I arrived forty minutes late at the hospital after passing the wreckage of a small school bus and a jackknifed tractor-trailer. I thought of stopping to assist the response but figured the six ambulances and fourteen paramedics would be better equipped to deal with the gaggle of crying schoolkids abandoned along the chaotic roadside.
My first patient of the day was already gowned and waiting for me in an examination room. George MacGruder sat on the examination table, his craggy face contorted with premonitions of doom. In truth, he was my favorite patient.
“How long this time, doc?” MacGruder said, his feet up on the examination table as I walked in. I lifted his feet and placed them back on the ground, careful to not catch a glimpse underneath the gown.
“Sorry I’m late. Just a fenderbender. Rubberneckers for miles,” I said.
“I wasn’t asking why you were late. You’re always late. I expect this,” the patient said. “I was talking about my prognosis. How long do I have?”
I shook my head, a slight smile on my face. I scanned MacGruder’s retinas, then used my Atman so that the wall monitors cycled through the latest test results from the O’Neill-Kane.
“George MacGruder, eighty-eight years old, Blood Type AB-positive, blood sugar normal, cholesterol satisfactory, heart rate and body-mass index average, carcinogen scans show no abnormal cell growth,” I said, pulling a stool underneath me. “There’s no doubt about it—you’re a perfectly healthy senior citizen.”
MacGruder pounded his fist into his open palm. He shook his head.
“There has to be something, doc. My grandfather. My father. My mother. My aunt,” he said, counting on his fingers. “They all died before their eighty-ninth birthday. They were all fit as a fiddle when they turned eighty-eight, and then—boom. Dead.”
“What did they die from?”
“Bathroom fall,” MacGruder said, counting on his fingers. “Two car accidents. One suicide.”
I smiled and shook my head.
“No, George,” I said. “If you can avoid slipping in the shower or jumping off a cliff, you’re doomed to live into your nineties, at least. You know, people are living into their one-thirties now. You might make it fifty more years. You could outlive me.”
“Christ, I hope not,” the patient said. “I’m bored at eighty-eight. How the hell will I kill fifty years? I’m retired. I don’t golf. No real books left, since the Blackout. My clothes will only last another few years, and I promised myself I’d never have to go shopping again. There has to be something wrong. Do me a favor—look over those results again.”
I stood, patting MacGruder’s veiny wrist.
“I’m sure you’ll figure out your existential dilemma,” I said. “These are good problems to have. Just think—you could be dead from that brain tumor we caught ten years ago.”
I tapped my Atman twice to power it down. I stuck my hand out, and my old patient and friend shook it.
“You’re good for another six months, George. Guaranteed—or your money back,” I said.
“A thousand bucks says you’re wrong,” MacGruder said, shaking his head, a sheepish but relieved grin spreading along his face.
We stepped to the doorway.
“You’re on,” I said, grinning. I leaned in close. “And actually, George, I’ve got some good news. I’m going to be a father.”
MacGruder hooted. He grabbed my hand and pumped it vigorously.
“Congratulations, my good man! I knew you’d make it happen, eventually. You can’t ever give up hope! Great news—the best of news.”
“Thanks, George. It’s a medical miracle, truly.”
“Miracles visit those who faithfully open the door,” MacGruder said, scratching his chin philosophically.
I visited three more patients: Mrs. Goldfarb, Mr. Mastrangelo and Mrs. Jefferson. All three were long-time patients of mine, too. Each of them heard my news. Mrs. Goldfarb pinched my cheeks; Mr. Mastrangelo, grinning, socked me in the arm; and Mrs. Jefferson left lipstick kisses on my face and rumpled my white coat with a scandalous hug. Afterward, I staggered down the hallway. Something about the news of a coming birth could drives even normal people to madness, hysteria—I had seen this over my years in the hospital.
