Beat the Reaper by Josh Bazell
“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 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 it?”
“Yesterday.”
“What’d they find?”
“They called it ‘Bleeding amorphous glandular tissue.’”
Double yuck. “How long have you had it?”
“This time?”
“What do you mean?” I say.
“The first time I had it was for maybe ten days. But that was three months ago.”
“I don’t understand. It went away?”
“Yeah. Till about a week ago. Then it came back.”
“Huh,” I say. “I’ve never seen that before.”
“They did say it was pretty rare.”
“But they don’t want to see if it goes away again?”
“The kind of cancer it is is too dangerous.”
“Osteosarcoma?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s true.”
If it is osteosarcoma.
Though what the fuck do I know?
“I’ll look it up,” I tell her.
“You don’t have to. It’ll only be around for a couple of hours.”
“I will, though. Do you need anything else?”
“No.” She pauses. “Not unless you want to give me a foot massage.”
“I can give you a foot massage.”
She blushes like a police siren, but keeps her eyes on mine. “Really?”
“Why not?” I sit down on the edge of the bed and take her foot. Start pushing the ligament of her arch around with the edge of my thumb.
“Oh, fuck,” she says. She closes her eyes, and tears come out of them.
“Sorry,” I say.
“Don’t stop.”
I keep going. After a while she says, barely loud enough to hear, “Will you lick it?”
I look up at her. “Lick what?”
“My foot, you pervert,” she says, still not opening her eyes.
So I lift her foot to my mouth and lick along the arch.
“And my leg,” she says.
I sigh. I lick up the inside of her leg, almost to her crotch.
Then I stand up. Wondering, briefly, what my life as a doctor might look like if I ever behaved like a professional.
“Are you all right?” I say.
She’s crying. “No,” she says. “They’re cutting my fucking leg off.”
“I’m sorry. Do you want me to check on you later?”
“Yes.”
“I will, then.”
I consider adding “if I’m still around,” but decide against it.
I don’t want to bum anybody out.
8
In the winter of 1994 the Locanos went skiing again, this time at Beaver Creek or something in Colorado, and invited me to go with them. I said no, and went to Poland instead. But I swear to God I did not go to Poland to kill Władysław Budek, the man who sold my grandparents into Auschwitz.
I went for a far worse reason. I went because I believed there was an entity called “Fate,” and that if I did as little planning as possible, Fate would either place Budek in my sights or not, and thereby show me whether I should become an off-the-books hitman for David Locano. Somebody he could use to take out both Italians and Russians, and also be sort of a bodyguard for Skinflick. And in the meantime I could use one turned-down ski trip to
Speaking medically, the strange thing about my decision to let a fictional, supernatural agency choose the course of my life—as if the universe had some sort of consciousness, or agency—is that it doesn’t qualify me as having been insane. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, which seeks to sort out the vagaries of psychiatric malfunction to the point where you can bill for them, is clear on this. It says that for a belief to be delusional it must be “based on incorrect inference about external reality that is firmly sustained despite what almost everyone else believes and despite what constitutes incontrovertible and obvious proof or evidence to the contrary.” And given the number of people who buy lottery tickets, knock on wood to avoid jinxing themselves, or feel that everything happens for a reason, it’s hard to label any mystical belief as pathological.
Of course, the DSM doesn’t even attempt to define “stupid.” My own feeling is that there are eleven or so different kinds of intelligence, and at least forty different kinds of stupidity.
Most of which I’ve experienced firsthand.
Since it seemed unlikely I would even be able to find Władysław Budek, I decided to at least see the sights. I made my first destination the primeval forest my grandparents had been hiding in when Budek contacted them. I flew to Warsaw, stayed a night in the ex-Communist shithotel in Old Town (it’s literally called Old Town, like it’s the capital of Old Country), ate some weird-shaped tubes of breakfast meat in the restaurant there, then took a train to Lublin. From there I got on a bus with a bunch of zit-faced sixteen-year-old Catholic school girls, who talked about blowjobs the whole trip. My vocabulary in Polish—which was crap, though my pronunciation was okay—picked up a bit.
Meanwhile, every place we passed through was mostly factories and train tracks. If I was Polish, I might try: “Of course I didn’t know the Holocaust was happening! The whole fucking country looks like a concentration camp!”
Like I would care, if I was Polish.
Finally we reached a town so rural it only had four factories, and I got off the bus. There was a plowed access road that ran out of town and along the front of the woods. I double-checked the return schedule, left my backpack with the woman at the station, and started down the road.
Did I mention how fucking, fucking cold it was in Poland? It was really fucking cold. The kind where your eyes gush water to keep from freezing and your cheeks clench up and pull your lips back, and the only thing keeping you warm is the image of Hitler’s Sixth Army’s hobnailed boots conducting their body heat into the ground. The air was almost too cold to breathe.
I chose a random departure point from the road and climbed up into a snowdrift so deep and soft that moving through it felt like swimming. The surface had a glassy coat of ice that cracked and slid away in tectonic sheets as I pushed my way into the woods.
