word?” he asked, not sounding hopeful.
The geologist, Marvin, Mortenson, something with an M and an N that I knew and couldn’t grasp, turned to him, afraid to be the one to tell him, but sat up straight anyway, realizing at that moment he was still an astronaut, and trying for all he could to live to that, “He wants us to keep going, sir.”
Bill paused, giving me a moment of silence in his own head, and then turned to the crew. “You heard him. Everyone who’s not attending to the commander, get back in your seats. We’ve still got work to do.”
I realized then how tired I was, not just in my body, that was no longer moving save for the dull palpitating of my heart, the slow and staggered breaths that stopped and started around sharp pain as they went. I was so tired, in my eyes, and they rolled shut, and so tired in my own mind, I felt that if I could only stop thinking for a moment, just rest my head for a minute or two, everything would be just all right…
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Euthanasia
I’ve gotten used to not sleeping much- my internship was pretty useful preparation for that- but it’s hard getting used to shunning the sun. It goes up, I go to bed. I get up in time to see it sink below the horizon. It just makes me uneasy- that’s the reason I haven’t been sleeping. Of course, if I’d known the chief of medicine would be here tonight, that might have been the cause. But I didn’t know, not until he paged me with a message to come to his office.
“Jack, have a seat.” He’s calm, too calm. He must have slept all day to be this calm, or started in on the scotch he was pouring himself before I got here. I sit down, not awake enough to be comfortable, though my eyes and mind are on the edge of sleep. I’m drifting, back in med school, where my instructor’s going on about Hippocrates and his damned oath- of course the only part that echoes is the part everybody knows, “First, do no harm.”
I hear laughter, first my father’s, the way he’d laugh when he was drinking too much, but it grows and stretches until I know that it’s coming from me, and then I know why: the oath is bullshit. The harm we do is rarely medical, but often there for even a fool to see.
And last night I was fool enough to see it, a man who’d beaten his son nearly into a coma, probably would have, had he not stopped in the middle to get a beer. The boy knew where his father kept his shotgun- knew enough to disengage the safety, how to make it roar- everything but how to make sure his father died. He was hit in the groin, and the wound was a mess. He’d been shot from close enough he was burned by belched barrel fire. Most surgeons couldn’t have saved him, but I chose not to even try. He was far from my first.
The chief of medicine’s glass clanks against the edge of his desk when he sets it down. He pours another two fingers and my mouth waters because I want one, but of course I’m on-call, so he doesn’t offer me a glass. “I said when I hired you that you were one of the most talented surgeons I’d ever met. Well, as it turns out, I was underselling your ability. Your numbers over the years have been so good you’ve bumped up the stats for the entire hospital. But it seems like ever since you came onto the night shift you’ve had a little more trouble.”
“And Jack, it isn’t so much that you’ve had a few more errors, lately, just that you’ve been having more fatalities. In fact, I think fatalities have been universal, when it gets right down to it. You either save people or they die, though still favored heavily towards the living end of that spectrum. But I was going through your case work over the last year, and I found that your difficulties started before the shift change, and I wondered why that might have been.”
“I-” my throat was too dry to choke out another word.
“Don’t, Jack, don’t.” My fists balled up inside my coat pockets, gripping a scalpel that isn’t there- but even if it were, I wouldn’t- not on a man whose only sin was being smart enough to see through my lies.
“I’m not worried, not about your ability, anyway. But how are things at home? Everything all right with your family? It was a kind thing you did, taking the night shift, but it can grind a person. Night does strange things to people, makes them do strange things to each other. We see a lot of that come through our doors. If it’s taking its toll- you just say the word, we’ll work something out. Maybe a rotating schedule, something. I just wanted you to know, we’re here for you. Not just me, but this entire hospital- we take care of our own. If you’ve got a need, and it’s something we can give, we’ll do it.”
My pager goes off, a text. “I have to go. Looks like there was a meth lab raid, one of the suspects killed one of the cops and took a bullet himself.” He raises his glass in my direction and nods. His eyes are tired, but I think that’s from the drink.
