Death and the Intern

by Jeremy Hanson-Finger

  “You didn’t come on video chat at all.”

  “I don’t leave video chat on. I thought we agreed that this week I’d call you and then we’d both go on video chat.”

  “I waited online for you for one-point-five days. It is okay that you did not want to talk to me.”

  “I’m sorry we had a misunderstanding. I was just busy, okay? I did want to talk to you, but I was busy.”

  “Sure,” Ajay says. “Okay.”

  Janwar imagines Ajay waving him off. “What’s new with the family?”

  “Your grandfather fell and broke his hip at the India-Pakistan cricket match.”

  “Oh no.”

  “Pakistan won.”

  Janwar shrugs to show that’s okay, his grandfather is more important, then remembers he’s on the phone. “Is Grandpa okay?”

  “He’s fine. But you should go to Mumbai to visit our family.”

  Janwar says he’ll go once he is done medical school, which is only a year away, and Ajay doesn’t say anything in response, which Janwar takes as begrudging acceptance. “Anyway, how was your week, Dad?”

  “Your mother had her lawyer friends over for dinner. I did yardwork.”

  “During the dinner?”

  “Before. Here, I’ll put your mother on.”

  Janwar holds the phone away from his ear so he isn’t deafened by the squeak of his father’s office chair and the digital distortion of Ajay’s shouting to Garati without covering the mouthpiece.

  “Hello, son,” his mother says.

  Janwar returns the phone to his ear. “Hi, Mom.”

  “Your father said you don’t have any nice Hindu lady co-workers.”

  “How—?”

  “He wrote me a note while he was talking to you.”

  “What other notes did he write?”

  “Supervisor impressed.”

  “Any others?”

  “That’s it.”

  “Okay.”

  “So, your supervisor is impressed?”

  Janwar holds the phone at arm’s length, shakes it exactly as you aren’t supposed to do with a baby, and screams silently. His head hurts even more now, and he returns the phone to his ear.

  “That’s right,” he says in a calm and measured tone.

  Janwar manages to extricate himself from the cross-examination after only fifteen minutes. He curls up on the couch with a blanket and flips through the TV-guide station on Dr. Flecktarn’s absurdly large television. After a brief dalliance with a CBC News story about the Canadian Rangers, during which Janwar learns they are charged with defending Canada’s arctic, and are being issued new weapons for the first time since 1941, he settles on a channel showing a Western movie marathon.

  “My mistake. Four coffins,” Clint Eastwood says.

  The next morning, Janwar kills Diego Acosta.

  Exhibit C

  TRANSCRIPT OF AUDIO RECORDING FOUND ON SUSAN JONESTOWN’S CELLPHONE

  SPEAKING: SUSAN JONESTOWN, JEAN-MARIE DUFOIS, TERRY SMOLENSKI

  Friday, July 4

  Couldn’t follow Martina or the man in the periwinkle scrubs without them noticing me. Might as well talk to the receptionist: baby-faced long-haired man in his twenties, blond neckbeard.

  SUSAN JONESTOWN: Hi, I’m just curious. I saw those dogs coming in here. How does one go about becoming part of the therapy dog program?

  JEAN-MARIE DUFOIS: First off, you have to be a dog.

  SJ: Cut it out. You know what I mean. It’s volunteer-based though?

  JD: Right. We offer a weekend course for you and your dog. It costs $360. If your dog is selected, you drop it off in the morning a couple of days a week and pick it up after work.

  SJ: So the owner has to pay for the course? Does the hospital at least take care of walking the dog during the day?

  JD: No, we’re cash strapped enough as it is. You need to hire a dog walker, like Martina, who you just saw with those greyhounds.

  SJ: That seems sort of unfair.

  JD: Most people take part because they want to help the infirm, not because they want free dog-sitting. And they’d probably have a dog walker anyway. The dog walker would just have to pick the dog up at the hospital instead of home. Do you even own a dog?

  The dogs’ owners will probably start getting home by five to take their dogs out.

  Going to stop by my house and pick up my running gear for disguise purposes.

  Reviewed the Google Maps pins from following Marina around as she dropped off the dogs. 1393 Kilborn Avenue looks good for a stakeout. Kilborn is wide and busy enough that a parked truck won’t stand out too much.

