Beat the Reaper

by Josh Bazell

  The weirdest, worst shit happens to people.

  I do Head Girl’s admission paperwork without looking at it, but before I’m done I get another page, this one to the room shared by Duke Mosby and Assman.

  The deal, by the way, is this: Akfal and I are required to admit thirty new patients to the ward each week. How long we keep these people in the hospital is up to us. Obviously we have an incentive to get them out fast, so we don’t have to take care of them. But on the other hand, if they come back to the emergency room less than forty-eight hours after we’ve discharged them, we have to take them back onto our service. Whereas if they come back, say, forty-nine hours after discharge, they get assigned randomly, as if it were their first visit, and odds are five to one they’ll be someone else’s problem.

  The art is in spotting the exact moment when a patient is sufficiently well to survive a full forty-nine hours outside, then flushing them. It sounds harsh—actually, it is harsh—but the second Akfal and I stop doing it, our job will become impossible.

  It’s almost impossible already. Some insurance executive long ago found the precise line past which it won’t pay to push us—our own forty-nine-hour mark, if you will—and is doing an expert job of keeping us there. Between admitting new patients and discharging old ones, both of which are paperwork nightmares, we barely have time to manage the patients who are staying around.

  This means that checking on any one of the patients we’ve already seen for the day—like Assman and Duke Mosby—is a pure waste of time. Unless the patient is in immediate, fixable trouble.

  Which is always an outside possibility, and in this case sends me back to the fire stairs, then running down the hall to their room.

  There’s a crowd just inside: the Attending Physician from rounds (of all people), Zhing Zhing, our four med students, and the Chief Resident. There are also two male residents I don’t recognize. One, who’s darkly handsome but also crazed-looking, has a giant syringe in his hand. The other one is birdlike and looks annoyed.

  “No way,” the Chief Resident is saying to the one with the syringe. “Unh uh, Doctor.” She’s standing between him and the bed.

  I say, “Hi,” and hold a fist out for Assman to knock with his knuckles, but he just glares at me. “Who are you guys?” I say to the residents.

  “ID,” says the one with the hypodermic. Infectious Disease.

  “Pathology,” says the other one. “Did you page me?”

  “Maybe an hour ago,” I say. “Did you page me?”

  “I did, sir,” one of the medical students says.

  “This guy wants to biopsy the lesions,” the Chief Resident says to me, meaning the ID guy.*

  “Okay,” I say.

  “Okay?” the Chief Resident says. “This patient has an unknown pathogen that’s spreading, and you want to risk disseminating it farther?”

  “I want to find out what it is,” I say.

  “Did you think about informing the CDC?”

  “No,” I say.

  Which is true.

  “It’s already gone from his glute to his upper thorax,” the ID guy says. “How much farther can it disseminate?”

  “How about through my whole fucking hospital ward?” the Chief Resident says.

  The birdlike Pathology guy breaks in. “Why did you page me?” he says.

  The Chief Resident ignores him and turns to the Attending. “What do you think?”

  The Attending looks at his watch and shrugs.

  “I’m going in,” the ID guy says.

  The Chief Resident says, “Wait—”

  But the ID guy gets an elbow around her and moves in with the needle. Taps twice on Assman’s upper chest, raising a scream with the second tap. ID keeps his finger there and sinks the needle in right next to it, then quickly tugs at the plunger. Assman’s howl rises in pitch, and the chamber of the hypodermic fills with blood swirled with yellow fluid.

  “God damn you!” the Chief Resident shouts.

  The ID guy yanks the needle out and turns to her, smug, but overestimates the distance between them. Actually there is no distance between them. As the Chief Resident gets knocked backwards, she and ID guy flail into a tangle and start to fall together.

  Right toward me.

  I shift sideways, but there’s a med student under me, yapping beneath one of my clogs. I jam into the wall, and all I can do to protect my face is raise a forearm. Which the hypodermic hits, sinking up to the plastic.

  There’s a pause.

