The Body Human

by Nancy Kress

  I said, “I’m sorry.”

  He turned. “Yeah, well, that was Vince, wasn’t it? He always came first with himself.”

  No, I could have said. God came first. And that’s how Bucky beat the J-24 withdrawal. Human bonds, whether forged by living or chemicals got torn down as much as built up. But you don’t have to live in a three-room apartment with God, fight about money with God, listen to God snore and fart and say things so stupid you can’t believe they’re coming out of the mouth of your beloved, watch God be selfish or petty or cruel. God was bigger than all that, at least in Bucky’s mind, was so big that He filled everything. And this time when God retreated from him, when the J-24 wore off and Bucky could feel the bonding slipping away, Bucky slipped along after it. Deeper into his own mind, where all love exists anyway.

  “The doctor said he might never come out of the catatonia,” Tom said. He was starting to get angry now, the anger of self-preservation. “Or he might. Either way, I don’t think I’ll be waiting around for him. He’s treated me too badly.”

  Not a long-term kind of guy, Tommy. I said, “But you never took J-24 yourself.”

  “No,” Tom said. “I’m not stupid. I think I’ll go home now. Thanks for coming, Gene. Good to meet you.”

  “You, too,” I said, knowing neither of us meant it.

  “Oh, and Vince said one more thing. He said to tell you it was, too, murder. Does that make sense?”

  “Yes,” I said. But not, I hoped, to him.

  After Tom left, I sat in the waiting room and pulled from my jacket the second package. The NYPD evidence sticker had torn when I’d jammed the padded mailer in my pocket.

  It was the original crime scene report for Lydia Smith and Giacomo della Francesca, the one Johnny Fermato must have known about when he sent me the phony one. This report was signed Bruce Campinella. I didn’t know him, but I could probably pick him out of a line-up from the brief tussle in Mulcahy’s: average height, brown hair, undistinguished looks, furious underneath. Your basic competent honest cop, still outraged at what the system had for sale. And for sale at a probably not very high price. Not in New York.

  There were only two photos this time. One I’d already seen: Mrs. Smith’s smashed body on the pavement below the nursing home roof. The other was new. Della Francesca’s body lying on the roof, not in his room, before the cover-up team moved him and took the second set of pictures. The old man lay face up, the knife still in his chest. It was a good photo; the facial expression was very clear. The pain was there, of course, but you could see the fury, too. The incredible rage. And then the grief and loss and anger…especially the anger that it’s over.

  Had della Francesca pushed Lydia Smith first, after that shattering quarrel that came from losing their special, unearthly union, and then killed himself? Or had she found the strength in her disappointment and outrage to drive the knife in, and then she jumped? Ordinarily, the loss of love doesn’t mean hate. Just how unbearable was it to have had a true, perfect, unhuman end to human isolation—and then lose it? How much rage did that primordial loss release?

  Or maybe Bucky was wrong, and it had been suicide after all. Not the anger uppermost, but the grief. Maybe the rage on della Francesca’s dead face wasn’t at his lost perfect love, but at his own emptiness once it was gone. He’d felt something so wonderful, so sublime, that everything else afterward fell unbearably short, and life itself wasn’t worth the effort. No matter what he did, he’d never ever have its like again.

  I thought of Samuel Fetterolf before he took J-24, writing everyone in his family all the time, trying to stay connected. Of Pete, straining every cell of his damaged brain to protect the memories of the old people who’d been kind to him. Of Jeff Connors, hanging onto Darryl even while he moved into the world of red Mercedes and big deals. Of Jenny Kelly, sacrificing her dates and her sleep and her private life in her frantic effort to connect to the students, who she undoubtedly thought of as “her kids.” Of Bucky.

  The elevator to the fifth floor was out of order. I took the stairs. The shift nurse barely nodded at me. It wasn’t Susan. In Margie’s room the lights had been dimmed and she lay in the gloom like a curved dry husk, covered with a light sheet. I pulled the chair closer to her bed and stared at her.

  And for maybe the first time since her accident, I remembered.

  Roll the window down, Gene.

  It’s fifteen degrees out there, Margie!

  It’s real air. Chilled like good beer. It smells like a goddamn factory in this car.

