Beat the Reaper

by Josh Bazell

  “If I have to see something God made,” Mershawn says, “I’d rather look at some pussy.”

  “You see any pussy around here?” Mosby asks him.

  “No sir.”

  “Then I guess we’re stuck with the river.” Mosby notices Mershawn’s haircut, and says, “What the hell is that on your head?”

  It occurs to me I might be losing my mind.

  “Can we go back to the hospital now?” I say.

  In the lobby I try Prof. Marmoset again, mostly as a reflex. I set my teeth for Firefly, but he picks up the phone himself.

  “Yeah, hi, Carl —” he says.

  “Professor Marmoset?”

  “Yes?” He’s confused. “Who is this?”

  “It’s Ishmael,” I say. “Hold on one second.” I turn to Mershawn. “Can I leave this on you?” I ask him.

  “I can handle it, Doc,” he says.

  “I believe you,” I say, looking in his eyes, which sometimes works. “Take him to PT, wait twenty minutes, ask why they haven’t called him for his appointment. When they tell you he doesn’t have one take him back up to the floor and say PT made a scheduling error. You got that?”

  “I got it.”

  “I believe you,” I say again. Then I turn away and uncover the phone. “Professor Marmoset?”

  “Ishmael! I can’t talk long, I’m expecting a call. What’s up?”

  What is up? I’m so happy to actually be talking to him that I can’t precisely remember where I’d planned to begin.

  “Ishmael?”

  “I’ve got a patient with signet cell cancer,” I say.

  “That’s bad. Okay.”

  “Yeah. A guy named Friendly’s doing the laparotomy. I looked him up—”

  “John Friendly?”

  “Yes.”

  “And this is a patient of yours?”

  “Yes.”

  “Get someone else to do it,” he says.

  “Why?” I ask.

  “Because presumably you want him to live.”

  “But Friendly’s the highest rated GI surgeon in New York.”

  “Maybe in a magazine,” Prof. Marmoset says. “He inflates his statistics. He does things like bring his own blood supplies into the OR so he doesn’t have to report transfusions. If we’re talking about reality, he’s a menace.”

  “Jesus,” I say. “He didn’t want the patient to have a DNR order.”

  “Exactly. When your patient’s a vegetable, Friendly won’t have to report him as a fatality.”

  “Fuck! How do I get him off the case?”

  “Let’s think about it,” Prof. Marmoset says. “Okay. You call a GI guy named Leland Marker at Cornell. He’s probably skiing, but his office will be able to track him down. Tell his scheduler Bill Clinton needs a laparotomy and is hiding out at Manhattan Catholic to avoid the press. Tell him Clinton’s using a fake name, and give him the name of your patient. Marker’ll be pissed as hell when he figures it out, but by then it’ll be too late, and he’ll have to operate.”

  “I don’t think I have time for that,” I say. “Friendly’s operating in a couple of hours.”

  “Well, you could drop some GHB in his coffee, but from what I’ve heard he probably wouldn’t notice.”

  I lean against the wall. There’s a ringing in one of my ears, and I’m starting to get vertigo.

  “Professor Marmoset,” I say. “I need this patient to live.”

  “Sounds like someone needs some distancing techniques.”

  “No. I mean I need this patient to live.”

  There’s a pause. Prof. Marmoset says, “Ishmael, is everything all right?”

  “No,” I say. “I’ve got to see this patient through.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s a long story. But I have to.”

  “Should I be worried about you?”

  “No. It wouldn’t do any good.”

  There’s another pause while he decides what to do with this.

  “All right,” he says. “But only because I have a couple other calls coming in. I want you to call me when you can tell me about it. Leave a message. In the meantime, I think you should scrub in.”

  “Scrub in? I haven’t done surgery since med school. And I sucked at it even then.”

  “Right, I remember that,” he says. “But you can’t be any worse than John Friendly. Good luck.”

  Then he hangs up.

