History doesn’t often linger on the details of messy aftermaths, those inevitable compatriots of vast dreams and noble intentions. Whatever survivors emerge become preoccupied with surviving, too distracted by necessity to look too deeply beneath the surface. Choice trickles down to either weathering the storm, or succumbing to it. Doing, not discussing. Striving, rather than talking.
Talking is the last thing you’d want to be caught doing.
I traded my street shoes for the worn white rubber clogs at the bottom of my locker. Next went my jacket, replacing the stethoscope on its hook. Into my pocket it went, along with a handful of pens, a light, and two peppermints to pick up the slack since OSHA still forbade water bottles on the med carts. Finally, I clipped two plastic holsters over my drawstring waistband; one for my epigenetic drift meter, the other my viral shed breathalyzer.
I slammed the locker closed.
“You’re mad at me, aren’t you?” said Paloma from where the metal door had just been.
“Jesus, Pal!” I clutched the front of my scrubs.
Paloma set her lips in a pout while I waited for my pulse to come back down where it belonged. She’d worn lipstick today—and rouge, though not enough to disguise the lacework of green veins flanking her copper-brown cheeks. She, like I, had embraced our mutations. The visible bits anyway. But the makeup told me she was just as nervous as I was about her transfer.
“I’m not mad at you, I just … don’t like the idea of you not being around down here anymore.”
“Oh, c’mon, Mel! I’ve been waiting years to be moved to Transplant. Be happy for me, pleeease?”
“I’m happy! I promise. It’s just … it’s going to be a little weird, you know, when no one finishes my chorus of ‘Sweet Caroline’ from the opposite hall at three AM and stuff.”
Paloma fluttered her eyes upward. “Oh, now I am going to cry. Dammit, and I wore mascara too.”
I hugged her, tight. “Don’t waste your tears on this floor. Take a look at our—ahem—my circuit today.”
Releasing me, she turned to look at the assignment board. “Oh, girl. You’ve got the North Wing?”
“Yup.” I crossed my arms. “And you know what that means.”
Paloma pulled a face halfway between sympathy and disgust. “Fucking Rosebud.”
“Fucking Rosebud,” I agreed. “Go on, clean out your locker. Transplant’s waiting, and you’ve got hearts to break.”
She gave me another tight hug, but when she moved to pull away, I refused to let go. “Nope, gotta hold it ‘till it’s awkward.” She snorted into my ear, and I finally let her go. “Take care of Mr. Anders for me, alright? He’s headed up your way today.”
“Pfft—man’s got a nine-million-dollar set of printed lungs coming his way, hot off the human-genome-only press. Don’t know how I’m supposed to make his day any better.”
“If anybody can, it’s you.”
She fanned herself as though she might blush. “Alright, alright, anything for you, boo. Five-star service.”
“That’s why you’re the best.”
“You know it.”
Bumping my hip against hers, I headed out.
Nurses aren’t supposed to have favorites. We’re not supposed to get attached either, but, hell, I’m only human.
Mostly human?
More human than most, I decided with a satisfied nod. One of the lucky ones.
I greeted the South Wing outer security guard with a tip of my head. The rigid, bark-like skin around his left eye and jaw stood out beneath the harsh overhead lighting, earned from blows exchanged with his first shedder. He threw me a casual salute and reached for the control panel.
Yes, things definitely could have gone worse for me. The door beeped, hissed, and then I stepped into the airlock.
I’d been on a beach in South Florida breaking every rule known to dermatology-kind when I’d been exposed. But in my case, my poor life choice ended up being my saving grace. The sunburn I earned from my noontime margarita-nap had been so severe, it kicked off the virus’s latent regenerative phyto DNA before it had a chance to settle in and multiply. It latched on to my rapidly migrating melanocytes, mutating in-situ to match its demand. The phyto DNA healed my damaged skin but left its mark in a spread of bright green freckles before my Langerhans cells caught on and sent the rest of the virus packing.
‘Business in the back, party in the front,’ Paloma often teased.
Others hadn’t been so lucky.
The familiar smell of virucidal disinfectant tickled my nose as the opposite doors opened with a negative pressure whoosh. Passing the nurse’s station, I swiped a tablet from the end rack and hurried on before Margie or Lynn noticed.
The sound of castors on tile quickened my steps.
