Pete Manison: No Blood on My Hands

Illustration by Darryl Elliott

In her first waking moments, when dreams and reality overlapped and the world was soft and hazy, Dr. Janet Jeffries became vaguely aware of something wet and sticky on her hands. She pawed at her pillow. The smell brought her fully awake, and she stared at the dark streaks her fingers had left on the pillowcase.

Blood.

She sat up in bed and looked at herself. This had to be a dream, she told herself, because people just didn’t wake up with blood halfway up their arms and spattered all over their nightgowns. Not in the real world. No, it just didn’t happen.

But when she’d waited a minute or two and the dream was still going on, she began to notice the unmistakable signs of real life. A truck could be heard moving down the street, and she remembered that today was Thursday, garbage pickup day. She ran her tongue over her teeth and found a layer of disgusting residue there. And she had to go to the bathroom.

Janet looked at her hands again. The blood had begun to dry. She got up from bed and moved to the bathroom. Washing her hands, she began to notice other things: a grayish powder on the bottoms of her feet, a throbbing behind her ears, a general feeling of fatigue that made it seem like she hadn’t slept at all.

A shower and two cups of coffee cleared up all these symptoms, and by the time Janet Jeffries left for the hospital, the whole thing began to seem like it might have been a dream after all.

Reminder:you need to start getting out more often.

“Morning, Dr. Jeffries.”

“Morning, Paul. Anything unusual on the docket for today?”

The receptionist’s eyes moved over his computerized lists of appointments and notes. “No, ma’am. Two defibrillator implants, at ten and twelve, consultations till four, and I have a note saying you planned dinner with Dr. Forester at eight.”

Janet blinked. “What? That man! Did he call again? Or did he send roses?”

“He called.”

“The nerve. Next time hang up on him. That’s doctor’s orders. And call me Janet, will you? You’ve been my receptionist for a month.”

Paul reddened slightly. “Of course… Janet. You know, you’re looking a little tired today.”

Janet smiled, slipped into her lab coat. “I’m fine,” she said. “I’ll be checking x-rays until that first defibrillator at ten. Buzz me by a quarter till if I’m not here.”

Paul nodded. Janet went out, walking with her short energetic steps down the hospital corridor. That Fred Forester! If he wasn’t questioning her skill as a surgeon he was trying to seduce her or make her look like a fool in front of the rest of the staff. Sexual harassment was what it was, but she was new at the hospital and it hadn’t gone too far and… damn it, she was mad as hell!

What could she do? Report him and open a Pandora’s box of trouble? Encourage him and end up—she shuddered. Don’t think it. Not with that bald, sneering fat man. Ignore him. Hope he’ll go away.

“Janet! I was hoping I’d bump into you this morning.”

She turned.

Suddenly, she felt sick to her stomach.

Reminder:get rid of that “sexy perfume,” and avoid the corridors near the x-ray lab whenever possible.

The next morning, Janet awoke in confusion. Something about a dream, about smoke and fire and… blood. She looked at her hands.

“This is getting weird,” she grumbled. She cleaned up and sat down to look herself in the eyes in the steamy bathroom mirror. Something was going on here. What? She tried to remember the feeling, like standing somewhere amidst loud noises and acrid fumes and anguished screams.

She gasped. The image was so real. A dream. Yes, surely a dream. No, not a dream. Physical traces. Two consecutive nights. Somnambulation? And what? Murder? The thought so terrified her that she went out, picked up the paper off the front lawn, and scanned it for mysterious attacks or deaths. Nothing. Quiet all week. Less than the usual amount of violence.

Blood on her hands two days running.

She went to work.

Reminder: talk to Dr. Cisneros about “dreams.” Don’t mention the blood.

The next day was horrible. She almost lost two patients, both on what seemed routine operations. Both were easily explainable as unavoidable complications, and she brought one back so miraculously that the anesthesiologist actually congratulated her afterward and said he’d never seen such fine work. But inside, Janet wondered. She felt awful. Maybe she was coming down with something. Maybe she was cracking up.

Forester cornered her again, this time in the elevator as she was heading to the parking garage at the end of the day.

“So,” he said through his usual jowly smirk, “are we on for tomorrow night?”

Janet blinked. “Excuse me?”

“I called your receptionist, but I guess he hasn’t been giving you all your messages. I wouldn’t trust that boy, Janet. He reminds me of a guy I used to room with in med school: innocent as hell on the outside, but a scheming bastard underneath. Don’t let a guy like that ruin a potentially meaningful—”

The elevator stopped, and the doors opened.

There was a god.

“Sorry, Fred,” she said quickly, stepping out and glancing around and spotting, thankfully, several other doctors and nurses in the parking garage. “I don’t want to go out with you. Not last night, not tomorrow night, not ever. I hope I’ve made that clear enough. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m very tired, and I’m going home.”

He stared after her. She could feel his eyes, feel the heat from them, but when he called out it was with his usual false joviality. “Sure, Janet. Maybe some other time, then.”

She kept walking.

Reminder: what? Stop washing? Hedge trimmers? Christ, I need some rest. But do I dare sleep?

By the seventh time she’d awoken in bloody sheets, Dr. Janet Jeffries had become convinced that she was either going the schizophrenic hallucination route or she was the victim of malevolent, small-bodied aliens who abducted her into their spacecraft every night and performed bizarre surgeries on her body and then erased her memory before returning her to her bed each morning. One of the two, had to be.

What was certain to her was that she could not continue to work—to take the lives of trusting patients into her hands—under these conditions. Every muscle in her body was sore, she had unusual aches and pains, and it felt like she hadn’t slept in a month. Her hand was steady when she held it out before her that seventh morning, but she knew better than to trust it.

She got on the phone.

“That’s right, Paul. A very nasty virus. Wouldn’t want to take any chances. Yes, yes I’m on antibiotics, and don’t worry, I’ll be fine. I just can’t risk spreading the infection. Exactly. Just take all my messages, tell them I’m unavailable for the next several days, and I’ll check in with you regularly. But Paul? Call me if there’s an emergency with one of my patients. No one knows them the way I do. Sure, I’ll do that. Thanks. Bye.”

Janet hung up the phone. She hated lying, especially to Paul, who seemed like such a nice kid. But she needed time to think this thing out, and the truth, if reported at this stage, could wreck her career.

She shivered. It sure had been getting colder these last couple of days. In July, to have the heater on? She turned it higher, though, because she was cold, as if her innards were made of ice.