Reminder (1)

The postcard was in the mailbox between a credit card offer and a flyer for a pizza place that had closed in November. Stuart Kemp pulled all three out together and separated them on the kitchen counter the way he separated claims at work — keep, discard, investigate. The credit card went in the recycling. The pizza flyer went in the recycling. The postcard stayed on the counter.

It was printed on heavy stock, cream-colored, the kind of card a dental office sends. Across the top, in a serif font chosen thirty years ago and never revisited: Gateway Wellness Associates. Below that, in a hand that was neat without being careful:

Your appointment with Dr. Pell is confirmed for Thursday at 2:15 PM. Please bring your insurance card and arrive ten minutes early.

He turned it over. His name. His address. A stamp, not a meter. The card smelled like adhesive and, underneath that, something floral — the sweetness of a waiting room where flowers have stood long enough to stop being noticed.

Stuart had never heard of Dr. Pell. He had never heard of Gateway Wellness Associates. He did not have an appointment on Thursday at 2:15. The card did not say what Dr. Pell was a doctor of. It did not say what Gateway Wellness Associates associated.

He put it on the counter next to his keys. He made dinner — a turkey sandwich, the same one he'd been making on Tuesdays since the divorce, the same bread, the same mustard, the lettuce he bought on Sundays that turned by Thursday. He ate standing up, because the kitchen table was where the laptop lived and the laptop was where the claims lived. He ate and he looked at the postcard.

He considered calling to say it was a mistake. Wrong Stuart Kemp. There would be another one somewhere in the system, a Stuart Kemp who knew what Gateway Wellness Associates was and had a reason to arrive ten minutes early. He finished his sandwich. He put the plate in the sink. He did not call.

---

Thursday. He went.

He went because it was easier to go than to call. This was the logic of a man who adjusts insurance claims for a living — some errors resolve faster in person, where the file can be located and the name pointed to and the voice at the desk can say of course, let me fix that. He told himself he was being efficient.

Gateway Wellness Associates was in a medical complex off Ridgeline Drive — dentists, podiatrists, allergists, a shared parking lot, a lobby directory in white plastic letters on black felt. Dr. Pell was Suite 204. The directory didn't list a specialty.

The elevator opened onto a hallway with gray carpet and recessed lighting and the particular quiet of a building where everyone behind the doors is doing something that requires a low voice. Suite 204 was at the end. Wood-grain laminate, a small brass plate: Gateway Wellness Associates — Dr. R. Pell. No indication of what was being associated, or with whom.

He opened the door. The waiting room was small — four chairs, a low table with magazines, a reception window with frosted glass. The carpet was a green no one had chosen for its beauty. Two prints of landscapes that were not landscapes of anywhere: generalized hills, generalized sky, the visual equivalent of hold music. A tabletop fountain in the corner ran water over a stack of flat stones.

The receptionist slid the glass open. She was young, mid-twenties, dark hair pulled back, a cardigan the color of oatmeal. She looked at him with the expression of a person who recognizes someone she has been expecting.

"Mr. Kemp," she said. "You're early. That's good."

"I think there's been a mistake. I got a postcard, but I don't have an appointment here. I've never been here."

She looked at him. The expression did not change. She reached below the counter and produced a manila folder with the patient's name on a color-coded tab. KEMP, STUART J. The folder was four inches thick.

"Your file," she said. She set it on the counter between them. It landed with the weight of a book.

"That's not my file."

"It has your name on it."

"I've never been here."

She smiled. The smile was professional, sympathetic, the smile of a person trained to respond to this with patience. "Dr. Pell will see you in a few minutes. Please have a seat."

Stuart looked at the file. Four inches. He tried to calculate what four inches of paper meant in visits, notes, test results — years, it meant. Fifteen, maybe. A decade and more of someone named Stuart J. Kemp sitting in one of these four chairs, waiting for Dr. Pell to open the inner door and call his name.

He sat down. The cushion gave in the right places. The armrests were at the right height. He adjusted, and did not need to adjust. The chair fit him the way a chair fits a person who has been sitting in it every few weeks for fifteen years.

The waiting room was quiet. The water moved over the stones, continuous and even, and underneath the water there was another sound, or the absence of one — a thickness in the air, a pressure that was not the HVAC and was not the fountain. The air held still. Stuart's ears adjusted as though he had driven up a mountain. The room was warmer than it should have been. He sat in the chair that fit him and the pressure held.

The inner door opened. A woman in her mid-sixties, silver hair, reading glasses on a chain around her neck, a cardigan that was a different shade of the same oatmeal. She smiled the way people smile when they are seeing someone they know and the seeing is uncomplicated.

"Stuart," she said. "Come in."

---

Dr. Pell's office was the size of a generous bedroom. Two upholstered chairs, the fabric a green someone had chosen with thought. A desk organized in a way that suggested the organization was permanent rather than performed. Bookshelves. A south window, the blinds angled to let the light in without letting the outside in. The room smelled like paper and, underneath it, the floral note from the postcard.

Dr. Pell sat. She gestured to the other chair. Stuart sat. The chair fit him. He did not remark on this.

"How have you been?" she said.

"I think there's been a mistake."

"Tell me."

"I got a postcard. I don't have an appointment here. I've never been a patient here. The receptionist has a file with my name on it that's four inches thick and I have never been in this building."

