Mercy 6

by David Bajo

  “You would have thought me nuts. You would have dismissed me. You still would if you hadn’t seen it firsthand.” Covey shrugged.

  “Besides, there’s nothing we can do about it. So it’s a virus. I’m turning you in.”

  Mendenhall eyed Covey’s reflection in the screen. Twenty-one pieces of Shoemaker-Levy shot into Jupiter, a straight line of lights, pulsing into the spinning sphere. The event drew a diagonal across Covey’s reflection, swept her hair across her forehead, lifted one corner of her mouth, stroked her neck.

  Mendenhall put high-resonance amygdalae on Covey’s main screens. The laptops continued to show Jovian impacts, crush lines stitching straight seams across bands of orange and cream and red.

  She explained the limbic system, even though Covey claimed to know it.

  With her finger Mendenhall circled the almond shapes inside the coronal view of the brain. “No. They do even more. They use sensorial memory to help the nervous system react to intrusion, pain.”

  “And pleasure,” added Covey. “So?”

  “So.” Mendenhall again lifted her hands. “So your particles.”

  “I’m sure people and buildings and trees and animals are hit with them from time to time. More as the planet crowds. But mostly nothing would happen. Just a little ripple.” Covey pointed to the bowls.

  “What would happen if one passed through a fluorescent tube?”

  Mendenhall nodded to the low lights of the basement lab.

  “The mercury vapor would anticipate a sudden influx of energy.

  The tube would explode. It’s probably happened a time or two.”

  “We’re fluorescents,” said Mendenhall. “Not limpid pools.”

  “I have a colleague,” said Covey, looking at the ceiling light.

  “Actually, I’ll call him a friend rather than a colleague. He calls them my particles, too. Jude particles. He claims we should approach them as a-life. But that’s only when he’s drunk. Which is much of the time.”

  “We see what we are.” Mendenhall felt as she did when the big doors slid open, the ambulance releasing, ramp clattering down.

  She needed to move, to see, to snitch a pulse.

  “They’re bullets, Jude.”

  “Not really, Doctor. They have no mass. Just velocity. A near-infinite velocity.”

  “Let’s not split hairs. Let’s not split anything. Show me the line.

  The line from here to Mercy. Small scale. Can you do that? Using the location of a hospital in Reykjavik?”

  “How small?”

  “Street level.”

  Covey laughed, her smile lingering, almost too pretty, would melt to the touch. “That’s not small. I can use Reykjavik and Mercy to pinpoint a line across your thumbnail.”

  “Will I be able to read it?”

  “It’ll be a string of coordinates. A bunch of numbers.”

  “I like numbers. And I have someone who will be able to read them.”

  “You have someone?”

  Mendenhall was tempted to follow that direction, to make girl talk. Just something to convince herself she was normal enough, not mad. Instead she returned to business. “How many crush lines can there be?”

  “Not many. Two or three. They would slide into one. The one you suggest would be new to my research. If it’s really there, then maybe it just started.”

  “Just started?”

  “Or it’s ending. A crescendo of sorts. Time is the hardest thing to figure. Shoemaker-Levy went on for thirty years, and we only noticed it for a few last days. The crescendo. No one looks for this stuff. Just a few trombone players like myself. A thousand hotshots around the world can locate a particle of dark matter for you, pinpoint it in some salt cave deep underground. Smash atoms and isolate their particles. Or they can show you the nearest black hole or measure the microwave background of the universe. But no one looks for regular matter, dust. Even when it’s hitting us in the face.

  Just me and some others. We’re just not sexy enough.”

  “But you’re here. Right here in this particular spot. Here now because you know where the crush line is. Today it runs through this city.”

  Covey offered one deliberate nod, a patient’s reluctant answer.

  “So,” said Mendenhall, “we’re either in the beginning, middle, or end?”

  “Probably near to the end.”

  “You mean it will worsen?”

  “Thicken,” said Covey. “Though quicken is more accurate.”

  52.

  There’s someone in my lab.”

