Death and the Intern

by Jeremy Hanson-Finger

  “That’d be really attractive. It’d show your childlike playful side. Chicks would be all over you.”

  “Would you trust someone with terrible refrigerator art on their skin to anaesthetize you, though?”

  “It’s not like you have to do it so it’s visible when you’re wearing scrubs. You can be a secret punk.”

  “Doctor above the belt, punk below.”

  “Every girl’s dream.”

  Janwar’s not sure where to go with the conversation. The jokes aren’t coming thick and fast anymore. He could go somewhere with that, but… No, it’s too much.

  Susan’s not holding a drink anymore. Maybe a quick trip to the bar will give him time to come up with a plan. “Anyway, can I get you a mixed drink?”

  Susan punches him in the upper arm. “They don’t do old-fashioneds here. Can you get me a whisky sour?”

  As he forces his way through the crowd toward the bar, Janwar wonders, are the Pushers willing to set him up to kill someone just to make trouble for the Mixers?

  The house music between the Creepshots and the Trillaphonics is a medley of cheery Top 40 from years past, some songs that Janwar, more an aficionado of minimal electronic music than anything else, even recognizes. Janwar got into electronica in high school because its steady tempo helped him be productive—he mostly listened to music while studying to block outside noises and his own subconscious, but he’s never seen any of the artists in his music library play live.

  The playlist culminates in “Bohemian Rhapsody,” as the Trillaphonics finish setting up their equipment on the stage: two drum kits flanking two tables, one with a keyboard and the other covered in hundreds of different wires of varying colours plugged into almost as many metal boxes.

  The Trillaphonics open with a noise like Janwar’s parents’ bathroom fan when it was broken, in between the keening of a scared animal and a grain thresher. Somehow Janwar finds it pleasing.

  The singer is a bearded, portly man wearing a bandana. He picks up a microphone from the nest of cables and leads the crowd through activities as the drummers pound away and the keyboard player builds up loop after loop of wavering scree.

  “Everybody crouch down and follow my hand movements,” the singer says. The crowd obeys, and Susan loses her balance and ends up sitting, or leaning, on Janwar’s angled lap. She laughs. “I don’t think I can get up again. This chick in front of me is sitting on my foot.”

  “I don’t mind,” Janwar says, but she can’t see his smile from where she sits.

  A few songs later, over a whooshing keyboard bass line, the portly man points at the exit. “Hey, you two over by the door. Can you… I don’t know if this is going to work. Is there… Oh, I got it. Okay, you all, you see the small flight of stairs going up from the floor? You there, in the blue hat, and you, with the big smile, put your hands up like this, but each other’s, like, yeah, okay, you got it. Now, you two on the other side, yeah, you”—he is pointing at Janwar and Susan, now standing again—“you do the same.”

  Janwar puts his arms up and Susan threads her fingers through his, forming an arch.

  “Now when I say ‘go,’” the singer continues, the bass line syncopating underneath his voice, “if you’re on the left side I want you to go under the arms of the people by the stairs, and once you’ve gone through, put your arms up and make an arch with the person who came through behind you. And the same on the right. Got it?”

  Drumsticks crash into drums.

  “Go!”

  Janwar becomes aware that he is enjoying himself, even beyond the fact that he is holding Susan’s hands. As people duck under his and Susan’s arms and the archway becomes a tunnel that snakes around the hall, he feels part of something good and human, and when the last person on the dance floor has gone through, Janwar follows Susan into the human tunnel. The music is hypnotic, the two drummers laying down a complicated tribal rhythm. Lights paint everyone’s skin in primary colours. Janwar has to crouch down so low that his head is far forward of his legs, and he follows the man in front of him through the tunnel, feeling like the contents of an IV tube must feel going into a vein.

  When the song ends and the tunnel breaks up, Janwar and Susan are on opposite sides of the room.

  “All right,” the singer says. “Now, everybody, let’s get into a circle. Put your hands on the shoulders of the person in front of you and close your eyes.”

  This isn’t Susan, it’s a different woman. Normally Janwar would feel uncomfortable with this—dance with the girl who brung ya and all—but any sort of concerns about himself seem petty compared to the positive energy of this joyous communal event. Janwar feels human.

