Emergency Room (7 page)

“Sneakers didn’t make it,” said the other one, cutting off what was left of Alec’s high tops.

A cold slimy slab covered the agonizing burn where the exhaust pipe had cooked off his skin. Alec moaned slightly and the EMT said, “It’s Jell-pac, son. It’ll cool off the burn and keep it nice and clean for the doctors to look at.”

A tiny clear plastic bag covered his face now, and an explosion of clarity fireworked in his head.

“How much oxygen are you giving him?” said one.

“Fifteen liters. You think that’s too high?”

“Nope. That’s what I’d do.” This EMT said gently, “We’re going to pour water over you, son. Get the worst of the junk off your skin. You got sand and pebbles and tar stuck to you. Hang on, this won’t feel good.”

It didn’t.

“You’re gonna feel a little stab,” said the woman EMT. “I’m starting an IV on your left hand.”

He wanted to watch but could see only her moving shoulders and arms. She was braced against the shiny built-in cupboards that lined the interior of the ambulance. He felt nothing when she claimed to be putting in the needle. That scared him more than if he had felt everything.

“He’s got a wallet,” said the man who had cut off his jeans. “Driver’s license says this is Alexander Whitman. Age seventeen.”

Distinctly, over everything else, Alec heard a pencil scrawling on paper. They are filling in forms for me, he thought.

He wondered if there were carbons to give to the morgue.

“Taking a corner!” yelled a voice from the front.

He had forgotten about the driver, forgotten how fast they were going.

He felt the engine back off, saw the woman grab a ceiling rod like a subway bar for balance. He felt every degree of the turn the ambulance took. The vehicle whirled. He felt like a vegetable in a blender.

Vegetable.

A picture of himself — unspeaking, unmoving, naked and helpless — appeared in Alec’s mind.

Vegetable.

Please, no. Please don’t let me be a vegetable.

S
ETH WAS COMING BACK
from the Blood Lab, two buildings away. Newly built hospitals would have delivery systems with pneumatic tubes, like drive-up windows of banks, but this hospital was too old and had too many buildings for a straight shoot. Seth loved going to the Blood Lab, not because he got to do anything or talk to anybody, but because the route involved an underground tunnel not accessible to the public.

It was one of the few things he would do tonight where he felt part of the system. Somebody who knew what was going on; a grownup. He loved that tunnel.

Fat yellow tiles covered the walls and floor of this sub-basement tunnel, but the ceiling, which contained everything that let the hospital exist, was not enclosed. Spookily low over Seth’s head stretched armloads of exposed wiring, huge square air-conditioning ducts, and black plastic water mains. This allowed the maintenance crew to reach everything easily, but if you really wanted to disable the hospital, it wouldn’t take long from here.

Seth dodged several large carts of dirty laundry being hauled behind a small electric truck. He found the right stairs (elevators were too slow) and walked swiftly back to the ER. (Real doctors did not take their time; they rushed; Seth loved rushing.)

The doors to the Trauma Room were closed and the halls were mobbed by police and ambulance personnel. Something big went down, thought Seth, and I missed it!

Perhaps there had been a drug war or a race riot or a multiple car crash! Seth wedged between the phalanx of cops and reached out for the silvery handle of the Trauma Room door. A cop blocked his way. “Run along, kid.”

Run along, kid?
The cop was dull looking. Beefy, beer-bellied, in need of a shave. How could this person push Seth around? Seth glared at him, ready to argue, but the cop never even glanced at Seth, never had looked at him to start with; Seth was nothing but a pink jacket taking up valuable space.

The cops passed him like a plate in a restaurant down the hall and out of the way. Oh, well, he thought, diverting himself by looking for the really pretty medical student. He searched the main halls and then poked around through the minor halls that led to X-ray and storage and conference rooms. On his second pass Meggie said, “They’re in the Family Room.”

“Who?” said Seth.

“The medical students. You think I didn’t see you pretending to be one? You want to catch up, they’re in the Family Room.”

There was a glint in Meggie’s eye that Seth could not decipher. He debated his strategy. Should he acknowledge that he had his eye on the pretty doctor? Or did this have nothing to do with flirting? And was there something terrific going on in the Family Room that he should get in on? What was Meggie’s motive here? Was she making a gift to him or setting him up?