  Mendenhall checked the doorway, the line of microscopes, the collecting bowls. Then she turned to Covey, who pointed to the ceiling.

  “The lab up there. Not in here.” She motioned to one of the side laptops. The screen showed a man in Covey’s fifth floor office. He was scanning the room, looking at the gels.

  “But you locked up.”

  “People get through locked doors.” Covey leaned closer to the screen. “That’s why I have this.” She pressed her hands above the laptop.

  Mendenhall was skeptical, started to speak but was interrupted.

  “You’re thinking I’m nuts. But I’m not crazy. See? Someone broke in.” With her cell she got ready to notify security.

  Mendenhall leaned in, studied the man. A drunk, paralyzed, dragged himself to her on his elbows. A hitchhiker, filed into a half person, spoke to her. Albert Cabral sat on the floor and asked her how she had found him. Lual Meeks curled himself into the brass cup of the boiler, kept his eyes open as his nerves whiplashed to death. The man in Covey’s study was from government security, one of those new guys sent in after containment. He wasn’t in uniform, but he had the same haircut and expression as the others, the ones she had encountered. He wore a t-shirt and sports jacket, like a lot of men in this city. She hated that look.

  “He’s looking for me.”

  “Why follow you?” asked Covey. “Why not just take you?”

  They watched the man look at Covey’s gels as he answered his cell. He received a text, replied.

  “They want to see what I’m thinking.”

  “Why don’t they just take you and ask what you’re thinking?”

  “Because they know I wouldn’t tell them. And they don’t want anyone to know, to call attention. Right? Like you said, it’s a virus.”

  The man left Covey’s office. Her laptop showed the empty room for a moment, then went blank.

  “They probably know what you’re thinking now,” said Covey.

  Covey offered two choices for a change of clothes. Mendenhall took the formal one, a moss-colored cocktail number. When Mendenhall started to slip into the dress, Covey shook her head.

  “That sports bra thing won’t work underneath.”

  Mendenhall shrugged hard, glared.

  “Go without,” Covey told her.

  Covey watched her remove the bra and fling it across the lab.

  “There’s no treatment for fate, Dr. Mendenhall. Fate is fatal.

  Unstoppable, undeterred . . . Did you just need to escape?”

  Mendenhall worked into the dress. The fit was close enough to right. “No. I need to show them I’m right. Even if I don’t get to act on it. And I needed to bring something in, a patient to make my point. I needed to go see the source; now I have to go back where I can do some good.”

  Covey offered a thin silver necklace with a chip of peridot. “This goes.” She stood behind Mendenhall and clasped the necklace and finished the zipper. She spoke into her ear. “I would want that. In my own work. To see the source and the return. But I just catch helpless glimpses. That’s all I ever get to live on.”

  53.

  Covey handed over a map she had made of the crush lines through the city and was about to go fetch some cash for Mendenhall when something crashed against the door. It was the sound of a body driven into the steel door of Covey’s lab. Arms slapped against the basement linoleum. Mendenhall had heard it many times on the bay floor, nur
ses or EMTs tackling and subduing seizure cases, mean drunks, psychotics, or just those who wanted to fight, furious over wounds, death, life. Covey reached for the handle. Mendenhall stopped her, pulled her elbow, shook her head.

  Mendenhall eased herself against the floor, concerned about the dress, the necklace. She peered through the sliver beneath the door, caught shadows moving swiftly across her view, a mix of dark steps and drags. Flesh-on-flesh noises buzzed her nerves.

  Mendenhall rose, pressed Covey to the side, put finger to lips.

  She kissed her cheek and left.

  Again she felt certain to be stepping into deliverance. This time dressed for it, arms open to it.

  The basement hall was empty. Two dimes of blood stained the gray linoleum. Doors with hip-handles lined both walls. She could’ve been in a hospital—the morgue, quiet and abandoned.

