Death and the Intern

by Jeremy Hanson-Finger

  “Don’t worry about that,” Janwar said. Dr. Adam Lehman didn’t laugh.

  On the street corners sit newspaper boxes for publications Janwar doesn’t recognize—Xtra, XPress, Metro, 24—with headlines like “OxyContin: Ontario’s New Obsession,” “Queer Youth Sex Workers Remain at Risk,” and “Bronson St. Condo Development Passes LEED Platinum Environmental Certification.” As Janwar waits for the lights to change, he bends down and looks at the article about OxyContin, or at least what he can see of it above the fold, but he doesn’t learn much in twenty seconds, except that if there’s an OxyContin Obsession and Queer Youth Sex Workers are at Risk, Ottawa’s murder rate could be above average.

  Janwar visited Ottawa once before as a teenager, in the early spring, when it was still cold. His strongest memory now, not yet pushed aside by drug-interaction statistics, is of visiting the National Gallery in the rain. Specifically, he remembers the thirty-foot-tall spider that stood in front of the building, as if it had crawled up out of the Rideau River after years of narcotized slumber. Upon closer inspection, he saw the spider was made of bronze, and held visible marble eggs in its egg sac. It was named “Maman”—French for “Mother.”

  “Spiders are helpful and protective, just like my mother,” the artist’s plaque at the base read.

  Janwar’s mother, Garati, is also helpful and protective—and not protective just of her only child, because she’d once leapt over a six-foot fence into the neighbours’ yard to save a kitten from a mastiff. She’s also tall and spindly, like Janwar, especially next to Janwar’s fireplug-shaped father, but she probably wouldn’t like being compared to a spider.

  Inside the gallery, desperate to get away from his parents as they perused pictures of everyday Flemish folks feasting and celebrating and illustrating proverbs (like “Fools get the best cards” and “The herring does not fry here”) in the Middle Ages, Janwar wandered through the postmodern art exhibit. Most of it went over his head, but he found himself drawn to an installation called “Trans Am of the Apocalypse,” a seventies muscle car spray-bombed matte black, the entire Book of Revelations carved into it with a box cutter.

  “Neither repented they of their murders, nor of their sorceries, nor of their fornication, nor of their thefts,” the scratches read above the driver-side door handle.

  Janwar has almost reached Sparks Street, with its clouds of hookah smoke and kitschy souvenir shops selling Canadiana, when a woman calls his name. He turns. Fang waves from a parking lot, where she stands with a man in his early thirties. The man’s black hair juts upward in spikes. It looks hard to the touch, the consistency of uncooked glass noodles. He wears rimless glasses with transparent plastic temples, and at first Janwar thinks the trippy distortion around his eyes means something is wrong with Janwar’s own vision, until the lenses catch the reflection of a passing car’s lights.

  Fang sips from a can-shaped paper bag. “Sometimes these group outings are a little awkward at first, so it’s kind of a ritual for us to pound tallboys in the parking lot before we hit the bar. Janwar, this is Peter Wongsarat. He’s the Fellow in the department.”

  “Jolly good,” Janwar says.

  Peter holds up another paper bag. It has “Liquor Control Board of Ontario” printed on it in green. “You want a drink, Janwar?” His Southern drawl flows from his mouth like a river that’s enjoying the inland sun and isn’t in much of a hurry to get to the sea.

  “Sure, why not.” Janwar feels a twinge of guilt about drinking in public, but they aren’t operating any vehicles, and it isn’t tribal group bonding unless you drink enough to lose control a little. He cracks open the can, and foam pours over the edge of the bag. He has to work tomorrow, but so do they. Placements are as much about networking as practising hard skills. He has to take it easy, try to drink water in between beers, which is always harder to remember than it should be, for Janwar at least.

  Peter shrugs. “Guess it got a little shook up in my bag. Well, cheers. To the Mixers.”

  Janwar shakes the foam out into a puddle of motor oil, and the three clink their paper bags together. “To always pimping,” Janwar says. “And never failing.”

  Fang reaches up and pats his shoulder. “You’ve almost got it.” Her phone buzzes and she angles it away from him and Peter as her fingers fly over the screen. The juxtaposition between Peter’s drawl and Fang’s big-city yap is disconcerting. Janwar feels like he’s switching languages in order to understand them both.

