Death and the Intern

by Jeremy Hanson-Finger

  Susan is a very dirty bird, at least in terms of what she says over the next hour or so. While Janwar hasn’t been into that sort of talk in the past, in this case, because of the proximity to death, the edginess of the whole situation in which they find themselves, it seems appropriate, part of the drama they are playing out. Janwar gets into it, taking control to a degree that he has rarely done in the past.

  “Are the pants coming off?” he says, which is probably not the best possible phrasing for the situation. He needs to verbally make sure that consent has been given without trying to seem as if he’s unsure of himself.

  Susan pulls her head back to look at him. “I don’t know, are they?”

  He does experience a couple of stabs of fear when his erection is not initially as tenacious as he’d like, but he gets there in the end. And after it’s over, he doesn’t panic at all about his performance. In fact, lying in his bed with Susan, their bodies together like a fleshy jigsaw puzzle, the play-roughness having dissipated, Janwar becomes aware of the fact that although he is in a ridiculous situation, and has been for some time, he isn’t panicking. Maybe it’s just because the situation hasn’t been resolved yet, and his panicking usually comes after, or maybe it’s because he’s just had athletic and satisfying sex with an attractive woman and has possibly conquered some leftover feelings of inadequacy from past relationships, but he thinks it’s something more than that, something deeper. It’s like the feeling he had at the concert when the Trillaphonics were playing, that feeling of being part of something greater than he was, of knowing what he needed to do. A feeling of loyalty and community.

  He pries himself out of the Susan-Janwar puzzle and pads to the door naked, checks the lock, and attaches the chain, just in case Giacomo gets any ideas. Taking this precaution is not just paranoia; it’s actually reasonable, Janwar tells himself. If Dr. Flecktarn was doing anything untoward at home, by virtue of being his neighbour, Giacomo could have also been involved. Men of Ottawa are not to be trusted, Janwar has learned. Women too, but especially the men.

  CHAPTER 10

  Onside – Thundercoat – Drawers – Pure Reptile – Déja Vu – The Boogeyman Closet – Staying Awake – Hickory Wood

  Tuesday, July 15

  When Janwar’s alarm wakes him just a couple of hours later, Susan’s fingers have found his. They have been holding hands like otters who don’t want to drift away from each other during the night. He does not, under any circumstances, repent his fornication. He rubs her knuckles.

  “Susan, I didn’t tell you before. I’d kind of forgotten because I was so fucked on hydromorphone at the time. Both the Pushers and the Mixers told me that the other was part of some giant political thing involving kickbacks—from syringe companies, for the Pushers, or from the company that makes propofol, for the Mixers.”

  “That’s some heavy pillow talk. How about we have sex first and then you run that by me again?”

  Janwar doesn’t have any problem with that. Afterwards, Janwar reiterates. “That’s not what you think they’re into, is it? It sounds ridiculous, telling you here in the light of day.”

  “What the fuck time is it anyway?”

  “Six o’clock. But, my question. What do you think?”

  “No. I don’t think five anaesthesiologists could use enough syringes to make a difference in the profits of Cohasset, or enough propofol to make a difference to whatever company owns propofol.”

  “Suspira Labs.”

  “I think it’s just Oxy. The Pushers are into selling Oxy, with the whole dog walker thing, and they were framing you for murdering Diego. And they got you to kill Diego for Chilton. For some reason. I don’t know why the Mixers are making that shit up about plastics though. Maybe they don’t know anything and they were just trying to get you onside.”

  “I’d like to get on your side,” Janwar says. Susan ignores him. They’ve already done that, scant minutes ago, and now it’s business time. Janwar has, however, remembered that one reason he likes having been physically intimate with someone is that he’s able to create innuendos out of almost anything they say.

  “Llew talked about BC, right? Maybe it was just an appeal to your caring for your homeland.”

  “Maybe. What about the real-estate connection? That seems more promising.”

  “I need to go to work. Split shift today. I’ll try to do some digging into Chilton when I’m off. When do you finish your shift?”

  “Seven.”

  “Okay, come by the Lazarus Coffee at Wellington and Caroline?”

  “Deal. Susan, you know what? I don’t know your last name.”

