Plugged - Eoin Colfer [7]
Oh baby, she’d said. Oh baby.
Inside a cloud of steam, my imagination adds levels. A husky catch at the end of the phrase.
Oh baaby.
How could I not have noticed this at the time? Connie was sending me a message.
I turn the shower knob way over in the blue.
Sunshine is slanting through my bathroom window, warming the chequered vinyl shower curtain. It’s going to be hot today. Too hot for a woollen hat.
That’s okay. I got lighter hats.
I quite like this time of year in New Jersey. The air on my skin feels like home. The old sod, the emerald isle. Ireland. Sometimes, on a clear day, the sky has the same electric-blue tinge.
Just go home then and stop bitching.
I’m even beginning to irritate my own subconscious. Is there anything more pathetic than a Mick on foreign soil, wailing ‘Danny Boy’? Especially one who never liked the country when he was there.
It wasn’t the country, I remind myself. It was the people in the country and the things that happened there.
My apartment is two floors up, three blocks north of Main Street and ten blocks south of the line of buildings with mildly risqué fronts that pass for a strip in this town. I stroll down the cracked concrete, trying to rein in the menace. I dated a gypsy once who told me I had an aura that looked like shark-infested water. Sometimes I piss people off just by walking by, so I hunch a little and keep my eyes on the ground, trying to radiate friendliness. Think hippies, think hippies.
Dr Kronski’s surgery is in a part of town where there aren’t any trees set into the sidewalk. The trashcans are generally teeming with beer bottles, and if you stand in one place long enough someone’s going to offer you whatever you need.
All of which would suggest that Zeb Kronski isn’t much of a surgeon, which would be totally not true. Zeb Kronski is a hell of a surgeon; he just doesn’t have a licence to practise in the United States. And he can’t apply because he had a boob job die on the table in Tel Aviv; not his fault, he assures me. Implant-related death.
The building is maybe twenty years old, but looks five times that. Part of a mini strip mall, mostly glass and partition walls. In winter, accountants and dental nurses freeze to death in these boxes.
Zeb’s is wedged between Snow White’s dry-cleaners and a Brite-Smile. Chemical sandwich. No wonder my doctor friend has his off days, with fumes like that eating his brain. I make sure my appointments are in the mornings, before depression takes hold.
The sign is flipped to Closed when I arrive. Surprising. Usually Kronski’s homeopathic centre is doing a brisk business in powdered crocodile penis capsules by this time. Zeb tells me that the homeopathic bit started out as a front, but now he’s having to file returns.
People are fucked up, Dan, he confided one night at Slotz, down to a film of whiskey in the bottom of his glass. Everyone’s looking for the magic pill. And they don’t give a shit whose horn gets ground to make it.
Wooden blinds stretch across the shop front; reminds me of a schooner deck I worked on in Cobh harbour. Kronski’s Kures reads the decal. This mall is big on misspellings. Two doors down is Close Cutz, and around the back there’s a roomful of Krazy Kidz slugging down Ritalin.
I feel a little irritated. Zeb better not be face down in an empty jacuzzi, sleeping off a bender.
Again.
Last time it cost me two hundred bucks to pay off the madam. I’ve been working up to this session, mentally, running through the scenarios, playing devil’s advocate with myself.
What if the follicles didn’t take? What if I end up scarred? What if I’m a vain asshole who’ll still be ugly after the next operation?
And now that I have myself totally psyched, as my adopted countrymen would say, Zeb Kronski is running late. And when Zeb is running late, he is generally running tanked.
I thumb the flap in my wallet for the spare key; at least I can get the percolator bubbling while I’m waiting. Then I notice the door is open a crack.
A little odd. But no more than a little. Zeb doesn’t remember to zip his own fly when he