“You’re going to get in trouble.”
I skipped backwards a few steps. Margie had rolled out from behind the counter. “Not if you don’t tell anyone.”
“They’re going to see the activity!” Her hands were extended in front of her, still hidden around the corner, but I could hear the loud clacking of pruning shears as Lynn trimmed the foot-long gnarled fingernails Margie walked in with each shift.
“Tell them I was sexting on company time,” I said with a wave, and then dipped around the corner to the circuit.
Mr. Anders was still in bed, nasal cannula in place, and was just reaching for his glasses when I knocked and cracked open the door. He settled them into place, and then his cheeks wrinkled into a perfect old-man grin. “Mel! Bit early, aren’t you?”
I shook my head and slipped inside. There were no cameras on South Wing, its patients being considered low-risk shedders, so I didn’t bother donning a mask or gown. My immunity had been rock-solid ever since that first rollercoaster week. “No, I’m on North today. But I heard someone made it to the top of the list, so … I figured I’d come in early to celebrate.” I pulled the tablet from behind my back.
His look of childlike surprise sent my heart into happy little wiggles. “You didn’t! Oh, Mel, you’re going to get in trouble again.” But he was already making room on the bed.
I scoffed. “What are they going to do, fire me?”
He swatted me as I sat down. “Don’t joke. If—”
I cut him off, pulling my personal phone out of my pocket. “No recorded lines on 8G.”
He only hesitated a moment, then waved me on, peeking over at the door.
I spared him one conspiratorial smile then opened my screen, dialing the number I now knew by heart.
It rang twice before the line clicked open and a young woman with black curly hair and completely human features appeared. “Dad?” she said before the video feed could even catch up.
“Hold for Dad,” I answered with a grin. Seems she knew my number too.
“Oh, Mel! Thank you, thank you! Ellie! Ellie, get over here, It’s Granddaddy!” A garbled scuffle came over the line as I turned on my app mirror and flicked the call over to the tablet.
The whole world rose and bloomed on Mr. Anders’ face as Tonya Anders winked onto the larger screen, a few dark curls poking out at harried angles. Then he let out a grandfatherly laugh as Ellie bowled her way into the picture, her own curls in even more disarray than her mother’s.
We were treated to a comprehensive rundown of what Ellie had learned that week and then had the honor of witnessing her performance of Ariel’s theme from The Little Mermaid. The green freckles on the mermaid doll in her arms didn’t slip my notice for a second.
It was about half-past seven when I glanced at the clock. Tonya must have caught the movement. “Are we out of time?”
I shook my head. “Still another thirty minutes before first rounds.” Then I gave them both a wide smile. “Hey, Ellie, do you know what Granddaddy’s doing today?”
Ellie shook her curly head back and forth and pushed closer to the screen. She had glitter on her cheeks. I nearly melted. I’d been taking care of Mr. Anders since I started at the facility six years ago. I’d celebrated Ellie’s first birthday on this screen, watched her grow up.
I swung an arm around Mr. Anders’ shoulders. “Granddaddy’s getting a brand-new pair of lungs today!”
Ellie’s eyes went wide, and she let out a shrill little-girl squeal. “And then he can come visit?”
I gave her an exaggerated shrug. “You never know. Maybe he will.”
Ellie flung herself out of her mother’s lap and began dancing around the room.
Tonya had gone pale, her face wiped clean of all emotion. I glanced at Mr. Anders, but he only stared back at her, his face a picture of love and contentment.
“You made it to the top of the list?” she finally asked. “Why so quickly?”
He gave her a wheezy huff. “Didn’t I teach you to never question fair fortune?”
“Maybe, but I do question it. What happened to ‘rejection candidate’ and ‘low priority’?”
“New technology,” I answered for him. “This set will be printed with your dad’s own stem cells as a blueprint. The hope is that this will eliminate his need to stay on the anti-rejection meds that keep him from being able to fully kick out the virus.”
She didn’t respond, only kept staring at her father, her eyes growing brighter as the seconds ticked by. Something seemed to pass between them, something that went beyond words.
After a minute or so, Mr. Anders broke the silence with a shaky bob of his head. “We’re cutting things a bit close. Best end things here, I think.”