My office was quiet, calm. I scanned the data from my rounds into the terminal, then poured myself a glass of distilled water from the cooler next to my desk. As I drank I looked up at the digital monitors on the wall, which flashed pictures and thank-you notes from patients, all of whom were still alive. MacGruder appeared there, along with Goldfarb and Jefferson and Mastrangelo. All of them had survived malignant brain tumors. All of them were still alive, because of the appropriate medical treatment. I always smiled when I saw MacGruder appear on the screen, holding an enormous fish on a boat off the Pacific coast, his shit-eating grin as wide as the horizon behind him. These pictures kept me going, no matter how tough a day I was having.
I pulled up the patient census on the terminal. I searched again for the name Esmeralda, and the same entry popped up. Esmeralda Foyle, age seventeen, admitted at an undisclosed time, the same strange old alphanumeric serial number prefix: BOW-137. But there was one small difference. The reason for admission had been altered. It wasn’t traumatic injuries now—instead it was for cosmetic surgery. All the other fields for notes and further information were blank. The picture of the cherub-faced girl had vanished, replaced by the holographic seal of the Bureau of Wellness: a staff with two snakes coiled around it, with a quiver of arrows fanned out at the top, an eagle screaming silent above it all. The symbol had always given me a queasy feeling, for some reason—like it was a veiled threat or had some hidden meaning that eluded me. But I could never precisely place my uneasiness about it until that moment. Here it seemed to be hiding something from me, from any and all prying eyes.
The Atman rang, and I jumped. I rubbed my face. I picked it up on the second ring.
“Hello,” I said.
“Joe, it’s Betty.”
“Betty. How you doing? Where are you?”
“Dandy. I guess you saw George MacGruder. I hope you said hello for me.”
“I did. He asked about you and your sweet derriere. I think those were his exact words. The man’s like a hormone-addled teenager.”
She chuckled, somehow amused by the creepy, but non-threatening, worship of an old man.
“Quite a character, that George. If he was only twice my age, he’d have a shot at this sweet derriere. Anyway…I won’t be there for another hour. I pulled late shift yet again.”
“You never told me that.”
“Yes, I did. Yesterday. I told you I drew the short straw because of that new hire. You were too busy staring at that chart from that little brat who dropped dead.”
“James Cruzen.”
“Yeah, the twerp,” she said. “You know, he actually groped me when he woke up from surgery? I had half a mind to report him, but he dropped dead before I got the chance.”
“Did he say anything to you about a girl with him in the car?”
“No—but I heard he was delirious. Possible brain trauma,” she said. “Or the crafty little jerk made up some crazy story about a girl and bugs falling from the sky so he wouldn’t get arrested for burning down half the state forest in that car crash.”
I shifted in my chair.
“So, what about this new hire?” I said. “What’s his name, Culling? Hiring him doesn’t mean you’re going back to nights, does it?”
She sighed.
“Just for a few days,” she said. “They’re seeing if he can be trusted with overseeing the wing on the undead shift. But boy am I glad I don’t have to work with him regularly. Dude gives me the creeps, Joe. Just being in the same room is too much. The guy looks like he just crawled out of some dive bar.”
“I met the guy briefly. Pretty strange person.”
“Know what I mean?” she said. Some beeping came from her end, behind her voice. “Oh, Joe—I’ve got to go take care of something. Catch you later.”<
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“Alright.”
We hung up. I tapped my desk, then leaned back to my refrigerator, took out an energy stick, and snorted it.
But even with the clarity from the stimulant, my thoughts returned to the limp body of James Cruzen—the image of that corpse, that blank face. That visage of death I’d never gotten accustomed to, whether old or young, diseased or healthy. The juiceless husk, the soulless meat. I took another sip of water and glanced at the wall monitor, at MacGruder’s stupid grin over that huge dead tropical fish in his tiny clawlike hands. But it was no good. No happy pictures of the teenager, no thank-you note, no happy story of Cruzen’s recovery would ever appear there. Five minutes of my lunch break remained, but I couldn’t purge the vision of the boy’s gaping mouth out of my mind.
There was one thing I could do. I picked up my Atman and tapped the screen. Within seconds I found it. A picture, a curriculum vitae, and a number for the researcher at the Ivy League school who led the stem-cell research program I had been reading about. Yoshiro Fujimi: a dapper-looking man, mixed-race, with traces of Japanese heritage around his eyes and cheekbones, and graying hair rebelling around his ears. An impressive track record of stints at major academic institutions, and some work for the Bureau of Wellness—all places for the brightest and best-connected in the country. I picked up the Atman and dialed.
