Death and the Intern

by Jeremy Hanson-Finger

  Monday, July 14

  In the morning the glass on the counter is now full of a grey-brown liquor-fly slurry. The insect corpses under the Saran Wrap have started to decompose, but despite the presence of death, the trap keeps attracting more flies. Are they coming into Dr. Flecktarn’s unit just for the whisky now? Or for the other dead flies? Janwar commits the flies to a mass grave in the kitchen garbage and washes the glass. On his way out of the apartment, he throws the garbage bag down the chute. His phone tells him he has three missed calls from Ajay’s cellphone. He texts Ajay back Can’t talk now, sorry.

  6:30 am—New message from Ajay: That’s now. What about last night, huh?

  Janwar turns his phone off.

  As he approaches the hospital, his heart rate begins to climb. Last time he was here, only the quick action of the Mixers prevented Shaughnessy’s injecting Janwar with an unknown substance. The Irishman has already suckerpunched him, stomped him, and now tried to introduce a foreign agent into his bloodstream. Where will he escalate it next?

  Two police officers, a man and a woman, are speaking with one of the information-desk personnel as Janwar crosses the lobby. They stare at him unashamedly because they’re cops and he’s looking a little worse for wear, more like he should be lying on pale cotton than wearing it.

  Even though Janwar has broken very few laws in his life, having won a citizenship award and all, and even though Canadian police are miles away from, say, Haiti, on the corruption index, police officers still make him nervous. He can trace this feeling back to the time when he was eighteen and a Victoria police constable at a drunk-driving checkpoint stopped Janwar in Ajay’s Navigator. She asked for his driver’s licence, looked at it, then took a step back and put her hand on the butt of her 9 mm. Janwar can remember the woman’s name still, Constable Diane Phelps, from the adrenaline-spiked, hyper-aware moment during which he stared at her as she appraised him, before realizing that she had misread the beaten-up card, which Janwar had once dropped in a sewer grate and managed to rescue with a convenient branch, a couple of bulldog clips, and a piece of string. The constable thought it said “Jairam Aashish Gupta,” one of the three men who made up the notorious Gupta Brothers gang, when in fact it said, “Janwar Aashish Gupta.”

  The Gupta Brothers aren’t part of Janwar’s family, or if they are, they’re so far removed he hasn’t met them—and he’s met everyone, Garati has made sure of that—but he’d seen them at Hindu community events when he was a teenager, with their shiny SUVs and sports cars and bombshell girlfriends and sharp suits and expensive sunglasses, and he admired them. Ajay, in a rare display of social intelligence and good parenting, saw young Janwar coveting their chattel, animate and otherwise, and told him that the Gupta Brothers were criminals and that he, Janwar, could have all the same things they had by becoming a medical specialist, and that being a specialist came without the risk of getting shot in a crowded restaurant or while walking out of a mall or dancing in a club or doing anything else anywhere else, really.

  The presence of the police officers jacks up Janwar’s heart rate even more, and reminds him that Diego was brought into the hospital as the result of a crime. He turns his phone back on, swipes away the notifications for more messages from Ajay, and calls the police communications phone number to ask about Diego’s mugging.

  The communications officer isn’t going to be too scary to talk to. She just works there, and over the phone, she can’t point a gun at him.

  “Ottawa Police Service, Callie Sjostrom, speaking?”

  “I’m Ganesh Agrawal, a journalism student at Carleton,” Janwar lies. Ganesh was the first word that popped into his head. He always liked Ganesh, the elephant-headed god. If the God of Detectives had an animal head, what would it be? “Is there a public report about the mugging of Diego Acosta on July 9 that I can access?” Janwar says.

  “Is it a class assignment or something? You’re the second journalism student to call about this.”

  “Scooped again,” Janwar says. “Nuts!”

  “I’ve got the brief here,” Callie says. “Do you want me to email it to you?”

  Receiving an email is obviously not compatible with Janwar’s previous lie unless he’s able to sign up for a new email address before she sends the file—Janwar.Gupta@ubc.ca is pretty clearly not the email address of Ganesh Agrawal at Carleton. “Uh, if you have a minute can you just give me the Coles Notes?”

