Drop by Drop

5

Shay Mulligan lived on the edge of town in an area where homeowners could have horses or a family-sized swimming pool. His son kept a horse in the stable at the rear of the property. Shay’s veterinary clinic was adjacent to the house. It was life in the country without being fully committed. No one made a fuss about barking dogs.

Shay looked forward to his daily run; it was a self-imposed discipline. Five miles every day of the week, rain or shine, was a ritual with him. He preferred to go in the late morning, before lunch. Or instead of lunch. Running kept his head clear and his reflexes quick.

By eleven that morning no more patients were in his waiting room and the appointment book was empty until two. Shay left his veterinary nurse, Paige Prentiss, in charge of the clinic with instructions to contact him if an emergency came in. Tall, tanned and competent, in school she had been the captain of her soccer team. She wore no makeup, but her hair, the color of brown sugar, hung to the small of her back in a glossy braid.

“Before you leave,” she said, “remember where we’re going this evening.”

“Hmmm?”

“The fund-raiser for the Daggett’s Woods Conservancy. I told you about it last week and you said you’d join me.”

Shay snapped his fingers. “Sorry, Paige, I guess it slipped my mind. I have a date for tonight.”

“Angela Watson?”

“Who else? But I’ll go to the next one, I promise.”

“There might not be another one: you know what we’re up against. This was important, Shay.”

“Okay, I’ll write a check for it as soon as I get back,” he assured her.

His nurse looked dubious. For a man with a degree in veterinary medicine, her employer was lamentably absentminded. He never forgot anything pertaining to the animals and their welfare, but things like bills to pay and family birthdays to commemorate flew right out of his head.

Paige had concluded she could never be romantically interested in a man who would not remember her birthday.

Beginning at the grove of cottonwood trees that marked the boundary of the old Miller estate, Shay’s customary route for running took him past the derelict Miller mansion with its graffiti-covered walls, across the fields to Nelson’s apple orchard, two miles along the bike path that circled Alcott Park, and then back to the clinic, the long-established practice founded by his father. His parents now lived in a retirement community in Florida.

Today Shay’s nearest neighbor, Gerry Delmonico, happened to look out a window and saw him go by. Gerry shouted, “Hold on and I’ll join you!” In less than a minute he emerged from his house clad in cutoffs and a T-shirt. “I don’t have to be in the lab until later,” he said, “so I was doing some work on my taxes.”

Gerry’s long black legs took one stride for every two of Shay’s, but when he tried to alter his pace to accommodate his companion, Shay protested. “Hey, pal, don’t do me any favors.”

“Don’t worry,” Gerry said amiably, “I wouldn’t piss on you if you were on fire.” They jogged in silence until he remarked, “Speaking of fire, we’re having a barbecue on the deck on Saturday. Come on over, anytime. Gloria said to tell you to bring Angela.”

“You’re supposed to tell me? You can’t just ask me, nice and polite-like?”

“My wife said tell.”

“That’s why you have a wife and I don’t.”

Gerry cast a sideways glance at Shay. “You don’t have a wife because you don’t know a good thing when you see it.”

“I do too. Tonight I’m taking Angela to that new French restaurant, Chez Pierre, and I’ve got cash for a big tip. Remind me to tell you what happened while I was at the S and S, by the way. You’ll never believe it.”

They ran on.

Halfway down the bike path on the way home Shay slowed to a trot; a walk; then leaned forward and put his hands on his knees. Gerry turned and came back to him. “What were you saying about the bank?”

“Tell you in a minute. Stitch in my side.” Shay took a deep breath and slowly straightened up. “That’s better. First, let’s agree not to talk about Angela, I already heard enough on that subject. I know a problem when I see it. If I married Angela I’d have to take the whole package, including her man-crazy mother, when the woman bothers to come home, and her alcoholic father. I can’t set foot in their house without one or the other starting in on me.”

“So don’t set foot in their house. Move Angela into yours, you have enough room. Evan likes her, doesn’t he?”

Shay gave a rueful smile. “I’m not sure how he’d feel about it, I don’t discuss my sex life with my son, we’d both be too embarrassed. Besides, the only time I mentioned living together Angela made it plain she wanted marriage, so I haven’t pushed her. I’m not ready for that.”

“You’re too soft for your own good, buddy. I don’t know how you can stand the vet business, you must see a dozen things a day that make you want to cry.”

“Not a dozen. Since the last recession if I treat a dozen patients in one day I’m ecstatic. But if I see some I can help—and I help a lot of ’em—then it’s worthwhile. How about you out there in Bennett’s Bunker in the forest; you helping a lot of people?”

“To be honest, Shay, I’m not quite sure what we’re doing anymore. When Robert Bennett hired me his company was involved in producing packaging for the pharmaceutical industry. My job was to help develop containers for sensitive or volatile materials; real cutting-edge stuff. The lab was equipped for a wide range of testing and it was a pleasure to work there.

