Josh Bazell - Beat the Reaper - A Novel

“Hmm,” the doctor says.

I wonder if I’ll have to touch the front of his gown too.

“All right, calm down,” he finally says, tearing his gown off by himself. “I’ll go do a lit search on Medline.”

“Thank you.”

“And with whom do I have the pleasure of speaking? Just so I can have you fired when you’re wrong.”

Good luck, dickhead.

“Bearclaw Brnwa,” I tell him as I leave.

The escalator landing, though, is staked out: a hitter at each end, and two riding up to the next floor.

Fuck, I think. How many of these guys are there?

I have a Rambo moment in which I consider yanking a Purell alcohol hand gel dispenser off the wall and using it as napalm, but then decide that burning down a hospital filled with patients kind of crosses the line. Instead I double back to the fire stairs, which are echoing with the careful footsteps of people looking for me, and sprint up the three flights to Medicine as quietly as possible.

Heading back toward the center of my lair.

Which has its bonuses. Like my having hidden that fuckhead mugger’s handgun up here.

I just have to find it.

I have no recollection whatsoever of where I put the gun. When I try to think back I feel only a haze of drugged-out exhaustion.

I decide to use a Prof. Marmoset trick.

According to Prof. Marmoset, you should never bother trying to remember where you put something. You should just imagine needing to put it somewhere now, then go to the place you pick. Because why would you pick a different location now than you did earlier? Your personality is more stable than that. It’s not like we wake up each day as different people. It’s just that we don’t trust ourselves.

So I give it a shot. I use the Force. I imagine myself at 5:30 in the morning, with a handgun to hide and practically nothing on my mind.

It leads me to the nurses’ lounge behind the Medicine station. To the antique textbooks on the high-up shelf that runs around it, which haven’t been used since the advent of the Internet. To a large book in German on the central nervous system.

Behind it is the handgun.

Score another one for Marmoset.

Out in front at the nursing station I can see that there are two hitters at each end of the hall, searching rooms. Coming toward me.

If I want a straight-up shootout I can cross to the parallel hallway on the other side of the station, and fire at these guys from there. Which in addition to killing an unknown number of bystanders will bring every armed person in the hospital running. I think about this for a moment, then discard the idea. I’ve met those security guards.

I duck into a patient room behind me. I know it’s empty because just before Squillante’s surgery I discharged one of the patients who was in it, and the other one was the woman I found dead in her bed this morning. Nothing in this hospital happens fast enough for someone to have even pretended to change the sheets between then and now.

I search the cabinets. The largest gown I can find is a medium. I kick my clogs and clothes off into the bathroom, pull the tiny, warmthless thing on, and hop into the bed the woman died in.

A couple minutes later two hitters come into the room.

I’m lying back. They look at me. I look at them. The crappy gun I’m pointing at them from beneath the sheet feels ready to dissolve in my hand. Most of its weight is in its bullets.

I try not to look in their eyes. Even so, I realize what I must look like to them now that they’ve searched all the other rooms. Way too healthy, even with my stupid neck bandage on. A complete impostor.

They reach into their jackets simultaneously. I aim the fuckhead’s gun at the nearer of the two and pull the trigger.

The hammer clicks but nothing happens. I pull the trigger again. Another click. Within two seconds I’ve tried all six cylinders, and the trigger is starting to bend. It’s not the bullets, it’s the firing pin or something.

Fucking cheapie bullshit gun. I throw it at them and reach for the knife taped to my thigh.

Apparently they Taser me.

I wake up.

I’m in a checkered linoleum hallway, face down. The two guys holding my arms know what they’re doing: at least one of them has a foot on my back, so I can’t roll forward to escape. The knife is gone. Most of what I can see are shoes. Most of what I hear is laughter.

“Just fucking do it,” someone says. “This is making me sick.”

“It’s a precision job,” another guy says, and there’s more laughter.

I look around wildly. On the wall to my left there’s a brushed aluminum door. A walk-in freezer. I’m still in the hospital.

Over my shoulder I can just see a guy crouching behind me with an enormous plastic syringe that’s full of some brown fluid. “We heard you got stuck with something nasty earlier, but it didn’t kill you,” he says. “So we thought we’d stick you with something even nastier.”

“Please don’t say it,” I manage to say.

But he does: “If you weren’t full of shit before, you will be now.”

Hilarity. Meanwhile I’m still in the fucking hospital gown, which is untied at the back and lying open. The guy jams the syringe into my left buttock and injects the whole burning mess. At least he flicks the air bubbles out first.

“You’ll be good and ready by the time Skingraft gets here,” he says.

Apparently they Taser me again.

Magdalena and I left the Aquarium in the shark-feeder guy’s green Subaru hatchback. I had to lean on the steering wheel with my chest to drive. I couldn’t extend my arms.

Magdalena was in one of the yellow raincoats from the metal cabinet. She had her legs under her on the passenger’s seat. She was keening so hard, her entire face red and wet with tears, that when she first spoke I didn’t realize she had, or understand what she was saying.

Which was, over and over, “Stop.”

“We can’t,” I said. My gums were hot and fat where I’d lost a tooth and ground down the socket.

“We have to tell my parents.”

I thought about this. Her parents needed to leave. Once Skinflick found out we were still alive, he would go after them. They had to be warned.

But they also had to stay calm. If they called the cops before the Feds had protection in place, Skinflick would just find out sooner.

“You can’t tell them about Rovo,” I said.

“What do you mean?” Magdalena said. Both our voices were hoarse. Parody voices.

“You have to tell them to leave. To get out of New York. Get off the East Coast. Go to Europe. But if you tell them Rovo’s dead they’ll freak out, or they’ll stay, or both.”

“They deserve to know,” Magdalena said.

“Baby, you can’t,” I said.

“Don’t call me baby,” she said. “Never call me baby. There’s a payphone. Pull over.”

I pulled over. If she hated me, which she was right to, there was certainly nothing else worth worrying about.

I think she did lie to her parents about Rovo, though. Because she was crying while she talked to them, but silently, with her chest jolting in and out.

Whatever she said, she said it in Romanian.

For which I am eternally grateful.

It was night by the time we crossed into Illinois. There was a restaurant pretty high above the highway in a long strip of widely spaced motels. It was Somebody’s Pies or something. It was a chain.

Magdalena came in with me to order, shivering the whole time. It was stupid to be seen together, but I couldn’t let her out of my sight. I felt rootless to the point of nonexistence.

What Skinflick had said about my grandparents, I knew, had been right. It explained too much: all those years of avoiding other Jews, their silence about their families before the war, the wrong tattoos on their forearms. I didn’t know what to make of it, or of their attempt to live their lives as other people, but I knew I had only one connection to humanity now, and that was Magdalena.