Mercy 6

by David Bajo

  She hooked her thumbs over the navicular and dug her fingertips between each metatarsal, counting three for each palpation. All the while Silva pressed the base of her rib cage to Mendenhall’s toes, stretching them back.

  “From down here,” she said, “I could stop your heart.”

  Mendenhall let her eyes finish closing. She thought of her dog, Cortez, the last time she had taken him to the observatory, let him rest in her lap, placed her palm between his ears, called him “Killer.

  Hey, Killer.”

  “Take me with you when you go.”

  36.

  Mendenhall crouched in the boiler relic where Meeks had fallen. The heat bubble created by the metal bowl felt soft, something about the copper, the stilled drip of the weld lines.

  With a laser pen stolen from Mullich’s desk, she fired the red beam.

  The air inside the relic was humid enough to illuminate the line, pink in the mist, almost not there. She positioned herself as Meeks before collapse, given his final pose. She held the pen to her left shoulder, just above the upper lobe of the lung. She imagined the shattered fluorescent above the copper lid, aimed there. Retraced the line.

  The line of Mullich’s god particle. Not the elegant God Particle, the math of subatomic forces, but the blatant straight line of an architect. On Seven, a fluorescent tube explodes above Enry Dozier as he reaches down from his ladder perch. He collapses over the top step, dies, his shoulders and arms posturing from the pulse that disconnects his brain stem. Within the same second, the same pulse, on fourth floor recovery, Lana Fleming falls across the body of her roommate, dies, her fingers holding a cup of tea, her last breath a dead breath, a residual puff from the spasm in her bronchus. On third floor ICU, Richard Verdasco stares at the ceiling and dies, pretty eyes open, nerve endings just beginning to fizz and break the thinnest of capillaries in the softest organs. In a storage closet on second floor surgery, Marley Peterson holds her last cigarette and dies, the neuropaths throughout her entire body firing.

  On the first floor ER—her ER—Albert Cabral crouches near a bed curtain, practicing shadow puppets on the gauzy surface. What does he feel? Is it an emotion? A sudden sadness? A loss of heart?

  Of meaning? The butterfly silhouette on the curtain reduced to nothing more than the shadow of his hands?

  In the subbasement boiler room, she is Lual Meeks. The fluorescent above the boiler relic explodes, and she is struck through her shoulder and left lung. Her last instinct is to slide into the warm copper palm beneath her.

  To Mullich’s microscopic God Particle, surfaces are liquid or gas, the first state of matter irrelevant due to velocity. Cinder block and bone are hollow matrices. Metal, glass, skin, and vessel walls part and collapse, ripple and recompose. Water. She knows there is a fourth state of matter. And a fifth. But she is ER, trauma, molecular, as rough in matter as the architect’s line.

  Mendenhall released the button on the laser pen. She backed out of the copper relic, sought distance, looked at the dark panel covering the dead fluorescent and the hard surface of the boiler tank.

  A virus is not the thing we see in the electron microscope, hiding in protein folds. That is a virion, a first and necessary cause, a particle that is neither alive nor dead. It is a-life. Other causes and conditions must occur to create the virus. A virus is an event, a collection of actions and reactions between the virions and the involved cells. You do not have a virus. You experience it. You can’t see it; you see its effects. You adjust. You try. You live. You die.

  She aimed the laser at the dark half of the fluorescent panel. The red beam sparkled into thousands of pieces as it refracted through the shards of the shattered tube. They lay scattered across the inside of the translucent panel, reminding her of a kaleidoscope.

  “I’m no crazier than Thorpe,” she said, firing the stolen laser pen.

  She was alone and speaking to the ghost of Lual Meeks.

  37.

  It had been twelve hours: 0736. Seven thirty-six a.m. on her six-dollar running watch. According to protocol, a meeting had to be ordered. Mendenhall was summoned as the physician who had called containment. She had thought Thorpe would assume this position. She was also summoned as Floor One leader, a position she had thought she had deferred to Dmir, or somebody like him, somebody dressed like him.

