Death and the Intern

by Jeremy Hanson-Finger

  The girl’s glass is empty except for a thin layer of yellow-brown and an orange wedge. She’s still looking at him. She’s interested in what he has to offer, which at the moment is another drink.

  “Hi, my name’s Janwar. Can I get your next one?” Janwar isn’t slurring too much, but enough to sound a bit more relaxed than he does when chatting up a lady sober.

  “Susan. Sure, another old-fashioned.”

  “Sounds good.” Janwar turns to the man behind the bar. Susan’s drinking a cocktail so he feels like he has to as well. “One mojito and one old-fashioned.”

  The bartender’s brass moustache bobs with his head.

  “What are you knitting there?” Janwar asks.

  “A scarf.” She holds it up. “Do you knit?”

  “No, but I also work with needles.”

  Susan arches an eyebrow.

  “I’m an anaesthesiologist.”

  “So you put people to sleep.”

  “Only at work. What do you do? Or is knitting your day job as well?”

  “I’m a barista at Lazarus Coffee while I’m working on my master’s.”

  “Which one? Not the one in the Civic Hospital?”

  “No, the one in Westboro.” Susan kicks her foot against the bar.

  Janwar glances down. “Damn, those are shiny. I can actually see myself in your boots.”

  “Not sure you’d fit,” Susan says.

  Janwar blushes.

  There’s no actual sexual context here, Janwar’s pretty sure; he made a dumb comment about her well-polished shoes and she said his feet were big, but—

  The bartender brings two glasses over.

  Janwar sips at his mojito. The cool radiates from the glass. Soon his face will return to normal, and, anyway, it’s pretty dark in here.

  An Inuit man in an army uniform with lots of gold braid sits at the bar next to Janwar. Susan startles but he takes no notice of her.

  “Can I pay for my soda and lime?” the man says. “Cheers.” He slides a ten across the bar.

  Susan turns back to Janwar and uncrosses and crosses her legs. Leather slides across other leather. “Are you an anaesthesiologist at the Civic?”

  “Yeah.”

  Fang intrudes on Janwar’s peripheral vision and Janwar hopes she can appraise the situation. She holds up her hand. Five minutes. Janwar doesn’t want to ditch her, she’s his new friend, but Susan could be a new more-than-friend, and he has to at least try to get her number. In this new city he’s a new, more confident man.

  Susan leans closer, and Janwar can feel her breath on his face. “That’s exciting. Are you a Pusher or a Mixer?”

  Susan’s skin smells good, like sport sunscreen. Janwar adjusts his lean against the bar to pin himself against it. He does often have a problem with girls understanding that he’s interested in them in a more-than-friendly way, but to openly display his physical arousal might be a little excessive, or gratuitous, as his mother described movies that were too sexy for young Janwar. “A Mixer. Wait, what is a Pusher? No one will tell—”

  Susan looks at her watch. Its dial glows faintly. “I’ve got to get going, Janwar. Do you have a pen?” Her nose ring sparks golden as she raises her glass. She finishes the rest of her old-fashioned in one gulp.

  Janwar fishes in his pocket and passes her his space pen, which can write upside-down and underwater and won’t fade from whatever it is Susan chooses to write on.

  Susan’s left hand darts toward Janwar’s waist, and his breath catches for a second, but she’s going for his hand. She rotates his wrist, lays it on the counter, and writes out a ten-digit number in block capitals, right below his knuckles. Then, with a sly smile over her shoulder, she’s gone, her smell and body heat with her.

  The air outside the bar is still much more liquid than Janwar would like. He breathes it in as he waits for Fang to use the bathroom again. He imagines perfect spheres of water forming inside his lungs like they do on the aluminum skin of a chilled beer can. Thinking about the outside of a beer can makes him think about the inside of a beer can, and that second thought makes him queasy. The hard alcohol on top of all that beer was a mistake. The iron statue of bear-plus-salmon across from the bar’s entrance makes Janwar think of home, until loud voices distract him.

  Two men in polo shirts with chests like inverted triangles stare each other down and ready their fists. A third man with an even wider inverted-triangle chest pulls them apart.

