Josh Bazell - Beat the Reaper - A Novel

“Fair enough,” I have to say.

On the way down Mershawn asks me how I knew the guy had emphysema, and I list the physical signs he was showing. Then I say, “Teaching point, Mershawn. Who whistles?”

“Assholes?”

“Okay. Who else?”

Mershawn thinks about it. “People who are thinking about something, then subliminally start thinking of a song about that thing. Like when you’re doing a cranial nerve exam and you start whistling ‘Keep Ya Head Up.’”

“Good,” I say. “But a lot of people also whistle because they’re subconsciously trying to increase the air pressure in their lungs, so they can force more oxygen through the tissues.”

“No shit.”

“Shit. You know the dwarfs in Snow White who work in a mine?”

“Yeah, okay.”

“If you had silicosis, you’d whistle your ass off too.”

“Damn.”

“That’s right.”

For the rest of the block I feel like Prof. Marmoset.

Duke Mosby, when we find him, is on a flagstoned pavilion overlooking the Hudson from the heights of Riverside Park. It’s a hell of a view, but the river’s charging heavily for it, spitting back a wet and flurrying wind. The kind you can feel through the vents in your plastic clogs. Snowflakes are skittering up from the ground at the same time they’re wheeling in from the sky. They’re lodged in Mosby’s hair and eyelashes.

“What’s going on, Mr. Mosby?” I shout to him above the wind.

He turns, and smiles. “Not much, Doctor. You?”

“You know Mershawn?”

“Sure do,” he says without looking at him. “Doctor, tell me this. Why is it so important to look at a river now and again?”

“I don’t know,” I say. “I think I may have missed that lecture in medical school.”

“I think it’s because we all have to see something God made once in a while. Like maybe if they put some plants around the POW camp, people wouldn’t break out so often.”

“If I have to see something God made,” Mershawn says, “I’d rather look at some pussy.”

“You see any pussy around here?” Mosby asks him.

“No sir.”

“Then I guess we’re stuck with the river.” Mosby notices Mershawn’s haircut, and says, “What the hell is that on your head?”

It occurs to me I might be losing my mind.

“Can we go back to the hospital now?” I say.

In the lobby I try Prof. Marmoset again, mostly as a reflex. I set my teeth for Firefly, but he picks up the phone himself.

“Yeah, hi, Carl —” he says.

“Professor Marmoset?”

“Yes?” He’s confused. “Who is this?”

“It’s Ishmael,” I say. “Hold on one second.” I turn to Mershawn. “Can I leave this on you?” I ask him.

“I can handle it, Doc,” he says.

“I believe you,” I say, looking in his eyes, which sometimes works. “Take him to PT, wait twenty minutes, ask why they haven’t called him for his appointment. When they tell you he doesn’t have one take him back up to the floor and say PT made a scheduling error. You got that?”

“I got it.”

“I believe you,” I say again. Then I turn away and uncover the phone. “Professor Marmoset?”

“Ishmael! I can’t talk long, I’m expecting a call. What’s up?”

What is up? I’m so happy to actually be talking to him that I can’t precisely remember where I’d planned to begin.

“Ishmael?”

“I’ve got a patient with signet cell cancer,” I say.

“That’s bad. Okay.”

“Yeah. A guy named Friendly’s doing the laparotomy. I looked him up—”

“John Friendly?”

“Yes.”

“And this is a patient of yours? ”

“Yes.”

“Get someone else to do it,” he says.

“Why?” I ask.

“Because presumably you want him to live.”

“But Friendly’s the highest rated GI surgeon in New York.”

“Maybe in a magazine,” Prof. Marmoset says. “He inflates his statistics. He does things like bring his own blood supplies into the OR so he doesn’t have to report transfusions. If we’re talking about reality, he’s a menace.”

“Jesus,” I say. “He didn’t want the patient to have a DNR order.”

“Exactly. When your patient’s a vegetable, Friendly won’t have to report him as a fatality.”

“Fuck! How do I get him off the case?”

“Let’s think about it,” Prof. Marmoset says. “Okay. You call a GI guy named Leland Marker at Cornell. He’s probably skiing, but his office will be able to track him down. Tell his scheduler Bill Clinton needs a laparotomy and is hiding out at Manhattan Catholic to avoid the press. Tell him Clinton’s using a fake name, and give him the name of your patient. Marker’ll be pissed as hell when he figures it out, but by then it’ll be too late, and he’ll have to operate.”

“I don’t think I have time for that,” I say. “Friendly’s operating in a couple of hours.”

“Well, you could drop some GHB in his coffee, but from what I’ve heard he probably wouldn’t notice.”

I lean against the wall. There’s a ringing in one of my ears, and I’m starting to get vertigo.

“Professor Marmoset,” I say. “I need this patient to live.”

“Sounds like someone needs some distancing techniques.”

“No. I mean I need this patient to live.”

There’s a pause. Prof. Marmoset says, “Ishmael, is everything all right?”

“No,” I say. “I’ve got to see this patient through.”

“Why?”

“It’s a long story. But I have to.”

“Should I be worried about you?”

“No. It wouldn’t do any good.”

There’s another pause while he decides what to do with this.

“All right,” he says. “But only because I have a couple other calls coming in. I want you to call me when you can tell me about it. Leave a message. In the meantime, I think you should scrub in.”

“ Scrub in? I haven’t done surgery since med school. And I sucked at it even then.”

“Right, I remember that,” he says. “But you can’t be any worse than John Friendly. Good luck.”

Then he hangs up.

I met Magdalena the night of Denise’s wedding, August 13th, 1999. She was in the string sextet, playing viola. Ordinarily she played in a quartet, but her booking agent handled a couple of different quartets, so when people wanted a sextet, which was usually for a wedding, the agent made one up. Denise’s wedding had a sextet and, for after dinner, a DJ.

It was a big wedding. It was at a country club on Long Island that the groom’s family belonged to, since Denise had decided to do it back East, where most of her extended family was. Skinflick and I were seated about a mile away from her.

Somehow everybody seemed to understand that it was my job to babysit Skinflick, and that I was supposed to keep him either too sober or too drunk to do anything embarrassing. It was a pretty sordid job, and it got old fast. I was almost as hung over as he was, and I was tired of hearing him complain. Half of me thought if he was serious he really should make a scene, and steal Denise away. Ignore the constraints of tradition and family and be true for once to his Golden Bough bullshit.

But rituals turn us all into fucking idiots. Like those birds that sleep with their heads facing backwards because their ancestors slept with their heads under their wings. Plutarch says carrying new wives across thresholds is stupid because we don’t remember that it refers to the rape of the Sabine women—and that’s fucking Plutarch, two thousand years ago. We still draw the Reaper with a scythe. We should draw him driving a John Deere for Archer Daniels Midland.