  “Sure. A man in a red hooded sweatshirt approached Mr. Acosta and asked him for money. He told the man he didn’t have any change. The man said he wasn’t asking and to hand over his wallet and cellphone. But as Mr. Acosta put his hand in his pocket to get his wallet out, he turned and saw another man with a baseball bat, also wearing a red hooded sweatshirt, was standing behind him. This second man smashed Mr. Acosta in the kneecaps. Then the first assailant held him down while the second took his wallet and cellphone, and then they left him on the ground and the two of them took off. A cab driver who turned the corner a few minutes later called 9-1-1. We’re encouraging people to call in if they witnessed anything.”

  Still seems like a straight-up mugging, but maybe that’s just what they want Janwar to think—whoever they are.

  Shaughnessy seems rather obviously to be the key to this whole thing, given his leadership role in both the beating and the OK Corral standoff. Janwar decides to follow the Irishman again. He did okay mano a mano with Shaughnessy when they sparred in the nightclub, he reassures himself. Both times Shaughnessy came out on top; he had the drop on Janwar. If Janwar follows him, the element of surprise should be on his side. But first he’s got patients to attend to. He returns to active service, inducing and intubating with his usual efficiency, though he’s still feeling a little light-headed, his forehead is tender, and his ribs ache dully. You can’t do anything about cracked ribs anyway, besides avoid strenuous exercise, and anaesthesiology isn’t a heavy-lifting-based profession.

  Both Karan and Victor are scheduled for one of Janwar’s operations this morning. Victor and Janwar are in the operating room alone. Even though he’s got no leverage on Victor, Janwar wings it. “Victor, about the other day, can I—”

  “I’ll give you one free answer: the anaesthesiologists killing my patients joke? Was a joke.”

  “But—”

  “That’s all. Our issue with the anaesthesiology department is personal. They’re insufferable. ‘You’d be nothing without us,’ they say. ‘Nothing but butchers.’ But we’re the ones doing what needs to be done. If you anaesthetize people and don’t perform surgery, that doesn’t get you anywhere. They just go to sleep for a while and when they wake up their femur is still sticking out of their leg.”

  Karan walks in.

  “If you conducted surgery without anaesthesia,” Victor continues, “the patient would be in a lot of pain, sure, but they’d have had the operation they needed. So, surgery trumps anaesthesiology.”

  Janwar opens his mouth.

  Victor holds up a hand. “Our personality conflict has got nothing to do with that man’s death. Don’t pull us into your little hard-boiled wonderland.” He turns away, removes something from his pocket, and dry-swallows it. Karan’s arms are crossed and the muscles in his biceps twitch underneath his scrubs.

  Karan sees him looking. “And anaesthesiologists are all about counterproductive drugs. It’s unprofessional. The only moral position is to take drugs to make you work faster and harder. Oxy just makes you boneless.” He scratches the edge of his turban.

  “And, coming full circle, if you’re so bored by what you do that you need downers to get through it, your job isn’t that important anyway,” Victor says.

  Victor turns back to his instruments. Karan does the same. With no cart to occupy himself with yet, Janwar studies the patient’s chart.

  Henry walks into the room pushing the anaesthesiology cart. He looks from one man to another. “Did I just interrupt concentration camp?” he rumbles.

  “Just give me the dam
n cart,” Janwar says. He swipes his tablet at it to unlock the drawer.

  Back in his taxi-driver disguise, his vision tinted blue by the amber sunglasses, Janwar follows Shaughnessy. This time Shaughnessy does leave the hospital. Janwar maintains twenty feet between them and makes sure to swing wide to stay in Shaughnessy’s moving blind spot as the man looks both ways before crossing the street, his shitty little fedora turning side to side to be sure that a red Miata and maroon Explorer will slow enough to let him through.

  Janwar waits for the two vehicles to pass and then darts across the street himself. A cyclist flying by skids her rear tire when she sees him, and Janwar feels a little bit bad about it, but it isn’t a safety issue, just a being-an-asshole issue. Shaughnessy doesn’t turn.

  Janwar lets a couple of people pass him to distance himself from Shaughnessy, though if Shaughnessy looks back, he’ll see Janwar’s head bobbing above them, like a hot-air balloon wearing a TVOntario hat.

