Beat the Reaper

by Josh Bazell

  Judge me if you want. Judge her and I’ll break your fucking head. You’ll learn about the primordial when it enters your living room. The sharpness and the richness of Magdalena’s pussy, the nerves down my spine that were receptive to no other stimuli, made the ocean seem weak. They meant life.*

  Throughout the night we heard a snorting noise, maybe once every fifteen minutes. As the skylight brightened, slowly then ridiculously quickly, I started to see a small, round head appear at the surface, black eyes gleaming, to blow water out reptilian nostrils.

  When I could read my watch, it was just past six AM. We were shivering and nauseated. Just as it became bright enough to see the sharks through the water, they turned a lot more aggressive. Apparently they like dawn and dusk. They came darting in like the shadows of a bouncing ball.

  But they’d missed their chance. All it got them was a lot of shoe heel in the face. The tank brightened further. We could see that the snorting animal was a large sea turtle, and was probably also the thing I had thought was a rock. Then we could see that there were two of them. Then that the tank was packed with animals.

  There were at least a dozen human-length sharks (twenty minutes later I was able to put the count at fourteen for sure), of two different types, neither of which I could identify. Both were brown and looked like they were made of suede, and had a surprising and revolting number of fins along their sides. One type had spots.*

  A slow, fluid stingray that looked like half its tail had been bitten off moved along the sand and cement bottom of the tank. Higher up there was a school of parrot fish, more than a foot long each, herding and striking at the remains of Rovo’s body, driving them around the edges of the tank as they fed like he was dancing.

  There wasn’t much left of him: the torn-up head, the spine, the bones of his arms. His hands were shredded, the tendons splayed like pompons. Occasionally a shark would rake the body anyway for the fibrous remains of its meat, and send it head over heels until the fish got hold of it again. At one point I dunked and caught it as it went by, thinking that if I could keep the fish off it Magdalena might stop hyperventilating so much. But it made the sharks too aggressive, and the feel of it made me retch. The only place you could really hold on to it was at the sharp, slimy base of the spine, next to the holes through which both kidneys had been taken. So I just let it drift again and told Magdalena not to look at it. We both kept looking at it, though.

  Around 7:30 the sharks steered away from us as if they’d heard some signal, and the feeder guy appeared.

  He was in his twenties with a shaved head and sideburns, in yellow rubber pants. He stood and stared at Magdalena’s spiked-out nipples. She was completely naked. At least it kept the fucker from noticing Rovo.

  “Get us out of here,” I rasped.

  He came and folded down the ramp, and I launched off the wall with Magdalena in my arms, ready to tear the eyes out of any shark that fucked with us now. Pulling myself up after I’d pushed her out made my head spin so hard my vision went to static for a moment.

  “I’m calling the cops,” he said.

  “How?” I said. “You don’t have a cell phone.”

  “Yeah I do,” he said, taking it out.

  Shithead. I smashed it on the railing, and dropped the pieces into the water after I knocked him unconscious.

  The twenty-four hours that began at that moment were the worst and most important of my life. During them—though this is the least of it—I traveled close to two thousand miles, only to end up back in New York, one full day after Magdalena and I crawled out of the water.

  Specifically, I ended up in Manhattan, where Skinflick’s doorman recognized me and let me into the building. The two goons in Skinflick’s apartment I killed with his glass coffee table.

  Skinflick himself, still awake and coke-fried, I picked up by the hips, like I used to pick up Magdalena. Then I hurled him, twisting and screaming, face-first through his living room window.

  Immediately afterwards I wished I had him back so I could do it all over again.

  And from the street, where the crowds were already forming, I called Sam Freed, and for the second time that day told him where to pick me up.

  21

  I reach the street as a civilian. Free. I have given it all up. I will treat no more patients. And whatever a uniform and a prefix before my name have done for me, they will now stop doing. I have left the priesthood, molesting no altar boys along the way.

