Nurse Margie was back with an empty pint-sized plastic bag and a new IV set-up. She gave me a sweet smile as though she was bringing me candy and said, “I’m going to move the line up further, and then we’ll take your blood.”
“You’re going to fill that whole bag?”
“It is a lot, isn’t it?”
“Are they raising vampire bats in the attic?”
“Hard to say. Things are pretty secretive around here. I do know you’re going to be getting a special treatment every afternoon while you’re here. And that Dr. Harry is very happy with your progress so far. You certainly look better than you did yesterday.” She smiled at me, then pulled the old IV out of my hand, pressing a ball of cotton onto the tiny hole. “Hold this.”
I pressed down on the ball while she wrapped an elastic band around my bicep and began looking for a new vein without much success. “You’ve had a lot of chemo, haven’t you?”
I nodded.
“Not so good for the veins.” She stuck me a few more times until she finally got a vein just below my elbow. With a sigh, she relaxed. Really, she’d been tenser about it than I’d been. It hurt but not as much as I’d have thought. Not as much as it used to. She began to fill the bag, taking a whole pint of blood from me.
“This is the only time we’ll have to do this, right?”
“No, this is part of the treatment. It’s on the schedule each morning,” she said, unable to look at me.
An entire pint of blood each morning? That worried me, it worried me a lot. I was too sick to make that much blood. Wasn’t I? I tried to think about how many pints of blood I had total. Eight? Nine? If they took a pint every day and I had trouble replenishing the stock, how long until I was running on empty?
“That seems like a lot of blood.”
“You’ll be getting the same amount put back in. That’s the afternoon treatment.”
So they’re taking my blood out and putting it back in. What happened to it in between? I decided not to ask her.
“When will I see Dr. Harry?”
“I believe he’s at a conference for the next few days. He’ll be looking at your results every day, though. Via email.”
“So there is wi-fi here?”
“Only DSL. In Dr. Harry’s office. Part of the whole secrecy thing.” Then she lowered her voice, “All the employees have to sign a non-disclosure agreement. Seems kind of extreme, if you ask me. Not to mention I keep violating it left and right.” She looked at the pint bag filling with my blood. It wasn’t filling quickly. She got a quizzical look, then reached out for my free arm and took my pulse.
“What’s the matter?”
“Your pulse is a bit low, that’s all. I’ll put that in the email later today.”
It all seemed kind of weird. I mean, there were four of us at the institute, well, four that I knew of. Two of us were in a coma. And Dr. Harry went to a conference? Shouldn’t there be another doctor?
“Dr. Harry is the only doctor here? Isn’t that weird?”
“I’ve never worked research before. It’s probably completely normal.” She sat down on the bed next to me, and we waited while I slowly bled into a bag.
“How long have you been a nurse?”
“Nearly ten years. I started out at a regional hospital. Was there nearly five years, but then…well, office politics. You’re too young to really know about that, but it can be vicious. I was off for a while after that. Just as well. I got to spend time with my son, not that he appreciated it. Then I was at Glen Lake Urgent Care for a year. Maybe less. And now I’m here.”
She hopped off the bed and checked the bag of blood, decided it had filled enough and unhooked me. Then she positioned herself next to the bed. “All right, let’s get you upstairs.”
I swung my legs over the edge of the bed just as I had in my dream. I stood up and looked across the room. The old men were gone. Their beds were empty. They’d been taken away while I was asleep.
“Hey, where—”
And then I passed out, landing on the floor with what I can only guess was a loud squishy thud. When I came to, Nurse Margie was pushing the last of me back onto the bed. I was face down, ass in the air, feet dangling. Nurse Margie was sweating. She must have struggled to get me onto the bed all by herself. Seeing my eyes open, she said, “You went out like a light.”
“Did that happen because my blood pressure is low?”
“I couldn’t say. Maybe.”
“But you’ll tell Dr. Harry about it?” I asked.
“Yes, of course.”
