Bath Haus

by P. J. Vernon

  “Good thing, right? Thumb’s in the trauma bay and seemingly still viable.”

  Spotty murmurings in the affirmative.

  “I secured his airway, diagnosed the spleen laceration by ultrasound, and determined the femur wasn’t a time-sensitive priority.”

  “Not so much the thumb, huh?” That same, smug asshole from seconds earlier. Does he think this is a conversation?

  “Correct. Necrosis is an irreversible bitch.”

  I cringe the instant bitch leaves my lips. Between Oliver, the panic, the bourbon, and the asshole, it just came out. The light laughter it earns is decidedly disapproving and my heart thrums.

  “We transferred him to the OR for an emergency splenectomy, but the thumb’s presence had already broken our rhythm. Disrupted my team’s focus, and suddenly I’ve got surgical techs preoccupied with preserving it. Metabolic derangements, hypotension—we’re seconds from a dead kid, and a severed digit steals the show.”

  I’ve finally got the room. Nothing like beer and amputated thumbs to hold attention.

  “Now I’ve got a real problem and very little time to solve it.” I toggle the mouse. “And…”

  Oliver’s face peers back from the darkened audience. Bruised throat. Dead eyes. I blink, and something unfortunate happens: while scrolling, I somehow close the window entirely. The whole damn window. Gone.

  This is a problem, and my cheeks flush. I can’t regurgitate this case off the cuff because, again, I’ve altered the ending. Oliver was nearly choked to death, and now my notes have vanished. And maybe I’m more than tipsy. And I’ve burned a solid minute squinting in silence while my pulse pounds in both ears.

  “And?” A woman. Seated somewhere in the front.

  “And…” I wipe my brow. “And so…”

  Click. Click. Tap. Scroll. Click. Nothing!

  “Just give me a quick second.” Where the hell is Needy Mouse when she’s needed? “Having some technical difficulties here.”

  “Dr. Klein,” Mouse whispers. She crouches in the aisle just below. “We’re okay. Everything’s working.”

  “No, it’s not.” My mouth is ashtray dry. Desiccated and I’m lisping. “I can’t pull up my notes.”

  “Dr. Klein—”

  “It’s not working.” I reach for my water and knock it over. It strikes the carpet with a mic-aided boom and rolls. “Jesus!”

  “So, what did you do?” Asshole again.

  Breathe, Nathan. Regain control. Oliver—

  “With the thumb?” Another man. My bumbling’s registering. My talk’s coming apart. It’s as fragrant as a pinhead of blood in a vast ocean. And this crowd is nothing but tiger shark through and through.

  “I directed my team, the nurses…” Christ, where the fuck did my notes go!? I’m clicking through browsers, rapid-fire opening and closing whatever files my cursor finds. Where the hell—

  “Sir?” Mouse asks. “Are you okay?”

  I’m not a fucking sir. I’m about to scream at her, to bolt and book a flight and get home to my husband who’s been almost killed when, just like that, my presentation is back. My notes reappear. All of them. Diligently crafted. Ordered and bulleted and waiting to be ticked through.

  Oh. Okay. You’re back, Nathan. Back online.

  I draw breath, offer the crowd a wide smile. “Sorry about the water, folks.” Then a wrist flick and a white lie: “Procedure for carpal tunnel four weeks ago. A surgery from doing too many surgeries.”

  It engenders sympathy and explains my shakiness and they laugh.

  “As I was saying, in a case like this, you’ve got to make hard calls.” The room settles back into silence. “Tough choices, and it was evident the kid’s life and the kid’s reattached thumb were mutually exclusive outcomes.”

  My confidence growls like an engine with fresh gasoline, and I proceed to instruct the crowd on the criticality of rhythm. A narrative about the power of succinctness in the face of insurmountable pressure. How fierce patient advocacy often looks cruel. How I had just seconds and very few words to spare, and deftly used both. Brevity to demonstrate gravity.

  The message was received. The thumb was abandoned. The patient was saved.

  And my presentation, mercifully finished.