  I should feel awful. I know that. It has taken me seven years to become a doctor. Essentially I have nothing else. No job. No safe place to live, even.

  But somehow the freezing wind spitting ice up off the sidewalk tastes like night spring air full of fireflies and drunken female barbecue guests.

  Because I don’t feel bad at all.

  I am in New York City. I can go rent a hotel room and call WITSEC from there. Then I can go to a museum, or a movie. I can ride the Staten Island Ferry. I probably shouldn’t, since every male on Staten is either a mob guy or a cop, but I can. I can go buy a fucking book and read it in a café.

  And fuck, how I have hated being a doctor.

  Since med school I have hated it. The endless suffering and deaths of patients whose lives I was supposed to fix but couldn’t, either because no one could or because I just wasn’t good enough. The filth and the corruption. The corrosive hours.

  And I have particularly hated this New York Death Star of a hospital, this fluorescent Moria known as ManCat.

  I have remained a doctor as long as I could. I owe a debt, I know, and I appreciate that being a doctor has forced me to pay it, bringing me my good deed for the day, every day, so that I have not had to go looking for it.

  But I can only pay what I can pay. Getting killed on top of giving up seven years won’t help anyone. In fact it will just eat up resources. There is nothing more for me to do in this profession.

  Which is hardly the end of the world. Maybe after I’m resettled I can work in a soup kitchen. Malpractice insurance for that can’t be too high.

  Dr. Friendly’s term—“Post–Malpractice Suit”—comes to mind and makes me laugh.

  Then it makes me think of something else, and I stop like someone’s spiked my foot to the ground. I almost fall over.

  I think it through to find the way it’s wrong.

  I keep thinking.

  But it’s pointless.

  I know how to save Osteosarcoma Girl’s leg.

  Standing in the wind and muck, I try Surgery on my cell phone. No answer.

  Orthopedics. Busy.

  Akfal. Dvořák’s New World Symphony comes on, which means he’s taken a patient into MRI.

  Meanwhile, at the end of the block ahead of me, two limousines pull up, and six men get out without speaking to each other.

  All six have coats that go past their waists, to cover their weapons. There’s a dark-haired guy and a Hispanic-looking one, but the other four look midwestern. Jeans and sneakers. Faces lined by too much time in the sun on their ranches in Wyoming and Idaho that they think no one knows about.

  I’ve visited some of those ranches. On business, if you know what I mean.

  The hitters split both ways at the corner, to block off all exits. I look behind me. Another two cars.

  I’ve got about half a second to decide whether to cross the street and be gone or head back into the hospital.

  I’m an idiot. I choose the hospital.

  I race back up the escalators to the operating floors. If the guys outside are the first ones here, this will buy me some time, since they’ll probably sweep from the ground up.

  If.

  I cut through the recovery room, where the ICU guys are still looking around the cubicle where Squillante died, trying to figure out where the printout from his EKG went. Eventually they’ll get IT to print a new one. Like in a month.

  In the Surgery locker room there’s a flat-screen TV on the wall that shows the operating schedule. It says Osteosarcoma Girl had
her leg removed three hours ago. Which is impossible, because I just saw her. At least there’s a room number, one floor up.

  When I get there, though, some schmuck in scrubs and a face mask is mopping the floor, and there’s no one else there. Which probably means the schedule has the wrong room on it, but isn’t a guarantee.

  “When’s the next procedure?” I ask the guy with the mop.

  He just shrugs. Then, when I turn to leave, he drops the mop and loops a wire over my head.

  Cute. The guy’s probably been waiting here since he overheard me talking to Osteosarcoma Girl outside her room. Playing the long odds to keep Locano’s reward money for himself. And he’s a wire psycho.

  A wire is simple to make, simple to get rid of, and simple to hide, even in scrubs. But only a psycho uses a wire. Who else wants to get that close to someone? I barely have time to get my hand up in front of my throat before he yanks it tight.

