“Thank you, sir,” said Simon.
“That having been said,” said Armbruster, leaning forward even further, “I need you to stop describing to our potential customers, in gruesome detail, how you’re planning on going to Africa and getting eaten by a lion.”
“Lions,” corrected Simon, politely.
“My point,” said Armbruster, “remains a salient one.”
“I see,” said Simon, biting his lip. “‘Gruesome’ detail, though, sir?” he asked, then. “I mean, I realize that I’ve been a bit chatty on the fact to some of them, but—”
Armbruster reached beneath his desk and produced a portable cassette player. He clicked at a button. “—organ meats!” came Simon’s voice. “Not as desirable as the muscle meats, mind you, which are frequently claimed by the dominant male of the pride, but certainly full of good, nutritious—”
Armbruster clicked the ‘stop’ button.
The clock on the desk ticked a handful of times.
“Well…yes,” said Simon. “I can see where you might—”
“I don’t know if I’m imparting the proper gravity to this situation, Simon,” Mr. Armbruster interrupted. “So I will make it perfectly clear to you that I have no desire to see Consolidated Amalgamated Mutual become known as ‘That Place With The Guy Who’s Always Going On About Lions.’ To this end, I am warning you that I absolutely, positively will not tolerate any further behavior of this sort. Do we understand one another, Mister Pfennig?”
“Mm hm!” said Simon, cheerily.
Armbruster narrowed his eyes at Simon. “Let me try this again,” he said, picking up a pencil in an attempt to add emphasis to his words. “We are talking about you losing your job with us, Simon. You don’t want to be unemployed in this city. Not in this economic climate. Trust me.”
Simon nodded brightly. “I understand, sir,” he said.
“You don’t seem like you understand,” said Mr. Armbruster. “I’m looking for a little solemnity or something.”
Simon pondered for a moment. “Permission to speak freely, sir?”
“This isn’t the military, Simon,” said Mr. Armbruster.
“Well,” said Simon. He gathered himself. “The thing is, sir, it’s really hard for me to get worked up at the prospect of losing my job, sir.” He raised a hand against Armbruster’s objection. “Now, I don’t mean that,” he continued. “I will try to restrain myself from talking about my lions to the customers from here on in. But if I can’t…?” Simon shrugged. “Well, another job will be on the way. After all, I have to fund my African safari somehow.” He smiled. “These are more than just idle hopes and dreams now, Mister Armbruster,” he said. “They’re part of my destiny.”
Armbruster regarded Simon for a moment, then shook his head. “You are a strange little guy,” said Armbruster. “If you were any less of a salesman, I’d be handing you your pink slip now and personally ushering your behind out of this building while I instructed Stacy to prepare an invoice charging you for the milk ball. But for every lion mutilation story I’ve got on tape, there’re two or more instances of you winning over a stubborn customer on attitude alone. And that’s the kind of attitude we need around here. Desperately.”
“‘Desperately’, sir?” inquired Simon.
Armbruster tapped his pencil on the desk a couple of times. “I don’t know if I should even be talking with you about this,” he said. “According to the last Board of Directors meeting, Consolidated Amalgamated Mutual isn’t doing so well. It’s not bad,” he added, quickly. “But comparing our first-quarter sales to how we were doing two years ago, well, it’s sobering. To say the least. And that’s company-wide, Simon. It’s not just Targeted Media Solicitation. It’s across the board.”
He sighed, deeply, and tossed his pencil back into the little cup on his desk. “It’s this damn Machine of Death thing, Simon,” he said. “We’re in the uncertainty business, here. All we’ve got to offer the world is protection against the frightening, unpredictable future. You give the people something, anything, to latch on to, something that gives them a sense of control—even a false one—and suddenly, well, they don’t need us anymore.”
“I’m sure we’ll come through this all right,” Simon volunteered.
