Chapter Six

Chapter Six of Darwin's Theories.

Chapter 6

At Northern Shore Medical Center, where Nova worked, Darwin wandered the halls holding a clipboard. He had learned in his youth--usually when trying to get backstage at a concert or just in general arrogantly wanting to go wherever he pleased--that most of the time, if you just acted like you belonged somewhere, people will simply assume that you do. Also considering that scores of people in their respective fields are either too busy doing their job, hate their job, or both, they normally don’t care what anybody else is doing one way or the other as long as they aren’t actively causing trouble. Darwin supposed this would be doubly so at a job where people show up to your place of business sick and bleeding and on a particularly bad day would die. So he fastened some papers onto a clipboard (his EN-101’s recent papers, which were as godawful as most freshmen composition papers are), took off his sweater-vest and put on a blazer over his collared shirt, rumpled his hair up, stuck a plastic name tag holder to his front pocket that he had gotten from the last conference he attended and inserted his university library card, which had his picture on it, and looked down scowling at the clipboard as he walked so that at first glance he could easily be mistaken for an over-worked medical professional.  

Indeed, it worked fairly well: at most security checkpoints there were guards who really looked like they didn’t want to be there and were sick and tired of buzzing every single person in. He lined up with a scrum of actual doctors at these points and they all passed through en masse. He supposed that as long as he didn’t look like a patient and was holding a clipboard, he would gain fairly easy access to any part of the hospital he wanted; and so it was.

Once he reached the cardiology wing, Darwin found a rack of lab coats and put one on. He also found a spare stethoscope and put it around his neck. This is crazy, thought Darwin, who was now potentially facing criminal charges for impersonating a doctor. But he was a man who thought he was in love, so doing stupid, criminal things was par for the course, he supposed. Picking his clipboard back up, he began walking somewhat randomly down the hallways.

He had never visited Nova at work so he was trying to go by memory of what she had told him about her workplace. Considering that he’d never worked outside of a university and knew very little about physiology, he was slightly out of his depth. But all he needed to do was find the mailboxes for this department.

After several wrong turns and being stopped by a few patients who called him from inside their rooms as he passed by with questions (to which Darwin would glance at their chart, tell them that everything’s fine and that a nurse would soon be around to check on them), he found the mailboxes for the department.

He stood in front of the forty open boxes and calmed down a little; department mailboxes were one thing in this crazy place that he was familiar with. It was one of the few locations you would ever actually see other professors on campus, since one of the main goals of a professor was to be untraceable once they left a classroom. Darwin had gotten adept at staking out his department’s mailroom on-campus, waiting just around the corner for whomever he was trying to find as they snuck up to their mailbox. He was employing this tactic now, looking at his chart and trying to busy himself just around the corner from the space where the mailboxes were.

What he was looking for, he wasn’t sure, but he had noted where the mailboxes of Drs. Pendler and Matthews. Darwin had supposed that if Nova was being blackmailed for the same paper that she shared credit for with them, they would be blackmailed, as well. After a few minutes of no doctors coming in for their mail, Darwin thought the coast was clear and began looking through their mailboxes.

In Dr. Pendler’s mailbox, he found a letter from an attorney’s office, of which he wrote down the name, and in Dr. Matthews’ mailbox he found a letter from the New England Journal of Medicine. A doctor came in just then and reactively Darwin took the letter from the journal and stuck it behind the papers on his clipboard.

“Long day?” Asked the older doctor to Darwin.

“Exhausting,” said Darwin.

“I haven’t seen you around before, Doctor…?” The doctor waited for Darwin’s response.

“Winrad. Doctor Winrad.” He stuck his hand out. The doctor took Darwin’s hand.

“Nice to meet you. I’m Doctor Pendler.”

An alarm went off. It was a code blue down the hall. Dr. Pendler turned his head as if he had heard an ice cream truck in the distance.

“I’m on call, I should take that,” said Darwin, wondering if this is something doctors actually say. Dr. Pendler looked at him askance after he said this so he guessed not. But he also seemed like he didn’t care very much either way.

“Sure, sure. Once more unto the breach,” said Dr. Pendler.

Darwin said goodbye and have a nice day and walked down the hallway the opposite direction of the code blue alarm as Dr. Pendler checked his mailbox. He ditched the stethoscope and lab coat in a storage closet and continued to look down at his phoney baloney clipboard. After passing all of the security checkpoints and once outside, Darwin unclipped the badge from his blazer and found his way to his car in the visitor’s parking lot. It took five minutes before he calmed down enough to drive away.