  I realize then that it isn’t going to kill me. At least not fast. With my hand palm-out in front of my voice box, and the tube of my stethoscope caught beneath the wire on both sides, the psycho can’t generate enough force to cut off the arteries, even with the wire crossed behind my neck. He can cut off the veins, which are closer to the surface than the arteries, but that will just stop blood from leaving my head. I can already feel the heat and pressure building up. But I won’t be unconscious for a while.

  Then the guy does a back-and-forth sawing motion, quick enough that I can’t take advantage of it, and the wire cuts deeply into my palm and the sides of my neck. The psycho’s braided something into it—glass, or metal or something. The head of my stethoscope clanks as it bounces off the floor.

  Apparently this is going to kill me fast.

  I stomp on his foot. He’s wearing steel-toed shoes. Of course he is—he’s a wire psycho. He’s expecting this. The toe cap caves a little, causing him to grunt as his toes get pinched, but it doesn’t change his plans much. You can run a car over steel-toed shoes.

  So I shove us both backwards, hard. He’s expecting this too, and easily braces us against the operating table with his legs.

  But this is my house. I drive my heel into the pedal that unlocks the table’s brakes, and this time when we go flying it takes him by surprise.

  I land on top of him on the floor. There’s a satisfying grunt as his air goes. But his grip on the wire holds.

  So with my free hand I reach back and grab a bunch of hair—which, stupidly, he has—on the left side of his head. Then I sit up, yanking him up and over my shoulder, and twisting him at the same time.

  This only works if the wire psycho’s right handed, or at least has his right wrist crossed over his left one. But I’m running out of options.

  It works: the wire’s no longer around my neck as he goes over.

  The psycho hits the floor pretty hard and missing some hair, face up with his head toward me. Where it’s not too much trouble for me to rapid-strike his face with alternating elbows and knife-hands—back and forth, back and forth—until he’s unconscious and bleeding out the back of his head.

  I get dizzily to my feet.

  Wrong day to mop, fucko.

  In the supply corridor between surgery rooms, I use a staple gun to close up my palm. The pain is maddening, but it’ll keep my hand functional. My neck I wrap in a bandage. There’s not much more I can do about it without being able to see it, and the most mirrorlike object I can find is an instruments tray.

  While I’m changing into a new pair of scrubs, I notice the kit shelf, which has steel shoeboxes with the instruments for various surgeries. They’re labeled things like “CHEST, OPEN” and “KIDNEY TRANSPLANT.”

  I pull out the one that says “LARGE BONE TRANSECTION.” Select a knife that looks like a machete with a grip cut out of it and use it to slice open the side of my new pants. Then I attach it to my outer thigh with surgical tape.

  When I go out to the sink to try to wash the blood off, there’s a nurse there scratching his armpit with the needlelike camera of a laparoscope that will later be inserted into someone’s abdomen by doctors wearing moon suits to prevent contamination.

  He takes one look at me and scuttles off.

  I go from room to room on the Surgery floors until I find Osteosarcoma Girl. It’s the fastest way to do it. When I get there, she’s unconscious, with the anesthesiologist holding the mask on her.

  She’s laid out naked on the table. The residents are squabbling over who gets to shave her pussy, which isn’t necessary in the first place.

  The scrub nurse’s eyes go wide when he sees me. “You’re not wearing a mask! Or a hat!” he shouts.

  “It doesn’t matter,” I say. “Where’s the doctor?”

  “Get out of my operating room!”

  “Tell me who’s doing the surgery.”

  “Don’t make me call security!”

  I pat the front of his paper gown, contaminating it, and he shrieks. If the operation does happen, I’ve just extended it by half an hour. “Tell me where the fucking doctor is,” I say.

  “I’m right here,” the doctor says, behind me. I turn. Above the mask he’s patrician. “What the hell are you doing in my operating room?”

  “This woman doesn’t have osteosarcoma,” I tell him.

  His voice stays calm. “No? What does she have?”