“Then Bennett started adding ‘peripheral products,’ as he calls them, and they’re taking over. They’re not, well—and this is between us—not strictly on the up-and-up. The other employees don’t seem to mind, but I’m not sure I want to be involved anymore. The money’s too good to turn down if we want to start a family, though, and we’re trying. Gloria plans to take a leave of absence from the hospital when she gets pregnant.”

“Family man, hunh?”

Gerry smiled. “We plan for two boys and a girl. Or two girls and a boy, either way, as long as they’re healthy. I was an only child and so was Gloria. We want our own tribe.”

Shay gave a whistle. “That’s going to be some leave of absence.” He was about to start running again when he noticed a photographer and his assistant setting up a photo shoot in the park. They were accompanied by a reed-thin young woman in a semitransparent crimson toga with a matching pair of designer sunglasses. When she realized Shay was looking at her she assumed an aloof professional smile—that faded abruptly as she began to paw at her face.

The designer sunglasses were oozing down her perfect cheekbones.

When they returned from their run the two men found a gleaming red convertible parked in front of the vet clinic. “Hey, look at that, Gerry! Jack Reece must be back in town. D’you know him?”

“Not personally, but I’ve heard the name. He’s a… well, what is it he does?”

“No one knows exactly, but he’s a hell of a guy. Come on in and I’ll introduce you.”

It was obvious that Paige Prentiss knew Jack. She was watching him the way a greyhound watches a rabbit.

A plastic pet carrier stood on the counter. The unseen occupant was complaining bitterly.

“Who do we have here?” Shay asked Jack.

“Plato, Aunt Bea’s oldest cat. He’s having trouble going up the stairs and she wants you to give him glucosamine.”

“How old is he?”

“At least twenty. If she can’t get a cat to live into his twenties she thinks she’s a failure.”

“So I guess you don’t want him put to sleep.”

Jack shook his head. “It would be more than my life is worth.”

“My wife’s that way about plants,” said Gerry. “She even hates to kill weeds.”

“She’s a gardener?”

“She’s a psychologist at Staunton Memorial.”

Jack raised an eyebrow. “I’m impressed.”

Shay said, “You two wait for me, I’ll take Plato to the back and examine him before I decide on his treatment. Come on, Paige, I’ll need you to hold him.”

While they waited, Gerry told Jack about the model and the dissolving sunglasses. “Poor girl’s probably going to need help from my wife.”

“Think she has psychological damage in addition to being burned?”

“She wasn’t burned, which makes it stranger. The glasses weren’t any warmer than skin temperature, I touched them myself.”

“But plastic won’t dissolve at skin temperature.”

“You won’t convince me of that, Jack. I saw it with my own eyes; so did Shay. Some of the stuff even dripped onto the ground.”

“Then I think you’ll be interested in what my aunt saw at the bank. Listen to this…”

Shay soon returned, carrying the cat carrier with its now-silent contents. “Plato’s unhappy about having a shot in his spine and one in his neck, but he’s not hurting. We’ll repeat the process in six weeks and it should last him the rest of his life.”

“No glucosamine?”

“That’s outdated, Jack: nobody uses it now.” He noticed their expressions. “What were you two talking about, anyway?”

They told him.

“Aren’t you both describing the same thing?”

“Sounds like it.”

“We’re having a hell of a hot season,” Shay said. “Could the climate be responsible somehow?”

Jack shook his head. “You can’t blame the climate for things dissolving inside an air-conditioned bank. I think there’s something larger at work here.”

“Based on what evidence?”

“Gut instinct, Gerry.”

“That’s a damned poor substitute for science. Tell you what, Jack; we’re having a barbecue at my house on Saturday, and by then we’ll probably know what’s going on. Shay’s coming, so why don’t you join us? Bring a friend if you want to.”

“I’ve only been back in town for a couple of days, there isn’t anybody special.”

“You never know, you might meet someone at the party. But I warn you; the most gorgeous girl there will be my wife, Gloria, and she’s strictly off-limits.”

By the weekend the inhabitants of Sycamore River knew their town was not unique. Similar incidents had been reported elsewhere around the country; plastic items were inexplicably dissolving. Small things; unimportant bits and pieces. News commentators began referring to the bizarre incidents as “the Change.”

People made jokes about it.

On Saturday afternoon a good-humored crowd gathered on the deck at the Delmonicos’ house to enjoy the barbecue. The Change was the main topic of conversation.

“It’s weird, but is it dangerous?” a woman wondered.

“Only if you’re plastic,” said a male guest, glancing at her breasts.

She snapped, “Everything you see is real!”

Most of the guests laughed, but one said, “I have a bad feeling about this, we don’t know what’s going to go next. It’s like waiting for the other shoe to drop.”

“Don’t sweat it,” advised Frank Auerbach, publisher and editor of The Sycamore Seed. “Crazy things happen all the time, but you never hear about most of them. Usually it’s technology gone bad and they’re trying to cover it up. This is just another of the petty annoyances of the twenty-first century.”

