Mercy 6 (11 page)

“It's that,” she said again. “Until you get to the surgeons. Or Claiborne. I'm nothing, Mullich. Stop trying to find me.”

“Your cynicism is false.” Mullich stood.

It was difficult for her to remain relaxed against the wall.

“Your action betrays you. You hurried down here to see, to prove something. To yourself. Then to Claiborne, whom you respect.”

“To prove what?” She tightened her arms about herself.

“Something you know. You moved like someone who knows.”

“I don't feel like that,” she said. “Like someone who knows anything.”

“Come back to the lab. Let's see.”

“Claiborne's?”

“He won't be there.” Mullich checked his tablet. “Yes. He's up with Thorpe.”

She eyed the tablet. He brushed it.

“Silva's there. That's all.”

“She'll have orders,” said Mendenhall.

Mullich put away his laser pen and raised his card. “I have this.”

“Then you go in first,” she told him. “Set things up for me, let me in. That will be most efficient. I need to make an appearance on my floor. I don't want to look like a runaway.”

The building continued to shift. Arriving from the subbasement, Mendenhall sensed a gathering and sliding of weight in the important floors above, the strides of those assuming charge and knowledge. Others, she imagined, lingered close to doors and windows, false exits. Her own floor was escaping her. Her nine patients appeared pushed aside, separated now by a blank slot along the wall. They didn't look at her as she passed them, did not offer that expression of salvation reserved for the doctor. At the nurses'

station, two dressed in ID purple had sequestered counter space.

Both were focused on their notebook screens.

Mendenhall slipped into her cubicle. Someone, probably Pao Pao, had left her an orange juice. She drank it, felt the physical need rush through her. It was proper medicine to treat the Meeks case as evidence for further containment. She knew this, but she did not feel it. She was beginning to fear she couldn't trust her instincts, wondered how much they were skewed by what she sensed from the floors above and what might be happening outside.

On her screen, she entered the trauma forum and started a discussion thread for the five cases. She usually enjoyed this part of her profession. Rarely did ER specialists get to partake of such deliberation and exchange. Even in a worldwide exchange, their cases almost never lasted long enough for true discussion, ending in demise or reassignment to the real specialists.

She kept her information blunt and scientific, using Claiborne's summations, reserving her doubts. She merely asked for similarities.

She knew Thorpe—one of his techs anyway—would monitor this exchange. She liked to imagine that her mentor checked them. She used that for control.

Within the moment it took her to rest her eyes on the bay, the Thorpe tech added corrections and extensions. Good wishes and promises came from ERs in Calcutta and Dublin. Then one more from Montreal, who had heard.

What usually emerged from these forums were strange ways that people died or didn't die. Patients hauled from the bottom of frozen rivers who were revived after several hours, unharmed, relating dreamy visions of the underside of the ice. Or the Phineas Gages of the world, those who staggered from death, dazed, changed, alive.

24 .

Mullich let her into Pathology. Claiborne was not there. Silva stood facing the far wall, the screens showing the hollow body outlines above her. There was already one for Meeks, showing the same trauma pattern, his passing through the left torso, the upper lobe of the lung and shoulder muscles. All five body patterns were gridded, set in sublimate position, arms and legs slightly spread, hands turned and open. She thought of the Da Vinci sketches. Silva said nothing, did not acknowledge Mendenhall's arrival.

Mullich stood before the adjacent wall, his screens showing floor and building diagrams, points of discovery marked by red dots. Mullich, at least, was facing her.

“I blame you,” she told him. “Mostly.”

He offered a confused expression.

“You and your building,” she said, “for taking me away from my medicine. Away from where I should've stayed. Inside the bodies.

Inside what I know.”

“You don't strike me as the blaming type.”

“I'm trying to be different.” She turned to Silva, who remained facing her work, manipulating the overhead screens. “And you, too.

For calling me out.”

Silva did not turn around but flexed her shoulders. The black line of her ponytail remained still and straight down the middle of her small back.

Mendenhall gazed at the digital bodies, the tornadic patterns passing through them, the peripheral smudges marring the grid lines.

