Death and the Intern

by Jeremy Hanson-Finger

  “Some coffee, love?” Mrs. Minsky says.

  Janwar nods.

  Fang puts her hand on his forearm. “I’ll get your meal. I’m flush right now.”

  Black liquid pours from the carafe into his mug.

  Janwar has to be careful around diners with free refills. He likes coffee, but if he drinks too much his anxiety gets out of control.

  “Thank you, 289.” Fang bows her head. “Moment of silence?”

  Janwar has just killed a man and Fang has won money from the dead pool.

  “Is 289…?”

  “Oh, fuck. No, 289 was a massive internal hemorrhage. Got hit by a VIA Rail train. Car stalled crossing the tracks, I think. That’s so shitty of me, though. I shouldn’t have mentioned it.”

  “It’s okay. So Llew won last week, and you won this week?”

  “It’s been a long time coming.”

  “But, like, aren’t there ways to spend money that have a greater return? After you left the other day, Aspen called me a pussy for not joining. She made cat noises.”

  “Aspen? What a freak. The dead pool is more of a social status thing. It’s like having a polo pony or a golf membership. It’s part of the lifestyle. You know, like those rich fucks in the Hamptons who can say, ‘Polo is my life,’ and mean it. It’s what separates us from the patients.”

  “It’s kind of sick, isn’t it?”

  “It’s not like we’re killing anyone,” Fang says. “Oh fuck. Sorry.”

  “Has anything like this happened to you?” Janwar takes a few bites out of his burger, but he isn’t hungry.

  “Almost. I was about to administer a drug, I can’t remember what, and then one of the nurses was like, ‘Wait, what are you doing? That’s 10 per cent! And I was like, ‘Damn yo, when did they change the vials?’”

  Janwar’s phone rings. A number with way too many digits.

  “Hello?”

  “Hi?” A woman’s voice, Eastern European, with the parking-garage echo that signals an overseas connection.

  “Janwar Gupta, speaking?”

  “This is Katerinka? I was told to create a SHROUD account for Janwar Gupta?”

  “Yes, that’s right?” Janwar can’t help lifting his inflection at the end of the sentence like Katerinka does. He imagines her as very attractive, in the manner of many Eastern European women he has seen but not known, in the biblical sense.

  Janwar takes down his username, which is “jagupta,” and his password, which is a random string of digits and letters. Janwar is pretty sure he got them right. In fact, it’s easier to tell the difference between 1 and L and 0 and O when dictated by an Eastern European woman than when you see it written down. “Thank you. Can I ask, where are you? The connection makes it sound like you’re really far away.”

  “Georgia?”

  “Like, Atlanta?”

  “No, like Tbilisi?”

  “How did you end up working for—” Janwar catches himself. Fang is looking at him, interested. She could ask him who it is. He could tell her he was talking to the hospital’s IT department. He realizes “outside” is in Tbilisi, outsourced, and that in itself probably wouldn’t compromise his investigation, but he is a terrible liar, meaning he is terrible at lying, especially when he has to think on his feet, and if Fang asks a follow-up question, he might freeze. He doesn’t know if Fang’s involved. He hopes she’s not.

  Katerinka is speaking again. “My manager said something about victory, and now we spend all our time working for this hospital in America?”

  “Canada.”

  “Whatever?”

  “Okay, thanks.” Janwar hangs up.

  “Who was that?”

  “The bank. Making sure the credit-card charges in Ottawa are me.” Janwar is proud of this lie.

  “How thorough. Where was I?” Fang asks.

  “Uh, we were at, ‘Damn yo!’”

  “Right.”

  “Listen, Fang, how serious is the surgery-anaesthesiology rivalry?”

  “It got pretty violent at one point, just over stupid dick measuring, but now just nobody talks to each other. Why? Is someone hassling you?”

  “Nah, just curious. How violent is pretty violent?”

  “Victor got a black eye. I think he actually cracked an orbit, and Carla lost a tooth—I think that’s all. A punch-up in the surgery rec room. It wasn’t long after I started here.”

  “Over what?”

  “Like I said, dick measuring. Or, I guess, clit measuring?”

