Second, he can believe he isn’t responsible for Diego’s death, in which case he can at worst occupy himself with an investigation, even if it leads nowhere, and at best prove his innocence. He can’t feel any worse than he felt yesterday. So: finite loss (having to deal with responsibility again) versus infinite gain (completely clearing his name and continuing his life as if nothing has happened).
Janwar decides he is going to believe in God: the God of Detectives.
Janwar has to come up with a plan. Detectives always have plans—which men to bully, which women to cajole—even if they end up getting knocked out a lot, the backs of their heads growing pulpier and pulpier throughout the case. He still can’t think of how the vials could have been switched between the dispensary—which, given its collection of controlled substances, is the most audit-friendly room in the hospital, with constant video surveillance, individual pass codes for pharmacists, and log files tracking all operations—and the operating room. He’ll leave that alone for now and try to figure out the who and why…and try to do so without letting any of the anaesthesiologists know he’s playing detective.
If someone caused Diego’s death on purpose, could they have been involved in other OR deaths? Is someone getting their rocks off by allowing med students to kill patients? He’ll visit the records department and ask the librarian to gather a list of all the OR deaths in the last five years. Even if he can’t get Victor or Karan to talk, maybe he can find out how many times an anaesthesiologist has killed one of Victor’s patients. But what if one of the other surgeons was involved in Diego’s death? The two in Diego’s operation appeared to be passive observers. But how intense was the surgeon-anaesthesiologist rivalry here? Brazil-level? Would the surgeons somehow cause the death of a patient just to fuck with the anaesthesiologists? Is that what Horace was alluding to with his warning to watch out for the surgeons? This is a lower-probability scenario, Janwar figures, but when he looks at the OR death records he’ll check if any surgeons or anaesthesiologists pop up more than once.
He checks his watch. He has half an hour before his first operation and he’s dreading surrounding himself with the same environment in which Diego died. He mops his brow with his Batman do-rag.
Dr. Brank would not approve of this “being a detective” plan. She’d say the idea of a setup is a manifestation of anxiety related to Janwar’s issues with failure. That even thinking about other explanations is deeply unhealthy, that he has to move on, to accept his mistake, and not attempt to fight crime.
But, this strategy assumes that every time he worries that he’s made a mistake, he has.
A big rift lies between mistakes that might have had negative consequences—misjudging cliff-jumping, driving too fast in the rain and feeling the car hydroplane for a split second, leaning over a gas barbecue while lighting it—and mistakes that have life-changing negative consequences, like this one.
Finding out the truth is more important than Janwar’s own mental health. Dr. Brank would say nothing is more important than his mental health, that the problem is not the situation itself, but how he’s thinking about the situation. She might be right. His anxiety has often made him think that determining responsibility is more important than his mental health. But a high percentage of false positives doesn’t discount the possibility of a true positive.
So, fuck Dr. Brank. Janwar pushes the down button for the elevator.
He shares the elevator with a man in a wheelchair who, seeing Janwar’s scrubs with the blue Ottawa Civic Hospital logo, complains that the last time he was in the hospital, they ran out of beds after his operation and stuck him in a supply room with an IV drip and left him there overnight. When the doors open in the basement, a cart heaped with garbage bags sits unattended, blocking the exit. Janwar shoulders it out of the way so the man, whose confidence in the Civic Hospital hasn’t improved, judging by the pulsating vein on the side of his head, can disembark.
The entrance to the records room is clean and modern. The radio jabbers quietly. Despite the lack of windows, the plants in the corner are thriving. The chairs are so minimal it’s like they aren’t even there. They must have cost a fortune. The desk is expensive wood, or at least has the veneer of expensive wood. Why is the records room so fancy?
“Can I help you?” the middle-aged woman behind the desk barks, raising her head from behind what Janwar believes is a philodendron. Her lab coat is rumpled, as if she has slept in it. She looks unhealthy, her sallow skin damp and almost grey. She puts down her magazine, which bears the coverline “Bad Mom Sandpapered My Face,” and removes her glasses. The copper wires of the nose pads are green with oxidation.
