It’s standard.”
“What’s wrong with me?” he asked her leaping from his chair, feeling his heartbeat string together the loud chorus of a drum.
“I’m going to wait and let Dr. Ambrose speak with you more in depth when he comes in. He’s been terribly anxious to talk to you. But, if you don’t want to waste anymore time when he gets here, I suggest we finish this survey. How does that sound to you? Does that sound like something you might want to do?”
She made it so that Alex would feel foolish with any response. She caught him in a box so he snuck out from the bottom, sat back down. “Okay,” he said.
“Alex, have you ever been in love?”
“Have I ever…what kind of question—of course….” He put his head in his hands, listened to the sound of the halogen lamp buzzing overhead and thought about Maggie and the universe, all the emptiness in between.
“No,” he answered. “I’ve never been in love.”
“Okay.” She brought the form from the desk to her hands and held it up, her eyebrows suspended in curiosity. “It says here that you have…well, it says that your grandfather lives in a room in your parent’s house?”
“Yes,” he said casually and crossed his legs. “In the attic.”
She drew a short breath and put the paper back down on the desk as she exhaled. “So, you believe in ghosts?” she asked him.
“Ghosts?”
Dr. Ambrose walked into the room and interrupted. He was a tall man, pale, designer clothes under his white lab coat, his hair a deep chestnut color with a style straight out of the nineteen- fifties, proper, and he spoke in a deep but subtle tone.
“Hello, Alex. Hello, Angela,” he said.
“I was just finishing Alex’s survey,” Angela told him as she sheepishly got up from his desk and handed him her notepad.
“Thank you,” he said and replaced her behind his desk.
Angela retreated to the window, her arms folded behind her back.
“I like the changes to your office,” Alex told the doctor who ignored him as he rushed through the notes left on his desk for his review.
“Thank you, Alex,” the doctor replied, looking up at Alex with only the tops of his eyes. “Have you been taking the pills I prescribed you?”
“Yes.”
“Good. The headaches?”
“Still.”
“Uh-huh. And the nightmares.”
“Yes.”
Suddenly Alex had the doctor’s full attention. “The blackouts?”
Alex looked at Angela, then back at the doctor. “Not half an hour ago.”
“Really?” the doctor asked, shaking his head in disbelief.
“Yes, really,” Alex told him.
“Have you been missing doses?”
“No.”
Angela sneezed. (Only Alex said “God bless you.”)
“Well, how do you feel overall, Alex?” the doctor asked him.
“Feel? I don’t feel anything anymore. The only time I feel anything is right before I have an attack, or when I wake up from one of my dreams. I’m supposed to be in love,” he said desperately. “I’m supposed to be happy, I have a great job and money and instead…instead, I’m—I’m just not.”
Dr. Ambrose, familiar with patients like Alex, sat back in his chair and folded his arms. He would not be blamed for matters of faith. “Alex, the pills I prescribed you have been clinically tested,” he said convincingly. “And besides, isn’t it better to be numb than in pain?”
“Those are my options?”
“Look around, Alex,” the doctor replied sardonically as he leaned back in towards the desk. “The world isn’t perfect. Those are everyone’s options. My job is to take away that pain for you, to offer you a clean slate.” He picked up Alex’s folder and continued to thumb through his notes, Angela still quiet by the window. “Oh,” he said, a new look of concern upon him.
“What is it?” Alex asked him.
“I didn’t see this—”
Alex felt the panic of an attack coming over him. Even Angela noticed something and stepped closer to the doctor’s shoulder.
“You came into the lab for the tests I suggested?”
“I did.”
“When?”
“Last Tuesday. I spoke to a Dr. Woodrow. He did the bloodwork.”
The doctor took a moment to collect his thoughts. “Well, Alex,” he said and put his folder down and leaned in across the table. Alex could smell his expensive, subtle cologne, could see all the slight imperfections in the doctor’s face under the light from above on the ceiling. “Before we get into your dosage, we should discuss a more serious matter. Dr. Woodrow sent over the lab results,” he told him, his eyes coming up to face Alex slowly.
There was a part of Alex, as there’s a part in everyone that waits, almost expects to hear it’s all going to end, that it’ll all be over soon. It’s even worse when you’re in a doctor’s office and you see him struggling to find the right words to present to you some news, which invariably, when a struggle, is almost always disagreeable.