  The lights went off. A hollow sound, either a groan or something dragged, rose through the floor, along the walls. How many basements did this place have? Only the green exit sign above the stairwell door remained aglow. She was okay with it. All of it. They were reading her wrong. So wrong. They were giving her a series of quick things, surfaces, dilations. They were giving her the bay floor.

  She took the stairway. Through the little mesh window of the first floor door, she spied one man wearing the t-shirt/sports jacket look. He was standing dead center in front of the doorway to the building. She continued climbing. Between the third and fourth floor landings someone was descending, the steps heavy and athletic, booted.

  She did not raise her head and kept ascending at a normal pace, giving herself over to her disguise, letting it work. She pretended to be adjusting her necklace clasp, unhooked it as she neared the government man.

  “Pardon?” she asked, looking down, fingering the clasp at her nape. “Could you, please?”

  His shadow loomed over her. Callused fingers brushed her skin, the knob of her vertebrae. His fingers were swift, adept.

  “Thanks,” she said, felt for the clasp after he finished, tugged the peridot into even position.

  He let his fingers graze her neck and shoulder as he trailed away, and she continued her ascent. She could sense him looking at her calves, checking her ass. If he gave chase, she felt ready to race, to get to the roof. Let them catch her there.

  She climbed one more floor, then exited to the elevators, just to complicate her route. She pressed the up button, triggered to run back to the stairway if the elevator arrived occupied. The doors parted. It took her a moment to register the emptiness. She never received emptiness in the bay. Every gurney brought her someone, some immediate decision, some aimed expression, some blood or wrong bend of bone, inappropriate gaze or words or tone, sometimes bone through flesh, bloodless and absurd.

  It would have been easier to step inside the elevator if it contained a wound—or corpse. She forced herself to go in and press the button to the seventh floor. In the hall a pair of students, one janitor dragging a trash cart, and a professor passed her. She received second looks from every one of them. The professor called her Jude.

  Mendenhall figured her options. She could pull the fire alarm and maybe get out in the confusion. That confusion was hard to predict. Or she could give up in the face of fate, turn herself in to the guy on the first floor or his partner searching the halls and stairs, let herself be caught. But she wanted to trace Covey’s line—the crush line—back to Mercy General. Did she feel the crescendo only because it had become a possibility? Wasn’t that how crescendos worked? Was this thinking in metaphor? Feeling in metaphor?

  And there was the blood on the floor, the struggle outside Covey’s door. It was no longer just a matter of giving up, of pride.

  The fight was blood, apparently, to someone—to the ones who commanded the men in t-shirts and jackets.

  Schrader’s door was partially opened. Protocol. A student sat in his office. She was pretty, appeared to be crying. Mendenhall pushed the door all the way open. Schrader looked up, kept his eyes on her. If he had checked the student, Mendenhall would have apologized. Instead she ignored the student, her tears. She leaned her shoulder against the doorjamb and folded her arms.

  “I’m visiting from Molokai. I don’t want to eat alone. Can you join me?”

  Schrader eyed the dress. “It’s you.”

  “Yes, it’s me.” She held her pose. “I need cab fare. My card’s in limbo. We can dine somewhere nice. You know a place? By the ocean?”

  “I have . . .”

  “You tell me the place, and I’ll go there and wait.” She unfolded and refolded her arms, kept the rest of herself still, angled. “For you.”

  She held forth her palm. The student stared into the crease.

  Mendenhall waited for the cash but eyed the student. “Can you tell me a back way out of here? I really need not to be seen. Can you show me, walk with me?”

  54.

  The student walked her to the sidewalk after they exited through a loading ramp. Various types of smokers lined the slanted concrete edges: janitors, professors, grad students, administrative assistants. The smoke collected in the still pitch of the ramp. They all seemed proud of that, that production.

  One of her searchers stood on the sidewalk, his feet set wide apart, arms crisscrossed, hands on shoulders. Mendenhall was surprised that the student stayed with her, was happy for it.

  She showed her the gem chip on her necklace as they neared the man. “See this? Know what it is?”