  “Jonestown.”

  “Jonestown? Really?”

  “Sort of.”

  “Sort of?”

  “My grandfather’s last name was Zhukovsky when he immigrated from Ukraine. But because there’s no Cyrillic zh character in English, immigration officials changed the name to Jukovsky. Grigori’s co-workers on the Canada Pacific Railroad changed his name from Jukovsky to Jewkovsky to Jerkoffsky. Eventually he got sick of the taunting, at which point Grigori Jukovsky moved down the line one stop and signed up with a boring Canadian name. And Greg Jonestown’s name stayed boring until that business with the Peoples Temple.”

  Janwar likes that Susan also answers simple questions with long stories. “I’m glad I met you, Susan Jonestown.”

  “I’m glad I met you, Janwar Gupta.”

  He gives her a solid hug and kisses her, and her lips feel good against his lips and her body feels good against his body. After she closes the door, he turns on the speaker dock again and dances around the room, strumming in the vicinity of his genitals, even though there are no guitars in this track, just wailing organs. He still might have killed someone, but at least he’s had emotionally satisfying sex with a girl who was even sexier out of her tights and boots than in them. Her legs could wave at him from below a cliff any time and it would be worth the danger… She lives in Ottawa and he lives in Vancouver, but he reminds himself it’s too early to think about things like that. He turns the speakers up and heads into the shower to wash Susan off, although he kind of doesn’t want to, just wants to roll around in her scent like a dog.

  After the shower, he suits up. This time, instead of putting his paramedic shears in his scrub pants pocket, he tapes the holster to his leg. Concealed carry, what’s up, he thinks.

  Outside the entrance to the hospital, Janwar stops to pet an unbelievably tall and narrow dog. He’s always liked dogs but finds the idea of paying for a living being that’s obligated to be friends with you discomforting. Janwar is used to seeing greyhounds in flight, as it were, on the sides of buses, all four legs extended in full gallop, and so it takes him a minute to realize this gangly alien thing standing quietly is a greyhound at rest. He isn’t sure what it’s doing tied up outside at 7 a.m., or why it’s wearing a backpack that looks empty. Its owner, a neon-jacketed runner, comes out of the lobby and sees him staring.

  “Why the pack?” Janwar asks.

  “It helps him feel safe. It’s like a Thundercoat but cheaper.”

  “Thundercoat?”

  “You know how animals sometimes get scared in thunderstorms?”

  “Yeah? I guess you guys do have a lot of thunderstorms here.”

  “Pismo’s scared all the time when he’s outside. Skateboards, plastic bags, you name it. He’s got an anxiety disorder.” She unties Pismo from the post. He doesn’t move.

  “He seems okay now.”

  “That’s the backpack, that’s making him okay. Who’s a good neurotic?” she asks the dog as she rubs his hairless belly. His rear leg jerks.

  “How does it work?”

  “You tighten it around his body, so he feels like he’s always being hugged. Come on, Pismo.”

  When the woman and her dog are gone, Janwar tightens his belt, but it doesn’t have the same effect. He loosens it again and takes in a deep breath.

  He needs to clear his head before following up on hi
s hunch. He’s never been up to the roof of the hospital. Maybe he’ll do that. He sets a timer for ten minutes and takes the service elevator to R. When he steps outside onto the gravel, the noise of the air-conditioning system’s fans reminds him of the Trillaphonics. The machine bears a sign that says, “Do Not Fork Under Coil,” whatever that means. Janwar, who has recently forked for the first and second times in a good couple of years, has a nice trip through last night’s and this morning’s experiences, but the closed-eye viewing of his private reel doesn’t relax him; it just raises his heart rate even more.

  Janwar looks southeast over the arboretum and Dow’s Lake. It’s too early for kayakers. Morning joggers are running along the canal path. Soon he will be gone, back home to British Columbia, away from polluted, hot, criminal Ontario, back to clean air and evergreens, away from dead pools and GHB wizards and rival gangs of surgeons and anaesthesiologists… Though he still has to solve a complicated and far-reaching mystery first.