“Where’d they go?”
“Where’d who go?”
Nodding my head toward the other side of the room. “The old men.”
“Oh, them. I heard someone say Dr. Harry moved them to an extended care facility downstate.”
“He couldn’t make them better?”
“I imagine they’ll be more comfortable.” Then she considered saying something she seemed to know she shouldn’t. “I’ve been here three months. You’re the first success story I’ve seen.”
What did that mean? It felt like a huge responsibility. Being first. The idea of it made me tired, very tired. Without intending to, I drifted off to sleep.
SIXTEEN
The next day, my mother was there when Nurse Margie came to take my vitals. Dr. Harry must have thought my low blood pressure and passing out like a drunk at the end of a three-day bender were just fine because nothing was said or done. After I bled out another pint, Nurse Margie unhooked me from the IV, and then she and my mom slowly got me up and acclimated. Despite a dizzy wave or two, I managed to remain conscious.
Yay me. I was racking up the accomplishments left and right.
We paused on the landing. I needed to catch my breath. That gave me time to take a close look at the resurrected Jesus. We hadn’t seen each other since the night I arrived. The two of us, me and the savior made of glass, were almost the same size. I noticed he didn’t look as gray as he did the night I got there. Light coming through the window turned his skin almost yellow, making him jaundiced, as though his resurrection wasn’t going well. And, hey, maybe it wasn’t.
There’s nothing to say that things hadn’t been a little bumpy between being resurrected and lifted up into heaven to enter the family business. I mean, seriously, even if someone had originally, truthfully written down in the Bible, “Jesus was brought back to life except for a bad case of liver damage,” someone else would have come along and erased it. Nobody wanted an imperfect messiah.
That reminded me, although don’t ask me why, of my former roommates. I asked my mom, “The old men are gone. Did you see that?”
“Of course, I saw that. Concentrate on what you’re doing.”
“You didn’t say anything.”
“I thought they might have, you know, passed.”
“Nurse Margie says they went to a home downstate.”
“That’s what Dr. Harry told me,” Nurse Margie added. That was weird. Before she’d said “someone” told her. Now that someone was Dr. Harry. I wondered if Nurse Margie had a problem with the truth. She certainly had a problem keeping her mouth shut.
“Well, that’s good. It’s better than passing.”
“So, does that mean Dr. Harry is back from his conference?”
Nurse Margie shrugged underneath my arm. “I haven’t seen him.”
“But he must be back if he sent the old men to a nursing home.”
“Maybe. There was a note on the nurses’ station. That’s all I know.”
A note? Totally bizarre. “Someone” had told her what happened to the old men. Dr. Harry had told her what happened. And now it was a note. I wondered if she had any idea at all what happened to the old men.
When we reached the second floor, I made them stop. I felt weak, like my energy had dribbled out of me as we climbed the stairs. I wanted to lay down on the dusty wooden floor and sleep forever. Except I couldn’t. My mom and Nurse Margie held me up. I looked down the hallwa
y that sliced the second floor into two halves. Doors were cut into each side, maybe five, I don’t know. I wasn’t in a counting mood. Everything was painted putty like the downstairs, a dull, lifeless color that made me think whoever chose it got bored partway through deciding and just said, “That one.” Putty was the color of giving up. Which at that moment I wanted—
“It’s this way,” Nurse Margie said, pulling me to the left.
Had these been classrooms when the building had been a boys’ school? Or had they been dormitories? What was it like to go to a boys’ school? Maybe the place was haunted. Little boys caned to death by—
We stopped, and Nurse Margie opened one of the doors. We walked into what seemed like an office. There was a built-in desk against one wall, with two computers sitting on it. Over the desk was a window that looked into the room next to us at a machine shaped like a giant metal donut. I’d done this before, so there weren’t going to be any surprises. I was about to be laid on a too-narrow table and repeatedly slid back and forth through a metal donut hole, a process that would have been more enjoyable if there were actual donuts involved. Except I didn’t want a donut. Why didn’t I want a donut?