  Don’t start again. I’m warning you.

  Are you so afraid the job won’t kill you that you want the cigarettes to do it?

  Stop trying to control me.

  Maybe you should do better at controlling yourself.

  The night I’d found Bucky at Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrows, I’d been in control. It was Bucky who hadn’t. I’d crawled back in bed and put my arms around Margie and vowed never to see Bucky and his messy stupid dramas of faith ever again. Margie hadn’t been asleep. She’d been crying. I’d had enough hysteria for one night; I didn’t want to hear it. I wouldn’t even let her speak. I stalked out of the bedroom and spent the night on the sofa. It was three days before I’d even talk to her so we could work it out and make it good between us again.

  Have a great year! she’d said my first September at Benjamin Franklin. But it hadn’t been a great year. I was trying to learn how to be a teacher, and trying to forget how to be a cop, and I didn’t have much time left over for her. We’d fought about that, and then I’d stayed away from home more and more to get away from the fighting, and by the time I returned she was staying away from home a lot. Over time it got better again, but I don’t know where she was going the night she crossed Lexington with a bag of groceries in front of that ’93 Lincoln. I don’t know who the groceries were for. She never bought porterhouse and champagne for me.

  Maybe we would have worked that out, too. Somehow.

  Weren’t there moments, Gene, Bucky had said, when you felt so close to Margie it was like you crawled inside her skin for a minute? Like you were Margie? No. I was never Margie. We were close, but not that close. What we’d had was good, but not that good. Not a perfect merging of souls.

  Which was the reason I could survive its loss.

  I stood up slowly, favoring my knee. On the way out of the room, I took the plastic bottle of Camineur out of my pocket and tossed it in the waste basket. Then I left, without looking back.

  Outside, on Ninth Avenue, a patrol car suddenly switched on its lights and took off. Some kids who should have been at home swaggered past, heading downtown. I looked for a pay phone. By now, Jenny Kelly would be done delivering Darryl to his aunt, and Jeff Connors was going to need better than the usual overworked public defender. I knew a guy at Legal Aid, a hotshot, who still owed me a long-overdue favor.

  I found the phone, and the connection went through.

  THE MOUNTAIN TO MOHAMMED

  “A person gives money to the physician.

  Maybe he will be healed.

  Maybe he will not be healed.”

  —The Talmud

  When the security buzzer sounded, Dr. Jesse Randall was playing go against his computer. Haruo Kaneko, his roommate at Downstate Medical, had taught him the game. So far nineteen shiny black and white stones lay on the grid under the scanner field. Jesse frowned; the computer had a clear shot at surrounding an empty space in two moves, and he couldn’t see how to stop it. The buzzer made him jump.

  Anne? But she was on duty at the hospital until one. Or maybe he remembered her rotation wrong…

  Eagerly he crossed the small living room to the security screen. It wasn’t Anne. Three stories below a man stood on the street, staring into the monitor. He was slight and fair, dressed in jeans and frayed jacket with a knit cap pulled low on his head. The bottoms of his ears were red with cold.

  “Yes?” Jesse said.

  “Dr. Randall?” The voice was low and rough.r />
  “Yes.”

  “Could you come down here a minute to talk to me?”

  “About what?”

  “Something that needs talkin’ about. It’s personal. Mike sent me.”

  A thrill ran through Jesse. This was it, then. He kept his voice neutral. “I’ll be right down.”

  He turned off the monitor system, removed the memory disk, and carried it into the bedroom, where he passed it several times over a magnet. In a gym bag he packed his medical equipment: antiseptics, antibiotics, sutures, clamps, syringes, electromed scanner, as much equipment as would fit. Once, shoving it all in, he laughed. He dressed in a warm pea coat bought second-hand at the Army-Navy store and put the gun, also bought second-hand, in the coat pocket. Although of course the other man would be carrying. But Jesse liked the feel of it, a slightly heavy drag on his right side. He replaced the disk in the security system and locked the door. The computer was still pretending to consider its move for go, although of course it had near-instantaneous decision capacity.

  “Where to?”

