Free Beat the Reaper: A Novel by Josh Bazell Page A

that again.” But when I chose to instead express my pathetic need for the Locanos, and my rapid-onset addiction to bloodshed.
    “Never lie to me again,” I said.
    “I didn’t—” Locano said.
    “Fuck you. And if you do, and I end up killing an innocent, I’m coming after you next.”
    “Of course,” he said.
    We were already negotiating.

7
    At seven forty-two AM I fall asleep in my armchair again and my head hits the wall. Proving, interestingly, that no amount of stress on earth can keep you awake through Attending Rounds.
    Attending Rounds is when a large group of people convenes in one of the ward lounges and goes through the patient list to “make sure we’re on the same page” and satisfy the legal requirement that someone actually qualified to be making patient-care decisions at least hears about these decisions after they’ve been made.
    This person is the Attending Physician, a real-world doctor who comes in and supervises the ward for one hour a day for one month each year, in return for which he gets to call himself a professor at a prestigious New York medical school that, as far as I can tell, has no other connection with Manhattan Catholic whatsoever. In keeping with the clarity goals of healthcare terminology, the Attending is the person present on the ward least.
    This particular Attending is one I know. He’s sixty. He always has superbly expensive-looking shoes, but what has truly earned him my admiration is that his usual answer to my asking him how he’s doing in the morning is “Terrific. I’m on the nine a.m. back to Bridgeport.”
    Right now he’s supporting his head with one hand, which his jowls overhang like the corners of a tablecloth. He has his eyes closed.
    The other people in the room are: an intern who’s one of the counterparts to Akfal and me but for the ward at the other end of the building (she’s a young Chinese woman named Zhing Zhing, who sometimes gets so depressed she needs you to unbend her limbs for her), our combined four medical students, and our Chief Resident. We have the lounge to ourselves, because we kicked out the herd of bathrobed patients who were watching TV in the hopes of dying somewhere outside of their hospital beds. Sorry, folks. There’s always the hall.
    But Jesus fucking Christ am I tired.
    One of the medical students—not even one of mine, one of Zhing Zhing’s—is reading an incredibly long list of obscure liver function test results, verbatim. These tests should not have been ordered in the first place. The patient has heart failure. And since they’ve all come back normal, you would think the med student would at least spare us having to hear them.
    And yet, no one screams.
    I have a waking hallucination that there’s moss growing up one of the walls, then I feel myself falling asleep again. So I try the trick where you keep one eye open—the one the Chief Resident can see—and hope that means half my brain is getting some rest. My head bangs off the wall again. I must have drifted off.
    Now it’s seven forty-four.
    “Are we boring you, Dr. Brown?” the Chief Resident asks.
    The Chief Resident has finished her residency but has chosen to stay on at ManCat for an extra year, in a manifestation of what I believe is still called “Stockholm Syndrome.” She’s wearing a fairly hot skirt suit under her white coat, but also her usual facial expression, which would go well with her saying “You took a shit on my shoes? ”
    “No more than usual,” I say, trying to rub my face into wakefulness. I notice there actually is moss growing up one of the walls, though my double vision is exaggerating it.
    “Maybe you’d like to tell us about Mr. Villanova.”
    “Sure. What would you like to know?” I say, wondering who Mr. Villanova is. For a moment I worry it might be another of Squillante’s nicknames.
    “Apparently you ordered stat CT scans of his chest and buttocks.”
    “Oh, right. Assman. I’d better go check