by Mark Teppo
Fordham rested his hands on the high counter and leaned over Jayne, peering at her notes and, she suspected, her chest. She realized that, much as she wanted to, she couldn’t ignore him today. She looked up as he continued speaking, fixing her attention on the slightly crooked canine tooth he displayed every time he opened his mouth. "How many times do I have to remind you to call me ‘Rob’?" he asked, gracing her with his insincere, management smile.
She held his attention in a moment of defiance before going back to her notes, saying nothing. Please let that be the end of it, she hoped.
Fordham looked around, taking in the quiet ER. To one side, a bed was being curtained off as a nurse prepared to change the dressing on a female college student who had developed a rash across her chest following a bad piercing. Across the wide room, Doctor Thomas Rourke was using all of his infamous bedside charm to sweet talk a screaming seven-year-old boy with a bug in his ear to hold still for a moment—just a few seconds—while he cleared the blockage.
Fordham tapped his fingernails against the counter, drumming an urgent rhythm as he scanned the area. "Where’s Doctor Napier?" he finally asked.
"Carson? I don’t know. Probably outside grabbing a smoke," Jayne suggested.
Fordham sighed loudly between clenched teeth. "Great. That’s just what we’re paying him for," he grumbled, making a beeline for the exit doors to find Carson. Jayne got up from the desk and chased after him, pushing the tails of her white coat out of her way as her low heels drummed haphazardly across the vinyl tiling of the floor.
"Wait up, Robert," Jayne said, posting herself between Fordham and the double doors leading to the ambulance bay. "Car’s been on since twelve last night. The guy deserves five minutes to himself, don’t you think? I only heard he was smoking again last week, and I think it’s probably down to the amount of traffic we’re getting through the ER right now. Everybody’s overworked," she concluded.
Fordham looked at her, then looked back, taking in the quiet Emergency Room. "You don’t look too ‘overworked’ to me, Doctor," he stated.
"I got on at eight this morning, and this is the first lull we’ve had," Jayne told him defensively.
"And why is that? Have you tampered with the regulator?" Fordham asked suspiciously.
Jayne threw her hands up in the air. "Oh, come on! I’m catching up on case histories—which, you know as well as I do, is the legal requirement of any practicing doctor. Carson’s taking five minutes for himself for the first time in fourteen hours, just so he can stay sane enough to deal with the final six hours of his shift."
Fordham looked at her accusingly. "You switched it off, didn’t you?" When she didn’t answer, Fordham stomped back to the reception desk. He glared at Taira, the receptionist, until she stepped out of the way. Then he looked at the device beneath the desk. He crouched before the machine for a few moments, checking the settings, before finally looking up at Doctor Irwin. "Stand-by mode. You set it to stand-by mode."
Jayne felt her fists clench involuntarily as anger rose within her. "It’s not like I wasn’t working, Rob," she told him, turning his name into a curse. "Those case histories . . ."
"Can be filled," he interrupted, "by Taira here on reception and you can sign off on them. We’ve been through this procedure a dozen times, Doctor."
"Taira doesn’t know the difference between—" she wracked her brains as she glared at him, "—flupenthixol and fluticasone. I don’t want to discharge a schizophrenic with a record of how much wart cream I assigned him," she finished, angrily.
Fordham reached for the switch on the regulator. "Go tell Doctor Napier and the others here that your vacation is over," he uttered. With that, Fordham flipped the switch, and the regulator jolted back to life.
Deliberately, Rob Fordham got up from his crouch before the device, and stared Jayne in the eye. "If this happens again, Doctor Irwin," he told her, "I will have no choice but to institute disciplinary proceedings. Don’t touch the regulator."
She glared at him, swallowing back her urge to answer. She could already feel the faint thump against the floor as the regulator rocked and went to work, plowing the potentialities for their next case. She should tell Carson.
From her computer port at the desk, Taira looked up and informed Jayne that an ambulance would arrive in thirty seconds, her tone apologetic. With a triumphant smile, Fordham made his way back to the bank of elevators, doubtless going back to his comfortable management suite, Jayne realized as she headed for the double doors to the ambulance bay.
She found Doctor Napier outside, huddled beneath the porch, pulling his white coat tightly around him in the chill April air. He coughed as he took another drag on his cigarette, watching the heavy rain falling in the open ambulance bay. "Hey, Jayne," he began as she approached, "you come to join me?"
"Bad news, Car," she replied. "Fordham came down and turned the regulator back on."
Anger flashed in Napier’s dark eyes, and he shook his head in disbelief. "What? We’re not allowed five minutes now?"
Jayne nodded towards the bay entrance as an ambulance hurtled through the mist, screeching to a halt on the damp tarmac. "Guess not," she told him, rushing out into the cold rain to see what the regulator had brought them.
Napier muttered a curse as he extinguished his cigarette underfoot, before joining Jayne at the opening back doors to the vehicle. Two paramedics leapt out, escorting a stretcher from the back of the rig. The patient was a girl, perhaps thirteen or fourteen, a wide gash on her head and her face covered in thin streams of blood. The girl was dressed for summer, and her bright T-shirt darkened as the driving rain soaked it through. "What happened to her?" Napier asked as Jayne bent in to open the girl’s closed eyes, checking them with her penlight.
