Imperfect Combinations - first seven chapters by Lee Bob Black

Between 2003 and 2010, I wrote a novel called Imperfect Combinations. Here are the first seven chapters (4,500 words).

Chapter 1

Patients’ cellphones sometimes ring in ambulances speeding towards hospitals. Sirens and ringtones. A man has a cardiac arrest—now he’s in an ambulance, trying to answer his ringing phone, ready to real-time share how he could die. Elsewhere, a man is pulled from the rubble of a collapsed building and is resuscitated—now he’s in an ambulance, concussed and coughing up blood, and he wants to answer his ringing phone, to tell whomever it is how he nearly died.

Driving her delivery truck, Linda remembers these anecdotes and then phones her sister.

“Hi, you’ve reached Rochelle Patton of Information Technology. Please leave a message.”

“I’m heading home,” Linda says into her phone. “Call me when you get this.”

She considers the possibilities. Maybe her sister is in back-to-back meetings, assigning tasks to software programmers, planning projects, projecting plans. Rochelle, the Director of the Organ Center’s IT Department, could just as easily be saving a life as letting one slip through the system’s fingers. Playing goddess. Shifting numbers. Changing meanings. Just another death at the office.

Linda re-dials.

This time Rochelle picks up, saying, “Let me guess, you’re driving aren’t you?”

“Yeah.”

“Without a hands-free device.”

Linda nods incredulously, looking at a can of Red Bull in the cupholder.

“That’s reckless, Lin. That’s illegal.”

“Not in New Jersey. Not yet anyway.” She turns on the rear window defogger.

“What the hell are you doing in Jersey?” says Rochelle, on the verge of tears.

Since receiving a kidney transplant two decades ago, Rochelle consumes a daily cocktail of drugs. She wolfs down massive doses of immunosuppressants so that her immune system won’t reject the kidney. Yet this makes her susceptible to infections that her immune system struggles to combat. To counteract that, she takes powerful steroids, which make her overemotional. She can cry at anything.

“Alix’s yoga classes have been a bit . . . uncomfortable recently,” Linda says. “She pays too much attention to my boyfriend. So I heard good things about a yoga studio out here, so here I am.” She pauses, then speaks quickly. “More importantly, you know it freaks me out when you don’t answer my calls. Cellphones ringing in ambulances—remember? Patients bleeding, screaming out names—remember? You know that when I call you I often think you’re going to be in the back of an ambulance. By the way, where are you?”

“Just pull over,” Rochelle urges.

“I have air bags.” Linda likes to believe that her vehicle is designed to prevail over the environment, not respond to it. She likes to believe that the bigger her delivery truck is, the safer it is. If she rams into a tree, the more metal between the tree and her, the better.

“I’m at a rebirthday.” Rochelle’s voice is shaking, getting closer to tears. “Pull the fuck over if you want to keep talking.”

“I could eat a pear while driving, that’s not illegal. I could masturbate while driving, not illegal. You smoke while driving, not illegal. Who’s rebirthday is it?”

“This conversation is over unless you pull over.” Rochelle sniffles.

“I’m pulling over now,” Linda says, “and I’m crying now. Happy?” She wants to tell her older sister to stop micromanaging her emotions.

“Lin, you’re upset. I’m upset too. I’m here for you. I love you. So pull the fuck over, that’ll make me happy.”

Linda pulls onto the motorway’s shoulder—but she misgauges its width and for a few bumpy moments she’s half driving on grass. She veers back into traffic, slows down, then again pulls into the emergency lane and stops. She flicks on her hazard lights and says, “This is just a release. I’m not crying to make you happy.”

Rochelle blubbers, “Let’s figure this out, we can do this again.”

“Don’t send me to voicemail.”

“Little sis . . . let me be your heroine.”

“What the fuck does that mean?”

“I don’t want to ping-pong anymore,” Rochelle says. “Ping, what do you mean by that? Pong, but you said you wouldn’t do that. Ping, you’re not listening to me. Pong, this complaint. Ping, that complaint.”

“We can do this?” says Linda, faltering.

“We can do this.”