Sitting at the desk, was a tall, unwieldy guy with dark hair and a bad attitude. “This is Ray,” Nurse Margie said. “Ray, this is Jake Margate. You’ll be seeing a lot of Jake.”
His eyes were algae green, bloodshot, and a bit crossed. There was something reptilian about him. If you told me his blood was colder than mine, I would have believed you. He looked me over and decided he was unimpressed. He was only a few years older than me and still had fresh acne scars on his cheeks.
After mumbling a sort of hello, he led us into the room with the machine. He and Nurse Margie helped me lay down on the thin metal table. Then he covered me with a thin blanket. I was uncomfortable, but at least I was laying down.
He hooked me up to another IV, and something bright red began to flow into my veins. Oh my God, I realized I’d gotten my wish. Colored chemo! Shit, Ray was asking me something.
“What?”
“I said, did you take everything out of your pockets?”
“I don’t have anything in my pockets.” I still wore The Simpson’s pajamas. Did he really think I’d shove my keys and some change into my pockets to hang around all day in bed?
“You’re not wearing a belt, are you?”
“No. Not with pajamas.”
I had the uncomfortable feeling a manual somewhere told him to ask these questions. I looked at my mother and used what energy I had to roll my eyes. She pursed her lips at me the way she always did when I had an opinion that didn’t match hers.
Ray left the room. Nurse Margie and my mom stood there a moment, and then Nurse Margie said, “I think we’re supposed to leave, too. You know, radiation.”
“Of course,” my mom said. It wasn’t her first time at the rodeo.
The two of them walked out and closed a thick door behind them. That left me alone in the room with the metal donut. Having done this before, or at least something similar, I knew Ray would talk to me through an intercom system. He’d push a button and slide me into the machine and tell me when to hold my breath. The donut would make a whirring sound kind of like a small turbine engine. Then I’d slide out again, and Ray would tell me to breathe.
Except that isn’t how it went.
Nothing happened for a long time. I just lay there. Then I heard Nurse Margie through the intercom, “I think it’s this button here.”
Followed by Ray. “Can you hear me, Jack?”
“It’s Jake.” That was my mom.
“Yeah, I can hear you.” I’d been called Jack enough times not to give a shit.
“Um, good.”
I waited. Nothing happened. “Are we going to start soon?”
The intercom clicked on. “Um. We have to wait a half hour after we start the IV. You have like sixteen more minutes.”
“Oh. Okay.”
I thought this was like tests I’d had before. But it wasn’t. I was pretty familiar with the kinds of tests out there. I’d had simple X-rays, CT scans, CT scans with dye, and MRIs. This was different. This was a PET scan. Dr. Harry had mentioned it, and so had Nurse Margie. I’d heard of them before. I thought I’d even had one, but I must not have. I’d have remembered having to cool my heels for half an hour before we could even start the test.
For a moment, I wondered why we weren’t doing a simple CT scan. I mean, that’s what the machine looked like it was. It could do both, couldn’t it? So why not do that kind of scan? The answer came to me almost immediately. A CT scan told you where there was cancer. If I was cured, there would be nothing to see. But did we know that for sure? Didn’t we need a CT scan just to find out that we didn’t need to do a CT scan? And what was a PET scan anyway? What did it tell you?
SEVENTEEN
“—reports of the subject’s condition continue to be positive. Vitals remain on the low side but have increased. All organ systems appear to have begun functioning. Kidney function has returned. We were unable to measure first output as patient was incontinent during the night. Circulation remains suppressed, particularly in the extremities, but I’m hopeful it will improve.”
Dr. Harry sat at his desk talking into his phone again. A duffle bag crammed with some clothes sat next to the desk. He’d poured himself a half glass of some kind of brown liquor. He looked stressed but not distressed, a man who had important things to do, a man who was anxious to get to them.