  And Janwar has been playing detective since the start, he can see now. His trip to Ottawa began with a dark-haired woman handing him an envelope as he sat in an office chair, his feet up at his desk—even if the woman was his mother, the letter told him he’d been assigned a two-week placement in anaesthesiology at the Ottawa Civic Hospital, and the desk was in his childhood room in his parents’ house.

  The timer beeps on his phone.

  After the carts are done being used for the day, they live in the storage room in the anaesthesiology department. Nobody is in the department when Janwar lets himself in. He turns the lights on, and the fluorescents buzz to life.

  There’s a man standing in the corner. Janwar reaches for his shears, then realizes it’s the cut-out of young, unbearded, dark-haired, bespectacled Llewellyn Cadwaladr that Llew used to send to parties in his stead. Janwar turns it around, but it’s double-sided.

  The carts are lined up against one wall. Janwar pulls out his tablet and replicates how he imagines the José-Llew collision in the hallway went down. He walks past the cart, passing within one foot. Nothing. The drawer’s lock’s light doesn’t even flicker, let alone flash green. He moves within six inches. No dice.

  Rubber squeaks against the floor behind him. Janwar spins around, right into another person. A solid Welsh person.

  “Sorry,” Janwar says.

  “Didn’t mean to scare you, boyo. I thought I heard some noise. What are you doing by here so early?”

  “Oh, hi, Llew. I was just checking…” Janwar’s vocal cords freeze.

  “What were you checking, Janwar?”

  Janwar points at the drawer of the cart.

  “The drawer, is it? You don’t have to worry about it. Everything’s in its right place.”

  Janwar’s voice module reactivates. “What about those cops yesterday morning?”

  “Filling in some paperwork on an emergency-room patient.”

  “You’re up-to-date on what’s going on.”

  “Take me at my word, boyo, you have nothing to worry about regarding the carts.”

  “I’m not worried about what’s in there now. I’m worried about what could’ve been there. And how it got there.”

  “I do get moithered in my old age, boyo. Can you run that by me again?”

  “I think someone switched the vials.”

  “I get why your confidence in yourself as an anaesthesiologist is shook. I know you put in that SHROUD ticket, but I’m willing to ignore that breach of trust. It’s all squared, boyo. You can go by me.”

  Janwar could give up for now and come back later, when Llew isn’t there. Something feels off, and his instincts are telling him to get out of there. But now that he’s started, he has to figure it out, and there’s no way to do so without revealing his investigation to Llew. Who had told Janwar that there was a shortage of ketamine and other coinduction agents that weren’t lidocaine? None of the other coinduction agents could have caused instant death the way lidocaine had.

  “I understand that and I appreciate it, Llew. But, listen. Here’s what I think. Right before Diego’s operation, I heard José run the cart into someone in the hall. I heard a squeak of wheels and someone tell him to watch out. So, if he ran into an anaesthesiologist, maybe he got the lock close enough to their tablet to open it. And it would’ve been easy for someone to have switched the bottles back after.”

  “That was me he ran into,” Llew says.

  Janwar has given Llew an out, but Llew hasn’t taken it. What does that mean? Is he trustworthy, or just playing a higher-level game?

  “I’m proper interested now,” Llew continues. “What are you trying to figure out by there?”

  “How far away the tablet would open the cart from.”

  “Let’s have a look.” Llew covers one eye and squints at the cart.

  Janwar repeats the distances he tried earlier, to no effect. Finally, he holds the tablet against the receiver with his left hand and, after a full second, the drawer snicks open. There’s no way it could have happened by accident. Maybe Janwar was wrong and José’s running into Llew was a red herring, but—

  Carla told him about the shortage of coinduction agents. A Mixer.

  Had Shaughnessy been on the phone with Llew when Janwar tried to call him back?

  Janwar’s thoughts tumble together, too fast for his conscious mind to process. Faces flicker and merge. Jacques and Horace and Shaughnessy and Llew and Fang and Carla and— Llew darts to the door, closes it, and flicks the light off. Janwar scrabbles for the paramedic shears taped to his leg. But before his eyes can adjust to the darkness, a sharp pain blooms in his thigh. He folds and sinks to the floor.