  “Okay? Now, start to turn to your left. Slow. Slowww.”

  The strobing bathroom fan sound from the start of the show returns, the keyboard wheezing into an almost orchestral melody overtop of it, but when the drums and keyboard kick in, the singer shouts “Break!” and the crowd surges forward and crams together, spasming in ecstasy.

  Janwar spots Susan near the front of the mosh pit. He inhales deeply and works his way toward her.

  As he gets closer to the speakers, someone taps him on the shoulder: a stocky man wearing a thin-brimmed fedora that doesn’t go with his Euro-fit blue jeans and tight T-shirt.

  Shaughnessy reaches up and puts his arm around Janwar’s shoulder and screams in his ear. “I was just trying to warn you before, lickarse. The Mixers are bad news. You don’t want to get involved with them. And you killed a patient this week? You should’ve stuck with what you learned in school.”

  “That’s my problem, not yours,” Janwar says

  “It’s everyone’s problem. And you make everything worse when you run around playing guard.”

  “Buddy, just back the fuck off. The more people tell me not to dig, the more I’ll keep digging. I’m a goddamned terrier.”

  “You’re too goddamned naive, is what you are. Everyone’s got shite going on that they want to keep to themselves, that’s got nothing to do with any of this.”

  “So there is a ‘this.’ And something else on top of that? Something else you’re personally invested in? Does the something else perchance involve OxyContin?”

  “Shut your fucking mouth.”

  “Maybe if Venolia gets desperate enough she’ll tell me what’s going on.”

  A vein throbs under the brim of Shaughnessy’s pushed-back fedora. He swings a roundhouse punch right into Janwar’s sternum, and Janwar is too slow to get out of the way of Shaughnessy’s Fist Express. All the air rushes out of Janwar’s lungs. He can feel them sucking inward, sticking to each other. He knows he is wheezing in great whoops and gulps but he can’t hear anything. He wants to throw up. His stomach is an elastic band.

  “Don’t you fucking dare,” Shaughnessy says. “Lay off Venolia or the next time you find yourself in the ER you’ll be looking at the ceiling. Oh, and say hi to Susan for me. Did you really think a bird like that would go for a gowl like you?”

  Janwar wheezes in response. He turns his head to look at Shaughnessy and, probably without mens rea, spews lager and bile all over him. Now his lungs are inflating again. Did he hear Shaughnessy right? How does Shaughnessy know Susan? Have they slept together? He’d feel sick at the thought if he didn’t already feel sick from Shaughnessy’s punch.

  Shaughnessy releases Janwar. Janwar breathes in, white dots exploding behind his eyes, and grabs at the pain point by Shaughnessy’s collarbone. Shaughnessy pulls back and paws at his eyes. Janwar figures Shaughnessy must be wasted or on some heavy prescription narcotics, otherwise he’d be screaming, so he summons all his strength, makes sure his thumb is outside his fist, which is one of the two things he knows about punching people, then swivels on his right foot like he is grinding out a cigarette and slugs Shaughnessy in the face.

  “I’ll look at whatever I want,” Janwar says. Each word throbs in his chest. Not exactly a zinger, but accurate, covering both the ER and his amateur detective work.

&
nbsp; Shaughnessy’s head snaps back and he stumbles and falls, his boot soles unable to gain purchase on the beer-slicked floor. Blood sluices from his nose, turning the bird logo on his shirt into a cat victim. Janwar doesn’t have a ton of muscle, but at least he has leverage.

  Shaughnessy’s elbows hit the ground first, then the brim of his fedora, and finally the back of his head. Probably not hard enough to cause any permanent damage; Janwar well aware that if the circumstances had aligned differently, Shaughnessy might have hit the ground headfirst at exactly the wrong angle and died, becoming Janwar’s second murder of the week. But he’s thrashing around right away. And what else could Janwar have done? Shaughnessy started the fight.

  The bouncer holds the crowd back while some other concertgoers help Shaughnessy up. He pushes his way to the back of the crowd, his face barely missing the flailing feet of another crowd-surfer.

