Death and the Intern

by Jeremy Hanson-Finger

  Over the course of the morning he caffeinates, he mixes, he induces, he paralyzes, he intubates, he monitors, he repeats. Different developing regions of the world blend their aromas in his work mug. (He has left his favourite, the “Induce like a Motherfucker” one, with the text hand-lettered like a sixties concert poster into a syringe shape, at his parents’ house in Victoria—hidden away in his night table since his parents wouldn’t approve of the language.) Clear liquids go into veins, eyes roll back, oxygen hisses through tubes, knives carve into abdomens and legs and chests and arms, and unhealthy bits of people come out and are deposited on trays. Computer displays beep and blink and warble but stay more or less steady. Nobody dies or, at least, nobody dies while Janwar is monitoring them. He isn’t sure what happens to them afterwards, but they are healthy when they leave his care. Constable Gupta is keeping the peace. For now.

  Janwar and Fang both get out of their respective operations at the same time. Karan gives Fang the evil eye as she passes him.

  “Asshat,” Fang mutters.

  “What was that for?” Janwar asks.

  “Oh, just the usual surgeon-anaesthesiologist conflict. All about that scrill. I mean, I don’t make that much yet, but I’m gonna pass him in turbo mode. Surgery is fail.”

  For lunch in the Tulip Cafe Janwar chooses Bavarian lentil soup, a tuna salad sandwich with flecks of green onions, and a slice of cantaloupe. Fang and Janwar sit at a two-person table, surrounded by so many other staff wearing light mauve scrubs that an outside observer might mistake the cafe for being full of tulips. Janwar’s own scrub pants are riding in the sweet spot, his paramedic shears not dragging the waist down, and in the air-conditioned chill of the hospital, the extra layer of fabric is welcome.

  “Hey, Fang.” Janwar lays down his sandwich. “I have a question for you.”

  “Shoot away, Cowboy.”

  Janwar is the least Wild West of anyone he knows, except that sometimes he wears double denim, and while he’s seen others chastised for doing so, nobody thinks it’s a problem when he does it—but as nicknames go, Cowboy isn’t bad. He’ll roll with it, or gallop with it, or canter, or whatever it is that horses do.

  “I know when you used to get someone’s number, they expected you to call.”

  “Yes.”

  “But now they expect you to text.”

  “Yes.”

  “And it’s kind of weird and creepy to call, even though it wouldn’t have been, say, five years ago.”

  “Yes. That sounds right to me. Calling is fail. I don’t remember the last time I had a phone call with someone who wasn’t a bestie or family. Usually it’s all ‘9 p.m.—new text message from unknown number: hey babysex dis is Mitch good to meet you last night you are cute wanna hang tonight,’ with no punctuation and letters and numbers instead of words, and then after a while it’s like ‘1 a.m.—new text message from Mitch: hey sweetflanks I want you come over.’ And ‘sweetflanks’ would be spelled with an X.”

  “And you like that? Also, do you only date historical re-enactors with flip phones? Nobody uses textspeak anymore because of autocorrect. It’s harder to misspell things than it is to spell them correctly.” Janwar picks at his sandwich.

  Fang sighs. “That’s just how it is. It’s not a matter of liking it. It’s the register of our times. Once I was seeing an emergency room paediatrician—”

  “Aren’t you a little too old to—”

  “You don’t stop with the jokes, do you. What was your question?”

  “I guess it’s not so much a question, more just talking something out. See, I’d prefer to call this girl—”

  “The one from last night?”

  “Yeah. It seems more honourable. But it’s not, because I don’t want to interrupt her, she might not be prepared, and so on. And”—he looks at his watch—“enough time has probably gone by. I mean, it’s alien to me to wait. Not so much that there’s anything wrong with waiting, but like if I strategize at all, if anything about romance is strategized, I go down this hyper-rational scientific path and I lose track of what I actually feel—”

  “Just text your tall pretty white girl now, Janwar.”

  Is that jealousy? Fang isn’t interested in what Brown can do for her, it seems, but maybe her testy expression is a symptom of wider-ranging racial jealousy. Like, even if she thinks she’s pretty herself, and she is, she’s been outpickupped by tall blondes one too many times and has an inferiority complex about it.