  Shaughnessy speeds up and turns left on Irving. Janwar has to abandon his confident approach to shadowing and dive behind a newspaper box in order to avoid being seen. At least the traffic noise along Carling is loud and big trucks make the ground vibrate as they pass. One semi has spikes on its hubcaps like something out of Mad Max, which can’t possibly be legal, even in Quebec, which is where the truck’s licence plates say it’s from. The word Quebec tickles something in the back of Janwar’s mind…

  Now that they’re on a side street with trees and cars and elevation changes, Shaughnessy looks around furtively. He does this at every street and driveway crossing, and Janwar begins to enjoy finding pieces of cover to aim for, to plan his route like Billy in Family Circus with a series of dotted lines and vector changes. He lies prone next to a Dodge Caravan, dives into the shadow an elevated set of steps casts on a sun-browned lawn, crouches next to a garbage bin that smells like the intestinal flora of several dogs with diverse but equally unhealthy eating habits, and slides onto a park bench and scoops up an Ottawa Citizen (“Stephen Harper Close to Finding Lost Arctic Ship from Franklin Expedition”), as Shaughnessy tacks and leads Janwar down side streets. Turning left on Norman, Janwar is a little too slow to take cover, and Shaughnessy spots him, stiffening and breaking into a run before disappearing around the corner.

  Janwar stops. Maybe Shaughnessy is waiting for him, syringe in hand.

  If so—Janwar turns right, cuts through the alley next to Capital Cutlery Sharpening Ltd. East, hoping the fence will be vaultable without incurring too much damage to himself. The fence is chain-link with a hollow pipe across the top. Not barbed, not purposely sharp on top, but the pipe is affixed to the links with bands of metal. Janwar strips off his exterior pair of scrub pants and wraps them around his hands before taking a running jump at the fence.

  The last time Janwar examined a fence this intensely was when he was in Grade 9, freshly arrived at the senior school campus, and a few Grade 12s lured all the Grade 9s to the Nelly McClung Pavilion with the promise of a surprise, which turned out to be more, stronger Grade 12s who seized them and zip-tied their wrists to the fence.

  After his Grade 12 captors had released him and the rest of the future class of 2008 and trooped off to the headmaster’s office to face the music, Janwar and Nick had gone to the computer lab to research how to get out of zip ties. One method required having the presence of mind to hold your hands out in a certain way to be bound, another required your hands being bound together no matter the way and having the ability to raise your wrists above your head and then bring them down again as if you were trying to make your shoulder blades touch, and the final method required a second person who was able to reach your zip ties with a fingernail or credit card.

  He feels the pants tear, but they don’t catch, just rip right through. Metal brushes against his fingers, maybe drawing blood, but he’s already over the fence and running with Shaughnessy, who’s slowed down to a walk, in his sights.

  Shaughnessy stops in the parking lot of the Natural Resources Canada building. Janwar is now able to observe him from the bushes just around the corner of the south wing. Something furry rubs against Janwar’s leg, and he really hopes it’s a cat. By the time he looks down, it’s gone deep into the underbrush, but he thinks he catches a glimpse of a pink tail.

  Shaughnessy raises his phone to his ear and lowers it again.

  A Lincoln Continental with no front licence plate pulls up next to Shaughnessy. It’s matte black like the Trans Am of the Apocalypse.

  A familiar leather-jacketed Quebecker opens the door to let Shaughnessy in. Jacques. But Jacques is Horace’s patient? Regardless, Jacques doesn’t look happy. And Jacques was wearing a “1%” T-shirt in D’Arcy McGee’s. Meaning, Jacques is a Hells Angel, or a member of another motorcycle gang. A Bandido, or a Red Devil, or a Rock Machinist… But probably a Hells Angel. The Angels are so big, especially in Quebec, that they have a legitimate merch store that sued Zappos for copying their logo.

  The car purrs to life and swings out of the parking lot, revealing the Je me souviens license plate of la belle province. Janwar sprints around the corner and races after the Lincoln, trying to at least get an idea of where the car is going.

  A van cab pulls up alongside him. Janwar waves it down, slides into the back seat.

  “Where to?” Same company as last time, but the driver isn’t long tall Saleh.

