“Mmm.” Rafiq nods, unimpressed.
I don’t know why I feel like apologizing. Actually, I do. “I’m not complaining about it. I know guys who deal with a lot worse. I’m used to it; it’s been going on for a long time.”
“How long?”
“Since February. This year. I was, uh—” I can’t see a way out of it, but I don’t want to admit, with Natalie in the room, that I was on the ground when a boom went off. Especially not one I set myself.
“You were exposed to a neurochemical agent,” Rafiq finishes. “I’m familiar with the kinds of side effects that present. I think I can even name, or guess, which one you encountered. But I’ll bet you wish I wouldn’t.”
I risk another look at Natalie. She’s watching me. Her eyes are bright and hard, and half-lidded, and her mouth is set. Neurochemicals are built into most of the triggers we used over there. Nonlethal, we were told, but don’t let yourself be caught out in one. Don’t take your helmet off until the trigger’s completed and you’re well clear. For God’s sake don’t take your gloves off, don’t handle anything or anyone or any pieces of anyone, and don’t breathe it in.
“Yeah,” I croak. “I wish you wouldn’t.”
Rafiq gives me a long look, then nods. “I wish I had better news for you, son. But the symptoms are not going to stop. In fact, they will most likely progress, as I’m sure you’ve already seen. The kind of damage we’re seeing, from that particular toxin, it follows a certain course. It might not kill you, but you’ll probably wish it would. We can, however,” he says, snapping his scanner’s display panel shut with a brisk little click, “treat the symptoms pretty well. I brought you something. A sample.” He reaches into his coat pocket, removes an air-compressor syringe, and smacks it down none too gently on the examination bench next to my leg, then without warning yanks his reader off my wearable. A few dozen tiny needles and a panel of powerful magnets disattach from my skin. I grunt and have to keep myself from clapping my hand protectively over my arm. The skin stings and sings—it’s the kind of pain Gard used to call “spicy” when she was little. Skinned knees, scraped palms, she called them “spicy.”
“Sorry, son. It’s an old one. I find it’s better if I just yank it off in one quick shot. You all right?”
“Yeah. I’m fine.”
“ ‘First do no harm,’ yes?” He smiles oddly back at Natalie. “Hold out your other arm.” I extend it, and he flips it over to expose the wrist. From the corner of one eye, I see Natalie make a hesitant movement toward us, then check herself. Rafiq presses the tip of the compressor syringe to the skin of my inner wrist and jams the plunger button. There’s a sound like a zipper. “There. You should be set for twenty-four hours, maybe thirty-six if you’re not as far along as I’m afraid you are.”
“What?” I stare at him. Far along? Even I know that’s the kind of language you use for pregnant women, or people with something chronic, fatal. “What is it?”
“You should have asked before I administered it to you. Isn’t that right?” Again Rafiq smiles over his shoulder at Natalie, who looks stricken. “Kidding. I’m kidding. It’s a new kind of APC, what you get from your medical corpsman when you get banged up. Basically a supercharged serotonin uptake inhibitor laced with an NSAID. Antidepressant plus anti-inflammatory, and a bit of caffeine. You’ll have fewer headaches and the ringing in your ears should stop. You want more, come see me. In my office. In fact, come see me anyway. I’ll have my staff hold you a spot. Tomorrow morning. We should talk more about this, how we’re going to treat you. I am not going,” Rafiq says, leaning in toward me with a gentle smile, a smile of concern so fatherly it hurts to look at, “to let you go under. I see too many good men going under. I’m tired of it. It makes me want to quit my job. And then what would I do?” He stands up, starts packing.
“You’d probably play more hoops with my pop,” I reply. I feel woozy, sleepy. My sight is clear, though. My ears aren’t ringing.
Rafiq looks at me knowingly, merrily. “Tell me honestly, Private. Do I look like I ought to meet Captain Quinn on a basketball court? How are you getting home, by the way?”
“I’ll manage,” I say. I’m not sure I trust myself to stand up yet, but I hold out my hand and Rafiq clasps it, covers it, shakes. His hands are dry like lizards, like leather.