  “She asked me what I thought of her,” the first man says. “She said to be honest.”

  “Janwar.” Fang has appeared at his shoulder. She has a bit of a Neil-Young-in-The-Last-Waltz thing going on with one nostril. It’s very evident, even in the darkness, since her light brown skin contrasts better with the white powder than Neil’s ghostly face did in the film Janwar’s father made him watch over and over as a child. Janwar points at his own nose, and she rubs hers.

  “Thanks.” Janwar is too drunk to form any sort of judgment about Fang’s obvious drug use. It’s an element of his environment, like the inverted-triangle men, the darkness, the moisture, the heat, and the Celtic music leaking from the pub.

  “Where’s Peter?”

  “Probably with a girl.”

  Although Janwar had seen Peter talking to a young woman earlier, he’s a big believer in not leaving people behind, and he asks if Fang can text Peter.

  “Sure,” she says.

  Her phone pings back a few seconds later. She holds up the screen: Go home. I’m with a girl.

  Fang takes a step forward and Janwar follows her. The sticky smell of marijuana wafts by from a group of girls with blond dreadlocks going the other way.

  Fang totters on the cobblestones of Sparks Street. Janwar grabs her arm to steady her, but she shakes his hand off, saying she is fine.

  They walk in silence for a minute. A long black car with diplomatic plates whirs past.

  “Sorry I freaked when you touched me,” Fang says. “It’s been a bit of a rough few weeks. I’ve been on a fail streak in the pool.”

  “What pool?”

  “Come on, cowboy, keep up. The gambling pool. The intensive care docs run it. They send out people’s patient numbers as they’re admitted and you choose one over the course of the week. And then you see who goes from the ICU to the ECU.”

  “ECU?”

  “Eternal care unit.”

  That takes Janwar a second to process. “Morgue.” The left corner of his mouth twitches. He can feel it happening, but he can’t make it stop. “You make money when someone dies?”

  Fang nods. “Yeah, it’s a dead pool.”

  “That’s horrifying.”

  “It’s not like we’re killing anyone. It’s just a way of picking numbers.”

  The streets are quiet as Janwar’s and Fang’s shadows stretch and snap between the lampposts. An unmarked police cruiser with its window-mounted lights flashing roars by in the opposite direction and squeals around the corner onto Albert Street, tire residue melting onto the hot asphalt.

  Fang halts and screams. She’s looking down at her feet. Janwar follows her gaze. She’s speared a rat with her stiletto. There’s no blood, so Janwar assumes it was already dead. Fang shakes her foot in the air, attempting to dislodge the furry mass.

  “Put your foot back down.” Janwar steps down hard on the rat with his Oxford, flattening it even more. “Now pull it out.”

  During the walk south to Somerset, Janwar having promised to walk Fang home—and just walk her home, they are colleagues, she has made sure to stress this fact—Janwar starts to babble. He trusts Fang, somehow. Perhaps the business with the dead rat has brought them closer together, a shared encounter with the presence of death—tiny death, maybe, but death all the same.

  Janwar tells Fang that the girl she saw him talking to at the bar seemed into him. But that isn’t as uncomplicated as it sounds.

  Here’s the deal, he says. He presents himself to women exactly as he is: a friendly, charming, tall, and
fairly good-looking Indian-Canadian anaesthesiologist-in-training. The problem is that he is so friendly and charming that nobody ever wants to shoot him down.

  For the most part, he has a bit of a cult-of-personality problem, where people he has only recently met, guys and girls, love him right away, far more than seems reasonable. In the case of girls, their signs of interest in him as a charming, friendly person are very difficult to distinguish from signs of interest in him as a sexual being.

  Sure, he’s dated, his maximum relationship length being about six months, after which his then-girlfriend, Lise, had asked him to choose between medical school and her. Janwar had come out of the womb “checking dilation,” as his mother joked to her friends often enough that it made Janwar both uncomfortable and angry, so leaving UBC Med wasn’t an option, and their relationship flatlined.

