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

those.”
    “Do it later.”
    I sit back down. Wipe my nose with my left hand to cover the slow movement of my right hand toward my beeper. “Guy’s got some right buttock and subclavicular pain OUO despite PCA,” * I say. “Looks like a fever, too.”
    “His vitals were normal.”
    “Yeah, I noticed that.”
    My right thumb flicks the test button on my beeper so quickly I wouldn’t have seen it either. When the glorious alarm goes off, I glance at the LCD and jump to my feet.
    “Shit. I gotta go.”
    “Please stay till the end of rounds,” the Chief Resident says.
    “I can’t. Patient,” I say. Which is not so much a lie as a non sequitur.
    To my med students I say, “One of you look up the statistics on gastrectomy for signet cell cancer. I’ll catch up to you later.”
    And, just like that, I’m free.
    I’m thinking too slowly to deal with the Squillante problem, though, so I crush a Moxfane with my fingertips and snort it out of the declivity you can make at the end of your wrist by sticking your thumb out as far from your hand as it will go.
    It makes my nostrils burn crazily, and my vision goes out for a second. What brings me back is my stomach, which is making a series of accelerating metallic spring noises.
    I need to eat something. Martin-Whiting Aldomed is probably hosting a free breakfast somewhere in the hospital, but no way do I have time for that.
    In the rack of used trays by the service elevator I find an unopened plastic bowl of Corn Flakes and a reasonably clean spoon. There’s no milk, but there’s a half-full four-ounce bottle of Milk of Magnesia. Which, I’m sorry to tell you, under certain circumstances is as good or better.
    I take the whole thing into a room with an empty door-side bed, and sit on the edge of the piss-stained mattress to eat.
    I’ve just dug in when a female voice from the other side of the curtain says, “Who’s there, please?”
    I finish first—it takes about four seconds—then chew another Moxfane and stand and walk around to the other bed.
    There’s a young woman in it. Pretty, twenty-one years old.
    Pretty is rare in a hospital. So is young.
    But that’s not what stops me.
    “Fuck,” I say. “You look like someone I used to know.”
    “Girlfriend?”
    “Yeah.”
    The resemblance is slight—it’s the dark vixen eyes or something—but in my current condition it rocks me.
    “Bad breakup?” the woman asks.
    “She’s dead,” I say.
    For some reason she thinks I’m kidding. It’s the Moxfane fucking with my facial expressions or something. She says, “So now you work in a hospital to save people?”
    I shrug.
    “That’s pretty corny,” she says.
    “Not if you’ve killed as many people as I have,” I say. Thinking, Huh. Maybe I should leave the room and let the drugs do all the talking.
    “Medical mistakes, or is it more of a serial killer thing?”
    “Probably a little of both.”
    “Are you a nurse?”
    “I’m a doctor.”
    “You don’t look like a doctor.”
    “You don’t look like a patient,” I say.
    Which is true. Visibly, at least, she’s pure health.
    “I will soon.”
    “Why’s that?”
    “You’re not my doctor?”
    “No. I’m just curious.”
    She looks away. “They’re cutting off my leg this afternoon.”
    I think about this for a moment. Then I say, “Donating it, huh?”
    She laughs, harshly. “Yeah, to a trash can.”
    “What’s wrong with your leg?”
    “I have bone cancer.”
    “Where?”
    “Knee.”
    Prime osteosarcoma territory. “Can I see it?”
    She flips back the covers. They take the corner of her gown with them, giving me a glistening beaver shot. The modern type: Mexican hairless beaver. I can see her blue tampon string. I quickly pull the covers back over her crotch.
    Look at her knees. The right one’s noticeably swollen, more so at the back. Soggy when I feel it.
    “Yuck,” I say.
    “Tell me about it.”
    “When was the last time someone biopsied