The Body Human (14 page)

I thought of Samuel
Fetterolf
before he took J-24, writing everyone in his family all the time, trying to stay connected.
Of Pete, straining every cell of his damaged brain to protect the memories of the old people who’d been kind to him.
Of Jeff Connors, hanging onto Darryl even while he moved into the world of red Mercedes and big deals.
Of Jenny Kelly, sacrificing her dates and her sleep and her private life in her frantic effort to connect to the students, who she undoubtedly thought of as “her kids.”
Of Bucky.

The elevator to the fifth floor was out of order. I took the stairs. The shift nurse barely nodded at me. It wasn’t Susan. In Margie’s room the lights had been dimmed and she lay in the gloom like a curved dry husk, covered with a light sheet. I pulled the chair closer to her bed and stared at her.

And for maybe the first time since her accident, I r
e
membered.

Roll the window down, Gene.

It’s
fifteen degrees out there, Margie!

It’s real air. Chilled like good beer. It smells like a goddamn factory in this car.

Don’t start again. I’m warning you.

Are you so afraid the job won’t kill you that you want the cigarettes to do it?

Stop trying to control me.

Maybe you should do better at controlling yourself
.

The night I’d found Bucky at Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrows, I’d been in control. It was Bucky who hadn’t. I’d crawled back in bed and put my arms around Margie and vowed never to see Bucky and his messy stupid dramas of faith ever again. Margie hadn’t been asleep. She’d been crying. I’d had enough hysteria for one night; I didn’t want to hear it. I wouldn’t even let her speak. I stalked out of the bedroom and spent the night on the sofa. It was three days before I’d even talk to her so we could work it out and make it good between us again.

Have a great year!
she’d
said my first September at Benjamin Franklin. But it hadn’t been a great year. I was trying to learn how to be a teacher, and trying to forget how to be a cop, and I didn’t have much time left over for her. We’d fought about that, and then I’d stayed away from home more and more to get away from the fighting, and by the time I returned
she
was staying away from home a lot. Over time it got better again, but I don’t know where she was going the night she crossed Lexington with a bag of groceries in front of that ’93 Lincoln. I don’t know who the groceries were for. She never bought porterhouse and champagne for
me
.

Maybe we would have worked that out, too.
Somehow.

Weren’t there moments, Gene
, Bucky had said,
when you felt so close to Margie it was like you crawled inside
her skin for a minute? Like you
were
Margie?
No. I was never Margie. We were close, but not that close. What we’d had was good, but not
that
good. Not a perfect merging of souls.

Which was the reason I could survive its loss.

I stood up slowly, favoring my knee. On the way out of the room, I took the plastic bottle of
Camineur
out of my pocket and tossed it in the waste basket. Then I left, without looking back.

Outside, on Ninth Avenue, a patrol car suddenly switched on its lights and took off. Some kids who should have been at home swaggered past, heading downtown. I looked for a pay phone. By now, Jenny Kelly would be done delivering Darryl to his aunt, and Jeff Connors was going to need better than the usual overworked public d
e
fender. I knew a guy at Legal Aid, a hotshot, who still owed me a long-overdue favor.

I found the phone, and the connection went through.

“
A person gives money to the physician.

Maybe he will be healed.

Maybe he will not be healed
.”

—
The Talmud

When the security buzzer sounded, Dr. Jesse Randall was playing
go
against his computer.
Haruo
Kaneko, his roommate at Downstate Medical, had taught him the game. So far nineteen shiny black and white stones lay on the grid under the scanner field. Jesse frowned; the computer had a clear shot at surrounding an empty space in two moves, and he couldn’t see how to stop it. The buzzer made him jump.

Anne? But she was on duty at the hospital until one. Or maybe he remembered her rotation wrong…

Eagerly he crossed the small living room to the security screen. It wasn’t Anne. Three stories below a man stood on the street, staring into the monitor. He was slight and fair, dressed in jeans and frayed jacket with a knit cap pulled low on his head. The bottoms of his ears were red with cold.

“Yes?” Jesse said.

“Dr. Randall?” The voice was low and rough.

“Yes.”

“Could you come down here a minute to talk to me?”

“About what?”

“Something that needs
talkin
’ about.
It’s personal. Mike sent me.”

A thrill ran through Jesse. This was it, then. He kept his voice neutral. “I’ll be right down.”

He turned off the monitor system, removed the memory disk, and carried it into the bedroom, where he passed it several times over a magnet. In a gym bag he packed his medical equipment: antiseptics, antibiotics, sutures,
clamps, syringes,
electromed
scanner, as much equipment as would fit. Once, shoving it all in, he laughed. He dressed in a warm pea coat bought second-hand at the Army-Navy store and put the gun, also bought second-hand, in the coat pocket. Although of course the other man would be carr
y
ing. But Jesse liked the feel of it, a slightly heavy drag on his right side. He replaced the disk in the security system and locked the door. The computer was still pretending to consider its move for
go
, although of course it had near-instantaneous decision capacity.

“Where to?”

The slight man didn’t answer. He strode purposefully away from the building, and Jesse realized he shouldn’t have said anything. He followed the man down the street, carrying the gym bag in his left hand.

Fog had drifted in from the harbor. Boston smelled wet and grey, of rotting piers and dead fish and garbage. Even here, in the Morningside Security Enclave, where that part of the apartment maintenance fees left over from security went to keep the streets clean. Yellow lights gleamed through the gloom, stacked twelve stories high but crammed close together; even
insurables
couldn’t afford to heat much space.