“Oh, I know,” said Armbruster, pushing his chair back and rising to a stand. “I know. We weathered that damn ‘no-call list’ thing all right, and I suppose we’ll pull through this, too.” Armbruster rounded the desk and patted Simon on the back; Simon stood, sensing his cue. “But to do it,” said Armbruster, “we’re going to need all our salesmen giving us one hundred and ten, or perhaps fifteen, percent. Can you do that for me, Simon?”
“Yes, sir!” said Simon.
“Good,” said Armbruster, ushering him to the door. “Now get back out there and sell us some policies, all right?”
“Will do, sir!” said Simon, disappearing out the door.
“And NO LIONS!” added Mr. Armbruster, calling after him. But if Simon Pfennig had a response to this, Mr. Armbruster did not hear it.
He sat back against the corner of his desk for a while after Simon had gone, listening to the whirr of the air-handler and the steady ticking of the clock.
“Wish I were looking forward to my heart attack like that,” said Mr. Armbruster.
Night. Home. Simon stood at the sink, washing the last few remnants of tonight’s dinner of lamb and parmesan orzo out of his good dishes. In fact, Simon only had good dishes, nowadays. He had long since donated the bad ones, and even the slightly dodgy ones, to the local thrift shop. The window over his sink was open to the cool night air, and the crickets outside yammered excitedly among themselves, unable to contain their enthusiasm that evening had arrived again, right on schedule. The dishes had been a bit crusty, as they had been left sitting for several hours, and it felt good to Simon to get them all cleaned up. Easier, perhaps, to have tackled them right after dinner, but Simon had run out of time to wash them before his show had come on the television, and the show took clear precedence because it happened to be all about lions tonight. Simon had, naturally, enjoyed every minute of it.
And Simon knew how ridiculous this all must seem, this arrangement of his entire life around the concept of being Torn Apart And Devoured By Lions. Particularly ridiculous, he felt, was the poster (lionesses, of course) he had tacked to the ceiling—preteen-girl style— right above his bed, so it’d be the last thing he saw at night every night of his life. The lion-themed comforter, too, he knew, went a bit beyond the pale. But really, honestly? The whole thing. Ridiculous.
And, as always, Simon had to conclude that there really was no choice.
It was just too exciting.
The dishes done and dripping in their wire rack, Simon moved on to an invigorating workout on the shiny new exercise bicycle he’d purchased at the mall, and from there on to a relaxing shower. Thusly cleaned up for bed, Simon dressed himself in his lion-print pajamas, snuggled down beneath his leonine blankets, and waited for sleep to come. And, as ever, the last sight that greeted him before he finally shut off his bedside lamp was of his lionesses, all in a row, waiting patiently for him and him alone.
At night he dreamed of them, low and tawny, their eyes luminous in the charcoal African dusk. He welcomed them to him like he might a lover, inviting them in to the limits of his light, inviting them to feed.
“Come, beautiful ones,” he whispered to them as they circled close. “Come.”
Story by Jeffrey Wells
Illustration by Christopher Hastings
DESPAIR
THEY DIED ANYWAY. Of course they did, that’s what those little cards are good for. The security guards here have a league table of the most impressive death predictions reported in the UK press: “The Cool List,” they call it. They got me to phone the doctor whose machine predicted that an eighty-three-year-old bedridden Cardiff woman would die of STUNT PLANE CRASH. I used to feel sick looking at the list, because for a moment a bit inside me would laug
h in wonder at the improbabilities written there, and then the moment would pass and I would begin to imagine the Cessna tumbling from the sky, falling down, down, down onto a slate roof under which an old lady was sleeping. The top of the list at the moment is SOLAR FLARE. I have no idea how that one will turn out.
The first one came in twenty-one hours ago, just as I’d started my shift. In the early morning the emergency waiting room was intolerably bright, and I squinted out of the windows—clean enough at midday, but blindingly dirty against the low sun. The call that the ambulance was coming in had been taken by the guy who’d just gone off shift, and I didn’t really know what to expect. In theory there is supposed to be some kind of chain of responsibility to keep us all prepared, but in practice, doctors have long shifts and want to go home more than they want to tell you that a middle-aged man is coming in suffering from severe pain and passing blood in his urine.