“Alex, I’m afraid—”
Alex felt a cool gust of wind, only it was inside him, between his bones, rushing through him racing up to his skin, wanting desperately to breach the surface.
“The tests, Alex, Alex, Alex, they tell me…”
“What?” asked Alex, playing nervously with his fingers. “What is it?”
“Dr. Woodrow says that the tests reveal that….well…that you’re going to die.”
It’s never how it sounds it your head. There aren’t any bells. No soft choruses. Alex tried to speak but only smoke came out, his soul, the cool wind suddenly gone, escaped, only empty space in its place to remind him of the pain it left behind.
The doctor continued to speak, making sure to be carefully delicate with his words. “Alex, I want to be able to tell you just how long you have, but I’m afraid I can’t do that. It could be anywhere from, well, a few days from now to anywhere up to—I don’t know, forty, fifty years. ‘How long’ isn’t important, Alex.” He was using his hands as if to demonstrate a failing point. “Alex, are you listening? There are no guarantees in life, but with the way things are in medicine these days, you never know. I’d be more than happy to prescribe you something, Alex, something stronger, something to make it easier on you.”
Angela wouldn’t look Alex directly in the eyes. He tried. He tried to find comfort in her, solace, anything, but she kept her head down by the window, her arms folded uncomfortably just below her chest. She knew what Alex was trying to do, what he was trying to get from her. The doctor rose from his desk and stepped away. He stood in front of one of his diplomas, his back to Alex. “Life is a tricky thing,” he reflected. “You’re healthy all your life until one day—” He turned around. “Until one day you’re not,” he concluded.
“This seems like a dream,” Alex mumbled, his hands shaking, his thoughts in spin. He didn’t know why he was suddenly thinking about a girl he knew when he was seventeen. Elizabeth. Forget it.
“Excuse me?”
Alex couldn’t bring himself to lift his eyes. All of his ineffable self deceptions had come back to haunt him through moving shadows on the doctor’s freshly painted white walls. Voices from the shadows, nobody lives forever, nobody lives forever, Nobody—Lives—Forever and someday everyone’s reminded.
“Alex, are you all right?” Angela asked him as she slowly brought herself away from the window. Dr. Ambrose quickly threw his eyes at her and tightened his lips. Angela, in response, stepped back to the window and drew a deep breath.
“Alex, don’t be afraid,” the doctor told him. “The uncertainty of our existence has caused us all enough grief. You have to be strong, Alex. You have to bring yourself to understand that, well, that in the end we’re all only human. But don’t worry, Alex. Don’t worry. You can trust me. I’m going to help you.”
“I’ll do whatever you tell me,” Alex replied with urgency in his voice exposed as unabated desperation. “Just tell me what to do—I don’t want to die, (his body trembling) I don’t understand I thought the blackouts were just stress—”
“You have to be strong, Alex.”
“I don’t think I want to die, Dr. Ambrose, I don’t think—”
“Nobody wants to die, Alex,” he replied haughtily, “but it’s all right to be afraid. There’s nothing I can do to make you live forever. Nothing. And even if I could? Unfortunately, I’m powerless in God’s arena,” he chuckled. But—”
Alex’s eyes jumped up at him.
“What I can do is help towards denial, Alex.”
“Denial?”
“I can help you take your fear away.”
Alex couldn’t speak. There was nothing to say, nothing to plead.
“There’s no reason to deny yourself the comforts of denial, Alex. Why suffer through all of this unpleasantness? Why suffer needlessly?”
“Is there anything I can do?” Alex asked. “Is there any way to make this stop?”
“I’m sorry,” the doctor told him and searched fervently through
his drawers as Angela watched over his shoulder. He came up with a silver package that had one small red, white, and blue pill suspended in the center and presented it to Alex.
“What is it?” he asked him while trying to control his hands, stop them from shaking.
Dr. Ambrose rose again from his desk and came around to stand near him. “Paradise, Alex,” he said. “I’m going to give you Paradise! One pill. It’s a tranquilizer with heavy concentrations of opiates. And it has anti-depressant qualities, like Zoloft or Prozac, only without the side affects. It’s the perfect drug, Alex, designed to alleviate the discomforts of all of it. You don’t have to do it anymore. You don’t have to be afraid of life or death or missing your next payment on a house. You won’t have to worry about your job, or your future. Paradise takes care of all of it. It’s perfect,” he said and waved his finger three times, “Perfect, Perfect, Perfect! We’re all waiting anxiously for it to be approved for a full market expansion. Any day now. Any day now.” He clenched his fists, brought his voice down. “There are too many problems for us to face now everyday. The world is changing, our minds our changing. Everything. It’s getting harder and harder to live with yourself with all you didn’t do because there’s so much more to do now—and for what? To be told someday it’s all going to be over? Everything you worked so hard for? It makes us crazy, Alex, it makes us crazy. Why? Why should we have to deal with any of it anymore? Why can’t we just—get back? Paradise, Alex. The answer (slowly) is Paradise.”