  “Next time.” Janwar sips and swallows. He peels the bag down enough to see the brand. Pabst Blue Ribbon—Vitamin P. Well, if he’s going to power through a beer as fast as possible, it might as well be inoffensive. A dark shape scuttles between two Dumpsters. A groundhog? Ottawa is known for its groundhogs, the way Victoria is known for its rabbits. The shadows are too deep for Janwar to identify it. Regardless, a rodent of unusual size.

  “I have to ask, where’s that accent from?” Janwar asks.

  “N’awlins.”

  “Bit of a change, weather-wise.”

  “It’s July and I’m still cold. The first year I was here, I had to ask if it’d ever get warm enough for me not to wear a sweater. How do you like Civic so far?” Peter asks.

  “It’s good. I’m glad you guys are pro-experimentation. And Llew seems like a good dude.”

  “He’s got his quirks.”

  Fang laughs. “Understatement.”

  “Like the GHB?” Janwar says.

  “That’s more than a quirk.” Peter grimaces. “It gives me the howlers. I know GHB was used in anaesthesia before it was used in date rape, but the idea of someone being a wizard with GHB scares me, to be frank.”

  “He talks about it a lot, too,” Fang says. “But maybe he just misses being an anaesthesiologist. Misses the action.”

  Peter winces and raises his paper bag.

  Janwar sips his PBR. Whereas Peter is dressed as if he is on clinic duty, Fang is wearing a form-fitting black dress and leopard-print tights. Her voice is even louder than at the hospital, like she’s maybe done a line or two of coke. Any dilation of her pupils isn’t visible in the dark parking lot.

  Janwar has done coke only once, in a medically supervised environment. At UBC Med, a professor had instructed him and his classmates to examine each other’s vocal cords. The accepted manner of doing so is to insert a fibre-optic camera up your nose; in order to perform that step, all your nasal secretions have to be dried up, and the way to accomplish that is to administer a 5 per cent solution of medical-grade cocaine. So, on a Thursday morning, Janwar, who had never even smoked cigarettes or cigars or anything, including marijuana, had nasally self-administered enough cocaine to feel a little euphoric and light-headed, at which point his classmate Samson shoved a tiny camera up his nose and down his throat. Janwar felt pretty good for a couple of hours afterward, even considering the nose-camera thing, and if peer-pressured to do more in a similarly safe environment with certified pure cocaine in a controlled dosage, he’s concerned he might not say no.

  “Come on, slam it.” Fang drops her can on the ground. She sniffs.

  “Okay there?” Janwar says.

  “Just these fucking tulips.” She sneezes almost hard enough to lift herself off the ground. Her height is disconcerting; her pointy heels are gothic in the architectural sense, like twin inverted Peace Towers.

  “Aren’t the tulips done—” Peter says, and Fang shoots him a look. He crunches his can underfoot. “All right. Chug that beer, Janwar.”

  “Hey, I was going to ask you guys, what’s the deal with Shaughn—”

  “Bad news. We’ll talk after.”

  Janwar tips the paper bag back and swallows the last of the lager. It reminds him of the rocky beaches of the West Coast, not because of the taste but because its consistency is similar to the weird foam that sometimes washes up along with the non-venomous jellyfish and giant whips of bull kelp.

  D’Arcy McGee’s is a standard Irish pub on the inside. Its mahogany surfaces and
dim chandeliers keep the tone rich but not gloomy. Llew sits at a window table with Carla and another doctor Janwar hasn’t met, an Asian man in his forties, short and powerfully built. Light-coloured craters mar his jawline, probably the aftermath of a war between Accutane and teenage acne. He’s chosen not to cover it with a beard, which Janwar feels is a mistake.

  Llew waves the three new arrivals over. “Janwar Gupta, this is Dr. Horace Louisseize.”

  The moonscape jaw nods hello.

  “I’ve ordered us a couple of pitchers,” Llew continues. “Put a glass in your hand. First to the mill can grind.”

  “Oh, I can get—”

  Llew waves Janwar’s objection away. “I did well this week.”

  Well at what? Janwar wonders.

  Janwar, Fang, and Peter sit.

  “What kind of beer did you get?” Fang says.