“I’m not helping Jaymz with his stupid Reinventionalist thing.”

“Of course you’re not,” Rochelle comforts. “I’m not helping him, you’re not helping him. We won’t help him together. Your boyfriend’s exhibition can—”

“You know that’s the real reason I called, don’t you? . . . I’m also not going to the Transplant Games.”

“Of course you’re not,” Rochelle says.

“Don’t of-course-you’re-not me. I’m serious.”

“I know, I know, Lin.”

“Don’t I-know-I-know me!” Linda slams her hands into the steering wheel. “The first part of Jaymz’s exhibition is going to be in Brooklyn, and the second part is going to be at the Games in Minneapo—”

“He’ll never go through with it,” Rochelle says. “You watch.”

“You have no confidence in my boyfriend.”

“You do? Besides, you can’t go to Minneapolis because you don’t have any vacation time.”

Linda grumbles. “But you said we were going to do this together.”

“I can’t stick my neck out for you at the hospital anymore. We’ve talked about this before.”

Chapter 2

Linda Patton rides on the back of her boyfriend’s motorcycle. Rochelle Patton rides on the back of her husband’s motorcycle. The two couples glide through traffic, chatting via their helmet intercoms.

“She pulled out a huge brown bag filled with dozens of different condom brands,” Capp says into his helmet’s microphone. “I just wanted to put any condom on,” he continues, “but suddenly it was a project. Undoing a woman’s bra is hard enough. But being with a woman with more sexual experience than me just—”

“How was the sex?” Linda says into her microphone, giggling.

“It was decades ago,” Capp says. “All I remember is she had slept with dozens of men.”

“You can’t remember how the sex was?”

“She was thirty and intimidating,” he says. Even though he’s motorcycling in thick traffic, Capp shrugs and lifts one arm high in the air. “I was eighteen and used to cum quickly—”

“Still do sometimes,” Rochelle chimes in, hugging her husband’s substantial waste from behind.

On the other motorcycle, Jaymz coughs into his mic like he’s doing a sound-check.

Capp shifts in his seat and grips the handlebars tight. “Thanks, hun.”

“You only pre sometimes, sweetie,” Rochelle adds.

They park in front of Domario’s. A former auto-repair shop in Brooklyn’s Williamsburg, Domario’s is now a café and beer garden. Every chair and table is mismatched and individual. Exposed pipes scurry along the unpainted brick walls. It’s open twenty-four hours a day, and it’s where the Patton Four often hang out. The Patton Four, as the two couples are called at Glennview Hospital and at the Organ Center, get off their two motorcycles and reach into their helmets and turn off their headsets.

They stroll into the café/bar. Jaymz’s red hair sticks up everywhere. His girlfriend Linda Patton pats it down and it springs back up. The two of them drive for a living. She delivers hospital supplies, anything from bedsheets to catheters. He, a former emergency medical technician, now transports organs on behalf of the Organ Center.

Rochelle Patton administers the computer systems for the Organ Center. Her husband Capp, also a retired EMT, has taken up photography.

As they zigzag through tables to the far end of the room, Capp scratches his baldhead and says, “I had no idea what I was doing in bed—”

“Until you shacked up with me,” Rochelle deadpans.

“And it’s been golden ever since. Well, sometimes,” Cap says.

As they take their protective jackets off, Capp notices pimples on his wife’s neck—zits being one of the side-effects of her medical treatment.

Chapter 3

Back when she had two perfectly good kidneys, Rochelle Patton worked as a bereavement liaison in her hometown of Rochester, Minnesota. “These are the forms you need to fill out,” she would say to the surviving kin.

Her next job was as a recovery coordinator, which was also known as an organ procurement officer. Back then, when she encouraged family members to consent to organs of deceased loved ones being donated—using uplifting truisms like “you can give the gift of life” and “the death of your loved one will acquire meaning if their organs enable others to live”—Rochelle never considered making a career out of computers, even though she was studying information technology at night college. Never in her wildest dreams did she imagine that one day she would be the head of a hospital’s IT department.

