Mercy 6

by David Bajo

  Mendenhall gazed at the digital bodies, the tornadic patterns passing through them, the peripheral smudges marring the grid lines.

  Mullich started discussing floors and then the bodies. Fleming, Verdasco, and Peterson, he said, were particular to single floors: Four, Three, and Two. Dozier and Meeks, by occupation, roamed all floors and subbasements.

  “According to precedent, that indicates something airborne, the progression being strictly vertical despite the free roamers. Like Legionnaires’.”

  But it was as though she heard the outside of his words, only the echo.

  “The odds,” said Mendenhall. “What are the odds? That Meeks and Dozier happened to be on different floors? From each other?

  From the others?”

  “Three to one,” replied Mullich. Again the echo.

  She had moved on. She spoke to Silva’s back. “Can you shift the bodies to their found positions?”

  From a laptop below the screens, Silva curled each body into its found position. Verdasco was the only one who hadn’t moved, who hadn’t fallen or collapsed. She studied the tornadic pattern across his bronchus. She looked away to refresh, caught Mullich’s blueprint, felt her heart rate increase but did not know why.

  “Move all the bodies into their positions before collapse.” Her own words registered as echoes.

  “We don’t have the new one yet.”

  “His name is Lual. Lual Meeks.” Mendenhall stared intently at Mullich’s blueprints. “The ones you have, then.”

  Silva looked over her shoulder with a worried expression, then worked the laptop. The hollow figures shifted in quick increments, clicked into positions: Dozier on his invisible ladder, Fleming with her invisible cup of tea, Verdasco remaining at rest, Peterson and her cigarette.

  Mullich probably saw it before Mendenhall did. The bodies coiled into their various ready positions, all different postures. But the tornadic patterns. Those. They went parallel to one another, all five, perfectly parallel.

  Mullich looked at the body screens. Mendenhall looked at the building screens. She focused on the one showing the cross-section of the hospital.

  “Draw it,” she said. “You see it. I smell it on you. Draw it.”

  But he didn’t have to draw it. The diagonal formed by the red discovery points reflected the diagonals on the bodies. Paralleled them. Mullich then connected them with a green line from Seven to the subbasement, from Dozier to Meeks, passing through Fleming, Verdasco, and Peterson.

  Silva was now seeing it, gazing from her wall to Mullich’s, then back.

  “That’s not possible. That’s absurd.” Silva checked her laptop, redid the contortions. The line through the building remained parallel to the line through each of the bodies. She finally looked at Mendenhall. “There are no straight lines in medicine.”

  “We all noticed,” said Mendenhall. “Without prompting. We all see it.”

  The green diagonal passing through the blueprint was duplicated four times by the tornadic patterns through the bodies on the adjacent wall. That was what showed.

  Mullich appeared fascinated. He gazed back and forth from the bodies to the building.

  “The explanation is simple,” he said. “Amazing—but simple. The two of you marked the calibrations on each floor. But you carried with you impressions of the bodies you had examined. Your floor marks were influenced by your knowledge of the bodies.”

  She hated Mullich. She hated when doctors were like this, so quick with their expertise. Let the patients have their moments, her mentor had told her, their moments of recognition. Let them be right. Learn. Learn with them.

  25.

  Silva touched the tablet beside the laptop, a graceful tap with middle finger. Her look excluded Mullich. Her eyes were stark, black as her lashes and hair. “Dr. Claiborne’s on his way down.”

  She configured the hollow bodies back into their sublimate positions, all parallels gone. The diagonal through Mullich’s blueprint now seemed aimless, out of place in a medical lab. There were no straight lines in trauma, either, especially not in ballistics.

  “Thank you,” Mendenhall said to Silva. “I’ll go. I’ll take the stairs.”

  “He takes the stairs. When he can’t get in his run.”

  “Okay. The elevator.” Mendenhall addressed Mullich, pointed to the green line. “Take that away.”

