Chris Adrian - A Better Angel

The blood neatly and safely organized, and all her sharpswaste disposed of, Judy turned on her heel and walked out of the semiprivate recess that Beatrice occupied in the first bay of the SICU. Judy walked down the bay, nodding to the nurses and doctors whose eyes she caught. Beatrice followed her out. She was nodding to people, too. No one saw her.

Judy walked up to the front desk, where a perpetually idle nursing assistant named Frank was flipping through an old issue of Reader’s Digest and looking bored.

“Here you go,” she said, pushing the blood at him. “Take this up to the lab and tell them it’s extra-stat.”

“Sure thing,” he said, closing his magazine. He took the blood from her and felt a familiar dislike. Mouse-face, he thought to himself. Others in the SICU agreed with him that Judy had mousy features: a small, forward-sloping face beset with a long, thin nose; prominent, well-cared-for front teeth. Whenever Judy was in a mood and taking it out on the other nursing staff, he would whisper to one of his friends, “Perhaps the rodent would like a piece of cheese.” He had not gone so far as to leave a piece of cheddar in her locker, but he planned to do that one day.

The thought of her expression as she beheld the cheese sitting on top of her street shoes, and the thought that followed that one, of her bending down with alacrity and nibbling it up, amused him greatly. He laughed out loud on his way out of the bay, even as another nurse hurried up to him with a full gallon jug of urine to carry up to the lab. Beatrice, who did not find any of the mouse business amusing, and did not particularly care for Frank, followed him out of the SICU, walking just a few steps behind him and watching as he swung the jug of urine back and forth and hummed to himself.

Walking down the wide hospital hallway, Frank looked out the enormous windows on his right. Outside it was snowing, but he could just barely see that. What the windows showed him was mainly his own reflection. Looking at himself, he regretted not wearing a shirt beneath his scrubs, because he thought the cut of his sleeves made his arms look thin and weak.

He took the elevator labeled EE up to the sixth floor, not noticing that Beatrice had stepped in behind him. On the sixth floor he walked straight out of the elevator and down a hall that looked over a balcony into an atrium whose main feature was a shiny black grand piano. The atrium extended in a shaft up through every floor of the hospital. Sometimes people came in and played something cheery on the piano, but never during his shift. Beatrice had heard them during the day. Her favorite was a little Mennonite girl who sat primly under her paper hat and played hymns. Turning right, away from the hallway, Frank and Beatrice entered the pathology department.

Frank was always surprised by how nice it smelled there, not at all like a hospital, or even like a lab. There were no foul odors like what proceeded from people with failed kidneys, nor any sharp chemical smells to make your nose itch. Rather, the lab smelled like the perfume of the beautiful women who worked there. To Beatrice it smelled sweet also, mostly because there were people there whom she counted as friends, though none of them had ever met her. The lab was one of her favorite places to spend time.

Frank had a passing interest in one of Beatrice’s friends, a blue-eyed hematology technologist with poor dental hygiene but very handsome hips. His name was Denis. He wasn’t there when Frank dropped off the blood and urine. Two women and one man were intent on their computer screens, typing in various patient information, ordering tests, and entering results. They did not notice Frank in the window.

“Stat!” Frank shouted. They all jumped. Beatrice wanted to smack him.

“Thank you,” said the man, a funny-looking, taciturn fellow with enormous ears. “You can leave it there.”

“It’s super-stat,” said Frank, setting the urine in the window.

“All right,” said the man.

“We need you to get right on it. This lady’s getting her transplant started in the morning.”

“Right,” said one of the women, who was thin with long straight hair. Frank envied her her eyes, which were green and gold. She rolled her chair over to the window and snatched the blood from his hand.

“Thank you,” she said, setting the tubes next to her computer terminal but doing nothing with them. Her name was Bonnie. She made a show of being focused on her screen, waiting for Frank to go away. Go away, she thought, exerting the full force of her will upon the odious nursing assistant. Beatrice tried to help her out and wished fervently that Frank would return to his hell of shrewish nurses.

“He’s gone,” said the man with the ears. His name was Luke.

“I can’t stand the way that guy looks at me,” said Bonnie, adroitly unwrapping the blood, unfolding the requisition, and entering the requested tests into the computer.

“Like a snake,” said Olivia, the other woman.

“Damn!” said Bonnie. She’d noticed that the urine had no name on it. She stuck her head out the window and called down the hall, “Hey, Urine Boy!” If Frank heard, he made no response.

“What’s wrong?” asked Luke.

“They didn’t label the urine. What a pain in my ass.”

“I’ll call them,” he said.

“Thanks,” Bonnie said. She watched Luke as he got up and walked over to the phone, wondering why he always cut his hair so short instead of leaving it long to cover his silly ears. They really are very large, she thought, and wondered if that signified anything, in terms of personality. Men with large hands were said to possess large penises, red-haired people were said to be volatile, but she had never heard anything special said about people with large ears, except maybe that they heard a little better than most folks. Someone might have told her that, maybe her grandmother or her sixth-grade science teacher. To Beatrice, Luke’s ears indicated oafishness, because her big-eared father had been a great oaf. But regardless of the ears, Beatrice found herself partial to Luke.

Luke hung up the phone and said, “They’re sending it up.” Behind him self-adhesive labels were printing out for Beatrice’s specimens. Bonnie looked him up and down again, and thought about how she might have found him attractive in some other lifetime, one with different standards of beauty. For what seemed to her the hundredth time she imagined him shirtless and was disappointed. She got up from her chair and handed the specimens to Olivia. “Would you label these, please?” she asked.

“Sure,” she said. “Hey, it’s the jumping lady.”

“Is it?” said Bonnie. “I didn’t notice.”

“I wonder how she’s doing?” said Luke.

“Not too well,” said Bonnie, “if she needs a new liver.”

“But as well as can be expected,” said Olivia. “I mean, considering.” She was labeling intently.

“You really should wear gloves when you do that,” said Luke.

“I know,” said Olivia.

“One of the tubes might break in your hand. Then where would you be?”

“All bloody,” said Bonnie. “I know. It happened to me once. Lucky I had gloves on.”

“Would you like me to put on some gloves?” Olivia asked Luke.

“I don’t care,” he said. “It was just a suggestion.”

“Jesus,” said Olivia. Beatrice came through the window and stood next to her. You have nothing to fear from my blood, she said, but Olivia did not hear her. Olivia was, in fact, wishing she had put on a pair of gloves. She smoothed a label onto the round edges of a lavender-topped tube and suffered from the perversity of her imagination. She imagined the tube breaking in half as she held it, the jagged glass edge piercing her thumb to the bone, inoculating her with the jumping lady’s blood and whatever diseases it carried. In the same way she sometimes imagined being a bystander in a bank robbery, standing behind a security guard when he got shot with such force that the bullet passed right through him and into her. Who could tell what she might get? Who could speculate on the sexual habits of that security guard, and whether or not they spelled death for her?