“Hm.” Rafiq looks down at me, and there’s a bit less affection in his laser beams than there is a certain quality of assessment. Whatever he’s seeing of my current condition, even after whatever he just shot me full of, he’s clearly unenthusiastic. He turns to Natalie. “Is there a place out of your way where he can rest until the medication takes effect?”
“I’m sure we can find something,” Natalie says, likewise unenthusiastic.
“Thank you, Nurse. I greatly appreciate it. This young man’s father saved my life, too many times to count. More times than that, he saved my sanity. We were in the First Wars together, you know. I’m glad to have met his son at last. And, Nurse, I’m glad to have met you, too.” Rafiq expands, beams at us both.
I clear my throat. “Well. Thank you, sir. Even if you’re exaggerating what a pleasure it was to meet me, and I know you’ve got to be . . . I’m grateful. I’m really grateful.”
“Come see me,” he Santa Clauses at me one last time, then turns the charm back in Natalie’s direction, where I’m not sure he encounters much to encourage it. “Judging by the crowd I saw in the waiting room when I came through, I’d say you must see an impressive number of patients for a facility this comfortable and intimate. How long have you been in this space?”
“About two years,” Natalie replies, voice flat. Then, unprompted, she gives the same little speech she gave me. “We’re a private clinic, but fully licensed. It’s a safe place for hundreds of women who don’t have many options.”
“Small staff, I take it?”
“We maintain a flex staff that can rotate in as needed. Mostly Nurse Completionists like myself. Some specialists.”
“I should imagine,” Rafiq says neutrally, but I can see Natalie bristle.
“Every mother, every pregnancy, is unique. As you probably know. What’s different about our service is that we find a way to get each woman what she needs, when she needs it. Our clients can do their entire Care journey with us, from prenatal to Care Standard maintenance counseling.”
“You must have a waitlist a mile long.”
“No waitlist. We see everyone who comes to us.” She smiles slightly, but her pride is obvious. Getting to throw down to a VA doc, no less. In this moment, she might even be glad I blacked out in her office, just to give her the opportunity.
“And you perform Insemina, too?” Rafiq continues politely.
“Our clients don’t tend to come from the background that can afford it. Most are natural pregnancies. Most, in fact, are unplanned.”
“So most of your mothers are struggling to meet Care Standard.”
“Yes,” Natalie says, and even at a remove from the conversation I detect some frostbite.
“No judgment,” Rafiq says, holding his hands up in surrender, a gesture Natalie seems to be able to elicit from better men than me.
“The math,” Natalie puts in icily, “doesn’t work. However a woman attempts it.”
“Just so,” Rafiq agrees. He does a little bow. “Thank you for your time. And my apologies.”
“For what?”
“For emptying your waiting room as I came in. Most of your clients, as you say, up and left at the sight of me.” He’s halfway out the door. It’s a hell of an exit line. Natalie looks ready to murder. Rafiq is brave enough to meet my eyes, anyway. “See you tomorrow, Private. Come early.”
Then he’s gone, and both Natalie and I find ourselves staring dumbly after him at the closed door. I couldn’t move if I wanted to, which I do not. But Natalie seems caught in a moment’s indecision.
She grabs the door handle. “Stay here,” she tosses back over her shoulder as she’s on the threshold, an
d adds, on second thought, “Please.”
While she’s away from me—either because she’s hustling Rafiq out the door before he can ask any more questions, or confirming whether he has in fact scared off all her patients—I have a moment of quiet, and I use it to test myself out, my limbs, my senses, my head. All seem perceptibly improved. Except for my heart, which is thudding heavily but otherwise just doing its job. Sir, yes, sir. Sir, yes, sir.
The symptoms are not going to stop. . . . It follows a certain course.
What does this mean? Think. Think. Try to understand. Try to absorb what he meant. If you’re as far along as I’m afraid you are. This message, at least, is not hieroglyphics. It might not kill you but you’ll probably wish it would.
I’m twenty-four years old. Is this really happening? And if it is really happening, does that mean it’s never going to stop?
I can’t absorb it, somehow. It’s as if the understanding only seeps in so far before encountering a hard place, and there’s nowhere for the idea to go, nowhere for it to move except to spread out along the surface, infinitely wide and a millimeter deep.