  “Innocent Gun. It’s brewed in old whisky barrels in Scotland.”

  Janwar peers at the pitcher. “Innocent Gun?”

  “Aye, boyo.”

  “Guns don’t kill people. People kill people.” Janwar jackets a couple of rounds into a finger gun and discharges them into the ceiling.

  Llew laughs. “Innis and Gunn. Two blokes.”

  “Ah.” Janwar mimes holstering his revolver. “I guess I just like shootin’ too darned much.”

  “Now, that’s why you’re an anaesthesiologist, cowboy,” Llew says.

  Janwar can feel the warmth of the Vitamin P spreading through his body. He feels good, relaxed, but not sleepy. Behind the bar, a busty Teutonic girl pulls pints from a lengthy series of taps. One of them has a devil’s tail on it.

  Janwar can taste a hint of vanilla, which he finds pleasing.

  “Careful, cowboy,” Carla says. “It’s 6.6 per cent.”

  Janwar wipes his mouth and clunks his pint glass down. “More ‘gun’ than ‘innocent.’”

  “Hey, that makes me wonder,” Fang says. “When you were a kid and you played cowboys and Indians with your siblings…uh…”

  “I was an only child,” Janwar says, “so I just played Indian cowboy by myself.”

  Turns out Llew was right about the tribal bonding. Janwar feels pretty familial toward everybody, including Horace, who, despite the steady disappearance of liquid in front of him, remains just as ramrod straight, and whose diction remains just as precise, such as when he answers Janwar’s question about who Dr. Mengele is with “That Nazi doctor who performed fatal experiments on twins and dwarves and gypsies at Auschwitz.”

  “I thought he might have been a Nazi with a name like that,” Janwar says. “But most of what I know about the Nazis is just their battleships and stuff.”

  This is true: Janwar was obsessed with warships as a child, to the point where his pacifist parents had worried a little. They soon figured out from the book Janwar always had out from the library, Jane’s Fighting Ships 1943–44, that it was the machinery that interested him, the specifications, the cannon bores and the dazzle camouflage and the types of propellers, not the actual killing of people.

  “Zwillinge heraus,” Horace continues, in response to Janwar’s second question, could be translated to “twins out,” which was what Dr. Mengele would say to a room of potential subjects before taking the twins out to be experimented upon. Horace knows this because he did his undergraduate thesis on eugenics.

  With little evident concern about the increasingly dark tone of the conversation, Peter tells the group he saw a documentary recently about the persecution of gypsies. A friendly-looking old man talked about how after all the zwillinge heraus business was dispensed with, Dr. Mengele used some sort of hand-cranked augur to drill so far into him, starting between his legs, that he thought the doctor was planning to take his heart out, before various other bad things happened that Peter declined to describe. By that time the primal, mythic quality of a person actually stealing your heart, more than the stomach-churning violence of the unanaesthetized surgery itself, has drilled an augur into Janwar’s own chest, and he can’t imagine how much worse any other details could make him feel.

  Janwar takes a deep breath. He has a grudging respect for Henry’s and José’s skill with puns, but now he sees that their joking was far more malevolent than he had initially thought. He means to ask for more details about the two nurses, but the arrival of a group of four stocky men distracts him. They sit at the table to the left of the anaesthesiologists.

  “I wasn’t a eugenics major,” Horace says to Fang. “I wrote a paper on eugenics.” He turns to Janwar. “I did a BSc in posthumanism. Eugenics is part of the history of posthumanism. I’m not for it.” The alcohol has finally loosened Horace’s monotone into the rise and fall of normal conversation.

  The Valkyrie from behind the bar deposits a round of whisky glasses in front of the four men at the next table.

  “Come on, leave poor Dr. Louisseize alone.” Peter waves his pint glass and Fang jerks backwards to avoid the falling suds. “He’s telling the truth. He wouldn’t have taken his wife’s last name if he was into eugenics.”

  “Wait,” Janwar says, “so the name Louisseize really is related to King Louis the Sixteenth?”

  “Meaning his wife’s a bit of an…” Peter strums an air banjo. “Inbred,” he stage whispers.

  Horace snorts and turns to Carla and Llew.

  “But that’s not how names work!” Janwar whispers to Fang. She shrugs.

