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.
TWO
26.
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?”
Mendenhall knew Cabral was dead. She knew from the waking dream. This realization was what that two-second dream was about.
But it was hard to get her body to work. She had no grip. She needed to focus just to turn her wrist, to see her watch. She had slept for three hours, a stunning amount for her in the ER.
Dread sharpened her logic. If she stepped out there to do her job, to take charge, chances were high that ID would quarantine her, connecting her with Cabral, Meeks. If she left the ER along the periphery of the bay, took the elevator somewhere quiet—like Physical Therapy—only Mullich would find her. She would have to go into hiding. The only way she could survive that emotionally would be to stay involved in these cases. That involvement would reveal her.
Thorpe was the unknown factor. How accurate was her assessment of him? Was he power or science, more paper than blood? How strongly did she believe her claims about him, the ones she had voiced to Claiborne and Mullich, that he was paper? That he needed her science, their science, their blood work?
Undecided, she slid through the curtain opposite the commotion.
She knew all of the bay’s blind spots, every crease. Pao Pao spotted her immediately but said nothing. Mendenhall raised a staying hand. The nurse stood along the inner circle surrounding Cabral.
Again, that series of Busby Berkeley dancers swayed this way and that, people afraid but wanting to see. There were more ID people than Mendenhall had expected, purple and done up as surgeons, none of them where they were supposed to be. Only Pao Pao was positioned correctly, ready for orders. Dmir stood in the second circle, hesitating.
Cabral had not even been transferred to a gurney. Someone had spun his bed into the bay. The brakes were still set on one of the wheels, and so his bed angled in throwaway position, his body uncovered. His hands were clasped beneath his chin as he curled on his side, a child saying bedtime prayers. His eyes were open. She could tell from across the bay. The curtains and rods of his stall lay collapsed, ruined by panic.