Tonya didn’t blink, but a tear spilled over onto her cheek, and she pulled in a sharp sniff. “I love you, Daddy.”
“I love you too, sweetheart.” Without another word, he ended the connection.
Tears stood in his eyes. I took his hand. “She’s worried.”
He squeezed my fingers. “As am I, I suppose.”
My nurse’s sense tingled, and I slipped into pre-op mode. “What is it you’re worried about? I’ve read the research, the stats are air-tight, no rejections. And the transfer procedure is old hat, completely routine. You’ll be flying out to Tonya and Ellie by Christmas if all goes as planned.”
“Whose plan, I wonder?”
He spoke so softly I wondered if I’d heard him right. “Mr. Anders, how long have we known each other? Talk to me.”
His lips tightened, parted, then tightened again. “Just, whatever happens today, make sure my affairs are carried out as I’ve designed.”
“Mr. Anders!”
“No, no, Mel—I mean it. Things can go wrong. Expectations can be … flawed.”
I gave his hand another squeeze. “It’s okay to be worried going in. Who wouldn’t be, after what you’ve been through? But your last set of lungs were C-grade,” I reminded him—unspliced, fully human but from a donor who had once had a spliced organ of their own. A shedder. “Last time, your expectations of being able to fully clear the virus were fifty percent or less. These new ones are A-grade. Nothing at all keeping you from reaching zero viral load.”
I’d never seen him so hesitant. “How well do you remember the early days of the PhyZen Mutations?” he finally asked.
“I mean, I was a junior in high school. Not exactly oblivious at that point.” In truth, the memory was seared in—spring break, isolated from my family, the patient in the next bed’s skull exploding from a phyto-regenerated brain tumor that grew branches. They had blossomed. The petals had been pink.
He only nodded as if he hadn’t heard.
Thinking he might need some space to think, I stood, slipping my phone back into my pocket.
“Did I ever tell you what I did before all this? Who I used to be?”
His leaps were leaving me behind, but I’d rolled with worse. “As a matter of fact, you haven’t. No matter how many times I’ve asked. All you’ve ever told me is ‘business.’”
My exaggerated air quotes earned me a smile, but I recognized in all his skating around a man approaching a very fragile subject.
I checked the time. “I don’t clock in for another ten minutes. Anything I hear until then is off the record.”
He responded with a swipe of his hand as if he might bop me on the back of the head though I was well out of reach. “Yes, I was in business. The big kind, where companies, livelihoods, sometimes even more precious commodities were bought and sold at the click of a button. Nothing in that world is unattainable if you know what you’re doing. And while I’m almost ashamed to admit it, I was very good. So good that it didn’t take me long to realize what kind of man I was likely to become if I wanted to make it to the top. Success always comes at a cost. And the higher I climbed, the more I learned what true evil was.”
I stilled in my journey to stash the tablet in the chart rack at the end of the bed. Mr. Anders never talked about his past. I didn’t want to break whatever spell he’d slipped under.
“I made my exit from the industry when Tonya was born. I wanted to be the kind of man a daughter could be proud of, so, I turned my attention to private investing. Medical field, mostly. What more noble act could there be than furthering the advancement of helping others? So, when word came out of a young man—one on the brink of groundbreaking research but who was only in the country on a school visa—I was well placed to secure him a lucrative career at one of the more prominent bio-laboratories.” He paused for a moment, a tremor brushing his cheek. “That student’s name was Javier Mendoza.”
The tablet slipped from my hands into the rack. What. The. Shit. I couldn’t have heard him right.
But his slow nod was confirmation. “I see I don’t need to elaborate on what his research was.”
I swallowed. “A little something to do with splicing plant and human DNA, I imagine?”
His breath came heavy. “At the time he’d only managed to splice in specific, task-oriented plant genes, no real application yet, no results on the cellular level. But, as you know, this was soon to change.”
“The Augusta burn patient.” I remembered the article from my freshman year current events reading.
“Completely healed within weeks of suffering third degree burns to nearly ninety percent of his body,” he said. “The first success of many. This historic debut made Dr. Mendoza the medical equivalent of ‘most eligible bachelor.’ Everyone wanted to apply his science, from interventional radiology to dermatologists injecting cosmetics.”