  The slight man didn’t answer. He strode purposefully away from the building, and Jesse realized he shouldn’t have said anything. He followed the man down the street, carrying the gym bag in his left hand.

  Fog had drifted in from the harbor. Boston smelled wet and grey, of rotting piers and dead fish and garbage. Even here, in the Morningside Security Enclave, where that part of the apartment maintenance fees left over from security went to keep the streets clean. Yellow lights gleamed through the gloom, stacked twelve stories high but crammed close together; even insurables couldn’t afford to heat much space.

  Where they were going there wouldn’t be any heat at all.

  Jesse followed the slight man down the subway steps. The guy paid for both of them, a piece of quixotic dignity that made Jesse smile. Under the lights he got a better look: The man was older than he’d thought, with webbed lines around the eyes and long, thin lips over very bad teeth. Probably hadn’t ever had dental coverage in his life. What had been in his genescan? God, what a system.

  “What do I call you?” he said as they waited on the platform. He kept his voice low, just in case.

  “Kenny.”

  “All right, Kenny,” Jesse said, and smiled. Kenny didn’t smile back. Jesse told himself it was ridiculous to feel hurt; this wasn’t a social visit. He stared at the tracks until the subway came.

  At this hour the only other riders were three hard-looking men, two black and one white, and an even harder-looking Hispanic girl in a low-cut red dress. After a minute Jesse realized she was under the control of one of the black men sitting at the other end of the car. Jesse was careful not to look at her again. He couldn’t help being curious, though. She looked healthy. All four of them looked healthy, as did Kenny, except for his teeth. Maybe none of them were uninsurable; maybe they just couldn’t find a job. Or didn’t want one. It wasn’t his place to judge.

  That was the whole point of doing this, wasn’t it?

  The other two times had gone as easy as Mike said they would. A deltoid suture on a young girl wounded in a knife fight, and burn treatment for a baby scalded by a pot of boiling water knocked off a stove. Both times the families had been so grateful, so respectful. They knew the risk Jesse was taking. After he’d treated the baby and left antibiotics and analgesics on the pathetic excuse for a kitchen counter, a board laid across the non-functional radiator, the young Hispanic mother had grabbed his hand and covered it with kisses. Embarrassed, he’d turned to smile at her husband, wanting to say something, wanting to make clear he wasn’t just another sporadic do-gooder who happened to have a medical degree.

  “I think the system stinks. The insurance companies should never have been allowed to deny health coverage on the basis of genescans for potential disease, and employers should never have been allowed to keep costs down by health-based hiring. If this were a civilized country, we’d have national health care by now!”

  The Hispanic had stared back at him, blank-faced.

  “Some of us are trying to do better,” Jesse said.

  It was the same thing Mike—Dr. Michael Cassidy—had said to Jesse and Anne at the end of a long drunken evening celebrating the halfway point in all their residencies. Although, in retrospect, it seemed to Jesse that Mike hadn’t drunk very much. Nor had he actually said very much outright. It was all implication, probing masked as casual philosophy. But Anne had understood, and refused instantly. “God, Mike, you could be dismissed from the hospital! The regulations forbid residents from exposing the hospital to the threat of an uninsured malpractice suit. There’s no money.”

  Mike had smiled and twirled his glass between fingers as long as a pianist’s. “Doctors are free to treat whomever they wish, at their own risk, even uninsurables. Carter v. Sunderland.”

  “Not while a hospital is paying their malpractice insurance as residents, if the hospital exercises its right to so forbid. Janisson v. Lechchevko.”

  Mike laughed easily. “Then forget it, both of you. It’s just conversation.”

  Anne said, “But do you personally risk—”

  “It’s not right,” Jesse cut in—couldn’t she see that Mike wouldn’t want to incriminate himself on a thing like this?— “that so much of the population can’t get insurance. Every year they add more genescan pre-tendency barriers, and the poor slobs haven’t even got the diseases yet!”

  His voice had risen. Anne glanced nervously around the bar. Her profile was lovely, a serene curving line that reminded Jesse of those Korean screens in the expensive shops on Commonwealth Avenue. And she had lovely legs, lovely breasts, lovely everything. Maybe, he’d thought, now that they were neighbors in the Morningside Enclave…

  “Another round,” Mike had answered.