Dr. Pell looked at him over the tops of her reading glasses, which she had put on at some point, and the looking was steady and warm and had the quality of a person listening to something familiar. Not dismissing it. Receiving it.

"Stuart," she said. "How is Carol?"

The name landed in the room like a glass set down on a table. He did not know a Carol. He did not know a Carol the way you do not know a person — completely, with the full weight of never-having-known.

"Carol," he said. The name felt like a word in a language he had studied and forgotten. The shape of it in his mouth was not wrong.

"And Graham? How is Graham doing in school?"

Graham. A boy's name. A son's name. The air held the name the way the waiting room chair had held his body — with the precise acceptance of something held before, in this room, by this man or someone wearing his name.

"I don't know a Graham," Stuart said.

Dr. Pell made a note on the pad in her lap. The pen was gold and the gold caught the light from the south window and she wrote something Stuart could not read, because the pad was angled away from him. The angle was professional. The notes were not for Stuart.

"The overlap is increasing," she said. She said this to the pad, not to him. Then she looked up. "Stuart, we've talked about this. The convergence is part of it. It's what the treatments are for."

"What treatments?"

"Your treatments. Tuesdays and Thursdays. We moved you to Thursdays in — let me check." She opened the file and flipped through it with the speed of a person who knows where the information lives. "January 2019. We moved you to Thursdays because Carol's schedule changed and Tuesdays conflicted with Graham's piano."

Stuart looked at the file. The pages were covered in handwriting, some printed, some cursive, the blue ink of a ballpoint used for thirty years. Dates in the margins. His name. The word convergence repeated at intervals, and the word overlap, and once, at the bottom of a page Dr. Pell turned past quickly, the phrase patient presenting with increased overlap. Recommend accelerated protocol.

"I don't have a wife," Stuart said. "I don't have a son. I adjust insurance claims. I live alone in an apartment on Birch Street. I eat turkey sandwiches on Tuesdays. I have never been here."

Dr. Pell closed the file. She set her pen on the desk. She took off her reading glasses and let them hang on the chain and looked at him with the steady warmth of a person hearing a symptom.

"Stuart," she said. "Would you like some water?"

"I'm fine."

"The fountain in the waiting room. Have a drink before you go. The water is good."

He stood. He moved toward the door. Dr. Pell stood too and touched his arm — the lightest pressure, the kind of touch a doctor gives a patient who needs to be told the visit is over.

"Same time next week," she said. "Thursday. 2:15."

"I won't be here next week."

She smiled. The smile was warm and patient and belonged to a person who has been told this before, many times, by this man, and the man has always come back.

---

He stopped at the fountain. He did not decide to stop. His legs stopped and his body turned and he was standing there with a cone cup in his hand. He filled it. He drank.

The water tasted like champagne. Not champagne — the memory of champagne. Champagne left on a table for three or four hours at a reception, after the toasts and the cake, when someone picks up the glass because it is there and drinks it and it is flat and warm and sweet in a way champagne is not supposed to be sweet. The water from the fountain tasted like that. His mouth had the taste the way his body had the chair — precisely, completely, from a life he had not lived.

He stood at the fountain with the cup in his hand and the taste stayed. It did not wash away. It stayed the way a song stays after the song is over, the melody running underneath whatever comes next. He could taste the hour it had been poured and the hour it had been drunk, and the distance between those two hours was the distance between a wedding he had not attended and a mouth that remembered attending it.

He dropped the cup in the small trash can by the fountain. He left the office. The door closed behind him. The hallway with its gray carpet and its recessed lighting and its particular quiet. The elevator. The lobby. The parking lot. His car.

He sat in his car. He put the key in the ignition and these were his hands and this was his car and the parking lot was a parking lot. The taste of the champagne was settling, the way sediment settles to the bottom of a glass. Still there. Underneath.

He drove home. Route 8. The strip malls. The light failing. His apartment building, the parking space that was his, the stairs that were his stairs, the door that was his door. He unlocked it. He went inside. The apartment was the apartment — the one bedroom, the kitchen with the counter where the postcard had been, the laptop on the table, the claims. Everything functional. Nothing chosen.

He sat on the couch. He turned on the television and the television was noise and the noise was the kind of company that doesn't require you to be anyone. He watched without watching. The taste was still underneath.

He fell asleep on the couch. He dreamed a kitchen larger than his, a window over the sink, a coffee maker, a bowl of fruit on the counter — bananas, two oranges, a pear. The fruit was chosen. Somebody in that house liked fruit. A boy's voice from another room. Not the words. The pitch of it, the particular frequency of a ten-year-old calling down a hallway, and the one he was calling was Stuart, and Stuart knew the hallway, and Stuart had never been in this house.

He woke at 2 AM. The television was still on. The taste of the champagne was gone, and in its place the ordinary staleness of a man who fell asleep without brushing his teeth. He turned off the television. He went to bed.

The bed was a queen, too large for one person and too small for the memory of two. He lay on the left side, the side he had slept on when the right side was occupied and still slept on now that it wasn't. The right side of the bed was cold and flat.

His hand was on the pillow next to his pillow. The spare. He kept it because taking it off the bed would be a decision. His fingers spread across the cotton. The cotton was cool and smooth and his fingers lay on it the way fingers lie when they are used to a head being there and the head is not there.

He closed his eyes. Behind his eyes, the kitchen. The fruit. The boy's voice. The hallway he knew and had never walked.

 

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