“You’re gonna make a good doctor,” Meggie said. “I can see the calculating going on behind your eyes.”

I hate women, thought Seth. They spend all their time trying to look inside men. Analyzing us. Trespassing on our thoughts.

Meggie laughed. “Not a bad night for a future doctor. You got three women making eyes at you.”

Three? That would have to include Diana. Seth, although busy hating women, found that he was still very interested in them. Playing for time and hoping for clues, he said, “So what’s happening in the Family Room?”

“Patient is brain-dead but not body dead. Doctors are telling the family. They got to decide whether to donate the organs and pull the plug or what. Medical students are down there listening to see what kinds of things you say and what kinds of reactions you get.”

Seth almost gagged. The family of some half-dead person had to have this terrible announcement made in the company of medical students taking notes on their clipboards?

“This is a teaching hospital,” said Meggie. She sounded as if she were quoting a news release. “So anything that happens, you have to expect it to be a teaching event.” Meggie adjusted everything on her person. She adjusted her hair, her eyeglasses, her bra straps and the contents of her bra. If Seth did that much adjusting to
his
person, somebody would arrest him. “Go on down there,” Meggie added. “You might learn the really good stuff if you go down there.” There was such a taunt in her voice that Seth knew it was some kind of test.

I learned something from Diana, he thought. I think I know the passing grade here. He sat down next to Meggie. The inner side of the desk was usually littered with doctors using telephones or computers, scribbling on charts, or looking something up in the pharmacology references. It was rare to find an empty seat. What great stuff had he missed? Seth looked longingly at the press of cops blocking the Trauma Room and forced himself to pay attention to Meggie. “I guess I don’t want to interrupt the family, Meggie,” he said, although in a sick and twisted way he wanted very much to do that. “I guess that’s pretty hard on the family.”

Meggie relaxed. She smiled at him. He had passed her test, and Meggie thought better of him.

Diana was walking in their direction, very slowly for Diana, a sheet of paper in her hand. She was about the same color as the sheet of paper. Seth frowned.

Meggie said to Seth, so casually that he knew it was not casual at all, “What’re you doing tonight after work?”

A hundred thoughts rocketed through Seth’s mind. None were complimentary to Meggie. Was she asking him out? What if somebody saw him with her? How could she possibly think — but when he looked her way, he knew she had thought he would be interested, and he could not imagine how to be polite about his refusal. He could hardly answer, “Ugh! Yuck! Never!”

After all, no matter what night of the week he volunteered here, Meggie would still control the desk; he had to stay friends with her. Now how was he supposed to accomplish that without notice or time to prepare an intelligent answer?

Since Meggie worked the four-to-midnight shift, he said, “Diana and I are probably quitting around nine and we have to share a taxi back to the dorm. I haven’t even started studying yet, so I’ll probably be up until one or two hitting the books. My roommates will throw old sandwich crusts at me to make me turn out the lights.” He laughed lightly, pretending he and Meggie shared the trials of being a college kid.

Meggie of course saw right through him, going back to her original assessment of Seth as calculating.

Women stuck together. They never considered themselves calculating. Oh, no. Only men. We just calculate differently, he thought.

He tried to saunter off, but under Meggie’s stare, every move was awkward. Diana was almost upon them, walking with a queer lurch, as if the paper she held in her hand weighed a great deal.

What if Meggie told Diana about the supposed taxi sharing? Diana didn’t want to share Seth’s oxygen, never mind a backseat. Well, the thing was to distract everybody. “Hey, Diana,” he teased, “you look as if you’ve been asked to escort a body to the morgue.”

Diana’s black hair looked even blacker, and her skin even whiter, as if she were human no longer, but had been cut out of paper. “Seth.” Diana said his name as if it were a key. A door. “Seth, I have to show you something.”

He could not help himself. “Gee, Diana, thing is, I’m in a hurry. Stuff I do is important, you know.”

“Okay,” she said, “I know I’ve been kind of — well —”

“A bitch,” said Meggie.