Mullich started discussing floors and then the bodies. Fleming, Verdasco, and Peterson, he said, were particular to single floors: Four, Three, and Two. Dozier and Meeks, by occupation, roamed all floors and subbasements.

“According to precedent, that indicates something airborne, the progression being strictly vertical despite the free roamers. Like Legionnaires'.”

But it was as though she heard the outside of his words, only the echo.

“The odds,” said Mendenhall. “What are the odds? That Meeks and Dozier happened to be on different floors? From each other?

From the others?”

“Three to one,” replied Mullich. Again the echo.

She had moved on. She spoke to Silva's back. “Can you shift the bodies to their found positions?”

From a laptop below the screens, Silva curled each body into its found position. Verdasco was the only one who hadn't moved, who hadn't fallen or collapsed. She studied the tornadic pattern across his bronchus. She looked away to refresh, caught Mullich's blueprint, felt her heart rate increase but did not know why.

“Move all the bodies into their positions before collapse.” Her own words registered as echoes.

“We don't have the new one yet.”

“His name is Lual. Lual Meeks.” Mendenhall stared intently at Mullich's blueprints. “The ones you have, then.”

Silva looked over her shoulder with a worried expression, then worked the laptop. The hollow figures shifted in quick increments, clicked into positions: Dozier on his invisible ladder, Fleming with her invisible cup of tea, Verdasco remaining at rest, Peterson and her cigarette.

Mullich probably saw it before Mendenhall did. The bodies coiled into their various ready positions, all different postures. But the tornadic patterns. Those. They went parallel to one another, all five, perfectly parallel.

Mullich looked at the body screens. Mendenhall looked at the building screens. She focused on the one showing the cross-section of the hospital.

“Draw it,” she said. “You see it. I smell it on you. Draw it.”

But he didn't have to draw it. The diagonal formed by the red discovery points reflected the diagonals on the bodies. Paralleled them. Mullich then connected them with a green line from Seven to the subbasement, from Dozier to Meeks, passing through Fleming, Verdasco, and Peterson.

Silva was now seeing it, gazing from her wall to Mullich's, then back.

“That's not possible. That's absurd.” Silva checked her laptop, redid the contortions. The line through the building remained parallel to the line through each of the bodies. She finally looked at Mendenhall. “There are no straight lines in medicine.”

“We all noticed,” said Mendenhall. “Without prompting. We all see it.”

The green diagonal passing through the blueprint was duplicated four times by the tornadic patterns through the bodies on the adjacent wall. That was what showed.

Mullich appeared fascinated. He gazed back and forth from the bodies to the building.

“The explanation is simple,” he said. “Amazing—but simple. The two of you marked the calibrations on each floor. But you carried with you impressions of the bodies you had examined. Your floor marks were influenced by your knowledge of the bodies.”

She hated Mullich. She hated when doctors were like this, so quick with their expertise. Let the patients have their moments, her mentor had told her, their moments of recognition. Let them be right. Learn. Learn with them.

Silva touched the tablet beside the laptop, a graceful tap with middle finger. Her look excluded Mullich. Her eyes were stark, black as her lashes and hair. “Dr. Claiborne's on his way down.”

She configured the hollow bodies back into their sublimate positions, all parallels gone. The diagonal through Mullich's blueprint now seemed aimless, out of place in a medical lab. There were no straight lines in trauma, either, especially not in ballistics.

“Thank you,” Mendenhall said to Silva. “I'll go. I'll take the stairs.”

“He takes the stairs. When he can't get in his run.”

“Okay. The elevator.” Mendenhall addressed Mullich, pointed to the green line. “Take that away.”

She felt Silva's gaze, a wanting of exchange with her. We see what we are. They were two very different people yet had seen the same thing, constructed the pattern together, even argued a bit while doing this. As Mendenhall closed her eyes—she knew Silva was watching—she saw the diagonal, the slash of demise, through the building and the bodies, green turned to its negative, red.

