Jonathan Kellerman - Blood Test

“I’ll do what I can. Let’s start by getting me in there.”

She called for help and a tiny Filipino nurse appeared bearing a package wrapped in heavy brown paper and marked STERILE.

“Take off your shoes and stand there,” ordered the nurse, pintsized but authoritative. She pointed to a spot just outside the red taped no-entry zone. After washing her hands with Betadyne, she unwrapped a pair of sterile gloves and slipped them on her hands. Having inspected the gloves and found them free from flaws, she removed a folded spacesuit from the brown paper and placed it inside the red border. It took a bit of playing with the suit — which, in a collapsed state, looked like a heavy paper accordion — but she found the footholes and had me step inside them. Gingerly, she took hold of the edges and pulled it up over me, tying the top seam around my neck. Being so short, she had to stretch to do the job so I bent my knees to make it easier.

“Thanks,” she giggled. “Now your gloves — don’t touch anything until they’re on.”

She worked quickly and soon my hands were sheathed in surgical plastic, my mouth concealed behind a paper mask. The headpiece — a hood fashioned of the same heavy paper as the suit attached to a plastic, see-through visor — was slipped over my face and fastened to the suit with Velcro strips.

“How does that feel?”

“Very stylish.” The suit was oppressively hot and I knew that within minutes, despite the cool rapid airflow in the unit, I’d be drenched with sweat.

“It’s our continental model.” She smiled. “You can go in now. Half hour maximum time. The clock’s over there. We may be too busy to remind you, so keep an eye on it and come out when the time’s up.”

“Will do.” I turned to Bev. “Thanks for your help. Any idea when the parents will be in?”

“Vangie, did the Swopes say when they’d be in?”

The Filipino nurse shook her head. “Usually they’re here in the morning — right around now. If they don’t come soon, I don’t know when. I can leave a message for them to call you, Doctor—”

“Delaware. Why don’t you tell them I’ll be here tomorrow at eight thirty and if they arrive earlier, please have them wait.”

“Eight thirty you should catch them.”

“I’ll tell you what,” said Bev, “I’ve got the number of the place they’re staying — some motel on the west side. I’ll call and leave a message. If they show up today do you want to come back?”

I considered it. Nothing on the agenda that couldn’t wait. “Sure. Call my exchange. They’ll know where to reach me.” I gave her the number.

“All right, Alex, you’d better get in there before you truck a few million pathogens over the border. See ya.”

She hoisted the large purse over her shoulder and walked out the door.

I stepped into the Laminar Airflow Room.

He’d sat up and his dark eyes followed my entry.

“I look like a spaceman, huh?”

“I can tell who you are,” he said gravely, “everyone looks different.”

“That’s good. I always had trouble recognizing people when they wore these things.”

“Ya gotta look close, with strong eyes.”

“I see. Thanks for the advice.”

I got the box of checkers and unfolded the board on the armlike table that swung across the bed.

“What color do you want to be?”

“Dunno.”

“Black goes first, I think. You wanna go first?”

“Uh huh.”

He was precociously good at the game, able to plot, set up moves, and think sequentially. A bright little boy.

A couple of times I tried to engage him in conversation but he ignored me. It wasn’t shyness or lack of good manners. His attention was focused on the checkerboard and he didn’t even hear the sound of my voice. When he completed a move he’d lean back against the pillows with a satisfied look on his grave little face and say, “There! Your turn,” in a voice made soft by fatigue.

We were halfway through the game and he was giving me a run for my money when he clutched his abdomen and cried out in pain.

I eased him down and felt his brow. Low-grade fever.

“Your tummy hurts, doesn’t it?”

He nodded and wiped his eyes with the back of his hand.

I pressed the call button. Vangie, the Filipino nurse, appeared on the other side of the plastic.

“Abdominal pain. Febrile,” I told her.

She frowned and disappeared, returning with a cup of liquid acetominophen held in a gloved hand.

“Swing that counter over this way, would you.”

She set the medicine on the slab of Formica.

“You can take it now and give it to him. The resident’s due by within the hour to check him over.”

I returned to the boy’s bedside, propped him up with one hand behind his head, and held the liquid to his lips with the other.

“Open up, Woody. This will make it hurt less.”

“Okay, Doctor Delaware.”

“I think you’d better rest now. You played a good game.”

He nodded and the curls bounced. “Tie?”

“I’d say so. Although you were getting me pretty good at the end. Can I come back and play with you again?”

“Uh huh.” He closed his eyes.

“Rest up, now.”

By the time I was out of the unit and had shed the paper suit, he was asleep, lips parted, sucking gently at the softness of the pillow.

The next morning I drove east on Sunset under a sky streaked with tin-strip clouds and thought about last night’s dreams — the same kind of spooky, murky images that had plagued my sleep when I first started working in oncology. It had taken a good year to chase those demons away and now I wondered if they’d ever been gone or had just been lurking in my subconscious, ever ready for mischief.

Raoul’s world was madness and I found myself resenting him for drawing me back into it.

Children weren’t supposed to get cancer.

Nobody was supposed to get cancer.

The diseases that fell under the domain of the marauding crab were ultimate acts of histologic treason, the body assaulting, battering, raping, murdering itself in a feeding frenzy of rogue cells gone berserk.

I slipped a Lenny Breau cassette into the tape deck and hoped that the guitarist’s fluid genius would take my mind far away from plastic rooms and bald children and one little boy with henna-colored curls and a Why Me? look in his eyes. But I could see his face and the faces of so many other sick children I’d known, weaving in and out of the arpeggios, ephemeral, persistent, begging for rescue...

Given that state of mind, even the sleaze that heralded the entry into Hollywood seemed benign, the half-naked whores nothing more than big-hearted welcome wagoners.

I drove through the last mile of boulevard in a blue funk, parked the Seville in the doctors’ lot, and walked through the front door of the hospital with my head down, warding off social overtures.

I climbed the four flights to the oncology ward and was halfway down the hall before hearing the ruckus. Opening the door to the Laminar Airflow Unit turned up the volume.

Raoul stood, bug-eyed, his back to the modules, alternately cursing in rapid Spanish and screaming in English at a group of three people:

Beverly Lucas held her purse across her chest like a shield, but it wouldn’t stay in one place because the hands that clutched it were shaking. She stared at a distant point beyond Melendez-Lynch’s white-coated shoulder and bit her lip, straining not to choke on anger and humiliation.

The broad face of Ellen Beckwith bore the startled, terrified look of someone caught in the midst of a smarmy, private ritual. She was primed for confession, but unsure of her crime.

The third member of the audience was a tall, shaggy-haired man with a hound dog face and squinty, heavy-lidded eyes. His white coat was unbuttoned and worn carelessly over faded jeans and a cheap-looking shirt of the sort that used to be called psychedelic but now looked merely garish. A belt with an oversized buckle in the shape of an Indian chief bit into a soft-looking middle. His feet were large and the toes were long, almost prehensible. I could tell because he’d encased them, sockless, in Mexican huaraches. His face was clean-shaven and his skin was pale. The shaggy hair was medium brown, streaked with gray, and it hung to his shoulders. A puka shell necklace ringed a neck that had begun to turn to wattle.