Mercy 6

by David Bajo

  Obviously it opens from the inside. I didn’t crawl in, but I know that would have to be the case. I did go and find where the exit would be. I guessed the garden first thing and was right. But that door is now sealed from the outside as well. It’s grated over, and there is a bar and lock. And it would have to be dug out some. I left it pretty much intact.”

  “Why?”

  He shrugged. “I suppose I want to keep it hidden. My escape.

  I always do that with my projects. Things like that. Gains in knowledge. Secret passages are the dreams of architects.”

  Mendenhall closed her eyes. “So you would have to go over there and unseal it.”

  “That’s not possible. I haven’t figured it out yet.”

  She opened her eyes, looked at the city, which was gray and white and beginning to shimmer along its far edges. “I know how to do it. I know of someone. Someone who would want to get in.

  Someone who might know how to be . . . clandestine. Someone who would swap. Him in, me out.”

  “Who?”

  “You’ll like this. It’s just right for you. Your desire for transparency or redemption—or whatever it is. Democracy?” She wanted to kiss his throat. Just that, just there. “He’s a journalist. For the Times. He wants to see, to be in here, to report.”

  “You won’t be able to communicate with him without others knowing.”

  “I’ll figure out a code. Doctors are great at speaking in code. To patients, to loved ones, to other doctors. We’re great at saying only exactly what needs to be said, to be suggested. And leaving it at that. Trusting that.”

  He wouldn’t look at her. “I know you’re right. I know you won’t carry a virus out there. Because there is no virus. I know it better than you do.”

  “I’m ER. An eternal carrier. I will sterilize myself and be careful out there. Just in case.”

  They stood together, quiet for a moment, watching the horizon, a glance or two toward the ruins. They enjoyed the sunlight, the outside air, the intermittent breeze.

  “I’ll help you as far as I can. You can’t take your phone, and even if you can get to your car, you won’t be able to drive it out.”

  “Look, Mullich,” she said, “I’m a good doctor. I’m ER. I might be heading out there just to prove myself a fool. But I really believe I can help alleviate misery. Inform triage. I know you think I most want to get out there and run free for a while. But that’s not what I want most. I want to diagnose. I want to treat.”

  40.

  In Reykjavik, a young man strolling with a group of friends fell dead on the sidewalk. The forum noted that he had been in perfect health, had been a soccer star for his work team. His friends thought he was joking when he fell; he always liked to scare them with little pranks like that, they said. They said he hadn’t taken any drugs. They had all been drinking, but not a lot. They were in between clubs, strolling and laughing as they walked from one to the other. The night was unseasonably warm, and they had all loosened their scarves. He had fallen just after three a.m., Reykjavik time. The ER there had registered him at 0312, unresponsive.

  Three twelve. About two hours after Mendenhall’s cases—

  the Mercy Six. His case had only come up on the forum after the others in his group had been checked for drugs and alcohol.

  All of his friends described his fall in the same way: from life to death, from laughing and buoyant to collapse, no gasp or seizure or disorientation or stumble. From alive to dead. Brain scans showed very faint, very mild incipient hemorrhaging in the frontal lobes, nothing near fatal. Pathology still thought it was drugs, was waiting on toxicology.

  But Mendenhall’s cases, there in the forum, had Reykjavik looking at Mercy General. They had Pathology on alert, and they had the friends come back to the hospital for observation in containment. Mendenhall could have sent three guesses to Pathology there, three suggested scans. She was afraid one would be right. She sent nothing.

  She fought off images of a group of young friends on a night sidewalk, laughing and turning to one another beneath a Nordic sky, steam and false dawn on the horizon. She saw one fall, the tallest and most gangly of the group, the handsome clown. Struck through. Where? Left lung? Kidney? Perhaps across the torso? Was another in the group, a girl with a secret crush strolling close, struck through in the same diagonal at the same microsecond? Through the thigh or calf or foot? Like Cabral, her sudden quiet attributed to circumstance rather than physiology?