  She felt Silva’s gaze, a wanting of exchange with her. We see what we are. They were two very different people yet had seen the same thing, constructed the pattern together, even argued a bit while doing this. As Mendenhall closed her eyes—she knew Silva was watching—she saw the diagonal, the slash of demise, through the building and the bodies, green turned to its negative, red.

  With her card, she commandeered the elevator to the top floor, closed her eyes and imagined it shooting through the lid of Mercy General, a passage from a childhood book. She imagined, too, the iron tamping rod shot through the brain of Phineas Gage, recalled the photos from her medical texts, the bust of his head, the portrait of him holding the rod, the rod he had carried with him as a cane for the rest of his life. She imagined it erasing his thoughts. She thought of Phineas Gage relearning himself.

  At the door to the roof she punched in her card. The red light blinked. She counted to ten and punched again, was refused. She repeated this four times, her forehead pressed to the door, her eyes closed. Beneath, the momentum of the building continued to slide away from her.

  Ten more hystericals had come in after the discovery of Meeks.

  Pao Pao messaged her not to come; the ID people were there. Pao Pao had termed them hysterical, was still on her side. That was good.

  She punched the card key again. She wasn’t sure why or whom she was conjuring. Mullich could come, let her onto the roof.

  Thorpe’s people could arrive, take her to quarantine. Maybe she was testing her value.

  No one came. She returned to the ER.

  The ten new arrivals were fully curtained. This was a mistake.

  They had to be obvious hystericals. Thorpe would have taken anyone of interest. Closing the curtains fully around the patients would only increase their anxiety, heighten symptoms. Symptoms—even false ones—could injure and kill.

  Her mentor had made her study psych wards. Among the

  catatonic and the wild, the doctors and nurses moved with rehearsed precision, every gesture a revelation. They did what they could do.

  They probably had an abandoned file room, somewhere they went to laugh, cry, push their weight into the glass.

  She parted the first curtain, just the section at the foot of the bed, giving the patient a view of the bay. The patient seemed very fit, midfifties, a visitor. Beneath the sheet, his torso formed a wedge to his narrow waist. His face was lean and drawn, temples and cheeks forming hollows, a guy who ate plain tuna and nonfat cottage cheese and used his gym membership. A guy who believed the world was out to destroy his body.

  In her early years she had felt no sympathy for psychosomatic arrivals, had seen them as selfish time-wasters. But by now she had developed some sympathy. It was their way of engaging with life, of acknowledging it. Her mentor had given her a book. The book’s premise was that life is the perfect crime. She liked it because it denied the metaphor, denied itself, found purpose in that denial.

  She sanitized her hands, introduced herself, and took the patient’s pulse. The curtained nook seemed quaint: no equipment, no technology, light filtered through gauze, a neat stack of cool towels, and a cup of water. She pressed his forehead: 101.5.

  “Do you know what it is?” he asked.

  “I know that what you have is completely different.”

  “You know that?”

  “Yes. I was the first one. I’ve been working with Pathology. And everybody.”

  Across the opening in the curtain, Cabral passed. She recognized him from his posture, downward and thought-filled. She was not surprised to see him return to the stall.

  “Dr. Mende
nhall.”

  “Yes, Cabral. Open the other stalls. Like this one.”

  He nodded. There was something about him. She sensed a retraction in her vision. When she looked back to the patient, she recognized what was happening to her. The familiar dizziness, one-sided, a physical click, pleasant above her brain stem. She needed to sleep. Stop everything and sleep. Lie down. She already yearned for the waking moment, that fresh blare of thought.

  She smiled at the patient and told him to drink his water. As she passed Cabral, she told him not to open the drape to her stall.

  She chose the stall three removed from the last hysterical. She enclosed herself within the curtains. As she sat on the bed, she removed her lab coat and readied it as a blanket. She knew Meeks had fallen at the same time as the others. She knew the rattle and thrum of the bay would lead her to sleep. She knew she would lose consciousness within seconds of sublimation. She knew how soft the pillow would feel. She knew there was something wrong with Cabral.

  What she didn’t know was how long she would sleep.

  TWO

  26.