  Needy Mouse signals a warning for questions, and the subject matter naturally lends itself to softballs. I bat them away, one after another. Anecdotes of similar experiences from the audience drain more time, and my lungs finally expand.

  The last barrier to returning home to my husband behind me.

  My creative liberties had blended seamlessly with fact. Regardless of my actual course of action, the outcome was the same: I made the call, and the kid’s alive today. Tossing back beers on a tractor in some cornfield. Nine fingers, but a beating heart. Because that’s what I do. That’s what I’m good at. I fix things.

  Shouldn’t we keep it on ice? a surgical tech had asked, referring to the thumb but neglecting the massively hemorrhaging spleen on the OR table. Maybe perfuse it?

  Heparinized saline, another resident suggested, suddenly blind to the thumb’s profoundly hypotensive owner. Flush with heparinized saline.

  But the choice was mine. The patient was crashing, the room was fixated on an inconsequential digit, and sometimes fixing big things means breaking tiny things. Rendering them moot because the stakes are far too high. Dr. Klein, we can reattach—

  Tiny things like a young man’s thumb.

  Dr. Klein? Oh my god, did you just—

  The one I’d deliberately dropped to the floor and crushed with my shoe.

  8

  OLIVER

  Kristian’s found me. He knows my name. He knows who I am.

  Despite the sudden cold, my cheeks swell and grow warm to the touch. I’ve broken out in a fever. Panic wraps my arms and legs, my fingers and toes, in invisible needle pricks.

  I no longer sit on the sofa, having sprung to my feet the instant my name appeared. As I pace half circles around the room, my eyes dart to my phone. Over and over and over again. It’s fallen between two couch cushions where it came to rest when I threw it. Like it was a rattlesnake. If I’d held it a moment longer, I would have been bitten. Milky venom seeping inside my body from hypodermic fangs.

  Think, I tell myself. Think!

  But thinking is the very last thing I want to do. I don’t want to know how, or when, or where. Least of all, why.

  I hyperventilate, cover my face with both hands. I’m standing before the powder room sink. I gulp cold water straight from the brass faucet. Note the dark bruises that clasp my throat. I drink again, repeating the process start to finish. Finally—when the explosion of energy from seeing Kristian’s face in the raw light of day wanes—I begin to unpack things.

  It’s not Kristian. Yes, it is. The photograph, crystal clear. Blond, cheek-length bangs. Dark brows. Ice-blue eyes like a sled dog.

  He doesn’t really know who I am. Yes, he does. He called me Oliver.

  He doesn’t want anything from me. He must. Why else message me? He pointed his sharp chin to the right in the photo, making prominent the laceration in his cheek from my locker key. The taut stitches pulling his flesh back together.

  How did he find me? He told me his name, and I didn’t share mine. But it doesn’t matter. The reception desk at Haus scanned my driver’s license. With the commotion I incited, I drew the front man away from his desk and files. Leaving copies unattended for opportunistic eyes.

  What are you looking for? He speaks to me again, his voice accented and soaked with false promise. Entrapment. His palms work their way from my back to my throat. My wrists are bound. His breath crawls inside my ear, whistling within my skull. I’m choking. A frantic search for air.

  For the second time today, I scream.

  * * *

  • •

&
nbsp; My Uber pulls to the curb a block away from the police station. I’d been in no state to drive or to touch shoulders with strangers on the Metro. The thought of asking the driver, “Take me to the police,” made me cringe. I gave him a cross street instead.

  During the ride here, I second-guessed myself. If I talked to the cops, if I told them the truth, what happened last night, I’d initiate a chain of events entirely out of my control.

  But control is what spurred this decision to come forward. Nathan can’t find out about Haus or Kristian. Nathan can’t discover what happened, but I can continue to exploit his absence. A rapidly closing window at that. I can initiate an investigation of some kind.

  Hands in my pockets, I take the sidewalk with faux confidence.

  I’ll disclose everything to the police in Nathan’s absence. It’s drastic, but I’m dealing with a killer. Kristian is a killer and his brazenness suggests he has much less to lose than I do. Or that he holds better cards. Or both.

