Beat the Reaper

by Josh Bazell

  We were on asphalt, at the rear of some kind of complex that looked like a cross between a power plant and a high school. A jagged line of cylindrical cement buildings, two or three stories tall, connected to each other at ground level by aboveground tunnels. No windows, just pipes coming out through the walls. There was a hum, and a strange smell of rot.

  Also, strangely, there was an amphitheater off in the distance. You could see its aluminum bleachers from below.

  “What is this, a sewage plant?” I asked. I couldn’t even tell where we were in relation to the parking lot.

  “Not even close,” Skinflick said. He walked straight for the largest building. Denise and Lisa were still pulling their shoes on, and they cursed as they hopped after him.

  By the time we all caught up, Skinflick was at an entranceway that stuck out of the building. And he had a key.

  When he opened the door there was a blast of warm air like an exhalation. It smelled like ocean. Like ocean concentrated.

  In the beam of Skinflick’s flashlight, we could see a hallway that followed the curve of the exterior wall. The place looked like the inside of a submarine: metal pipes freshly painted blue and wet cement, with a lot of dials and a couple of tanks of some sort. “Shut the door behind you,” Skinflick said as he started through it. The sea smell was far more intense than it had been on the beach.

  I said, “Skinflick, are we in the Aquarium?”

  “Sort of,” Skinflick said. He waited for me to close the door.

  “What do you mean, sort of?”

  “It’s kind of a back door,” he said.

  The hall ended, and a flight of yellow metal stairs took its place, continuing up along the inside of the wall until the darkness and the curvature of the building made it vanish.

  “It smells disgusting in here,” Lisa said.

  “I think it smells like pussy,” Denise said. She was into it now, joining Skinflick in his whacked-out mood. She took his hand and started pulling him up the stairs.

  It didn’t smell like pussy. It smelled like the front of a cave that had a giant sleeping in it.

  “I don’t think this is a good idea,” Lisa said.

  Denise looked down at her and put a finger to her lips. “Shh. Pietro will take care of you.” To me she turned her fingers into a “V” and flicked her tongue out through them. Then she and Skinflick clanked up out of sight, though we could still see their flashlight moving up the curve of the wall.

  “Fuck,” Lisa said.

  “We can stay here if you want,” I said to her.

  “Yeah, right.” She looked back along the hall, which was now consumed by darkness. She pushed her sweat-lank hair off her face. “Will you go first?” she said.

  “Sure.” I started up the stairs.

  It soon became completely dark, and as I slowed she came up close behind me and held on around my waist. She had very solid arms. Just as it started to turn me on, though, my foot clawed air, and I realized we were at the top.

  “Denise!” Lisa hissed.

  “Through here,” Denise said. Her voice was throaty, and echoey. Lisa and I followed it through a low arched hallway, trying not to bang our heads, and suddenly we could see again, even though Skinflick had his flashlight off. Because the room into which we emerged had skylights in the ceiling.

  “Room” might be the wrong word, but whatever it was, it was huge and hexagonal, and the grated metal catwalk we were on ran all the way around it like a balcony, leaving an open space in the center that was maybe thirty feet across.

  Five feet below the catwalk, not just in the center but also below the grate we were standing on, there was water. Water glinting from the skylights but otherwise pure black.

  We were above a giant water tank.

  The whole fucking building was a water tank.

  Skinflick and Denise were leaning over the railing, he behind her with his arms around her. “What do you think?” he said.

  “What is this place?” I asked him. It sounded like a church.

  “The shark tank.”

  “The one with the chest from the Andrea Doria in it?”

  “Yeah, but that’s been gone for years.”

  I was amazed. I’d seen the shark tank from below, through the glass, a dozen times, though not since I was a child. But from that side the Aquarium had seemed like one large indoor space. And now I realized that that was an illusion, allowed by the tunnel-like hallways that ran between the freestanding tanks.