Fucking Rosebud … Reminded of my rounds, I jerked my head to the clock. Ten ‘til. About to tell him I’d come back at lunch, I turned. He stared at the clock too, then at me. His expression stilled my tongue. He was trying to tell me something that went beyond his story, I could tell. I checked the hall. No sign yet of Margie or Lynn. Deciding, I pulled the privacy curtain halfway closed and sat next to him. “I can be late.”
He didn’t argue, and that more than anything told me I’d made the right choice.
“It was around this time I received my diagnosis.”
My thoughts jumped to his medical record. Idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis. “Your lung tissue was stiffening, and no one could pinpoint a cause.”
“‘Bad luck,’ they finally decided. Possibly genetic, who’s to say. But the disease was progressive to the point where tissue grafts or injections wouldn’t suffice. If I wanted to survive, I would need a total lung transplant. But the risks were high, and I’d seen enough patients rot away from the outside-in from anti-rejection meds. Tonya had just graduated high school. I still had a lot to be there for. So, I went to go speak to Dr. Mendoza.”
My hands crept up to cover my mouth. Please, no.
“He had already begun research into a more multi-disciplinary injection, but a competing pharmaceutical group was blocking his access to a critical resource. I didn’t have years to wait while the folks on top bickered over who would hold the majority share on the preservation of life. Instead, I offered to negotiate a merger between Dr. Mendoza’s human/phyto research and XenBio, leader in xenograft 3D printing—pig hearts and such.” He’d been speaking to his knees, but here he averted his gaze even more, staring out across the room. “I was successful, of course. Within the year, I was breathing through a new pair of lungs—human, but without the risk of rejection. Dr. Mendoza used genetic markers from bamboo to build them. Rapid cellular regeneration. Tissue that could now not only absorb oxygen but convert it as well. I was breathing better than I ever had, even as a child. Dr. Mendoza’s success made medical history again, and so began PhyXen Bio Group.”
My face had gone cold. Chills prickled my arms and back so hard my skin hurt. “Mr. Anders …”
He pushed on. “All of the press brought to light the stonewalling around the injection and within a few months, PhyXen was finally granted access to the immortal cells of Henrietta Lacks. Perhaps this is where we crossed the line, where we flew too close to the sun.”
I couldn’t speak. A distant knock echoed down the hall. Morning rounds had started but I didn’t move. Mr. Anders’ room was at the far end of the wing and there was no way I was walking away now.
“The E1 vaccine wasn’t what most of the world thought—a broad-spectrum, multi-strain vaccine. It was the virus. With the HeLa cells now within their scope, PhyXen was able to create a virus with the basic evolutionary instinct of seeking out and attacking weak or damaged prey, cells in this case. But whereas a traditional virus destroys the host cells as it multiplies, PhyXen’s evolutionary virus had non-selective, regenerative codes spliced in with the adaptive viral ones. The ability to mutate to heal any cell. Therefore, the developing offspring wouldn’t destroy the host cell, but regenerate it. The healthy cell would then wall off and expel the new generation just as we would a foreign body.”
The aura of guilt emanating from Mr. Anders pulled on every instinct I had. I already knew all of this, my class being the first to carry a virology/pathophysiology requirement to graduate, but something told me he hadn’t yet said what he’d held me here to say.
“The research was sound,” I offered. “PhyXen was hardly the first to produce a live attenuated vaccine. No one could have predicted how it would interact with a phyto-spliced host.”
“Perhaps they might have,” he interrupted, “had there been any clinical trials.”
There had been trials. Well-published ones. Trials with statistics now taught in every 101-level bio class on up. I opened my mouth—
“I know what you’ve been taught. I’ve viewed the curriculums. But I tell you now, those trials were the post-haste accumulation of numbers based on the outcomes of a privileged few. CEOs, politicians and their wives, influential medical personalities … That, Mel, is not a clinical trial. That is a sales pitch. And once the proper individuals were impressed and the vaccine was approved, PhyXen’s next priority wasn’t reaching the masses—it was protecting its investments.”
He lost me for a moment, then it hit. “The organ recipients!”
“Administered without a controlled study.” He went silent for a long moment, a subtle frown dipping and smoothing away as I waited. “I asked—I asked whether it would be safe with my lungs. I was told it would, and I believed them.” A long breath followed this. “I knew how these things worked. On some level, I knew. I knew what ‘type’ the men on top were. I should have …”
Oh, God … I couldn’t soothe this. I couldn’t heal this. I couldn’t ease whatever swirled behind Mr. Anders’ eyes. All I could do was keep my silence and listen. So that’s what I did. Scooting to close the short distance, I took his hand.