  Unlike the father of the burned baby, who never had answered Jesse at all. To cover his slight embarrassment—the mother had been so effusive—Jesse gazed around the cramped apartment. On the wall were photographs in cheap plastic frames of people with masses of black hair, all lying in bed. Jesse had read about this: It was a sort of mute, powerless protest. The subjects had all been photographed on their death beds. One of them was a beautiful girl, her eyes closed and her hand flung lightly over her head, as if asleep. The Hispanic followed Jesse’s gaze and lowered his eyes.

  “Nice,” Jesse said. “Good photos. I didn’t know you people were so good with a camera.”

  Still nothing.

  Later, it occurred to Jesse that maybe the guy hadn’t understood English.

  The subway stopped with a long screech of equipment too old, too poorly maintained. There was no money. Boston, like the rest of the country, was broke. For a second Jesse thought the brakes weren’t going to catch at all and his heart skipped, but Kenny showed no emotion and so Jesse tried not to, either. The car finally stopped. Kenny rose and Jesse followed him.

  They were somewhere in Dorchester. Three men walked quickly toward them and Jesse’s right hand crept toward his pocket. “This him?” one said to Kenny.

  “Yeah,” Kenny said. “Dr. Randall,” and Jesse relaxed.

  It made sense, really. Two men walking through this neighborhood probably wasn’t a good idea. Five was better. Mike’s organization must know what it was doing.

  The men walked quickly. The neighborhood was better than Jesse had imagined: small row houses, every third or fourth one with a bit of frozen lawn in the front. A few even had flower boxes. But the windows were all barred, and over all hung the grey fog, the dank cold, the pervasive smell of garbage.

  The house they entered had no flower box. The steel front door, triple-locked, opened directly into a living room furnished with a sagging sofa, a TV, and an ancient daybed whose foamcast headboard flaked like dandruff. On the daybed lay a child, her eyes bright with fever.

  Sofa, TV, headboard vanished. Jesse felt his professional self take over, a sensation as clean and fresh as plunging into cool water. He knelt by the bed and smiled. The g
irl, who looked about nine or ten, didn’t smile back. She had a long, sallow, sullen face, but the long brown hair on the pillow was beautiful: clean, lustrous, and well-tended.

  “It’s her belly,” said one of the men who had met them at the subway. Jesse glanced up at the note in his voice, and realized that he must be the child’s father. The man’s hand trembled as he pulled the sheet from the girl’s lower body. Her abdomen was swollen and tender.

  “How long has she been this way?”

  “Since yesterday,” Kenny said, when the father didn’t answer.

  “Nausea? Vomiting?”

  “Yeah. She can’t keep nothing down.”

  Jesse’s hands palpated gently. The girl screamed.

  Appendicitis. He just hoped to hell peritonitis hadn’t set in. He didn’t want to deal with peritonitis.

  “Bring in all the lamps you have, with the brightest-watt bulbs. Boil water—” He looked up. The room was very cold. “Does the stove work?”

  The father nodded. He looked pale. Jesse smiled and said, “I don’t think it’s anything we can’t cure, with a little luck here.” The man didn’t answer.

  Jesse opened his bag, his mind racing. Laser knife, sterile clamps, scaramine—he could do it even without nursing assistance provided there was no peritonitis. But only if…The girl moaned and turned her face away. There were tears in her eyes. Jesse looked at the man with the same long, sallow face and brown hair. “You her father?”

  The man nodded.

  “I need to see her genescan.”

  The man clenched both fists at his side. Oh, God, if he didn’t have the official printout…Sometimes, Jesse had read, uninsurables burned them. One woman, furious at the paper that would forever keep her out of the middle class, had mailed hers, smeared with feces, and packaged with a plasticene explosive, to the President. There had been headlines, columns, petitions…and nothing had changed. A country fighting for its very economic survival didn’t hesitate to expend front-line troops. If there was no genescan for this child, Jesse couldn’t use scaramine, that miracle immune-system booster, to which about 15 percent of the population had a fatal reaction. Without scaramine, under these operating conditions, the chances of post-operation infection were considerably higher. If she couldn’t take scaramine…