The Hour of Bad Decisions (6 page)

While he slept, a late-night thunder storm grumbled off to the west of the cabins, big clouds piled high and grey against the night, backlit by the occasional flash and wink of lightning, the kind of storm whose laconic travel along the horizon ticks like nature's clock, measuring with soft and imprecise strokes.

And he dreamt about the woman from Quebec, dreamt that he knew her, that he should know her name, that it should come to him unbidden at the simple memory of the brush strokes that shaped her face. But her name stayed disturbingly out of reach, a feathery thought that would not allow itself to be grasped.

He dreamt that she came to the pool, alone, stepping with long, incautious steps, and walked to where he lay, his head canted back against the side of the hot tub. That she reached out and ran a long, cool fingertip across the curve of his upper lip, over that shallow valley directly beneath his nostrils; all the time without speaking, just smiling gently. And he smelled a fragrance he had not smelled since high school, a perfume that he could always place and never remember having smelled again, the perfume the wife of his grade 12 English teacher used to wear. Tall and willowy, she had always seemed to move without walking, had seemed to float past the enraptured high school boys before they were even in a position to recognize the magic of her motion.

But when he opened his eyes, there was only the black, cool night and the gentle fizz of the sounds in his ears. This time, he knew he was smiling. And this time, he knew why.

Dawn often starts as a grey line on the morning after a sunny day, a grey starting that widens like an eye opening slowly from sleep in a familiar room. Then the arc of the sky blues, ever so slightly, and the periphery of stars begins to fade, leaving only the most energetic behind. The first birds start to sing awkwardly, throwing out fragments of their songs, as if every morning they have to learn the full melody all over again. The streetlights turn off, one by one, their sensors snapping away their pools of orange light, and the sky fills with light like singers singing. The gradient lightens from the bottom up, and the blues of the sky develop as if they were photographs gently rocking in a tray of darkroom developing fluid.

By the time John woke up, the sky had rinsed itself to blue. When he opened his eyes, the caretaker, an odd-looking thin man with a small head and arms too long for his body, was skimming leaves from the surface of the pool with a long-handled white net.

John saw that the caretaker was staring at him, and lifted one wet, puffy hand in an awkward wave. And the caretaker took one hand from the net and waved back, and then quickly looked away, scooping up the leaves and the struggling insects that had been lured into the pool by the rippling nighttime lights.

Looking towards the cabins, he could see the woman from Quebec hanging beach towels over the
railings on the deck behind her cabin. The quadrangle of grass was empty, except for a small flock of star-lings hopping along, bending their heads and pecking fitfully at the ground. She turned towards him, and smiled a knowing smile, the kind of smile that is more a shared answer than a question. With one long finger, she touched her upper lip.

And he knew then that he was rushing towards the surface, still able to feel and touch, that while his skin felt waterlogged and heavy, he hadn't really drowned. Not yet. He lifted himself out of the water, feeling the air on his skin and the ordered sense of muscles and bones moving as he stood up and climbed over the edge of the hot tub. The water streamed down his skin, staining the brown wood of the stairs. With deliberate effort, he took that strange and unfamiliar first step.

“Y
OU CAN'T BE TOO CAREFUL,” HE SAID, AND
he put the knife right in front of my face. He was right. You can't.

It's funny how my head works at times like that – I measure, examine. Useless information – a flick knife, about four inches long, blade with a channel, wooden handle held together with brass rivets. Blade long enough to permanently damage internal organs – liver, spleen, lungs, heart. Longenough to do slapdash punctures through roping yards of intestine, long enough to nick the jugular or aorta on its knifely travels, long enough to open a femoral artery, the big leg bleeder.

I'm always doing that – prepping for what comes next, trying to visualize the damage you don't have time to get tests to con firm.

I should have been thinking “walk slowly for the door, get away,” but instead, I was assembling information
 – still diagnosing. I should have been thinking about why we didn't have panic buttons in the examining rooms, and why I was in there alone with him, anyway.

Sometimes you get an early hint. And he gave me one – I've been an emergency room doctor for enough years now, and usually the first clue is early in the workup, while the door's still open and no one has their clothes off yet.

His was right inside the door, the first few words already filled out on his chart.

“Name – Miller, Robert.”

You try to jolly them along, sometimes, try to get them away from focusing on their symptoms. Especially when they've been waiting a long time, and this guy had been.

“How are you tonight, Robert?”

“Don't call me that,” he said. The tone of his voice should have said it all.

“That's not your name?” I asked – I hate it when the triage nurse gets it wrong.

“That's the name
they
gave me. My real name is Elephra.” He spelled it for me – it wasn't the name on his medicare card, clipped right there at the top of his chart.

Wind it all back and I should have known right there. I should have stuck my head out the door and gotten one of the big orderlies, the guys whose uniform shirts strain at the buttonholes all across their chests, the guys who like putting the wild ones into restraints. But I didn't – and that was the first mistake.

The second mistake was purely positional. Picture a hospital examining room, door in one corner, everything pretty much white, the gurney – you know, the bed you sit on – in the middle of the room, cupboards with everything from stitches to basins to bandages. The big light overhead. If I'd been thinking, you see, I'd have been on the door side of the examining table, facing him. Any doubts at all, have your back to the door – it gives you a couple of steps, anyway, a chance to get out into the hall and to start yelling at the top of you lungs.

But I'd walked to the other side, with my back to the cupboards. He was between me and the door I'd closed so he could take off his shirt and show me his back.

I'm not a big guy, maybe 5' 10” in my socks, handsome in that “he's a doctor so he makes lots of money” kind of way. When I take my face apart in the mirror, though, I always think that too many parts are just too much – nose too big, eyes too far apart, eyelashes long enough for a woman but kind of dopey-looking on me.