  Mrs. Minsky interrupts them with the bill. Fang pays cash and they leave the restaurant.

  Fang moves to cross the street against the light, but Janwar balks, so Fang stops too.

  “Let’s just wait,” Janwar says.

  “There’s no traffic.”

  “We’re in no rush.”

  Fang’s brow furrows and then smooths. “Whatever. What are you doing after work?”

  “I’m not sure,” Janwar says. His heartbeat speeds up.

  “What did you do after work yesterday, Janwar?”

  “Honestly?”

  “No, Janwar, I want you to lie to me. Yes, honestly.”

  “I drank an unreasonable amount of bourbon while sitting on the floor of the shower.”

  “Uh.”

  “Yeah. But I felt surprisingly good this morning. Like, I had that terrible clarity that—”

  “Okay, I feel like you not knowing what you’re doing this evening is a bad thing. How about I come over and we watch a movie or something?”

  It’s probably best for Fang, and everyone else, to think that Janwar isn’t investigating anything, is just flying on autopilot, as if he hasn’t thought of Gupta’s wager.

  The white man lights up on the crosswalk signal, and Janwar and Fang cross the street. There does seem to be a sexual element to this offer. Fang is very pretty, and it isn’t like he’s dating Susan or anything. It’s just one date. Janwar isn’t really sure how casual sex works, but he has two thoughts about it in rapid succession: one, it is almost certainly better than casual jerking off; and, two, is he capable of performing? This is a time of extreme stress, after all.

  Now he is no longer fixated on Diego’s death but instead on whether or not his sadness-masturbating has ruined him for women, and he feels driven in the same way that he was driven to analyze the Diego situation. To prove his virility to himself—if sex is explicitly what Fang wants, of course.

  “Sure,” he says.

  Janwar is thankful for the air conditioning in Fang’s Lexus. Unmufflered motorcycles bearing leather-jacketed men and women in German military-style helmets shoal around them at a stoplight on Bronson. Each has a patch on his or her arm that reads “1%.” Janwar has visions of motorcycle chains crashing through the windows, but the riders don’t give them a second look, and when the signal changes, they roar off, each hog climbing through the gears like a walking bass line.

  Janwar wonders about the 1% patch. He’s seen it a few times. Luckily, he lives in a time where the gap between wondering something and knowing the answer is almost zero, as long as he’s above ground. His phone tells him the 1% patch refers to a comment by the American Motorcyclist Association in 1948, in which they said 99% of motorcyclists followed the law. The outlaw gangs therefore took the remaining number, 1%, as theirs, calling themselves one-percenters.

  “Funny,” Janwar muses. “In 1948, the 1 % were the rebels.”

  “What?”

  Janwar explains what he’s just learned about motorcycle gangs, and how that relates to Occupy Wall Street, but Fang’s not interested. She’s driving, so he gives her a pass.

  Fang parks her car in the underground parkade of Dr. Flecktarn’s building, and they walk up to the lobby. The concierge is listening to the radio.

  “Tune in weekday mornings at six to the Bobby Dasler breakfast show, with Bobby and Juliana,” the radio says, before the soundbed changes and the program cuts to an advertisement: “Lowell Chilton Real Estate,” goes the jingle. “I
t’ll get less real if you decide to wait!”

  As Janwar and Fang round the corner toward the elevator, the super is walking down the hallway toward them. Super Giacomo, as Janwar thinks of him, lives in the apartment next door to Dr. Flecktarn’s. He is a young man, maybe twenty-five, Janwar’s age. His family’s company owns the building.

  “Hey, buddy. Big night?” Giacomo winks.

  “The biggest.” Janwar winks back, but his wink is so exaggerated it is like he is sighting down a rifle.

  Giacomo laughs. He throws his head back, giving Janwar a look at his strikingly hair-free nostrils. The elevator is mirrored on all surfaces except the floor, which still disconcerts Janwar. Sometimes he doesn’t recognize himself and flinches when he catches his reflection in his peripheral vision. For a brief second he imagines sexual positions with Fang in the elevator, Bombay/Beijing Calculus refracted through various angles. No, he doesn’t know what she wants from Brown. That’s only a possibility, and he shouldn’t get himself all worked up.