  It took all of me—and two shots of Dutch courage—to respond to that Hi Oliver. I snapped screengrabs of the exchange, which included his face, and flipped them right back his way with a simple text:

  911.

  He never replied, but I’m making good on my threat. I’m going to do this because Kristian tried to kill me and now he’s stalking me.

  The station emerges ahead. A brick two-story painted a not-so-calming canary yellow. Surveillance cameras perched along the roofline stoke unease in my gut. I swallow hard and pray this works. That the threat of a police investigation dissuades him from ever contacting me again. That Nathan and I can carry on with our blissfully banal lives like we’ve always done.

  Before I fucked up.

  * * *

  • •

  Truth be told, this isn’t the first police station I’ve been inside.

  I walk through spinning doors, sign my name at reception, step through a metal detector, and gather my things on the far side. Then I wait.

  Some minutes later, a uniformed officer collects me. “This way, please,” he beckons as I trace his steps. His tone is short. He’s had a long shift. He takes me to a room with a table and two chairs. No windows. A metal filing cabinet. Not exactly a peeling-paint interrogation room from Law & Order, but certainly nothing warm either. Somewhere in between. Burnt coffee and printer ink thread the air.

  When the door unlatches and swings back open, I flinch. A smiling woman walks in, and I’m instantly relieved. Be they gay, straight, bi, or none of the above, I prefer my doctors and my bosses and my friends and, apparently, my cops to be women. I’m far more at ease with women, more comfortable talking to women about how I have sex with men.

  “I’m Detective-Sergeant Rachel Henning,” she says. Plainclothes: jeans and a light, fitted button-down. Sleeves rolled up, skinny arms, and a clunky man’s watch wraps her wrist. We shake hands.

  “Oliver.”

  “Pleasure to meet you, Oliver.” She takes the opposite seat. A folder under her arm finds its place on the tabletop.

  She speaks with an accent that’s vaguely familiar. Midwestern, maybe. Michigan’s Upper Peninsula? I ask her where she’s from, hoping to forge a personal connection with the woman who’s about to learn my deepest, darkest secret. The most recent one, anyway.

  “Born and raised in Alberta.” She runs a hand through neck-length hair. “I understand you’d like to file a criminal complaint?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’ve come to the right place.” It’s intended as a joke. I do laugh, anxiously, and I’m sure this is the point. An icebreaker she’s likely used in dozens of conversations like this one. In this very room. “I’ll get to the forms in a bit. The paperwork stuff. But first”—she leans back, her jawline relaxed—“I’d like you to just talk. Tell me what’s going on.”

  I lick dry lips. My leg bounces beneath the table, tapping out Morse code on bad linoleum. Deep breath in, then: “I was assaulted.”

  Detective Henning says nothing. Her steely eyes scan my neck.

  “Someone tried to kill me.” The detective leans forward. She’s used to people lying to her. She can likely detect physical tells if only for the sheer number of lies she’s been fed on the job. She won’t find any here. She can scour my face for them—I hope she does—and she’ll come up empty-handed. She’ll appreciate the seriousness of my predicament.

  “I did something I shouldn’t have.” I rub my throat. “Last night. I visited an establishment.”

  “An establishment?” Detective Henning needs details.

  “A bathhouse. You know, like, a gay one.” I pause to make certain she’s following me. When she asks which, I plow ahead.

  “Haus. I met a man there.” My bouncing knee gathers speed. My teeth chatter. “He said his name was Kristian. We started to hook up. We kissed. Went into a room, a private one I guess he rented. We were going to have sex…” I close my eyes, swallow, stay my knee with a fist. “He tried to strangle me. To death. Before he could…finish…I cut his face with a locker key.”

  “Where specifically on his face?”

  “His cheek. The right one. Then I ran out as fast as I could.” I pull my phone from my pocket. My screengrabs will dispel any doubts she has. Kristian’s face. The taunting.

  Her eyes narrow as she scrolls. “You’re positive you didn’t introduce yourself? Exchange phone numbers? Perhaps you don’t recall? Had you been drinking?”