As I walk through his office door my eyes roll back into my head, and I know I’m not up for saving a life; then again, that wasn’t really what I was thinking, anyway.
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Shrink
He sat down on my couch. His suit, which likely cost a month’s revenue at my practice, was rumpled and stained with sweat. His hair had thinned considerably since he began seeing me a year ago, and it was disheveled. His eyes were tired and dry; his face tightened a moment and he rubbed his eyelids. “How do you feel?” I asked.
“Small,” he sighed. “Smaller than ever before.”
“Why is that?” I asked, leaning forward.
He smiled, stopped rubbing his eyes, and fixed me with a stare that was piercing, but not unfriendly. “I want you to know I’m not a callow moron.”
“Why is that important to you?” I asked, crossing my legs to extend out the moment he had to think before he answered.
“Because most people think that I am. You’re different. You listen, for a living, and you have the intelligence to understand my conundrum. Businessmen have gotten a bad shake, but we aren’t,” he stopped, and sighed.
“I know layoffs are a temporary resolution; it was originally a grave measure to a temporary budget shortfall. But the problem is, and this is mostly because of the shorter business cycle, it’s no longer temporary.”
“By laying off a section of the workforce, you’re cutting your maximum potential performance. You save for this quarter on payroll, which looks good on paper, but you’re just stealing from your next quarter’s productivity. And aside from the staff you lose, which, unless you’re a complete moron, you hired for a reason initially, the cuts take their toll on morale, which also affects productivity.”
“Any number of factors can affect profitability; in this downturn, we’ve had a lot of orders canceled or payments delayed, though the big one is still increased competition from foreign companies- shrinking market share. But when we miss our numbers, we reduce staff to make up the difference- which cuts future productivity- in essence voluntarily shrinking our market share even further.”
He took a breath and held it; over the course of his soliloquy his gaze had fallen to the floor, and he didn’t let the breath loose until his eyes flicked back to me. The breath seemed to be the only thing keeping him up, and he slumped noticeably in his seat as it left him. “You make a very impassioned but weighted argument, but that’s all intellectual. How do you feel about all of this?”
He swallowed; he hated the process, even if he needed its outcome. “I’m tired, of being vilified, being the bad guy. My hands have been tied every step of the way. Have I been complicit? Have I lost esteem in my own eyes? Absolutely; I thought at a certain point that I would stop being somebody else’s whore, but if you’re not management’s bitch you’re the shareholder’s, and either way they’re turning your ass out.”
He winced; he recognized how he was using his profanity as a crutch. “I liked my job; I was good at my job. I got to where I am because I could grow a business; they’ve turned me into a joke, an arborist pruning a dying tree.”
His eyes narrowed, brow furrowed; “But doctor, we’re dancing around the central issue, here, and I want you to be frank with me. It’s difficult enough to have to ask the qu
estion aloud, without jumping through the usual analytical hoops.” He paused, trying to regather his steam, but his eyes focused back to the carpet, and his question came out in a whimper: “Could stress be causing my penis to shrink?”
I paused, and pondered for a moment, then shrugged my shoulders. “Probably.”
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Indian Gift
Being kind, the woman serving drinks in the train car might have mistook the pair of men as father and son; being unkind, she would have guessed grandfather and grandson. The younger man, who she’d heard called “Pete,” flicked his cigarette out the open window.
“Take care, son. Matt Horner was an ornery son of a cuss. Shot a lot of men dead; cold blood dripped off his hands in the day.”
“Allegedly,” the younger man said, settling into his seat. “Horner’s only been linked to a handful of actual deaths, you know, ones with bodies or kin we can find, ones that aren’t just a part of his legend. And of those, there’s only one we can prove he shot, and that was in an honest duel.”
“Parts of legends disappear, son, don’t mean they’re any less true.”
“Whiskey?” the woman asked, holding out a bottle and a pair of glasses.
“I’m working,” said Pete, with irritation she didn’t deserve.
“Figure he’s working hard enough for the
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