Josh Bazell - Beat the Reaper - A Novel

“Girlfriend?”

“Yeah.”

The resemblance is slight—it’s the dark vixen eyes or something—but in my current condition it rocks me.

“Bad breakup?” the woman asks.

“She’s dead,” I say.

For some reason she thinks I’m kidding. It’s the Moxfane fucking with my facial expressions or something. She says, “So now you work in a hospital to save people?”

I shrug.

“That’s pretty corny,” she says.

“Not if you’ve killed as many people as I have,” I say. Thinking, Huh. Maybe I should leave the room and let the drugs do all the talking.

“Medical mistakes, or is it more of a serial killer thing?”

“Probably a little of both.”

“Are you a nurse?”

“I’m a doctor.”

“You don’t look like a doctor.”

“You don’t look like a patient,” I say.

Which is true. Visibly, at least, she’s pure health.

“I will soon.”

“Why’s that?”

“You’re not my doctor?”

“No. I’m just curious.”

She looks away. “They’re cutting off my leg this afternoon.”

I think about this for a moment. Then I say, “Donating it, huh?”

She laughs, harshly. “Yeah, to a trash can.”

“What’s wrong with your leg?”

“I have bone cancer.”

“Where?”

“Knee.”

Prime osteosarcoma territory. “Can I see it?”

She flips back the covers. They take the corner of her gown with them, giving me a glistening beaver shot. The modern type: Mexican hairless beaver. I can see her blue tampon string. I quickly pull the covers back over her crotch.

Look at her knees. The right one’s noticeably swollen, more so at the back. Soggy when I feel it.

“Yuck,” I say.

“Tell me about it.”

“When was the last time someone biopsied it?”

“Yesterday.”

“What’d they find?”

“They called it ‘Bleeding amorphous glandular tissue.’”

Double yuck. “How long have you had it?”

“This time?”

“What do you mean?” I say.

“The first time I had it was for maybe ten days. But that was three months ago.”

“I don’t understand. It went away?”

“Yeah. Till about a week ago. Then it came back.”

“Huh,” I say. “I’ve never seen that before.”

“They did say it was pretty rare.”

“But they don’t want to see if it goes away again?”

“The kind of cancer it is is too dangerous.”

“Osteosarcoma?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s true.”

If it is osteosarcoma.

Though what the fuck do I know?

“I’ll look it up,” I tell her.

“You don’t have to. It’ll only be around for a couple of hours.”

“I will, though. Do you need anything else?”

“No.” She pauses. “Not unless you want to give me a foot massage.”

“I can give you a foot massage.”

She blushes like a police siren, but keeps her eyes on mine. “Really?”

“Why not?” I sit down on the edge of the bed and take her foot. Start pushing the ligament of her arch around with the edge of my thumb.

“Oh, fuck,” she says. She closes her eyes, and tears come out of them.

“Sorry,” I say.

“Don’t stop.”

I keep going. After a while she says, barely loud enough to hear, “Will you lick it?”

I look up at her. “Lick what?”

“My foot, you pervert,” she says, still not opening her eyes.

So I lift her foot to my mouth and lick along the arch.

“And my leg,” she says.

I sigh. I lick up the inside of her leg, almost to her crotch.

Then I stand up. Wondering, briefly, what my life as a doctor might look like if I ever behaved like a professional.

“Are you all right?” I say.

She’s crying. “No,” she says. “They’re cutting my fucking leg off.”

“I’m sorry. Do you want me to check on you later?”

“Yes.”

“I will, then.”

I consider adding “if I’m still around,” but decide against it.

I don’t want to bum anybody out.

In the winter of 1994 the Locanos went skiing again, this time at Beaver Creek or something in Colorado, and invited me to go with them. I said no, and went to Poland instead. But I swear to God I did not go to Poland to kill Władysław Budek, the man who sold my grandparents into Auschwitz.

I went for a far worse reason. I went because I believed there was an entity called “Fate,” and that if I did as little planning as possible, Fate would either place Budek in my sights or not, and thereby show me whether I should become an off-the-books hitman for David Locano. Somebody he could use to take out both Italians and Russians, and also be sort of a bodyguard for Skinflick. And in the meantime I could use one turned-down ski trip to prove to myself I wasn’t closer to the Locanos than I had been to my grandparents.

Speaking medically, the strange thing about my decision to let a fictional, supernatural agency choose the course of my life—as if the universe had some sort of consciousness, or agency—is that it doesn’t qualify me as having been insane. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, which seeks to sort out the vagaries of psychiatric malfunction to the point where you can bill for them, is clear on this. It says that for a belief to be delusional it must be “based on incorrect inference about external reality that is firmly sustained despite what almost everyone else believes and despite what constitutes incontrovertible and obvious proof or evidence to the contrary.” And given the number of people who buy lottery tickets, knock on wood to avoid jinxing themselves, or feel that everything happens for a reason, it’s hard to label any mystical belief as pathological.

Of course, the DSM doesn’t even attempt to define “stupid.” My own feeling is that there are eleven or so different kinds of intelligence, and at least forty different kinds of stupidity.

Most of which I’ve experienced firsthand.

Since it seemed unlikely I would even be able to find Władysław Budek, I decided to at least see the sights. I made my first destination the primeval forest my grandparents had been hiding in when Budek contacted them. I flew to Warsaw, stayed a night in the ex-Communist shithotel in Old Town (it’s literally called Old Town, like it’s the capital of Old Country), ate some weird-shaped tubes of breakfast meat in the restaurant there, then took a train to Lublin. From there I got on a bus with a bunch of zit-faced sixteen-year-old Catholic school girls, who talked about blowjobs the whole trip. My vocabulary in Polish—which was crap, though my pronunciation was okay—picked up a bit.

Meanwhile, every place we passed through was mostly factories and train tracks. If I was Polish, I might try: “Of course I didn’t know the Holocaust was happening! The whole fucking country looks like a concentration camp!”

Like I would care, if I was Polish.

Finally we reached a town so rural it only had four factories, and I got off the bus. There was a plowed access road that ran out of town and along the front of the woods. I double-checked the return schedule, left my backpack with the woman at the station, and started down the road.

Did I mention how fucking, fucking cold it was in Poland? It was really fucking cold. The kind where your eyes gush water to keep from freezing and your cheeks clench up and pull your lips back, and the only thing keeping you warm is the image of Hitler’s Sixth Army’s hobnailed boots conducting their body heat into the ground. The air was almost too cold to breathe.

I chose a random departure point from the road and climbed up into a snowdrift so deep and soft that moving through it felt like swimming. The surface had a glassy coat of ice that cracked and slid away in tectonic sheets as I pushed my way into the woods.