  “Follow that—”

  “Hold on, guy. Are you police?”

  “I’m a doctor. Or, almost a doctor.”

  The cabbie shakes his head. “Not good enough. I have wife and kid in Bangladesh. No car chases for me. I’m not risking collision.” They’re at least going in the right direction, albeit very slowly. The Lincoln is idling at the corner of Rochester and Carling, waiting for the light.

  “I’ll pay,” Janwar says. “What do you want?” He doesn’t mean to have such a hard edge in his voice.

  “Don’t blow your short fuse at me, sir.”

  “The only reason I have a short fuse is because you cut it.” A bon mot lost on the driver.

  “You tell me somewhere to go, I take you there,” the cabbie says. His name card reads “Ahmid.” “But at my own law-abiding speed. Do you have any idea how much debt I took in order to own this car? I crash it, my wife and kid never come here.” The Lincoln swings right onto Carling.

  Janwar breathes in through his nose, which takes a long time on account of the pollen in the air having constricted his nostrils. “Okay, first you turn right on Carling.”

  “Nuh-uh,” the driver says. “I see what you’re doing. Tell me where you’re going and I decide how to get there.”

  Janwar makes a shaking-a-baby motion with his hands, then, abruptly, his adrenaline runs out. “Okay, just take me home.”

  Janwar needs to think through what had happened over the last couple of days, but now that he’s home it’s 9 p.m. and his brain is mush.

  He plugs his phone into Dr. Flecktarn’s speaker dock, skims through his library until he finds some calming, measured electronica, and shuffles into the kitchen, where he examines the flies hanging on to the cupboard doors and, at a loss for what else to do, gathers the materials to construct a second flytrap. There’s still a couple of inches of bourbon in the bottom of the old bottle of Wild Turkey. He doesn’t have to open the new one yet.

  Susan laughs. “What kind of drink requires Saran Wrap? Also, can I have one?”

  She’s sitting at the dining table, staring out the window into the darkness and playing with her lighter, flicking the flame into and out of life.

  “Jesus fuck.”

  Last time Janwar saw Susan, he got beaten to a pulp. Is Shaughnessy about to pop up and shit-kick him again? Will Susan try to injure him? Should he attempt to restrain her? How? He looks around wildly. With the cord from the vacuum cleaner? He’d have to cut it first. With a tea towel? It might not be long enough. And plus he’d be tying her up in a rapist’s apartment, the thought of which makes his stomach somersault
. His nervous system whines in his ears. He picks up the whisky bottle by the neck and brandishes the base at her. She can leave if she wants. He’s protecting himself in case Shaughnessy is here. No coercion is taking place. She is closer to the door than he is. He’s not blocking her way out.

  “Chill your boots. It’s just me.” She stands and turns her pockets out, holds her hands in front of her.

  Janwar peers into the other rooms. No Shaughnessy. “How did you get in?”

  “I told the super I was your girlfriend. I might have implied that we were looking for a third.”

  “With Giacomo? Ugh.”

  “If he knocks on the door later, just don’t let him in,” Susan says. “Now can I have that drink? It’s been a hell of a day.”

  Janwar shakes his head. “Why would you think that’s on the table?”

  “I’m a guest. People offer guests alcohol. I can see that you have some and that you were planning to drink it.”

  “I was planning to catch flies with it. Guests in general, sure. But specifically, you—why would I give you anything after you left me to get curb-stomped by Shaughnessy outside Babylon?”

  “Hold up, he came back?”

  “I ended up in a hospital bed with a concussion and cracked ribs. Among other injuries.”

  “I’m so sorry. I had no idea. He said he was just going to warn you off. But you’re okay now?”

  Janwar pulls up his shirt to show her the gash on his chest. “This’ll go away, but you never know about the long-term effects of concussions.”

  “Again, I’m really sorry,” Susan says. She looks genuinely concerned, but Janwar’s going to need a lot more information about what happened to decide if he can trust her.

  Susan must have at least some of that information and Janwar’s not in any apparent physical danger. Susan is also super attractive and doesn’t look disgusted by his bony, hairy chest. As long as he stays alert, it can’t hurt to keep talking, and to give Susan what she wants. “Whisky or rum?”