A Part of Them

(continued from page one)

	hree days since learning about the accident, each night the very same dream:
	The room is a swampy blue-green and a dim light is swirling, like I've been drinking too heavily at a sleazy smoky nightclub. A fish swims by, and I can sense the kelp swaying. Tiny bubbles float up past my eyes.

A shape emerges from the haze and lumbers towards me like a deep sea diver minus the heavy gear.

As he approaches, his arms lift up in offering. In his upturned palms rests a pile of opalescent pebbles. The light from above passes over them, and they shimmer.

When I reach out to take one, Robbie clenches his hands and pulls away.

	The skin of his face is gnawed and frayed, though he still tries to speak. But there's never any sound, just a quiver from swollen lips.

Not that I don't already know what he's trying so hard to communicate— hell, it seems like it's the only thing I can think about all day and night:

Do what you have to do, and then watch what happens next . . .

But after four months of waiting, nothing at all had happened and to hear Christine tell it nothing ever would.

Robbie's body was never located, and the feeling was that either the sharks got ahold of it or his decomposing corpse was carried by an undersea current to some secluded stretch of beach where it was picked apart by the gulls.

	An investigation turned up only a portfolio of soured investments, liquid assets of under five thousand dollars, four maxed-out credit cards, and a recent letter from Robbie’s banker declining a request for a line of credit.

Minus hard evidence to the contrary, the coroner ruled Robbie's death accidental, related to rough seas . . .

. . . while Christine and the newspapers favored suicide.

"Robbie Conner understood the rules around here only too well," Chrissie said. "In tinseltown, failure of any sort isn't tolerated. Find yourself a litle down on your luck, and you're no longer the flavor of the month."

I shrugged but didn't reply. Why upset my associate as well as my wife and all of the other thousands of women Robbie had helped over so many years? If it soothed their wounded consciences to believe that a man who cared so little about money that he donated much of what he earned to charity had killed himself over his paltry bank balance, then let them delude themselves.

"Today's hot sensation is tomorrow's what-ever-became-of-him," Chrissie said. "No mercy, no second chances. The people in Movie Land are in love with only themselves."

But Chrissie, I think, like many others with whom I had discussed Robbie’s disappearance, were, in fact, struggling to make sense of what, without more information, appeared to be a senseless event (Me, I had only a little more information than them, most of it soft, none of which I was up to sharing).

And as my own grief began to subside, I found it being replaced by an anger directed as much at myself as at Robbie’s unappreciative clientele.

In life, the recipients of Robbie's magic had rejected him outright, particularly the females, the spoiled starlets and studio amazons who let it be known that they could not stand to be around that 'ugly little gnome'.

They found Robby too coarse and unfashionable, too intellectual or overly principled, too reluctant to worship their superficial attributes. Yes, they were only too eager to place their precious faces, breasts, and waistlines into the hands of a devoted artisan and demand such perfection of him that he gradually came to doubt his own competence.

But even after he'd pleased them (which he did almost without fail), they all treated him like a valet or common vendor, as if they were too good for him and their cash payments obviated any need to express gratitude or to partake in even token social recognition.

Which aggravated the very problem that may have led to Robbie undoing.

Robbie was terribly lonely. His medical training had consumed his youth and left him without any meaningful personal relationships or hobbies he found rewarding.

An awful golfer, he'd taken up boating even though the water scared him. What he yearned for was to share in the adventure of his patients' jet-set lives, not directly (the mention of an affair would have made him blush) but through casual fraternity, to be acknowledged by an invitation to a cast party or perhaps a private screening or a studio barbecue, to experience the world behind the tabloid headlines.

None of these desires remained much of a secret, and the buzz on the street had it that Dr. Conner could make a royal pest of himself. His forewarned female clientele learned to use him for what he was worth but then discard him like a used hankie.

And so when Dr. Robert Conner first shocked me with the news of what he was doing to his lady patients under general anesthesia, I assumed without much reflection that it must be his own perverted way of getting even with his following of thankless ingrates.