Back in his office on-campus and after a scotch and cola, he stared at the purloined letter and calculated how many potential years in jail he was looking at from the past few days: between the mind-bending amount of illegal drugs that he had hidden in an unsuspecting science lab’s ceiling, impersonating a doctor, bluffing his way into secure areas, and now stealing another person’s mail, he was reasonably sure that he’d be out by retirement. Figuring that he’d already gone this far, he may as well open the letter. Under the letterhead, tt read:

Dear Dr. Matthews:

While we found the content of your and Drs. Pendler and Barnett’s paper, “Mitral Valve Repair through Oxygenation and Therapeutic Drugs” interesting and worthy of further study, we do not feel that it meets either our needs or the criteria necessary or inclusion in The New England Journal of Medicine at this time. Please do not take this as a rejection but as encouragement to investigate your claims more thoroughly before re-submission. In particular, you may want to go over your data samples, as there appears to be a number of irregularities evident in their calculations.

Best regards,

Mark Datsun

Associate Editor, The New England Journal of Medicine

So their paper hadn’t even been accepted by the Journal, thought Darwin. Why would she lie to me about this? He felt very uneasy, and not just because he had downed a scotch-infused soda drink too quickly this early in the day. What is it she’s after? And what is she using me for? Once he got to the phrase “using” in his thinking, Darwin felt very sad inside because he knew that’s what was happening: he was being used.

He called Nova, let the phone ring twice, and then hung up. He spent a few hours going over his EN-101’s papers making corrections, writing comments, and occasionally finding a well-written one. This gave him a small bit of comfort that afternoon.

In the leaky, creaky basement of the giant mansion of Wilson University that Darwin taught in, where the janitors disappear like rats that smoke and gamble, and through the winding tunnels under dim lights that illuminated the grimy pipe-filled passageways, and in an unlit room in the deepest bowels of this underground labyrinth, he found what he was searching for: the Atherton portrait.  

There it was, leaning against the wall with the portrait facing the wall. Even with only the light from outside the room, Darwin recognized it by its size and frame shape, which had gold-painted ripples from carved wood. He imagined the frame itself was worth a years’ salary alone. Darwin took a picture of it from the doorway using the flash from his cell phone, and then kept the flashlight on to investigate further.

He turned the portrait around and staring back at him was what looked like an older version of Warren Joffs--his father, --- Atherton. Darwin took a few more photos of the portrait and thought of how he could get it out of here without anyone seeing him. He had distracted the janitors that were huddled near the entrance of the basement by throwing loose cigarettes and spare change which sent them scrambling. When he tried to pick it up, he also noticed that it was far heavier than he had imagined, which means it couldn’t have been removed from the wall of the Board of Trustees’ room by just one person: in fact, it would take two rather able-bodied men. Just then, he heard two recently familiar voices echoing down the hallway.

“And I’m telling you, you rat-faced f**k, that Camus’ theory of the absurd absolutely falls in line with larger existentialist concerns of human freedom and autonomy.”

“Just how does that work, assface? You tell me,” said the voice of what Darwin recognized as one of the two erudite maintenance men from earlier that day as they set down what was most likely the window frame from upstairs just outside of the room he was in, “how Camus’ declaration of man’s struggle to find meaning-- itself an absurd proposition, as you well know--follows Sartre’s dictate for one to find meaning for one’s self?”

“Well maybe--just maybe, if you cleaned your f*****g ears out--you would have understood that both Sartre and Camus found the proposition of inherent meaning absurd, then you would understand the simple f*****g concept that all notions of meaning is ineluctable, therefore man’s search for meaning is absurd, as it should be in an absurd world, you f**k.”

“Ahh, applesauce,” replied the shorter gentleman, and the two men grunted and picked the window frame up again. By now Darwin had found a hiding place underneath a table covered by a dusty tarp in the storage room. The lights came on; there must have been a lightswitch he failed to notice when he first entered.

“Just set it down over there against that table,” said the larger man and with a loud clunk just outside from where he was hiding the large frame came to rest against the table he was hidden under.

“Ah, there it is: the pivoted sash, hollow-core window frame. Ya see? Just a quarter-inch of cement and we’ll have this fitting in there better than a Cartesian coordinate system fits a grid,” the larger maintenance man said. Darwin wondered where these two went to school and why they’re working maintenance. Then he realized they must have majored in philosophy and wondered no further. He heard the two grunt and pick up the other frame and the light went off again.

He crawled out from under the table and tried once more to pick up the portrait but was unable, so Darwin took a few more pictures of it and went to leave the room. As he left, he was surrounded on either side of the passageway by a group of janitors, with a phalanx pointing their mop and broom handles at him. An old bespectacled janitor made his way through the scrum and up to Darwin. He pushed the end of his gnarled old broomstick to Darwin’s neck.

“What’yre yoo doin’ down ‘ere?” he said in an improbable cockney accent, sneering and spitting out what looked like a cigarette butt on Darwin’s loafers.

“And that’s all the time we have today,” said Darwin to his EN-320 class. The class let out a groan of disapproval.

“But you said you’d finish the story today!” Whined Pete or Glenn or whoever that rather whiny kid in this class’s name was.

“Look, it’s a story with a lot of twists and turns. As you know from what the books we’ve been studying this semester, a story isn’t over in just a few pages: most of the time, it’s teased out for chapters and chapters to build suspense. Often, the story will zig-zag from one time period to another.”