  5:31: a fifty-ish man just came out of the house, two bulldogs in tow. They’re turning the corner onto Crocus Avenue.

  SUSAN JONESTOWN: Nice dogs. How old are they?

  TERRY SMOLENSKI: Jasper’s five and Nelly’s seven.

  SJ: I’m Susan. I’m a journalism student working on a story about dog walkers.

  TS: Sure, nice to meet you, Susan. I’m Terry. Terry Smolenski.

  SJ: What do you do with your dogs while you’re at work, Terry? I mean, do you have a dog walker?

  TS: Yeah, I do. Her name’s Martina. Maybe you’ve seen the posters around. “Too busy to walk your Golden Retrieva? Call Martina.” And, what’s the other one…

  SJ: Wow.

  TS: I’m a sucker for the dad jokes. Being a dad. I guess she knows her market. And Jasper and Nelly love her. She just seems to really get dogs.

  SJ: One more question.

  TS: Shoot.

  SJ: My neighbour uses this paw wax on her dog’s paws to protect them from the hot concrete. I’d never heard of that before. Is it common?

  TS: Martina actually sold me on it. Shake a paw, Jasper. It was designed for snow and ice, but it’s good in the summer too.

  SJ: Did Martina give you samples?

  TS: Yeah, that’s right. I think she said she’s got a connection with the manufacturer.

  SJ: Interesting. Thanks. All right, enjoy the rest of your walk.

  There’s one, a Martina poster. Martina Gonzalez, 613-255-7440, 168 Rachel Street.

  PART II: EYE ON THE BALL

  CHAPTER 4

  Lifeguards – Spaghetti Western – Experimental Farm – The Homicide Detective’s Shower – Wild Turkey

  Wednesday, July 9

  After Victor pronounces Diego dead, José covers the body with a drape, leaving all the tubes and lines in place. The trauma providers wheel away the crash cart, which features a bumper sticker that reads, “Trauma providers are the lifeguards for the shallow end of the gene pool.” This slogan has some pretty problematic socio-economic implications, Janwar feels. That said, anybody not employed by the hospital who saw that sticker would have more pressing concerns than parsing text on medical equipment.

  Except Janwar is in a pretty traumatic situation right now and he’s fixating on a detail like that. Janwar’s emotions have been turned off. He can take in sensory inputs, like the acrid smell of bowels voided on death, and produce actions, like turning away from the corpse, but in between the input and the output is nothing but circuits, empty of feeling.

  Horace’s voice is as level as Diego’s ECG’s last pattern. “Rasheeda, please lock the drawers. We need to ensure all the vials stay exactly as they are now, in case someone needs to take a look during the investigation.”

  Behind Janwar, the drawers snap shut and lock. This auditory stimulus prompts Janwar’s vocal cords and mouth to speak the word “What” followed by the word “now.”

  Stimulus: Horace says, “We’ll have to wait here for Brett Rutan from the perioperative board. He’ll ask a few preliminary questions.”

  Response: Janwar says, “Has this happened to you before?”

  “Yes.” Horace strips off his gloves. “Remember, Brett is an internal auditor. He’s here to protect us. Tell him the truth.”

  Janwar nods.

  “Oh, and don’t let the surgeons mess with you.”

  “
I won’t,” Janwar says, although he’d probably let anyone do anything to him at this point.

  Janwar turns away from Horace and Rasheeda and peels off his own gloves. He’s becoming aware of his body again. His skin is itchier than he could have ever imagined. He flexes his dry fingers and he feels the skin break, sees and even smells the little dots of blood well up. He washes his hands in the sink, turning the tap warmer and warmer, until stinging pain replaces irritation. The pain disappears with an almost orgasmic feeling of pleasure. He turns the tap off and his blood starts the slow process of flowing back away from the surface of his skin. The itching is gone, temporarily, though he knows it will be back. The bleeding from his cracked fingers has stopped. The cracks are elliptical like the footholds lumberjacks cut into trees with their axes during tree-climbing competitions, such as the one Janwar once witnessed on a school field trip to Campbell River. He hides his hands in his pockets.

