Blood Test

by Jonathan Kellerman

  Now, looking into the large dark eyes of the boy in the plastic room, these same feelings came back in a rush.

  His face was small and thin, the skin stretched across delicate bone structure, translucently pale in the artificial light of the module. His eyes, like those of his sister, were black, and glassy with fever. The hair on his head was a thick mop of henna-colored curls. Chemotherapy, if it ever happened, would take care of those curls in a brutal, though temporary, reminder of the disease.

  Beverly stopped stroking his hair and held out her glove. The boy took it and managed a smile.

  “How we doing this morning, doll?”

  “Okay.” His voice was soft and barely audible through the plastic.

  “This is Dr. Delaware, Woody.”

  At the mention of the title he flinched and moved back on the bed.

  “He’s not the kind of doctor who gives shots. He just talks to kids, like I do.”

  That relaxed him somewhat, but he continued to look at me with apprehension.

  “Hi, Woody,” I said. “Can we shake hands?”

  “Okay.”

  I put my hand into the glove Beverly relinquished. It felt hot and dry—coated with talc, I recalled. Reaching into the module I searched for his hand and found it, a small treasure. I held it for a moment and let go.

  “I see you’ve got some games in there. Which is your favorite?”

  “Checkers.”

  “I like checkers, too. Do you play a lot?” “Kind of.”

  “You must be very smart to know how to play checkers.”

  “Kind of.” The hint of a smile.

  “I bet you win a lot.”

  The smile widened. His teeth were straight and white but the gums surrounding them were swollen and inflamed.

  “And you like to win.”

  “Uh huh. I always win my mom.”

  “How ’bout your dad?”

  He gave a perplexed frown.

  “He doesn’t play checkers.”

  “I see. But if he did, you’d probably win.”

  He digested that for a minute.

  “Yeah, I pro’ly would. He doesn’t know much about playing games.”

  “Anyone else you play with besides Mom?”

  “Jared—but he moved away.”

  “Anybody besides Jared?”

  “Michael and Kevin.”

  “Are they guys at school?”

  “Yeah. I finished K. Next year I go into one.”

  He was alert and responsive but obviously weak. Talking to me was taxing and his chest heaved with the effort.

  “How about you and I play a game of checkers?”

  “Okay.”

  “I could play from out here with these gloves, or I could put on one of those spacesuits and come in the room with you. Which would you like better?”

  “I dunno.”

  “Well, I’d like to come in the room.” I turned to Bev. “Could somebody help me suit up? It’s been a long time.”

  “Sure.”

  “I’ll be in there in a minute, Woody.” I smiled at him and stepped away from the plastic wall. Rhythm-and-blues music blared from the module next door. I glanced over and caught a glimpse of a pair of long brown legs dangling over the foot of a bed. A black boy around seventeen was sprawled atop the covers, staring at the ceiling and moving to the sounds that screamed from the ghetto blaster on his nightstand, seemingly impervious to the I.V. needles imbedded in the crooks of both arms.

  “See,” said Bev, speaking up to be heard, “I told you. A sweetie.”

  “Nice kid,” I agreed. “He seems bright.”

  “The parents describe him as having been very sharp. The fevers have pretty much knocked him out but he still manages to communicate very well. The nurses love him—this whole pullout thing is making everyone very uptight.”

  “I’ll do what I can. Let’s start by getting me in there.”

  She called for help and a tiny Filipino nurse appeared bearing a package wrapped in heavy brown paper and marked STERILE.

  “Take off your shoes and stand there,” ordered the nurse, pintsized but authoritative. She pointed to a spot just outside the red taped no-entry zone. After washing her hands with Betadyne, she unwrapped a pair of sterile gloves and slipped them on her hands. Having inspected the gloves and found them free from flaws, she removed a folded spacesuit from the brown paper and placed it inside the red border. It took a bit of playing with the suit—which, in a collapsed state, looked like a heavy paper accordion—but she found the footholes and had me step inside them. Gingerly, she took hold of the edges and pulled it up over me, tying the top seam around my neck. Being so short, she had to stretch to do the job so I bent my knees to make it easier.

  “Thanks,” she giggled. “Now your gloves—don’t touch anything until they’re on.”

  She worked quickly and soon my hands were sheathed in surgical plastic, my mouth concealed behind a paper mask. The headpiece—a hood fashioned of the same heavy paper as the suit attached to a plastic, see-through visor—was slipped over my face and fastened to the suit with Velcro strips.

  “How does that feel?”

  “Very stylish.” The suit was oppressively hot and I knew that within minutes, despite the cool rapid airflow in the unit, I’d be drenched with sweat.