But I’m better. I feel better, at least for the time being. My head isn’t what you’d call clear, but I can see, my ears aren’t aching, what pains I feel are for the most part related to falling off an examination bench onto my face. I’m better, and I take a shuddering, grateful breath. If I could distill half a particle of this gratitude and slip it into an envelope addressed to Major Rafiq, he would know his trip was worth whatever trouble it cost him, and Natalie, too.
The thought of being a regular in Rafiq’s office, though—of having to shoot myself up daily with whatever was in that syringe. The thought of relying on the VA for daily keep-me-alive juice—God help me. No. That doesn’t want to absorb, either.
I rub my eyes with the heels of my hands and wait for Natalie to come and tell me what to do, where to go. I understand now that I’m not going to leave this place any closer to knowing where Gard is, and that hollows me out.
What would Gard want me to do? She’s seen clients in this very room, I’m sure. Some vapory version of her, the echo of her atoms, surrounds me as I sit here, my ass making an indentation in the paper that covers the exam chair. Gard, I’m sorry I lost you. I think it at her, at the ghost of her in the room.
“How are you feeling?” While I’ve been rubbing my eyes and listening to the blood rush in my ears, Natalie has reappeared in silence and is leaning her back against the closed exam room door.
“Better. I hate admitting it. But better.”
“Good.” There’s some speculation in her eyes. She’s watching me steadily.
“I’m really sorry about the inconvenience.”
“Which one?” With an eyebrow.
“I would like to be able to say all of them.” I’m just trying to show her I’m sincere. “But I’m not sorry I came here, Natalie. I have to try to find my sister, and it . . . it feels good seeing the place where she worked, at least, even if I’m not sure she would have wanted me here.”
Natalie inhales, nods once. She’s still watching me, and her head inclines to the left just slightly. Finally she says, “Do you understand what Dr. Rafiq just told you, Mr. Quinn?”
“I’m not sure I do,” I admit.
She nods again, purses her lips like she’s tasting something not quite ripe. “Well. How kind of him to leave it to someone else to explain.” I’m not sure I want her to try, but before I can interrupt her, she looks up at the ceiling and tells it, “I don’t think it’s my responsibility. But because I—because Gard, if she knew—” She breaks off. When she looks at me, her eyes are glittering. “I really liked her, you know.”
“I’m glad to hear that. She—”
“Did she know what you were doing in the Wars?” she demands abruptly. “Did she have any idea you were using biological weapons on people? Exposing yourself to that?”
Shame, when you’ve lived with it long enough, gets hard to recognize. Sometimes it looks like itself; sometimes it looks like a furious red ball; sometimes it looks more like a blank spot between your eyes. Sometimes it’s just an everyday lead weight in your stomach. That’s mostly what it is for me.
“Do you even know what those weapons do to people?”
“I don’t. I never did.”
“Well. You’ll have to ask jolly old Dr. Rafiq,” Natalie B. says venomously. She advances on me. “Your sister was a good person. Okay? She didn’t always love what she had to do, but she knew that she was helping people who needed help, or trying to, the best way she or anybody else knew how. She was scared. We’re all scared sometimes, but your sister—she—what we do here wasn’t easy for her. Because she was good. She was good, in a system that is bad.” Natalie bends closer, fixes me with a look of such hostility it’s about all I can do not to lean away. “Bad for people, bad for women, bad for poor women especially. And you. You were over there. You stupid boy. You were over there unleashing something you didn’t even understand, never even asking what or why or to whom or for whom—you—” She clenches her fists, and I understand suddenly that she wants to hit me.
“Do it. Go ahead. You want to. It’s okay.”
She does. It seems to settle her only a bit. In fact, it just seems to make her want to do it again. So she does. It’s okay. It really is.
She takes a minute to collect herself and catch her breath. She’s just pummeled me, but I’m not badly hurt. Still, the look of pity and scorn on her face curdles and scorches whatever’s in me that I still associate with being a good man, a stand-up guy, strong in a corner. All of that, whatever of it I have left, means next to nothing to this woman. It’s invisible to her, all because of what she knows I did.