  Janwar should have asked Shaughnessy how he knew Susan, instead of coming up with a lame action-movie retort. He’s too full of adrenaline to have a chthonic breakthrough, but it’ll get him later. Ignoring the pain in his chest, and now his knuckles, Janwar pushes his way toward Susan.

  Susan is still on the other side of the mosh pit, but now the pit has doubled in intensity. A crust punk crashes into Janwar, right about the time his adrenaline starts to subside. Vertigo washes over him. He’s got to sit down immediately. He staggers toward the entrance and leans against the door frame. A quick scan for Shaughnessy comes up empty. Janwar sits on the curb and puts his head in his hands. A couple of minutes later, he pulls his phone out and, with the stiffening, swollen fingers on his right hand, texts Susan: Getting some fresh air. Just outside.

  1:43 am—New message from Susan: I’ll join you, one sec

  The bile Janwar threw up earlier burns in his esophagus. Susan sits down next to him and puts her arm around his back. She leans her head, hair soaked with sweat, on his chest, and he twitches away violently. His ears are still ringing. It rained while they were inside. The ground is slick and reflects all the lights: street lamps, headlights, cigarettes.

  “Are you okay, Big Cat? One second you were there and then I couldn’t find you.”

  “I got hit really hard in the chest.”

  Susan leans back.

  Janwar pulls up his Vancouver EMS shirt; he already has a bruise right on his xiphoid process, an oval that shifts from grey to deathly purple as the xenon headlamps of luxury cars flash by.

  “Aw, Janwar. Did some asshole try to fight you in the pit?” Susan says. “Your shoulders don’t hurt when I touch you, do they?” She lifts her arm.

  “Yeah, someone really pushed me around.” Janwar feels a bit of relief, knowing he is, at this very moment, in control. He knows something she doesn’t, so she doesn’t know how to act.

  “What happened?” she says, but she knows already. She must. If Shaughnessy knows her, she’s playing a role in this whole business. Her voice, hollow and bony, drifts toward him from farther away than the ringing in his ears would account for. She reaches into her purse and produces a pack of Camels and a red BIC lighter.

  “It was Shaughnessy,” Janwar says.

  Susan inhales a deep breath of smoke, and it curls out from her nostrils. “Is that the guy from the hospital you were talking about?”

  “Oh, come on,” Janwar snaps. It feels good to snap. He never gets to be mean, so when it’s justified, he enjoys meanness like a vice. “He mentioned your name.”

  Susan’s expression remains blank. “What did he say to you?”

  “He said I was mixing with the wrong people at the hospital. And to say hi to you. And—” Janwar’s throat stops up, leaving him unable to repeat the presumed insult to his manhood, regardless of the fact that he has no idea what gowl means. The image of Shaughnessy’s sweating red face inches from Susan’s passes across Janwar’s vision like a cloud of smog.

  Susan takes another puff, and the cigarette crackles. Janwar is anti-smoking, but he can’t say that there isn’t something sexy about it now that he’s watching a pretty girl do it, even if she’s a pretty girl who might have asked him out at the behest of a Eurotrash wannabe mobster.

  Susan grinds out the end, which features a carmine imprint from her lips. “I can’t say any more about it. I didn’t mean for you to get hurt. Believe me.”

  “Things aren’t looking good in the ‘you’re interested in hanging out with me because you’re looking for a nice man to spend good times with’ department, Susan. You were interested when I said I was a Mixer. Somehow, you know Shaughnessy. And you invited me here, where Shaughnessy tried to beat me up.”

  Susan looks off at the partygoers clogging Bank Street, climbing into cabs, stumbling down the sidewalk, at the calf muscles straining against high heels. A beer bottle someone has snuck out of one of the bars explodes against a fire hydrant, spraying shards of glass.

  Janwar doesn’t move his gaze from Susan. “That’s not fucking cool. Do you want to explain?”

  “I can’t right now.”

  “You can’t or won’t?”

  “I should go. I’m sorry.” She stands and waves her hand. A cab swoops to the curb, and she climbs inside.

  Janwar slumps against the newspaper box. Two a.m. has come and gone. Susan has changed from being an exciting diversion to a bubble on his mind-map connected by dotted lines to the other bubbles that read “Pushers” and “Shaughnessy.” He’ll have to do some serious mapping soon, but not tonight. He’s been awake for twenty-two hours straight.