With her card, she commandeered the elevator to the top floor, closed her eyes and imagined it shooting through the lid of Mercy General, a passage from a childhood book. She imagined, too, the iron tamping rod shot through the brain of Phineas Gage, recalled the photos from her medical texts, the bust of his head, the portrait of him holding the rod, the rod he had carried with him as a cane for the rest of his life. She imagined it erasing his thoughts. She thought of Phineas Gage relearning himself.

At the door to the roof she punched in her card. The red light blinked. She counted to ten and punched again, was refused. She repeated this four times, her forehead pressed to the door, her eyes closed. Beneath, the momentum of the building continued to slide away from her.

Ten more hystericals had come in after the discovery of Meeks.

Pao Pao messaged her not to come; the ID people were there. Pao Pao had termed them hysterical, was still on her side. That was good.

She punched the card key again. She wasn't sure why or whom she was conjuring. Mullich could come, let her onto the roof.

Thorpe's people could arrive, take her to quarantine. Maybe she was testing her value.

No one came. She returned to the ER.

The ten new arrivals were fully curtained. This was a mistake.

They had to be obvious hystericals. Thorpe would have taken anyone of interest. Closing the curtains fully around the patients would only increase their anxiety, heighten symptoms. Symptoms—even false ones—could injure and kill.

Her mentor had made her study psych wards. Among the

catatonic and the wild, the doctors and nurses moved with rehearsed precision, every gesture a revelation. They did what they could do.

They probably had an abandoned file room, somewhere they went to laugh, cry, push their weight into the glass.

She parted the first curtain, just the section at the foot of the bed, giving the patient a view of the bay. The patient seemed very fit, midfifties, a visitor. Beneath the sheet, his torso formed a wedge to his narrow waist. His face was lean and drawn, temples and cheeks forming hollows, a guy who ate plain tuna and nonfat cottage cheese and used his gym membership. A guy who believed the world was out to destroy his body.

In her early years she had felt no sympathy for psychosomatic arrivals, had seen them as selfish time-wasters. But by now she had developed some sympathy. It was their way of engaging with life, of acknowledging it. Her mentor had given her a book. The book's premise was that life is the perfect crime. She liked it because it denied the metaphor, denied itself, found purpose in that denial.

She sanitized her hands, introduced herself, and took the patient's pulse. The curtained nook seemed quaint: no equipment, no technology, light filtered through gauze, a neat stack of cool towels, and a cup of water. She pressed his forehead: 101.5.

“Do you know what it is?” he asked.

“I know that what you have is completely different.”

“You know that?”

“Yes. I was the first one. I've been working with Pathology. And everybody.”

Across the opening in the curtain, Cabral passed. She recognized him from his posture, downward and thought-filled. She was not surprised to see him return to the stall.

“Dr. Mendenhall.”

“Yes, Cabral. Open the other stalls. Like this one.”

He nodded. There was something about him. She sensed a retraction in her vision. When she looked back to the patient, she recognized what was happening to her. The familiar dizziness, one-sided, a physical click, pleasant above her brain stem. She needed to sleep. Stop everything and sleep. Lie down. She already yearned for the waking moment, that fresh blare of thought.

She smiled at the patient and told him to drink his water. As she passed Cabral, she told him not to open the drape to her stall.

She chose the stall three removed from the last hysterical. She enclosed herself within the curtains. As she sat on the bed, she removed her lab coat and readied it as a blanket. She knew Meeks had fallen at the same time as the others. She knew the rattle and thrum of the bay would lead her to sleep. She knew she would lose consciousness within seconds of sublimation. She knew how soft the pillow would feel. She knew there was something wrong with Cabral.

What she didn't know was how long she would sleep.

The first waking was false, surfacing to dream glare. The stall hung white. She heard static. The sharpness of the real waking verified the first as dream. Eyes open, head lifted from pillow, she had trouble discerning between the two. Her heart rate, which had jolted her out of the dream, increased. Outside the gauzy enclosure of her stall, it was not quiet. Someone—a nurse—had screamed. Carts rolled, running shoes squeaked. Nurses tried to give orders. Finally one asked, “Where's Pao Pao?”