  “Endometriosis. It only bleeds when she’s menstruating.”

  “The tumor is on her femur. Her distal femur.” He looks at my neck bandage, which I imagine must be seeping again. It hurts like fuck. “Are you a physician?”

  “Yes. It’s migrated uterine tissue. It can happen. There have been cases.”

  “Name one.”

  “I can’t. I heard about it from a professor.”

  In fact I heard about it from Prof. Marmoset, once when we were on a plane together. He was talking about the stupid shit you have to learn in medical school that you never see again in your life.

  “That is the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.”

  “I can pull a case up on Medline,” I say. “She has uterine tissue in the anterior compartment of her quadriceps, attached to the periosteum. You can take it out. If you take her leg off instead, Pathology will realize that I’m right and fuck you. They’ll fuck everybody in this room. I will make sure of that.”

  I stare around at each set of eyes I can find.

  “Hmm,” the doctor says.

  I wonder if I’ll have to touch the front of his gown too.

  “All right, calm down,” he finally says, tearing his gown off by himself. “I’ll go do a lit search on Medline.”

  “Thank you.”

  “And with whom do I have the pleasure of speaking? Just so I can have you fired when you’re wrong.”

  Good luck, dickhead.

  “Bearclaw Brnwa,” I tell him as I leave.

  The escalator landing, though, is staked out: a hitter at each end, and two riding up to the next floor.

  Fuck, I think. How many of these guys are there?

  I have a Rambo moment in which I consider yanking a Purell alcohol hand gel dispenser off the wall and using it as napalm, but then decide that burning down a hospital filled with patients kind of crosses the line. Instead I double back to the fire stairs, which are echoing with the careful footsteps of people looking for me, and sprint up the three flights to Medicine as quietly as possible.

  Heading back toward the center of my lair.

  Which has its bonuses. Like my having hidden that fuckhead mugger’s handgun up here.

  I just have to find it.

  I have no recollection whatsoever of where I put the gun. When I try to think back I feel only a haze of drugged-out exhaustion.

  I decide to use a Prof. Marmoset trick.

  According to Prof. Marmoset, you should never bother trying to remember where you put something. You should just imagine needing to put it somewhere now, then go to the place you pick. Because why would you pick a different location now than you did
earlier? Your personality is more stable than that. It’s not like we wake up each day as different people. It’s just that we don’t trust ourselves.

  So I give it a shot. I use the Force. I imagine myself at 5:30 in the morning, with a handgun to hide and practically nothing on my mind.

  It leads me to the nurses’ lounge behind the Medicine station. To the antique textbooks on the high-up shelf that runs around it, which haven’t been used since the advent of the Internet. To a large book in German on the central nervous system.

  Behind it is the handgun.

  Score another one for Marmoset.

  Out in front at the nursing station I can see that there are two hitters at each end of the hall, searching rooms. Coming toward me.

  If I want a straight-up shootout I can cross to the parallel hallway on the other side of the station, and fire at these guys from there. Which in addition to killing an unknown number of bystanders will bring every armed person in the hospital running. I think about this for a moment, then discard the idea. I’ve met those security guards.

  I duck into a patient room behind me. I know it’s empty because just before Squillante’s surgery I discharged one of the patients who was in it, and the other one was the woman I found dead in her bed this morning. Nothing in this hospital happens fast enough for someone to have even pretended to change the sheets between then and now.

  I search the cabinets. The largest gown I can find is a medium. I kick my clogs and clothes off into the bathroom, pull the tiny, warmthless thing on, and hop into the bed the woman died in.

  A couple minutes later two hitters come into the room.

  I’m lying back. They look at me. I look at them. The crappy gun I’m pointing at them from beneath the sheet feels ready to dissolve in my hand. Most of its weight is in its bullets.

  I try not to look in their eyes. Even so, I realize what I must look like to them now that they’ve searched all the other rooms. Way too healthy, even with my stupid neck bandage on. A complete impostor.