  Dr. Brank told him not to use “should” or “shouldn’t” statements, because they foster guilt, but in this case, no, fantasizing about having sex with Fang in the elevator is something he really shouldn’t be doing.

  “I’ve always wondered what Ellis’s place is like” is Fang’s first sentence once they reach the apartment on the fourth floor. She doesn’t seem to notice the number of flies orbiting the empty bourbon bottle. “A kind of morbid fascination, I guess. Does it weird you out at all?”

  “Why morbid?”

  “Oh, I guess that’s the wrong choice of words.”

  “Why would it weird me out?”

  She stares at him for a second. “Just…staying in someone else’s house when they’re not there…”

  Janwar files this under “more weird shit that’s going on.” He’ll try to push Fang on it later. “Give me a sec, I just need to send an email.”

  He withdraws to the bedroom with his laptop and uncrumples the Post-it notes with the URL for SHROUD and his username and password. SHROUD looks like the ticket system he used to report problems with his home Internet. OPREP (Operation Reporting) is the most logical ticket type, and, yes, he can assign it to Venolia Parker in Records. He shudders at the thought of her zombielike skin.

  OPREP-9854 Need List of Patient Deaths During Operations Last Five Years.

  Hi Venolia! I was down this morning to talk to you.

  Can I please get a list of patient deaths during operations in the last five years and access to the files on each?

  He sets the priority to “Blocker,” meaning it’s blocking him from getting work done, because that’s true.

  There’s a field for “Business Case” and a field for “Manager Comments.” He has to hope Llew won’t get a notification that he filed a ticket, and also that Venolia won’t require further approval to begin the task. Maybe these fields are optional, but Janwar has a feeling they’re not.

  Fang is looking through Dr. Flecktarn’s bookshelf when Janwar returns. Medical textbooks. Classics, like the version of Moby Dick with the line drawing in various shades of blue on the cover, and that extra-creepy version of Lolita with the prepubescent lips.

  “So what do you want to watch? Something funny? Something intense?” Janwar rinses the bourbon bottle and puts it in the recycling. Maybe the flies will leave if there’s nothing else edible around.

  “People always want to watch funny things, so I never get to watch intense movies with other people, which is the only time I want to watch them, because, you know, they’re so intense.”

  “Awesome. We’re on the same page, or frame, or whatever.”

  “What have you got?”

  They crouch down in front of the giant plasma television to look at the shelf. As the shelf is deeper than the DVD cases, some DVDs are pushed in more than others. Fang starts pulling them out so they’re all equal.

  “You really are OCD, aren’t you?”

  Fang nods. “Let me tell you a story. Once during undergrad I was sitting on the porch of the super-ghetto house I lived in, cramming for a test, and I heard a car accident, like squealing tires and people screaming and shit. I ran around the corner and this chick was lying on the ground and syringes and little plastic bags of powder were scattered around her.”

  “Coke?”

  “Coke, heroin, I don’t know. She’d been punched out through the windshield of her car, so there was lots of glass too. And blood. I had no idea what to do.”

  Janwar raises his eyebrow.

  “Come on. I wasn’t a doctor yet. I was nineteen. I was studying chemistry.”

  At nineteen, Janwar was a volunteer for St. John’s Ambulance and would have known what to do. Sometimes he forgets not all doctors, or prospective doctors, followed his career path. “Go on.”

  “She said something and I bent my ear down to her mouth. Her face was totally fucked.”

  “Totally fucked in what way?”

  “Like standard-parts-missing fucked. She said to help her, but all I could think to do was to carefully pick up all of the syringes and the baggies and put them back into her purse and zip it up.”

  “After calling an ambulance though?”

  Fang shakes her head. “Eventually someone came out from one of the other houses and called an ambulance. That’s how OCD I am.”

  Did she keep any of the baggies? Maybe that’s an uncharitable thing to think. “And now you’re a doctor.”

  “Doesn’t that wig you out a little?”