Her transition from a student and hobbyist of computers to a full-fledged tech geek was triggered by being fired from her job as an “ambulance chaser”—which was what some hospital staff called her. Hospital management, some of whom viewed her role as a necessary evil, were unsettled with her overzealous vulturelike tendency to approach families in intensive care units and strike up a conversation about organ donation. Nor how she encouraged correspondence between organ recipients and their donors’ surviving kin, which violated hospital policies at that time.

Fortunately for Rochelle, it was the 1980s, a time when hospitals usually tacked on their computer functions to other departments, when only a few hospitals had their own distinct information technology departments. As computers became more confusing and more crucial to the running of nearly every department in Mayo Clinic, she took a job running daily backups of data for the emergency department, the very department she’d been fired from months earlier.

Over the next decade she became a consultant for hospitals and pharmaceutical companies in Minnesota and New York, performing numerous IT jobs. Systems programmer. Database manager. Business analyst. Rochelle built computing systems from the ground up, implemented procedures, set up some checks and some balances, mined data.

With each of her successive roles, the number of people she supervised increased, her expertise sprawled, her number of power suits swelled, her responsibilities ballooned, and the computation grind shot up. Realms of slight influence melded into realms of quasi-control, which upgraded into realms of complete domination. Her reputation built around her gradually, organically. By her late thirties, in the late 1990s, she was the youngest Information Technology Director of Glennview Hospital in New York City. Then she quit.

The next day, she became the IT Director of the Organ Center, an organization located right next to Glennview and which worked directly with the hospital. The Organ Center’s mission is to “improve transplant outcomes” and “increase organ sharing” and “make the most of every donated organ.” There, she continued to do what she had basically been doing at Glennview. She balanced groupthink and think tanks, closed capability gaps, supervised clickstreams, dodged auditors. She managed up and she managed down.

Graphically she was just one box on the org chart, but the heads of departments all had informal, dotted lines umbilically tied to her. She wielded disproportionate power, and, unbeknown to all of her colleagues except her personal assistant Pearl, she used it for her version of good.

At home, under the bed she shared with Capp, Rochelle kept several small notebooks. In the notebooks she listed people who had, at one time or another, been on the organ waiting lists that she maintained as part of her job. Under each name were various dates, notes, and markings. If the person died while waiting for an organ that never came, Rochelle marked an X, symbolizing that she or the system had failed them. If the person received an organ, and Rochelle had complied with all applicable protocols and laws, she placed a checkmark next to the person’s name. And if Rochelle had somehow intervened to assist with getting a person an organ—these being the words she liked to use when thinking about her ethically questionable methods—there were two checkmarks.

Chapter 4

In his thick Cockney accent, Jaymz says, “So Capp, let me get this straight. You lost your virginity to a woman who had slept with dozens of men? A woman who was almost twice your age?”

Capp licks his lips nervously and nods.

“Good for you,” Jaymz says. Then he announces to the group, “So what do we think is a reasonable number of sexual partners for a bunch of forty-somethings like us?”

“Twenty for a woman.” Linda plays with her thin head of black hair. There are small tinges of gray in her bangs. “Meaning: I’d say that the average man, Joe Six Pack, would think it would be reasonable for a woman to have slept with no more than twenty guys.”

“I guess that makes me ultra-unreasonable,” Rochelle says matter-of-factly.

All eight of their elbows are leaning on the table. The waiter brings over a Coke for Capp and coffee for Linda, this being their usuals. The waiter takes the other drink orders.

Linda continues the conversation. “Whereas your stock standard Jane USA would probably think it would be reasonable for a man to have slept with up to thirty women.”

“Are blowjobs eligible?” says Jaymz.

“Absolutely,” affirms Linda, her thin and pointy face full of glee.

Capp knocks over his glass. He raises his hands to his head, as if he’s running his fingers through the hair that’s no longer there. People at nearby tables swivel to look. Coca-Cola bleeds over the table. “Good question, good question,” he says in his chunky French accent. He jumps up and dashes towards the bar to get a cloth to clean up the mess. He swivels his huge mass sideways so that when edging passed people at tables, he doesn’t knock them with his side-belly.