  The largest of the tanks was the one we were now above. I remembered it as a vortex of giant, nightmare animals circling past the glass with dead eyes, not needing to visibly propel themselves. In the center of the tank, on the sand, had been the treasure chest from the Andrea Doria.

  “What happened to the chest from the Andrea Doria?” I said.

  “Some dipshit opened it live on national TV. Before you got cable.”

  “No shit. What was in it?”

  “What do you think was in it? They let it sit on the bottom of a shark tank the whole time we were kids. It was filled with mud.”

  Lisa cleared her throat. “Are there sharks in there now?” she said.

  “Lisa, it’s a shark tank,” Denise said.

  Skinflick turned his Maglite back on and pointed it down at the surface. It mostly just reflected back up.

  “Can we turn on the lights?” I said. There were heavy arc lamps clipped to support beams running just under the skylights.

  Skinflick flicked the flashlight beam over them, then clicked it off. “I don’t think so. They’re on a timer.”

  Lisa looked down at her feet. “Is this thing sturdy?” she said.

  Skinflick jumped up and pounded his feet down on the grate, making it ring out and vibrate.

  “Feels sturdy,” he said.

  “Thank you, Adam,” Lisa said. “Now I’m going to vomit.”

  “It gets better,” Skinflick said. He led the way around the ledge, past an open, freestanding metal closet that had bunched up wetsuits and a couple of scuba tanks in it. To a segment of grating that didn’t have a railing, just a yellow nylon rope. He unhooked one end of the rope.

  “Adam, what are you doing?” Denise said.

  I stepped back. It was instinctive—you couldn’t look at that section of ledge without thinking of falling in.

  “I’m lowering the ramp,” Skinflick said.

  The ramp was folded back up onto the grate. Skinflick lifted it and let it drop out over the water.

  The booming clang as the ramp bounced into place—not horizontally but pointed down toward the water, at a forty-five-degree angle—lasted forever, and the vibrating deck felt like it was going to hurl us into the water.

  “Look, there’s wetsuits,” Skinflick said. “Anyone want to go for a swim?”

  No one said anything.

  “No?” he said. “Well I’m going to put my foot in.” Then he actually started to step out onto the ramp.

  “Adam, don’t!” Denise shouted.

  “You’ve got to be kidding,” Lisa said.

  I said, “Skinflick. Get the fuck away from that thing.” I was gearing up to grab him, but even getting near the section without a railing was frightening.

  Skinflick lowered himself to his ass and started crab-walking down toward the end of the ramp. “Somebody take my hand,” he said. “It’s too scary.”

  “No way,” I said.

  “I’ll do it,” Denise said. She went and lay down by the top of the ramp, and reached one hand down to Skinflick. Then she had to look away. He took hold of it and started to work his foot over the edge.

  “Skinflick, don’t do it,” I said.

  He grunted. There was a good ten inches of space between the end of the ramp and the surface of the water, so reaching it with his foot while retaining hold of Denise’s hand required him to fully stretch out.

  He kicked the toe of one shoe in the water, then pulled his foot back onto the ramp. “See?” he said. “No big deal.
”

  Almost instantly there was an explosion in the water where his foot had been, then another one. In seconds the whole surface was roiling with enormous, slimy bodies. They looked like giant snakes sliding over each other in a bucket.

  “Oh shit! Oh shit! Oh shit!” Skinflick said, scrambling back up the ramp and all the way to the wall, taking Denise with him into his arms.

  Now, as the water bucked and dropped in waves, you could see sharks all over the place. One rolled and broke the surface with a fin, wet and shiny in the light from the ceiling panes.

  Eventually the water settled, and they were hidden again.

  Skinflick started to laugh. “Holy motherfucking shit,” he said. “That is the scariest thing that has ever happened to me.”

  Denise thumped him in the chest, and he grabbed her again and kissed her.

  My own heart was pounding, and I realized Lisa and I had our arms around each other too.

