Josh Bazell - Beat the Reaper - A Novel

Friendly’s behind the desk. Stacey the drug rep is sitting on the edge of it, right near him, surprised to see me. Friendly, noticing me looking at her, leans and puts his hand on her thigh just below the hem of her short dress. Which I can see up.

“What is it?” Friendly says.

“I’d like to scrub in on your procedure on Mr. LoBrutto.”

“No. Why?”

“He’s my patient. I’d like to help if I can.”

Friendly thinks about it. “Whatever. If it’s not you, it’s my resident, so it’s no loss either way. I’ll leave it to you to tell him you’re taking his place.”

“I’ll go find him,” I say.

“I’m starting at eleven, whether you’re there or not.”

“All right.”

Stacey shoots some kind of facial expression at me, but I’m too grossed out to try to decode it.

I just leave.

In order to make it to Squillante’s surgery I figure I’ll have to do about four hours of work in the next two hours, then another four hours of work in the two hours afterwards. I realize right off that this will require draping my med students with a bit more responsibility than is usual or legal, and also keeping at least one Moxfane under my tongue at all times. To balance things out ethically, I don’t give my med students any Moxfane.

We start. We see patients. Oh, fuck do we see patients. We see them and wake them up and shine lights in their eyes and ask them if they’re still alive so fast that even the ones who speak English don’t understand what the fuck we’re doing or saying. Then we replace their IV bags and tap their arteries and shove medications through their veins. Then we slash through their paperwork. If they’re in a tuberculosis tank, which you’re not supposed to enter without suits and masks, we fuck the HAZMAT procedures and just get in and out as fast as we can.

Speaking of HAZMAT, we dodge the two hospital teams—Occupational Health and Safety and Infectious Disease Control—that are trying to run me down and ask me about my needlestick with the Assman sample. Right now the injection site barely hurts, and I don’t have time for that shit.

As we move we get reminded, again and again, of what a fascinating mix a hospital can be of people in a huge hurry and people too slow to get out of their way.

We even save a couple of lives, if you can call correcting a medications error saving a life. Usually it’s just some nurse about to give someone milligrams per pound instead of milligrams per kilogram, but occasionally it’s something more exotic, like a nurse about to give Combivir to someone who needs Combivent.

A couple of times we get asked to help people make difficult decisions, the outcome of which will affect whether they live or die. We do this quickly too. If there’s a clear solution, it would have presented itself up front, and since it didn’t, there’s not much we can say to these people. That’s what crackpots on the Internet are for.

“Go home,” I tell my med students when we’re finished. We’ve got, like, ninety seconds to spare.

“Sir, we’d like to watch the surgery,” one says.

“Why?” I say.

But I can use the help.

We all race down to Prep.

The anesthesiologist is there, but Friendly isn’t. The nurse asks why, and whether I’ll do the paperwork and get the fucking patient down here already.

I “do” the paperwork with the speed and legibility of a seismograph. Then I send my students to look up some shit about abdominal surgery, and go myself to get Squillante.

“I screwed you, Bearclaw,” he suddenly says as we’re waiting for the elevator. He’s still in his roller bed.

“No shit.”

“I mean I screwed you a little more than I meant to.”

I press the button again. “Yeah?”

“Yeah. I thought Skingraft was in Argentina.”

“I don’t understand.”

“He’s here in New York. Right now. I just found out.”

“No. I mean, who the fuck is Skingraft?”

I figure it’s probably one of Skinflick’s two younger brothers, though as people to be afraid of they’re both a bit lacking.

That or it’s more bullshit with the nicknames.

“Sorry,” Squillante says. “Skin flick. I forgot you guys were friends.”

“What?”

The elevator arrives. It’s packed. “Hold on a second,” I tell Squillante.

“Everybody out,” I say. “This patient has rabbit flu.” When they’re gone and we’re on board with the doors closed, I use the same button Stacey did to stop the elevator.

“Now what the fuck are you talking about?”

“Skinflick,” Squillante says. “They call him ‘Skingraft’ now because of his face.”

“Skinflick’s dead. I threw him out a window.”

“You did throw him out a window.”

“Yes. I did.”

“It didn’t kill him.”

For a second I can’t say anything. I know it isn’t true, but my guts don’t appear to be so sure.

“Bullshit,” I say. “We were six stories up.”

“I’m not saying he enjoyed it.”

“You are fucking with me.”

“I swear it on St. Theresa.”

“Skinflick is alive? ”

“Yeah.”

“And he’s here? ”

“He’s in New York. I thought he was in Argentina. He was living there, learning to knife-fight.” Squillante’s voice drops even further, embarrassed. “For when he found you.”

“Well, that’s fucking great,” I finally say.

“Yeah. I’m sorry. I figured you’d have a little time if I died. But now you probably won’t, is what I’m saying. If I do die, you’ll probably just have a couple hours to get out of town.”

“Thanks for the consideration.”

To keep from hitting Squillante I palm-strike the “stop” button, and speed us toward surgery.

At the beginning of November Magdalena took me to meet her parents. They lived in Dyker Heights, in Brooklyn. A place I’d never been to before I started dropping her off there.

I’d already met her brother, a tall gangly blond high school kid who wore soccer uniforms all the time and was strangely shy, even though he spoke half a dozen languages and had been born five thousand exotic miles away. His name was Christopher, but his friends called him Rovo, because the family’s last name was Niemerover.

Like I say, I’d already met him. The parents were news, though.

They were blond and tall like Rovo, but also husky. Next to the three of them Magdalena looked like she’d been raised by greyhounds. [34] Magdalena looked which medieval Europeans called “Gypsy” because they thought the originated in Egypt. They originated in India. It’s a pretty good joke that Romania, which is historically one of the most racist countries on earth—when it got its first political party primarily based on Jew-hating, in 1910, both its Liberal and Conservative parties were already officially “anti-Semitic”—is also one of the most racially mixed, because it lies in a mountain pass used by every army in history. Unless you think jokes should be funny. The father worked for the subway system, as a shift manager for the IRT out of Grand Central, though in Romania he’d been a dentist. The mother worked in a bakery owned by a friend of theirs.

Dinner was spaghetti instead of Romanian food, out of “politeness” and a desire to point out how alien Magdalena and I were to each other. We ate in the dining room of the family’s crazily narrow three-story half of a townhouse. Everything in the room—the rugs, the dark wood clocks, the furniture, the yellowed photos and their frames—ate light. Magdalena and I sat along one edge of the table opposite Rovo, with Magdalena’s parents at the ends.