“Not in my world they don’t,” Rochelle kids. “Handjobs, blowjobs, footjobs—none of these count. You have to have penis in vag. Penetration, darlings. But then, what about penis in ass?” Rochelle isn’t known for her subtlety. To the chagrin of her friends and colleagues, she’s the kind of person who lives by the say-what-you-mean-and-mean-what-you-say motto, but flatly ignores the if-you-don’t-have-anything-nice-to-say-then-don’t-say-anything motto.

“Anal counts,” Linda says contemplatively.

“Why should BJs not count?” says Jaymz, pretending to be offended.

“Oral sex isn’t sex sex,” Rochelle quips.

Jaymz cackles. “So Linda and I didn’t have sex yesterday while I wrote in my diary?” He winks at the waiter as the rest of the drinks are handed over.

“It’s all the same in the dark, in a way.” Linda thuds her motorcycle boots on the floor. “But then again, when I was single, if I didn’t like a guy that much, I’d fuck him but not go down on him.” She makes an oops face at her boyfriend.

Rochelle sing-songs, “So it’s all about Little Lin, Little Lin, Little Lin?”

“Have you ever had an ego-less orgasm?” says Linda.

Capp rejoins them, wishing they’d stop talking about sex. He sponges up the oillike Coca-Cola and looks out the window. His Harley-Davidson and Jaymz’s Triumph lean on their stands. Black and leathery and glossy, the motorcycles look like drunken metal horses that have been freeze-framed while falling over.

Chapter 5

Rochelle Patton understood that it was the black magic aspect of technology that she had to thank. The way she looked at her job, information was just information. But if you added technology to the mix, information became a wriggly mysterious beast to be reckoned with, courted, spread out shrewdly. She believed that it was the technology that was unrestrained, necessitating specializations like hers where what the information represented—organs, patients, drugs, mortality rates, etc.—rarely changed in substance, but information delivery—the form—continually changed.

The problem was that the people who pushed, pulled, and prodded her believed that information was good, and so they concluded that it would be good to have more of it. In Rochelle’s department, the production of information spiraled upward. Sitting atop mountains of metadata, she became the point of interoperability, an empress of information about information. She was the go-to answer for many of the Organ Center’s questions.

Need something? Go ask Rochelle Patton.

But information was strewn all over the place, spoken in a thousand competing voices, and there seemed to be no common understanding. Insignificant fragments were magnified out of proportion. Life-saving facts and figures lay around and begged for attention. Technology took on its own momentum—toward excess and overload.

Rochelle began to doubt her role, and her ability to perform it. On her office door, a printout informed people entering her office: “We get more and more information . . .” On the other side of the door, a second printout completed the sentence: “. . . and less and less meaning.”

To compensate, she created a support group for organ transplant recipients. People who had received a new lease on life wrote thank you notes and letters—some anonymously—to the families of their donors. She fought against old ways of thinking, such as how in the 1970s and 1980s, bureaucrats believed that the only policies regarding interactions between organ givers’ families and organ receivers should be those that denied such connections. She wanted open communication, even face-to-face encounters.

Rochelle was half-satisfied.

She lobbied—unsuccessfully—for alcoholics to be deemed ineligible for liver transplants. In the 1990s, she lobbied for the creation of OrganDonor.gov. In 2001, she lobbied state governments to establish donor registries in the thirty-two US states that didn’t have them. But she was still only half-satisfied.

There were actually few things that truly fulfilled Rochelle. Her daughter was one, though she didn’t see Stephanie, who lived in Minnesota, much these days.

The main thing that gave Rochelle meaning in her life, more than even her family, was saving lives. This was the primary purpose of her work. The rest of her work was just talk; it was just uselessly moving information around.

If she had to take life from some who didn’t deserve it, and give it others who did, then so be it.

Chapter 6

At Domario’s, Linda says to her sister, “So how many men have you had sex with?”

“That’s not my question,” interrupts Jaymz, quickly sipping his mango Mojito. “The question is, what’s a reasonable number of sexual partners by the time you’re forty?”

