Writer, M.D.

by Leah Kaminsky

And the Dean had a contact at Kranfield Pharmaceuticals, and here you are.

  And out comes the new piroxicam derivative, so where are the marmosets? But this time it’s Labradors. And they wag their tails when you feed them something munchy after giving them forty times the recommended human dose of the drug. You know you have to do this, you know that people can’t be the first. But what about Rowan, AB, Wozza, Nataly, and the rest? All so happy to see you in the morning.

  You exercise them vigorously twice a day to maximize opportunities for wear and tear. Periodically, you X-ray their knees. Eventually, you will look at the tissues of their knee joints under a microscope, administering various stains to assess progression of disease, or degree of cartilage preservation.

  One night, in a dream, you set them free. All of them. You see them bounding through the night with knees glowing from numerous X-rays. Wafting silently into the distance like a blissful cloud of fireflies. And you are alone. There is an unpleasant smell, and a fart cracks the night like a walnut, and Robert is beside you. Questioning you. Oozing again. You depress his tongue with a spatula and pump in several liters of the drug, which then sets like concrete. His face goes red and he looks over your shoulder, grunting with some discomfort. In the enormous effort to shit he splits in two, the last thing to collapse into the rubble his bewildered puffed-up face.

  But you are unlikely to do the world this much good in your entire life. You are a known killer of marmosets, about to move on to animals that actually like you.

  On the bus into the city, you would tell people, explain yourself. Explain that you are doing it for them. But striking up a conversation about marmosets, your marmosets, or even your Labradors, would be as welcome as telling them how much better your life has been since you met Jesus. And offering them some helpful literature. A woman once did this to you on a bus, and then she hit you for a donation. So now if anyone says hi you just look straight ahead. No one says hi.

  You change buses in town. In the second bus, too, no one says hi. People talk only to people they already know, so you have no chance to unburden yourself, or to make any religious purchases. The bus works its way through the commuter traffic, and the passengers, who all appear to be students, are talking about their distaste for eight o’clock lectures and their plans to seek extensions for assignments. And you want to tell them about the real world. You want to tell them that when they were born someone might have cut their tongues out to check the fat pads. But no one did, and they don’t know how lucky they are.

  But one or two of them do look a little like marmosets. And you imagine that the bus is rocking along a lonely dirt road late at night and you are a prisoner of the marmosets. And they look at you with those eyes again. They turn and they look at you over the seats and they say nothing. They show you their empty mouths, they show you they have no tongues, and they never take their eyes off you. Dozens of them. You find an old pamphlet pushed down next to the seat. You pull it out as though it might distract them, and you say, Jesus anyone?

  At this moment, you realize you are holding an empty barbecue-chip packet between the heads of the two students sitting in front of you. They decline politely, as if it is clear to them you are disturbed, but not dangerous. They move up to the front of the bus to tell their friends about the madman who just offered them Cheezels from an empty barbecue-chip packet. There is considerable laughter at your expense. Students are like that. Despite the embarrassment, you are not glad when your stop arrives.

  At morning tea, you crunch through a plateful of the hard, wheaty biscuits of which you have grown fond, and real life doesn’t hold too many answers.

  And Robert doesn’t make things any easier. He’s becoming even more territorial, even more protective of what he’s doing. Less willing to let you into his office, even though access to the computer is essential to your work. He sits in the corner scratching himself, grumbling under his breath, making smells. And you are glad to enter your data and leave.

  You tell him you should wait a good time before killing the dogs, or the work will have little value. You’re not going soft are you? he says. You wouldn’t catch me going soft. And he laughs a hoarse laugh and he bares his teeth. He is a compendium of unpleasant habits, and they’re only getting worse.

  You return to the exercise yard to run the dogs. They’re pleased to see you. They jump up to you, paw you like drunk friends, sniff your pockets for biscuits, start raising their own doubts with you, like, why are we here? Does all this, this life thing, have any meaning? And you tell them they have been chosen. For what? they ask. Not unreasonably. Well, this is basically a holiday camp, a sort of Club Med thing, lots of team activities, you tell them. And they’ve won a prize, each of them, and the prize is that they get to spend a very long holiday here. Three meals a day and plenty of exercise and fun. And you tell them you have to return to work now, and you go inside.