It rang. Nothing—it just kept going, for minutes. My thoughts wandered as it rang on and on: the fleeting image of Cruzen’s dead face—the blackness of the open maw, the dead unseeing eyes, that abyss.
“Hello?” a woman suddenly answered.
“Oh—hello?” I said, startled. “Hello?”
“Yes, can I help you?” the woman snapped back at me.
Her voice—I couldn’t place that voice. But it was so familiar. I composed myself, quickly collecting my thoughts.
“Hi, my name is Joe Barnes, I’m a doctor here at Saint Almachius the Vulnerable in New Jersey. I was looking to speak with Dr. Yoshiro Fujimi.”
“If you’re looking for the Doctor, he’s on sabbatical in Guatemala. An important project. He won’t be back until December, at the earliest.”
“It’s important I reach him.”
“In that case, you can call back in December,” she said.
There was a click. She had hung up. I put the Atman down. What was a researcher with that kind of pedigree doing down in Guatemala, especially after the Cartel Wars? But most of all, that voice haunted me. I knew that voice. I tried calling the number again, but this time it was disconnected.
With a strange feeling of dread, I returned to my afternoon rounds. The hours dragged. But with each new room, new pulse and new terminal, I couldn’t keep focused. My mind wandered into places from the past that horrified me. Occasionally, the terrifying future of a baby and a family unmoored my stomach.
So I focused on the Cruzen death. I searched on my pocket Atman for more stem cell research as I walked the halls. As I wound through the scant medical literature, I remembered how quickly it had all progressed—how science had leapfrogged over the Hippocratic Oath in a few short years. The few pre-Blackout entries were huge, voluminous, boring studies. But after the Purge and the Blackout, the studies became mere summaries of a whirlwind of questionable work. I reached my office and sat at my desk. I proceeded to read nineteen of the thirty-nine publications I’d found, when Betty Bathory walked in.
“Hey, slacker. Getting in some reading?” she said, falling back into the patients’ chair.
I blinked. “What time is it?”
“Time to call it a day. I can take care of the last few fogeys. Go home, Joe.”
“I’m just finishing up here. Checking if the stem cells could have killed the kid,” I said. “I don’t know whether that’s possible. Apparently no one does.”
She waved me off.
“People die. It happens everyday, for good reasons and bad.” She shook her head. “Joe, you care a lot—sometimes too much.”
She paused.
“So anyway, I was talking with Mary just now.”
Her thin, plucked eyebrows arched over her eyes. Betty and Mary had been friends for years. It was as if I had two wives—one at home, one at work. One a retired warrior who shared my bed, one a crack nurse saving lives by my side. Betty stared me down. She knew.
“Yes, Betty, she’s…” I began to say, a smile breaking across my face.
“Oh my God,” she said, clapping her hands, lunging around the desk and hugging me. “I knew it! It finally happened! You guys are going to have a bayyyy-beeeee!”
She kissed me on the cheek, leaving lipstick smudges she quickly wiped off with her thumb. She waved her arms in the air, as she raved around the office.
“…and we should get a follow-up test just to be sure and we could run the DNA Tapestry Test and start Mary on the Bureau’s vitamin infusions…”
I barely understood her, in her whirlwind of excitement. I pinched my nose with thumb and forefinger, waiting for a quiet moment. She was like that—she would get carried away in fits of passion every so often. It made her a good nurse, how deeply she cared. She raved for a minute more, then the room was quiet. Detecting the silence, feeling her gaze, I looked up from my terminal.
“Joe, what’s the matter with you? Can’t you be excited that your wife is going to have your first child? For once, can’t you just be happy?” she asked.
“I’m incredibly happy, it’s just that…” I started to say.
“It’s just that you’re still thinking about the dead kid,” she said, completing my thought for me. Her mouth twisted, her hands went to her hips. “You’re unbelievable, you know that? I’m going to get started on my rounds.” She went to the door. But she stopped at the threshold.