He smiled briefly and gave my fingers a squeeze. “I was held for a twenty-four hour observation, interrupting my departure to my family’s ranch in Colorado—annual getaway, you know. Tonya had been looking forward to it for months, so I told her not to wait for me. My brother could pick me up from the facility instead. We would fly out the following week.”
My mind was churning. Twenty-four hours? E1 wouldn’t even have had a chance to fuse with the organ’s plant DNA by then. My brain started throwing numbers at me faster than I could process; thirty-two hours for the vaccine to identify the steady flow of rejected and regenerating organ tissue. Another twenty-four or so to adapt. Then replication began. Three more days for the rebound effect to set in from marrying two independent regenerative codes. By day five, viral load would have been sufficient to begin shedding. And while Mr. Anders would’ve been immune …
“My brother was diagnosed with the same pulmonary fibrosis as I, posthumously, after his lungs erupted through his ribs in a forest of sprouting bamboo. The vaccine had regenerated not only my human cells, but the fragmented plant DNA in my lungs as well. It shed, delivering the now-whole plant sequence into the dying cells of my brother’s lungs. His body never stood a chance. At that point, it was still unknown what had truly happened, but I knew the world stood at the edge of a precipice, so I acted on the one thing I still had control over.”
At no point during this grizzly account had Mr. Anders wavered, but here, his eyes spilled over, right as he squeezed them shut.
“I cut all outside communication and resources to my ranch.”
Wait—what? Then I slapped my hand over my mouth. “Tonya!”
“It’s a sound complex,” he explained, voice thick. “Completely independent, productive, a working ranch. Accessible only by chopper drop that time of year … I knew she and her family would stay safe. At least until I could learn more.”
I stared at him. Tonya had never left the ranch. She’d borne her daughter there. Raised her. Remained one of the few safe from the spread of the PhyXen mutations.
He wiped a hand over his eyes. “She is safe. So, whatever comes of today, I am content.”
The look on Mr. Anders’ face as I tore myself away from his room followed me all the way to North Wing where I hurried to slap my hand to the palm scanner and clock in. I looked again at the roster. Eight patients—down from thirty-two when I first started.
“There she is.”
I held my tongue as the night shift nurse I was supposed to relieve swung her feet down from the desk and groaned. “Sorry, got held up. What’ve we got?”
She tossed down her clipboard. “Same residents in one through five, no updates, viral load still too high to transfer, two new R&Ds; one kidney, one pancreas—”
“Seriously? I can’t believe they’re still finding them.”
“You’d be making yourself scarce too if you had someone gunning for your liver.”
I couldn’t really argue with that. PhyXen had been ruthless in rounding up all their organ recipients, forcing a mandatory Repossession and Destruction of what they managed to claim as “proprietary technology and property of PhyXen Bio corporation.” So long as the fertile ground of spliced tissue remained, the E1 would continue pumping out stronger and stronger progeny. Therefore, what had gone in, must come out.
She continued with her report before ending with a bored, “And Ms. Beaumont requests she not be disturbed until nine. Enjoy your day.” Pursing her lips, she dropped her pen onto the clipboard like a mic and left.
I paused for a moment of peace and reflection outside Lorraine Beaumont’s room. Once upon a time, she’d been the wife of Miami’s most sought-after plastic surgeon—until her rose petal augmented lips shed E1 all over her husband and the thorns that developed from his undiagnosed prostate cancer caused irreparable damage to his reproductive organs. He’d lived. She’d divorced him.
Taking in one final dose of oxygen, I donned my gown, gloves, and N95.
“Good morning,” I called out, simultaneously knocking and swinging open the door. I clicked on the light.
A shape moved under the bedcovers. “What part of nine AM don’t you people understand? Leave the coffee on the table. Turn off the lights behind you.”
I barely noticed her harsh lisp anymore. Ps that were more like Ts and such all flowed shockingly well, considering her damage. “Med pass comes before breakfast, Ms. Beaumont. Gotta be taken on an empty stomach.”