“But why?” whined Whiny the Whiner in a rather whiny voice.

“Because usually the author’s making it up as he goes along and is just trying to hit a page count. Anyway, if you’re all good after the next lecture and hand in your papers on time next class, we’ll see how far we get with the story before Thanksgiving break.”

The class filed out, with Annie saying goodbye and Tommy giving him a mournful look as they passed him. Darwin nodded at him knowingly. As soon as they left, Darwin checked the time on his phone: 3:20. He had ten minutes until his clandestine meeting with Nova in his office. Enough time to smoke a cigarette and then air himself out so she doesn’t smell the smoke on him; she had always given him grief for smoking, pointing out how it leads to cancer and emphysema and all of the other harmful side-effects that make fun activities like smoking less fun.

At 3:35 there were two knocks at the door and in walked Nova. Darwin got up from his chair, took her coat and hung it up, and gave her a quick peck on the cheek. She held onto his arms for just a moment longer than he expected and he could feel that her hands were cold.

“Drink?” Asked Darwin. He gestured at the little airplane bottles lined up on the top of his small fridge.

“Thanks, no. I’m back on duty in two hours.”

“Something else? Some soda?”

“Sure.”

Darwin took a can of Coke from the fridge, poured some into a paper cup, and handed it to Nova. He then dumped a shooter of vodka into the rest of the can and swirled it around.

“I hope you haven’t been drinking as much as you’ve been smoking,” said Nova after a sip from her small cup.

“I have, but I bet you could have figured that out,” said Darwin with an edge.

Nova looked down at her cup of soda as it popped and fizzed. He took a sip from his can.

“Have you learned anything new?” She asked after a moment.

“You haven’t given me much to go by,” he said. “I made a trip to your hospital to see what I could find out. Doctors Matthews and Pendler’s mail boxes didn’t show me much. Can I ask you: do you know what Pendler why Pendler would be receiving letters from a lawyer’s office?”

“Doctors get letters from lawyers’ offices all the time,” said Nova. “Usually offering them their services or hawking their prowess with malpractice suits.”

“I thought of that, but he wouldn’t be getting those at the hospital; at least, not in his private mailbox. Those would be sent to his house or P.O. Box or private office. This is addressed directly to him at the hospital.”

“He’s been mentioning trouble with the Mrs. at home,” she said. Darwin wondered why she was being so cagey with him; if he was going through a divorce, wouldn’t that have been your immediate answer? He thought.

“I found another letter, in Matthews’ mailbox,” said Darwin, somewhat unsure if he should reveal his hand so soon to somebody he barely felt he could trust, much less help, at this point. But then again, if he called her on her lie maybe she would finally start telling him the truth.

“Was it from the Journal?” asked Nova.

This knocked him off his line of questioning.

“Yes.”

“And it said the paper was rejected because of my...fudged numbers?”

He became uneasy.

“Yes.”

“Good. Do you have the letter?” She finally looked up at him from her soda. Her eyes had brightened somewhat at this news.

“Not on me,” he lied. “It’s at my apartment.”

“Do you think I….do you think you could give it to me?”

Darwin swirled his Coke can around for a second.

“I’m not sure,”

“Why not?” Her voice rose and became firmer. She was making direct eye contact and her eyes read as a mixture of sadness and anger.

“Why did you tell me that paper was going to be published?”

She looked back down at the paper cup clasped in her hands.

“I was buying myself time.”

“From who?”

“From you.”

There was a knock at the door which startled Nova. The door opened and Tommy’s big friendly head poked in.

“Professor Darwin? I was wondering if I could talk to you.”

“Give me a few minutes, Tommy. I’m with somebody right now.”

Tommy looked down and saw a woman sitting there.

“Oh! Sorry. Sure. I’ll, uh, wait outside.”

“Why don’t you take a lap, Tommy?” suggested Darwin, hoping Tommy would get the drift that maybe hanging outside of his office that had a PI sign hanging and being seen by someone looking for tens of thousands of dollars of drugs that went missing might start making connections.

“Sure thing. Around the building OK?”

“Sure. Five minutes, Tommy.”

Tommy’s head disappeared and the door closed

“Sorry. Student business. It’s my…”

“Office hours, yes, I know.”

They both sat there for a moment in silence.

“Why don’t you come by the apartment tonight after your shift at the hospital?”

“It’ll be after midnight,” she said.

“That’s fine; I don’t have to be on campus until after noon tomorrow, and I stay up late anyway.”

“All right then. I’ll see you later tonight,” she got up and took her coat off the rack.

“Or early tomorrow,” said Darwin and, although he knew it wasn’t the right moment, kissed her on the mouth. She received his kiss and then drew away, pulling the door open. The door whoomped shut behind her and Darwin was again standing alone. Taking her half-drank paper cup of soda, he tossed it into the wastebasket, not caring that some of it splattered against the wall when it landed.