Auerbach was an archetypal American, a blend of many generations of immigrants from the four corners of the earth. Average height, average build, medium brown hair, no distinctive features. His wife, Anne, who loved him and was annoyed by him in almost equal measure, once told him, “You wouldn’t stand out in a crowd of two.”

Now she asked, “Would you rather be living a hundred years ago, Frank? With no modern medicine, no wallscreens? No air-conditioning?”

“Of course not, but—”

Another guest interjected, “I think a Russian agent emptied—”

“A Chinese agent, you mean.”

“Whatever. A foreign agent’s emptied chemicals into our reservoirs and now the knobs on our cabinets are falling off. Some secret weapon that is!”

There was more laughter.

Gloria Delmonico, wearing a textured yellow sunsuit that contrasted with her smooth dark skin, emerged from the house carrying a tray of canapés. “It’s not funny,” she said as she set the tray on the redwood picnic table. “People are frightened by what they don’t understand so they make up stories to explain it. At the hospital we have a patient who’s seen a woman rise from the dead.”

“Like a ghost?”

“The poor man was hallucinating. He’s convinced she’s come back from the grave to ruin his life, but the real problem is he’s still suffering occasional flashbacks from a bad drug experience years ago. When he accepts that, I may be able to help him.”

“The Change can’t be a giant hallucination.”

“It’s a giant hoax and someone’s going to have to pay for the damage.”

Theories were batted around like tennis balls. Everything from a foreign conspiracy to the nation’s propensity for alcohol was blamed.

“The government’s going to have to do something about this.”

“Sure they will. They’ll form a committee the taxpayers will pay for, and the committee will form a subcommittee and put together a panel of experts…”

“That’s all we need, a panel of experts.”

Jack remarked, “The ordinary man in the street might be better than a panel of experts locked into their own viewpoints.”

“Don’t include me in that,” said Gerry.

“You’re a scientist, aren’t you?”

“Industrial chemist, that’s my job description. I got interested in science very early, when my granddad told me about smartphones that spontaneously caught fire years ago. In school I discovered I was like Marie Curie, fascinated by both chemistry and physics. But it’s easier to make a living in chemistry.”

“Did they ever find out why the phones caught fire?”

“Sure they did, science has an answer for everything.”

“You have a lot of faith in science, don’t you?”

Gerry grinned. “Faith and science are a contradiction in terms. Science is about what’s real; faith is wishful thinking.” He shot a glance in Gloria’s direction. “But don’t tell my wife I said that.”

“I know what I saw at the bank,” Nell Bennett insisted on Sunday evening.

“You should stop having those liquid lunches,” her husband told her. A ruggedly handsome man, retaining the neck and shoulders that had made him formidable at college football, Robert Bennett dominated the dinner table. “Alcohol’s going to start showing on your face.”

Nell hated it when her husband made disparaging remarks to her in front of the children. “I didn’t have a ‘liquid lunch’ that day, Rob, I didn’t have lunch at all.”

“Another diet, Mom?”

“I’m not dieting, Jess, I don’t need to.”

“Yeah, sure.”

A few minutes later Colin complained of a headache. Headaches had become a frequent feature of his teens. Rob dismissed them as attention seeking, but Nell worried. The specialist she consulted had sought to reassure her. “It’s a normal occurrence in teenagers, Mrs. Bennett; their bodies are changing so rapidly. If Colin’s headaches occur more frequently or the pain becomes worse, bring him back in and we’ll run some tests, but I don’t think it will be necessary.”

The meal ended as most meals did in the Bennett household; like the breakup of a small constellation. Robert Bennett announced he was going to his office at RobBenn for a couple of hours. His son went to his room to play war games on the internet. In her room Jessamyn avidly followed the celebrity gossip on social media.

Nell was left to retire to the media room and seek electronic company alone, as she did most evenings.

When she activated the wallscreen a local broadcaster walked toward her from a surrealistic set. “A blizzard of potato chips swirled through Alcott Park today. The bags disintegrated as they were being unloaded at the refreshment stand. We also have unconfirmed reports of plastic pill bottles dissolving on drugstore shelves.”

As if I needed this, thought Nell.

She switched the wallscreen to the international news to be greeted by an onslaught of violence and tragedy, interrupted at three-minute intervals by celebrities appearing to walk toward her from the screen, extolling the virtues of a new-model car or the latest energy drink.

She changed to a pay-for-view documentary channel where the past was brought to life again; the safe and distant past that held no surprises. A program on archaeology, one of her favorite subjects, absorbed her interest until bedtime. But she did not sleep well that night. When Rob finally crawled into their bed she was grateful for his bulk and solidity. Robert Bennett, to whom life had given all the prizes, was her bulwark.

He would keep her safe. Rob always kept his trophies safe.