  The first waking was false, surfacing to dream glare. The stall hung white. She heard static. The sharpness of the real waking verified the first as dream. Eyes open, head lifted from pillow, she had trouble discerning between the two. Her heart rate, which had jolted her out of the dream, increased. Outside the gauzy enclosure of her stall, it was not quiet. Someone—a nurse—had screamed. Carts rolled, running shoes squeaked. Nurses tried to give orders. Finally one asked, “Where’s Pao Pao?”

  Mendenhall knew Cabral was dead. She knew from the waking dream. This realization was what that two-second dream was about.

  But it was hard to get her body to work. She had no grip. She needed to focus just to turn her wrist, to see her watch. She had slept for three hours, a stunning amount for her in the ER.

  Dread sharpened her logic. If she stepped out there to do her job, to take charge, chances were high that ID would quarantine her, connecting her with Cabral, Meeks. If she left the ER along the periphery of the bay, took the elevator somewhere quiet—like Physical Therapy—only Mullich would find her. She would have to go into hiding. The only way she could survive that emotionally would be to stay involved in these cases. That involvement would reveal her.

  Thorpe was the unknown factor. How accurate was her

  assessment of him? Was he power or science, more paper than blood? How strongly did she believe her claims about him, the ones she had voiced to Claiborne and Mullich, that he was paper? That he needed her science, their science, their blood work?

  Undecided, she slid through the curtain opposite the commotion.

  She knew all of the bay’s blind spots, every crease. Pao Pao spotted her immediately but said nothing. Mendenhall raised a staying hand. The nurse stood along the inner circle surrounding Cabral.

  Again, that series of Busby Berkeley dancers swayed this way and that, people afraid but wanting to see. There were more ID people than Mendenhall had expected, purple and done up as surgeons, none of them where they were supposed to be. Only Pao Pao was positioned correctly, ready for orders. Dmir stood in the second circle, hesitating.

  Cabral had not even been transferred to a gurney. Someone had spun his bed into the bay. The brakes were still set on one of the wheels, and so his bed angled in throwaway position, his body uncovered. His hands were clasped beneath his chin as he curled on his side, a child saying bedtime prayers. His eyes were open. She could tell from across the bay. The curtains and rods of his stall lay collapsed, ruined by panic.

  Mendenhall spied the nurse who must have found him. She was slouched in the third layer, peeking around Dmir. At least have the courage to run, thought Mendenhall; at least have the decency.

  Mendenhall shifted into another crease, maintaining the same distance. Pao Pao checked her.

  Mendenhall sensed her about to move in. None of the purples from ID advanced. Once a man had been thrown into the bay, a drunk who had fallen asleep hitchhiking in the middle of a night highway, had gotten caught beneath a speeding semi and been filed down by the friction of the asphalt, the half of him that remained still somehow alive, the one arm pumping, the one eye looking in wonder. No one had moved to him. Mendenhall had to break from a patient to go to him, to get to his last breath, such as it was. Never bring your fury with you, her mentor had advised.

  She measured the distance to Cabral. She took a breath, the filling kind right before a run, getting oxygen to the muscles, relaxing nerves into readiness. She donned gloves, the snap turning heads. She stepped out of hiding and cut through the circles. She took the opportunity to hard-shoulder someone from ID as she passed, digging her forearm into the purple garb.

  Pao Pao waited until Mendenhall had driven through the final circle, then moved with her. The nurse pulled up her mask, offered a fresh one to Mendenhall. Mendenhall let her tie it as she bent toward Cabral.

  She pressed her fingers to Cabral’s carotid, knowing there’d be nothing. “Temp,” she ordered.

  Pao Pao slipped a disposable thermometer into Cabral’s mouth. It rattled on his teeth, the nurse’s jab kind and relentless.

  Mendenhall called time of death and pointed to three ID people.

  “You, you, and you, get him on a gurney and get him to Path. Warn them.”

  As they moved, Mendenhall crouched closer to Cabral, rested a hand on his shoulder. She looked at his face. His expression was in a dream, a knowing dream. From behind, she heard Dmir clearing his throat, popping forward.

