Josh Bazell - Beat the Reaper - A Novel

Together they helped me into the house, which I appreciated because it kept me from touching the walls.

“What happened?” Locano repeated.

I looked at Mrs. Locano.

Locano said, “Honey, excuse us.”

“I’m going to call an ambulance,” she said.

“Don’t,” Locano and I said together.

“He needs a doctor!”

“I’ll get Dr. Campbell to come to the house. Go get some stuff set up in the bedroom.”

“What kind of stuff?”

“I don’t know, honey. Towels and shit. Please.”

She left. David Locano pulled over a chair from a wooden desk they kept mail on in the hallway, so I wouldn’t have to sit on the living room furniture.

He crouched beside me and whispered. “What the hell happened?”

“I asked for Dzelany. They set me up. Three guys plus him. I got their wallets.”

“You got their—?”

“I killed them.”

Locano looked at me a moment, then hugged me gingerly.

“Pietro, I am so sorry. I am so sorry.” He backed off to look me in the eye. “But you did good.”

“I know,” I said.

“I promise you’ll get paid for this.”

“I don’t care about that.”

“You did good,” he said. “Jesus. I think you might be really fucking good at this.”

This was an interesting moment in my life. The moment when I should have said, “I’m out of here,” or “I’m scared shitless,” and “I’m never doing that again.” But when I chose to instead express my pathetic need for the Locanos, and my rapid-onset addiction to bloodshed.

“Never lie to me again,” I said.

“I didn’t—” Locano said.

“Fuck you. And if you do, and I end up killing an innocent, I’m coming after you next.”

“Of course,” he said.

We were already negotiating.

At seven forty-two AM I fall asleep in my armchair again and my head hits the wall. Proving, interestingly, that no amount of stress on earth can keep you awake through Attending Rounds.

Attending Rounds is when a large group of people convenes in one of the ward lounges and goes through the patient list to “make sure we’re on the same page” and satisfy the legal requirement that someone actually qualified to be making patient-care decisions at least hears about these decisions after they’ve been made.

This person is the Attending Physician, a real-world doctor who comes in and supervises the ward for one hour a day for one month each year, in return for which he gets to call himself a professor at a prestigious New York medical school that, as far as I can tell, has no other connection with Manhattan Catholic whatsoever. In keeping with the clarity goals of healthcare terminology, the Attending is the person present on the ward least.

This particular Attending is one I know. He’s sixty. He always has superbly expensive-looking shoes, but what has truly earned him my admiration is that his usual answer to my asking him how he’s doing in the morning is “Terrific. I’m on the nine a.m. back to Bridgeport.”

Right now he’s supporting his head with one hand, which his jowls overhang like the corners of a tablecloth. He has his eyes closed.

The other people in the room are: an intern who’s one of the counterparts to Akfal and me but for the ward at the other end of the building (she’s a young Chinese woman named Zhing Zhing, who sometimes gets so depressed she needs you to unbend her limbs for her), our combined four medical students, and our Chief Resident. We have the lounge to ourselves, because we kicked out the herd of bathrobed patients who were watching TV in the hopes of dying somewhere outside of their hospital beds. Sorry, folks. There’s always the hall.

But Jesus fucking Christ am I tired.

One of the medical students—not even one of mine, one of Zhing Zhing’s—is reading an incredibly long list of obscure liver function test results, verbatim. These tests should not have been ordered in the first place. The patient has heart failure. And since they’ve all come back normal, you would think the med student would at least spare us having to hear them.

And yet, no one screams.

I have a waking hallucination that there’s moss growing up one of the walls, then I feel myself falling asleep again. So I try the trick where you keep one eye open—the one the Chief Resident can see—and hope that means half my brain is getting some rest. My head bangs off the wall again. I must have drifted off.

Now it’s seven forty-four.

“Are we boring you, Dr. Brown?” the Chief Resident asks.

The Chief Resident has finished her residency but has chosen to stay on at ManCat for an extra year, in a manifestation of what I believe is still called “Stockholm Syndrome.” She’s wearing a fairly hot skirt suit under her white coat, but also her usual facial expression, which would go well with her saying “You took a shit on my shoes? ”

“No more than usual,” I say, trying to rub my face into wakefulness. I notice there actually is moss growing up one of the walls, though my double vision is exaggerating it.

“Maybe you’d like to tell us about Mr. Villanova.”

“Sure. What would you like to know?” I say, wondering who Mr. Villanova is. For a moment I worry it might be another of Squillante’s nicknames.

“Apparently you ordered stat CT scans of his chest and buttocks.”

“Oh, right. Assman. I’d better go check those.”

“Do it later.”

I sit back down. Wipe my nose with my left hand to cover the slow movement of my right hand toward my beeper. “Guy’s got some right buttock and subclavicular pain OUO despite PCA,” [23] Like you care what this means. I say. “Looks like a fever, too.”

“His vitals were normal.”

“Yeah, I noticed that.”

My right thumb flicks the test button on my beeper so quickly I wouldn’t have seen it either. When the glorious alarm goes off, I glance at the LCD and jump to my feet.

“Shit. I gotta go.”

“Please stay till the end of rounds,” the Chief Resident says.

“I can’t. Patient,” I say. Which is not so much a lie as a non sequitur.

To my med students I say, “One of you look up the statistics on gastrectomy for signet cell cancer. I’ll catch up to you later.”

And, just like that, I’m free.

I’m thinking too slowly to deal with the Squillante problem, though, so I crush a Moxfane with my fingertips and snort it out of the declivity you can make at the end of your wrist by sticking your thumb out as far from your hand as it will go.

It makes my nostrils burn crazily, and my vision goes out for a second. What brings me back is my stomach, which is making a series of accelerating metallic spring noises.

I need to eat something. Martin-Whiting Aldomed is probably hosting a free breakfast somewhere in the hospital, but no way do I have time for that.

In the rack of used trays by the service elevator I find an unopened plastic bowl of Corn Flakes and a reasonably clean spoon. There’s no milk, but there’s a half-full four-ounce bottle of Milk of Magnesia. Which, I’m sorry to tell you, under certain circumstances is as good or better.

I take the whole thing into a room with an empty door-side bed, and sit on the edge of the piss-stained mattress to eat.

I’ve just dug in when a female voice from the other side of the curtain says, “Who’s there, please?”

I finish first—it takes about four seconds—then chew another Moxfane and stand and walk around to the other bed.

There’s a young woman in it. Pretty, twenty-one years old.

Pretty is rare in a hospital. So is young.

But that’s not what stops me.

“Fuck,” I say. “You look like someone I used to know.”