The Body Human

by Nancy Kress

  The old man breathed.

  He sent the boy for more adults. The child took off at a dead run, returning twenty minutes later with uncles, father, cousins, aunts, most of whom spoke some language Jesse couldn’t identify. In that twenty minutes none of the well-dressed tourists in the Garden approached Jesse, standing guard beside the old man, who breathed carefully and moaned softly, stretched full-length on the grass. The tourists glanced at him and then away, their faces tightening.

  The tribe of family carried the old man away on a homemade stretcher. Jesse put his hand on the arm of one of the young men. “Insurance? Hospital?”

  The man spat onto the grass.

  Jesse walked beside the stretcher, monitoring the old man until he was in his own bed. He told the child what to do for him, since no one else seemed to understand. Later that day he went back, carrying his medical bag, and gave them the last of his hospital supply of nitroglycerin. The oldest woman, who had been too busy issuing orders about the stretcher to pay Jesse any attention before, stopped dead and jabbered in her own tongue.

  “You a doctor?” the child translated. The tip of his ear, Jesse noticed, was missing. Congenital? Accident? Ritual mutilation? The ear had healed clean.

  “Yeah,” Jesse said. “A doctor.”

  The old woman chattered some more and disappeared behind a door. Jesse gazed at the walls. There were no deathbed photos. As he was leaving, the woman returned with ten incredibly dirty dollar bills.

  “Doctor,” she said, her accent harsh, and when she smiled Jesse saw that all her top teeth and most of her bottom ones were missing, the gum swollen with what might have been early signs of scurvy.

  “Doctor,” she said again.

  He moved out of the hotel just as the last of his money ran out. The old man’s wife, Androula Malakassas, found him a room in somebody else’s rambling, dilapidated boardinghouse. The house was noisy at all hours, but the room was clean and large. Androula’s cousin brought home an old, multi-positional dentist chair, probably stolen, and Jesse used that for both examining and operating table. Medical substances—antibiotics, chemotherapy, IV drugs—which he had thought of as the hardest need to fill outside of controlled channels, turned out to be the easiest. On reflection, he realized this shouldn’t have surprised him.

  In July he delivered his first breech birth, a primipara whose labor was so long and painful and bloody he thought at one point he’d lose both mother and baby. He lost neither, although the new mother cursed him in Spanish and spit at him. She was too weak for the saliva to go far. Holding the warm-assed, nine-pound baby boy, Jesse had heard a camera click. He cursed too, but feebly; the sharp thrill of pleasure that pierced from throat to bowels was too strong.

  In August he lost three patients in a row, all to conditions that would have needed elaborate, costly equipment and procedures: renal failure, aortic aneurysm, narcotic overdose. He went to all three funerals. At each one the family and friends cleared a little space for him, in which he stood surrounded by respect and resentment. When a knife fight broke out at the funeral of the aneurysm, the family hustled Jesse away from the danger, but not so far away that he couldn’t treat the loser.

  In September a Chinese family, recent immigrants, moved into Androula’s sprawling boarding house. The woman wept all day. The man roamed Boston, looking for work. There was a grandfather who spoke a little English, having learned it in Peking during the brief period of American industrial expansion into the Pacific Rim before the Chinese government convulsed and the American economy collapsed. The grandfather played go. On evenings when no one wanted Jesse, he sat with Lin Shujen and moved the polished white and black stones over the grid, seeking to enclose empty spaces without losing any pieces. Mr. Lin took a long time to consider each move.

  In October, a week before Jesse’s trial, his mother died. Jesse’s father sent him money to fly home for the funeral, the first money Jesse had accepted from his family since he’d finally told them he had left the hospital. After the funeral Jesse sat in the living room of his father’s Florida house and listened to the elderly mourners recall their youths in the vanished prosperity of the 1950s and ’60s.

  “Plenty of jobs then for people who’re willing to work.”

  “Still plenty of jobs. Just nobody’s willing any more.”

  “Want everything handed to them. If you ask me, this collapse’ll prove to be a good thing in the long run. Weed out the weaklings and the lazy.”

  “It was the sixties we got off on the wrong track, with Lyndon Johnson and all the welfare programs—”

  They didn’t look at Jesse. He had no idea what his father had said to them about him.

  Back in Boston, stinking under Indian summer heat, people thronged his room. Fractures, cancers, allergies, pregnancies, punctures, deficiencies, imbalances. They were resentful that he’d gone away for five days. He should be here; they needed him. He was the doctor.

  The first day of his trial, Jesse saw Kenny standing on the courthouse steps. Kenny wore a cheap blue suit with loafers and white socks. Jesse stood very still, then walked over to the other man. Kenny tensed.

  “I’m not going to hit you,” Jesse said.

  Kenny watched him, chin lowered, slight body balanced on the balls of his feet. A fighter’s stance.

  “I want to ask something,” Jesse said. “It won’t affect the trial. I just want to know. Why’d you do it? Why did they? I know the little girl’s true genescan showed 98% risk of leukemia death within three years, but even so—how could you?”

  Kenny scrutinized him carefully. Jesse saw that Kenny thought Jesse might be wired. Even before Kenny answered, Jesse knew what he’d hear. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, man.”

  “You couldn’t get inside the system. Any of you. So you brought me out. If Mohammed won’t go to the mountain—”

  “You don’t make no sense,” Kenny said.

  “Was it worth it? To you? To them? Was it?”

  Kenny walked away, up the courthouse steps. At the top waited the Goceks, who were suing Jesse for $2,000,000 he didn’t have and wasn’t insured for, and that they knew damn well they wouldn’t collect. On the wall of their house, wherever it was, probably hung Rosamund’s deathbed picture, a little girl with a plain, sallow face and beautiful hair.

  Jesse saw his lawyer trudge up the courthouse steps, carrying his briefcase. Another lawyer, with an equally shabby briefcase, climbed in parallel several feet away. Between the two men the courthouse steps made a white empty space.

  Jesse climbed, too, hoping to hell this wouldn’t take too long. He had an infected compound femoral fracture, a birth with potential erythroblastosis fetalis, and an elderly phlebitis, all waiting. He was especially concerned about the infected fracture, which needed careful monitoring because the man’s genescan showed a tendency toward weak T-cell production. The guy was a day laborer, foul-mouthed and ignorant and brave, with a wife and two kids. He’d broken his leg working illegal construction. Jesse was determined to give him at least a fighting chance.