This is the procedure now: A vehicle comes into the bay, paramedics pull a body out on an unfolding trolley, and a nurse meets them and asks them for the card. Sometimes she smiles, and you know that this one might well walk out of the hospital. Sometimes she gets a stony look on her face and you know that her eyes have flicked across to the patient to see who’s going to die. Sometimes—rarely, but sometimes—she frowns. As Nurse Kealing did with that first one.
We doctors don’t like to look at the cards. Once upon a time all doctors sounded like Hawkeye Pierce. Death was our enemy, and if you can’t point to your enemy, your crusade is noble. You are fighting against the odds, snatching a few more years, months, weeks of life for your patients, defeating your endless foe. But of course, we don’t fight that fight anymore. We fight a stiff piece of card, and we know that ultimately we are going to lose. What could be more ignominious than to be defeated by a few grams of wood pulp?
I examined the patient. Late forties, according to the driving license that the paramedics had found, but looking like he might be in his thirties. I had seen people like him at the speed-dating evening the previous Friday, divorcees taking their shot while they still had the time, boring and desperate. He could so easily have been there, and as I directed him to be moved into a nearby observation room I suddenly felt sorry for them. They were alive, and they deserved their chance at a little happiness.
“Marianne,” Nurse Kealing said, by my elbow. The other doctors don’t like to be called by their first name, but I let the nurses do it because it endears me to them, and they don’t complain as much when I land them with paperwork that I should really be doing myself (which I do shamelessly).
“What’s the verdict?” I asked her.
“I…uh…” She held out the card to me, and I know that I recoiled, because I haven’t touched a card other than my own in five years. “You’d better look for yourself.”
I stared at the card without reaching for it, and Nurse Kealing flipped it up so that I could see.
TESTS.
“Shit.” I ran back to the doors that lead to the ambulance parking area. The two paramedics that had brought in my patient were trying to manoeuvre out past another ambulance, and as I cleared the doors the driver spotted me and leant on his horn in an effort to scare the other vehicle out of the way. I was too fast for them, though, ducking around the accidental roadblock and intercepting one ambulance as it swerved around the back of the other. They screeched to a halt a few feet in front of me, and I strode over and pulled open the door.
“Before you ask, we didn’t do any tests!” The paramedic in the passenger seat cried. The driver, who looked afraid for his life (and in truth I felt myself like pulling him out of his seat and beating him), cringed away from me and nodded.
“You’d better not have,” I snarled, and slammed the door shut.
We could barely do anything without the tests, of course. For two hours after he was brought in we watched my patient get weaker and weaker. He passed blood in his urine, but we were too scared to take even that for analysis. That is what the machines have done to us: they’ve left us second-guessing reality. We gave him an analgesic to keep him as comfortable as possible, but we all knew that we were not dealing with something that would pass if we treated the obvious symptoms. Something was wrong with him—injury, possibly, more likely a viral or bacterial infection—something that would kill him. But if we tried to discover what was wrong and he died, we would be outside the NHS rules. Clause 14 of the revised patients’ charter: Medical staff or hospital trust employees will take no action likely to hasten or lead to a predicted death.
“Realistically,” Nurse Kealing argued, “there’s no way that testing the blood in his urine can kill him, surely?”
“You know what those fucking machines are like,” Doctor Jamison said, shaking his head. “You could trip while carrying the test results back in and stab the poor bastard with a needle.” He leaned down and reached for the sheet covering our patient.
“What are you doing?” I asked sharply.
“Nothing.”
“It doesn’t look like nothing,” I told him.
