The Variant Effect: PAINKILLER (3 page)

What’s his problem?

Borland wondered if the Shomberg Clinic had
received the Variant Effect Alert bulletin that HQ was sending out
to all health care providers and hospitals. That was bound to
rattle anyone holding a doctor’s license.

Maybe
he
was afraid of Borland.
Especially with the doctor’s age being what it was: did he think
his patient was cooking the Variant molecule? Or was he afraid that
the new hybrid in the bulletin might set off his own inner
beast?

Borland shook his head and took a deep
breath.

“I know too much,” Borland mumbled
matter-of-factly.

The doctor looked up then, asked more
questions about Borland’s health: Do you take any medication? When
was your last physical? Do you have any allergies?

After much repetition, Borland managed to
provide answers and clear up a few questions of his own, or at
least as much as he wanted to know. He’d didn’t care for the play
by play.

Cut. Snip. Whatever
.

That was when the doctor slipped in a
bulletin of his own—how the Shomberg treatment stood up so well to
scrutiny because it depended on the patients being awake during the
procedure and did not involve dangerous anesthetics or lengthy
recovery times

Borland’s mouth dropped open.

“What?” he asked.

“Drop your pants please.” The doctor circled
his desk and pulled a short stool over as Borland got to his
feet.

The doctor sat and pointed at Borland’s
groin. “
And
underwear.”

“I’ll be awake for the surgery?” Borland
grabbed at his belt.

“Pardon me?” the doctor asked, slipping on a
pair of vinyl gloves. He peered up over his glasses as Borland
repeated the question, and then answered: “Oh, yes. It simplifies
everything. People do not realize how risky anesthetic can be
during a procedure and post-operatively.”

“But—I’ll be awake when you do it?” Borland
asked again, lowering his pants and underwear.

“
I
won’t be doing it.” The doctor
contemplated Borland’s hairy crotch and swollen belly.

“You really should have lost some weight,” he
sighed, looking up, sheathed fingers reaching out and abstractedly
manipulating Borland’s testicles. “We shouldn’t even operate.”

“I lost 15 pounds...” Borland grumbled
defensively, feeling his face flush unexpectedly when the doctor
told him to turn his head and cough.

“Not enough,” the doctor replied, shaking his
head, his gaze shifting up to Borland’s navel. He stared at the
swollen lump of flesh that protruded. Then he reached out and
forcefully pushed it in.

“Hey!” Borland gasped, coughed and stepped
back. He almost lost his footing when his pants tightened around
his ankles, but he caught himself against his chair.

“You could lose 30 more.” The doctor grabbed
his e-board from a short side table and tapped something on the
virtual keys.

“Inguinal hernias, left and right,” he said,
checking something off on the cartoon abdomen displayed on the
e-reader’s color screen.

He reached into the breast pocket of his lab
coat and pulled out a large pen. He uncapped it, and then stroked
it deftly across Borland’s belly, leaving a thick horizontal line
of black ink above the protruding navel.

“The surgeon will cut
here
,” the
doctor said, gesturing at the line before turning away. “He’s not
going to like the fact that you’re
obese
.”

Borland stared down at his swollen navel and
sighed.

Obese?

He felt a sudden urge to hit the bottles
tucked away in his bags. Call an end to the whole drama.

The hell with this
!

But from Borland’s point of view the doctor’s
black line appeared to curve down to either side beneath the
plum-sized hernia like a frown.

He had to get this done
.

“That’s all there is to it,” the doctor said,
saving the information on his e-board and copying it to Borland’s
file.

Wincing at the painful throb in his abdomen,
Borland pulled his clothing back into place, loosely fastening his
belt.

The doctor held out his file—the flash card
on it flickering as the data saved. He set it on Borland’s palm.
“Take this down to accounting. They’ll tell you were to go from
there.”

CHAPTER 5

Borland had read the background on the
website.

The Shomberg Clinic sold unique soft tissue
dissection and repair that had an almost zero failure rate, so
sufferers came from all over the world to receive the famous
treatment. They used industrial production techniques in their war
on hernias because the injuries were so common.

Dr. Shomberg had developed his innovative
surgical repair techniques during World War Two to help young men
who were unable to enlist because of their hernias. His repair soon
fixed these recruits for service, and before long all branches of
the military wanted his aid. His methods soon became the favorite
of construction workers and anyone in a strenuous line of work.

And the repair was so solid his patients
could get back to work or service in record time with little chance
of re-injuring themselves.

Shomberg founded the clinic and the clinic
grew into a hernia-repair factory.

Day surgery at most hospitals, the repair as
Dr. Shomberg saw it required an extended stay for lasting results.
So he developed an assembly-line method that involved constant
waves of injured patients arriving and entering the clinic to match
the waves of recuperating patients leaving after the three- or
four-day repair cycle.

The various stages of overlap that occurred
were responsible for the strange population Borland found wandering
the clinic halls.

There were check-in and orientation day
patients, operation day patients, healing day patients and final
day—
get me out of here
—patients. The result was a motley
crew of anxious, wounded and relieved individuals—all of them
wishing they were anywhere else on the planet, but all of them
thrown into a weird brotherhood of embarrassing injury, violation
and release.

Everybody had a limp or soon would.

Check-in day caused a lot of stress as new
patients inserted themselves into the clinic’s production line and
bore witness to patients a day or days ahead of them in the
process.

Operation day patients were the worst. They
could strike terror into any heart—tumbling out of their beds and
shuffling through the ebb and flow of arrivals and departures
smelling of disinfectant and body odors, and sporting grime and
fear and various fright-wig hairstyles.

Each of them moving gingerly; fearing that
any jarring motion might damage their recent repairs of flesh and
steel thread, or worse, according to rumor, start a gory cascade of
abdominal wall and intestines.