  The men at the other table are all looking right at Janwar, or, at least, right at the group of doctors. Their jackets fit well; they are expensive, fashionable leather jackets, but the men all radiate the aura of blue-collar menace Janwar has felt as a non-white when visiting smaller communities in British Columbia’s Interior.

  One of the men waves. He speaks in a heavy Québécois accent. “Horace!”

  Horace looks over at him. “One of my patients,” he says to the group. “How’s your recovery going, Jacques?”

  Jacques shrugs. “Horace, will you join me at the bar for the next one?”

  Horace nods. “I will. Thank you.”

  Jacques heads toward the taps as his three friends finish their drinks and go outside. He takes a seat at the counter by the tap with the devil’s tail on it.

  “Maudite, s’il vous plaît, Beatrice.”

  The bartender pulls the tail down and darkness hisses out.

  All the other anaesthesiologists’ cellphones buzz at once, but by this point in the evening, Janwar finds it interesting more in a ballet-performance sort of way than anything else, and he lets his mind wander.

  Midnight approaches. Peter and Fang are the only two anaesthesiologists left at the bar besides Janwar. Jacques spoke with Horace, then departed, leaving half his drink on the counter. He’d unzipped his leather jacket to reveal a T-shirt that read “1%.” The other men never came back in. Not long after, Llew left and Horace went home to his wife, Marguerite—a relationship that wasn’t at its healthiest these days, Fang said, which made her feel bad that they had razzed Horace about his name change.

  “What happened?” Janwar asks. Out of the corner of his eye he can see Peter talking to a woman in her mid-forties wearing a suit.

  “It’s not juicy. He didn’t cheat on her or anything, although I guess his being so close to his friend, what’s her name, bothered Grete a bit. But I think the issue is just kids.”

  “Hm,” Janwar says. Based on his romantic experience so far, he can’t even imagine a relationship getting to the point where kids would be the issue.

  Carla Welrod and her partner, Anastasia, have already committed to doing the kids thing, Fang continues. They’re going the adoption route, waiting for more of the endless paperwork to go through.

  “Anastasia and anaesthesia,” Janwar says. “There’s a joke there but I’m a little too hammered to make it happen.”

  Fang rolls her eyes. “Probably for the best.”

  “You’re not into jokes?”

  “I’m into jokes. Puns aren’t jokes.”

/>   Janwar runs his finger around his empty glass. “Now that you have hurt me so deeply…can I get you anything?”

  “I’m fine for now,” Fang says. “Going to the ladies’ room.”

  Janwar notices a tall girl with short blond hair sitting at the bar wearing black leggings and shiny black cowboy boots that outline her calves. Janwar likes girls in boots. Insofar as an article of clothing gets him going, it is leather boots paired with tight jeans or leggings. Maybe, subconsciously, he wishes he were a horse. He hasn’t had the courage to tell Dr. Brank that yet.

  As Janwar reaches the counter, the girl’s fingers dance over a piece of loose-knit green cloth, a scarf or a big sock. She turns when he puts his glass down on the bar.

  She has a large nose, but as her head finishes its rotation he realizes she isn’t pretty in spite of the nose, but because of it. It balances her angular features like the keel of a ship, and she is a knockout. She knows she has a big nose; she’s drawing attention to it with a ring. Nobody who is ashamed of their nose would put something shiny in it. Janwar respects that move. His own nose, which he inherited from his paternal grandfather, is also prodigious, but few people ever notice.

  Janwar isn’t bad-looking. He just doesn’t have the kind of cruelly attractive face that draws women to him like flies to a glass of liquor. In fact, the only people who have consistently found his handsomeness noteworthy are the parents of his high school classmates, specifically, their fathers. And even then he figures those dads combined his generally adult level of competence in most things with his middle-of-the-road teenage face and six-foot frame in some fantasy dad calculus that had little bearing on the sexual desires of teenage girls.

  “That Janwar must score like a bandit,” Mr. Balakian said once to his very attractive daughter Tabitha. She passed that comment on to Janwar in chemistry class in an “Isn’t that funny” sort of way, unaware of how painful it was for Janwar to have a beautiful girl tell him her dad thought he had lots of sex, when he really, really didn’t—and she knew that, and he knew she knew that.