“In the Eighties, I kept a list,” Rochelle boasts.

List-making has always been Rochelle’s way of making sense of the chaos of her personal life. Lists are crucial in her professional life too—her department maintains lists of people waiting for organ transplants.

“Lists?” says Jaymz eagerly. Part of his upcoming exhibition consists of listing all of his personal belongings. He’s about to say something to his girlfriend’s sister when—

“It depends on what’s reasonable,” Capp says. The sponge in his hands drips Coca-Cola. With his other hand he absently fingers the camera drooping around his neck.

“Of course it does,” Rochelle snaps at her husband. “It always does. What I think is reasonable will be different to what you think is, will be different to what he thinks is.” She points to a hipster plonked at the counter. “What I think is fair is different than what other people think is fair. There’s no uppercase Truth. Only lowercase truths.”

“Okaaay,” Capp says, not wanting to argue.

Rochelle remembers once paying a mother and father a $5,000 incentive, as she called it, to consent for their only son, who died in a car crash one block from Glennview Hospital, to be an organ donor. Money talks, Rochelle thinks to herself, and bullshit walks. She saved eight lives that day. Were her actions reasonable? Were they fair? She hated lame questions like those.

“The reasonable number of men I’ve slept with,” Linda throws out there, “is the number of women Jaymz has slept with, minus two.”

Capp chuckles, then stops, worried that his man breasts might wobble too much. He straightens up and squints his eyes at his spouse. “Rock, before we became romantically involved . . . you kept a list of men you’ve . . . ?”

“I even had a column for their profession.” Rochelle walks a coin across the back of her knuckles.

“So where do we draw the line?” Even though Jaymz says this loudly, his English accent makes it sound posh. “Twenty sexual partners? Fifty? What’s better—zero or two hundred?”

“Is this the sort of stuff you write about when we’re having sex?” says Linda aggressively.

“Let’s keep that private between us,” Jaymz says.

“Fine. Forget it,” says Linda, flustered. “The number is unimportant, by the way. It’s not even the right question. The right question is: Is he good in bed?—dick control is important.”

Jaymz plays with his red hair, which is getting spikier by the minute. “There’s nothing to be ashamed of if you’ve slept with a lot of men. Lin, start having a profound relationship with reality.”

“What if you don’t like reality?” says Linda brusquely.

Rochelle rattles the coins in her hand. She wants to say that maybe the number makes all the difference. She knows that her husband has slept with less than ten women, but she wants to say that she would hate it if, hypothetically, she were Capp’s hundredth roll in the hay. How would she satisfy her hubby if he compared her to the first ninety-nine women he’s had? Maybe ignorance is mental health?

Jaymz says, “But then again, maybe the number matters. If you”—he bobs to his girlfriend—“had slept with tons of men before me, would I obsess about it? Probably.”

“That’s not very Buddhist of you,” Rochelle says, rolling her eyes.

“What?” Jaymz lightheartedly sneers. “Rocknroll, come to my exhibition and you’ll see that Buddhists are hypocrites just like everyone else. We’re just better at acknowledging it.”

Over the past few days, Jaymz has been on edge. His only significant exhibition—Reinventionalist—in his meager artistic career is approaching, and here he is, at his local watering hole with his best friends. Sure, he’s enjoying himself. But he has stuff to organize, boxes to fill.

Rochelle’s faded t-shirt says, I’M NOT PERFECT, BUT PARTS OF ME ARE EXCELLENT. The t-shirt’s message, however, no longer rings true. Her transplanted kidney is now diseased and failing. She whispers to her younger sister, “What if your guy has slept with a guy?” Then Rochelle looks straight at her partner and booms, “If my husband once had sex with a man . . . it would crush me. I can compete with a woman, but not a man.”

Jaymz says in an extravagantly effeminate voice, “You got to relax, sweetie-dearest. Take a holiday from your problems.”

Rochelle interprets his teasing the wrong way. “What the fuck is that, Jay? I like my problems—they’re mine. I’m not going to deny them like you do.” She points at him.