  “Well, you’re not in emerg. You’ve got a bit more control over situations as an anaesthesiologist.”

  “And thank God. Am I right?”

  They look at the DVDs.

  “I think I remember hearing about this one.” Janwar hands Fang the slipcase.

  “‘Unpredictable and rich with symbolism, this Argentinian murder mystery lives up to its Oscar.’ Sure, sounds dope. But, uh, you down with watching an ‘Argentinian murder mystery’?”

  “I’ll be okay.”

  Dr. Flecktarn’s DVD player looks like it was carved out of a solid piece of metal, but when Janwar touches the glowing red light, a tray separates and slides out. Janwar deposits the disc and it disappears without leaving even the hint of a seam. Janwar wonders how much of the cost of the player went into the precision machining necessary for this illusion and how much went into the actual picture quality. At this moment he feels very much like his father. The first time he bought a jacket that wasn’t waterproof he felt a deep sense of shame, probably more shame than he felt at masturbating in the bathroom of the Canadian National Institute for the Blind, post–Thetis Lake.

  Janwar folds himself into the couch. A blanket is still out from when he was watching Westerns. He offers it to Fang. Outside the rain starts. Heavy drops streak the windows.

  “Thanks.” She wraps it around herself and sits on the couch next to him.

  The giant screen snaps into life, and Janwar starts the film. It has the predominantly yellow and green colour palette Janwar associates with French and South American films. An older man is writing a novel in the year 2000 about a murder case he was investigating in 1975. He is talking about it with a woman he is obviously in love with, but whom he isn’t with with. The narrative flashes back into the past.

  Within ten minutes, Fang lists to the side like a ferry that has struck a sandbar. She puts her head on his shoulder and he puts his arm around her. She snuggles into him. They stay like this for a while. It’s nice. Janwar feels loved in a platonic way, like a dog has fallen asleep on his lap. He tries to head a possible erection off at the pass, and seems to be successful, so far. What he was thinking before about proving his capacity has dissipated in the face of this pleasant feeling. The fact that she is so sleepy suggests that she probably isn’t going to suggest they do coke, which is one less awkward situation for him to navigate. Janwar still hasn’t determined exactly how he feels about it, but if anyone is going to be conscientious about their drug use,
it is an anaesthesiologist, so it isn’t likely she’s putting herself in a lot of danger.

  Fang makes a satisfied noise, mumbles something and pushes her head further into him, starting to arrange herself into a horizontal position.

  “Fang, did you want to lie down?”

  “Mmmm.”

  Janwar and Fang adjust themselves so that his spine is up against the back of the couch and her spine is up against the front of him.

  Fang says something that sounds like, “It’s only for two weeks.”

  “What?”

  “Most importantly, mind which side you’re on. Any questions, talk to me.”

  Janwar doesn’t respond to any of her further comments, which all seem to be instructions. Who is she instructing?

  Janwar watches the movie in silence for a while. The killer, wearing a garishly patterned shirt, is caught in a football stadium. The woman the investigator is in love with questions the killer’s masculinity, in a way that makes Janwar, even though he understands that it is a psychological questioning strategy, uncomfortable about his own masculinity, his strength, his potency, until the killer snaps, hits the woman in the face, says he fucked the shit out of the murder victim.

  But this is only halfway through the movie. The killer is set free by the investigator’s corrupt boss by way of revenge on the investigator for a previous conflict, under the auspices of the killer’s being suitable for spying on subversives, the Dirty War being more important to the corrupt boss than justice.

  At one point a series of gunshots ring out, and Fang snorts. Janwar strokes her flank by way of reassurance. He thinks about guys calling her “sweetflanx” by text and nearly laughs, but manages to suppress it. He is feeling sleepy. Her neck looks like a very soft and good place to put his face. He nestles it in there and she starts.

  “Wha!”

  “Huh?” Janwar assumed that she wanted to cuddle. Is he in fact invading her personal space? Is he being a creep? Does she now consider him a potential abuser?

  “You need a shave.”

  “I’m sorry, I thought—”

  “Don’t worry about it. I’m kind of a cuddly sleeper. Your neckbeard is just prickly as fuck.”