“You’re going to die. Okay? You didn’t even know it until I just said it, I bet, but there it is. You’re going to die. And that’s the only reason I’m going to tell you this. It’s all I can give you. And then I need you to get out of here and never come back. Okay?”
I think I manage to nod, but probably I’m just staring at her.
“If you want to know where your sister is, you should go home and ask your father.”
She steps back. She opens the door. All I can do is go through it.
GARDNER QUINN
2556 ASHLAND NORTH, APT. B
NEW CHICAGO 0606030301
NEW STATES
PFC C. P. QUINN 2276766
MCC 167 1ST MAW
FPO NEW CHICAGO 06040309
September 29, 7:32 a.m.
Hey CQ,
Hope you’re doing all right and taking care of yourself. I tried sending you some socks and some candy and some good sani, let me know if you got them.
I’m doing okay. I’m tired. I’ll live. I used to be able to catch a few z’s on the ride home in the morning, but lately I’ve been a little nervous about dropping off. Nobody’s ever on my bus until we get well back into the rehabbed zones, but a couple of days ago I woke up on the bus, all drooly, you know, like whuuuh, and there was a drone, right there outside the bus window at my eye level. It was an unmarked drone, private. It just felt like the thing was looking at me, through the bus window, while I slept.
I know how it sounds: Drones are following my bus home from work. But when I say it out loud it sort of turns the corner back around into sane again, you know? What is sanity in a world like this anyway? Natalie says I shouldn’t think about it so much. Carter, I’d love for you to meet her. She’s the only sane person I know these days.
Things have gotten a little . . . weird. It’s not just drones, though. I’m not sure—I don’t know how much Fred has told you, or what she’s told you. I don’t know what’s safe to tell you.
And honestly I don’t want to get into too much detail right now because all of this might just get clipped anyway—I’m going to try to transmit it during peak hours, when there’s less bandwidth for the censor filters, you know, just in case.
But I want to try to tell you something.
Where to start, though? Okay. Let’s try this: So, you know how everybody knows the water is what caused the fertility crisis—even though it’ll never be officially acknowledged—because if civilization’s ever going to have a chance of rebounding from the fires and everything after, we need H2.0 to do it—but still, everybody knows? I mean, we knew it as kids, when it first started to come out that the birth rate was plummeting.
What’s less well understood is why some women are still having unassisted pregnancies while most women aren’t, even with Insemina. Right? A mystery. So. Who are they? Well, mostly they’re women like the ones I see at my night job: young women who lived their whole lives on the fringes of the New Cities, most of them paying a third of their incomes for household H2.0 and not wasting a drop of what they did manage to get. Right? So sixteen- to eighteen-year-old women, who’ve just maybe encountered less H2.0 than women from families in the rehabbed zones. Ingested less. It’s a theory, there’s no science to back it up right now. Obviously.
So poor women pay too dearly for it to get much of it. And as a reward they’re that much more likely to get pregnant in the middle of an infertility crisis, so they can be subject to a Care Standard they can’t possibly hope to meet.
This, this is what I’m trying to tell you, what I’m getting at: Care Standard is . . . I’ve been doing Nurse Completionist work for, what, three years now, and I really think it’s impossible. I know it’s based on a lot of good ideas, about how babies should be protected at all costs, especially now, when people say we’re all still at risk of dying out. But it’s not possible.
I know you don’t know how this works. But listen. Listen. If you don’t clock all your Care Hours and meet your quota, then you’re not meeting Care Standard. Your Care Hours quota ramps up pretty quickly for first trimester, then slows down a bit during the second, and then goes back up in third tri and stays high until the baby’s born, at which point it tends to triple. And most women start with a deficit on their Care Hours because they don’t know they’re pregnant for at least two weeks, unless it’s an Insemina pregnancy. If you work hard at it—quit your job right away, go to all your meetings, follow the diet religiously—you can usually make up most of the deficit by the end of the third trimester. But if you fall seriously behind, you can get into a situation where you have more Care Hours to log than there are hours in the day. Then DOH can start fining you actual money, and the fines compound very quickly. Which is when things get scary.
The Completionist Page 9