Everyone here knows that Rochelle refuses to add herself to the waiting list for a replacement kidney, but that doesn’t mean that every time they get together that they want to talk about how she’s not going to be around much longer.

Rochelle thuds her cigarette pack into the palm of a hand.

“He was kidding,” says Linda uselessly, grating her coffee cup on the wood table.

“Besides,” Rochelle thumps her cigarette pack, “who would I be without my dramas? ‘Take a holiday from your problems’? Bullshit, it’s never that simple.” She starts crying. “This is just the steroids talking,” she adds.

Linda says, “This is like that ‘Seinfeld’ episode—”

“Hey!” Rochelle slaps her sister’s forearm, suddenly happy again. She cries and hoots with laughter and says, “Domario’s is a sitcom-analogy-free zone. No comparing us to your TV friends.”

Capp pulls a police scanner out of his camera bag.

Chapter 7

Jaymz and the Patton sisters are comfortably crammed into a backseat, taxiing down Flushing Avenue on their way to work. According to the cabbie’s ID, his first name is Islam. Linda wonders if the driver has ever met a guy named Christian, and they’ve shaken hands, looked into each other’s eyes, and sensed the equidistance. She wonders whether people with beer last names (“Hi, I’m Mike Guinness”; “Hi, I’m Emily Miller”) also share knowledgeable, suffering looks when they meet.

A song by The Guess Who comes on the radio. Islam turns up the volume. In unison, the Patton sisters sing along to the song. “American woman, get away from me.” They’re yelling out the open windows. “American woman, mama let me be.”

In her pinstripe suit, Rochelle strums an air rhythm guitar. Linda crashes imaginary drumsticks on imaginary pigskins, visualizing herself donning silver, sparkly disco glasses. Jaymz sits in the middle, silent and unmoving, nursing an explosive hangover.

Islam turns the radio up louder and the women thrash around, spazzing out, their hair whipping Jaymz, who fights involuntary memories of when he had long hair and bopped to Duran Duran and Depeche Mode, and head-banged to Poison and Mötley Crüe.

The song merges into advertising crap, and Islam lowers the volume. Linda loves their taxi driver in this moment, and wonders whether he defines jihad as “spiritual struggle against evil” or “war without constraints.” It’s too early in the morning to be thinking like this. She tells herself that she should be thinking about something less confronting, like scrambled eggs.

Her boyfriend says, “No more caffeine for you two.”

Instinctively, the sisters lean forward so that they can see past Jaymz. They gaze into each other’s eyes, flashbacking to themselves singing radio songs in their mom’s gray Ford sedan, seeing themselves entering the Milford Tunnel on the way to elementary school, the radio cutting out, and them continuing to sing until they popped out the other end of the tunnel. The challenge was one of timing. If the girls knew the lyrics, they had a good chance of exiting the tunnel synchronized with the song. But if they had to hum some of the verses while out of reach of the radio signal, they felt as if they had let their mom down.

“Islam,” Linda says, “do you know any tunnels in Brooklyn that are a block or two long?” While she speaks, he keeps both eyes on her in the rearview mirror.

Reaching over Jaymz’s lap and grabbing Linda’s hand, Rochelle mouths the word Islam as a question to her sister, who nods and mouths the words that’s his name. Linda sees him watching them.

“See, Islam,” Rochelle says, “when we were little, we sang along to the radio while driving through tunnels, even though we couldn’t hear the song.” As she talks, Islam keeps his eyes on her.

The driver says, “I can’t think of any tunnels in this part of Brooklyn. There’s the Park Avenue Tunnel in Manhattan. It goes from Thirty-Third to Fortieth Street.”

Without asking permission, Rochelle lights a cigarette. “It’s definitely out of our way.”

“It’ll make us late for work,” Linda says.

“Let’s do it,” Jaymz says loudly, always keen for upping his absenteeism, hungover or not.

“We can’t,” Rochelle reconsiders. “I have work to do. The medical science isn’t lacking, but the number of organs is. And I’ve got to do something about that.”

“There’ll always be a shortage of donors, Rocknroll. We can’t do—”

“We can’t do what, Jay?” scoffs Rochelle.