  “I—”

  “You,” she said turning to Dmir, catching him directly with the first shot of her glance. “Take it to Thorpe.”

  She had very little hope of keeping Cabral with Claiborne. But maybe for a few minutes she could get him there, in that right place for him, in that decent and distilled air. What he deserved.

  If it was airborne, they were all as safe as was possible; Cabral had stopped breathing long ago. If it was fluids, there was no added risk. No one was touching him. But she knew that it was neither of these. She could put her tongue to Cabral’s tongue. She could drink his blood. That was how strongly Mendenhall knew what she knew at this moment. She brushed the young man’s thinning hair across his temple and around his ear, then stood back. She eyed his whole form and tried to gauge where the pattern of occlusion would be, where it had slanted through muscle and capillary, roiled through nerves.

  She took two steps back and gave herself to ID, to whatever would take her. She bowed her head and shook her arms, elbows loose, run finished. Dream over.

  27.

  Nothing and no one took her. She made one more backstep, anticipated a hand on her shoulder. There was nothing, and she swayed. The ID people were following her orders, though Dmir now stood in charge. He was on his cell, not looking her way.

  If Cabral was to make it down to Path, it would only be for a quick pass. She had very little time. And Thorpe could still send her to Q. She had messed up with Meeks and in an even bigger way, it seemed, with Cabral. Her position was extremely weak. Thorpe might have liked it that way; better having her loose rather than sealed.

  She looked for the nurse who had found Cabral. She scanned the creases in the bay, the first blind spots nearest the station. She moved to cut off the nurse in the path toward the elevators. How smart could she be? How frightened?

  Mendenhall would have liked nothing better than to have her sequestered and taken to Q, pushed behind glass and strapped to a bed. She could picture the nurse finding Cabral, her silent scream within the curtains, the panic that had made her shove the bed through the stall, one brake still locked, the bed spiraling away from her, twisting her wrists. Abandoning him to another’s scream.

  She closed her eyes and inhaled. The nurse stopped when Mendenhall appeared, took one sidestep. Mendenhall eyed her name tag, raised her hands.

  “Nurse Amihan. Get us some coffee. My desk. One minute.”

  Amihan got there faster.
The cups shook in her hands. Mendenhall stood at the opening to her cubicle and motioned for her to set down the coffees.

  “Have a seat.” She offered the only chair in the cubicle.

  “Thank you, Doctor.” Her accent was heavy, even with this simple phrase.

  “Everyone’s shaking right now. Just sit. Just don’t spill anything.”

  Amihan sat and looked at her lap, her hands twisting there. She was young. Her hair was black and straight, a shine to it.

  “Were you in Manila? Before here?”

  She nodded, still looking down.

  “Did you know Cabral there?”

  She shook her head.

  “Try to speak.”

  “No, Doctor. He was here before me.”

  “But you knew him.”

  She nodded.

  Mendenhall tapped her lips.

  “Yes, Doctor. A little.”

  “Tell me about him.”

  “Tell you what?”

  “Just something. Was he funny? Did he tell jokes? Did he smile?

  Was he quick?”

  “Yes. He made little jokes. Little faces. He was quick. He made little—jokes—with his hands.”

  Mendenhall squinted. “Jokes with his hands?”

  “Like this.” Amihan fashioned her hand into a beak and made talking motions.

  “Hand puppets.”

  “Yes. Those. But on the wall.”

  Mendenhall smiled. “Shadow puppets.”

  “Yes. He talked for them but without moving his lips.”

  “Good.” She checked her watch. “Now, just one more thing.

  Then I’ll leave you alone. How was his posture?”

  “Posture?”

  “His shoulders?” asked Mendenhall. “Did he keep them straight?

  When he moved quick?”

  “Yes, Doctor. He made them straight. Always straight. Tried to look tall, maybe.”

  Mendenhall hurried from the cubicle, left the nurse without word or wave. It was the only torture she had time for, the only one she could imagine.