The Parallel Apartments by Bill Cotter Page A

low, shin-killer tables stacked with antiquarian Redbooks, Cryptotaxidermy Worlds, and National Reviews going thirty-deep, Dr. Gonzales’s waiting area was floored in antiseptic gray linoleum, furnished only with benches constructed of the same material bedpans were fashioned from, and entirely undisrupted by toys or magazines. It contained not a single manipulable entity with which one might pass the time.
    The doctors shared a receptionist, Alva Giddings. She had worked for Dr. Gonzales for as long as Livia could remember. In 1966, during the summer before Livia’s sophomore year at Austin High, Burt Moppett, her classmate and, later, husband—for three days—had been spending his lunch break from a shift as a university-sidewalk-weed-plucker by napping on a divan in the lobby of a dorm on the Drag, when Charles Whitman started to shoot people from the top of the UT Tower.
    Two years later, just after she and Burt had started dating, he told her he remembered waking up to see people racing urgently, but in eerie silence, through the dorm lobby.
    â€œWhen I think of people running scared,” he’d said, pulling Livia closer as they sat in the car on Friday night watching Olivia Hussey enchant the drive-in, “I always think of it coupled with screaming. Don’t you, my little October pumpkin?”
    Bubbly goose bumps crept up Livia’s neck at the word coupled.
    â€œI do, darling, I sure do,” she’d responded, stroking his ear as he yawned and stretched in preparation for a catnap. They’d both seen Romeo and Juliet twice and were just here to mess around and give Burt a chance to catch up on his sleep. Burt especially loved sleeping on the bench seats of cars.
    â€œBut it was all quiet. I went outside and stood next to a telephone pole on the sidewalk, looking to figure why all the automobiles were stopped smack in the middle of the street and folks were crouching behind mailboxes and pickemup trucks and it was a hot afternoon, and real quiet except for faraway shouts and faraway sireens and itsy-bitsy pops.”
    Burt had seen a man in an undershirt across the street pointing to the top of the Tower. A tiny puff of smoke appeared there. An instant later, a head-high chunk of the phone pole near Burt exploded. A substantial splinter, half a yard long and glazed with creosote, speared him laterally through the meat of the tip of his chin, where it lodged, hat-pin-style.
    The man in the undershirt hoisted Burt over a shoulder and hauled him dazed and bleeding to Dr. Gonzales’s office, a block and a half away. But Dr. Gonzales had gone to Brackenridge Hospital to help the other victims; the only one left at the office was Alva, the receptionist.
    Alva ordered the man in the undershirt to lay Burt down on the bench in the waiting room. She emerged from her reception booth with an old-fashioned leather doctor’s kit, put her white leather nurse’s-shoe-shod foot against Burt’s jaw, pulled on the splinter with one hand, was defeated, and so used both, with success. Burt squeaked and fainted. Alva cleaned him up, sutured the entrance and exit wounds, and left him resting on probably—surely—the same bench on which Livia and Charlotte were now sitting.
    With a fingernail Livia picked at a flaky bit of the bedpan-bench between her legs and thought of Burt: He bled here. At least he was lying down. Burt loved to be prone.
    Over Alva’s window hung an analog clock calibrated in military time. Livia practiced holding her breath. Given her mother’s recent spleen, which promised a future of patience-testing, Livia decided it was time to move her nerve-calming, breath-holding exercises to 130 seconds.
    From the other side of the room came the communicable hacking and barking of ill children, the schk of magazine pages being turned, and the occasional thump of a toy’s durability being tested by one of the barkingchildren. During the brief intervals