  Then people start to get up, backing away from me. I stand too. Look down at my arm. The hypodermic’s sticking out of it, empty, plunger all the way down. Starting to give me that pain any large shot will give you, because it separates the planes of tissue. I twist the syringe out of my arm.

  I snap the needle off and drop it into the drawer of a sharps box on the wall behind me. Then I take hold of the front of the ID guy’s scrub shirt and drop the hypo chamber into his pocket. “Scrape what you can out of this and analyze it,” I tell him. “Take the Path guy with you.”

  “I don’t even know what I’m doing here,” the Path guy whines.

  “Don’t make me hurt you,” I tell him.

  “Dr. Brown,” the Attending says.

  “Yes, sir?” I say, still looking at the ID guy.

  “Give me a five-minute head start?”

  “You left ten minutes ago,” I tell him.

  “You’re a mensch, kid. Cheers,” he says as he leaves.

  Everyone else stands frozen.

  “Stat, you fucking assholes!” I tell them.

  I’m almost out of the room when I realize something’s wrong. Something else, I mean.

  Duke Mosby’s bed is empty. “Where’s Mosby?” I say.

  “Maybe he went for a walk,” one of the med students says, behind me.

  “Mosby’s got bilateral pedal gangrene,” I say. “The guy can’t even hobble.”

  But apparently he can run.

  10

  I believe I’ve already mentioned that Skinflick was in love with his first cousin, Denise. He always had been.

  She was two years younger. Skinflick talked about her all the time, often in the context of his Golden Bough bullshit. About how unfair it was that he and Denise couldn’t be together just because of some stupid American prejudice that had no basis in scientific or even historical reality, and how the Sicilians had an expression, “cousins are for cousins,” that was not only more accurate historically but also an excellent piece of advice.* “Every other fucking thing rednecks do, Americans love,” he used to complain.

  After Skinflick and I finished high school we drove across the country to Palos Verdes, south of LA, to visit her.

  Denise’s father, Roger, was Skinflick’s mother’s brother. He was suspicious the moment we got there, and it didn’t help that Skinflick and Denise took every possible opportunity to sneak off—or out, or upstairs—and fuck.

  Denise’s mother, Shirl, was less of a problem, at least in that way. But in regard to hitting on me, and to getting turned on by the constant humping of her daughter by her nephew, she was a lot more of a problem. Not that I was exactly a saint.

  Thankfully, it was Skinflick and Denise who Roger caught in the guesthouse, not me and Shirl. Roger exiled Skinflick from the house. Denise sobbed. In a sordid way it was romantic.

  Skinflick and I backed off all the way to Florida, as if the point of our trip had been time on the beach. We had dinner with my father for a couple of nights running, which was pleasant enough. Silvio was selling boats and real estate at the time, and was in a phase of his life where he kept smiling and spreading his hands and saying, “Who can know about these things? Tell me that.” He may still be in that phase. Last time I spoke to him was when he came to visit me in jail during my trial.*

  Skinflick, meanwhile, continued to bitch and moan about Denise for the rest of the summer—even, charmingly, while we were out with other women.

  He also continued to f
ail to progress athletically. His father kept urging me to teach him to fight, but Skinflick was naturally terrible at combat sports. He would try to protect his face and stomach by twisting away, which exposed his spine, his kidneys, and the back of his skull. His reflexes were good, but without willpower they just made him flinchy.

  Skinflick and I had changed our minds about continuing with school by then and enrolled at Northern New Jersey Community College. We were living in a condo together in Bergen County. We both continued to laugh off Skinflick’s klutziness, since at that point I still respected him for other reasons.

  I saw Denise three more times. Once was in the lobby of a hotel in midtown Manhattan before she and Skinflick went upstairs to fuck. I don’t remember what year that was. The second and third times were in August of 1999, on the night before and then the night of her wedding.

  This was four and a half years after I had gone to Poland. In the meantime I had finished my two-year degree at Northern New Jersey Community College (which Skinflick had left after one year), helped Skinflick run a “record label” (paid for by David Locano) into the ground (it was called Rap Sheet Records, good luck finding anything), and went with Skinflick to work as a paralegal at David Locano’s four-partner law firm, from which we were subsequently fired by a vote of the three other partners, apparently for spending too much money entertaining clients while not doing anything else. Fair enough.