  “It’s our continental model.” She smiled. “You can go in now. Half hour maximum time. The clock’s over there. We may be too busy to remind you, so keep an eye on it and come out when the time’s up.”

  “Will do.” I turned to Bev. “Thanks for your help. Any idea when the parents will be in?”

  “Vangie, did the Swopes say when they’d be in?”

  The Filipino nurse shook her head. “Usually they’re here in the morning—right around now. If they don’t come soon, I don’t know when. I can leave a message for them to call you, Doctor—”

  “Delaware. Why don’t you tell them I’ll be here tomorrow at eight thirty and if they arrive earlier, please have them wait.”

  “Eight thirty you should catch them.”

  “I’ll tell you what,” said Bev, “I’ve got the number of the place they’re staying—some motel on the west side. I’ll call and leave a message. If they show up today do you want to come back?”

  I considered it. Nothing on the agenda that couldn’t wait. “Sure. Call my exchange. They’ll know where to reach me.” I gave her the number.

  “All right, Alex, you’d better get in there before you truck a few million pathogens over the border. See ya.”

  She hoisted the large purse over her shoulder and walked out the door.

  I stepped into the Laminar Airflow Room.

  He’d sat up and his dark eyes followed my entry.

  “I look like a spaceman, huh?”

  “I can tell who you are,” he said gravely, “everyone looks different.”

  “That’s good. I always had trouble recognizing people when they wore these things.”

  “Ya gotta look close, with strong eyes.”

  “I see. Thanks for the advice.”

  I got the box of checkers and unfolded the board on the armlike table that swung across the bed.

  “What color do you want to be?”

  “Dunno.”

  “Black goes first, I think. You wanna go first?”

  “Uh huh.”

  He was precociously good at the game, able to plot, set up moves, and think sequentially. A bright little boy.

  A couple of times I tried to engage him in conversation but he ignored me. It wasn’t shyness or lack of good manners. His attention was focused on the checkerboard and he didn’t even hear the sound of my voice. When he completed a move he’d lean back against the pillows with a satisfied look on his grave little face and say, “There! Your turn,” in a voice made soft by fatigue.

  We were halfway through the game and he was giving me a run for my money when he clutched his abdomen and cried out in pain.

  I eased him down and felt h
is brow. Low-grade fever.

  “Your tummy hurts, doesn’t it?”

  He nodded and wiped his eyes with the back of his hand.

  I pressed the call button. Vangie, the Filipino nurse, appeared on the other side of the plastic.

  “Abdominal pain. Febrile,” I told her.

  She frowned and disappeared, returning with a cup of liquid acetominophen held in a gloved hand.

  “Swing that counter over this way, would you.”

  She set the medicine on the slab of Formica.

  “You can take it now and give it to him. The resident’s due by within the hour to check him over.”

  I returned to the boy’s bedside, propped him up with one hand behind his head, and held the liquid to his lips with the other.

  “Open up, Woody. This will make it hurt less.”

  “Okay, Doctor Delaware.”

  “I think you’d better rest now. You played a good game.”

  He nodded and the curls bounced. “Tie?”

  “I’d say so. Although you were getting me pretty good at the end. Can I come back and play with you again?”

  “Uh huh.” He closed his eyes.

  “Rest up, now.”

  By the time I was out of the unit and had shed the paper suit, he was asleep, lips parted, sucking gently at the softness of the pillow.

  5

  THE NEXT morning I drove east on Sunset under a sky streaked with tin-strip clouds and thought about last night’s dreams—the same kind of spooky, murky images that had plagued my sleep when I first started working in oncology. It had taken a good year to chase those demons away and now I wondered if they’d ever been gone or had just been lurking in my subconscious, ever ready for mischief.

  Raoul’s world was madness and I found myself resenting him for drawing me back into it.

  Children weren’t supposed to get cancer.

  Nobody was supposed to get cancer.

  The diseases that fell under the domain of the marauding crab were ultimate acts of histologic treason, the body assaulting, battering, raping, murdering itself in a feeding frenzy of rogue cells gone berserk.

  I slipped a Lenny Breau cassette into the tape deck and hoped that the guitarist’s fluid genius would take my mind far away from plastic rooms and bald children and one little boy with henna-colored curls and a Why Me? look in his eyes. But I could see his face and the faces of so many other sick children I’d known, weaving in and out of the arpeggios, ephemeral, persistent, begging for rescue...

  Given that state of mind, even the sleaze that heralded the entry into Hollywood seemed benign, the half-naked whores nothing more than big-hearted welcome wagoners.

  I drove through the last mile of boulevard in a blue funk, parked the Seville in the doctors’ lot, and walked through the front door of the hospital with my head down, warding off social overtures.