She’s not just unhealthy. She’s malevolently unhealthy. Janwar’s almost a doctor and he sees sick people all the time, but somehow, she’s different. His chest tightens.
He struggles to speak. “I’m Janwar Gupta. Med student intern, anaesthesiology. I’m just gathering some data on OR deaths for a project.”
“You mean, you’re making me gather data on OR deaths for a project.” The woman’s eyes are spiderwebbed with burst capillaries and her nose is running. She wipes it with her sleeve.
Janwar shrugs apologetically. He tries a smile, but it doesn’t gain any traction. “I guess so. If I can help in any way…”
“How about you write me a prescription.”
“Got the flu?”
The woman laughs, which makes her throat skin quiver, but Janwar gets the sense it is a laugh at him, not with him. His face must have betrayed him, because the woman shakes her head. After her wattles have come to a rest she says, “You don’t just come down here. You go into SHROUD and log a research ticket, and then it goes into the queue. Assign it to me.”
“Your name is?”
“Venolia Parker.”
“If you don’t expect people to come down here, why is there a waiting area? Why are there magazines and all those chairs?”
“What, you don’t think I deserve a nice office?”
“No, I—”
“Here’s the website for SHROUD. You have to have an account to create a ticket.” She writes out the web address on a Post-it. It takes her a while. She writes left-handed and her sleeve drags across the ink. It’s the same sleeve she wiped her nose with, Janwar notes.
“I don’t have an account. How do I get one?”
“You have to put in a ticket with IT.”
“Which is, let me guess, also in SHROUD?”
“You got it.”
“Can I just visit the IT—”
“What do you think?”
Janwar blows air out slowly through his nose and squeezes his fists together hard enough to feel the skin snap. He looks at his watch and then at the hairline of blood across two of his first knuckles on his left hand. He has to go to his first operation. He hopes the skin cracks won’t bleed anymore.
Venolia is already looking back at her keyboard and flexing her pointers.
“What does SHROUD stand for?”
“Oh, honey,” Venolia says. She cracks her knuckles.
Janwar leaves the room, his own knuckles pulsating with a woozy heat. He can’t put it off. He has to get back on the horse. Horse tranquilizer, he can’t help but think. He has to anaesthetize again. Inject drugs that can stop a man’s heart—and, which, yesterday, did—into another human being.
The two operations Janwar conducts that morning appear flawless to outside observers, even if internally he’s locked into an obsessive loop and suffering microseizure-level panic cthonic breakthroughs. He checks and double-checks and triple-checks the labels of all his vials before and after he draws syringes.
The morning is a success from a medical standpoint, although he would have been happier if Rasheeda was there, to see if she remembered anything he didn’t. The fact that she’d made the mixing motion the first time he’d met her, during Mr. Nakamura’s operation, makes Janwar think she could be trusted. Instead, the nurses are Henry and an unfamiliar woman, Ashley P
enderecki, and the surgeons a new permutation, Gertie and Mildred, who stop talking as soon as they enter the room and see Janwar.
At his break, he decides to visit the IT department anyway. Almost everyone is away, it seems, the room curiously barren. Just one IT guy is drinking something that requires four tea bags out of a travel mug the size of Janwar’s forearm, watching code cascade down a vertically oriented screen. His name is Alvin and he has large perky ears like a Boston terrier’s.
“One doesn’t just forget to create a SHROUD account,” Alvin says. “You’re only here for two weeks, so there’s no good business case for us to spend our time on it. You can just ask someone else to make the request for you in SHROUD.”
“Oh Christ,” Janwar says. “Why does there need to be a business case?”
“Project V.”
“V?”
“V for Victory.”
“Over what?”