  A young man in a black robe crashes through the doors.

  “Too late, Padre,” José says.

  “Again! I’m so behind.”

  “Father. A man just died,” Rasheeda says. “You of all people should understand respect.”

  “Who cares! The final accounting is coming!” The priest runs out. The doors swing behind him.

  He’s replaced by two porters, who wheel Diego, or the thing under the sheet that used to be Diego, out of the room so the medical examiner can autopsy him. Janwar sits down to wait.

  “If I had a dollar for every time an anaesthesiologist killed one of my patients…” Victor is saying to Karan, but he trails off.

  “How many dollars would you have?” Janwar asks.

  Victor is very interested in his own shoes.

  Janwar can’t get another word out of either surgeon, even when his unconscious joke generator, which continues to operate under traumatic circumstances, prompts them with “A fistful?”

  Brett Rutan wears a dark suit and pointy shoes with pewter angels on the buckles. They are the kind of shoes a spaghetti-western villain would wear while tying damsels to the tracks. He invites the group to follow him to the lobby outside his office, where they wait for him to meet with them one by one. José, then Rasheeda, then Horace, then the surgeons, coming to Janwar last.

  The time before Brett reaches Janwar passes very slowly, or very quickly, Janwar’s not sure which. He can’t remember thinking anything at all. When Brett calls him in, he has an issue of Stitches in his hands, but he doesn’t even remember the jokes.

  “What medications did you administer to the patient?” Brett asks.

  Janwar tells him the drugs and the amounts, which Brett transcribes on his tablet.

  “And how are you feeling?”

  Janwar’s emotions kick back in with the unpleasant wobble of an old air compressor turning over. Guilt, sadness, guilt, sadness, guilt-sadness-guilt-sadness-guilt-sadness-guilt—

  He can’t help but be honest and forthcoming when a professional asks: Dr. Brank has coached, or conditioned, him well, and he begins his play-by-play for Brett, looking away into the middle distance every time he pauses.

  “I’d say, not anxiety about whether I could have done anything differently”—Janwar is careful not to use the word guilt—“but, like, crushing sadness now, like my eyes are way back in deep tunnels in my face and I can’t blink and because of that my eyes are watering. And I feel like my voice is shaking as I’m talking to you.”

  “It’s not.”

  “I guess it’s that everything else is shaking and my voice is staying the same. I have this tightness high in my chest. And what feels like a leather belt around my head, looped around a wooden dowel that someone’s twisting around and around and around, and there’s a throb each rotation of the dowel as the belt tightens… I mean, this guy was a living person who seemed healthy up until a few minutes ago. Diego came in here because he was mugged and now he’s leaving in a bag. Maybe he was a father, maybe a husband. His family didn’t get to say goodbye. I didn’t when my grandmother died; my parents thought I was too young and wanted me to remember her when she was healthy, and I’ve always resented them for that. Maybe someone in Diego’s family will make the same decision and there’ll be this like secondary trauma—” The tunnel-digging machines pushing his eyeballs through his grey matter until they touch his amygdala, the fear centre of his brain, triggering a rush of panic.

  “That all sounds like a pretty normal reaction,” Brett says.

  Brett’s measured tone forestalls Janwar’s nascent cthonic breakthrough. His eyeballs inch back into the sadness zone, and although the leather belt remains around his head, at least the tightening has stopped.

  “This might sound callous, but it does get easier each time.” Brett taps his iPad with his gold stylus. “Mr. Acosta didn’t list any emergency contacts in his intake paperwork, so he might not have any dependents. He’s from Argentina, and he was a consultant, a building engineer. If that matters. It’s still awful that he died, but maybe he’s the only person affected by his death. Besides all of us, of course. Speaking of which, if you need someone to talk to, go up to the psychotherapy department and I’m sure you can bump someone else off the list.”

  He looks at Janwar’s stricken face. “Oh, poor choice of words. No harm intended.”

  “It’s okay. After all this, I wouldn’t want to prevent someone else from getting psychiatric care they’d already booked.”

