The Body Human (16 page)

“You’re saying I’m dead,” Jesse said numbly. “They’ll find me guilty.”

The little lawyer looked pained. “Not ‘dead,’ Doctor.
Convicted—most probably.
But conviction isn’t death. Not even professional death. The hospital may or may not dismiss you—they have that right—but you can still finish your training elsewhere. And malpractice suits, however they go, are not of themselves grounds for denial of a medical license. You can still be a doctor.”

“Treating who?” Jesse cried. He threw up his hands. The books fell slightly faster. “If I’m convicted I’ll have to declare bankruptcy—there’s no way I could pay a jury settlement like that! And even if I found another residency
at some third-rate hospital in Podunk, no decent pract
i
tioner would ever accept me as a partner. I’d have to pra
c
tice alone, without money to set up more than a hole-in-the-corner office among God-knows-
who
…and even that’s assuming I can find a hospital that will let me finish.
All because I wanted to help people who are getting shit on!”

The lawyer took off his glasses and rubbed the lenses thoughtfully with a tissue. “Maybe,” he said, “they’re shitting back.”

“What?”

“You haven’t asked about the specific charges, Doctor.”

“Malpractice!
The brat died!”

The lawyer said, “Of massive
scaramine
allergic rea
c
tion.”

The anger leeched out of Jesse. He went very quiet.

“She was allergic to
scaramine
,” the lawyer said. “You failed to ascertain that.
A basic medical question.”

“I—” The words wouldn’t come out. He saw again the laminated
genescan
chart, the detailed analysis of chr
o
mosome 11. A camera clicking, recording that he was there. The hysterical woman, the mother, exploding from the back room:
noooooooooo
…
The father standing frozen, his eyes downcast.

It wasn’t possible.

Nobody would kill their own child. Not to discredit one of the fortunate ones, the haves, the
insurables
, the
e
m
ployables
…No one would do that.

The lawyer was watching him carefully, glasses in hand.

Jesse said, “Dr. Michael Cassidy—” and stopped.

“Dr. Cassidy what?” the lawyer said.

But all Jesse could see, suddenly, was the row of plastic ducks in his parents’ Florida yard, lined up as precisely as headstones, garish hideous yellow as they marched und
e
viatingly wherever it was they were going.

“No,” Mike Cassidy said. “I didn’t send him.”

They stood in the hospital parking lot. Snow blew from the east. Cassidy wrapped both arms around
himself
and rocked back and forth. “He didn’t come from us.”

“He said he did!”

“I know. But he didn’t. His group must have heard we were helping illegally, gotten your name from som
e
body—”

“But why?”
Jesse shouted. “Why frame me? Why kill a child just to frame
me
? I’m nothing!”

Cassidy’s face
spasmed
.
Jesse saw that his horror at Jesse’s position was real, his sympathy genuine, and both useless. There was nothing Cassidy could do.

“I don’t know,” Cassidy whispered. And then, “Are you going to name me at your malpractice trial?”

Jesse turned away without answering, into the wind.

Chief of Surgery Jonathan
Eberhart
called him into his office just before Jesse started his rotation.
Before, not after.
That was enough to tell him everything. He was ge
t
ting very good at discovering the whole from a single clue.

“Sit down, Doctor,”
Eberhart
said. His voice, normally austere, held unwilling compassion. Jesse heard it, and forced himself not to shudder.

“I’ll stand.”

“This is very difficult,”
Eberhart
said, “but I think you already see our position. It’s not one any of us would have chosen, but it’s what we have. This hospital operates at a staggering deficit. Most patients cannot begin to cover the costs of modern technological health care. State and federal governments are both strapped with enormous debt. Without insurance companies and the private
philanthro
p
ical
support of a few rich families, we would not be able to open our doors to anyone at all. If we lose our insurance rating
we
—”

“I’m out on my ass,” Jesse said.
“Right?”

Eberhart
looked out the window. It was snowing.
Once Jesse, driving through
Oceanview
Security Enclave to pick up a date, had seen
Eberhart
building a snowman with two small children, probably his grandchildren.
Even rolling lopsided globes of cold,
Eberhart
had had dignity.

“Yes, Doctor. I’m sorry. As I understand it, the facts of your case are not in legal dispute. Your residency here is terminated.”

“Thank you,” Jesse said, an odd formality suddenly r
e
placing his crudeness.
“For everything.”

Eberhart
neither answered nor turned around. His shoulders, framed in the grey window, slumped forward. He might, Jesse thought, have had a sudden advanced case of osteoporosis. For which, of course, he would be fully insured.

He packed the computer last, fitting each piece carefully into its original packing. Maybe that would raise the price
that Second Thoughts
was
willing to give him:
Look, a
l
most new, still in the original box
. At the last minute he decided to keep the playing pieces for
go
, shoving them into the suitcase with his clothes and medical equipment. Only this suitcase would go with him.

When the packing was done, he walked up two flights and rang Anne’s bell. Her rotation ended a half hour ago. Maybe she wouldn’t be asleep yet.

She answered the door in a loose blue robe, toothbrush in hand. “Jesse, hi, I’m afraid I’m really beat—”

He no longer believed in indirection. “Would you have dinner with me tomorrow night?”

