Fictions

by Nancy Kress

They stood in the hospital parking lot. Snow blew from the east. Cassidy wrapped both arms around himself and rocked back and forth. “He didn’t come from us.”

  “He said he did!”

  “I know. But he didn’t. His group must have heard we were helping illegally, gotten your name from somebody—”

  “But why?” Jesse shouted. “Why frame me? Why kill a child just to frame me? I’m nothing!”

  Cassidy’s face spasmed. Jesse saw that his horror at Jesse’s position was real, his sympathy genuine, and both useless. There was nothing Cassidy could do.

  “I don’t know,” Cassidy whispered. And then, “Are you going to name me at your malpractice trial?”

  Jesse turned away without answering, into the wind.

  Chief of Surgery Jonathan Eberhart called him into his office just before Jesse started his rotation. Before, not after. That was enough to tell him everything. He was getting very good at discovering the whole from a single clue.

  “Sit down, Doctor,” Eberhart said. His voice, normally austere, held unwilling compassion. Jesse heard it, and forced himself not to shudder.

  “I’ll stand.”

  “This is very difficult,” Eberhart said, “but I think you already see our position. It’s not one any of us would have chosen, but it’s what we have. This hospital operates at a staggering deficit. Most patients cannot begin to cover the costs of modern technological health care. State and federal governments are both strapped with enormous debt. Without insurance companies and the private philanthropical support of a few rich families, we would not be able to open our doors to anyone at all. If we lose our insurance rating we—”

  “I’m out on my ass,” Jesse said. “Right?”

  Eberhart looked out the window. It was snowing. Once Jesse, driving through Oceanview Security Enclave to pick up a date, had seen Eberhart building a snowman with two small children, probably his grandchildren. Even rolling lopsided globes of cold, Eberhart had had dignity.

  “Yes, Doctor. I’m sorry. As I understand it, the facts of your case are not in legal dispute. Your residency here is terminated.”

  “Thank you,” Jesse said, an odd formality suddenly replacing his crudeness. “For everything.”

  Eberhart neither answered nor turned around. His shoulders, framed in the grey window, slumped forward. He might, Jesse thought, have had a sudden advanced case of osteoporosis. For which, of course, he would be fully insured.

  He packed the computer last, fitting each piece carefully into its original packing. Maybe that would raise the price that Second Thoughts was willing to give him: Look, almost new, still in the original box. At the last minute he decided to keep the playing pieces for go, shoving them into the suitcase with his clothes and medical equipment. Only this suitcase would go with him.

  When the packing was done, he walked up two flights and rang Anne’s bell. Her rotation ended a half hour ago. Maybe she wouldn’t be asleep yet.

  She answered the door in a loose blue robe, toothbrush in hand. “Jesse, hi, I’m afraid I’m really beat—”

  He no longer believed in indirection. “Would you have dinner with me tomorrow night?”

  “Oh, I’m sorry, I can’t,” Anne said. She shifted her weight so one bare foot stood on top of the other, a gesture so childish it had to be embarrassment. Her toenails were shiny and smooth.

  “After your next rotation?” Jesse said. He didn’t smile.

  “I don’t know when I—”

  “The one after that?”

  Anne was silent. She looked down at her toothbrush. A thin pristine line of toothpaste snaked over the bristles.

  “Okay,” Jesse said, without expression. “I just wanted to be sure.”

  “Jesse—” Anne called after him, but he didn’t turn around. He could already tell from her voice that she didn’t really have anything more to say. If he had turned it would have been only for the sake of a last look at her toes, polished and shiny as go stones, and there really didn’t seem to be any point in looking.

  He moved into a cheap hotel on Boylston Street, into a room the size of a supply closet with triple locks on the door and bars on the window, where his money would go far. Every morning he took the subway to the Copley Square library, rented a computer cubicle, and wrote letters to hospitals across the country. He also answered classified ads in the New England Journal of Medicine, those that offered practice out-of-country where a license was not crucial, or low-paying medical research positions not too many people might want, or supervised assistantships. In the afternoons he walked the grubby streets of Dorchester, looking for Kenny. The lawyer representing Mr. and Mrs. Steven Gocek, parents of the dead Rosamund, would give him no addresses. Neither would his own lawyer, he of the collapsing books and desperate clientele, in whom Jesse had already lost all faith.

