The Syndrome

Chapter 5

Duran’s apartment complex, the Capitol Towers, included an underground shopping center that made it more or less u

Returning upstairs from the underground Safeway, Duran hefted three plastic bags of groceries with his left hand, while he struggled to open the door to his apartment with his right. Finally, the door swung open and, as soon as it did, he knew the telephone was about to ring.

It was a trick of his. Or something.

For whatever reason, he was peculiarly attuned to the pitches and hums of machines—the whir and chink of the icemaker, the somnolent hum of the air conditioner, the gush and gurgle of water in the dishwasher. Any change in the acoustics of his appliances, no matter how subtle, struck him immediately, the malfunction as apparent as a burglar’s sneeze at midnight.

It wasn’t a particularly useful trait, and he didn’t know how he’d acquired it. But that it was real was certain. Kicking the door closed behind him, he sensed a kind of tension in the room as soon as he entered it. For a moment, he stood there, frozen, just inside the doorway, listening to the air. Then, he stepped toward the phone.

And it rang.

It was unca

“Hello!”

“Jeff?”

He didn’t recognize the voice. And the question—no one really called him that. He was always Duran, or Doctor Duran.

“Hel-lo-oh? Anyone there?”

“Yeah! Sorry, I—this is Jeff.”

“Well, hi-iii! It’s Bu

“Really…”

“Almost always, but… I didn’t really know you? At Sidwell? We were in the same class. Not English or anything, but—the class of ‘87? I was just plain Bu

Duran thought about it. Had he been? Maybe. And Bu

“Two things. You can promise me you’ll respond to the query I’m sending. You know, one of those ‘where-are-they-now’ things?”

“Okay.”

“And the second thing is: you could come to the reunion. Reunion avec homecoming, you know. You got the alumni newsletter, right? I’m calling to remind you—we need every body we can get.”

“Well… “ He picked up a matchbook—de Groot had left his cigarettes behind at their last session—and rotated it through his fingers. The matchbook was embossed with concentric silver and black circles. An eye stared out at him from the center of the design. He flipped the matchbook over. The back showed the same concentric silver and black circles but instead of the eye, the center held the words: trance klub davos platz

He opened the cover to see that the matches inside were European, made of thin flexible wood instead of paper, with bright green tips.

“Jehh-eff?” said the voice on the telephone. “You still there?”

Pay attention. “Absolutely.”

“Well how about it?” Bu

“I’ll try.”

“Well, I guess I’ll have to settle for that. ‘I’ll try’ is better than ‘I’ll think about it’ (which, as we all know, means, ‘No way.’) So, put it on your calendar, okay?”

“Will do.”

“October 23rd.”

“Got it.”

“Great. And, Jeff?”

“Yeah?”

“If you can’t come to the reunion? I will not understand!”

When they’d hung up, he repeated her name aloud, turning it over in his mind as he put away the groceries, half expecting a face to well up in his memory. But there was nothing. Not an image or an anecdote.

High school was a long time ago, he reflected, putting the lemons into the vegetable bin. Even so: his class was only a hundred strong, half boys, half girls. So you’d think he’d remember something about her.

He emptied the ground coffee into the Starbucks canister and pushed his thumb down on the metal clip to close it. Bu

It was depressing. And the more he thought about it, the more he realized how little he remembered about school. Almost nothing, really. A couple of names and faces. The headmaster, Andrew Pierce Vaughn, his jovial face frozen in laughter. The front of the school. Commencement in the garden behind Zartman House. But of the friends he’d had, and the teachers… there was nothing.

It was a little unsettling, actually. Enough so that, even though it wasn’t at all his kind of thing, he wrote the date on a Post-it and stuck it to his computer monitor: Sidwell reunion: Sat. Oct. 23. What the hell…

His four P.M. appointment with Nico came and went—without her. He thought about calling, but decided against it. The responsibility for maintaining the co

So. When she didn’t show up, Duran wondered about it—but he didn’t call. Autonomy was important for Nico and he’d made a point of establishing from the very start that she, and she alone, was responsible for getting well. He could help her. But he was not her father, her husband, or her caretaker.

And so he watched Ricki Lake until it became time for di

There was a small CD player on the counter, and he peered through its glass top to see what it held. Cowboy Junkies. He forwarded to the fifth song, pressed Play, and flipped through a sheaf of take-out menus as the singer lamented that she’d

He could order Thai food—that would be okay. But only if he had some beer and, preferably, Singha. Pulling open the door to the refrigerator, he glanced from shelf to shelf. There was Perrier, milk and Coca-Cola, and a bottle of Pinot Grigio, but no beer.