Jon Talton: The Pain Nurse

Denise gave a knowing nod. “Not just that, baby girl. Used to be the morgue down there, the mental health wing. There’s lots of stories. Some say it’s haunted. Back in the day, they started having the toe tags disappear from the corpses down there. About a year later, they found out this girl who was working there had taken them and made them into an art project-it was on display in some gallery!”

They were both still laughing as Cheryl Beth walked to the elevator.

Dr. Lustig. Dr. Christine Lustig. Christine. The name conjured a mess of emotions inside Cheryl Beth as she rode down in the big empty elevator. She was glad for the distraction when the door opened two floors down and one of the patient transport guys wheeled in a heavy gurney. He was a tall, thin man with very dark skin. She had seen him before but couldn’t remember his name.

“Where to?”

“To one,” he said. “Imaging. But they already told me on the way back I got to go through the basement. Can you believe that? Got to go the long way. They brought a shooting victim to the ER and they’re going to close off the first floor in a few minutes. ‘Security concerns,’ they say. What they mean is they don’t want black folks coming down to see what happened.” He gesticulated fiercely. “This man in ER was shot by the cops. Man was unarmed. What is it? Fifteen black men shot by the police the past five years? Nights I go home I think I could be next, know what I’m saying? They disrespect the whole black community. Last month, police pointed guns at my neighbor right in front of his kids.”

He shook his head in disgust, then stared at Cheryl Beth. “Now everybody’s going nuts, afraid his friends and family are gonna come down and start trouble.” He looked around the elevator, up at the ceiling, then back at Cheryl Beth. “Some day this town’s just gonna blow, you know? Down there on Main Street, all them white yuppies coming to the new nightclubs, coming in from the suburbs. A block away you got six kids living in a room of a tenement, no heat, and a black man can’t walk on the street without a beatdown from five-oh. How long before those black folks look over on Main Street and see how goddamned poor they really is? Then what’s gonna happen, huh?”

Cheryl Beth looked at the patient on the gurney. He was a big man with wavy dark hair and a handsome face, even with the nasty blister on one lip. He must have been through a long surgery. He briefly looked at her, smiled, then closed his eyes. His eyes were tired and afraid. She had seen the look thousands of times. When the elevator opened at the first floor, she held the door while the patient was wheeled out. The transport guy was moving fast. He probably had a dozen more transports waiting for him, even at this time of night. Then she rode down another floor alone.

In a few moments she stepped out into a dim corridor. The floor was a uniform checkerboard, aged and scuffed. It was narrower than in the more modern parts of the hospital, and most of the lights were off to save money. This had been a main part of the original hospital, when the twenty-story, art deco tower had been a proud civic monument and Cincinnati Memorial had been one of the top hospitals in the Midwest. Generations of docs had trained here. Now the hospital was struggling and the basement was mostly forgotten. It still had a black-and-white tile floor that seemed right out of the 1930s. The wall was plaster, fading white with an institutional green stripe running horizontally. Cheryl Beth liked to imagine the medicine that had been practiced here once, when nurses had worn white uniforms and neat caps, when pain management had been, if someone was lucky, morphine.

It was better than thinking about Christine. Why was she even coming down here? What more was there to say?

The darkness of the corridor seemed to swallow sound. Other hallways, narrow alleys, and double doors led off at regular intervals. The doors had small, darkened windows. Old beds and laundry carts were lined along the walls and tucked into intersecting hallways. Then a metallic crash, muffled, short-lived, somewhere behind her. She jumped and looked back. Had the sound come through those two dark doors off to the left? She stood for a moment in the gathering silence. It was silly. Cheryl Beth was not the jumpy type. She liked walking the old corridors, taking shortcuts. The old building made its own sounds, never mind the reality that the basement also attracted horny staff members and the occasional transient. And for some reason, Christine had moved her office down here. In the distance, she heard an elevator bell sound, heard anonymous hums of large electric machines.

She could see warm, golden light breaking out of Christine’s office door, which was partly opened onto the corridor. Christine hated the overhead lights and often worked with only her desk lamp lit.

“Hey, it’s me.” Cheryl Beth knocked as she opened the door.

For an instant, the world seemed out of phase, not right, almost comically not right. Red spatter on the floor. Christine on the floor, undressed. Among the tide of emotions washing in was almost a millisecond of laughter: this was a practical joke. Then heavy breathing. Cheryl Beth’s own.

“Christine?” It took Cheryl Beth a moment to recognize her own voice.

Dr. Christine Lustig lay on her side, completely naked, her pale skin luminous except for the blood. Everywhere. Cuts lashed her arms, legs, side, face; in places, the skin had been viciously avulsed, like work a butcher might do. Cheryl Beth’s training effortlessly overcame the hysterical instinct boiling up in her and in two strides she was at the doctor’s side, reaching for a carotid pulse. Her fingers sank into gore. The knife had found its fatal target in Christine’s neck. Around the other side of her neck the skin was unbroken and pulseless. Her finger felt her thigh, the femoral artery; again, no pulse. She felt a ballerina’s spinning light-headedness. She felt disembodied but no, connected to another body, one that would take barely a breeze to float away. So much blood-maybe there were other victims. The average human contained 5.6 liters of blood. Then she realized how much blood she was standing in. It betrayed the unevenness of the floor, pooling here, flowing like scarlet canals between the aged tiles. It inundated her red patent leather Danskos. Suddenly she felt a touch slither against her neck.

Her disembodied hearing heard a sharp breath, a small “oh!” Her own.

Cheryl Beth pulled the stethoscope off her neck and stuffed it into her lab coat. The white coat was now streaked with Christine’s blood. Behind her was the doorway, with the empty black hallway beyond. The entire world seemed monstrously soundless, even the distant electric hum gone. Cheryl Beth sprang up, crossed the room, and closed the door, locking it. She carefully walked to the desk, her shoes now hopelessly hydroplaning on the bloody floor, and grabbed the phone receiver. Even before her ear registered the dead device she could see the cord ripped from the wall. Her own cell showed no signal.

Panic finally threatened to overwhelm her. Her breath came harder and she reached into her pocket for the small inhaler, shook it, and took a puff. She made herself breathe slowly. Buried beneath the vast hospital, the cell phone stubbornly refused to find a signal.

“Oh, shit.” She leaned against the wall and looked back at Christine. That’s when she saw the strange shape of the woman’s left hand. Christine’s ring finger was gone, leaving a dark red tangle of tissue.

Cheryl Beth walked quickly to the door, unlocked it, and ran down the hallway toward the elevator, but not before finding a disposable scalpel in the cabinets of Christine’s office, unwrapping it, and brandishing it before her like life itself.