  He never saw Kenny on the cold streets.

  The last week of March, an unseasonable warm wind blew from the south, and kept up. Crocuses and daffodils pushed up between the sagging buildings. Children appeared, chasing each other across the garbage-laden streets, crying raucously. Rejections came from hospitals, employers. Jesse had still not told his parents what had happened. Twice in April he picked up a public phone, and twice he saw again the plastic ducks marching across the artificial lawn, and something inside him slammed shut so hard not even the phone number could escape.

  One sunny day in May he walked in the Public Garden. The city still maintained it fairly well; foreign tourist traffic made it profitable. Jesse counted the number of well-dressed foreigners versus the number of ragged street Bostonians. The ratio equaled the survival rate for uninsured diabetics.

  “Hey, mister, help me! Please!”

  A terrified boy, ten or eleven, grabbed Jesse’s hand and pointed. At the bottom of a grassy knoll an elderly man lay crumpled on the ground, his face twisted.

  “My Grandpa! He just grabbed his chest and fell down! Do something! Please!”

  Jesse could smell the boy’s fear, a stink like rich loam. He walked over to the old man. Breathing stopped, no pulse, color still pink . . .

  No.

  This man was an uninsured. Like Kenny, like Steven Gocek. Like Rosamund.

  “Grandpa!” the child wailed. “Grandpa!”

  Jesse knelt. He started mouth-to-mouth. The old man smelled of sweat, of fish, of old flesh. No blood moved through the body. “Breathe, dammit, breathe,” Jesse heard someone say, and then realized it was him. “Breathe, you old fart, you uninsured deadbeat, you stinking ingrate, breathe—”

  The old man breathed.

  He sent the boy for more adults. The child took off at a dead run, returning twenty minutes later with uncles, father, cousins, aunts, most of whom spoke some language Jesse couldn’t identify. In that twenty minutes none of the well-dressed tourists in the Garden approached Jesse, standing guard beside the old man, who breathed carefully and moaned softly, stretched full-length on the grass. The tourists glanced at him and then away, their faces tightening.

  The tribe of family carried the old man away on a homemade stretcher. Jesse put his hand on the arm of one of the young men. “Insurance? Hospital?”

  The man spat onto the grass.

  Jesse walked beside the stretcher, monitoring the old man until he was in his own bed. He told the child what to do for him, since no one else seemed to understand. Later that day he went back, carrying his medical bag, and gave them the last of his hospital supply of nitroglycerin. The oldest woman, who had been too busy issuing orders about the stretcher to pay Jesse any attention before, stopped dead and jabbered in her own tongue.

  “You a doctor?” the child translated. The tip of his ear, Jesse noticed, was missing. Congenital? Accident? Ritual mutilation? The ear had healed clean.

  “Yeah,” Jesse said. “A doctor.”

  The old woman chattered some more and disappeared behind a door. Jesse gazed at the walls. There were no deathbed photos. As he was leaving, the woman returned with ten incredibl
y dirty dollar bills.

  “Doctor,” she said, her accent harsh, and when she smiled Jesse saw that all her top teeth and most of her bottom ones were missing, the gum swollen with what might have been early signs of scurvy.

  “Doctor,” she said again.

  He moved out of the hotel just as the last of his money ran out. The old man’s wife, Androula Malakasses, found him a room in somebody else’s rambling, dilapidated boardinghouse. The house was noisy at all hours, but the room was clean and large. Androula’s cousin brought home an old, multi-positional dentist chair, probably stolen, and Jesse used that for both examining and operating table. Medical substances—antibiotics, chemotherapy, IV drugs—which he had thought of as the hardest need to fill outside of controlled channels, turned out to be the easiest. On reflection, he realized this shouldn’t have surprised him.