Robbie had begun implanting tiny pieces of himself into his VIPs' otherwise untouchable bodies.

In retrospect, I now know, I should have pounded on my desk and demanded he immediately consult with a psychiatrist. Unfortuantely, the circumstances made that action difficult.

Another plastic surgeon had confronted Robbie and claimed to have figured out what was going on.

In return for professional silence, Robbie's jealous rival (none other than his former professor, Bartley Kessel) demanded major hush money.

The alternative to a payout was a major and unthinkable scandal.

Thus, my need to maintain a good attorney-client rapport while strategizing an appropriate legal response prevailed over simple common sense and lulled me into adopting that detached stance of hired counsel.

My partner knew Robbie only as a surgeon. Four years earlier, Chrissie had consulted Dr. Conner regarding breast augmentation. Despite a superb outcome (at poolside, Chrissie's an eye-full), she, like most others, found herself repelled by what she took to be Robbie's immature demeanor.

And like most high-powered attorneys, Christine has been forced into the mold of the hard-boiled. Knowing her as I do, my guess is that she treated Robbie with little compassion. Once he became my client, I made sure that the two of them had minimal interaction and didn't dare make Christine privy to the specifics of his dilemma.

And besides, little did Chrissie suspect that deep beneath her skillfully placed left breast implant sat a tiny sliver of Robbie's fingernail, which by now her body had encased within a capsule of white fibrous scar tissue not unlike the way an oyster forms a pearl around a grain of sand.

Fingernails, eyelashes, strands of hair, bone chips from an extracted tooth, more bone from Robbie’s bunionectomy, cartilage from his sinus surgery—all of these sterilized tidbits of non-living tissue had served as minor irritants surreptitiously implanted into trusting but patronizing patients during surgery.

The most they could ever cause was a small soft cyst to form . . .

. . . but apparently not so invisible that Dr. Kessell hadn't been able to stumble upon two examples on routine preoperative X-rays and then later deduce their cause.

Robbie never got around to explaining his motivation. Whether he envisioned such violation as a response to his clients' exclusion of him from their lives or as a sublimated form of sexual penetration (sowing his seed?), I still don't know.

Perhaps the act was nothing more than a cowardly practical joke, a humiliating desecration bestowed upon his helpless patrons, a polluting of their perfect ponds, although to me, at least, Robbie seemed incapable of true bitterness of spirit.

Maybe he saw the gesture as his own artistic signature, the way a painter (or graffiti artist?) marks the completed canvas.

Or perhaps the habit carried some unknown superstitious significance Robbie simply couldn't resist.

In any case, nearly every one of Robbie's female patients got a little something extra more than they had bargained for, seven thousand lucky ladies in all. That Robbie believed he would get away with the trick forever I found hard to believe.

Then again, perhaps he wanted to be discovered, like the criminal who risks leaving behind his calling card at the scene of each crime. If you swim in alligator-infested water, I said to him, eventually you get eaten. But honesly, I don't think he considered his odd habit as that big a deal.

Only under intense interrogation did Robbie confide to me that even my wife (Marcie, a former actress turned socialite) had been the recipient of a chunk of keratin peeled from a heel callous and implanted just beneath her belly-button during liposuction three years earlier. Robbie swore to me that none of his mini-grafts had the potential to cause deformity, infection, or any sort of ill result. Dr. Kessell, he said, had just make a lucky guess.

Watch what happens next?

How could Robbie be referring to anything but to these implanted relics, as if his miniature time capsules had been somehow pre-programmed to detonate, so to speak, and do . . . what?

But four months since his demise, why hadn't whatever he'd intended not yet transpired?

The room turns reddish-yellow and the light begins to swirl. It seems more like hell than underwater.

Robbie emerges and trudges forward, his stubby fingers all outstretched. His mouth is wide open, as if imploring me to do something.

Why such a strange parting message?, I want to ask him. I hardly knew you, you sneaky bastard. Why me of all people?

But decomposed and almost transparent, he can't make a sound.

(conclusion on page three)