  At the time David Locano was still maintaining to both of us that he didn’t want Skinflick to join the mafia. Which was probably even true, to the extent that any father can really want his child to surpass him or be different from him. But to warn us about what the life was like, and as a penalty for flunking out of the law firm, he sent us to work at a garbage truck dispatch facility in Brooklyn. And it’s hard to see that as anything but a Very Bad Move.

  For one thing, it wasn’t much of a penalty. It was dreary and boring, but it was easy. It gave you a lot of time off. And it was impossible to get fired from, since all we were getting paid for was being connected to David Locano.

  Also, some of the lowlifes, particularly the nostalgic ones, were interesting. Grown men named Sally Knockers or Joey Camaro,* who cowered in front of the blow-dried scumbags who came by doo, free ties a week to pick up half the take. Some of the scumbags were interesting too.

  Kurt Limme comes to mind. Limme was about ten years older than we were. He was undeniably handsome, and well dressed for real, not goombah. He seemed like an uncle you might have in Manhattan who was making a killing as a stockbroker and fucking a lot of women. In reality he was under indictment for a series of extortion schemes involving the installation of cell phone relay towers, but even that seemed to be relatively forward thinking.

  Skinflick fixated on him as a guy who was as cool, cynical, and relaxed—if not quite as smart—as Skinflick was. And who had made it. Limme, meanwhile, being the breakout member of a traditionally low level mob family, appreciated being worshipped by David Locano’s son.

  Limme started taking Skinflick with him on his endless errands in the city, which seemed to me to be mostly shopping trips. I knew I should have been discouraging Skinflick from hanging out with him so much, since among other things Skinflick did a lot of cocaine when he was with Limme, but I had started working jobs for David Locano regularly, and was glad Skinflick had someone to entertain him in my absence.

  Regarding the actual jobs, I’m not going to say too much. I can’t.

  I will say that if it so happened that I killed a dozen or so people—people I wouldn’t be able to talk about now, because the DA didn’t know about them so they weren’t part of my immunity agreement—then these would have been the years during which I did it. Not that I’m saying I did. I’m saying if.

  Furthermore, if I killed these people—if, motherfucking if—I would have made sure that every one of them was some truly evil fuck. A guy who, if you knew he was out there, would make you want to keep your family in a bank vault. David Locano would have known better than to offer me anything else.

  And—last point—I would have done every single one of those jobs right. No shell casings, no latents, no alibi gaps. No bodies, even, for most of them. So don’t even try.

  But anyway.

  Skinflick and I were still working in trash-haul, at least on paper, when he found out Denise was getting married.

  Elisabeth Kübler-Ross at one point said that our comprehension of death passes through five distinct stages—denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.* When Skinflick got the news about Denise, he went straight to sullen and irritable, then started losing weight and spending a lot of time alone.

  As it was, between the girls, the drugs, Kurt Limme, and the fact that we both had other places to stay (I still had my grandparents’ house, he had his parents’), I wasn’t seeing all that much of him anyway, even though we kept our two-bedroom condo in Demarest. But in the week before Denise’s wedding, Skinflick failed to show up to work even once, and I didn’t run into him anywhere else, either. And on the night before the wedding, Kurt Limme called me.

  “Pietro, have you seen Skinflick?” he said.

  “No. He didn’t come to work this week.”

  “I saw him about three days ago.”

  It so happened that I had had lunch with David Locano a day earlier, because he was worried about Limme’s influence on Skinflick, so I knew Locano hadn’t seen Skinflick for a while either. “He’s probably staying with some girl,” I said.

  “Not with Denise getting married,” Limme said.

  “Good point.”

  “I’m worried about him, Pietro.”

  “Why?” I asked. “How much coke did he have on him?”

  Limme said, “I don’t do cocaine or know anybody who does.”

  “Chill out,” I said. “I just want to know if he’s in trouble.”

  There was a pause. “Yeah, he might be,” Limme said.