She muttered something that resembled, “For fuck’s sake,” just without any Fs. “Opt me out of morning meds then.”
I set the small cup of pills on her bedside table. “If you stopped opting out of Last Pass you’d be out of here by now.”
“Take that damn thing off. I can’t hear a word you’re saying.”
“If mine’s off, yours is on. Policy.”
To my surprise, she lifted her hand, palm up, face still planted against her pillow. Pulling a spare mask from a cabinet, I handed it to her and watched her settle the loops around both ears. She sat up, gesturing to her face as though to say, “happy?”
I took mine off. “I said, your meds will continue to be ineffective if you keep opting out of med pass. They need to be taken consistently.”
She let out a rough laugh. “And if I hadn’t taken them at all, I’d still be in one piece. Go ahead, keep acting like you people care about us getting better.”
“I can assure you, Ms. Beaumont, your discharge is my number one priority.” I am an adult, I am an adult …
“Oh, I know how PhyXen treats its priorities.”
“Good thing I don’t work for PhyXen then.” I scooted the medicine cup closer to her, ready to be out of this room.
She took it, holding it between loose fingers as if it were a martini. “If that’s what you need to tell yourself to sleep at night.”
Aaand I’d officially had enough. Flashing her a tight smile, I pulled my viral count breathalyzer from its holster and held it up. “Deep breath.” She could take her meds or not. I didn’t care.
She pulled down her mask. I forced myself not to cringe. Red-tinged saliva streaked her chin and neck. The jagged waxy scars surrounding her lipless mouth had retracted even farther since I’d last seen them, baring her teeth and the cracked, bleeding gums beneath—a now permanent reminder of her graft rejection. She breathed in deep.
Too late, I saw her eyes on me. She coughed. A spray of thick, bloody mucous splattered my face. “The fuck, Lorraine!”
“Enjoy your stay.” Her laughs followed me to the sink where I spit and gagged until my hands could find a towel. I looked up, the red light of the security camera flashed green twice. Incident recognized and recorded.
I slammed my fist against the counter. Her raspy laugh continued. Marching out to my med cart, I snatched the walkie and turned to face her.
She leaned back against her pillow. “Going to call security on me?”
Tempting, but I turned the channel before lifting it to my mouth. “Dietary?” The line clicked open. “Room seventeen north just assaulted a nurse. Please hold breakfast and coffee until I can arrange a suitable escort.”
“You speckled-faced bitch …”
“Take your meds, Lorraine. And have a great day.”
The bathroom door swung closed behind me as I stepped back into the hallway. I plucked at the collar of my scrubs, wet from trying to scour off the sensation of Lorraine’s stuck-on loogie.
The doors hissed from the end of the hallway, and what sounded like a struggle filtered in. Forgetting my wet scrubs, I hurried toward them, sliding a bit when I took the corner.
I froze. “Mr. McGavens!”
The man being wrestled through the doors had been a patient of mine—a good one. Probably my favorite next to Mr. Anders with nearly as long of a residency. But why was he here? He’d been discharged six months ago.
Tears streaks lined Mr. McGavins’ cheeks and a bruise was growing around his right eye. “What is going on?” I called over the commotion.
The two masked guards turned to me. “Relapse,” one managed. “Popped positive at a subway checkpoint. Keep back. He’s testing at four times the safe range.”
The doors slid closed behind them. The sound of the decompressing airlock seemed to cut Mr. McGavins off from whatever fight he had left. He sank to his knees. “I was free, Mel. I was out. I can’t go back—I can’t. Can’t do another seven years of pills and tests and—”
A sob choked off his words and he dropped his head. I stared at him, tears burning behind my own eyes. I turned to the security camera.
Red.
Green.
Red.
Green.
You know what? Fuck it. Thanks to Lorraine, I was already on quarantine. So, I did the only thing I could for him. Pushing past the guards, I dropped to my knees and held him as he cried.
I finished out my shift in a haze of borrowed grief. I couldn’t go home; mandatory quarantine had me glued to the facility for the next five days. So, I switched out my scrubs from the exchange bin in the basement and headed out to the small courtyard where Paloma and I often took our lunch.
I hesitated when I found her sitting at one of the benches. One of her legs was propped up in the space next to her, and her rough-day-locker-flask dangled from her grip.