  In July he delivered his first breech birth, a primapara whose labor was so long and painful and bloody he thought at one point he’d lose both mother and baby. He lost neither, although the new mother cursed him in Spanish and spit at him. She was too weak for the saliva to go far. Holding the warm-assed, nine-pound baby boy, Jesse had heard a camera click. He cursed too, but feebly; the sharp thrill of pleasure that pierced from throat to bowels was too strong.

  In August he lost three patients in a row, all to conditions that would have needed elaborate, costly equipment and procedures: renal failure, aortic aneurysm, aneurism, narcotic overdose. He went to all three funerals. At each one the family and friends cleared a little space for him, in which he stood surrounded by respect and resentment. When a knife fight broke out at the funeral of the aneurysm, the family hustled Jesse away from the danger, but not so far away that he couldn’t treat the loser.

  In September a Chinese family, recent immigrants, moved into Androula’s sprawling boarding house. The woman wept all day. The man roamed Boston, looking for work. There was a grandfather who spoke a little English, having learned it in Peking during the brief period of American industrial expansion into the Pacific Rim before the Chinese government convulsed and the American economy collapsed. The grandfather played go. On evenings when no one wanted Jesse, he sat with Lin Shujen and moved the polished white and black stones over the grid, seeking to enclose empty spaces without losing any pieces. Mr. Lin took a long time to consider each move.

  In October, a week before Jesse’s trial, his mother died. Jesse’s father sent him money to fly home for the funeral, the first money Jesse had accepted from his family since he’d finally told them he had left the hospital. After the funeral Jesse sat in the living room of his father’s Florida house and listened to the elderly mourners recall their youths in the vanished prosperity of the 1950’s and ‘60’s.

  “Plenty of jobs then for people who’re willing to work.”

  “Still plenty of jobs. Just nobody’s willing any more.”

  “Want everything handed to them. If you ask me, this collapse’ll prove to be a good thing in the long run. Weed out the weaklings and the lazy.”

  “It was the sixties we got off on the wrong track, with Lyndon Johnson and all the welfare programs—”

  They didn’t look at Jesse. He had no idea what his father had said to them about him.

  Back in Boston, stinking under Indian summer heat, people thronged his room. Fractures, cancers, allergies, pregnancies, punctures, deficiencies, imbalances. They were resentful that he’d gone away for five days. He should be here; they needed him. He was the doctor.

  The first day of his trial, Jesse saw Kenny standing on the courthouse steps. Kenny wore a cheap blue suit with loafers and white socks. Jesse stood very still, then walked over to the other man. Kenny tensed.

  “I’m not going to hit you,” Jesse said.

  Kenny watched him, chin lowered, slight body balanced on the balls of his feet. A fighter’s stance.

  “I want to ask something,” Jesse said. “It won’t affect the trial. I just want to know. Why’d you do it? Why did they? I know the little girl’s true genescan showed 98% risk of leukemia death within three years, but even so—how could you?”

  Kenny scrutinized him carefully. Jesse saw that Kenny thought Jesse might be wired. Even before Kenny answered, Jesse knew what he’d hear. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, man.”

  “You couldn’t get inside the system. Any of you. So you brought me out. If Mohammed won’t go to the mountain—”

  “You don’t make no sense,” Kenny said.

  “Was it worth it? To you? To them? Was it?”

  Kenny walked away, up the courthouse steps. At the top waited the Goceks, who were suing Jesse for $2,000,000 he didn’t have and wasn’t insured for, and that they knew damn well they wouldn’t collect. On the wall of their house, wherever it was, probably hung Rosamund’s deathbed picture, a little girl with a plain, sallow face and beautiful hair.

  Jesse saw his lawyer trudge up the courthouse steps, carrying his briefcase. Another lawyer, with an equally shabby briefcase, climbed in parallel several feet away. Between the two men the courthouse steps made a white empty space.

  Jesse climbed, too, hoping to hell this wouldn’t take too long. He had an infected compound femoral fracture, a birth with potential erythroblastosis fetalis, and an elderly phlebitis, all waiting. He was especially concerned about the infected fracture, which needed careful monitoring because the man’s genescan showed a tendency towards weak T-cell production. The guy was a day laborer, foul-mouthed and ignorant and brave, with a wife and two kids. He’d broken his leg working illegal construction. Jesse was determined to give him at least a fighting chance.