But that's beside the point.

I shouldn't have been so easily cornered, but I was off my game – I was tired. For that, I blame the trombone player. And the coronary from earlier that night – he hadn't made it – the two drunks who fought with beer bottles “just like in the movies” and had more open bleeders on their faces than you'd normally see in a month. The lady with the kidney stones who was screaming even though we'd laced her up on Demerol.

I was double-shifted, too, because we were short on doctors and I'd agreed to work two, back to back. That can really drain you. The right combination of nights, and you can fall asleep in the cafeteria, face-down in the scrambled eggs.

But back to Miller. I just refuse to call this guy Elephra.

He said he was a taxi driver, that his car had slid sideways in snow down a St. John's hill, fetching up hard against a light pole. Not much of a margin in the taxi business, so there are a lot of clapped-out, repainted old cop cars with lousy tires. The kind of car where the engine warning light stays on permanently, so the drivers stick a piece of masking tape over it so they don't have to think about it. The drivers aren't much better.

Yeah, I hear what you're thinking. Another reason to be paying attention.

So Miller had smashed up a cab, and now his back hurt. He said it had been injured before.

I had him take off his shirt and his sweater and then he said he had to take his pants off, too, to show me where it hurt, and he spilled everything out of his pockets. Out of one front pocket, change – I remember a balled-up five-dollar bill – and car keys. From the other, the knife.

One minute, things were normal – well, as normal as a hospital emergency room gets in the middle of the night, and the next I had this big knife in my face. And it wasn't completely like a threat, although it was threatening. He didn't say he was going to cut me up, just held it there as if showing me the possibilities.

Not for long. He put it down on the end of the examining table, but the blade was still open, and not far from reach.

Then he started to tell me about his daughter.

“I didn't know I had a daughter,” he said, “because the doctors” – he underlined the word, I didn't – “said I couldn't have kids, but then I saw a girl on the street one day and when she looked at me, I knew I was looking at my daughter. You have kids, doc?”

Yes, I told him, not quite lying, a boy and a girl.

“And you know they're your kids the minute you look at 'em, right?”

That kind of seized me up right there. It didn't matter, though. He just kept talking.

“That's when I knew, and I tried to figure it out in reverse, you know, figure out how it was possible. I'd had the test and the doctors said I was sterile, that there was nothing there at all, so they must have been wrong again. And my girlfriend didn't tell me she was pregnant, and then I was gone to Alberta because, you know, we just started pissing each other off, and her mother, man, her mother was a piece of goods – always in my face about the smoking and the weed, so it just seemed easier to start fresh somewhere else, even if it was Calgary. But it should be against the law not to tell someone he's a father, right doc? Right?”

“Right.” Sometimes, it's easier just to agree. He'd broken off talking, and he was looking at me kind of sideways, his head tilted.

“Are you a blue?” he asked suddenly.

Now, what's the safest way to answer that question? I just shrugged, hoping he'd find the answer to be obvious.

“You look like a blue to me,” he said. “I can usually tell. That's good.”

“That's good?”

“Yeah, good. Would have been different if you were a red. But I can see there's a lot going on with you, doc. A lot going on.”

I made myself busy then, taking pages of meaningless notes, and I looked at his back, since that was what he had come in for. It seemed normal enough – tender when I prodded around, but he still had pretty good range of motion. He turned when I talked to him from behind, turned enough so that I could see that he was turning his head, not his whole upper body. Usually, the pain will stop you if anything's been torn in there.

“Spine's fused,” he said.

I looked, but there weren't any signs on his back that he'd had surgery – no scars, not even a stitch here or there. Sometimes scars can fade to quite fine lines, but nobody's perfect, and you almost always see a loop or two, a place where a stitch has gone too far before being pulled tight. So, spinal fusion? Not possible.

I was beginning to think – hell, I already knew – the guy was psychotic, or at least delusional. Didn't know any more about the speci fics, because it wasn't really an emergency room thing – but I thought if I could get past him, I could at least rally the troops and
get him sent upstairs for a psych exam. Or at least I could get a few of the bigger guys to pin him down so they could get the knife.

“How about we get an x-ray of that back, have a look and see what's exactly going on in there?” I moved towards the door.

“I don't like x-rays,” he told me, his hand reaching across the sheet. “Doctors don't know how to read them.”

Then he said he had been left alone in the examining room the first time he hurt his back, with the x-rays up on the big light box in front of him.

That he had turned the light on, and had seen everything the doctor had missed.

“Inside my ribcage, you know, there's a calci fied fetus,” he said, his eyes wide. “Never even knew it was there, but clear as can be on the x-ray. And under my shoulder blade, there's a fishhook – just a plain fish-hook, and I got no idea how it got in there.”

He dug his fingers in under his armpit – “I can't even feel the bugger. But the doctors didn't see any of it. It's like they can't see what's right in front of their faces.”

There was a singsong quality to his voice, a sort of hypnotic rhythm. Sometimes a person's voice gets that way when they tell a familiar story, one they've told many times before. Like the one where you drive your suv head-on into someone else's car because you're driving too fast and you're way too tired. And you're the only one in your family who even gets to walk away, and you go over it and over it with the
cops and the lawyers and your parents and your wife's parents, too.

Like that.

It was really hard to pay attention to Miller. Hard to focus on what he was saying about police of ficers following him, about the cab company's owners wanting him to deliver liquor, about everything else. The words were just blurring.

I couldn't help it. I was tired.

Hell, I was already tired when I came on shift.

See, I live in an apartment right now and in apartments, you're always at the mercy of the neighbours. You can complain when they're noisy, of course, but that often makes things worse, and most people just can't seem to fathom what a 24-hour emergency room shift is like.