  Anyway, Janwar, after each prospect who isn’t interested in what Brown can do for them, package-wise, and instead wants very badly to be his friend, starts re-evaluating his situation and gets into a weird mental place where he thinks that being himself—i.e., friendly and charming and someone everyone wants to be friends with—is underhanded and creepy, because behaviour that from other men would seem to indicate sincere romantic interest, which is what he, Janwar, is going for, from him seems to be only further evidence of his being friendly and charming and someone everyone wants to be friends with, and when he says, “Hey, I think you’re really lovely, let’s hang out again soon,” and his prospect says, “Yeah, that sounds great,” and he says, “Can I have your number?” and she rattles it off to him and gives him a big hug, pauses, and hugs him again and then smiles shyly and turns on her heel and leaves, that’s about as sincere as you can get, and when he texts his prospect the next night and she says, “I’m flattered you want to go on a date, but I’m not interested in you like that,” the only honourable way to proceed is to be exactly that which he doesn’t want to be—i.e., a creep—solely so he can make situations less ambiguous, but he can’t do it, can’t actually act like a creep, is too aware of how invading someone’s personal space is entry-level rape culture behaviour, like, Janwar is superconscious when walking at night not to get stuck walking behind women walking alone, to the point of jogging out into the street to pass them so they don’t think he is following them, because he’s not, to the point where once a Starbucks barista told him that she recognized him because the previous night he’d walked past her faster than anyone had ever walked past her before, and, like, once he was taking care of a friend’s beagle for a long weekend and he couldn’t really love the dog as much no matter how much the dog loved him once he learned that it had tried for years to sexually assault the owner’s female cat, or, like, does Fang know that famous picture of the sailor kissing the girl in Times Square when he comes back from fighting in the Pacific, and how that woman was a stranger and didn’t consent in any way to being kissed and said in an interview many years afterwards words like forcibly restrained and scared and loss of control, all things Janwar didn’t want women to have to feel, unless they wanted to (S&M isn’t his thing, but he understands that some people are into it, and that people in that community are generally very safe and respectful of boundaries because they use safe words, and outside of that safe and respectful community, who knows what kind of creep show you’d get involved with and whether they’d respect your saying no), and anyway, where this is going is that even though Susan has given him her number, Janwar doesn’t know what her actual feelings are, with respect to—

  Fang holds up her hand and Janwar sputters to a halt. “Stop worrying. You’re an anaesthesiologist. If it’s keeping you up at night, you know what to do.” She lets herself into her building, then turns to face Janwar and stops the door before it closes. “Also, what’s creepy is persistence. Showing you’re interested once is flattering. It’s when you don’t stop that you’re a creeper.” The door closes.

  Janwar watches her totter up to the elevator and stop to check her phone. He turns away and hails a cab. He heard there’d been an uptick in muggings in Ottawa recently, but he can’t remember who told him. He’s glad to see that the driver is Indian, though the driver doesn’t seem to care one way or another about Janwar’s ethnicity and continues muttering into his headset in Hindi—a language Janwar does not, in fact, speak, as he scans the empty road ahead of them.

  Exhibit B

  TRANSCRIPT OF AUDIO RECORDING FOUND ON SUSAN JONESTOWN’S CELLPHONE

  SPEAKING: SUSAN JONESTOWN

  Friday, July 4

  With the crackdown on Oxy, drug traffickers are having to get extra creative. Dog walkers make perfect drug mules. They even have their own mules: canine pack ponies, each with its own trendy backpack. Can see the headline in the Ottawa Sun: WHO SNIFFS THE SNIFFERS.

  So what’s the story here?

  I should go straight to the police. But what if it’s bigger than one dog walker?

  70 OTTAWA DOG WALKERS INVOLVED IN DRUG SMUGGLING NETWORK. GOVERNMENT DENIES KNOWLEDGE.

  May be getting a little ahead of myself.

  Martina’s got to come back for the container once she figures it’s gone. Two choices: take it with me, or wait for Martina to come back and follow her.

  Got a clip of Martina picking up the container. Now she’s heading toward my truck. And getting into the blue station wagon right in front of it. Let’s roll.

  Followed Martina as she dropped off dogs around the neighbourhood. I put pins in a Google map. Two dogs are still in the car as we pull into the Ottawa Civic Hospital’s lot. Big but thin. Dobermans or greyhounds.