"Came off her bike," one of the paramedics explained. "Smacked her head on the ground—probably looks worse than it is. Trouble was, the truck following her couldn’t swerve in time—went over both her legs."
The stretcher lurched over the tarmac as they rushed into the Emergency Room, kicking up rainwater as it leapt across the uneven ground. Nurse Mi-sun joined them at the doors and guided them through to examination room one.
Eight minutes later, the girl had been stabilized and Mi-sun was on the phone talking to surgery, seeing when they could get the girl’s legs in plaster. Carson had built a fairly instant rapport with the frightened girl while Jayne went to work on the cut across her head, so he had volunteered to stay with her while she waited for surgery. Her parents, for practical reasons, could not be alerted.
As she exited exam room one, Doctor Irwin almost walked into the driver of the ambulance rig who had been watching through the glass panel in the door. "Is she going to be all right?" he asked her.
Jayne nodded. "She’s a little scared still, but the injuries will heal. It’s just a shame that we can’t get her parents here until the surgery’s complete."
The driver shrugged. "Yeah, I almost tumbled my rig when I hit the rain in the bay. What are you on here?"
"Thursday, 2:30 PM, regulator time," she told him. "You?"
He checked his watch. "Saturday morning, a little after 10:00 now." He showed her the face of the analog wristwatch he wore: the dial showed it to be about five past ten. "We were enjoying the sun until you pulled us in," he laughed as she escorted him back towards the doors to the ambulance bay.
"At least the rain does clear up," she said with resignation, "eventually."
"Eventually," he agreed with a teasing smile. Joining his crew, the driver got back into the cab of his ambulance, and Jayne watched it disappear into the misty doorway that surrounded the entrance.
She was pleased that the rain would clear up for the weekend. She had an invite to a neighbor’s barbecue tomorrow night and was determined to go—her work patterns hadn’t been conducive to making friends with her neighbors since starting in the ER half a year ago, and she was hoping that this would be a chance to rectify that. Of course, as soon as she told them that s
he was a doctor the word would spread, and she’d be grilled by a long list of neighbors with back pains, curious rashes, irritating cramps and the need for prescription medication "if she could just spare a minute." It never failed.
She wondered if she should lie about her occupation, tell them that she was an assassin or something. Probably not a good idea—assassins most likely got pestered by their neighbors regarding unfaithful spouses, overbearing employers, and the possibility of borrowing "y’know, just a sniper rifle for a couple of days." Jayne watched as the mists at the entrance to the ambulance bay parted, and two rigs poured in one after another, lights flashing and sirens wailing.
She headed over to the closest rig as Thomas Rourke, the other doctor on shift, came through the bay doors to join her. "When did it start raining?" he asked, mystified.
"Couldn’t say," Jayne told him, "but I’ve been assured it clears up in time for the weekend."
The regulator had been installed at the start of February, shortly after Rob Fordham had joined the hospital. His background had been with an oil company, and he’d been employed for his perceptive management strategies, rather than any discernible knowledge of medicine. That very fact did not sit well with the hospital staff, and his tactless people skills had further diminished his popularity. But, he was a career manager, and wasn’t in the habit of making friends or listening to the opinions—however valid—of those who weren’t on the same pay scale.
By scanning forward through the next forty-eight hours, the regulator could provide a standard number of patients for the ER, rather than the peaks and troughs they had been used to in the old days. Tied to technology in the ambulances, the regulator plucked cases out of time, pulling them to the present from the future so that the underused doctors could begin working on them. The system, theoretically, balanced out. While a highway pile-up might generate upwards of thirty patients in need of immediate care, spreading those patients over a longer period in standardized succession meant that the doctors were never overwhelmed. However, Jayne realized, what the regulator failed to recognize was that adrenalin kept you going through those freak surges of patients, but the doctors also needed quiet moments just to gather their thoughts and keep themselves sane.
And, while you might be dealing with a case from two days into the future, you had no way of preventing it from happening. The regulator could plow the future, but it couldn’t be used to alter it. The effect that had on morale was less than positive.
With the regulator had come a drop in staffing levels in the hospital, the conclusion being that if you could predict precisely the number of cases the ER would receive each hour, you could adjust the number of doctors accordingly.
Typical management thinking, Jayne knew. Short term profits over long term gains. Fordham would be out of here, a healthy pay-off bonus for meeting his target, before anyone saw the problems that were inherent in the new system. Who had time to teach the next generation of doctors? Who could estimate the vast loss of knowledge and technique that only being trained by one or two doctors, over the original rota of twelve, would make to that new generation? And, of course, there was Carson Napier—his drifting back into old addictions was a clear sign that this system was burning them all out as quickly as his cigarette stubs.
She bristled as she cracked open the chest of her patient in examination room two.
