Josh Bazell - Beat the Reaper - A Novel

“Oh shit! Oh shit! Oh shit!” Skinflick said, scrambling back up the ramp and all the way to the wall, taking Denise with him into his arms.

Now, as the water bucked and dropped in waves, you could see sharks all over the place. One rolled and broke the surface with a fin, wet and shiny in the light from the ceiling panes.

Eventually the water settled, and they were hidden again.

Skinflick started to laugh. “Holy motherfucking shit,” he said. “That is the scariest thing that has ever happened to me.”

Denise thumped him in the chest, and he grabbed her again and kissed her.

My own heart was pounding, and I realized Lisa and I had our arms around each other too.

Skinflick let his hands slide down Denise’s back. “Okay,” he said to me and Lisa. “Which side do you guys want?”

“Like, what, like we’re supposed to have sex now?” Lisa said.

“It’s a bachelorette party. So, yes.”

“Jesus fucking Christ.”

“It’s not supposed to be romantic,” Skinflick said. “It’s supposed to be primal. Which it is. Right, Denise?”

“Fuck yeah,” she said.

“So which side do you want?” he said.

Lisa said, “Denise—”

Denise looked at her, and shouted, “Choose a fucking side!”

So she did. The one with the wetsuits, and the cabinet.

Which you could sit in and hold each other, and eventually even fuck in, without having to look down through the grate and see the water. Even if you could still smell it.

How young, or crazy, or callow do you have to be to have sex in a place that feels like you’re suspended over Satan’s eye?

I can’t defend it. All I can do is point out that twenty-four hours later I met Magdalena, and my life became a completely different thing.

At the nursing station outside Assman and Mosby’s room, a kid in a “volunteer” smock approaches me. He’s a City College student from the neighborhood who believes he’ll someday go to med school and become a neurosurgeon. He wants to be the grandfather who works his whole life to establish the family fortune. And maybe he will be.

I know all this because I once asked him why he wears an Afro pruned into the shape of a brain.

“Hey, Dr. Brown—”

“No time,” I tell him.

“No sweat, just wanted to tell you I took that patient down to PT.”

PT is physical therapy. I stop. “What patient?”

The kid checks his clipboard. “Mosby.”

“Who told you to take Mosby to PT?”

“You did. It was in the orders.”

“Orders? Fuck. How’d you get him there?”

“Wheelchair.”

Fuck!

I turn to the nursing station. “Did somebody bring Mosby his chart, then take it back and put it in the orders rack?” All four people working there avoid my eyes, like they always do when something goes wrong. It’s like something from a nature documentary.

“Did you actually take him into PT?” I say to the kid.

“No. They told me to leave him in the waiting room while they found his appointment.”

“All right. You want to come on a trip?”

“Yes!” he says.

I turn to my med students, who are just now coming out of Mosby and Assman’s room. “Okay, guys,” I say. “Anyone asks where Mosby is, tell them he’s in Radiology. If they say they already checked Radiology, tell them you meant PT. In the meantime, steal me some antibiotics for when the lab reports back on that shit I just got stuck with. I want a third-generation cephalosporin, a macrolide, and a fluoroquinolone. I also want some antivirals [32] Antivirals are not antibiotics because viruses, unlike bacteria, are not “biotic”—they’re not alive. They’re just pieces of genetic code that your body interprets as orders to make more, identical pieces of genetic code, then spread them around. Some viruses, like HIV, your body will even insert directly into your DNA for smoother copying, making them part of your identity. —everything you can get a hold of. Figure out some combination that won’t kill me. If you can’t, just use what I wrote for Assman, and double it. Got it?”

“Yes, sir,” one of them says.

“Good. Don’t be freaked out.”

I turn to the kid with the brain Afro and say, “Come with me.”

In the elevator I ask the kid his name again. “Mershawn,” he says. I don’t ask him to spell it.

I’ve made him put on his overcoat. I’m wearing a lab coat that has “Lottie Luise, MD,” stitched on the front of it. I don’t know who Lottie Luise is, but she leaves her coat in convenient places. Or used to.

“Mershawn, don’t get your tongue pierced,” I mention as we get to ground level.

“Fuck that shit,” Mershawn says.

In front of the hospital it’s snowing and sleeting and everything’s a mess. Visibility, as they say, is low.

I don’t know what I was expecting—well, wheelchair tracks in the slush, now that I think of it—but the sidewalk’s salted down and thirty people a minute are passing by. Plus there’s a big metal awning that runs for fifty yards along the front. The sidewalk is wet with black water.

“Which way did he go?” I say. Thinking: If he even came out this entrance, since there’s at least one on every face of the building.

“This way,” Mershawn says.

“Why?”

“It’s downhill.”

“Huh,” I say. “I’m glad I brought you already.”

Around the corner, the side street drops off toward the river even more steeply than the avenue we’re on now. Mershawn nods, so we head down it.

A couple of blocks along, there’s a twenty-five-foot patch of slush capable of holding prints. We know this because there are what look a fuck of a lot like wheelchair tracks running down it. The tracks angle toward a graffiti-covered metal door in a building with the windows boarded over, but die out before they actually reach there.

I go and bang on the door. Mershawn looks up at the building dubiously. “What is this place?” he says.

“The Pole Vault,” I tell him.

“What’s that?”

“Are you serious?”

He just looks at me.

“It’s a gay bar,” I say.

The door gets opened by a fifty-year-old black man with graying hair and a barrel chest. He’s wearing a flannel work shirt and bifocals. “Help you?” he says, angling his head back to look at us.

“We’re looking for an elderly black man in a wheelchair,” I say.

For a moment the man just stands there, whistling a tune I don’t recognize. Then he says, “Why?”

Mershawn says, “Because neither of us got one for Christmas, and they’re all sold out at Elderly-Black-Men-in-Wheelchairs-R-Us.”

I say, “He’s a patient at the hospital, and he escaped.”

“Mental patient?”

“No. He’s got gangrene in his feet. Though he is demented.”

The man thinks for a moment. Again with the whistling.

“I don’t know why, but something about you idiots strikes me as well intentioned,” he finally says. “He went down toward the park.”

“Why’d he come here?” I ask.

“He asked for a blanket.”

“Did you give him one?”

“I gave him a jacket a customer left. Put it over him.” He looks around, and interrupts a new bout of whistling with a shiver. “That all?”

“Yeah,” I say. “But we owe you one. You should come in and let us check out your emphysema.”

The man squints down his nose at the “Lottie Luise, MD” monogramming on the front of my white coat. “Thank you Dr. Luise,” he says.

“I’m Peter Brown. This is Mershawn. We’ll get you in and out for free.”

The man gives a wheezy laugh that tails off in a choke. “Figure I got where I am today by not going to the hospital,” he says.