  A few tables away, Janwar spots Shaughnessy and Aspen. They’re deep in conversation, but turned toward him and Fang, instead of across from each other like normal people. “Cheating,” it’s called in theatre, Janwar remembers from his role in the pit orchestra in Evita. Janwar feels a chill beyond the air conditioning. He looks at his hands. Still chapped and now that he’s thinking about them, itchy.

  “If you’re going to worry so much about this bitch,” Fang is saying, “you should just text her now. Like, she might think you’re anxious if you text too early, but since you are anxious, you could get boned by your anxiety if you wait too long.”

  “Forgive me for asking this, Fang, but do you have the same kind of anxiety? Since you nailed it—that’s exactly the way I think sometimes.”

  Janwar chances another look over at Shaughnessy and Aspen. They’ve stopped speaking. Aspen has her cellphone out. She’s holding it with the camera, facing Janwar. Neither she nor Shaughnessy flinches or even seems to register Janwar looking right at them.

  “Janwar,” Fang says. “I am an Asian doctor and my parents are Asian doctors. That’s all the environmental factors you need. I’ve got mad OCD.”

  “Fair enough.” Janwar lifts his sandwich and puts it back down. “That makes two of us. Substitute South Asian for Asian and one lawyer and one non-practising roboticist for two doctors.”

  “Non-practising roboticist sounds like a religious choice.”

  “I don’t actually know what he does now. When I was a kid, he used to work in the lab at the University of Victoria designing prosthetics for people who’d had their legs blown off during peacekeeping missions and stuff like that. But now he just wears sweatpants and watches CNN using a TV tuner card on this ancient desktop computer that he’s been upgrading since 1999. Sometimes he goes to India to visit his family. My friends joked he was a spy. Secret Agent Ajay Gupta.” His sandwich tastes like old air. Janwar pushes his plate away. “Oh man, the worst joke about my dad, though.”

  As soon as he starts, Janwar knows that Fang doesn’t want him to continue. She’s already reaching for her phone, but it’s too late. The stories-that-suck-and-go-nowhere train is already pulling out of the station.

  “Or like, not so much joke as…in social studies class in, like, Grade 9 we read an article about a primitive adding machine from ancient South Asia. The article was called ‘Bombay Calculus’ and my friend Nick whispered, ‘Naw, Bombay Calculus is Ajay over Garati equals Janwar,’ and I just about choked to death, and we got kicked out of class.”

  “Mm,” Fang says.

  “And then when I got older, I realized maybe they were a little more experimental than that, being, you know, from the land of the Kama Sutra, and the equation could instead be ‘Ajay over or under or added to the end of Garati equals Janwar.’”

  As Janwar suspected, Fang ignores this part of the story as well and finishes whatever she is doing on her phone, like texting Mitch back about how she can’t “come over now” because she’s busy at work, being a doctor and shit. She looks up. “Anyway, at least your dad was at home.”

  “He wasn’t exactly present. He came out of his office after school to ask how I did on tests, but only as compared to my friends.”

  Shaughnessy pushes his chair back and walks toward Janwar and Fang. He mock-stumbles as he passes their table and sends Janwar’s tray flying into the aisle. A table of priests look unimpressed.

  “What the fuck, man?” Janwar says. “What did I ever do to you?” But Shaughnessy is al
ready past them. “What did I ever do to him?”

  “Couldn’t tell you,” Fang says. “I’ll go get some more napkins.”

  When they’ve finished disposing of the sodden napkins and food remnants, Aspen is still sitting at the other table, with her ponytail spiky and her phone out. Janwar can’t tell if she’s close enough to be recording his and Fang’s conversation over the cafeteria: the rattling of dishes, the conversations in two different languages—medical and not.

  “Janwar. Quit stalling. Text that bitch. It’s a first date. It’s not like you got her pregnant. You’re stressing way too hard.”

  He pulls his phone from his pocket.

  Hey babysex, dis is Janwar from last nite.

  Janwar shows the screen to Fang. She laughs.

  “But seriously.” He returns to keying in the message. Hey, this is Janwar the anaesthesiologist. We met last night. Want to grab a drink this week?

