Sandman

by Sean Costello

  “From a surgical standpoint she’s ready for discharge,” Craig said. “I’ll leave it up to you how best to deal with the depression.”

  “I don’t think she’ll be ready to leave anytime soon,” Paul said. “I’d like to arrange a transfer to Psychiatry.”

  With what felt like an enormous effort, Jenny opened her eyes and said, “It’s impolite to decide a lady’s fate without consulting her first.” She rose up on her elbows and blinked at them dazedly.

  Paul said, “Sorry, Jen. I thought you were...”

  “Out of it?” She was amazed at how drained she felt. “Well, maybe I was.” She produced a brittle smile. “But now I’m back.”

  Paul cleared his throat. “Uh, Craig was just saying that from his point of view you’re ready to go. It’s been almost four days—”

  Four days?

  “Jen, are you all right?”

  “Yes.” Her face was sheet white. “I just, I didn’t realize...”

  “You were having a pretty rough go of it,” Paul said. “Bad dreams, hysterics. We had to sedate you.”

  Slivers of it came back to her then: waking up screaming in the night; ghoulish visions of her miscarriage; staff restraining her; painful injections in her hip.

  “I lost my baby,” Jenny said, thinking that if she didn’t play her cards right she could end up stuck in here for days. “It was a terrible experience. But I feel better now and I want to go home.”

  “I’m not sure we should rush things,” Paul said. “Why not spend a few more days...?”

  “Paul, I’m fine. Now I’d like you to arrange my discharge.”

  Paul glanced at Craig. “Okay. I’ll set it up for this afternoon.”

  When they were gone Jenny decided to test her legs. It took some doing—after four days on her back and God knew what medications, her legs felt like Slinkies—but she got herself going, shifting from handhold to handhold at first, then shuffling into the bathroom to examine herself in the mirror.

  My God, she thought. Sunken eyes stared back at her; a sallow face with a thin, bitter mouth; tousled, greasy hair. She hardly recognized herself.

  She slipped out of the hospital gown and stepped into the shower. The water was only lukewarm, the shower head so badly clogged only half the perforations produced spray. But it felt grand. She stood there for ten minutes, rotating slowly, letting the water arouse her blunted nerve endings. Then she toweled herself off and looked around for something to wear. She’d come in wearing only a bra, covered in a sheet the paramedics had thrown over her. Finding nothing, she buzzed the nursing station to explain her dilemma.

  A few minutes later a nurse appeared with a set of surgical scrubs. Jenny thanked her and pulled them on. Then she picked up the phone and punched in the extension for Jack’s office.

  “Yes?”

  “Jack, it’s me.”

  “What do you want?” Cold. Annoyed.

  Jack, what’s wrong? Had his tearful visit on the night of the storm been just another part of her delirium? Had she imagined it?

  “I’m, they’re letting me out today,” Jenny said. “Can you come and—”

  “You’ll have to take a cab. All hell has broken loose here. I’m very busy.”

  The line went dead.

  Stung, Jenny could only stare at the buzzing receiver. It wasn’t until a recorded voice came on and said, “Please hang up and try your call again,” that she thumbed the cutoff button and dialed their number at home.

  * * *

  Kim sat on the couch with a big bowl of Doritos in her lap and watched Oprah on TV. As guests Oprah had a bevy of the most obese women Kim had ever seen. Each woman was telling the audience about how she’d come to terms with her gargantuan figure, and it made Kim feel good. These women seemed genuinely happy with themselves and she wasn’t a third as big as any one of them.

  She munched another handful of Doritos. It was eleven-thirty Tuesday morning. She’d been alone in the house since Saturday, the night of the storm. In the interim she’d done little but sleep—on the couch mostly, whenever she happened to doze off—stuff her face with junk food and watch TV. The phone had rung a few times—friends of her parents’, the school wondering about her absences—but there had been no word from her dad. She’d called the hospital every day to check on her mom, but the message was always the same: “Your mother’s still heavily sedated.”

  A commercial came on the tube, a kid spooning pudding into her mouth, teasing her dog with it.

  Kim thought, Pudding, and slid off the couch. She was halfway to the kitchen when the telephone rang. She ran for it eagerly.