  The meeting was held in one of the old lecture theaters, a cupped room with stage and podium, used when Mercy had still been a teaching hospital. Years ago, before her time, it had become an informal storage space, its floors and aisles convenient for big equipment and stuffed files, its nooks ready for illicit cigarette breaks.

  Someone had prepared the room. The podium stood off center next to a table set up for a panel. An old surgical light cast a serious yellow glow over the stage. The aisles remained dim, a single thin light high above, seemingly unattached in the darkness up there.

  Old equipment had been pushed toward the ends and rear, looming, craning, containing. Mullich.

  She spotted him in the back row, in a lab coat along with the rest of the audience, laptop glowing blue. In the rest of the scatter—

  no one sitting side by side, no one in the first two rows—she recognized only Claiborne and a guy from Surgery. On the panel, she recognized only Dmir. The panel chair closest to the podium was empty.

  Mendenhall was terrible at meetings, never ready when she was supposed to speak, always speaking when it was best to hunker down and shut up. She climbed past old equipment—a steel X-ray with sharp joints and snagging wires—and took the seat next to Mullich. If not for the blue of his laptop, she would have been invisible.

  She returned his laser pen, cuffing it back to him, a passed note.

  He raised an eyebrow at the pen, slid it into the pocket of his lab coat. “I think you’re supposed to be down there.” He spoke softly as he nodded toward the stage.

  On the panel with Dmir were two other men she did not

  recognize. One had broad shoulders and did not fit into his lab coat. Some kind of security head. Mendenhall would leave before it was his turn. She eyed her exit path, over and around Mullich, back into the darkness. There would be clanking.

  “I figured that chair was for Thorpe,” she whispered. “Where is he?” She scanned the paltry audience, all of them mere silhouettes in front of their laptops and handhelds.

  Dmir rose from his panel chair and took the podium. Mendenhall suppressed a groan. She took a granola bar from her coat pocket.

  The paper wrapping crackled. Heads turned. She put the bar back in her pocket and slid lower in her chair, imagined herself hidden beneath Mullich’s tall shadow.

  Dmir began. “Six demises in twelve hours.”

  She whispered to Mullich. “Six deaths in one second.”

  The architect straightened. Onstage, Dmir paused and peered into the audience. Mendenhall slid lower.

  Dmir cleared his throat and continued, “We have reports of other possibles. From the Boston area and Reykjavik.”

  “The hell?” She looked at Mullich.

  Dmir paused and peered. Silhouettes moved.

  Mullich turned his screen to her. There was a page set up for this meeting. The first line was about Boston and Reykjavik. She looked at all of the other screens, all on the same page. Her name was all over it.

  Dmir proceeded. “Dr. Thorpe is speaking with the Centers for Disease Control.”

  With DC? With them? Outside? She resisted another whisper.

  Mullich was looking at her, the blue light carving the side of his face into angles. Mendenhall’s hands felt empty, the space in front of her gravitational.

  She stole the laser pen from Mullich’s pocket. She fired its beam into her cupped palm. Showed him. Six deaths in one second. She aimed the pen toward Dmir. She could put a red dot on his big forehead.

  She pulled Mullich’s laptop toward her. “I need to use this.”

  She only breathed the words, mouthed them carefully. “Yours. Not mine. Capice?”
>
  Mullich squinted at her. Dmir’s speech became nothing more than a drone, a recap of their cases, a vent sputtering somewhere.

  As Dmir went on, she began her research. Mullich did something to his screen, some function she did not understand. The screen changed color, to a kind of dull orange.

  Mullich saw everything.

  Mendenhall found one site, then another. Mullich reached over to help. Forty thousand tons of cosmic dust falls to Earth every day. Every day. This was the average. She found the most scientific sites, ones full of equations. She eased her eyes on the calculus, felt Mullich doing the same. They saw a photo of three cosmologists from the Kivla Institute crouching over a collection pool, a type of radar dish filled with water, mirroring the sky. They saw microscopic photos of the particles, some globular, some crystalline.