Both Seth and Diana blinked. “Well…” said Diana, flushing, but not using the word herself. She took Seth by the sleeve, and he wanted her to hold his arm, not the cloth; he wanted her to put her hand on his waist or his cheek, not his elbow. She pulled him into an ell where ceiling-height open-wire carts stored IV bottles, disposable thermometers, sheets, blankets, urinals, Kleenex, and gloves.

Seth made a mental note of the spot, in case any pretty medical students or Diana wanted to do something other than air kiss.

“
Seth.
”

She was actually trembling. He could not believe this. The Dianas of the world did not quiver. “What’s wrong?” he felt himself changing from future doctor to Diana’s brother. I don’t want to be her brother, he thought.

“Volunteer!” yelled Meggie from around the corner.

Not now, Meggie, he thought. But, of course, now was when Meggie would yell for them.

“Seth,” said Diana again, heavily, as if she needed the name. “The man in Bed Eight.”

Seth waited for her to go on but she didn’t. She looked glazed. “Yeah?” he said. “The white guy? About fifty? Shortness of breath?”

She nodded.

“What did he do to you?” asked Seth, suddenly angry, suddenly ready to go in there and slam the guy against the wall.

She held out the paper, presumably the guy’s insurance stuff. But she didn’t look at it. Her face trembled, and the smile she put on was unconnected to her thoughts. It came to Seth that if he had ever needed a bedside manner, he needed it now. Hesitantly, Seth put an arm around her shoulders. Diana did not appear to notice it there, which made him feel supremely awkward. He did not know how to touch in a comforting fashion. Perhaps he should practice. “Tell me what’s wrong,” he said. Now he didn’t even like the sound of his voice. Not soothing at all, but kind of rough. He should practice that, too. Make his voice kind. How did you do that, if you weren’t basically a kind person?

What if I’m not kind enough? thought Seth. What if Diana’s right? What if I really am in this for power and prestige and money and pushing people around? What if Meggie and Knika are right, and I’m just another despicable would-be doctor?

“What did Bed Eight do?” repeated Seth.

“I think,” said Diana Dervane, “that he’s my father.”

“M
OTHER?” SAID ROO NERVOUSLY
. She tugged on her own long hair, as if this would give her courage. “Do you think you could help me with the twins tonight?”

“No.”

The syllable hit Roo like a slap on the face. It was intended that way. Roo trembled. She needed an ally so badly she could not think. “Mother, I’m really coming apart. Please help me.”

“We’ve been through this, Ruth. You had choices. You made them. You have to live with it.”

“It’s too hard!” she cried. “Mother, it’s too hard!”

“You should have thought of that.”

She was five miles from her mother. Not in the pretty suburb but the terrifying welfare housing of the City. Not in the comfortable ranch house with its two bathrooms and easy-to-clean linoleum kitchen, but in an ugly dark apartment with roaches. It might as well have been five hundred miles. She had no car. Thursdays, her mother grimly did her good deed, and took Roo and the twins grocery shopping and then to canvas every thrift shop they could find for clothing for the babies. The City had a good bus system, but managing the double stroller by herself was impossible.

On nice days she stuck the twins in the stroller and walked. At first the street terrified her. After all these months, she was far more terrified, having seen what the City could be, but if she stayed home she became angry.

The anger was different from anything Roo had ever felt. It was creeping violence. It would begin in her fingertips and crawl back upward into her hands. Then her hands would knot into fists and she would have to wrap her arms around herself to keep from hitting the twins. The desire to hit the twins lived in her own hands, like evil muscles that belonged to some other body; some wrestler’s or boxer’s body.

But it was Roo’s.

Cal and Val cried all the time. They had diarrhea. Their noses ran. If one slept, the other was awake. They messed up everything. The floor of the little apartment was never free of stuffed toys or tipped-over plastic juice glasses.

She had thought their names were so cute when she picked them out: Callum and Valerie. Now they were nonsense syllables. Cal and Val. Like her life. She could not make sense of her life.

The babies were impossible to escape.

Roo kept the television on twenty-four hours a day. It was her only friend.

Today had been unbearably hot and the arrival of evening had not cooled the apartment one degree. The apartment baked. The babies screamed. Their diaper rashes got worse and their eyes watered and —