“Overuse of IT resources for avoidable tasks.” Alvin points at a World War II propaganda poster tacked up on his cubicle wall. It features two men holding a nutcracker. One man is labelled “Employees” and the other labelled “Management.” The title at the top reads, “The Real V for Victory,” and the bottom says, “Joined Hands Will Crack This Nut!” In the centre of the nutcracker, about to be cracked, is a caricature of a Japanese man’s head, radiator-grille mouth and all. Drawn on the poster with a Sharpie is an arrow pointing to the Japanese man’s head and the phrase “Doctors who bring their own tablets to work.”
“Trying to make all these third-party apps work on personal devices is a nightmare,” Alvin says.
Janwar lets his chin drop to his chest.
“Don’t tell me you’re offended,” Alvin says. “Hitler is the biggest joke there is. The one person you can make fun of without anyone getting upset. All those video remixes of Downfall. Why can’t I have a poster with Hirohito? Japan did some awful things to the Koreans and the Chinese during the Second World War. Look up ‘comfort women.’”
“I don’t even know where to start with this,” Janwar says.
“Tell you what,” Alvin says. “I’ll create a ticket for someone to make you a SHROUD account if you get the new server blade for me from Brenda in shipping and receiving. The dead pool server has had a lot of memory leaks recently. We’re upgrading to 64-bit architecture. That will reduce the IT task load by one user story, so it’ll about balance out.”
“Wait, the dead pool with the ER? There’s a whole server for that?”
“Of course. What other dead pool is there? We’re looking at opening it up outside the hospital. Bringing in some serious cashola.”
A blade sounds thin and maybe not that heavy. “I can just say I’m picking it up for Alvin?”
“Alvin Frond. Just forge my signature. It’s not hard.” Alvin prints “AF” on a Post-it in block capitals.
“Don’t they know what you look like?”
“Doesn’t matter as long as they have the signature in—”
“SHROUD?”
“Bangarang.”
“What does SHROUD stand for?”
“It’s just in capitals,” Alvin says.
The “blade” is actually an entire server and it weighs 60 pounds. Janwar staggers back into the IT department with it to find that Alvin is now gone. He leaves the server by Alvin’s desk and wanders into the next office over, which, according to the sign on the door, is the “Forestry Department.” Of course the Ottawa Civic Hospital has the budget for a forestry department, but not enough for adequate tech support. The city is one big park. Now that he looks around, he sees bilingual signs everywhere reminding visitors that the forestry department belongs to the National Capital Commission.
“Where’s the IT team?” he asks the forestry receptionist, a boy who seems barely out of his teens.
“Outside,” the boy says with a heavy Québécois accent.
“Where outside? Like, in the quad?”
The boy shakes his head. “Outside.”
Janwar returns to the IT department and leaves a Post-it on Alvin’s monitor bezel: Janwar Gupta left the new blade. Please get him a SHROUD account and call 778-889-1850 when complete.
They’d probably just email him anyway, but he might as well try to get a real person on the line.
In the afternoon, Janwar has to face not only another operation’s worth of anxiety over the continued existence of another patient, but also interacting with José and Emanda.
José calls him “Angel” again, which, now that Janwar knows more about Dr. M and his experimentation, has accrued a far more sinister valence. Janwar’s hands clench so hard he can’t let go of his syringe. Dr. Brank would be proud that he’s feeling angry, instead of guilty. He leans in toward the smaller man and speaks under his breath. “Can you fucking stop with the Dr. Mengele shit?”
“Listen, Angel,” José says. “In 1974, Pinochet’s death squads kidnapped my grandfather from his house in Santiago, flew him up in a helicopter, and dropped him in the river. I think I’ve earned the right to joke about atrocities.”
“That atrocity, maybe. But not other people’s.”
José shrugs. “I don’t think Dr. Mengele did any experiments on Indians. Just Jews, dwarves, twins, homosexuals, and Gypsies. So it’s not like it’s your tragedy, either.”
“Don’t assume I’m only one type of minority. You don’t know I’m not gay and that I don’t have a twin.”
“Touché.”
“Did you grow up in Argentina?” Janwar says.
“Santiago is in Chile, fuckface. And I grew up here. South Keys born and raised.”
