Under the Same Stars Read online

PRESCRIPTION

  When he was six years old Ignacio’s grandmother told him the meaning of his name, which had been her idea, and which her daughter--Ignacio’s mother--had simply accepted in the way she accepted most things her mother told her to do, or suggested, which amounted to the same thing more often than not. His grandmother told him that his name came from the Latin name “Ignatius”, which in turn came from the word “Ignis”, meaning "fire". Fire, she told him, because that was what was in his heart, a fire that he must never let the world snuff out. He had liked the way it sounded, and upon hearing it he had immediately felt a flush of warmth, as if discovering for the first time, feeling for the first time, that fire that his beloved grandmother was certain burned within him. As he grew older, year after year, he felt the flame grow smaller, fainter, sometimes guttering like a candle after someone has opened a window and let in a gust of wind. Now, at the age of fifty-eight all he felt, late at night when the house was quiet, or on the long drive to work, with open fields and gently rolling hills stretching out on either side of him, was a small hot coal, no longer aflame but still giving off a strange radiant heat.

  Now that fifty-eight year old man who once had a fire inside him stands in front of a monster of a building, a huge thing pouring our harsh white light into the night, a light that puts the meager light reflecting off of the moon above to shame. When the monster came to town many people said that it would kill the competition, and that all of the smaller stores in town would be forced to shutter their doors, to surrender to the monster. In the end, some stores had indeed gone out of business, but most were still around, as if they had come to some kind of an understanding with the monster, had achieved an uneasy peace.

  When he enters the monster he is greeted by a nice-looking older woman who looks to be in her seventies, if not older. She greets him with a smile, and tells him to have a nice shopping experience. He nods back at her with his own smile and continues on into the brightly lit belly of the beast, but it doesn’t really look like a beast at all, he has to admit, despite what Rudolfo had told him last year. Rudolfo, an old friend of Ignacio’s, was one of the smaller store owners who had found peace with the monster intolerable, and so had simply surrendered with much bitter resentment, taking comfort in telling his friends and people he thought were his friends his tales of misery and woe, and of rights put wrong by the monster.

  Ignacio turns left and walks the short way to the pharmacy counter. Two people are in line ahead of him, a woman with a cough and a young man, a business-looking type in a niceish suit, with glasses that have thin metal frames that the man keeps nudging back up the bridge of his nose. Ignacio knew that if he were to shake hands with the man, he would find that the man’s hands were too soft, the hands of a man who hasn’t ever done an honest day’s work, real work, in his life. Not the kind of work you did while sitting in an office or a cubicle, but the kind you did with the sun on your back and in your face, or with the rain soaking through your clothes until a certainty grows within you that you will never be dry again for the rest of your life. First the woman, and then the man with the soft hands finish their business and leave, and then Ignacio is at the counter. The pharmacist, a pretty young woman, looks at him questioningly.

  “Can I help you, sir?” she asks.

  He searches in his pockets, and for a moment panics, thinking that he has forgotten the piece of paper, has left it on the table by the door, or on an arm of the sofa, or worse yet, that it dropped out of his pocket somewhere between home and this counter. It lasts only for a brief moment, this panic, before his hand closes on the piece of paper buried deep within his left pants pocket, and he takes it out and places it on the counter, sliding it over to present it to the young pharmacist. She picks up the slip of paper and reads the strange writing there, the kind of writing only years of medical school can teach you to write, and only years in pharmacology school can teach you to read, and which looks like some alien cipher to the unschooled.

  “It’ll be one moment,” she says, and disappears into the back, where the pills and potions are kept.

  Ignacio checks the clock hanging on the wall behind the counter. It reads 8:38. When the pharmacist reappears, it reads 8:45. So, Ignacio thinks, a moment is exactly seven minutes long. The woman has a bottle of pills in one hand, and she drops it into a white paper bag and places it on the counter.

  “How will you be paying for this? Do you have an insurance card, or a Medicaid or Medicare card?”

  “No. Insurance no.”

  He pulls out his wallet and pulls out a few bills.

  “Self-pay, then” she says.

  She punches some keys on the cash register.

  “That will be thirty-six ninety-eight,” she says.

  Ignacio looks at his cash, and without counting it he knows that he does not have enough. Two days ago he would have had enough. On Friday he will have enough again. But right now, here tonight, he does not have enough. He looks up at the woman.

  “Too much. Another. Como se dice? Generic,” he says, the word finally coming to him.

  “There is no generic for this medication, sir.”

  And now she is starting to get irritated. She has worked a long day, she is tired, and she would like to get home to a bowl of chicken noodle soup and her DVR’d shows. Ignacio looks back at his money, the money that is not enough but will be enough on Friday, and then looks back at the young woman.

  “My wife, she sick,” he says.

  “Self-pay is thirty-six ninety-eight,” she tells him, as if she thinks that perhaps he didn’t quite hear her the first time.

  Again Ignacio looks at the money, the money that is not enough but would have been enough two days ago, before he paid the rent and the light bill.

  “Excuse me,” someone says behind Ignacio, and he turns around to see who it is that has spoken.

  The man who spoke has evidently been behind Ignacio in line for some unknown period of time. He is wearing a t-shirt and dark jeans, both splattered with paint, as if the man had been in the middle of painting a room in his house when he suddenly remembered that he had a prescription that needed filling.

  “Please, allow me,” the man says.

  He pulls out his own wallet and slips out some bills before stepping around Ignacio and handing them to the pharmacist. When Ignacio realizes what is happening, he waves his hands in the air nervously.

  “No, no, no; can’t take money,” he says.

  “Please let me do this,” he man responds. “I want to. I need to.”

  And Ignacio sees something in the man’s eyes then, some kind of desperation that he does not understand.

  “Please,” the man says again. “Let me do this for you.”

  After a moment of hesitation (not a seven minute moment, more like a nine second moment) Ignacio nods his head gently, and he sees the desperation in the man’s eyes dim just a bit, almost imperceptibly.

  “Thanks you very much,” Ignacio says.

  “No problem.”

  The pharmacist puts the money in the register, then tears off a receipt and staple sit to the bag before handing the bag to Ignacio. He grabs the bag and gives another nod to the man in the paint-splattered pants.

  “Thanks you,” Ignacio says again.

  “Have a good night,” the man says in return.

  “You have good night, too.”

  The man gives him a slight smile before turning to the pharmacist to conduct his own business.

  As Ignacio leaves the monster that does not look like a monster (though Rudolfo is pretty sure that it is) he nods to the woman who greeted him when he entered, and she nods back. Then he is in the sparsely lit parking lot, then he is in his car, and then he is home. He thinks about telling his wife about the man with the paint-splattered shirt and pants, but decides that he will wait. Someday the memory will come back to him like an old, lost friend, and he will smile, and she will see him smiling. She will ask why he is smiling, and then he will tell her. He hopes
that then, when he tells her the story of the man in the paint-splattered pants, she will smile, too. Later, while lying in bed, listening to his wife’s slow, steady breathing beside him in bed, Ignacio feels something that he hasn’t felt for a long time, something that he wasn’t sure if he would ever feel again, assuming he had ever really felt it at all, and it was not just some illusion, like a mirage that appears to a man lost in a lonely desert. What he feels, in that quiet hour of the night, is a flame, a flickering fire burning within.