  Skinflick let his hands slide down Denise’s back. “Okay,” he said to me and Lisa. “Which side do you guys want?”

  “Like, what, like we’re supposed to have sex now?” Lisa said.

  “It’s a bachelorette party. So, yes.”

  “Jesus fucking Christ.”

  “It’s not supposed to be romantic,” Skinflick said. “It’s supposed to be primal. Which it is. Right, Denise?”

  “Fuck yeah,” she said.

  “So which side do you want?” he said.

  Lisa said, “Denise—”

  Denise looked at her, and shouted, “Choose a fucking side!”

  So she did. The one with the wetsuits, and the cabinet.

  Which you could sit in and hold each other, and eventually even fuck in, without having to look down through the grate and see the water. Even if you could still smell it.

  How young, or crazy, or callow do you have to be to have sex in a place that feels like you’re suspended over Satan’s eye?

  I can’t defend it. All I can do is point out that twenty-four hours later I met Magdalena, and my life became a completely different thing.

  11

  At the nursing station outside Assman and Mosby’s room, a kid in a “volunteer” smock approaches me. He’s a City College student from the neighborhood who believes he’ll someday go to med school and become a neurosurgeon. He wants to be the grandfather who works his whole life to establish the family fortune. And maybe he will be.

  I know all this because I once asked him why he wears an Afro pruned into the shape of a brain.

  “Hey, Dr. Brown—”

  “No time,” I tell him.

  “No sweat, just wanted to tell you I took that patient down to PT.”

  PT is physical therapy. I stop. “What patient?”

  The kid checks his clipboard. “Mosby.”

  “Who told you to take Mosby to PT?”

  “You did. It was in the orders.”

  “Orders? Fuck. How’d you get him there?”

  “Wheelchair.”

  Fuck!

  I turn to the nursing station. “Did somebody bring Mosby his chart, then take it back and put it in the orders rack?” All four people working there avoid my eyes, like they always do when something goes wrong. It’s like something from a nature documentary.

  “Did you actually take him into PT?” I say to the kid.

  “No. They told me to leave him in the waiting room while they found his appointment.”

  “All right. You want to come on a trip?”

  “Yes!” he says.

  I turn to my med students, who are just now coming out of Mosby and Assman’s room. “Okay, guys,” I say. “Anyone asks where Mosby is, tell them he’s in Radiology. If they say they already checked Radiology, tell them you meant PT. In the meantime, steal me some antibiotics for when the lab reports back on that shit I just got stuck with. I want a third-generation cephalosporin, a macrolide, and a fluoroquinolone. I also want some antivirals*—everything you can get a hold of. Figure out some combination that won’t kill me. If you can’t, just use what I wrote for Assman, and double it. Got it?”

  “Yes, sir,” one of them says.

  “Good. Don’t be freaked out.”

  I turn to the kid with the brain Afro and say, “Come with me.”

  In the elevator I ask the kid his name again. “Mershawn,” he says. I don’t ask him to spell it.

  I’ve made him put on his overcoat. I’m wearing a lab coat that has “Lottie Luise, MD,” stitched on the front of it. I don’t know who Lottie Luise is, but she leaves her coat in convenient places. Or used to.

  “Mershawn, don’t get your tongue pierced,” I mention as we get to ground level.

  “Fuck that shit,” Mershawn says.

  In front of the hospital it’s snowing and sleeting and everything’s a mess. Visibility, as they say, is low.

  I don’t know what I was expecting—well, wheelchair tracks in the slush, now that I think of it—but the sidewalk’s salted down and thirty people a minute are passing by. Plus there’s a big metal awning that runs for fifty yards along the front. The sidewalk is wet with black water.

  “Which way did he go?” I say. Thinking: If he even came out this entrance, since there’s at least one on every face of the building.

  “This way,” Mershawn says.

  “Why?”

  “It’s downhill.”

  “Huh,” I say. “I’m glad I brought you already.”