  Don’t let her sleep, Mendenhall wanted to write. Don’t let any of them fall asleep. But she knew it was already too late for that by the time she heard.

  In her cubicle she bypassed the forum and contacted the Reykjavik ER directly. She received an autoreply, bland, suggesting minor technical difficulties. She recalled the flight of the helicopter from last night, Mullich’s laser cutting through the exhaust. And she knew the Reykjavik hospital, a third of the way across the world, was in containment, had two deaths. Hours apart. But not hours apart if they knew what she knew, had seen what she had seen, had someone like Mullich and someone like Claiborne and someone like Silva. If they had all that, they would know that both deaths had happened at once, out on that sidewalk, under that sky.

  Delivered from that sky.

  41.

  She began. She replied to Ben-Curtis. She knew others would read it before he did: As a doctor I cannot divulge case information.

  I can only carefully offer you a sense of what it’s like in here, what it was like when all this began to unfold. But I can only bring you so far.

  Metaphorically, only as far as, say, the little patch of ruin just beyond south parking. That odd stone you once asked about.

  Metaphor had its place after all. She pushed send. Later she planned to just send him a time, somehow frame it in something that looked fractured, incomplete, and accidentally forwarded.

  All else she trusted to her skill as a doctor, her understanding of persons. Maybe that would leave her trapped at the dark end of a sealed tunnel.

  She went down to Claiborne’s lab and asked to speak to Silva alone.

  Silva and Claiborne were together at Claiborne’s stand-up desk.

  They were patterning the capillary impacts of each case, composing comparative charts. All six body scans were on the overhead screens, sublimate.

  Mendenhall was ready with some lies. But Claiborne didn’t ask why, didn’t ask anything.

  “Her eyes could use a break,” he said. He looked at Mendenhall with concern, lingered. Then he returned to the overhead scans.

  Mendenhall felt relief. She was ready with the lies. But they were weighted with intense betrayal, personal and professional betrayal of this doctor who believed in her in spite of himself and his expertise. The closest thing she had to a friend in this hospital.

  A guy who could chide her with that loop of Cannonball Man, pass her with disregard on the running trail.

  She led Silva to the small lab where earlier she had found her napping. They left the light off and stood under the green dimness of the exit sign.

  “I want you to come with me,” said Mendenhall.

  Silva’s lips parted; her brow dipped. She lifted her hand, began to reach.

  “I want you to come with me,” Mendenhall said, “by staying here. I’m going out. I’ll be back. I need you to stay here and cover my leaving. . . .”

  The lab tech kept her head bowed and nodded, expecting Mendenhall’s words, knowing them before they were spoken.

  Mendenhall felt an unexpected pang. Despite this, she delivered her prescription: “I will leave all my stuff in my locker. You go in there and take my cell phone, carry it with you. You must listen to any message so that it appears I’m still in Mercy. You must make occasional calls to the ER desk. You must take my key card and use it in the elevators and doors. You must try to open the roof door with it. Answer my e-mails. Send some e-mails. Move things around on my desk. Drink juice left for me. When Nurse Pao Pao is on break—if she ever goes o
n break—you must change the dressing on my patient Kae Ng.”

  Silva put her hand to her mouth. “I can’t—”

  “Yes,” said Mendenhall. “Yes, you can do that. You have to be me. That’s what you have to do. And you will find ways that I don’t even know. Things about myself I don’t know.”

  “But that nurse.” Silva turned away, the green light bending in her hair. “Pao Pao.”

  “Yes. Pao Pao. She’ll eventually figure it out. She might confront you. She might let you continue. She might help you, join you. I trust her. I trust her more than I trust myself.”

  Silva shook her head. She breathed through rounded lips.

  “When?” she asked.

  “Today. I need to set something up first. I need to talk to Mullich one more time. When I’m ready, I’ll hang my lab coat on the right edge of my cubicle. When you see it there, you’ll know it’s time to start.”