  “I get wanting to drop that you’re an anaesthesiologist, and I didn’t hear you two talking, but don’t you think ‘doctor’ is enough?”

  “No, she perked up when I said anaesthesiologist. That’s my in, I think.”

  “Okay, then ship it.”

  Janwar presses send.

  Fang has gone off to her next operation. In the hallway someone taps Janwar on the shoulder. He turns to face pineapple foliage. Aspen Tanaka again.

  “So, Gupta, you gonna join the dead pool?”

  “No, I’m only here for two weeks.”

  “Everyone’s part of the dead pool, Pusher or Mixer, permanent staff or garbage-person intern. And don’t give me any sanctimonious bullshit.”

  “Pusher? Nobody will tell me what the fuck exactly a Pusher—”

  “Us. We’re the Pushers. Me, Tariq, Shaun, Sylvie. One drug per injection. Fo’ evah.”

  “Sylvie?”

  “Sylvie Daalsgard. The head of the department.”

  “Why wouldn’t any of the Mixers just tell me that?”

  “They didn’t want you being lured by our fruits.” She sways her hips mock-seductively, or maybe just seductively, or maybe just mockingly. “They want you to stay dumb.”

  “Forget it. I’m on the side of experimentation. And the side of…not gambling on dead patients.”

  “Aw, don’t be a pussy. Be a fucking man. Face the abyss!”

  Janwar breathes out through his nose, flaring his prodigious nostrils.

  “Mew!” Aspen says. “Mew! Mew! Mew! Mew!” She places a finger in front of her crotch and mimes an erection shrinking.

  “Oh, fuck off.” Janwar walks away.

  Janwar can see the text-message light blinking on his phone from across OR III. The light turns green when he receives a text message. It also turns green when he uploads a reminder to himself, but since he is over here and the phone is over there, and he is busy prepping Mr. Félipe Gagnon for surgery, it’s probably a text message. He leaves his phone on silent during the day, but the light still blinks. If he thought about it, maybe today he would have put his phone face down so he couldn’t see the notification light, so the possibility of Susan didn’t interrupt his concentration.

  But his concentration is already interrupted: he’s really starting to worry about his hands. No matter what he’s done—and he’s practically a doctor, so he’s done a lot—they still feel tight and sore, and the ellipse of raw skin on the inside of his right index finger has grown. He wears latex gloves in the OR anyway, so there isn’t any danger to anyone else, but it’s going to be hard for his hands to heal. The Band-Aids keep slipping off because of the moisture inside his gloves, and he can’t work without bending his fingers.

  “Hold this for a second,” he says to Rasheeda. He scrambles across the room to check the message.

  “Doctor, did you just put something pink into that IV?” the patient says. His field of view includes the tubing but not the tree/bag combo, which is located behind him.

  Janwar looks up, two steps away from his phone. “No, I—oh, fuck.” Blood is backing up the IV into the bag of saline solution. Crimson threads dissolve into blooms of pink. “Rasheeda, clamp that shit down.”

  Horace is watching him over his tablet. Janwar feels blood rising to the surface capillaries in his cheeks, but the staff anaesthesiologist stays seated.

  Rasheeda snaps to attention. “Got you covered, boss.”

  This would have happened whether he’d moved to check his phone or not, but it’s embarrassing that Mr. Gagnon has pointed it out. No harm done, but Janwar still feels a twisting pain in his stomach. Horace’s face is impassive.

  “Okay, under control.”

  Janwar changes the bag. Maybe Mr. Gagnon won’t remember this happened. He could ensure that Mr. Gagnon wouldn’t remember…he is an anaesthesiologist…but the nurse has seen too, and he can’t very well GHB the shit out of the nurse. And Horace. That’s a dangerous path. Maybe Llew could have done it in the seventies… Janwar shakes himself.

  This is the anxiety talking. An incident has occurred that wasn’t anyone’s fault. He could have been distracted or not distracted and the end would be the same—no, that isn’t a good way to think. He will be less distracted in the future. His fingers are wet and he checks his translucent gloves several times to make sure it’s just sweat and not blood.

