The office had hard plastic chairs, joined together in groups of four. Morgan had been sitting for almost a half hour, sharing the room with a heavy woman, her crying baby, and an old white man with toothpick-thin arms and legs. There was a TV mounted high on the opposite wall, a soap opera playing without sound.
The receptionist had shut the window above her desk. Morgan could see her on the phone behind the pebbled glass. On his lap was a two-month-old Newsweek. He flipped through the pages, reading an item here and there, looking at the ads.
The door beside the desk buzzed, opened, and a short black woman in a white coat came out.
“Mr. Morgan?”
He took off his reading glasses, folded them and put them in a shirt pocket, and got up, his knees aching. He dropped the magazine on his seat. She held the door open, and he followed her down a hall to a treatment room.
“You can hang your coat there,” she said, and he took the leather off, hung it on a peg on the back of the door. She weighed him on a scale, took his blood pressure, pulse, and temperature, noted them on a clipboard chart. She told him the doctor would be with him shortly, closed the door, and left him alone.
He sat on the treatment table, paper crinkling under him, looked around. There was a cutaway chart on one wall showing the progression of heart disease, cholesterol buildup in the arteries. Another had the seven warning signs of Type 1 diabetes.
After a few minutes, the door opened and a tall, skinny white man came in. Midthirties, short blond hair, glasses.
“I’m Dr. Kinzler.” He put out his hand. Morgan shook it. “Dr. Rosman at the clinic sent over your file this morning.”
He picked up Morgan’s chart from the counter, looked at it, flipped pages.
“You saw Dr. Rosman last week?” he said without looking up.
“Tuesday.” It was the first he’d spoken.
“You know you’re down five pounds from then?”
Morgan shook his head. He was worried it would be more.
“Vitals are fine, temperature normal.” He set the chart down. “Any pain?”
Morgan touched the right side of his stomach. “Here, sometimes.”
Kinzler felt there, probed gently.
“Liver size seems normal,” he said, “but we’ll run some more blood work.”
He slid the chestpiece of his stethoscope up beneath Morgan’s sweater, the metal cold, asked him to breathe deep. He did the same in back, between his shoulder blades.
“How long with the pain?” he said.
“Three, four weeks. Bad the last week or two.”
“You taking anything for it?”
“Vicodin when I need it. Try not to take it unless I have to.”
“Good.”
He made notes on the chart and then stepped back and leaned against the counter, clipboard held in crossed arms.
“So you know about the other test results, the second biopsy?” he said. “Dr. Rosman discussed them with you?”
“A little.”
“Goblet cell carcinoid is fairly rare. It only strikes one in about a hundred thousand people. And it can be fairly unpredictable. We don’t know a lot about it yet, but there are some relatively standard ways of treating it. You’re…” He looked at the clipboard. “Fifty-seven?”
“Fifty-eight. Next month.”
“You’re in good shape for your age. Fit. That’ll help. But a lot of this-and what we decide to do-will depend on how early we caught it. That’s why we’ll do a full set of blood work today. Then we can discuss how to proceed. Have you had an MRI or CAT scan?”
Morgan shook his head.
“You have insurance?”
“No.”
“Medicare, Medicaid, anything?”
“No.”
“That’s an issue. There’s a range of treatments that might be required, once we figure out which way to go.”
“I can get the money. I’ll do what I need to do.”
“What line of work are you in, Mr. Morgan?”
He shifted on the table. “Handyman, construction, whatever I can get.”
“Construction, huh? Union?”
“No.”
“Pension?”
Morgan shook his head.
“There’s various things you can apply for,” Kinzler said. “Social aid, some elder programs you might be able to get in on. All of it’s worth looking into. You’re likely eligible for Medicaid as well.”
“I’ll pay what I have to pay.”
“You seem confident.”
Morgan shrugged.
“Either way,” Kinzler said, “we can’t waste much time. We have to be proactive with these types of cancers. They removed the appendix when?”
“August.”
“So it probably took at least a couple weeks for the initial biopsy results to come back. Did you have any symptoms before that?”
“No. I had the pain, I went to the clinic. They sent me to the hospital.”
“That’s one of the ways goblet cell presents,” Kinzler said. “Or at least one of the ways we catch it. Routine appendectomies, and if they find a tumor in the removed organ, bingo. There you are.”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m saying early is better. And we might be fairly early here, which is good news. Depending on how far it’s gotten, where it’s spread, surgery may be an option as well. We go in, take out as many of the tumors as we find. Afterward, we put you on a maintenance diet of chemo, maybe radiation, if it looks like it’ll be effective. Then we test you regularly, see if they come back.”
The woman came back in, carrying a kit she opened on the counter.
Kinzler put out his hand. “Doris will draw some blood. We’ll get back to you when we know more.”
“That’s it?”
“For now.” He kept his hand out until Morgan shook it. “At least a few days before we know anything. Then we’ll set you up for a scan. You’re not going anywhere, right?”
“No,” Morgan said. The woman had a plastic syringe out, cartridges, a blue rubber strap.
“I’ll leave you in good hands, then, Mr. Morgan. We’ll speak soon.” He shut the door behind him.
The woman tugged at the left sleeve of his pullover. He rolled it up, and she tied the strap around his upper arm and swabbed the crook of his elbow with an alcohol pad. When he made a fist, the veins rose in his forearm. She laid the needle tip on the thickest one, and he winced as the steel slid in.