“Didn’t expect to find you here.”
She looked over at me, lifted her chin, then went back to staring across the yard.
I took the seat beside her. “Rough first shift?” I pulled a cafeteria sandwich from my pocket and began picking at the cellophane.
She nodded but kept staring straight ahead. After a moment her chin gave a tiny twitch. She lifted the flask to her lips, as if to hide it. “Mr. Anders didn’t make it.”
The air around me pressed in, pulling the breath from my lungs. Her words had been soft, direct, just like we’d been trained to deliver bad news to patients’ families. But that only made it more real.
“They’re calling it a ‘logistics error.’ We had him on the table, textbook excision, going perfectly. But when they called the new lungs in from O2 transfer submersion, they weren’t there.”
“Weren’t there …” The cold flashed to fire. “What do you mean they ‘weren’t there?’ How are a nine-million-dollar pair of lungs not there!”
“I asked the same thing. I was told they would figure it out, ‘let the chief handle it.’”
“And did he?” I struggled to keep my voice in check. It wasn’t Paloma I was angry with.
“Bitch, you know I don’t let other people handle my shit. I went straight to the logs.”
“And?”
She took a long draw from her flask. “Access denied.”
“What? How does a transplant nurse not have access to the transplant logs?”
“I asked myself the same thing. But you know me, I don’t drop a bone. I got on the phone with PhyXen printing right then and asked them why no lungs were on standby for a scheduled procedure.” She looked at me then, eyes red and so, so hollow. “They said they had no record of a request for today and no lungs scheduled to finish printing for another three weeks. Three weeks!”
No, something had to be wrong. “What did the chief say? Did you tell the director? We need to go to the director!” I stood to do just that but paused when Paloma didn’t follow. “Pal?”
“You’re not thinking, Mel. I wasn’t thinking. Not like I should’ve been. I was told to keep out of something. I didn’t. I was blocked from what should have been available information, and instead of thinking about what that meant, I went and called someone’s bluff on a recorded line. A recorded line, Mel!”
That horrible cold swept back in. I couldn’t help but look over my shoulder toward the facility looming behind me. “What are you saying?”
“I’m saying absolutely zero, that’s what. Because if Mr. Anders’ life wasn’t worth nine-million dollars, mine sure as hell isn’t.”
I couldn’t sleep. No wonder after everything that had happened. After a while, I decided to go and check on Mr. McGavins, see if maybe he wanted to talk. I didn’t keep a locker flask, so a couple of sodas from the vending machine would have to do. I asked his room number at the desk and followed the hall down to the end of North Wing. I kept my knock quiet and cracked the door.
A bag covered Mr. McGavins’ head. One of the clear plastic ones for patients to place the little bits of their life in until discharge.
The drinks tumbled from my hands. “Mr. McGavins!” I was at his side in the next breath, hands pawing at the plastic covering his face. His eyes blinked open. “Hold on, I’m going to get it off, hold on!” But I couldn’t get my numb fingers to do what I needed.
His lungs rose and fell once in a slow pull. The plastic fogged and expanded. Something wrapped gently around my wrist. I looked down.
It was his hand. I tried to pull away but when I looked back, he was staring right at me. Slowly, he shook his head. I shook mine back, frantically. I couldn’t do this—couldn’t let him do this. But his hand gently pulled mine from his face and settled it over his heart.
I sucked back a sob. “Please … Not you, too.” But I thought of his panic, his grief in the hallway hours before. I searched the ceiling until I found the security camera. The light was still dark. They hadn’t started his feed yet. Why hadn’t they started his feed?
Why?
No one would be coming.
What do I do?
There wouldn’t be any help.
“What do I do?” I whispered to him.
It took another seventy-two seconds for Mr. McGavin’s heart to stutter and then still. I knew because I didn’t once lift my hand, not when he went hypoxic and began to gasp, not when his lungs failed to rise again, and not when I lost his pulse. I waited. Waited until his skin began to go cold before I released him. In a daze, I hit the emergency call button.
The line opened. Above me, a little red light blinked on. I didn’t recognize the voice that whispered into the receiver, “I have a code green in room twenty-two North.” Oh, God, who even am I? “Viable C-grade organs. Starting compressions to preserve tissue.”
Content Warnings: suicide, death