  You notice a calendar and realize it’s a long time since you took your worm tablets. You pop two from a blister pack, and you mix them in with a bowl of appetizing soft food and devour it enthusiastically. But of course you then spit the tablets back into the bowl, and get fairly pissed off with yourself. You’ve never been good with tablets.

  You mix up the next few days’ worth of the drug, at a higher dose now for some of the dogs. And you aren’t happy about this, but it tastes OK.

  The next day is someone’s birthday, so you all bring along lunch. One of the others has brought soy chicken wings, a known favorite of Robert’s. He watches you all as he pulls the flesh from the bones, watches you all ’cause he knows you want it too. And then he crunches the bones, but in his haste starts spluttering, coughing, turning purplish. Some dickhead hits him in the back and he coughs up the bone fragment, turns pinkish again, drools quietly with relief.

  The man is a shit, and you’d like nothing more than to see him whitening by the roadside, crumbling into powder, slowly dissipated by the wind.

  You have a bit of a doze after lunch, and when you wake you give yourself a good going over with a stiff brush. And you feel all shiny and clean, even though the others don’t notice.

  And Rowan’s not looking well. He makes it clear he’s feeling distinctly queasy, and he wonders if it’s what you’re pumping into him. It could be just the birthday lunch, you tell him. Labradors can eat too much too quickly and not feel the best. But he was feeling sick before lunch. He didn’t eat any lunch. Let’s see how it goes, you say, there’s a bit of it around and in fact I’m not feeling so well myself. And you feel your nose, just to show you’re monitoring things. Rowan really isn’t looking well, and he goes for a lie down.

  It’s hard to concentrate on your work after this. After you haven’t even bothered to come up with a good lie for him. Surely he’s worth more than this, you tell yourself. And you really don’t feel well and you want to go home for the afternoon. You’d tell Robert about it, but he’s pacing up and down in his office, basically grumbling and scratching himself, and he’s obviously anxious about something. He’s tugging at his uncomfortable shirt and you notice how old and worn the collar looks. And he scratches under his arms and he scratches his flanks and he scratches behind his ears.

  So you just go home.

  The next morning is one of those mornings when you wake up feeling as though you’ve copped a bait, and you’re off your breakfast and you head for work with no enthusiasm whatsoever.

  And Rowan’s cage is empty. Big, happy Rowan. One of the others tells you he started throwing up blood during the night, and no one came when they called for help, and it didn’t last long. And Robert’s somewhere with his knee joints, and he’s not very happy. This could bugger up the whole thing. It’s not the result the company wants at all. Great knees maybe, but not a great drug if the patient’s dead.

  And Robert will have to hold someone responsible for this. And even though you stuck strictly to protocol, you know it will be you.

  You are told he wants to see you at five, when al
l the others have gone. And at five, all the others go, and it’s no use curling up in the corner on your blanket whimpering.

  You hear his feet on the lino, his heavy panting breathing, smell that Robert smell. He snarls at you with contempt when he sees you cowering there, growls cruelly. And you know he’s offering you only one way out.

  You back across the room and he follows you, checking your ineffectual moves to escape, growling ever more menacingly. And you back into the empty Dog One cage and he shuts the wire door. He prowls around the cage, obviously tense, and you sit in the basket looking pathetic and making inadvertent whining noises. He comes right up to the wire, shows you all his teeth, backs off again. His smell is suffocating. Before he leaves, to make his position clear, he squats at the cage door, his face goes bulge-eyed and distant, and he drops a large shit to the lino floor.

  He laughs at you with heavy, wet breathing, and he clatters off down the hallway.

  And as you wait for the morning, a morning meaning a heavy, pasty dose of the piroxicam derivative, a bowl of something crunchy, and more exercise than you’re used to, Robert bounds through the night, baying at the moon in anger and triumph.