  Brett reaches up and claps Janwar on the shoulder. “Put yourself first, kid. I doubt whoever you’re replacing would have the same immediate responsibility you do. You’re going to have to go back to work and do all the same things you’ve been doing, knowing that every time there’s the possibility that this could happen.”

  “I appreciate that,” Janwar says, but at the word responsibility, his stomach twists around his spine like the serpent around the Rod of Asclepius. He’ll call Dr. Brank later, probably. Right now he wants to be alone and in a cocoon. He twitches violently and Brett removes his hand.

  “All right. Thank you, Dr.—Mr. Gupta. I have your phone number here. I’ll be in touch if I have any further questions, or if the medical examiner does.”

  Janwar paces along the hallway with Brett’s self-correction from Dr. to Mr. echoing in his head, a correction that he hopes doesn’t reflect his future.

  If he’s at fault, this could be it for Janwar Gupta’s dreams of being a doctor. What else could he do? Anything else he’s qualified for also involves medicine, and he’d always be the med student who fucked up and killed a man.

  Without anyone around to hold himself together and stay verbal for, Janwar’s anxiety displaces his grief. Now all of his thoughts are focused on his role in Diego’s death. There is nothing more important in the world than determining his level of responsibility. The hallway dissolves into a blur.

  Diego suffered cardiac failure forty-five seconds after the injection. Many different causes could have led to his demise. Janwar weighs each in turn and compares it to the symptoms. The most likely is cardiotoxicity—an overdose. The word negligence swims up through Janwar’s brain. So does the word mislabeled, but negligence is more arresting.

  “Janwar Gupta to room B309 in two hours.” The mention of Janwar’s name over the intercom halts his line of thinking.

  “Janwar Gupta to room B309 in two hours.”

  B309 is Llew’s office. Janwar’s hyperventilating. He takes a slow, measured breath, and then another. He’s stopped walking. He can’t focus on two things at once.

  On autopilot, his head full of toxicity statistics, Janwar changes out of his scrubs into a T-shirt and shorts and leaves the hospital by the main entrance, avoiding eye contact with the people in the lineup for Lazarus Coffee.

  The temperature outside is warm again to the point of cruelty, which makes him feel even more suffocated. Air molecules hang in the sky like tiny helicopters, which makes him think of M*A*S*H, which makes him think of the theme song from M*A*S*H, “Suicide Is Painless.”
The statistics have ceased to have meaning. Now they’re circling around and around, faster and faster, until they’re a thick fog blocking out other thoughts.

  Across from the hospital lies the Central Experimental Farm. Janwar isn’t sure what goes on there. He can’t help but imagine hybridized farm animals roaming the grassy hills of the grounds, which stretch all the way to the Ottawa River and Carleton University, body parts mixed up across species, order, even kingdom… By the time Janwar passes an old man reading a newspaper on a park bench close to Dow’s Lake, the fog has begun to dissipate. His ability to spend twenty minutes doing nothing but putting one foot in front of the other and looking very intently at the grass and trees means that he’s in shock, and he’s going to feel a lot worse very soon. “Suicide Is Painless” still stuck in his head: B, A-B, A, B, A… Janwar’s hands are shaking and he feels a chill ripple across his shoulders. A honk makes him spin around, his heart pounding. A four-by-four National Capital Commission truck rolls along the path, its headlights boring into his shoulders. Janwar steps aside. The orange-clad workmen in the cab peer at him as they pass, and Janwar flinches.

  B, A-B, A, B, A… He shouldn’t be in public. He should be somewhere quiet, controlled, indoor. He turns, walks back past the old man sitting on the bench, then decides he should continue with his original plan, turns, passes the old man again, then halts. The idea that he has already passed the old man twice in such a short time makes it impossible for him to change directions yet again, even though he knows the old man doesn’t care and isn’t judging him.

  He commits to his current direction, to looking again at the varied deciduous trees, the beech and the maple and the others he can’t identify immediately. They are not signifiers of summer or childhood or new life but the gnarled backdrop of grim fairy tales.

  When he reaches the lake, the murky smell of the decaying wood docks is putrid. Squadrons of seagulls wing overhead. People with fishing rods cast into the water, but what sort of fish would live in a manufactured canal? Sinister, sleazy fish that leave a wake of iridescent oils behind them…