“You know, when you get like this, you sound like Old Man Wetherspoon, Joe.” Then she left, the door shutting behind her.
* * *
Old Man Wetherspoon. The man had an answer for anything and everything. I hadn’t thought of that. I hadn’t been down to the basement in days, maybe weeks. I stood from my seat, and walked out the door, down the hallway to the central hospital elevator. I could already hear the grizzled old voice as I walked down the stairs toward the Old Man’s darkened lair.
Cornelius Wetherspoon was a man out of time—a gambler who had bet his life savings on an American millennium…and lost. He owned ten houses within a short drive of the hospital, but they were all empty and dilapidated and cost so much in taxes he still couldn’t retire, even at the age of 105. He had come of age during the Bush administration, and had been an enthusiastic, charismatic supporter of the Grand Old Party as a young doctor, even going so far as to run for state office once in the 2010s against an impossible-to-beat liberal incumbent. Despite his defeat, Cornelius Wetherspoon emerged as a wunderkind. Heading into the 2020s, there was no stopping him. Except for Nixon II. First he had been primed for a key position in the new administration—probably in the Bureau of Wellness—because he had made such a good showing against the liberal, in spite of the odds. But like his disgraced ancestor, President Richard Malthus Nixon owed too many people. So instead of the qualified Cornelius Wetherspoon, the new president picked a pair of knucklehead New England doctors who had delivered New Hampshire in the primary using any means necessary. Wetherspoon, then in his 40s, had seethed. But still he bided his time. Within the Committee to Re-Elect the President the second time around, Wetherspoon tried even harder, made himself indispensable in delivering New Jersey’s precious electoral votes. But almost every state in the nation went to Nixon II anyway. And this time the President hired no one for any of the open positions, claiming the need for budget cuts. Wetherspoon suffered in silence, although he told his story to anyone who would listen for the next half-century.
The longer he lived, the deeper the wrinkles etched into his face, and the more people turned out to be sonsofbitches who inevitably betrayed him. His wife ran off with a colleague, his teenagers had bastard children and became
drug addicts, the hospital administrators all tried to cut corners and killed patients by degrees, as he tirelessly recounted. Residents came and went, his second wife died the night Pakistan nuked Kashmir, his children died in the 2040s, and he started drinking a fifth of Scotch every night. Rebounding, he attended Alcoholics Anonymous, decided after five meetings they were just a bunch of sniveling weaklings, and quit the booze through sheer willpower. He tried to phase himself out toward retirement at the hospital, but every time another retirement date loomed he quietly withdrew his notice of resignation as the taxes encroached closer to fiscal disaster. The hospital didn’t know what to do with him—a doctor who had trained as a student to treat the cured epidemics of HIV and cancer, but who had lasted through the Great Purge to the incredible gains of genetic modification and stem cells. He was a walking museum, a fount of institutional knowledge. The administrators wanted him out. They coaxed him to quit with severance packages, promises of bonuses, implied threats.
But he ignored them. The bitter widower remained in his tiny office, surrounded by the ramparts of old paper books, reading. Occasionally he emerged to give the nurses and young doctors terse nuggets of advice, passing by and barking that a bandage was too tight or that a second opinion was needed, or even criticizing patients for not trying hard enough to heal. He hated the O’Neill-Kane machine with a passionate rage and had even been seen once punching its arachnid arms out of anger. (He was promptly reprimanded, but they still couldn’t fire him). Students were terrified of him. No error slid by him as he made his silent circumlocutions of the hospital, like an assassin.
I was never frightened of him, though. I had come one day into the office to ask a routine question about laxatives and care of the elderly. I had figured he was the seniormost doctor, and he could help me out with a quick answer. But Old Man Wetherspoon—then just ninety-five—would not make it easy.
“Someone tell you to ask the bitter old man in the basement for advice?” Wetherspoon had croaked.
“No, I saw you’re the most senior physician in the hospital directory,” I had said, standing by the doorway. “I’ve heard you’re the expert. I have a patient who has irritable bowel syndrome and a norovirus, but still isn’t defecating.”
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