  “All right. If I hear anything, I’ll call you.”

  “Thanks, Pietro.”

  “Yeah.”

  Twenty minutes later the phone rang. I figured it was Limme again, but it was Skinflick.

  Slurred. “Where are you?” he said.

  “I’m at home. You called me.”

  “Yeah, I was trying all the numbers. Dress up. I’m coming over in a limo. I’ve got a girl for you.”

  I looked at the clock. It was only nine, but whatever this was sounded bad.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Hello?”

  He’d hung up.

  The inside of the limo was like a nightclub lit by penlights, and it took me a moment after I got in to adjust to the darkness. On the squishy leather couch at the back were Skinflick—glistening and pale except beneath his eyes—and Denise. Next to me, facing them, was a young blonde with good posture and strangely muscular bare shoulders and a broad neck. I later found out she’d swum competitively in college, which had ended for her three months earlier.

  Skinflick was in a tuxedo with the shirt open. Denise was in a black sheath. The blonde’s dress was weirder: green satin. “Jesus,” I said, leaning over to kiss Denise as the car started up. “I didn’t realize it was prom night.”

  “You look good enough, honey,” Denise said. “This is Lisa.”

  “Hi Lisa.”

  Lisa kissed my cheek and breathed hot alcohol on me, saying she’d heard a lot about me.

  “You too,” I lied.

  “Lisa’s the maid of honor,” Skinflick said.

  “No shit,” I said.

  Skinflick keyed the intercom. “Georgie—you know where we’re going?”

  “Yes sir, Mr. Locano.”

  “Where are we going?” I asked, as we started moving.

  “It’s a surprise,” Skinflick said.

  I looked at Lisa, who had “weak link” written all over her as far as information pumping went, but she just shrugged at me as she leaned toward where Denise was holding out a coke spoon for her. It was a weird
moment.

  The limo turned north at the first big intersection, so the Midtown Tunnel was out. Denise scooped some coke for me as Skinflick licked a joint closed.

  “Let me have a drink first,” I said.

  By the time we got to Coney I was completely drunk and stoned, and everyone else was worse. Skinflick was talking about coke spoons. Who made them, and whether they came as part of a whole tiny cutlery set. The driver, Georgie—he was a guy I knew, with a ponytail and a full chauffeur’s outfit—parked in the same lot I’d parked in when I killed the Russians in 1993. After he let us out he got back in the car to wait.

  I told Skinflick I didn’t want to go to Little Odessa.

  “We’re not going to Little Odessa,” he said. He took Denise’s arm and led her out across the boardwalk, toward the ocean.

  The Coney Island boardwalk has to be one of the widest in the world. When you’re as fucked up as we were it seems endless. And that’s when you’re on top of it. Once we made it down the stairs to the beach, and the women got their high-heeled shoes off, Skinflick took a small Maglite out of his pants pocket and announced that we were going back the way we came, but underneath the boardwalk.

  Like in the fucking Motown song.

  “No fucking way,” Denise said. “I’ll cut my foot. I’m getting married tomorrow.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Skinflick said. “If he doesn’t take you I will.”

  “I’ll step on a crack needle.”

  “It’ll be worth it.”

  “To you, maybe.”

  “Just step where I’m stepping.”

  Skinflick headed in without looking back, and Denise followed him. It was that or lose the benefit of the flashlight he was holding. Lisa went next, with me in the back.

  It was creep-out city down there. Somehow the Motown song doesn’t mention the semivisible homeless people, or how they fast-shamble away from you like they’re scared of something only they know is down there.

  Still, even in the darkness and the moving shadows, and even with all the columns, Skinflick got us to the other side pretty quickly. It was like he knew his way around. At the time I thought it was just that he was so depressed about Denise getting married that he didn’t give a fuck what happened to him or any of the rest of us, but when we reached the end—a chain-link fence that had long strips of plastic woven through it vertically—he already knew where the loose corner was. While Denise and Lisa complained about how cold the sand was, Skinflick pushed the corner in and held it open. Denise went first, and suddenly we were all back under the glare of the New York night sky.