  12

  I met Magdalena the night of Denise’s wedding, August 13th, 1999. She was in the string sextet, playing viola. Ordinarily she played in a quartet, but her booking agent handled a couple of different quartets, so when people wanted a sextet, which was usually for a wedding, the agent made one up. Denise’s wedding had a sextet and, for after dinner, a DJ.

  It was a big wedding. It was at a country club on Long Island that the groom’s family belonged to, since Denise had decided to do it back East, where most of her extended family was. Skinflick and I were seated about a mile away from her.

  Somehow everybody seemed to understand that it was my job to babysit Skinflick, and that I was supposed to keep him either too sober or too drunk to do anything embarrassing. It was a pretty sordid job, and it got old fast. I was almost as hung over as he was, and I was tired of hearing him complain. Half of me thought if he was serious he really should make a scene, and steal Denise away. Ignore the constraints of tradition and family and be true for once to his Golden Bough bullshit.

  But rituals turn us all into fucking idiots. Like those birds that sleep with their heads facing backwards because their ancestors slept with their heads under their wings. Plutarch says carrying new wives across thresholds is stupid because we don’t remember that it refers to the rape of the Sabine women—and that’s fucking Plutarch, two thousand years ago. We still draw the Reaper with a scythe. We should draw him driving a John Deere for Archer Daniels Midland.

  So maybe it’s understandable that Skinflick felt unable to step in front of a parade that went thousands of years back. It still made me kind of sick, though, and the humidity didn’t help. At one point I took the long way back from the bar to have some time away from him.

  That’s when I saw Magdalena.

  I’m not sure this is any of your business, but if you really want me to talk about her, here it is.

  Physically: She had black hair. She had a widow’s peak. She had slanted eyes. She was small. Bone-thin except for her lower body, which was muscled from running. Before I met her I’d always liked big blondes. She kicked all their asses instantly.

  The white shirt she wore to play viola was too big for her, so it was rolled at the sleeves and open at the neck. You could see her collarbones. When she played she kept her hair back with a velvet band, but locks of it always escaped to arc forward from her widow’s peak. When I first saw her they looked like antennae.

  That night she was pale, but whenever she spent time in the sun she would turn brown, like she was from Egypt, or Mars. The waist of her bikini bottoms would stretch from one sharp hip bone to the other and float a centimeter off her stomach, so you could slide a hand down there. She had full lips. I’d kill everyone I ever killed all over again for those lips.

  None of this says anything about her. It doesn’t even tell you how she looked.

  She was Romanian. Born there, moved to the U.S. at fourteen, late enough to keep a bit of an accent. She was feverishly Catholic. She went to church every Sunday and got sweat on her upper lip when she prayed.

  It may strike you as odd that someone—the only one—I loved like that was so religious. I loved even that about her, though. It was hard to argue in her presence that the world didn’t have some kind of magic going on, and she was completely undogmatic. To her, the fact that she was Catholic and I was not had to be as much God’s intention as everything else. God wanted us to be together, and would never make her love someone He didn’t love also.

  Prior to meeting Magdalena when I thought of Catholicism I thought of dusty icons, cor
rupt popes, and The Exorcist. But where I imagined creepy wooden statues of St. Margaret, she imagined St. Margaret herself, in the fields of Scotland, with the butterflies. What Magdalena was to me, the Virgin Mary was to her. It never made me jealous. It just made me grateful to be around her.

  Speaking of the Sabine women, by the way, my favorite thing to do was carry Magdalena around. In the days when I had the condo in Demarest and Skinflick was never around, I used to do it for hours. Carry her naked in both arms, Creature from the Black Lagoon–style, or else seated on my bent right arm, facing forward with one of her own arms looped back around my neck. Sometimes I would put my arms out straight against the wall, and she would sit facing me with her thighs over my forearms, so I could lick her from her pussy to the sides of her neck, and get at her hip bones, and her ribcage.

  I’m still not making this anywhere close to clear.

  We knew the second we saw each other. How depressing is that? How far from anything that will ever happen again, to me or anyone else?

