Josh Bazell - Beat the Reaper - A Novel

A man with a gun appears in silhouette and says “I said, Come...Jesus Christ! ” Then he says, “He’s back there. But he’s covered in blood, Mr. Locano.”

A crowd of other men with guns appears behind him to look in. “Oh, fuck,” one of them says.

Then Skinflick speaks. I recognize his voice, though it’s rougher than it used to be. Both deeper and with a strange new whistle to it.

“Get him out of there,” Skinflick says.

No one does anything.

“It’s just hepatitis,” I say. “You probably won’t catch it from touching me.”

Everyone backs away from the doorway.

“Fuck all of you,” Skinflick says.

He steps into sight. I can’t see him too well because he’s silhouetted and my eyes are still freaking out. But he doesn’t look good. In fact he looks like someone gave an Adam Locano kit to a four-year-old, when it’s recommended for ages nine and up. His entire head is potluck.

I should talk. I’m naked, except for the blood. My own and the extra bag I needlessly smeared all over myself to draw attention away from my right leg, and the tourniquet there that I made out of my hospital gown. There’s blood all over the room.

I can’t tell if it bothers Skinflick. He comes in waving his knife, held backhand. The blade is serpentine, with a pattern on the side, so it’s probably Indonesian.

Skinflick’s not bad. He keeps the knife going constantly, in a kind of electron cloud of defense. Idealist School all the way. But the moment he sees my knife—proud product of my own flesh and blood—he stops and flinches away in fear and surprise, exposing his entire right side to me.

“Jesus, Skinflick,” I say.

I stab him just below the right side of his ribcage, angling upwards through the natural hole in his diaphragm, so that the jagged end of my fibula punctures his aorta before coming to rest inside his beating heart.

Beating till that moment, I mean.

The next thing I remember is waking up. The thing I remember after that is thinking that For a guy who complains all the time about never getting any sleep, I sure wake up a lot.

I’m in a hospital bed. Prof. Marmoset is sitting in the La-Z-Boy by the head, reading and marking up what looks like a journal article.

I’m struck, as always, by how young he looks. Prof. Marmoset has a kind of agelessness that comes from being smarter and better informed than, say, I will ever be, and having really thick hair. But he can’t be that much older than I am.

“Professor Marmoset!” I say.

“Ishmael! You’re awake,” he says. “Good. I need to get out of here.”

I sit up. I feel dizzy but stay up on one arm anyway. “How long have I been out?” I say.

“Not as long as you think. A few hours. I caught a flight right after we talked. You should lie down.”

I lie down. Pull the blanket aside. My right leg is heavily bandaged. I still have patches of dried blood all over me. “What happened?” I say.

“You’re better at surgery than I remembered,” Prof. Marmoset says. “That bit with the girl who turned out not to have osteosarcoma was impressive. We discussed a case like that once, I think. But the autofibulectomy was very impressive. You may have to write that up for the New England Journal . For the Federal Witness Edition, at least.”

“What happened with those guys?”

“The mob guys?”

I nod.

“David Locano’s son, you stabbed in the heart. The rest of them you shot with David Locano’s son’s gun. Except for one of them, whose head you slammed in the fridge door a bunch of times. He’s not going to make it either.”

“Jesus. I don’t remember any of that.”

“You’ll be wanting to stick to that story.”

“Why? Am I under arrest?”

“Not yet. Keep your fingers crossed.” He gathers up his papers. “It’s great to see you’re all right. I really wish I could stay longer.”

I force myself to ask. “Are they going to throw me out?”

“Of Manhattan Catholic? Definitely.”

“Of medicine.”

Prof. Marmoset looks right at me, for what I realize might be the first time in my life. His eyes are a lighter shade of brown than I’d thought.

“That depends,” he says. “Do you feel your work as a physician is done?”

I think about it.

“Not even close,” I have to say. “I wish it was.”

“So we’ll figure something out,” he says. “In the meantime, you may need to get a grant to go do research for a while. Somewhere far away. I recommend UC Davis. Call me about it.” He stands.

“Wait,” I say. “What about Squillante?”

“Still dead.”

“Who killed him?”

“Your med students.”

“What?” I say. “Why?”

“He went into ventricular fibrillation. They tried to stop it by giving him potassium. They thought they were doing him a favor.”

“That’s my fault. I gave them way too much responsibility.”

“That’s what they’re off claiming now.”

“I was asleep when it happened.”

He looks at his watch. “ They weren’t. And they knew better than to try to handle a code on their own. Anyway, it’s not our problem: they’ll either get thrown out or they won’t.”

“How did you find out it was them?”

Prof. Marmoset looks uncomfortable. “It...seemed kind of obvious. Anything else?”

“Just one more thing,” I tell him. “I had a patient with multiple abscesses. I got an anonymous call claiming he was bitten by a bat—”

“The man from your needlestick.”

“Right. How’s he doing?”

Prof. Marmoset shrugs. “His insurance company wouldn’t pay for him to stay another day, so he got transferred to a state facility.”

“But what was wrong with him?”

“Who knows? You can try calling them if you want. Odds are we’ll never hear anything else about it. Your own blood work is clear. It’s just one more thing that’s not our problem.”

He pats me on the noninjured knee. “It’s like the alcoholics say. Any time you can tell the difference between something you can do something about and something you can’t, you should thank God. Particularly if it turns out to be something you can’t.”

I shift, and the pain in my leg ignites, then fades weirdly. My head and my stomach are both light from painkillers. “Thank you for coming,” I say.

“I wouldn’t miss it. Call me.”

“I will.”

He leaves. I doze.

It’s cool: he’s got shit to do.

I don’t.

All parts of this book except this paragraph, the acknowledgments, and the dedication are fiction. Even the epigraph is fiction. Believing otherwise, particularly regarding medical information, would be a very bad idea.

TEACHERS Stanley and Doris Tanz, Marvin Terban, Gilbert and Barbara Millstein, Martin Martel, Wendi Dragonfire, Arnold Weinstein, Michael Wilkes

MOVERS Susan Dominus, Markus Hoffmann, Reagan Arthur, Michael Pietsch

SOURCES DESERVING SPECIAL MENTION FOR INFORMATION NOT FOUND ELSEWHERE Cause of Death: A Leading Forensic Expert Sets the Record Straight , by Cyril H. Wecht, Mark Curriden, and Benjamin Wecht; Guy Shochat; Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, City of New York; New York Aquarium; WITSEC: Inside the Federal Witness Protection Program , by Pete Earley and Gerald Shur

SUPPORT IN NEW YORK The Bazell family, Benjamin Dattner, Joanna Fried, the Fried family, Eric Grode, Marc Leonardo, Linda Lewis, C-Lo and the Gang, Marcia Lux, Elizabeth O’Neill, Joseph Rhinewine, Scott Small, David Sugar, Susan Turner, Jason White, Jesse Zanger, Sam Zanger