“I’m taking a look, all right? A look, not a fucking test, a look!” I stepped back, and he peered under the sheet at the patient’s back. After a few seconds, he stood up again. “Kidneys rather than bladder, definitely.”
“So it’s going to kill him,” I said.
“Yes,” he said, in a quiet flat voice.
The second and third ones came in almost together, although I didn’t know about the second one until much later. I found out about the third one from Doctor France, who saw me standing at the vending machine in the lobby. I was deciding whether to have a Crunchy or a packet of Nik Naks, and had been trapped in that decision-making process for three minutes. Perhaps I wanted to make a difference to something, however trivial.
“Hello Marianne,” he said. “Are you doing anything tomorrow night?”
“Going out with my boyfriend,” I lied. I don’t have a boyfriend. I occasionally fuck one of our security guards in the supply closet –an ex-policeman who was fired because his card read SHOT. The Northampshire police force have one of the lowest reported incidents of gun crime in the UK, and it would have been a terrible public relations blow to have a policeman shot on duty. I like him because he keeps himself in shape, and because he has an ex-wife and a child who take up all the emotional energy that he would otherwise spend developing feelings for me.
Doctor France flinched. Perhaps he knows, I thought.
“Anyway,” he said, plastering on a smile. “I’ve got something a bit interesting, thought you might enjoy wrestling with a little problem. We’ve got a young woman in with blood in her urine, probably simple urinary tract infection.” An ice sheet spread out from my spine. “Thing is, her card says…”
“TESTS,” I interrupted him.
He looked at me quizzically.
“How did you know?”
Patient Two was in a room at the other end of the ward, being treated by one of the junior doctors. Patients Four and Five we found by calling the emergency admissions at Kettering, and Patient Six, a thin middle-aged woman in old clothes, came in a few hours later. I could see instantly that she could understand the way things were headed, because she was arguing strenuously in Italian with her husband and in somewhat less eloquent English with the two grown-up daughters that accompanied them. She wanted to go home, and she must have understood what we did, that her devoted family’s wish to help might be the death of her.
We gave her painkillers and I talked to them, individually and as a group. But for bad timing I think she would have persuaded them to let her go home, but about a quarter of an hour after they arrived, I noticed that she was beginning to fade somewhat, and five minutes later she fell unconscious. At that point we had to give her the same care we were giving the others, and we moved all four of the local patients into the same ward. Doctors France and Jamison argued endlessly with me over the treatments we could give, but all of our arguments came to nothing.
&nbs
p; Without knowing the cause of the distress, any actions we took were more likely to be harmful than helpful (and more likely still to have no effect at all other than to waste time).
I got desperate and handed the details of the patients over to Joe (my occasional tryst)—strictly against hospital policy, because security staff do not generally need access to confidential medical records, or indeed any kind of patient information. I thought he might be able to shed some light on a possible connection between the unfortunate four patients at our hospital—and if he had found one I might have been able to persuade our equivalent numbers at Kettering to hand over the equivalent information about their unfortunates. Despite a bit of help from some old friends of his at the local police station it was all dead ends. The six people lived near each other, but not near enough to form a cluster for the purposes of determining some environmental cause.
There were no common work links, and no social connection. There was a moment of excited hope when he discovered that the serial numbers on the back of two of the cards showed identical mistakes in the printing, but neither of the other two cards showed any similar signs. So two of the patients had been diagnosed by the same machine—probably at roughly the same time—but that was the only connection we could find.
“Almost certainly a coincidence,” he told me sadly. “I mean, I’ll keep looking if you like, but don’t rely on me to turn up anything useful anytime soon.”
“Fine,” I said, and left him to it. I was grateful to him for trying, for giving me that moment of hope that we might find some way to cheat the machines (if only for today), but I couldn’t show it. That wasn’t the way it worked between us.
We got the two patients from Kettering transferred over by ambulance—it was easy, no one wanted responsibility for them. Even with all six of the sufferers together we could find out no extra information.
Machine of Death Page 4