  I saw her and I couldn’t stop staring at her, and she kept staring back. I worried I just happened to be standing in the spot her eyes gravitated toward when she played, so I moved, and she followed me. During the times she wasn’t playing, when she put her viola down, her mouth would open just a tiny bit.

  Then Skinflick came up behind me and said, “Hey, that faggot’s going off alone.”

  “Who?” I said, still looking at Magdalena.

  “Denise’s ‘husband.’”

  Faggot was a charming mannerism Skinflick had picked up hanging out with Kurt Limme. He’d started out using it ironically, like he was mocking goombah bigots, but it had stuck to him. At least he didn’t use it to refer to gay people.

  “Okay,” I said.

  “Let’s go follow him.”

  “No thanks.”

  “Whatever, asshole,” he said. “I’ll go do it myself.”

  A few moments later I said “Fuck,” and pulled myself away to go after him.

  I saw Skinflick heading around the back of the catering tent. I followed.

  Denise’s new husband was standing there in the darkness, smoking a joint, alone. He was a blond guy with a ponytail and rimless glasses who worked as a computer animator or something in Los Angeles. I think his name was Steven, though who really cares.

  “He’s a motherfucking pothead?” Skinflick said.

  The guy looked about twenty-six, which was four years older than we were, and six years older than Denise. He said, “You Adam?”

  “Fuckin right,” Skinflick said.

  “You’re the mob cousin?”

  “The what?” Skinflick said.

  “Must have the wrong guy. What do you do for a living?”

  “Are you giving me fucking lip?” Skinflick shouted.

  The guy flicked the remains of his joint away and put his hands in his pockets. I was impressed. He might have been able to kick Skinflick’s ass if Skinflick was alone, but Skinflick was not alone.

  “I’ll have Pietro kick your head so far up your ass you’ll be able to see out your own mouth!” Skinflick said.

  “No he won’t,” I said, laying a hand on Skinflick’s shoulder. To the guy, I said, “He’s a bit drunk.”

  “I can see that,” the guy said.

  Skinflick slapped my hand off. “Fuck both of you.”

  I took Skinflick by the arm, too hard to slap off. “You’re welcome,” I said to him. “Say congratulations.”

  “Eat shit,” Skinflick said. To the guy, he said, “You better treat her right.”

  The guy was wise enough to not answer as I dragged Skinflick back to the wedding.

  I took him to our table and made him eat two Xanax while I watched. When they kicked in I left him there and went back to watch the sextet.

  At nine o’clock they stopped playing so the DJ could take over and people could dance. They all stood up and started packing their instruments and music stands.

  I went to the edge of the stage. Magdalena blushed and avoided my eyes as she packed. “Hello?” I said.

  She froze. The others stared.

  “Can I talk to you?” I said.

  “We’re not allowed to talk to the guests,” one of the other ones said. The woman who had been playing cello. She had an underbite.

  “Then can I call you?” I said to Magdalena.

  Magdalena shook her head. “I’m sorry.” It was the first time I heard her accent.

  “Can I give you my number? Will you call me?”

  She looked at me.

  She said “Yes.”

  Later, I was standing around stunned, and Kurt Limme came up to me.

  “Noticed you hitting on the help,” he said.

  “I didn’t know you were invited to this,” I said.

  “I came here to support Skinflick. This is tough on him.”

  “Yeah, I know. I’ve been with him all night.”

  Limme shrugged. “I was busy. I was fucking his aunt in one of the Port-a-Potties.”

  “Shirl?” I said.

  He looked uncomfortable. “Yeah.”

  “Yuck for her,” I said. “I hope she was drunk.”

  But I didn’t really care.

  Love was in the air.

  I spent the next three days in Demarest, killing my heavy bag and waiting for her to call. When David Locano called instead and asked me to meet him at the old Russian Baths on 10th Street in Manhattan, I jumped at it just to have something to do.

  Locano was using the Baths regularly at that time, on the theory that the FBI couldn’t build a microphone capable of surviving a steam room. This seemed overly optimistic—it was before 9/11, when we all learned how incompetent Louis Freeh’s FBI really was—but we went with it.

