Peter Clement - Mortal Remains

“No, I didn’t mean that. It’s just what you do here compared to what we did in the field. Christ, sometimes it was so primitive we were limited to providing little more than food, water, and simple hygiene.”

He said nothing, yet brought his breathing close to a halt, as if her words were about to cut close to a vital organ. The image of his father, a blackened form, the eyes still alive, crept out of the nightmare where he kept it buried. He immediately shoved it away.

“I mean, you really go all out, won’t – no, make that can’t settle for less.”

Again he said nothing, wishing she’d take the hint that he didn’t want to talk about it.

“I meant it as a compliment,” she added, his silence obviously making her uneasy.

“Look, if they’re comfortable and want to stay home, and I can swing it, why not? All it takes is I make a nuisance of myself at Saratoga General, borrowing stuff, so don’t make too big a deal of it. Besides, I haven’t many cases like these, and the local medical profession isn’t comfortable about the ones I do. ‘Roper’s specials,’ the doctors in town call them. But they go along because they’d rather lend me what I need than have my Medicaid and Medicare bunch take beds away from their upscale, private-insurance crowd.” He hoped now she’d let it go.

“Well, I for one think it’s cool, and a hell of a lot more useful than having to watch someone die for want of ‘stuff’ as you call it. They haunt you forever, every lost one.”

He stared straight ahead.

She had him pegged, all right, and that left him uncomfortable. She must have heard what had happened to read him so well. He wasn’t used to feeling so exposed, yet he forced himself to meet her gaze.

The hint of sadness that he’d caught a glimpse of in her eyes last night had returned in force, and her face sagged into a bleak look of defeat. She’d been describing her own scars, not his.

“You’re right,” he said, relaxing a little. “When it comes to human misery, I’m a retail kind of guy, good at handling it case by case. But wholesale slaughter…” He shuddered, television images of sick, starving babies and children flooding into his head.

“It takes courage to know your limits, Mark.” Her voice became soft. “Believe me, I didn’t know mine when I went overseas. Waded in naive as a schoolgirl, then had no choice but to cope.”

Apart from his giving her the occasional direction, they didn’t talk for a long time. It wasn’t an uncomfortable silence. She simply seemed as lost in her own thoughts as he in his.

He found himself wondering about her fiancé. She hadn’t mentioned him, despite being so open about her family, brothers, work – almost everything under the sun. Obviously she intended to keep that part of her life private.

They pulled into a parking lot in front of a sleek glass-and-steel, tan building made up of three- and four-story modules, each floor wrapped in black-tinted windows. A modest plaque on the snow-covered grounds near the front entrance read NUCLEUS LABORATORIES.

“The place looks like a cubist’s limousine,” Lucy said. Even at this late hour there were few parking spaces. She pulled into one close to the front door. “What’s a fancy operation like this doing out here?” She reached into a small cooler lodged on the floor of the backseat and retrieved from it the brown paper bag containing a half dozen blood samples they’d drawn from patients over the course of the day. Holding it up between them, she added, “Obviously you don’t keep them in business.”

He grinned, took it from her, and got out of the car. The cold tingled the top of his ears. “Some conglomerate built it about five years ago,” he said, leading the way up a wide set of freshly shoveled stone steps. He gestured to the dark line of thick forest on the perimeter of the property. “Liked the cheap real estate and low taxes, I guess. They mostly do work for insurance companies that underwrite employee health plans for a slew of head offices in New York City. The volume’s huge, and they ship a refrigerator truck worth of samples up here every night of the week. The lab provides state-of-the-art service that does everything from routine bloods to genetic workups for research groups. Even Saratoga General and hospitals in Albany contract out their more exotic testing to them. I’m told that all these things taken together bring in more than enough to pay the heating bills.”

“No offense, but why do they bother with you?”

He winked at her over his shoulder. “Because I know the manager. Come on and see science fiction in the sticks.”

They approached a sliding glass panel that opened automatically and admitted them to a marbled reception area befitting any Park Avenue address. The click of their shoes on the floor echoed like castanets.

“Hi, Doc,” said a spindly, white-haired security guard seated behind a polished curved console with a dozen video screens. He pressed a button that unlocked one of the six mahogany doors behind him with a loud click.

They passed through into a long, white corridor.

Minutes later they shook hands with Victor Feldt, a broad-faced, big-bellied man with a walrus mustache and a complexion that easily flushed. His cheeks glowed as he greeted Lucy. “Welcome to our lab, Dr. O’Connor. May I show you around?”

“Oh, I don’t want to be any trouble-”

“You don’t take the tour, you’ll hurt his feelings,” Mark interrupted. “Victor lives for the chance to show off his pride and joy to visitors, especially ones in the business.”

Victor turned a shade more crimson. “Now that’s not true, Mark. I just thought she’d be interested.”

“And I am, Mr. Feldt. Lead on. This facility looks amazing.”

His cheeks got so red, Mark wondered if he shouldn’t take the man’s blood pressure. He’d been treating his hypertension for years, but Victor kept going off the pills whenever he got a new boyfriend because they affected his sex life. Not that that happened often, Victor being one of the few gay men in Hampton Junction.

Let him have his fun talking shop with Lucy, Mark decided. The blood pressure could wait.

He followed along behind, having received the tour several times during the facility’s first years of operation. Impressive as the layout was – room after room of spinning centrifuges, automated conveyers feeding trays of sample wells into multitask analyzers, chorus lines of pipettes dunking into specimens and sucking them up fifty at a time, then reams of tiny tubing carrying the fluids to more machines that would perform another fifty tests on each of them – it still accomplished nothing more than the basic job of any hospital lab. Break the human body down to a measure of its red cells, white counts, and biochemical ingredients – sodium, potassium, proteins, albumin, and so on. Except this outfit scaled itself to process ten times the load of any single health care institution.

Mark watched Victor animatedly explain the details of the operation to an extent that went far beyond what Lucy could possibly want to know, a mark of his loneliness for intellectual company as much as his enthusiasm for his work. He’d arrived from New York when the lab opened, but gravitated away from Saratoga, unable to afford a place among the rich and famous, yet wary of the homophobia of Hampton Junction. So he’d settled on the no-man’s-land between the two, a pretty but isolated cabin by a lake not far from here, where his lifestyle wouldn’t raise eyebrows. When he wasn’t involved with anyone he substituted the Internet for companionship, and owned one of the most awesome computer setups Mark had ever seen in a private home. Victor approached Mark to be his doctor after several bad experiences with a few general practitioners in Saratoga. “Nothing overt, just that they were old farts and not at ease with handing the potential health problems of someone who’s gay,” he’d explained. “On the other hand, I hear nothing scares you.”