  I climbed the four flights to the oncology ward and was halfway down the hall before hearing the ruckus. Opening the door to the Laminar Airflow Unit turned up the volume.

  Raoul stood, bug-eyed, his back to the modules, alternately cursing in rapid Spanish and screaming in English at a group of three people:

  Beverly Lucas held her purse across her chest like a shield, but it wouldn’t stay in one place because the hands that clutched it were shaking. She stared at a distant point beyond Melendez-Lynch’s white-coated shoulder and bit her lip, straining not to choke on anger and humiliation.

  The broad face of Ellen Beckwith bore the startled, terrified look of someone caught in the midst of a smarmy, private ritual. She was primed for confession, but unsure of her crime.

  The third member of the audience was a tall, shaggy-haired man with a hound dog face and squinty, heavy-lidded eyes. His white coat was unbuttoned and worn carelessly over faded jeans and a cheap-looking shirt of the sort that used to be called psychedelic but now looked merely garish. A belt with an oversized buckle in the shape of an Indian chief bit into a soft-looking middle. His feet were large and the toes were long, almost prehensible. I could tell because he’d encased them, sockless, in Mexican huaraches. His face was clean-shaven and his skin was pale. The shaggy hair was medium brown, streaked with gray, and it hung to his shoulders. A puka shell necklace ringed a neck that had begun to turn to wattle.

  He stood impassively, as if in a trance, a serene look in the hooded eyes.

  Raoul saw me and stopped his harangue.

  “He’s gone, Alex.” He pointed to the plastic room where I’d played checkers less than twenty-four hours ago. The bed was empty.

  “Removed from under the noses of these so-called professionals.” He dismissed the trio with a contemptuous wave of his hand.

  “Why don’t we talk about it somewhere else,” I suggested. The black teenager in the unit next door was peering out through the transparent wall with a puzzled look on his face.

  Raoul ignored me.

  “They did it. Those quacks. Came in as radiation techs and kidnapped him. Of course, if anyone had possessed the good sense to read the chart to find out if radiologic studies had been ordered, they might have prevented this—felony!”

  He was boring in on the fat nurse now, and she was on the verge of tears. The tall man came out of his trance and tried to rescue her.

  “You can’t expect a nurse to think like a cop.” His speech was just barely tinged with a Gallic lilt.

  Raoul wheeled on him.

  “You! Keep your damned comments to yourself! If you had an iota of understanding of what medicine is all about we might not be in this mess. Like a cop! If that means exercising vigilance and care to insure a patient’s safety and security, then she damn well does have to think like a cop! This isn’t an Indian reservation, Valcroix! It’s life-threatening disease and invasive procedures and using the brain that God gave us to make inferences and deductions and decisions, for God’s sake! It’s not managing a reverse isolation unit like a bus terminal, where people come in and out and tell you they’re someone they’re not and whisk your patient away from under your lazy, sloppy, careless nose!”

  The other doctor’s response was a cosmic smile as he zoned back out into never-never land.

  Raoul glared at him, ready to pounce. The gangly black boy watched the confrontation, eyes wide and frightened, from behind his plastic screen. A mother visiting her child in the third module stared, then drew the curtains protectively.

  I took Raoul by the elbow and escorted him to the nurses’ office. The Filipino nurse was there, charting. After one look at us, she grabbed her paperwork and left.

  He picked up a pencil from the desk and snapped it between his fingers. Tossing the broken pieces to the floor, he kicked them into a corner.

  “That bastard! The arrogance, to debate me in front of ancillary staff—I’ll terminate his fellowship and get rid of him once and for all.”

  He ran a hand over his brow, chewed on his mustache, and tugged at his jowls until the swarthy flesh turned rosy.

  “They took him,” he said. “Just like that.”

  “What do you want to do about it?”

  “What I want is to find those Touchers and strangle them with my bare hands and—”

  I picked up the phone. “You want me to call Security?”

  “Ha! A bunch of senile alcoholics who need help finding their own flashlights—”

  “What about the police? It’s an abduction now.”

  “No,” he said quickly. “They won’t do a damned thing and it will be a freakshow for the media.”

  He found Woody’s chart and leafed through it, hissing.

  “Radiology—why would I schedule x-rays for a child whose treatment is up in the air! It makes no sense. Nobody thinks anymore. Automatons, all of them!”

  “What do you want to do about it?” I repeated.

  “Damned if I know,” he admitted and slapped the chart on the desktop.

  We sat in glum silence for a moment.

  “They’re probably halfway to Tijuana,�
� he said, “on a pilgrimage to some damned Laetrile clinica —did you ever see those places? Murals of crabs on filthy adobe walls. That’s their salvation! Fools!”