Death and the Intern

by Jeremy Hanson-Finger

  “You think I’ll be so traumatized I’ll cave and tell you who else knows.”

  “Doesn’t that sound square?”

  “Llew, I’ll just be traumatized. It won’t make a difference.”

  “I carn’t just take your word for it, can I, boyo?”

  GHB, Janwar thinks. There was GHB in that syringe as well. Which means—

  “You think you’re such hot shit with GHB, don’t you, Llew? You think you can make me forget everything that just happened.”

  “And everything that’s going to happen.”

  “So…” Janwar has to fight to keep an insane grin from spreading across his face. “So why don’t you tell me how it all went. Give me the full rundown. So I can appreciate how well you executed it.”

  “Not a hope in hell.”

  “Wait, so I won’t forget everything?”

  Llew says nothing.

  “You don’t think you’re a good enough Mixer?”

  What Janwar can see of Llew’s face darkens behind the mauve mask. Janwar is getting somewhere, but not fast enough, because now Llew is standing over Janwar.

  “Enough talking.” He rubs alcohol onto the inside of Janwar’s left elbow, swirling the hair around into a Milky Way pattern. “Now clench your fist or I’ll clench it for you.”

  At least Llew’s doing his part to avoid infection. Janwar clenches his fist, then clenches it again, until the median cubital pops out nice and blue and ready for the IV. Llew’s going to stick him no matter what, so Janwar might as well help Llew get a good connection the first time.

  Once the IV is in, Llew tapes the tubing down and picks up the syringe. “Having fun now, boyo?” He taps out a couple of drops and injects the roc into the IV.

  The first part of his body Janwar loses control of is his left big toe. He tries to wiggle it and nothing happens. He’s lost his fingers, too. Roc paralyzes small fibres before large ones. After about a minute, when Janwar’s body attempts to breathe, it can’t.

  Llew holds up the clear tubing. “Open wi-i-de.”

  The paralytic has taken care of Janwar’s gag reflex, and the tube slides down his throat.

  Llew’s gloved fingers in Janwar’s mouth remind Janwar of the Ayatollah of Tooth Care giving him a tough-love flossing lesson as a child.

  The tube slides into his esophagus, not his windpipe. Does Llew know? The ventilator turns on. Air bubbles into his stomach. Janwar can’t indicate to Llew that the air is going into the wrong place.

  Janwar’s lungs stick together. The white blob with yellow edges that has been his frequent companion over the last few weeks covers his vision again.

  The halting of the ventilator brings Janwar back. Now he feels the tube slide back out, then, a second later, down into his windpipe.

  “Just kidding,” Llew says. “Remember how rough I can make it for you, boyo.”

  Janwar hears the ventilator begin to whirr again, and air rushes into his lungs, but Llew is touching his forehead and he can’t move away. Llew removes Janwar’s glasses and tapes his eyes shut. The fear catches up with him. The rational part of Janwar’s brain switches off, and he is pure reptile.

  A visceral feeling of relief shoves Janwar’s reptilian brain back for a second. He focuses on the feeling. When he tries to articulate it into words in his head, the feeling is that he has been here before.

  The memory coalesces: as a child, when Janwar had nightmares, sometimes he’d wake up and not be able to move his muscles or call for Garati or Ajay. At the time, he thought it was something that everyone experienced, that it was scary but ordinary. One of these nightmares, in fact, being of a grey-bearded man bending over him…

  But in medical school, after he’d forgotten he’d experienced it himself, he learned his symptoms described a condition called sleep paralysis, which is the failure of the natural human function that paralyzes skeletal muscles while sleeping—to avoid rolling over onto a child, or acting out one’s dreams—to wear off upon returning to consciousness. The nightmare was caused by the paralysis and not vice versa. Janwar had been strong dealing with it as a child; he could make it through this experience. He has no idea what is going to happen, but it’s more likely to turn out all right if he’s able to focus on what Llew’s saying now.