  “Dad?”

  “No, honey, it’s me.”

  “Oh, Mom, hi! You’re awake. I called, I called every day.”

  “I know, sweetheart. They told me. I’m glad.”

  Kim didn’t like the sound of her mother’s voice. It seemed to lack something that was apparent only in its absence—a certain almost musical quality of affirmation and love. Kim was seized by a sudden, shapeless dread. She said, “Are you okay, Mom? You sound kind of strange.”

  “I’m fine, Kim. I’m coming home. I’ll see you this afternoon.”

  “Okay. I’ll get things ready.”

  Kim hung up and gazed around in mild shock. The place looked like a war zone. Dirty dishes everywhere, crumpled chip bags and pizza boxes and pop bottles. And look at me! She hadn’t bathed since Thursday, and she’d been wearing the same clothes for four days.

  Gotta get ready, Kim thought, trying to shake off the creeping unease her mother’s tone had aroused in her. Gotta get ready for my mom.

  She ran upstairs to her room, leaving Oprah to her panel of guests.

  15

  DR. PHIL CARRUTHERS GUIDED THE cystoscope into his patient’s penis, watching through the eyepiece for evidence of pathology as he advanced the tip toward the bladder. The patient, whose legs were up in stirrups, was an overweight man of sixty with emphysema and a lousy heart. But his most urgent problem was his kidneys. Both of his ureters—the conduits through which urine made its way to the bladder—were blocked, and Carruthers had no idea why.

  He’d hoped for a sharp anesthetist today, someone who could keep things rolling; Tuesdays were always busy in Urology, and today was no exception. To make matters worse, they’d stuck him in suite 3, a goddam dinosaur of a room, the equipment so outdated Carruthers sometimes felt it bordered on malpractice to operate in it. That was why, when he walked in this morning at eight o’clock and saw Dr. Rahimifar standing at the head of the table, his mood had taken an immediate nose dive. The man was a snail. It was past noon already and they still had five cases to do.

  On top of all that, there was something going on. There’d been an anesthetic death the day before. “Equipment failure” was all anyone was being told. But who were the spooks in the suits? Technicians? Carruthers didn’t think so. Cops, more like. So what was the deal? Why hadn’t he been informed? He hadn’t gone to university for twelve years to be treated like a goddam kid. Why—

  There was a sudden grating shriek followed by a flourish of finger cymbals and sitars. Carruthers looked up from his perch between the patient’s legs and ground his teeth.

  Look at that crazy bastard, he thought miserably, watching as Rahimifar adjusted the volume on his boom box. Where does he think he is?

  Carruthers and the circulating nurse traded exasperated glances, then the urologist went back to his scope. The next step was to thread fine plastic catheters up the ureters to the kidneys. Radiopacque dye could then be injected and serial X-rays taken. The differential diagnosis of renal obstruction was not all that extensive. The retrogrades would help narrow it even further.

  Doing his best to ignore the jangling horseshit from Rahimifar’s boom box, Carruthers snaked a catheter into the scope. Then, fitting his bespectacled eye to the eyepiece, he identified the opening of the right ureter. The catheter threaded easily. Carruthers advanced it blindly until he encountered resistance,
then turned to the circulating nurse.

  “Roll that screen over here, would you?” He indicated the portable X-ray monitor, which resembled a large television set.

  The nurse, Brenda Wilks, obliged, adjusting the monitor’s tilt to accommodate the surgeon’s line of sight.

  “That’s good,” Carruthers said. “Is the X-ray girl here?”

  Bonnie, the X-ray tech assigned to urology, spoke up. “Ready when you are, Doctor.”

  “Okay. Switch me over to monitor.”

  The video screen flickered to life. Carruthers groped around with his left shoe, already soaked in the irrigation fluid that flowed in and out of the patient’s bladder, until he found the X-ray foot switch. He identified the correct pedal by touch and stepped on it.