It was 4:45, and the flow of current traffic—a couple of prangs on the school run, a sewerage worker who had been bitten by a rat—had ceased. Carson joined her at the coffee machine.
"Do you have time for that, Doctor?" he said in his sternest voice. When she looked up he displayed one of his canines in a sneer, shifting his head as though it were at odds with the tooth.
"You’re nothing like him, you know?" she told him, unimpressed.
He nodded, closing his mouth. "Let’s all be thankful for that, eh?"
She looked at Carson, taking in the lingering smell of tobacco on his clothes. His eyes looked tired, and his jaw was darkened with stubble. "Do you want a coffee?" she asked him, holding out her cup. "Would you like my coffee?"
He shook his head, smiling. "I couldn’t possibly, Jayne."
"Sure you could," she told him, placing the paper cup in his open hand. "You look like you need it more than me, just now."
He took a sip from the cup. "I’ll return the favor," he told her, "at . . . what time are you off?"
"Erm," she rolled her eyes, "at midnight on the third of never, I think. But it might be the fourth."
Behind them, the doors to the ambulance bay opened, and a paramedic began telling them about a GSW to the leg.
She took one last look at Carson, meeting his eyes for a second. "My day off tomorrow," she told him with a grin.
"Any plans?" he asked.
She nodded in response as they got a breakdown of the case from the paramedic. "This and that," she told him.
Doctor Onuki of the night shift poked her head around the doors as Jayne sewed up a chest wound (window cleaner, thirty-foot fall, iron railings) in exam room one. "Weren’t you off about ten minutes ago?" she asked as Jayne put in the fifth stitch.
"I don’t know," she replied. "What time is it?"
Onuki checked her watch. "11:08," she told her precisely. "But you don’t need me to tell you that, Jayney. We both know that you’re putting off something."
"We do?" she asked, pausing in her stitch work as she looked up at Onuki.
"Well, that there is a nurse’s job," Onuki told her, "meaning that you’re killing time."
She put in the last stitch on the unconscious window cleaner’s chest, sealing the wound, before snapping out of her gloves. "I’ve been thinking about calling my mother all day," she told Onuki as she joined her at the door, "but I never quite got around to it."
Onuki nodded. "Day gets away with you. Happens."
"Yeah, it was one of those days, all right," she agreed, a note of resignation in her voice. "Do you know if that girl—Lucy Collins . . . Collings . . . something . . . ?"
"Lucy Cowell, fourteen years old, bike versus truck?" Onuki asked, and Jayne nodded. "She got out of surgery at 7:00 and was sent forward to her own time. Her parents should be there with her by now."
"Good," Jayne nodded. "She seemed scared, and I hated to just leave her like that."
Jayne passed an accident at the side of the road as she drove home through the drizzle. Emergency vehicles were already on the scene, but, being truthful, she was too tired to stop and help anyway. She had put in a fifteen-hour shift, and, right now, she wanted nothing more than to curl up in her bed and fall asleep to the sound of the rain on her windows. Idly she wondered, as a cop waved her past the accident against the traffic flow, whether she had maybe treated one of the victims of this accident at some point over her last two shifts. With the regulator in place, it was always possible.
The regulator had dehumanized them all, she realized. And all in the name of efficiency. She was annoyed with herself that she hadn’t caught up with Carson before he’d left earlier that evening—he looked like he needed someone to talk to or he was just going to explode, even if he’d done good work with the bike girl today. Checking her mirror as she pulled into the underground car park of her apartment block, she realized that making the time to talk to anyone at work was becoming impossible. Maybe she’d call him tomorrow, with her day off, before she went to the barbecue.
Now that was going to be interesting. What was she going to wear? Felt like she had spent so long either in a white coat or in scrubs over the last three months that anything else would be too alien.
As she bleeped her car doors locked, Jayne thought back over what had been a lousy day. The run in with Fordham had been pointless, because management would always win that argument. It hadn’t helped that she had been in a bad mood since the start of her shift when she had been unable to revive that choking case, had had to pronounce it DOA. A regulator case, of course, from about thirty-six hours in her future—a
day and a half back then.
She glanced at her watch as she stepped into the elevator. "Time of my death," she told herself, "17:12 tomorrow evening."
She was really going to have to try to call her mother before then. She could write her parents a note but her handwriting was getting worse—she was sure of it.
The Math (A Fairy Tale)
— Marc Levinthal
The witch lived in the tree.
Occasionally a starving, desperate wretch would make the ascent along the sloping trunk, all the while wondering how the tree, wide and tall as the shattered skyscrapers surrounding it, could possibly be there in the midst of all that desolation.
He or she would climb, and then find the hollow, where the tree righted itself and rose, straight as an arrow, into the sky.
They’d never see her, not at first. There would be a whisper, barely there, possibly imagined, and then nothing for a while. The unfortunate would crawl further down into the hollow, with just enough room to get through to the next chamber.
They’d hear the next whisper, further down below, and keep crawling, all the time wondering how all this could be inside of the tree, how the topography could shift so radically inside it, why they were angling down now. How the tree could even be there to begin with.
Until it was too late.