  “Here’s what it is. Doctors are proper bad with investments: we have money and no time. Whole companies of financial planners exist that work only with doctors to try to prevent us from making investments in shady condominium projects, like the one we all invested in…”

  Under the influence of the anaesthetic cocktail, Llew’s voice recedes from Janwar’s ears, and the story passes in front of Janwar’s eyes at twenty-four frames per second, in high-contrast black and white.

  Llew’s sitting by a hotel pool in Miami with a martini and a crime novel. A fat man in tiny swimming trunks has taken the chaise next to him. When Llew finishes his martini and gets up to refill his drink, the fat man asks if Llew can get him another drink as well. He hands Llew a twenty. As Llew opens his wallet to put it in, the fat man says in a deep, South African–accented voice that he can’t help but notice that Llew has an Ontario driver’s licence.

  Llew nods. “Are you also from Ontario?”

  The man says he was born in Cape Town, but now lives in Ottawa and spends most winters in Miami. He’s a condo developer, name of Lowell Chilton. They talk investments.

  Llew flies back to Ottawa. A week later he brings the other anaesthesiologists to an information session Lowell Chilton is holding at the Château Laurier. Everybody is jazzed about the project: a condo complex on the site of the Bronson Centre. Since the centre is a charity, it can’t afford to stay in its current location as the neighbourhood gentrifies. It’s moving out to Tunney’s Pasture, and Bronson Slope will be built in its place.

  The plans show a LEED-platinum-certified tower sharp as a scalpel jutting up into the Ottawa skyline. The mock-ups of each condo’s interior look like they’re from Los Angeles, all clean and white, decorated in an art-deco revival style. In a city full of concrete apartment blocks, rich federal bureaucrats who believe they have taste and care about the environment will gobble them up like taxpayer dollars, Chilton says.

  The entire anaesthesiology department gets in on it. Between them, they own almost the whole building. The units start selling, and life is good.

  Then, a few months later, Chilton calls Llew at 3 a.m. There’s a small problem. One of the prospective residents, a man named Diego Acosta, is a structural engineer, and when he walked by the build site to see how it was progressing, Diego recognized that the builder had made substitutions that weren’t in the plans. These are substitutions Lowell had instructed the construction company to make. In fact, Chilton has paid off the LEED inspector with the doctors’ money. Llew gets red in the face.

  Chilton tells Llew to hold on. This isn’t a black-and-white situation. These structural changes—they’re not dangerous. They’re just saving some money. Putting in thinner insulation, mostly. The building’s not really going to be LEED platinum certified. But who cares? The tenants pay for hydro, and if it’s a little higher than they expected? They’re buying the idea of LEED certification, so that’s what Chilton is selling them. Canada is built on property scams. It wouldn’t be an economically sustainable country if the government lived up to every promise. Chilton’s just continuing in that tradition, but he’s scamming everyone equally. Isn’t that progress? And Acosta isn’t some shining knight, because he’s shaking Chilton down for money. A lot of money. He’s going to tell the press unless Chilton pays him off.

  “So what are you going to do?” Llew asks.

  They’re all in it together, Chilton says. If Llew squeals to the papers that the building’s not LEED platinum, all the tenants are going to back out.

  “Then we’ll sue you for our money back, won’t we.”

  Chilton says that’s not going to happen. The doctors are welcome to try but they won’t get shit. Chilton didn’t get to b
e a real-estate mogul without the civil courts and city council in his pocket.

  “What are we going to do?” Llew says. “Scare him? Hit him sick?”

  There’s only one way to get rid of a blackmailer, Chilton says.

  “You want to put him in the ground.”

  He’s not a nice man, Chilton points out. Diego’s bleeding them of hundreds of thousands of dollars, and he won’t stop unless they take action. If he were a nice man, Diego would go straight to the papers. And nobody will miss him. Chilton did his research when approving Diego to buy the unit. Diego’s from Argentina and he doesn’t have any family here. He moved here in the 1980s. He was probably involved in the Dirty War.

  “That’s a bit far, Lowell,” Llew says. “That’s like saying you likely left South Africa because apartheid ended.”

  Chilton waves that away. They’re talking about murdering a blackmailer. Chilton’s racial politics aren’t relevant. They have to stay focused on the problem—which the anaesthesiologists, with their easy access to narcotics, could solve. And Llew’s the dean of anaesthesiology. He’s got to be able to pull strings.