  Mendenhall returned to her cubicle. She received a reply from Ben-Curtis: I understand.

  Surrender or confirmation? She had to trust the latter.

  She sent him what she had ready, in her head, her fingertips. It would be the last message for him. Thorpe’s readers could make of it whatever they wanted. When we were lovers, two was always best.

  42.

  Mullich was waiting for her on the roof. He was not standing by the telescope, stood instead where she had stood that first night, away from him, just before all this happened. She took her place beside him. He stared at the horizon.

  “Broad daylight is best. Two is perfect, though soon. You sure?”

  She shrugged.

  “Night wouldn’t work. They’d be on higher alert, would catch movement. He’ll need bolt cutters and a spade.”

  “I can’t tell him that,” she replied. “I have to trust he’ll be ready for almost anything. I have to trust him to be good at what he does.

  He wants to infiltrate, he’ll bring tools to infiltrate.”

  Mullich changed the direction of his gaze, lowered it toward the running trails. “When you emerge, don’t head downhill. And don’t try for your car. Don’t go away. Use the running trails. Look as if you’re going for a jog. I’ve seen runners and strollers out there during this containment, people coming from neighborhoods in the canyon. They get watched. They are approached if they venture too close and are warned away. Don’t think you won’t be seen.

  Hope that you won’t be seen right away. Get to the trail and then to the canyon and then to the neighborhoods. I hope you’re in good shape.”

  “I feel ready to run a marathon.”

  “You ever run a marathon?”

  “Not my thing,” she said. “I like a fast, hard five. You know?”

  43.

  She returned to Claiborne’s lab. This time she entered and asked Silva to leave. Claiborne appeared a little exasperated, the way he looked whenever she passed him on the trail.

  Silva complied, said nothing, hurried by Mendenhall without eye contact. Claiborne faced Mendenhall, eased back against the edge of his stand-up desk, crossed his ankles, and folded his arms. He shrugged.

  “You have sketches,” she said.

  “I have lots of sketches. It’s one thing I do. When I’m home, with my wife, after dinner.”

  Mendenhall had an apartment instead of a home, no spouse, didn’t really eat dinner. The closest thing to a sketch pad was a set of golf clubs her mentor had bought for her. The irons were still shiny.

  “Please don’t do that to me.” She hugged her shoulders, let her hands run down her arms.

  “Do what to you?”

  “Hurt me.”

  He looked at her for a moment, then bowed his head and nodded.

  He turned to his desk, opened one of the secretary drawers, and removed a sketch pad. He raised it. “Sketches of Cabral’s scans.”

  Eyes closed, she sighed, then looked. “Of the basolateral complex.”

  “The amygdala.” He flipped through the pad. “Don’t be coy.”

  “Why make sketches?” she asked. “Why make sketches of

  scans?”

  He stood assessing his own work before showing her. “It’s a way of interpreting. Of getting myself free to interpret. You don’t need to do that. With you—up there—it’s all about being light on your feet, ready, making quick reads. And I don’t always get comparisons.

  I don’t get to see scans of Cabral from when he was alive. From before he may have suffered . . . whatever it is you think he suffered.”

  He thrust the open sketchbook at her. “So here.”

  He was a good artist. She could see that. It made her sad to see that someone could be a really good doctor and also be something else. In charcoal, beneath studies of the amygdala, he had written

  ‘Albert Cabral.’

  There was nothing for her to see in the charcoal except his interest, his consideration. And maybe he was done with that.

  “Anything?” She raised the pad, tried a smile.

  “Just the inclination. To draw, to go there with my eyes and hands.”

  “Hands?” She turned her palms upward. “You use both hands?”

  He held up his left hand and pointed to the outside edge of his thumb, where black skin curved into pink. “I shade and feather with this.”

  “When?” she asked. “When do you do this?”