  When Janwar wakes up, he’s lying on the table in the anaesthesiology department meeting room with his shirt off and sensors attached to his skin. He’s shoeless and his leg stings where the tape holding his paramedic shears has been ripped off. The conference table is cold on his back, which means he probably hasn’t been in this position long. His hands and feet are bound with zip ties. He tests their strength, but they are looped through the cable holes for the conferencing system and will not give. Their microribs dig into his flesh, bringing him back to the fence at the Nellie McClung Pavilion.

  Because his arms and legs are spread apart like the universal man, zip-tie escape options one and two are out. Llew is the only other person there; so is option three.

  Llew is wearing scrubs and a cap, and his mask is hanging around his neck. He sits at the head of the table, near Janwar’s feet. His gloved fingers twirl a vial like a helicopter rotor. The halogen track lighting on the ceiling is focused on Janwar, and he half closes his eyes against the glare. Janwar’s glasses are still on his face, so whatever Llew’s doing probably requires that he be able to see what’s happening.

  “What the fuck, Llew?”

  “What did you expect, boyo?” Llew’s pupils are pinned out, like Shaughnessy’s. Now that Janwar’s all tied up, Llew has taken something to calm down.

  “You can’t just keep me here. I have operations today. Someone will find out.”

  “Fang and Shaughnessy are filling in for you.”

  Shaughnessy? Why would Shaughnessy—

  “So, boyo, who knows about this?”

  The plot has expanded far beyond Janwar’s imagination. What’s Llew’s angle? Why would he have killed Diego? Were just he and José involved? Do Fang and Shaughnessy know why they are filling in for Janwar? Why would Shaughnessy do a favour for Llew? Are Horace and Shaughnessy working together on the Oxy smuggling with Jacques? Is that even related?

  Janwar has nothing. No evidence. Just that Llew thinks Janwar knows something he doesn’t and has flipped out, and now Janwar is tied to a conference table.

  “Nobody,” Janwar says.

  “Your eyes are giving you away. I can make life proper unpleasant for you if you don’t tell me. You’re not a fool, boyo, now are you. You must have told someone if you figured out this much.”

  Janwar is telling the truth. Nobody k
nows, but he isn’t protecting Susan by saying that; he’s making himself useless to Llew, which doesn’t augur well for his longevity.

  “Okay, yeah, I told someone. About Chilton. About Diego. About Denis and Jacques.”

  “Who?”

  Janwar presses his lips shut.

  Llew rocks his chair forward. “Tell me, Janwar.”

  Janwar declines. At least he knows that no matter what Llew does to him to find out, Llew is a doctor, and while it might be painful, it probably won’t kill him.

  Llew circles the table and disappears from Janwar’s field of view. When Janwar arches his neck backwards to see behind him, he sees upside-down Llew, his mask now on, picking up a syringe with a red label from the anaesthesia cart. An anaesthesia machine and two IV trees are also present, Janwar is thankful to see, though who knows how far Llew is going to depart from standard protocol during this operation. Just because he’s monitoring Janwar’s signs doesn’t mean he’s committed to keeping them vital. Janwar also can’t see if any surgical implements are laid out. This being a conference table, not a surgical bed, there’s no standard swing-out tray to put them on. They could be anywhere outside of Janwar’s eye line.

  “Know what I’m holding, is it?” Llew says, waving the syringe.

  “Roc. Rocuronium.”

  “So you know what I’m going to do to you if you keep on being contrary.”

  “You’re going to put me in the boogeyman’s closet.”

  “So there for you. Who’ve you been spouting to?” Llew holds up a vial of GHB. “You can tell me, boyo. You won’t even remember now, will you. It’ll be like you didn’t do it.”

  “Not telling,” Janwar says.

  Llew takes a vial of fentanyl from the cart, and draws a syringe combining GHB and fentanyl.

  At least it won’t hurt when Llew intubates him. Llew is anaesthetizing him, which makes any sort of pain-based physical torture pointless, although some serious psychological damage would probably ensue from eyes-open surgery of any kind, even if it didn’t hurt. Like if Llew showed him his ripped out fingernails, even if he couldn’t feel it…And it’s not like the boogeyman’s closet will be a walk in the park, by any stretch. Llew could do some pretty serious damage to him without cutting him up, either by withholding oxygen or injecting God knows what into him.