  “Peridot,” she replied without looking at the stone. “My birthstone. August. It’s associated with fame, dignity, and protection.

  When it’s that quality,” she waved her hand over Mendenhall’s necklace, “it most likely comes from an island off the coast of Egypt. Really rare stuff comes from meteorites.”

  “Oh.” Mendenhall almost forgot about the man on the sidewalk, peered at the gem and let the student guide her by the elbow.

  A cab, as promised by Schrader, slid to the curb. The man on the sidewalk called to them, “Excuse me, ladies. . . .”

  Mendenhall did not listen to his excuse for approaching. She hurried into the cab and told the driver where to go. Only after they had pulled away did she realize the student was riding with her.

  “That’s the wrong direction.”

  “What?” Mendenhall had to blink to make sure the young woman was really in the cab with her.

  “That place is in the opposite direction. Of the beach. Of where you’re meeting Professor Schrader.”

  “I’m not meeting Schrader. I needed his cash.”

  The student’s stare quivered. She chewed her lower lip, red against white teeth, brimmed with youth. “Good,” she said finally.

  “Where do you want to get off ?”

  “I thought I was going to the beach.”

  “I’m sorry.” Mendenhall looked away, then back. “We’ll drop you off at the next corner.”

  “No. I’ll go wherever.” The student fashioned her short hair into a spiky ponytail. “I just needed to go somewhere.”

  Mendenhall offered confused concern, an ER trick. The student blew at her bangs before explaining.

  “Schrader’s kind of a wank. I wish I’d thought of your move. All the way to the beach. Who wouldn’t want to go to the beach with you? You always dress like that?”

  “Almost never.”

  “Who are you running from?”

  “More than one.”

  “One what?”

  “Side. Apparently.” Mendenhall eyed the student’s black skirt, white t-shirt, and blue Mary Janes. She used to dress like that in college. “What size are you?”

  The idea was to make it seem as though she didn’t plan to return to Mercy. Her thin disguise might misdirect them, keep them following the cab. More likely it would only lead them to underestimate her.

  The Mary Janes were fine in the cab but felt tight as she stepped onto the sidewalk. She liked the way they looked, felt insecure in the t-shirt, tried not to think t
oo much about the skirt. She ran a little, just to shake into the clothes more, into herself. The idea was also to stay outside longer, to be away from the bay an hour more, to see what was out here. To be alone.

  On the map Covey had marked a bar with a star, a place for Mendenhall. It was getting close to rush hour. Traffic was the same—thick and slow as always—but the sidewalk was intensifying, the pedestrian flow becoming more one-way, pointed, moneyed, with ties and heels and good haircuts. Happy hours were starting.

  For Mendenhall and the rest of the ER, happy hour was neither happy nor an hour. It was three hours of discontent producing a full spectrum of wounds, stretching into several more hours of outright misery. You name it, said her mentor once said, and happy hour’s done it.

  She took a stool at the bar corner. This was the center of the universe, a cup of space in a cluster. She felt sent, stung, a mark. The only other remaining seat was on the other side of the bar corner.

  A man in a loosened tie moved into it, sliding away from his three buddies. Mendenhall could tell that he had underguessed her age.

  There was a drop in his look followed by reconsideration.

  “I’m waiting for someone,” she told him, motioned toward the stool.

  “I think you’re lying.”

  “I am lying. I don’t want you sitting by me.”

  “Nasty.”

  “You wanted the truth.”

  The bartender brought her wine. It was the color of the blood Claiborne had drawn from her. She imagined it warm and lifted it by the stem, got set to take it away to some quiet corner. A woman emerged from the crowd, jarred her way between Mendenhall and the guy.

  “Sorry I’m late.”

  Mendenhall rescued her glass from the interruption. Jude Covey slid in front of the guy, shouldered her way onto the stool, set her tablet on the bar. He hovered close, eyed both of them. Covey gave him an over-the-shoulder glare, and he returned to his former place. She pointed to Mendenhall’s wine and made eyes with the bartender, tucked then licked her lips.