  He pulls out his phone: Gowl is a derogatory Southern Irish term for female genitalia.

  He begins to stand up, but a boot crashes into his ribs and he falls back, his phone skittering across the concrete. The boot’s toe slams into his sternum again, and the nebula with yellow edges comes back and takes over his vision. He struggles to rise, but the blob hangs between him and the outside world. His attacker shoves him back down. Janwar’s head bounces off the front glass of the Ottawa Citizen box, right where the headline reads, “Bronson Slope Condo Development LEEDer of the Pack,” and the last thing he hears, before blackness claims him, is the wail of sirens.

  Exhibit G

  TRANSCRIPT OF AUDIO RECORDING FOUND ON SUSAN JONESTOWN’S CELLPHONE

  [RECORDING REDACTED BY ORDER OF BRIGADIER GENERAL SILUK TUPIQ]

  PART III: THE CRUNCH

  CHAPTER 8

  Cohasset – Suspira – OK Corral – Pushrods Forever

  Saturday, July 12

  When Janwar wakes up, he’s in a hospital bed and everything is beautiful: the light coming in the window, the view of Dow’s Lake beyond it, the reflections on the waxed floor, the crisp white of the sheets. He moves his eyeballs over to the left. An IV sticks out of his arm. Probably a mix of hydromorphone and sufentanil, based on how he feels.

  Although he’s also been badly beaten, and he has no idea how badly, he feels a weight off his shoulders. Because he’s been beaten, in fact. Since Shaughnessy warned him off and then presumably came back and stomped him, he almost certainly picked the right side on Gupta’s wager. Even if he hasn’t come anywhere near clearing his name, something criminal is going on here and Diego’s death has to be related.

  The weight is gone, but now he feels guilty. Dr. Brank would tell him that even as he lies here, he’s reinforcing negative neural pathways. His obsessive commitment to determining the responsibility for Diego’s death at the expense of his own health, to, like, a really serious degree, now that he’s lying in a hospital bed, has been borne out. And in future, Dr. Brank would say, he will have that much more of a reason to disregard his own personal health and follow his own anxious thinking, and that’s not a positive outcome for his development into a functional person.

  “Aye, awake are you?” a voice says from outside of his field of vision. “Here’s what it is. You have a minor concussion, a gash across your chest, a couple of cracked ribs, and significant bruising and swelling. And you opened up a proper nasty cut on your knuckles.
But we mixed you up the good stuff. Never let it be said that we Mixers don’t protect our own.” The voice wobbles and reverberates in his ears so much that he can’t tell who it belongs to. Llew drifts in from Janwar’s left with the fluidity of motion reserved for film, until he stands at the foot of Janwar’s bed.

  Janwar tries to nod but all he manages is a slight inclination of his head, which means he can now see that Carla is standing in the doorway. His muscles feel like they belong to a housefly stuck in a glass of liquor. He can move his lips a bit. Air flows over them and strings of saliva connect his upper lip to his lower lip as his mouth parts.

  “Uh,” he says. His tongue feels dry and alien. “Thhhh,” he continues, the Hs dragging on far longer than he wants. He isn’t concerned and he isn’t troubled. That’s the nice thing about opiates. Chemicals can counteract pretty much any kind of thought pattern, especially blunt-force heavyweights like hydromorphone. He concentrates, trying to make his Jell-O mouth form one syllable at a time. “Thanks,” he manages, or something close to it that takes a long time to say. He closes his mouth again.

  Someone knocks on the door. “Never, Father,” Llew says. “He’s right as rain.”

  Llew turns back to Janwar.

  “I expect you figured out that the conflict between the Pushers and the Mixers isn’t just a matter of professional disagreement. But don’t fancy we’re a gang of ruffians. There are two reasons we ‘beef,’ as Fang puts it. First off, mixing drugs helps our patients. I wanted you on board because I heard you were beyond a dab hand with a syringe and I didn’t want the experimentation flattened out of you by the Pushers. I thought they’d leave you alone because you’re new, and that not telling you the whole story would protect you. The second reason is a larger political one.”

  “Mm?” Janwar manages. He’s conserving energy. He’ll form words again only when necessary.