“What about Henry?”
“What about Henry?”
“Did one of his family members go sky-diving?”
“Fuck you. Henry’s from rural Nova Scotia. He can make all the jokes he wants because he’s black.”
“What does his tattoo say?”
“On his arm? That’s not a tattoo. That’s a scar.”
Janwar puts his syringe down. Karan and Mildred are the surgeons in this operation. Janwar wants to get Karan alone for questioning, but he isn’t quick enough on the draw, and the man disappears while Janwar’s distracted by the sound of Mildred grinding her teeth.
After the operation, Janwar expects Horace to pull him aside, since, as far as Horace knows, Janwar is responsible for getting him in trouble. But Horace doesn’t say peep, just closes the flip case on his tablet and walks off. Maybe that’s weird, or maybe he’s just the nonconfrontational type.
A quick Internet search backs José up—the Rio Mapocho does flow through Santiago, and Pinochet was the Chilean dictator from 1974 to 1990.
Diego’s death probably isn’t connected to his Argentinian heritage, or at least, if it is, it’s not through José. Although that’s not to say José didn’t switch the vials back while Janwar was focused on Diego’s EKG and before Rasheeda locked the cart. Or maybe he could have switched the vials before the operation, in some way Janwar hasn’t yet determined.
Leaving aside the fact that someone would probably have spotted him fiddling, José couldn’t have just taken another employee’s tablet. A tablet is an identity at the hospital. Each tablet has a fingerprint reader, and you have to launch the app and press your thumb on the metal pad to validate your permission to unlock the cart. You have five minutes to do so before you have to prove your identity again, and unless José had cut off an anaesthesiologist’s thumb and kept it on his keychain…
The fact that Janwar doesn’t know how the initial switch could have happened and that his whole presumption of innocence rests on someone having switched the vials is worrisome, but he pushes it from his mind. For the time being he has a lot of other questions, and he can’t get bogged down in this one detail.
In the hall, Janwar passes Brett Rutan. Instinctively Janwar tenses. But the man looks him right in the eyes and nods, as if they were colleagues. The investigation must be complete from his point of view, and now he’s onto the nex
t medical fuck-up, the next pair of scissors left inside someone’s abdominal cavity, the next organ theft from the morgue, the next patient getting frightened by Victor’s presumably drug-induced situation-independent and overly tenacious erections, which no structureless scrub pant could contain. Janwar could question Brett, but why would he answer? That’s the problem with being an amateur detective—leverage.
Janwar runs into Fang when he’s about to go to the cafeteria for dinner. She says she’s heard what happened, and she’s there for him. Like, seriously there for him, if he needs anything. The implication that arises here makes Janwar uncomfortable. When they walked home from the bar, she made clear that they were colleagues, and only colleagues. He wonders what’s changed.
He has avoided seeking out casual sex up to this point in his life because he’s afraid he’d fall in love. Or, that’s what he’s told himself, but now Janwar realizes that this is simplistic and is most likely because casual sex has never been explicitly offered to him—a perspective he’s kind of been submerging. Regardless, Janwar isn’t in any shape to determine if casual sex is what Fang is offering. “I appreciate it.” Janwar tells himself he will leave it at that.
Fang suggests they go to Minsky’s Diner for dinner. Minsky’s is where the hospital staff eat when they get sick of being on campus, about a fifteen-minute walk away. Janwar agrees.
“Every once in a while I have to take a break from the embalming fluid they sell us in the Tulip,” Fang says.
Mr. and Mrs. Minsky are real sweethearts, a couple in their eighties, and they still run the place, which is pretty much as it was in the 1960s: black-and-white-tiled floors, shiny counters, and blue sparkly seats with curved backs reminiscent of a Corvette Stingray. A framed photo on one wall shows a young man sitting on a stool at the counter, and Janwar can see right away that it is Mr. Minsky, probably in his early twenties. The photo and the actual man have the same smile. There’s something life-affirming about the permanence of the smile, even though the man’s vitality is fading away.
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