Borland hated it all and decided to do his
best to avoid identification with any group. He wanted to go in
like a Sneak Squad. Keep his head low, have the treatment and get
out of there without experiencing any but the absolute bare minimum
of human contact.

As he stumped along the carpeted hallway
after the nurse, careful not to jingle his hidden
cranking
materials, he mused over his ill luck and growing thirst.

Soon. He thought of the dark brown bottles of
whiskey so near.
Soon
.

The halls and rooms were designed and built
in the 50s, all Arborite and chrome, with 70s upgrades like faux
stained glass lamps and dark wood paneling and room dividers
decorated with super-graphics.

Time had stopped at an ugly time.

Borland wondered if that happened in
efficient places. They were too busy doing their jobs in its
deepest and darkest rooms—the OR and labs—unable to give more than
a passing thought to decor.

Borland was aware of the ever-present hum and
rattle of air conditioning units—the buzz and click of old light
fixtures and the starched rustle of the scrubs worn by the nurses
and orderlies.

He realized that the more he tried to shut
them out, the more he noticed the sounds. And then he understood an
important underlying factor.

He needed a drink
.

Borland had been cranked for most of the last
couple decades so sobriety was close to an alien concept. And
that’s what was pushing in on him, causing his ears to ring,
allowing him to feel his pulse in his fingertips.

He needed a drink
.

So he tried to distract himself with the
nurses. They went by all manner of kind: fat, thin, broad, awkward
or dippy; dressed in ill-fitting floral patterned pants and
jackets.

And they made annoying rustling sounds
when they moved
.

As he glanced at their pastel forms he
realized that the majority were approaching retirement. These ones
either had their men or were moving into a new phase of life.

Join the crowd
...

As he moved past a recreation room with a
pool table, loungers and couches, Borland ignored the mincing nods
of the new boys that needed friends, the salty glances of the
seasoned who had stories to tell, and the normalizing, shifting
gaze of those who desperately wanted to leave their hernias and all
Shomberg associations behind them.

Borland had been through too much to fear a
surgical procedure—even one he had to be awake for—but he knew
enough about people and Variant to keep an eye out for the wrong
kind of look.

There
was
a look, and he knew it.

The
Effect
was coming back and it
could be, in fact was, lurking everywhere he looked in everyone he
saw. Even in the doctors and nurses.

Everywhere, so then
...

Then they wanted him to take powerful
painkillers, lie down and have his abdomen cut open. He was
supposed to trust a stranger to take him apart and stitch him back
together.

They better have some world-class
painkillers
.

His hernias were 98 percent discomfort, two
percent pain—he was used to them. He didn’t care about his looks,
so he could have put the procedures off pretty simply.

Until your liver falls out?

The nurse led him down the corridor, her
voice a raspy horn of menopausal know-how, telling him about what
he couldn’t do and what he had to do.

“Don’t remove your wristband. Don’t remove
your nametag. Wear it at all times,” she ordered and glanced at his
tag as he followed her into the room. “Your number is 328-2. The
‘2’ stands for
you
.” She walked to the head of a very narrow
single bed by the window. “This bed is number ‘2’, so you use it.
Same as the closet.” She pointed at a pair of closets marked ‘1’
and ‘2.’ “Anything with a ‘2’ on it is yours.” She smiled through a
mass of tanned wrinkles. “Your roommate is number ‘1.’”

Roommate
.

“Who’s that?” Borland managed to hide his
discomfort with the question. “I have to share at 200 bucks a
night?”

“We’re not the Best Western, Mr.,” She looked
down at his nametag. “
Borland
. Everybody gets a roommate at
the Shomberg Clinic.” The nurse looked into his eyes. “Who knows,
you might accidentally make a friend.”

Borland grumbled, scowling around the
room.

“It’s a little late, but you can probably
still get some lunch. There’s an orientation meeting at four
o’clock,” the nurse said, pulling a pamphlet from where it was
shoved under the pillow on bed number 2. “Bring that card. They’ll
answer your questions there.”

She turned and in a flurry of action guided
her wide hips out the door.

Borland set his bags by the foot of the bed
and dropped onto the mattress with a loud
THUD
.

He looked through the window at a group of
tall pines that grew over a walking path. They were rusty brown and
green and somehow felt clean to watch.

CHAPTER 6

Lunch?

Borland knew it was late enough in the day
for any meal to qualify as supper, but he was hungry from all the
waiting so he followed the river of patients that flowed to and
from the dining room. They were milling about bored, coming and
going, up and down the stairs. It was plain that if you weren’t
eating, you were walking around until the next meal.

It was an endless line of white hair and
loose clothing, pulling magnetically, drawing Borland down the
steps; they linked him to the daisy chain of aging.

He felt very old in such company.

Nothing new, he’d felt old for years, a fact
pounded home by his hernias but for some reason the resolute,
unrelenting shuffle of the hernia-borne, the operation and healing
day patients; the core group of smiling gramps, hot wrinkles shot
with red, chipped at his ability to confidently deny the overall
affect of aging upon him.

He was feeling ancient and it was their
fault
.

This added to the fact that the gray beards
automatically started to count him among their number, involve him
in their mumbling irrelevance, made him reluctant to go to the
dining room at all—
besides, no drinking, no point
.

And he’d never been big on company. The
Variant Effect just made the apprehension worse. So Borland tended
to eat at home or alone, choosing isolated places to sit or stand
if he did have to be around people, especially when he was called
upon to fraternize or like now, join the
crew
for
dinner.

And especially if he was sober.

He needed a drink
.

Then he imagined Brass setting the whole
thing up. He’d know what the Shomberg Clinic was like, one of the
strings he pulled would have told him how out of place Borland
would be.

Brass was laughing
...