  “I’m certain.” I don’t answer her last question. It’s irrelevant. I had a single drink at Haus. The Dutch courage I downed before replying to Kristian is another matter. Can she smell it on my breath? On my skin?

  The silence between Detective Henning and me is thick, stiflingly heavy. She’s digesting what I’ve said. “You said you were going to have sex?”

  “I wasn’t raped.” The abrupt proclamation feels foolish. I’m not even sure that’s what she meant, but a lifetime portraying masculinity—what I’d been conditioned to believe was masculinity—compelled me to clarify. “Not raped. There was no penetration. He choked me before.”

  “But the expectation was that sex would occur?”

  “Yes.”

  “Was there any conversation regarding the activities you both planned to engage in?” Detective Henning asks. “A reason for this man, Kristian, to assume he had permission to choke you?”

  “No.” And permission? Would she ask a straight man that question? Like gays are all kink all the time? Fifty Shades of Grey is nothing compared to bread-and-butter gay sex. “Absolutely not.”

  She eyes my throat, my bruises. “Have you received medical attention?”

  “No.”

  “Your injuries might need—”

  “My partner is a medical doctor.” An impulsive attempt to direct the conversation away from my injuries and back to Kristian. It’s also very informative.

  “I see.” She pauses, retools. “Where’s your partner?”

  “Out of town. A conference in New York.”

  “His attendance at this conference is verifiable?”

  “I don’t see why it wouldn’t be.”

  “Huh,” she says, hard stop. Her brow peaks like she’s seen all this before, heard this story already. A rerun and she’s curious whether Nathan did this to me. She’s wondering if I’ve come up with an elaborate cover for the bruises on my neck. But she must see I’m not lying. And what would be the point if I was? Why come here to report a fantastical crime that my partner perpetrated? A desperate plea for help?

  “Do you need me to verify—”

  “I’ll take care of that.” She clicks her pen and slides a legal pad my way. “Just note the location here.”

  “Sure.” I pull my shoulders back, scrawl NYU Langone Medical Center shakily. That she can verify so much with so little is unsurprising—yet still jarring. “And I�
�d appreciate discretion. Given, you know, the circumstances.”

  Detective Henning hesitates, then: “Every effort will be made to be discreet, but investigations necessarily probe where we might not be comfortable.”

  Her words tighten my stomach, but before I can protest, she cuts me off. “I’m not going to get into the specifics of attempted homicide, but I can tell you this much. You’ve been assaulted.”

  Of course I’ve been assaulted!

  “It’s evident from the markings on your neck that the intention was to cause significant harm to your person. Given the intimate context, where on your body, it looks like aggravated assault.” Her gaze finally departs my throat.

  “Aggravated?”

  “Much more serious than simple assault. Significantly so.” She takes back her legal pad and I shiver. “A couple of last q’s before I leave you with the paperwork. Drug use?”

  “What?”

  “Do you use drugs recreationally?”

  “No.” The sweat pearling on my brow, the trembling and chattering and rubbery concentration; there’s not a lot of daylight between symptoms of both withdrawal and recounting that time you were strangled in a gay sex sauna.

  “How about sexual partners? How many?”

  “Are you for real?”

  “Are you?” Her question strikes like a bat to the skull, and the blow leaves me reeling. “You said Nathan’s your partner. Not your husband?”

  “Yeah.” I wipe my forehead.

  “How about that, then?”

  “What?” I follow her eyes to the wedding band on my finger. “We just, we like to wear them. Like an engagement ring or something, I guess.”

  Another uneasy stretch of silence.

  “I want to be clear with you, Oliver.” The edge in her tone dulls. “What you’re describing here is serious and very concerning to me. I want you to know I’m fully appreciative of the situation. Of the physical and emotional harm you’ve experienced.”

  Despite her incredulity, this last bit loosens the knot in my chest. Maybe this is it. This might do exactly what was intended. Kristian will be confronted. My threat may have already scared him off, but Detective Henning will be the death knell for his game. Whatever the hell that game actually is. I’m even a bit proud. I stood up. Refused to be scared—at least, visibly scared to him.