  BIRTHING POOL

  Mommy said they had been here too long.

  How long was too long? The question didn’t make much sense to Rilla. She had been on Genji her whole life. Did that mean her life had been too long? She was not quite ten standard.

  “Less than a year till we go home to Earth,” Mommy said, dumping mush from the food processor into a bowl and reaching for her precious spice safe. She said this often, as if she didn’t want Rilla to forget it.

  “I am home,” Rilla said, but Mommy’s QED chimed softly and in a flash she had left the food machine and run to the console in the corner of the field dome, where new figures and pictures scrolled across the screen.

  “I’m only the fourth human born on Genji,” Rilla said loudly, in case Mommy could be distracted from the QED. “Rita Byrne, Seigi Minoru, Cade Anson, and me.”

  But all Mommy said was, “Call your father, Rilla! He’s down at the village! Tell him to come see this!” Nobody listened to a ten-year-old. Nobody.

  Still, it was all right to be sent down to the village. Tmafekitch might even be there. Rilla put on her suit, checked the tanks and translator and safety devices, cycled through the air lock, and started across the plateau toward the loose collection of Ihrdizu farms and pools and greens.

  She found her father taking water samples from a birthing pool with two Ihrdizu grown-ups. Even Rilla knew that her father, or any other scientist on Genji, couldn’t possibly need any more water samples from any more birthing pools. For nearly thirty years teams had collected thousands of samples from pools in Nighland, Southland, even in Farland, on the other side of the world where it was always moonless and Rilla had never been. The QED had analyzed all the sample data and then analyzed it again and again, and not even Daddy could think there was anything left to learn from the algae growing in an empty birthing pool. No, Daddy just wanted a way to talk to the two Ihrdizu grown-ups, one of whom had only just arrived in the village and mated with Tshifel, an unmarried male, a little while ago. Daddy always liked to talk to females who had just finished their mating journey, especially if they had traveled a long way to find a mate.

  Rilla sometimes considered that the only mate her age in the entire Murasaki System was Seigi Minoru. He was on Chujo with his parents. That would be a long mating journey.

  “Rilla,” Daddy said. “What are you doing here?
”

  “Mommy says to come right away. There’s something interesting on the QED.”

  It was hard to see Daddy’s expression through his helmet, but it seemed to Rilla that he didn’t really want to leave. Why not? Nothing interesting could be going on here. But then Daddy said his good-byes—without the translator, as what he and Mommy called a gesture of courtesy, and Rilla couldn’t help noticing that his accent was terrible—and reached for her hand.

  “Come on, Rilla.”

  But Rilla caught sight of Tmafekitch, coming around the corner of the Carnot temple. “I’ll stay here, Daddy. There’s Tmafekitch.”

  “Be careful,” he said automatically, and hurried toward the dome.

  “Tmafekitch!” Rilla yelled. Tmafekitch saw her and ambled over. “What were you doing?”

  “Listening to the talker in the Carnot temple,” her friend said. She spoke a combination of English, Ihrdizu, and the private language she and Rilla had spoken to each other all Rilla’s life. All Tmafekitch’s, too. With Tmafekitch, Rilla hardly used her translator at all.

  “There was a talker in the temple and you didn’t come tell me?” Rilla said, outraged. “What story was she talking?”

  “Szikwshawmi.”

  “That’s the best one!” In Ihrdizu, this came out “the best one to eat,” since stories for the Ihrdizu were listened to with devouring attention. Daddy had explained this to Rilla, and ordinarily she got the giggles every time she thought of stories coming out of Mommy’s food machine. But this time she was too disappointed. The story of Szikwshawmi was great, with angels appearing out of the sky to strike female Ihrdizu and give them greater strength to be warriors. Rilla and Tmafekitch had acted it out lots of times, changing parts so that each got to pounce out of the sky and each got to be given great strength and fierceness. And it was even better told inside the Carnot temple, which a man named Robert Carnot had built for the Ihrdizu to be religious in a long time ago, because if the talker sat in the right place there were thrilling echoes.