Chris Adrian - A Better Angel

Olivia shook her head and walked the blood through the lab, back into the chemistry section, where Otto, the great big chemistry technologist, sat with his feet up on the Hitachi 747, a very accomplished machine that was capable of all sorts of magnificently complex chemical analyses of serum and plasma, as well as urine and cerebrospinal fluid, and even stool, provided it was of a sufficiently liquid consistency. Beatrice had followed right behind her, and now she watched as Olivia watched the sleeping Otto, admiring his strong jaw. Olivia was committed to a girl she’d met in her organic chemistry class, but she felt no guilt admiring Otto’s jaw, or any other portion of his vast anatomy.

“Wake up,” she said, putting the red- and the gray-topped tubes in a rack by Otto’s foot. She wiggled the tip of his shoe with her hand.

“I’m not sleeping,” he said. “Just resting my eyes.”

“Sure,” she said. “You’re not allowed to be tired yet. We’ve got seven more hours.”

Otto sat up, picked up the tubes, and began to transfer them to his centrifuge. “Oh,” he said. “It’s the jumper.”

“Yeah.” Olivia walked off toward the hematology section of the lab, then turned back. “I guess you can take some of this for the ammonia level,” she said, offering him the lavender-topped tube. “But give it to Denis as soon as you’re done.”

“Sure,” he said. “Thanks.” The thought of having an excuse to go in search of Denis appealed to him. He felt the same way about Denis that Frank and Bonnie did.

As quickly as he could, he pulled off a small aliquot of Beatrice’s blood and put it into a small plastic test tube. He was careless in his haste; a single gorgeous drop fell and landed on his ungloved index finger. Panic flared in him because he thought for a moment that he had a raw hangnail on that finger, but it was actually on the index finger of the other hand. Nevertheless he hurried to the sink and sprayed bleach from a squeeze bottle onto his finger. The smell reminded him of the bathroom he grew up with, which his mother had religiously disinfected, practically after every use. Beatrice stood next to him and said, You have nothing to fear from my blood.

When he was all cleaned up, Otto got the ammonia level and other analyses running in the 747 and hurried down to hematology. He found Denis hunched over a magazine full of details about the lives of musicians. Denis looked up when Otto rounded the minus-70 freezer.

“Hi,” he said. Beatrice came in, sat on the freezer, and began to drum her legs silently against its side.

“Hi there,” said Otto, gazing not at Denis’s hips but at the upper portion of his biceps. Those muscles appealed to him not because they were particularly large (they were only about a third the size of his own) but because they were very shapely, and because he could imagine himself drifting off to sleep with his cheek resting against them.

“What’s up?” Denis asked.

“Got some blood for you. They want a CBC and a diff and a sed rate.”

“No problem.” Denis held his hand out for the tube. Otto placed it in his palm, taking care despite himself not to let any part of his hand touch Denis, but his pinkie scraped Denis’s wrist as he drew his hand away.

“It’s the jumping lady,” said Otto.

“Oh,” said Denis. His placid expression belied his true reaction. He thought he could feel his heart rising in his chest, and he wanted to bring the blood to his forehead and hold it there, but of course he didn’t. Otto was standing in front of him, looking down and smiling awkwardly.

“Looks like she’s getting a transplant,” he said.

“Another one?”

“Liver this time.” The previous one had been a kidney.

“Where do they get all these organs?”

Otto shrugged. “Got to get to work,” he said, walking away. The phone rang. Denis picked it up and listened for a few moments, then hung up and walked out into the hall. He could see Otto down past the other end, bending over his machine. “Hey, Otto!” he said. “The liver’s on its way! They’re sending up some donor blood for serology!”

“Okay!” Otto shouted back. Denis walked back to his lab, sat down, and began to work. He felt very strongly about the jumping lady. It was his conviction that he was in love with her, and had been ever since she had first arrived, ever since he had heard her story and handled her blood for the first time. It was not an attraction that made sense in any way that he could explain to himself, but every night he worked in the building where she lay, and every time he handled her blood, she became a little more irresistible. He closed his magazine and sighed. He leaned his head against the machine that was busy counting and sorting her blood cells by type, waiting for the information, which was precious to him because it concerned her.

Beatrice sat and watched him, feeling sad because if she was in love with anyone in the lab it was not Denis, and was probably nobody, but just might be Luke with his enormous ears. She could not bear to watch Denis mooning over her, so she left his lab through an open back door and headed up to the roof, where she waited in the blowing snow for the arrival of her new liver.

She looked out on the city from a familiar height. The hospital, like the parking garage, was seven stories tall. She could see the university campus spread out before her, neatly bisected by the river. When she tried to leave, she got only as far as that river. Some force held her bound to the hospital. She supposed it was her living body, and wished it would die. It was not for no reason at all that she had thrown herself off the garage. Not that she could recall the reason, in her present state. She only knew that she did not wish to go back, and that it all had to do with a crushing sadness under which she had labored for most of her life, and which she had never blamed on anybody.

She heard the helicopter before she saw it. It was incredibly loud. Covering her ears with her hands, she watched as it came out of the snowstorm and settled onto the helipad. She watched the flight nurses scramble out, one of them with a Styrofoam cooler held between his hands. Just as they had with the kidney, they would take it downstairs, where doctors would examine it and make it ready for her. After the nurses had disappeared inside the hospital, Beatrice turned and stepped off the roof.

It was never like the fall that had brought her here. It was slower, for one thing, and it did her no harm whatsoever. In fact, she fell so slowly that she had time for reflection on various subjects, and this time as she floated down, she watched the snowflakes passing her and thought about her very first boyfriend. His name was Boukman. They had been eight years old together. Her parents had disapproved of him because he was black. They would not let him swim in their pool. This was in Miami, where in the summer it was practically a medical necessity to swim every day.

So she swam in his family’s pool, and exulted in his strangeness. Boukman claimed to have been born of a dog, and that he could fly. These were not his parents who applauded when he and she did synchronized back dives into the pool. His real mother’s name was Queenie, and she was a Great Dane, just like Scooby-Doo. He was from Haiti. He said such things were common there. She believed him all through the summer, and looked forward to the flying lessons he promised her.

On the day of the first lesson, she gave him a lingering kiss on the mouth, and then they ran hand in hand along his flat roof. She balked at the edge and watched him go flying out alone. He went out and straight down to fall directly on his well-formed, closely shaven head. She looked down at the gruesome angle of his neck. Because she was a child, she did not realize right away that he was dead.