An empty plastic cartridge went into the syringe. She pressed it home, and he watched dark red blood swirl into the tube, slowly fill it. His blood. His life.
He waited in the doorway of a beauty supply shop, its metal grille covered with graffiti. Eleven P.M. and only a handful of cars had passed in the half hour he’d been there. In the distance, the Prudential Building rose over the skyline like a floodlit tombstone. No matter where you went in the city, it was always in sight.
He watched the big black Chevy Suburban come down the street slow. Tinted windows, silver rims and spinners. He stepped out of the doorway, and the Suburban swung to the curb, the rear passenger door opening. He got in, and C-Love pulled the door shut behind him.
The Suburban had been customized with two facing bench seats. Mikey-Mike sat in the rear one, arms up on the seatback. Morgan slid onto the other, facing him. C-Love settled in beside him, close to the door. They pulled away from the curb, hip-hop throbbing low from hidden speakers.
Mikey wore a Michael Jordan jersey, an Adidas headband, and warm-up pants and jacket, but he was pushing three fifty, and Morgan doubted if he’d seen a basketball court in twenty years. There was a thick rope of gold around his neck. To Morgan, it was all foolish gangsta bling that said Drug dealer. Lock my ass up.
Morgan wore his leather, the Beretta tucked into his belt in back. He looked behind him, saw the Coleman twins, Dante at the wheel, DeWayne riding shotgun, a hundred pounds heavier than his brother, with a lazy left eye. He was a month out of Rahway at most. He looked at Morgan without expression.
“Yo, DeWayne,” Mikey said. “Turn that shit down.”
The music faded to a dull thumping Morgan could feel through the seat. He looked out the window. They drove past City Hall with its gold-leaf dome, marble steps, barricades in front.
“That was good work you put in,” Mikey said.
“True that,” C-Love said. “Showed those niggas the error of their ways.”
“But I heard some things,” Mikey said.
“Like what?” Morgan said.
“Like maybe that bitch had a stash there.”
Morgan reached into his pockets. He felt C-Love stiffen, turn toward him. Morgan took out banded stacks of cash, tossed them onto the seat beside Mikey.
“There was shit there, too,” Morgan said. “I left it.”
“Why?”
“Too much trouble. A whole G-pack. I wasn’t going to carry it around.”
Mikey looked at the stacks, then at C-Love. “Count that shit,” he said. C-Love leaned over, picked up the bills.
“There’s seven there,” Morgan said. “I found fourteen, kept half.”
C-Love finished counting, nodded. Mikey leaned forward, took one of the banded thousand-dollar stacks, tossed it into Morgan’s lap.
“Don’t ever trust anyone who’s not taking his share,” Mikey said. He looked at C-Love. “If a nigga ain’t stealing a little, he’s stealing a lot.”
Morgan left the stack where it was.
“Maybe you need it more than me,” he said.
“Nah,” Mikey said. “What those lawyers are charging, that wouldn’t buy them lunch. Take it, ’cause we got something else to talk about, too.”
Morgan put the money away. “What?”
“That deal down south,” Mikey said. “Some shit happened. Ain’t gotten to the bottom of it yet.”
“Maybe you should back off it.”
“It’s not that easy. I need that connect, the money it’s gonna bring in, to pay those motherfuckers working my case. They got another delay, but first of the year, man, they can’t put that shit off anymore.”
“What happened?”
“Don’t know. I sent someone down there, prime the pump, get things moving, but he never made it. People he was supposed to meet called, said ‘What the fuck?’ I didn’t know what to tell them.”
“What was he carrying?”
“We’ll talk about that shit someplace else. But I may need you to go down there soon.”
“Why?”
“Find out what the fuck happened. And who’s responsible. And settle that shit before it gets out of hand.”
Morgan thought about Kinzler, what he’d said.
“I got some things going on,” he said, “I need to take care of. Up here.”
“Ain’t no shit that can’t wait. I’m waiting to hear back on something. When I do, might be I’m gonna holler at you. And you need to be ready to go.”
Morgan looked out the window, felt them watching him. The Suburban rolled past a block-long housing project.
“What?” Mikey said. “You actually need to think on this? Whatever it is, I’ll make it worth your while. You know me.”
“Yeah,” Morgan said. “I know you.”
“Besides, being gone for a while might be a good thing, case someone’s thinking payback for that work you done, you feel me?”
“I’ll handle it if they do.”
“I know you will. Just sayin’.”
“Up at the corner’s fine.”
“Dante,” Mikey said, “pull up over there by the playground.”
The Suburban rolled to a stop.
“Well?” Mikey said.
Morgan reached across for the door latch, popped it.
“Call me,” he said and got out.
He walked home down Washington Street, past boarded-up tenements, vacant lots between them like missing teeth. At the corner of West Kinney, he stopped in front of an empty brownstone, windows bricked up, the facade darkened with smoke damage. A sign in the yard promised new condominiums to come, gave a phone number.
He’d lived there for six years, from the time his grandmother died until he’d turned fifteen and taken to the streets. A group home, him and ten other boys. Back in 1967, on the second day of the riots, he’d snuck up to the roof, watched smoke and flames bloom from the corner of Springfield and Bergen. Sirens everywhere, and the crack of gunfire blocks away. Gray ash had fallen from the sky like snow, covering the city. A lifetime ago.
He walked on.