Free After the Plague by T. C. Boyle Page B

discuss what was going on at the far end of the parking lot and on the sidewalk out front. The zombies with the signs—yes, signs, I could see them out the window, ABORTION KILLS and SAVE THE PREBORNS and I WILL ADOPT YOUR BABY—were of no more concern to them than mosquitoes in June or a sniffle in December. Or at least that was how they acted.
    I tried to draw Fred out on the subject as we sat together at lunch in the back room. We were surrounded by shadowy things in jars of formalin, gleaming stainless-steel sinks, racks of test tubes, reference books, cardboard boxes full of drug samples and syringes and gauze pads and all the rest of the clinic’s paraphernalia. “So what do you think of all this, Fred?” I said, gesturing toward the window with the ham-and-Swiss on rye Denise had made me in the dark hours of the morning.
    Fred was hunched over a newspaper, doing the acrostic puzzle and sucking on his teeth. His lunch consisted of a microwave chili-and-cheese burrito and a quart of root beer. He gave me a quizzical look.
    â€œThe protesters, I mean. The Jesus-thumpers out there. Is it like this all the time?” And then I added a little joke, so he wouldn’t think I was intimidated: “Or did I just get lucky?”
    â€œWho, them?” Fred did something with his nose and his upper teeth, something rabbity, as if he were tasting the air. “They’re nobody. They’re nothing.”
    â€œYeah?” I said, hoping for more, hoping for some details, some explanation, something to assuage the creeping sense of guilt andshame that had been building in me all morning. Those people had pigeonholed me before I’d even set foot in the door, and that hurt. They were wrong. I was no baby-killer—I was just the little brother of a big brother, trying to make a new start. And Philip was no baby-killer, either—he was a guy doing his job, that was all. Shit, somebody had to do it. Up to this point I guess I’d never really given the issue much thought—my girlfriends, when there were girlfriends, had taken care of the preventative end of things on their own, and we never really discussed it—but my feeling was that there were too many babies in the world already, too many adults, too many suet-faced Jesus-thumping jerks ready to point the finger, and didn’t any of these people have better things to do? Like a job, for instance? But Fred wasn’t much help. He just sighed, nibbled at the wilted stem of his burrito, and said, “You get used to it.”
    I wondered about that as the afternoon crept by, and then my mind went numb from jet lag and the general wash of misery and I let my body take over. I scrubbed out empty jars and test tubes with Clorox, labelled and filed the full ones on the racks that lined the walls, stood at Fred’s elbow and watched as he squeezed drops of urine onto strips of litmus paper and made notations in a ledger. My white lab coat got progressively dirtier. Every once in a while I’d come to and catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror over the sinks, the mad scientist exposed, the baby-killer, the rinser of test tubes and secreter of urine, and have an ironic little laugh at my own expense. And then it started to get dark, Fred vanished, and I was introduced to mop and squeegee. It was around then, when I just happened to be taking a cigarette break by the only window in the room, that I caught a glimpse of one of our last tardy patients of the day hurrying up the sidewalk elbow to elbow with a grim middle-aged woman whose face screamed
I am her mother!
    The girl was sixteen, seventeen maybe, a pale face, pale as a bulb, and nothing showing on her, at least not with the big white doughboy parka she was wearing. She looked scared, her little mouth clamped tight, her eyes fixed on her feet. She was wearingblack leggings that seemed to sprout from the folds of the parka and a pair of furry white ankle boots that were