  Haven’t been here, in the hospital, since I was in high school, I guess. When Alan ate too many mushrooms and thought he was going to die.

  Wherever she’s taking these dogs must be public. They don’t let dogs into surgery. If they do, I don’t want to know about it. Surgeons use pig parts, don’t they?

  Shadowed Martina into the psych ward. These are therapy dogs. She’s handing the leads over to a red-haired man in periwinkle scrubs. He’s rubbing their nylon-covered sides. Their packs are empty.

  CHAPTER 3

  Pillows of Salt – Bombay Calculus – The Abyss – Green Light – The Ugly – It Is Okay – Death Valley 7/9

  Tuesday, July 8

  Janwar wakes up before dawn on Tuesday morning with his glasses folded on the night table next to him and his clothes piled on the floor next to the bed. The last memory he has of the night before is getting into a cab, but he remembers that with great clarity, down to the fact that the radio was tuned to CHEV 95.3, Ottawa’s Best Country. He doesn’t remember the cab ride, though, getting into Dr. Flecktarn’s apartment, or taking his clothes off, but he seems to have managed all three tasks with a reasonable amount of dexterity.

  He has a tune in his head that he realizes quickly thanks to his Anglican school education, follows the melody of the chorus to “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” Multi-ethnic voices singing not the normal lyrics about glory and things marching on, but only eleven unique words:

  Civic Mixers, we’ll induce ya!

  Civic Mixers, we’ll induce ya!

  Civic Mixers, we’ll induce ya!

  Cause Mama said knock you out.

  Janwar thinks about shaking his head and then decides against it. He has the beginnings of a wicked hangover. He might still be drunk. Near the pillow, a couple of spots of blood darken the bottom sheet. The fingers on his right hand sting. He inspects them, notes the raw line on the inside knuckle of his index finger and the patches of rough, dead skin on the outsides of several knuckles. His left hand is in a bit better shape, but it feels tight and sore as well, like all he’d have to do is brush it against the edge of a table for the skin to break. This is the most dehydrated he’s ever been from drinking. Or maybe he just isn’t used to air conditioning, which he never lived with in BC. Janwar rubs his lips and feels dead skin slough off there too. He has to be at the hospital in forty-five minutes. He made a mistake, alcohol-wise, and now he
has to deal with the consequences. Janwar’s almost a doctor. A little dehydration is nothing to a doctor, so it’s almost nothing to an almost-doctor.

  He pads off to the bathroom for extra-strength ibuprofen, a Band-Aid for his one knuckle, and hand lotion. Then it’s the kitchen for a bottle of off-brand sports drink, which he at least had the foresight to purchase after work, if not the presence of mind to drink last night. The corner store had nothing but fruit-punch flavour, which is Janwar’s least favourite, but he toughs it out, chasing it with a glass of water to get rid of the cherry-medicine taste.

  Coffee is the next step. Can of ground coffee from cupboard; mug bearing logo for Lowell Chilton Real Estate from different cupboard. Janwar roots around in Dr. Flecktarn’s almost-empty shelving for a new filter for the drip coffee maker before remembering he used the only remaining one in the package yesterday morning before his first shift. The situation is dire. There’s no instant. There’s no French press. There isn’t even paper towel to make his own filter. Toilet paper will not work. He’s not drunk enough to try that.

  He might not make it out of the house without coffee. He might not even make it into the shower without coffee. Dr. Flecktarn’s bed, despite the salt stains on the pillows from a night’s worth of beer sweat, is more inviting than anything in the world right now. He can’t look back.

  The garbage can held a fresh bag yesterday when he threw out the filter. He opens the lid on the can, and it is as he remembers: the filter and grounds are the only contents of a bag that still smells like plastic. Could be worse. Nobody is around to see him. He shakes as many of the grounds as he can off into the bag and runs cold water over the filter before placing it back in the coffee maker.

  The coffee, sports drink, ibuprofen, and dry toast work their magic and Janwar is able to stand up straight by the time he leaves the shower, able to interact with the bus driver in spoken English by the time he gets on the bus, and able to perform anaesthesia on a patient by the time his first operation is scheduled at 9 a.m.