“Oh, I’m sorry, I can’t,” Anne said. She shifted her weight so one bare foot stood on top of the other, a gesture so childish it had to be embarrassment. Her toenails were shiny and smooth.

“After your next rotation?”
Jesse said. He didn’t smile.

“I don’t know when I—”

“The one after that?”

Anne was silent. She looked down at her toothbrush. A thin pristine line of toothpaste snaked over the bristles.

“Okay,” Jesse said, without expression. “I just wanted to be sure.”

“Jesse—” Anne called after him, but he didn’t turn around. He could already tell from her voice that she didn’t really have anything more to say. If he had turned it would have been only for the sake of a last look at her toes, po
l
ished and shiny as
go
stones, and there really didn’t seem to be any point in looking.

He moved into a cheap hotel on Boylston Street, into a room the size of a supply closet with triple locks on the door and bars on the window, where his money would go far. Every morning he took the subway to the Copley Square library, rented a computer cubicle, and wrote letters to hospitals across the country. He also answered classified ads in the
New England Journal of Medicine
, those that offered practice out-of-country where a license was not crucial, or low-paying medical research positions not too many people might want, or supervised assistantships. In the afternoons he walked the grubby streets of Dorchester, looking for Kenny. The lawyer representing Mr. and Mrs. Steven
Gocek
, parents of the dead
Rosamund
, would give him no addresses. Neither would his own lawyer, he of the collapsing books and desperate clientele, in whom Jesse had already lost all faith.

He never saw Kenny on the cold streets.

The last week of March, an unseasonable warm wind blew from the south, and kept up. Crocuses and daffodils pushed up between the sagging buildings. Children a
p
peared, chasing each other across the garbage-laden streets, crying raucously. Rejections came from hospitals, e
m
ployers. Jesse had still not told his parents what had ha
p
pened. Twice in April he picked up a public phone, and twice he saw again the plastic ducks marching across the artificial lawn, and something inside him slammed shut so hard not even the phone number could escape.

One sunny day in May he walked in the Public Garden. The city still maintained it fairly well; foreign tourist traffic
made it profitable. Jesse counted the number of well-dressed foreigners versus the number of ragged street Bostonians. The ratio equaled the survival rate for uni
n
sured diabetics.

“Hey, mister, help me! Please!”

A terrified boy, ten or eleven, grabbed Jesse’s hand and pointed. At the bottom of a grassy knoll an elderly man lay crumpled on the ground, his face twisted.

“My Grandpa!
He just grabbed his chest and fell down! Do something! Please!”

Jesse could smell the boy’s fear, a stink like rich loam. He walked over to the old man. Breathing stopped, no pulse, color still pink…

No.

This man was an uninsured. Like Kenny, like Steven
Gocek
. Like
Rosamund
.

“Grandpa!” the child wailed.
“Grandpa!”

Jesse knelt. He started mouth-to-mouth. The old man smelled of sweat, of fish, of old flesh. No blood moved through the body. “Breathe, dammit, breathe,” Jesse heard someone say, and then realized it was him. “
Breathe
, you old fart, you uninsured deadbeat, you stinking ingrate, breathe—”

The old man breathed.

He sent the boy for more adults. The child took off at a dead run, returning twenty minutes later with uncles, f
a
ther, cousins, aunts, most of whom spoke some language Jesse couldn’t identify. In that twenty minutes none of the well-dressed tourists in the Garden approached Jesse, standing guard beside the old man, who breathed carefully
and moaned softly, stretched full-length on the grass. The tourists glanced at him and then away, their faces tighte
n
ing.

The tribe of family carried the old man away on a homemade stretcher. Jesse put his hand on the arm of one of the young men.
“Insurance?
Hospital?”

The man spat onto the grass.

Jesse walked beside the stretcher, monitoring the old man until he was in his own bed. He told the child what to do for him, since no one else seemed to understand. Later that day he went back, carrying his medical bag, and gave them the last of his hospital supply of nitroglycerin. The oldest woman, who had been too busy issuing orders about the stretcher to pay Jesse any attention before, stopped dead and jabbered in her own tongue.

“You a doctor?” the child translated. The tip of his ear, Jesse noticed, was missing.
Congenital?
Accident?
Ritual mutilation?
The ear had healed clean.

“Yeah,” Jesse said.
“A doctor.”

The old woman chattered some more and disappeared behind a door. Jesse gazed at the walls. There were no deathbed photos. As he was leaving, the woman returned with ten incredibly dirty dollar bills.

“Doctor,” she said, her accent harsh, and when she smiled Jesse saw that all her top teeth and most of her bottom ones were missing, the gum swollen with what might have been early signs of scurvy.

“Doctor,” she said again.

He moved out of the hotel just as the last of his money
ran out. The old man’s wife,
Androula
Malakassas
, found him a room in somebody else’s rambling, dilapidated boardinghouse. The house was noisy at all hours, but the room was clean and large.
Androula’s
cousin brought home an old, multi-positional dentist chair, probably stolen, and Jesse used that for both examining and operating table. Medical substances—antibiotics, chemotherapy, IV drugs—which he had thought of as the hardest need to fill outside of controlled channels, turned out to be the easiest. On reflection, he realized this shouldn’t have surprised him.