  He stops, to concentrate hard on another shit, and as he lets it go, feels that calm feeling of letting it go, he is clubbed from behind by the proprietor of a nearby Chinese restaurant who is finding the going tough in these times of recession, and needs to come by his Mongolian lamb through other than conventional means.

  He drags the body onto the back of his ute, making sure not to step in the shit, which over the following several months whitens by the roadside, crumbles into powder, and is slowly dissipated by the wind.

  And in his absence, and with a number of the dogs developing side effects, the new molecule is abandoned, the experiment erased, and you end up with a nice family in the suburbs. And in summer they take you to their holiday house at the coast, where you run on the beach for hours. And at sunset you jump and snap, but only playfully, at the fireflies.

  The Duty to Die Cheaply

  PETER GOLDSWORTHY

  “If there is a doctor on board the aircraft, please identify yourself by pressing the attendant call-button. I repeat …”

  Heads craned all along the cabin: Who needed a doctor? And where? Dr. Philip Shaw—3A, Business Class—craned his head for one reason only: in the hope that a better Samaritan might reach up for the call-button first. How long could he decently wait? He was out of practice—epidemiology left no time for the sharpening of clinical skills. Worse, he had been drinking. The announcement ended abruptly, the river Vivaldi flowed again through his headphones—Light Classics, Channel 4, Inflight Entertainment. He rapidly drained his third complimentary scotch and glanced at his watch: the second hand slipped a cog, then another. Worst-case scenario: cardiac arrest, four minutes to brain death. Could he afford to wait even one more second? He had waited no more than five when an attendant leaned in over him, clutching a passenger manifest.

  “Doctor Shaw? Doctor Philip Shaw.”

  He lifted his hand and pressed the call-button above his head, absurdly, automatically. The red call-light glowed, fingering him publicly. You got me. His neighbors in Business—charcoal suits and silvered heads mostly—turned and examined him; he tried not to make eye contact.

  “I’ll come quietly,” he said.

  The cabin attendant was all whispered, suppressed agitation. “Doctor, one of the passengers is rather unwell. If you could follow me, please …”

  He rose immediately and followed her back into Economy, running a gauntlet of stares that was definitely more judgmental than up front. 25C, aisle seat. The victim—male, overweight, gray-pepper beard—appeared terrifyingly still. The two adjacent seats had been emptied; the ejected passengers stood in the entrance to the rear galley, trying not to watch, yet of course watching. The purser—a painstakingly groomed older woman who had earlier fetched Philip his scotches—was bent over the victim, pressing a mask to his face. A young male attendant was wrestling with the valve of an oxygen cylinder. The cylinder distracted Philip momentarily; it seemed for some reason to have been designed according to aerodynamic principles, a tiny version of the aircraft itself, clean-lined and slender, lacking only wings.

  “This is Mr. Brice, Doctor,” the purser said.

  The victim was long past introductions. He was also past oxygen. Kneeling in the aisle, Philip checked the neck pulses—absent. A clammy sweat covered the brow—heart attack, almost certainly. The pupils were fixed and dilated.

  Various emotions washed through him, among them a definite gust of relief. The late Mr. Brice had been dead for some time, well before the intercom’s first summons.

  He reached across and gently twisted shut the oxygen valve. His eyes met the purser’s; she held his gaze.

  “His neighbor thought he was asleep,” she said, simply.

  Philip stepped back into the aisle, made superfluous by death. The routines of the cabin crew which followed seemed well practiced: the seat was reclined, the seat belt lengthened and buckled about the victim’s big body, the two flaccid hands placed carefully in his lap. Lastly, the head, face, and upper torso were draped with a cabin blanket.

  The woman in the row immediately in front of the dead man—a young, harried mother, traveling with two small girls—turned, disbelieving. “You’re going to leave him there?”

  The purser’s tone was smooth and soothing. “Space is at a premium, madam. There is the galley, but—you will understand—health regulations forbid …”

  Busy with her daughters, the woman may or may not have heard the reply. “I said face the front, Simone!”

  Philip had a jokey, slightly drunk suggestion: “Is there room on the flight deck?”