  The surgeons this time are Victor and Mildred. Mildred makes clicking noises with her mouth as she works and at one point Janwar notices a tent in Victor’s pants, a totally situation-inappropriate erection that takes a long time to subside. Janwar’s not watching it per se; it just keeps intruding into the edges of his vision. Seated, as he is, right at waist level. Janwar’s starting to think these two are using a little more than caffeine to stay awake. Maybe dexedrine. Some kind of ’drine at least. That’d account for Victor’s frequent and prolonged tumescences and Mildred’s phonic spasms. But they’re doing their jobs okay, seems like. The military use dexedrine as “go pills” so pilots can fly long enough to get in and out of combat zones at full awareness; maybe having greater surgery endurance is worth the side effects if it saves more lives.

  Every time he looks across the room to refocus his eyes from the red dots of the vital-signs console, the green dot of the phone’s LED winks at him.

  When Janwar is finished with the operation he unlocks his phone.

  1:00 pm—New message from Susan: Hey Big Cat, good to meet you too! Hope you don’t mind that I call you “Big Cat.” I just thought of it, cause Janwar sounds kinda like Jaguar ;)

  1:01 pm—New message from Susan: And I do want to go for a drink with you! There’s a concert Thursday night, the Trillaphonics at Babylon. They’re great live. It won’t put you to sleep! Want to be my date?

  Janwar can feel a movement in his scrub pants. He surreptitiously puts a hand in his pocket to keep it from forming a tent like Victor’s.

  It’s now two. A reasonable time to respond.

  Janwar types out I can’t wait to get my claws into you, then deletes it. Care must be taken while drafting to avoid embarrassment caused by premature release. Big Cat wants your little pussy. Ugh. Who is he? That’s the perviest thing he’s ever even thought to say. He deletes the text again. That sounds great! And the nickname is perfect, cause my initials are JAG. Should he risk a smiley face? Would it make him seem unmanly? Or just charming? She’s already used one. He decides to risk it. :) Send.

  Everything is okay because he has a date with a pretty girl. He hasn’t just about killed a man, no matter how he feels. He made a minor mistake, one he would be careful not to make again. “Love games, Janwar. Love games have no place at work, boyo,” he can imagine Llew saying, his penetrating eyes dulled to cobalt.

  Unless Susan doesn’t respond. This has been known to happen to Janwar. He loves women, he really does, but sometimes they can be capricious. No, Susan will respond. She came up with a nickname for him and she explicitly said “date.” Anything that might involve dancing would be a good venue for him. People have told Janwar he is an excelle
nt, if non-traditional dancer. The notification light flashes.

  2:10 pm—New message from Susan: Okay see you there at 10:30 :)

  The rest of the day passes into night without incident, except for the brief moment of panic Janwar experiences when, about a minute after putting a serving of dry spaghetti in a pot of boiling water and retiring to the living room to await the beeping of the timer, light flashes in his periphery. He twists in his seat to find that the pasta resting against the rim of the pot has burst into flames that lick at the range hood. He grabs the pot and drops it in the sink and turns on the tap.

  Once his heart rate has returned to normal and the steam has dissipated, he dumps the mix of whole-wheat ashes and barely cooked noodles into the garbage, destroying the coffee filter once and for all, and orders a pizza from the wood-fired-oven place down the street.

  Janwar is just sitting down to eat when the phone rings. Ajay. Even 5,000 kilometres away, he’s still watching Janwar.

  “Hey, hey, Janwar!” Ajay yells. “Where were you last night? Why weren’t you picking up your phone? What have you been up to? Huh?”

  When Ajay calls Janwar, he often uses this exaggerated tone. He doesn’t yell because he’s angry; Janwar thinks of it as a “trying to be funny and form a bond while still asserting dominance” approach.

  “Hi, Dad.” Janwar closes his eyes and watches red spiders drift across his vision. “I was out for dinner with my co-workers from the anaesthesiology department.”

  “Oh, your co-workers, huh? Your lady co-workers? Your nice Hindu lady co-workers?”

  “Some are ladies. Some are gentlemen. None’s Indian. One’s Welsh, one’s Thai, one’s Chinese, one’s Korean, and one’s whatever the name Welrod comes from. English, maybe, or Irish? They’re all nice though. I managed to induce and intubate a patient with a massive number of drug contraindications using a new method yesterday, and my supervisor was very impressed.”