  Around the corner, the side street drops off toward the river even more steeply than the avenue we’re on now. Mershawn nods, so we head down it.

  A couple of blocks along, there’s a twenty-five-foot patch of slush capable of holding prints. We know this because there are what look a fuck of a lot like wheelchair tracks running down it. The tracks angle toward a graffiti-covered metal door in a building with the windows boarded over, but die out before they actually reach there.

  I go and bang on the door. Mershawn looks up at the building dubiously. “What is this place?” he says.

  “The Pole Vault,” I tell him.

  “What’s that?”

  “Are you serious?”

  He just looks at me.

  “It’s a gay bar,” I say.

  The door gets opened by a fifty-year-old black man with graying hair and a barrel chest. He’s wearing a flannel work shirt and bifocals. “Help you?” he says, angling his head back to look at us.

  “We’re looking for an elderly black man in a wheelchair,” I say.

  For a moment the man just stands there, whistling a tune I don’t recognize. Then he says, “Why?”

  Mershawn says, “Because neither of us got one for Christmas, and they’re all sold out at Elderly-Black-Men-in-Wheelchairs-R-Us.”

  I say, “He’s a patient at the hospital, and he escaped.”

  “Mental patient?”

  “No. He’s got gangrene in his feet. Though he is demented.”

  The man thinks for a moment. Again with the whistling.

  “I don’t know why, but something about you idiots strikes me as well intentioned,” he finally says. “He went down toward the park.”

  “Why’d he come here?” I ask.

  “He asked for a blanket.”

  “Did you give him one?”

  “I gave him a jacket a customer left. Put it over him.” He looks around, and interrupts a new bout of whistling with a shiver. “That all?”

  “Yeah,” I say. “But we owe you one. You should come in and let us check out your emphysema.”

  The man squints down his nose at the “Lottie Luise, MD” monogramming on the front of my white coat. “Thank you Dr. Luise,” he says.

  “I’m Peter Brown. This is Mershawn. We’ll get you in and out for free.”

  The man gives a wheezy laugh that tails off in a choke. “Figure I got where I am today by not going to the hospital,” he says.

  “Fair enough,” I have to say.

  On the way down Mershawn asks me how I knew the guy had emphysema,
and I list the physical signs he was showing. Then I say, “Teaching point, Mershawn. Who whistles?”

  “Assholes?”

  “Okay. Who else?”

  Mershawn thinks about it. “People who are thinking about something, then subliminally start thinking of a song about that thing. Like when you’re doing a cranial nerve exam and you start whistling ‘Keep Ya Head Up.’”

  “Good,” I say. “But a lot of people also whistle because they’re subconsciously trying to increase the air pressure in their lungs, so they can force more oxygen through the tissues.”

  “No shit.”

  “Shit. You know the dwarfs in Snow White who work in a mine?”

  “Yeah, okay.”

  “If you had silicosis, you’d whistle your ass off too.”

  “Damn.”

  “That’s right.”

  For the rest of the block I feel like Prof. Marmoset.

  Duke Mosby, when we find him, is on a flagstoned pavilion overlooking the Hudson from the heights of Riverside Park. It’s a hell of a view, but the river’s charging heavily for it, spitting back a wet and flurrying wind. The kind you can feel through the vents in your plastic clogs. Snowflakes are skittering up from the ground at the same time they’re wheeling in from the sky. They’re lodged in Mosby’s hair and eyelashes.

  “What’s going on, Mr. Mosby?” I shout to him above the wind.

  He turns, and smiles. “Not much, Doctor. You?”

  “You know Mershawn?”

  “Sure do,” he says without looking at him. “Doctor, tell me this. Why is it so important to look at a river now and again?”

  “I don’t know,” I say. “I think I may have missed that lecture in medical school.”

  “I think it’s because we all have to see something God made once in a while. Like maybe if they put some plants around the POW camp, people wouldn’t break out so often.”