  The purser affected not to hear. He was tempted to try again—some variation on flying on autopilot—but the words would not quite come together. Those quickfire scotches on an empty stomach were beginning to fuzz his brain. He needed a fourth.

  “Well, if there’s nothing else I can do.”

  It seemed there was. The purser plucked at his sleeve, subtly detaining him.

  “Doctor, I realize it’s an imposition, but the flight is fully booked, and it would be a great help if you would agree to sit with the, ah, patient.”

  Philip stared into her face, surprised for the first time that day, though not unpleasantly. The unexpected had become a rare commodity in recent years; he was learning to savor it.

  “You want me to sit with a dead man?”

  “Just for the remaining minutes of the flight.”

  He glanced at his watch. “That would be … ninety remaining minutes? Give or take.”

  He felt loosened by the whisky, even a little reckless, but the purser remained unfazed.

  “Doctor, please. We could hardly expect someone, ah, inexperienced, to sit with the deceased.”

  Philip glanced about the cabin. Fait accompli: the two displaced passengers had vanished forward, a Business Class upgrade, at his expense.

  He squeezed in past the fat, shrouded body—no simple matter—and eased himself into the window seat.

  “There might be an undertaker on board,” he said to the purser, lightheartedly. “Perhaps you could make an announcement.”

  “Please, Doctor. If you could fasten your seat belt.”

  The purser vanished, but the attendant who had earlier summoned him from Business Class was now leaning in, a younger woman wearing a fixed, cheery smile, her hair tugged back into the tightest of plaits.

  “Can I get you anything, Doctor?”

  “Flyspray?”

  Her smile remained cheery, as if tethered by the same tight drawstrings that bound back her hair.

  “Sorry,” he excused himself. “But if you don’t laugh, you cry.”

  The woman in 24C turned her head again.

  “Excuse me, but I’d like to change seats. I really don’t think my children can be expected to sit here in front of that poor man.”

 
; “I’ll see what I can do,” the attendant promised. “I’ll have a scotch,” Philip got in before she left. “And my valise, please.”

  “Of course, Doctor.”

  “In the overhead locker. 3A.”

  More whisky arrived, a jug of water, ice, and a whispered apology to the concerned-mother-of-two, “There is simply no other seating available, madam.”

  Philip unscrewed the mini-bottle—Johnny Walker, Black Label, nothing special—and drank it neat. The first shot burnt his mouth pleasantly, the next smoked down into his chest, relaxing him deeply, and somehow warming his heart en route. His cold heart, according to some. He smiled over the intervening shroud at a young woman seated across the aisle; she glanced away.

  “Another?” he waved the little empty bottle, trying to catch the attendant’s eye, but now she was pushing the lunch trolley, working backward, row by row, offering meal trays. As she neared the rear of the cabin there appeared to be fewer takers.

  “Would you care for some lunch, madam?”

  “Hardly!” the woman in 24C said.

  “And the children?”

  “They’re not hungry, either.”

  “But, Mum—”

  “Hush. We’ll have something at Grandma’s.”

  “But I’m hungry.”

  The trolley rolled on.

  “I don’t suppose you will be wanting any lunch, Doctor?”

  He looked up into that determined smile. “In fact, yes,” he said. “Please. And some wine.”

  She handed him a shrink-wrapped plastic tray, reaching across high above the body. He handed it back.

  “Business Class,” he reminded her.

  Her smile remained cryptic, but there was something in the eyes: definite distaste. Was it the company he was keeping? He smiled to himself, amused by his own private joke.

  “And might I have another scotch while I wait?”

  She passed down another Johnny Walker, topped his jug of water and plastic cup of ice, then wheeled her trolley past. The purser arrived shortly with the menu card, and—reaching across the shrouded body with difficulty—set a starched linen napkin on his lap. The card seemed difficult to read for some reason, hard to bring into focus, but he chose the fish—barramundi—and the sauvignon blanc, and when the food arrived ate hungrily enough, the flow of digestive juices released, as always, by alcohol. Pots of coffee were offered about as he tucked into the crème caramel, the passengers in the vicinity of the body once again refusing to partake.