Alex was so lost inside his own head he barely heard a word the good doctor said. But still he repeated it just the same, “Paradise,” and it put a glow on Dr. Ambrose’s already jubilant smile. Alex sat there motionless and numb while the doctor wrote out the prescription.
“Good,” Dr. Ambrose concluded and handed him the package and the prescription. The pill had a white body with the number 8 inscribed in the center. There was one red tip and one blue. Paradise. “I really am sorry, Alex, to have to give you this sort of news. Is there someone you might need us to call?”
Angela stepped away from the window towards Alex but stopped when he said “No.” He had so many questions that all seemed to just melt into one and other and again, came out as smoke. Fear and faith and love and purpose suddenly all combined to tear out his insides, to abandon his body, to abandon his mind and thoughts and emotions.
“I don’t understand,” Alex said.
Dr. Ambrose’s smile went back to a meaningless, professional grin. “You will, Alex. You will. Call it the only side effect of Paradise. You walk out of here and you start with a clean slate.” Angela moved around uneasily by the window and it caused her a malicious look from the doctor. When he turned his attention back to Alex, Alex was already by the door.
“They’ll fill your full prescription for you downstairs,” the doctor told him. “You can pick it up in five minutes.”
Alex didn’t reply.
“I want you back here in two weeks for a follow up.”
Silence, again.
As Alex made his way down the hall he saw a woman sitting in the waiting room with her two young children. When she saw Alex she stood up, whispered something in her children’s ear and left them sitting there as she walked past him down the hallway to the door marked DOCTOR’S OFFICE.
You need to log in to urbis or create an urbis account to review this writing.
Reviews
Sort Reviews by Newest | Oldest | Highest Quality | Lowest Quality | Newest Comments |
Okay just some quick pointers here on how I think you could improve your writing and make this piece work better.
Eliminate redundancy – “The doctor continued to speak, making sure to be carefully delicate with his words.” You could take out ‘carefully’ in this sentence because it means practically the same thing as delicate. I’d suggest, ”...sure to be careful with…”
Also avoid using ‘to be’ and all the verbs associated with it (was, been, were, had, etc.) as much as possible. Ferret them out in MSword using the control+F. Find them and burn them at the stake.
““Life is a tricky thing,” he reflected. “You’re healthy all your life until one day—” He turned around. “Until one day you’re not,” he concluded.” ‘said’ is almost always invisible to the reader. Instead of reflected/concluded, just use ‘said’. Also try to avoid colorless verbs. ‘turned’ is one of these. Same with ‘went’ ‘got’ ‘walked’ etc. Hope this helps.
-Curt
- add/view comments (0)
Here are my belated plaudits on your piece:
This was a very gentle but quite honest story of someone with a drug problem and speaking from experience I think you portrayal of how the medical professional deals with it, it was well captured.
The sense of Alex losing his grip on reality made for a jarring read, and you almost made the reader fall into his work too, a place of confusion, escape and desperation.
Given you are a published author, there is little point quibbling over the technical things here. I can see the choices you made in the style were all taken to increase the dramatic tension towards the end of the excerpt and I think you will have succeeded in leaving the reader wired enough for more.
I liked it. Happy now?
Alice
Wow, this is great. Really engaging, I was hooked the whole way through. Really well written, accessible yet elegant. I think you really captured the tension of the moment in the Doctor’s office and I could definately picture the scenario, also you took it to a really interesting place. I’d be very keen to read more and I think you have an excellent piece of work on your hands here.
It seems a little wordy. I expected the Angela to turn into at least a semi-important character, though it seemed her only purpose was to show us some of his history.
Be careful of phrases like “flashed her pearly-white teeth at him.”
I was kind of curious about what would happen.
This 70 word review has not been unlocked.
Showing 1 - 5 of 5
Review item
Add to faves
GENERAL
REVIEW QUEUE
Ratings & Rankings
