Dear Old Dead(2)
“Bad?”
“Two police officers dead over at Lenox Hill Hospital not more than five minutes ago. A two-year-old boy dead on arrival here about quarter to six. What do you mean, bad?”
“Right,” Michael said. He looked around the emergency room. People were tense and bustling, but they weren’t really busy, not yet. That would come when the sirens he could hear in the distance were no longer so distant.
“Okay,” Michael said. “We better assume a full disaster and set up to process to Triage. Can you get me six nurses down to OR in five minutes?”
“Sure.”
“I’m going to need both Jenny Kaplan and Ben DeVere. Jenny’s supposed to be having the day off. You’ll have to find her.”
“I already have.”
“Find Ed Marchiano, too. I know he’s only a medical student, but we’ll just have to fudge a little. It’s that or watch people die on the floor. He’s supposed to be teaching a health class to the mother’s group at six thirty. You can find him there.”
“I’ll send Sister Margarita Rose.”
“Right,” Michael said. Then he looked around and shook his head. “Are we ready for this? Didn’t we promise ourselves the last time that we’d be more ready for this? What’s happened to New York?”
“Oh, New York.” Sister Augustine was dismissive. “This hasn’t been New York for years. This is Beirut. Are you all right, Michael?”
“I’m fine.”
“Newspapers haven’t been bothering you?”
“I’m fine, Augie. I really am.”
“I don’t care if you get arrested, Michael, but if you keep this up, you could get AIDS. Or just plain killed.”
Michael was about to tell her that it didn’t make any sense to practice safe sex through a glory hole, just to see if she knew what that was, just to see if he could shock her—but he knew he couldn’t. He didn’t because the bell started to go off and the staff started to run in from everywhere at once, pulling back the double doors to let the stretchers in, standing back while one white-sheeted casualty followed the other in a confusion of sterilized cotton and stainless steel. Michael grabbed a box of disposable surgical gloves from the nearest shelf and started heading for the OR.
“Demerol,” he shouted back at Augie over the crowd. “I need Demerol for post-op.”
“Coming,” Augie shouted back.
Michael saw Sister Margarita Rose and thought it might be a lot less than three full months. The little nun looked paralyzed. She looked as if she wanted to be dead.
Michael himself felt fully alive for the first time all day—for the first time in weeks, really, in spite of that ill-fated excursion down to Times Square. He felt alive and clear and healthy and energetic and smart and beautiful and perfect. It was as if he had been taken completely out of the world and transformed and returned to it. It was as if he had reached that state desired above all others by every graduate of the Harvard Medical School: the state of being able to do no wrong.
He smashed through the double swinging doors to the back hall where the OR was and started to jog. He passed nuns and center volunteers and surgical nurses in OR green who stopped to stare at him. He knew what they were all thinking and he didn’t care.
He could see himself, a tall, cadaverously thin man with a face too lined for his forty-six years, beginning to lift up off the floor and swim with effortless grace through the air.
2
CHARLES VAN STRAADT KNEW, almost as soon as he sat down in Michael Pride’s office, that he had come down to the center at a bad time. That he had come down to the center at all he thought was perfectly understandable. Charles van Straadt was a very rich and a very powerful man, and a very old one. He had reached all three states on his own and by virtue of superior cunning. He had never given himself credit for superior intelligence. Charles van Straadt was no Michael Pride, and he knew it. He could never have graduated from high school at fifteen or MIT at eighteen. He could never have made it into the Harvard Medical School, never mind out with a summa cum laude and an internship at Columbia. What Charles understood was much more basic. Charles knew why the New York press was dying and what to do about it. He knew what people everywhere were willing to pay to hear. He understood populist politics, local television, working-class aesthetics, and the art of the headline. He understood these things so well that he was now the major newspaper player in sixteen cities across the world, from London to Melbourne, from New York to Milano, from Miami to Athens. He was seventy-eight years old and still in excellent health. He attributed his longevity to red meat and fried potatoes and owned a steak house in every city where he owned a newspaper. He made the covers of gossipy magazines in pictures that showed him smoking a big cigar and scowling into the camera. He was an eccentric of the first water and getting more eccentric all the time—but he understood that, too. It had been a long, hard life, but he had loved every minute of it. Lately, he had been expecting to find out he was immortal.