  For my part I kind of liked the steam room. It was dirty but it gave meetings a kind of ancient Rome feeling.

  “Adam’s getting his own apartment in Manhattan,” Locano said when I got there. He looked depressed. He was hunched forward in his towel skirt.

  “Yeah,” I said. I sat down next to him.

  “Were you going to tell me?”

  “I figured you knew.”

  “Have you seen it?”

  “Yeah, I went with him to look at it.”

  That made him wince. “Why didn’t he tell me?”

  “I don’t know. You should ask him.”

  “Yeah, right. I can barely talk to him. Even when I get to see him.”

  “He’s going through a phase.”

  Which was true. Skinflick was spending all his time with Kurt Limme. But I wasn’t too upset about it. I had my own shit going on, and in a weird way the fact that Skinflick would rebel against me as well as his father was flattering. It showed that Skinflick saw me as an influence on him, just as he’d been an influence on me.

  His father felt otherwise, though. “It’s that fuck Kurt Limme,” he said. “He wants to put Adam in the business.”

  “Skinflick won’t go through with it,” I said.

  He nodded slowly. Neither one of us believed me.

  “I really don’t want it to happen,” Locano said.

  “Neither do I.”

  He lowered his voice. “You know it means he’d have to kill somebody.”

  I let that sit for a minute. “What about getting him an exemption?” I said.

  “Don’t jerk my chain,” Locano said. “You know there aren’t any exemptions.”

  I did know that, I guess.

  It still freaked me out to hear him admit it.

  “So what can we do?” I said.

  “We can’t let him do it.”

  “Right, but how?”

  Locano looked away from me, and whispered. I couldn’t hear him.

  I said, “Excuse me?”

  “I want you to kill Limme.”

  “What?”

  “I’ll pay you fifty grand.”

  “No way. You should know better than to ask me that.”

  “A hundred grand.
Name it.”

  “I don’t do that shit.”

  “It’s not just for Adam. Limme is bad news.”

  “He’s bad news? Who gives a shit?”

  “He’s a cold-blooded killer.”

  “How’s that?”

  “He shot a Russian grocery clerk in the face.”

  “To get made?”

  “What difference does that make?”

  “It makes a shitload of difference. You’re telling me Limme shot someone what, five years ago? That sucks. He deserves to die for it, and I hope he at least goes to jail for it. But it doesn’t give me the right to kill him. It doesn’t give you the right, either. If you feel that strongly, call the cops.”

  “You know I can’t do that,” he said.

  “Well I can’t murder someone for being a bad role model for Skinflick. Who’d you kill to get made?”

  His voice turned hard. “That’s none of your fucking business.”

  “Whatever,” I said.

  “What the fuck’s gotten into you?” he said. Then, a moment later, “I hear you and Limme spent some time together at Denise’s wedding.”

  “We spent about thirty seconds insulting each other. I hate that dick.”

  “And Adam fucking worships him,” Locano said. “It’s gonna get him killed, or sent to jail.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Well maybe you should have thought about that twenty years ago.”

  What can I say?

  Your best friend’s dad. Somewhere along the way you start to think of him as kind of like your own dad, or your idea of what your own dad should be. You come to believe that he likes you, and that you can trust him, and even talk shit to him.

  You never think This guy’s a killer, and he’s smart. You piss him off, he’ll turn on you. Like that.

  You never think it in time, I mean.

  When I got back to my apartment there was a message.

  “Hello. This is Magdalena.” Breathy, like she was keeping her voice down. Then a pause, then a hang-up. Nothing else. No number.

  It flipped me out. I played it five or six times, then called Barbara Locano, then called Shirl, feeling weird about the Limme thing. Shirl gave me the name of the wedding planner in Manhattan who had hired the sextet.

  The wedding planner told me from the cell phone in her car that she didn’t give out contacts, “for their privacy.” She said, “I mean, I’m sure you’ll find a perfectly nice orchestra if you arrange your own wedding.”