Where they were going there wouldn’t be any heat at all.

Jesse followed the slight man down the subway steps. The guy paid for both of them, a piece of quixotic dignity that made Jesse smile. Under the lights he got a better look: The man was older than he’d thought, with webbed lines around the eyes and long, thin lips over very bad teeth. Probably hadn’t ever had dental coverage in his life. What
had been in his
genescan
?
God, what a system.

“What do I call you?” he said as they waited on the platform. He kept his voice low, just in case.

“Kenny.”

“All right, Kenny,” Jesse said, and smiled. Kenny didn’t smile back. Jesse told himself it was ridiculous to feel hurt; this wasn’t a social visit. He stared at the tracks until the subway came.

At this hour the only other riders were three hard-looking men, two black and one white, and an even harder-looking Hispanic girl in a low-cut red dress. After a minute Jesse realized she was under the control of one of the black men sitting at the other end of the car. Jesse was careful not to look at her again. He couldn’t help being curious, though. She looked healthy. All four of them looked healthy, as did Kenny, except for his teeth. Maybe none of them were uninsurable; maybe they just couldn’t find a job.
Or didn’t want one.
It wasn’t his place to judge.

That was the whole point of doing this, wasn’t it?

The other two times had gone as easy as Mike said they would. A deltoid suture on a young girl wounded in a knife fight, and burn treatment for a baby scalded by a pot of boiling water knocked off a stove. Both times the families had been so grateful, so respectful. They knew the risk Jesse was taking. After he’d treated the baby and left ant
i
biotics and analgesics on the pathetic excuse for a kitchen counter, a board laid across the non-functional radiator, the young Hispanic mother had grabbed his hand and covered it with kisses. Embarrassed, he’d turned to smile at her
husband, wanting to say something, wanting to make clear he wasn’t just another sporadic do-gooder who happened to have a medical degree.

“I think the system stinks. The insurance companies should never have been allowed to deny health coverage on the basis of
genescans
for potential disease, and employers should never have been allowed to keep costs down by health-based hiring. If this were a civilized country, we’d have national health care by now!”

The Hispanic had stared back at him, blank-faced.

“Some of us are trying to do better,” Jesse said.

It was the same thing Mike—Dr. Michael Cassidy—had said to Jesse and Anne at the end of a long drunken evening celebrating the halfway point in all their residencies. Al
t
hough, in retrospect, it seemed to Jesse that Mike hadn’t drunk very much. Nor had he actually said very much ou
t
right. It was all implication, probing masked as casual philosophy. But Anne had understood, and refused i
n
stantly. “God, Mike, you could be dismissed from the hospital! The regulations forbid residents from exposing the hospital to the threat of an uninsured malpractice suit. There’s no money.”

Mike had smiled and twirled his glass between fingers as long as a pianist’s. “Doctors are free to treat whomever they wish, at their own risk, even
uninsurables
.
Carter v. Sunderland
.”

“Not while a hospital is paying their malpractice i
n
surance as residents, if the hospital exercises its right to so forbid.
Janisson
v.
Lechchevko
.”

Mike laughed easily. “Then forget it, both of you. It’s
just conversation.”

Anne said, “But do you personally risk—”

“It’s not right,” Jesse cut in—couldn’t she see that Mike wouldn’t want to incriminate himself on a thing like this
?—
“that so much of the population can’t get insurance. Every year they add more
genescan
pre-tendency barriers, and the poor slobs haven’t even got the diseases yet!”

His voice had risen. Anne glanced nervously around the bar. Her profile was lovely, a serene curving line that r
e
minded Jesse of those Korean screens in the expensive shops on Commonwealth Avenue. And she had lovely legs, lovely breasts, lovely everything. Maybe, he’d thought, now that they were neighbors in the Morningside E
n
clave…

“Another round,” Mike had answered.

Unlike the father of the burned baby, who never had answered Jesse at
all.
To cover his slight embarras
s
ment—the mother had been so effusive—Jesse gazed around the cramped apartment. On the wall were phot
o
graphs in cheap plastic frames of people with masses of black hair, all lying in bed. Jesse had read about this: It was a sort of mute, powerless protest. The subjects had all been photographed on their death beds. One of them was a bea
u
tiful girl, her eyes closed and her hand flung lightly over her head, as if asleep. The Hispanic followed Jesse’s gaze and lowered his eyes.

“Nice,” Jesse said. “Good photos. I didn’t know you people were so good with a camera.”

Still nothing.

Later, it occurred to Jesse that maybe the guy hadn’t
understood English.

The subway stopped with a long screech of equipment too old, too poorly maintained. There was no money. Boston, like the rest of the country, was broke. For a second Jesse thought the brakes weren’t going to catch at all and his heart skipped, but Kenny showed no emotion and so Jesse tried not to, either. The car finally stopped. Kenny rose and Jesse followed him.

They were somewhere in Dorchester. Three men walked quickly toward them and Jesse’s right hand crept toward his pocket. “This him?” one said to Kenny.

“Yeah,” Kenny said. “Dr.
Randall,”
and Jesse relaxed.

It made sense, really. Two men walking through this neighborhood probably wasn’t a good idea. Five was be
t
ter. Mike’s organization must know what it was doing.