  “First we’d have to get him under the doctor,” Llew says.

  Chilton says his goons could follow Diego and accost him, and if they did it close enough to Civic, the man would end up by there instead of General. He looks to Llew for confirmation.

  Llew nods.

  And Diego would go along with the mugging narrative when he talked to the police, because even if he suspected something else, he couldn’t risk having the whole story come out before he got all his money, Chilton continues.

  “I have to mull it over and talk with the others, don’t I,” Llew says.

  Chilton breaks character. His anxiety can’t handle this much longer. He’s already Xanaxed to the tits. Llew has to let him know tomorrow.

  Llew calls a meeting at Minsky’s. Over eyeball-rattling amounts of caffeine and artery-busting piles of doughnuts, Llew sketches out the situation and tells the rest of the department that he’s going to pitch something that might sound heartless. “What if we get a poor lamb of a med student to administer a lethal dose of a medication to Diego by accident?”

  It’s beyond heartless, it’s straight evil, the other anaesthesiologists bluster at first. But when Llew explains the impact of not taking action, they have second thoughts. A guaranteed tripling of their money is going to turn into total financial ruin—their all-time sure thing will go bad, real bad. Or they could suffer through a couple of weeks of moral turbulence and then it’ll be like nothing ever happened.

  Some of them have killed people by accident in the past, Llew continues. Over years of putting people to sleep with narcotics, it’s unavoidable. This isn’t that much different—it doesn’t take a tectonic shift, just a minor push in morals. Sylvie is the biggest opponent, and she takes the opportunity to remind Llew that their last excursion past the restrictions of the law resulted in irreparable damage to the muscles in her left eye. Llew reminds her that it was her own fault, for not wearing the eye protection he had provided. Above everything else, Sylvie is a rational person, a scientist, and she gives in: this is the least risky play to make in a very ugly situation.

  It’s early summer at this point. The department will be getting a medical student in July. They’ll select one from out-of-province, so he’ll return back home once their placement is over, minimizing the chances of an in-depth investigation.

  Right before the operation, one of the nurses will run into Llew in the hallway, and Llew will swipe his tablet across the sensor, unlock the drawer, and drop in a more potent solution, enough to kill the patient.

  Next the anaesthesiologists have to figure out how to make the medical student use the right solution, and believe that he’d messed up, rather than that the drugs had been switched.

  The solution comes from Carla. She says they could convince the student that there were two factions of anaesthesiologists. They’d then cast the groups as violently opposed to each other and make it appear that under no circumstances would they ever work together outside of the OR—like the surgeons and the anaesthesiologists in real life. Fang looks away.

  Some of the anaesthesiologists mix their induction agents and some don’t, Peter says. Maybe that could be the division. Shaughnessy thinks the med student would be suspicious. In Fang’s opinion, that’s non-issue. They need to remember that the student would be coming from med school and he’d have no idea how the real world worked.

  Carla jumps in: Peter’s idea would solve both problems. The mixers always use thiopental and the other group always uses propofol. The two drugs require different coinduction agents. As long as the anaesthesiologists knew which agent the student would use, they could swap the vials and increase the potency enough to kill.

  Llew suggests that he and Sylvie watch the student during his first operation through the two-way mirror. If the student used propofol she’d congratulate him and invite him to be a Pusher. If he used thiopental, Llew would induct him into the Mixers. José and Henry would aggravate him if he mixed, and Carla would aggravate him if he pushed. They’d play out a whole West Side Story charade so that the student believed in the conflict and it wouldn’t occur to him that both groups could’ve been in league.

  With unanimous agreement, Llew goes back to Chilton the next day.

  “Okay,” Llew says, “we’ll do it. Have your lads break his kneecaps late on the night of July 8, and do it somewhere close to Civic. Make it look like a mugging that went wrong. I’ll have the emergency-room doctors get him to surgery.”

  Chilton says he knows how to stomp a nosy son of a bitch without getting pinned. Llew shouldn’t assume he hasn’t done this before. But he has a deal.