  When Detective Fransen questioned her about it later, Brenda Wilks would tell him that at first it had sounded like a lightning strike. Then Carruther’s body stiffened and the patient levered up at the waist, his forehead striking the overhanging X-ray tube. Both men were seized by violent, high frequency convulsions. Thin smoke rose from the surgeon’s gloved hands, which clutched the cystoscope in a death grip. Behind his glasses his red eyes bulged, then exploded. The patient’s arms flapped erratically, his upper body slamming up and down on the tilted surgical table, giving the impression of an immensely powerful man doing rapid-fire sit-ups. Each time his face came up it bashed into the hard, irregular surface of the X-ray tube.

  One hundred and fifty thousand volts of raw electricity surged up Phil Carruther’s leg, turning him into a human cook oven. The proteins in his muscles coagulated like steaks on a grill. The water in his tissues turned to steam. The current followed his blood vessels, making brief exits from his body at any point where a vessel came close to the surface. A black hole appeared in his neck above the collar of his scrub suit—later, jarred awake from a recurring nightmare of the hideous events of that day, nurse Wilks would tell her husband that it was as if someone had shot Dr. Carruthers through the back of the neck, point blank, and she had actually seen the bullet make its exit. Torn from inside, Carruthers’ thyroid artery spouted blood, cooked into clotted sludge. The current plunged back into his body between his ribs, creating a new charred hole and finding his heart, bursting it. It crackled over the surface of his body from a hundred different escape points, setting his greens on fire and withering every hair on his body. It screamed through his arms into the cystoscope, and from there into the patient’s internal organs, heating the air in his guts and making it expand, inflating his intestines like an endless loop of inner tube. A long smoking fart issued from his exposed anus. The methane gas in his rectum ignited and turned his ass into a geyser of bloody gravy. The surgical drapes caught fire.

  Ten seconds had passed.

  Rahimifar stood goggling. Dr. Huggins, who’d been doing a radical prostatectomy in the next room, burst onto the scene through an adjoining doorway. Brenda reached instinctively for Carruthers and Huggins roared at her: “Don’t touch him.” Brenda froze, gaping at Huggins in horror, realizing how close her good intentions had come to making her a part of the human barbecue she was now a witness to.

  “Run out and find somebody who can shut off the power,” Huggins said. The X-ray technician, who might have been able to shut the rig down, had already bolted from the room. “And grab a fire extinguisher.” In counterpoint to the madness, Rahimifar’s boom box wailed.

  The nurse ran out and the bodies of Phil Carruthers and his patient—Rudy Bolan, a gentle man who liked his beer and his Saturday afternoon wraslin’ and who had two grandkids who adored him—continued to fry. By the time Brenda got back with an electrician, Huggins had found an extinguisher and coated the dead men with foam.

  The electrician threw the breaker switch, killing the main power generator. The hospital fire alarm clanged and a whispering crowd of staff gathered at the urology suite doors.

  * * *

  Byron Waverly from Biomed did the honors again today, but this time he refused to go near the place until the carnage had been bagged and carted away. Even with the bodies gone the stench of burnt flesh kept slithering down his throat like a plumber’s snake. Thankfully, the source of the problem took even less time to puzzle out than it had the day before.

  “Look here,” he said to Fransen, indicating the fuse panel. The flatfoot kept triggering one of those inhalers into his lungs every few minutes. “Lengths of copper pipe where the fuses should be. And over here.” He walked Fransen to the X-ray consul and pointed to a heavy gray cable. “Stripped. The S.O.B. spliced the main power cable to the consul. The foot switch opened the circuit and—” Byron slapped his palms together “—wham. A hundred and fifty K.V., full bore. Goodnight, Irene.”

  “Colorful,” Fransen said.

  “What?”

  “Thank you, Mr. Waverly, you’ve been a great help.” Fransen pointed to the door. “An officer will meet you outside and take your statement.”

  Mumbling to himself, Byron gathered up his tools and left.

  * * *

  “You’ve got another one,” Fransen told Chartrand. “A double header.” All of the officials present at yesterday’s meeting were assembled in the boardroom again today. The mood was exceedingly tense. “Somebody hot-wired the X-ray machine.”

  Frantic, Chartrand said, “But how can that be? I had a crew of men in there all last night installing deadbolts.”