  Somewhere in the middle of Dmir’s speech, his notes on Albert Cabral, she found a local cosmologist who was somehow connected to the Kivla Institute. A consultant. Not a cosmologist, technically.

  An astrochemist. A chemist. Someone who had covered childhood sketch pads with the periodic table while listening to the purple dinosaur sing. Someone crude and molecular.

  “Him,” she whispered to Mullich. “I need to go see. Him.” She pointed to the name atop the website: Dr. Jude Covey. Below the name was another photo of cosmologists crouched around a collecting pool, two men and a woman. The caption didn’t name the scientists, just said we. The sky and its reflection in the circle of water appeared Scandinavian, broken clouds with rims of light.

  When it became clear that Dmir was not going to discuss the outside possibles, was not going to take them to Iceland, Mendenhall knew she would not be able to stay quiet. If he wasn’t going to present bodies, occlusions, scans, she had to leave. She clambered over Mullich, her breasts skimming his forehead. Mullich took hold of her hips and helped ease her over. She struggled through the equipment in the darkness, her coat snagging on an old EKG

  monitor, the kind with suction cups. Dmir paused, visored his hand over his eyes. Everyone turned to her.

  She found Claiborne’s silhouette, scanned the seats, sort of bowed.

  “Everything,” she said. She firmed her voice. “Everything on One is ready for you. Whatever you need. I have a call. Sorry. ER, you know?”

  She finished her exit, let them see her hop, slide, and stumble through the remaining obstacles.

  38.

  The Higgs boson used to be called the God Particle, a force predicted by the math of subatomic physics. The math led to an absence, a particle that had to exist due to the behavior of the subatomic sphere, that behavior defined by a weakening.

  Mendenhall began reading the math, had to stop herself. She would have liked nothing more than to sip tea and see how far she could follow it, the expression of the Higgs boson.

  Thorpe’s God Particle was an unseen and unknown virion, submicro, existing outside most definitions of life, not composed of cells but able to reproduce, able to act, those actions defined by hiding, disguise, and opportunistic moving, sliding. Not inanimate but not life. A-life. Thorpe’s God Particle was also predicted by absence but not one evidenced in math. It was predicted by history.

  Medicine was stacked on history. A correct diagnosis—this man has influenza caused by an RNA virus—can be traced back through medical history, never veering from the text, to a laughable diagnosis: This man is sick from walking the cold, wet heath.

  Mullich’s God Particle was a hypothetical mass defined by its velocity and its effects on surrounding cells and particles. It would be microscopic. It would be extrasolar, produced by a stellar explosion somewhere in the galaxy. These particles exist, are prevalent. They have been defined by math. They have been collected. They have been photographed. They hide in apathy. No one cares about them except the few scientists who collect and study them. They are pieces of glass or metal. Studying them earns no reward or recognition.

  Studying dark matter, antimatter, the Higgs boson, earns reward, money, even makes it to television. Studying Thorpe’s virions earns the same.

  Take me with you when you go.

  39.

  It was full morning. They stood on the roof, the telescope relic focusing the sun into a hard white circle on the surface between them. The daylight gave her near-vertigo, the way it always did after night shift, her circadian rhythm awry. Below, blocking the roads from Mercy General, white trucks had morphed into white vans. In daylight she could see that the vans had clusters above them, receivers and transmitters and surveillance. Mullich followed her gaze. He pointed to ones she had not seen right away, the ones in camouflage with armored sides. He pointed to the roof of a far building, about a mile away, where that night helicopter roosted.

  “The cases in Boston,” she told him. “They’re false.”

  He nodded.

  “The one in Reykjavik.” Her voice faltered. She had to take an extra breath. “There may be something.”

  The look he gave her—for him it was a gentle one, the closest to gentle she had seen. An angle of revelation in his expression, a nick of a smile. “Does that break your resolve?”

  “It heightens it.” She almost took hold of his hand, wanted to feel the coolness of it, the length of fingers. “It gives me necessary complexity. You know?”