  Llew tells José and Henry and Rasheeda and Emanda just enough to play their roles, and pays them off. The department writes a letter of offer to Janwar, and right on time, Diego turns up in the emergency room.

  The screen fades to black and Llew’s voice-over returns.

  “And you know the rest. Diego was scheduled for surgery the next day. José had the cart filled at the dispensary for the audit trail. José ran into me in the hallway. I switched the vial. Rasheeda switched it back. You killed Diego.

  “Oh, and Shaughnessy: that half-soaked paddy almost botched everything. He was supposed to recruit some piece to play the femme fatale and get you out to the bar so he could give you a warning, to make the whole conflict seem more real. But he wasn’t supposed to give you a belter, let alone stomp you. We had to switch our plan up a bit after that, since I wasn’t expecting Shaughnessy to let loose. And we certainly weren’t planning on you being a patient. Then this week Sylvie told me she found out Shaun has been running an Oxy scam with Horace: they’d been writing ghost prescriptions and paying off Brenda in shipping and receiving to redirect packages for them, somehow involving dog walkers. The Hells Angels in Gatineau bought all the Oxy. I expect you caught on to that and that’s why Shaun clobbered you, boyo? Sylvie and Lowell pulled Shaun apart and as far as I understand Shaun and Horace were calling it off. Shaun managed to tell the Hells Angels they were getting out of the deal without them dropping him in the Rideau River with heavy shoes. So, thank the Lord the police didn’t come down on us for that Oxy business, or for anything else.

  “I think that’s about everything. Any questions? No? Now we just have to figure out what to do with you.”

  Janwar doesn’t, in fact, have any questions. Llew has pretty much laid it all out on the table. The problem is that Janwar is still laid out on the table. And now that Llew has stopped talking, Janwar has nothing to focus on outside himself. His world has shrunk to just him, in the closet, paralyzed.

  Another voice speaks, a female voice. “What’s going on here? Janwar, are you okay?”

  “He collapsed. Must be all the stress. I had to act fast now, didn’t I.”

  “Why’s he got his eyes taped shut, then? And why the fuck is he zip-tied to the conference table wi
th a tube sticking out of his mouth?”

  “Are you an anaesthesiologist?”

  “No, I—”

  Then Janwar hears the sounds of 60/40 poly-cotton lab-coat sleeve against lab-coat pocket, the scuffling of feet, and a thud.

  “Stupid girl,” Llew says. Drug-preparation noises. Janwar’s muscles start to come back under his control; Llew shot him up with sugammadex to reverse the paralyzing effects of the rocuronium. Why? So Janwar can talk? What’s Llew done to Susan? Janwar must have been willing himself so hard to thrash that as soon as his muscles can accommodate it, he spasms and bucks epileptically.

  “Easy.” Llew yanks the tube out of his throat. “Was this piece who you told, you crot?”

  “What did you do to her?” Janwar slurs. His throat is on fire.

  “Buck up. I just shot her with a tranquilizer. She’s right enough, but she won’t be if you keep at being contrary.”

  “What’s your plan now?”

  “Putting you back to sleep now, aren’t I?”

  “I am so goddamn sick of going to sleep,” Janwar says. “When this is over, I’m going to stay awake for days.”

  When Janwar wakes again, he’s in a dark room. His wrists are zip-tied together behind his back, his ankles are also bound, and his mouth and eyes are taped shut.

  Somehow, despite all of these concerning elements to his environment, he’s calm and his head is clear. He’s not anxious at all. He’s in a problematic environment, but he can still act. He can perform one action after another until he is out of the situation. It might be too much to assume that the boogeyman’s closet has cured his anxiety, but maybe now that he’s in a physically dangerous situation, his adrenaline is doing what it evolved to do in primitive homo sapiens. That is, making him more alert and able to act quickly and correctly, able to fight sabre-toothed tigers and chase mammoths—not just revving his motor in neutral like it normally does in a standard chthonic breakthrough. Or maybe there is going to be a permanent benefit to all this. Now that the worst has happened—he’s visited the boogeyman closet—he can move on. Unintentional aversion therapy, Dr. Brank would say.