Josh Bazell - Beat the Reaper - A Novel

When it came to saving Magdalena, though, I felt indestructible, and immune to fatigue. I came up with a technique. I put Magdalena’s legs over my shoulders with her facing me so that I could keep as much of her as possible out of the water. I did it for hours, I think. Eventually we took her clothes off, since she was warmer without them. And eventually after that she let me lick her, although she never stopped crying, even while she came.

Judge me if you want. Judge her and I’ll break your fucking head. You’ll learn about the primordial when it enters your living room. The sharpness and the richness of Magdalena’s pussy, the nerves down my spine that were receptive to no other stimuli, made the ocean seem weak. They meant life. [57] People think the ocean’s about life, and freedom. But beaches are the most impassable barriers in nature. People worship them like they worship outer space, or death, or anything and anyone else that says no to them and means it.

Throughout the night we heard a snorting noise, maybe once every fifteen minutes. As the skylight brightened, slowly then ridiculously quickly, I started to see a small, round head appear at the surface, black eyes gleaming, to blow water out reptilian nostrils.

When I could read my watch, it was just past six AM. We were shivering and nauseated. Just as it became bright enough to see the sharks through the water, they turned a lot more aggressive. Apparently they like dawn and dusk. They came darting in like the shadows of a bouncing ball.

But they’d missed their chance. All it got them was a lot of shoe heel in the face. The tank brightened further. We could see that the snorting animal was a large sea turtle, and was probably also the thing I had thought was a rock. Then we could see that there were two of them. Then that the tank was packed with animals.

There were at least a dozen human-length sharks (twenty minutes later I was able to put the count at fourteen for sure), of two different types, neither of which I could identify. Both were brown and looked like they were made of suede, and had a surprising and revolting number of fins along their sides. One type had spots. [58] They were tiger sharks or nurse sharks or something. Who gives a shit? Any shark that large will attack a human if it thinks it can get away with it. And all shallow-water sharks are brown on top and white underneath, so that fish above them will think they’re sand, and fish below will think they’re sky.

A slow, fluid stingray that looked like half its tail had been bitten off moved along the sand and cement bottom of the tank. Higher up there was a school of parrot fish, more than a foot long each, herding and striking at the remains of Rovo’s body, driving them around the edges of the tank as they fed like he was dancing.

There wasn’t much left of him: the torn-up head, the spine, the bones of his arms. His hands were shredded, the tendons splayed like pompons. Occasionally a shark would rake the body anyway for the fibrous remains of its meat, and send it head over heels until the fish got hold of it again. At one point I dunked and caught it as it went by, thinking that if I could keep the fish off it Magdalena might stop hyperventilating so much. But it made the sharks too aggressive, and the feel of it made me retch. The only place you could really hold on to it was at the sharp, slimy base of the spine, next to the holes through which both kidneys had been taken. So I just let it drift again and told Magdalena not to look at it. We both kept looking at it, though.

Around 7:30 the sharks steered away from us as if they’d heard some signal, and the feeder guy appeared.

He was in his twenties with a shaved head and sideburns, in yellow rubber pants. He stood and stared at Magdalena’s spiked-out nipples. She was completely naked. At least it kept the fucker from noticing Rovo.

“Get us out of here,” I rasped.

He came and folded down the ramp, and I launched off the wall with Magdalena in my arms, ready to tear the eyes out of any shark that fucked with us now. Pulling myself up after I’d pushed her out made my head spin so hard my vision went to static for a moment.

“I’m calling the cops,” he said.

“How?” I said. “You don’t have a cell phone.”

“Yeah I do,” he said, taking it out.

Shithead. I smashed it on the railing, and dropped the pieces into the water after I knocked him unconscious.

The twenty-four hours that began at that moment were the worst and most important of my life. During them—though this is the least of it—I traveled close to two thousand miles, only to end up back in New York, one full day after Magdalena and I crawled out of the water.

Specifically, I ended up in Manhattan, where Skinflick’s doorman recognized me and let me into the building. The two goons in Skinflick’s apartment I killed with his glass coffee table.

Skinflick himself, still awake and coke-fried, I picked up by the hips, like I used to pick up Magdalena. Then I hurled him, twisting and screaming, face-first through his living room window.

Immediately afterwards I wished I had him back so I could do it all over again.

And from the street, where the crowds were already forming, I called Sam Freed, and for the second time that day told him where to pick me up.

I reach the street as a civilian. Free. I have given it all up. I will treat no more patients. And whatever a uniform and a prefix before my name have done for me, they will now stop doing. I have left the priesthood, molesting no altar boys along the way.

I should feel awful. I know that. It has taken me seven years to become a doctor. Essentially I have nothing else. No job. No safe place to live, even.

But somehow the freezing wind spitting ice up off the sidewalk tastes like night spring air full of fireflies and drunken female barbecue guests.

Because I don’t feel bad at all.

I am in New York City. I can go rent a hotel room and call WITSEC from there. Then I can go to a museum, or a movie. I can ride the Staten Island Ferry. I probably shouldn’t, since every male on Staten is either a mob guy or a cop, but I can. I can go buy a fucking book and read it in a café.

And fuck, how I have hated being a doctor.

Since med school I have hated it. The endless suffering and deaths of patients whose lives I was supposed to fix but couldn’t, either because no one could or because I just wasn’t good enough. The filth and the corruption. The corrosive hours.

And I have particularly hated this New York Death Star of a hospital, this fluorescent Moria known as ManCat.

I have remained a doctor as long as I could. I owe a debt, I know, and I appreciate that being a doctor has forced me to pay it, bringing me my good deed for the day, every day, so that I have not had to go looking for it.

But I can only pay what I can pay. Getting killed on top of giving up seven years won’t help anyone. In fact it will just eat up resources. There is nothing more for me to do in this profession.

Which is hardly the end of the world. Maybe after I’m resettled I can work in a soup kitchen. Malpractice insurance for that can’t be too high.

Dr. Friendly’s term—“Post–Malpractice Suit”—comes to mind and makes me laugh.

Then it makes me think of something else, and I stop like someone’s spiked my foot to the ground. I almost fall over.

I think it through to find the way it’s wrong.

I keep thinking.

But it’s pointless.

I know how to save Osteosarcoma Girl’s leg.

Standing in the wind and muck, I try Surgery on my cell phone. No answer.

Orthopedics. Busy.

Akfal. Dvořák’s New World Symphony comes on, which means he’s taken a patient into MRI.