  Linda Fry, the OR head nurse, said, “That suite only gets used on Tuesdays.”

  “What?” Chartrand shook his head, a man jacked into a permanent nightmare. “What?”

  “Urology suite three,” Fry said. “It only gets used on Tuesdays. Whoever did this could have done it anytime between last Tuesday night and today.”

  The administrator searched the other faces in the room. For the first time in his career he was at a loss. “My God, what are we going to do?”

  “Shut ’er down,” Fransen said. “The whole OR. Until we get some kind of handle on the situation, it’s the only thing you can do.”

  “He’s right, Peter,” Jackie Fox, the hospital lawyer, said. “From a legal standpoint, there’s no other choice. We’re looking at lawsuits here. Colossal ones. And when the media gets wind of this—and quite frankly, how can it be avoided?—this place is going to be crawling with reporters. As soon as I leave here I’m going to call the Ministry, get their people involved.”

  “You’re right,” Chartrand said. He turned to Linda Fry. “Tell your staff to finish up any cases already in progress. Cancel anything that isn’t a bona fide emergency. We’ll have to devise some sort of system to deal with the overflow. Alert the other hospitals. And we’ll need a cover story.” He got to his feet. “Linda, tell your staff I’ll meet with them in an hour with an explanation. Surgeons, anesthetists, everyone. I—”

  Jack Fallon had his hand up.

  “Yes, Jack?”

  “May I suggest a compromise?” Chartrand nodded impatiently. “Wouldn’t it be more prudent to keep at least two rooms going? One to handle general emergencies and the other to deal with the obstetrical overflow? We could strip these suites down in a matter of hours, go over the machines with a fine-tooth comb, restock with fresh supplies and be ready by end of shift today.”

  There were nods and murmurs of assent.

  “That’s an excellent idea, Jack. Can I leave it to you to get things rolling?”

  “Glad to oblige, Peter.”

  The intercom buzzed. It was Chartrand’s secretary.

  “Sophie,” Chartrand said, “I told you not to interrupt this meeting.”

  “I know,” Sophie said. “But there’s been another...incident.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I think you should go to the OR right away. The eye room.”

  * * *

  Dr. Ian McWhirter had been an ophthalmologist for thirty-eight years. In that time he’d published more scientific papers than any ten of his contemporaries, performed all manner of delicate surgica
l intervention in a dozen different eye clinics around the world, and fathered six physically and intellectually superior boys. His professional attitude was unshakably old school; he’d be the first to admit that, and with pride. And the single thing that most incensed him about this ‘modern’ medical community was the rampant lack of respect. In England, where he’d trained, surgeons of his stature were treated like royalty, revered by the nurses, cow towed to by the resident staff. In those days you could make or break the career of a surgical trainee with a single word. Back then medicine had been disciplined.

  Now look. Something goes wrong in another part of the OR—an electrical fire was all he’d been told—and the entire staff goes flapping off like headless chickens. There were patients to be tended to, damn it.

  Oh, he knew what they thought of him. He was old and he was grumpy and they all thought he should have retired years ago. Well, let them think what they would. He still had the dexterity of a man half his age. When he operated, usually through a high-powered microscope, the instruments went exactly where he wanted them to.

  McWhirter strode into the eye room and slid open the glass door of the equipment cabinet. He selected a glass syringe with a stainless steel needle, a small jar of pre-soaked alcohol swabs and a vial of local anesthetic. This last he had to hunt for, as usual. There should have been a whole selection of local anesthetics, all neatly ranked like battle-ready soldiers. But all he could find was a single vial, and a used one at that.

  Annoyed, the surgeon ran the needle through the vial’s rubber seal, drew up the last ten cc’s of anesthetic solution and went back to the hallway, where his next patient lay waiting on a stretcher.

  * * *

  Anna Rukutis was afraid. At eighty-eight years of age, she was no stranger to fear. She’d been afraid when the Nazis rolled into her native Poland and herded her family into cattle cars, and she’d been afraid when the commandant at Buchenwald showed her the ovens, promising immunity for certain unspeakable favors, which she had willingly performed. Yes, fear was always near at hand, lurking in the high rafters of joy.