“It has been difficult to keep my emotions to myself. The joy I feel at my success is nearly impossible to describe. I’ve sacrificed so much for this. I could have had a more prominent, lucrative career if I hadn’t pursued Property Five. I could have found some shred of happiness in that, however brief. But I chose not to. And now I’m glad. There were times I wondered if I was squandering my life on research that would go nowhere, could go nowhere. I hesitate to think what would have happened to me if I hadn’t succeeded—no, no, I know what would have happened. I would have continued until I did succeed or until I simply died.”
He took a sip of his drink, set it down, closed his eyes, and thought. About what? Was he thinking I was a real person and not just an experiment? I doubted that. I was little more than my measurements. I was my pulse, my blood pressure, my respiration rate.
“And then I think even if I had never succeeded, it would have been worth it because I’d tried. That was the only important thing, to try. That’s wrong, though. That’s the justification of someone who has failed, someone comfortable in failure. And I no longer have to justify anything. My worth has been established. Or it will be when I reach the point where I can publish my findings.
“I can’t help but imagine how people will react to the news stories. The interviews. The television appearances. I’ve thwarted death. Most people will be grateful. Some, I suppose, will suggest I’ve somehow destroyed their religious faith. That if I’m able to use science to reign in death, to provide in some small portion exactly what they promise in their Bible, that somehow makes everything they believe false.”
The Dr. Harry in my dream had a funny way of saying things. He’d cured leukemia, and that was a big deal. Why did he have to try and make it an even bigger deal by saying things like “reign in death?” What did that even mean? Had he cured other diseases? Did he expect to?
“Others may question the wisdom of extended life. How will the world support the human race if we can conquer all illness, all death? Yet, I wonder. If we can find a way to ward off what was once inevitable, then might we not also find solutions for things as simple as over-crowding?
“And, of course, there may be ethical—”
EIGHTEEN
Suddenly, the machine came on, waking me with its whirring noise and an unexpected jolt to the table beneath me. It began to slide into the donut. This wasn’t exactly right.
“Should I hold my breath?” I asked.
“Hold your breath.”
I took a deep breath and held it as I continued my slow journey into the machine. There was something space-age about the sound of the machine, and I had the random thought that my entrance into it should have been preceded by a countdown. Ten. Nine. Eight. Seven. I needed to settle in and think about something. Or nothing.
Then I was thinking about the dream I’d just woken from. Why did I keep dreaming about Dr. Harry like that? Why was my mind making up things I couldn’t possibly know? I knew almost nothing about Dr. Harry’s research, and I knew even less about him as a person. Why did I think I knew? I’d only seen him what, twice? Three times? He seemed mysterious. No, not seemed, was. He was mysterious. I didn’t know anything about him. So, exactly what did I know?
I tried to figure out what year it would have been when he got out of medical school. He looked like he was in his sixties so he must have gotten out of medical school in the late seventies or early eighties. Where did he go to school? It could have been anywhere, but I decided it was Chicago. Mainly because I knew Chicago. And they had good medical schools. I was the one inventing him, so he definitely wasn’t going to some crap school in the Caribbean. Northwestern was a good medical school, I was pretty sure. Loyola, too.
I imagined Dr. Harry living in Chicago—not the Chicago I knew, but more the Chicago of ER reruns, the shabby, dark, always-under-construction-Chicago. I pictured him working in a big public hospital where he’d lose so many patients to cancer that the only way to recover from his sadness was to find a cure. And now he had. He’d found a cure to cancer.
It was hard to imagine he’d done something so amazing because he was so stoic. A normal person would be bouncing all over the room screaming, “I cured cancer.” A normal person would be calling up The Today Show and demanding someone smarter than Kathie Lee Gifford interview him—though she could sit in the background gasping and mouthing wide-eyed surprise while pretending not to be drunk at ten in the morning. But Dr. Harry didn’t seem like a normal person. He was more animated in my dreams. Maybe that’s why I dreamed him that way, because in real life he barely reacted.
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