  “But,” replied Mullich, “it indicates possible outbreak. It gives Thorpe and Disease Control much more power and license. Now their concerns are global. Their audience global. If you still want to do this, you will be heading into something that just got a lot stronger and a lot more vigilante.”

  “You think it’s shoot to kill?” She made her hand into the shape of a pistol.

  “I wouldn’t joke,” he said. He folded his hand over hers and pushed it down. “You really need to see that Kivla person? See him?

  I could maybe get him messages.”

  “I do. I have to see Jude Covey’s reactions and I have to have a full exchange. What I’m thinking is new to me. I need to have an exchange with an expert. My expertise with his. Just like you with me.”

  He appeared to like this, drew his finger along his jaw.

  “Okay, then.”

  He pointed to an area just beyond south parking, where the scrub of the foothills met the asphalt of the lot. “See that little protrusion of stone? That stump just poking out of the brush?”

  She thought he was demonstrating averted vision again. She felt way beyond that. But she complied, and she looked, and she saw it. Something she had passed a thousand times and never thought about, never bothered to identify as anything more than an oddly large and upended stone.

  “I see it.”

  “It’s a remnant,” he told her. “Most likely a sundial. All around it are other stones and pebble lines, almost hidden beneath decades of scrub and brush and soil. But it’s in the original landscape blueprints. A therapy garden. The kind still prominent back then, in the 1930s.”

  “For the loonies.” She rubbed her eyes, glanced at the sun for needed sting. “Like me.”

  “And for physical therapy. And for the doctors. Like your running trails out there.”

  She could kind of see it, a vague impression in the scrub and hardpan surrounding the stone remnant. Shallow, truncated pathways among the sumac, a line here and there too straight for nature.

  She nodded.

  “It was named for the mother of the doctor who started this place.” Mullich tapped the telescope relic. “The same man who put this here.”

  “He wasn’t happy. Was looking for a way out.”

  “Probably you’re right,” replied Mullich.

  He straightened his arm, pointed to the sundial ruin, checked her eyes, made sure she followed. He swung his aim slightly and said, “There, two paces left of that stone, is your exit.”

  The word struck her, confused and clarified. It verified what he was doing—for her. But she could not see how any exit—any literal exit—could be way out there beyond south parking. She feare
d he was speaking metaphorically, something that would have hurt her, coming from him. But then she knew he couldn’t be. He was Mullich.

  He offered her a view of his tablet. On it was an old-looking blueprint of Mercy General, a vertical cut showing only the two bottom floors and three basements. Another basement suddenly new to her. He circled his finger around the very bottom rectangle.

  “This really isn’t a floor, technically. It’s airspace between terra firma and the building. Buildings do not rest on the ground, as most people believe. They are tied to the ground. For us—architects—

  they are structures wont to float, to rise and shift. The pier posts are drilled deep into the earth. They don’t just stabilize and offer foundation. They fasten. Get it?”

  She nodded, still wondering about exit.

  “What I’m telling you is that it won’t be clean down there. It will be grim and unoccupied. An empty space, a vacuum. It will drain you.” He glided his finger along that bottom rectangle, settled on a smudge just outside the wall. “This,” he said. “This vague shading is a bomb shelter. Built later. You can guess when. Whoever built it marked the blueprint with this shading. And that’s all.”

  “You know it’s there?”

  He nodded. “Sure. Right when I saw this shading. It’s what I would have done if asked to build a bomb shelter.”

  “But you verified?”

  “Of course. I ventured into the airspace and found the metal door. I used penetrating oil to break the galvanization on the handle. It’s a submarine door. I went into the shelter. It’s small.

  Good for maybe ten people. Maybe they had plans to construct more along the other walls.”

  “So you went in,” she said. “It was okay.”

  “But I’m used to such spaces. Given what I do. Reconstruction.

  You’re not.”

  She started to speak. He pressed his finger to her lips. The touch felt cool and pleasant.

  “There’s more. Listen. The shelter has a sealed vent. The vent is also designed as an escape in the event the building collapses.