  He shrugged. “When Silva leaves to take a little break. Little in-between moments. It only takes a few minutes.” He raised the sketch pad again. “These. Sometimes she catches me, at the end, brushing my thumb over the charcoal.”

  She felt an unexpected, unclear twist. Had to take a quick breath, underneath.

  “You want to tell me something?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “You need to tell me something?”

  I need to tell you everything. Everything I’m about to do.

  “No,” she said. “No.”

  “In medicine,” he said, “a double no means yes.”

  “I’m not your patient.”

  She looked at him—his lean form at ease against the desk edge.

  She wanted him to come with her. She needed his expertise, his sketches. His pace. With his lips he shaped the opening syllable of her first name but made no sound.

  When she returned to the hospital, she hoped he would

  remember this moment, remember it right.

  44.

  On her desk Pao Pao had left a small glass bottle of grape juice—

  Mendenhall’s favorite. How had she found it in all this? Too, there was a porcelain teacup filled with granola, a homemade mix with the scent of burned honey and cashews. Not from the cafeteria or any vending machine.

  Pao Pao was in the bay, moving along Thorpe’s fever patients.

  Mendenhall could see that the nurse was recording their body temps, entering them in a ledger she must have started on her own.

  If Thorpe had ordered that, Pao Pao would have asked Mendenhall.

  She must have been running trajectories, tracing the wax and wane of each fever, matching it to her floor log. Proving these patients false—or hoping to prove them false, healthy but empathetic. Pao Pao hunched into her procedure, sidestepped swiftly from bed to bed, shedding the thermometer sleeves behind her. It was not hard for Mendenhall to imagine her tending to soldiers lying on a battlefield amid fire and chaos, their eyes wide to her. Her firm and quiet line.

  One man dressed in the purple scrubs of ID and two security guards with that special piping on the uniforms approached Pao Pao. They cut her off.

  Mendenhall swooped into the bay. In ER mode, she was there in seconds. The ID guy rested a hand on Pao Pao’s elbow. The two guards had formed a bracket, and their arms hung restive.

  “You,” Mendenhall said to the scrubs, “take your hand away from her. She’s the floor nurse. My floor nurse. You do not lay a finger on any personnel on my floor.”

  The guards now bracketed Mendenhall. One put a hand to the hilt of his baton.


  “Oh, try us,” she said to him. Bantamweight, she crowded him.

  “You have no idea.”

  She turned to the scrubs. “What are you gonna tell him? She was recording fever temps; we had to stop her?”

  He drew his shoulders back, found his height. His glasses were outdated, his hair thinning and losing its color. Behind that was a slight attractiveness, a nice trim in his jaw and cheekbones.

  “My advice,” she said to him, “do your job, your one job. Keep us from getting out.”

  Mendenhall led Pao Pao to an open space on the bay floor, closer to her line of patients. She squared to the nurse, offered a shrug.

  “Sorry, Doctor,” said Pao Pao. “It made sense.”

  “Don’t apologize. It does make sense. It’s smart medicine.

  Running comparative charts between their symptoms and floor activity makes total sense for the good of this entire floor.”

  Pao Pao offered her tablet. “I’ll send these, then, to you.”

  “But then stop. For a while, stop. Let’s stay out of their way.”

  Pao Pao looked back to their patients, her way of clearing.

  Mendenhall could see that she was confused, maybe a little bit hurt. Mendenhall felt the need to protect her, to keep her from her own good sense, from her capable person. A person Mendenhall was about to abandon and betray. How does a body at once protect and betray another? How torn could she be and still navigate her way out?

  She should’ve just gone, just done it.

  45.

  Mendenhall hung her lab coat on the right edge of her cubicle.

  There it was. She hurried to the locker room. Its emptiness disappointed her. She had hoped for some company, a

  colleague or two to chat with, to test her volition and demeanor.

  The hollow sound of her locker door and the still air only bared her thoughts. She scrubbed to her elbows, as though for surgery. She put on a fresh tracksuit and running shoes. It felt good to change her socks.