Fifty yards in, my eyes adapted to the gloom. The noise and wind were gone. Weird giant trees I couldn’t identify (not that I could identify, say, an oak) had branches going out in all directions. The lowest-lying ones snagged my feet beneath the snow.
It took so much attention just to pick my way forward that I didn’t notice the ravens until one dropped to a branch right above and in front of me. Another two stayed higher up and watched me. I lay back against the snow and stared at them. They were the largest wild birds I’d ever seen. After a while they started cleaning themselves like cats.
I breathed the clean sharp air and wondered whether ravens could live as long as parrots, and if so whether these ones had been here during World War II. Or World War I, for that matter. I wondered if my grandparents had ever tried to eat them.
If they hadn’t tried to eat them, what had they tried to eat? How did you even get around in a place like this? How did you do laundry, let alone fight off Nazis? The place was like some kind of afterlife.
Eventually one of the ravens screamed, and all three flew away. Shortly after, I heard machine noises.
The obvious thing to do was go back to the road, since the snow was starting to work into my boots. But I was curious—not just about the source of the noise, but about how quickly you could get someplace through these woods if you had someplace you needed to go. So I followed the noise, and went farther into the woods.
As the noise got louder, other mechanical sounds joined it. Soon I could see the tops of cranes. Soon after that I stumbled out through another wall of snow and rolled to my feet in a clearing.
It was a clearing in the sense of “just recently cleared.” The ground was scraped perfectly flat for maybe a hundred acres, and men in parkas and primary-colored hardhats were using giant machinery to clear more trees from the edges, whacking them down and cutting them into lengths that could be lifted onto flatbeds. Black exhaust from half a dozen sources smudged into the otherwise white sky.
I tried to talk to one of the workers. I think he said he was from Veerk, the Finnish lumber company, but we didn’t seem to have a common language, so in the end we both just shrugged and laughed, since what the fuck else can you do.
It wasn’t very funny, though. Białowieża is the last remains of a forest that once covered eighty percent of Europe. Seeing another chunk of it mowed down was like watching the navel of the world sanded off. It left one less point of entrance to the past— my grandparents’ or anyone else’s. One less sign that we’d been human to begin with.
And one more piece of history as vapor, in which you could see anything you wanted, or nothing at all.
I backed up to Lublin and headed south for the main event. Took the Iron Curtain Express down to Kraków by sleeper car, something I’d never done before and probably won’t do again, though it wasn’t a bad time. In my upper bunk I ditched the blanket, which appeared to have an inordinate amount of pubic hair woven into it, and lay on the sheets in my overcoat, reading by the bare bulb near my head.
I’d bought a stack of books in Lublin. The Communist-era stuff was funny but shallow. (“Visitors are invited to inspect the Lenin Steel Works, the Czyżyny cigarette factory, and the Bonarka artificial fertilizer plant!”) Most of the modern Polish stuff was stupid and hateful, with hundreds of pages on how Lech Wałesa was a saint, and none on how he should be eating shit like the pig-faced bitch that he is.* And the stuff that seemed accurate was just depressing.
Jews blamed for fire! Jews blamed for plague! Jews blamed for all of Europe being ruled by Jew-hating fucks!
Jews making up a third of Kraków’s population in 1800, a quarter in 1900, and none at all in 1945.
In the morning, on my way from the train station to my hotel, I stopped and bought my bus ticket to Auschwitz.
I’ll spare you most of it.
Auschwitz when it was up and running was really three different camps: the death camp (Birkenau, also known as “Auschwitz II”); the I. G. Farben factory camp (“Auschwitz III,” or Monowitz) where the slaves worked, and the combination holding and extermination camp that lay between them (“Auschwitz I,” or simply Auschwitz). Since the Germans bombed Birkenau as they fled—proving Plato’s claim that human shame arises solely from the threat of discovery—and then the Poles scavenged the ruins for bricks, the main museum is at Auschwitz I.
To get there you take one of those buses that, through some kind of historical leapfrogging, are more modern than any in the United States. The Poles call the neighborhood Oświęcim—you never see a sign that says “Auschwitz.” The area is fully industrialized and occupied, with apartment buildings across the street from the concentration camp entrance, although the tour guide tells you in Polish that they would have been knocked down to build a supermarket by now if it hadn’t been for militant international Jews making too much trouble. You look around to see who’s taking offense at this, but the only people grinding their teeth are the Hasidic family at the back of the bus.
You cross an outer courtyard. The Nazis kept expanding the camp as long as they were able to, so to get
Inside the gates themselves, there’s a sixty-foot wooden cross with a bunch of nuns and skinheads around it handing out pamphlets about how hysterical international Jews are trying to forbid Catholic services at Auschwitz, which is in a Catholic country. It makes your hands itch, and you wonder if twisting a skinhead’s neck would satisfy Freud’s dictum that the only thing that can ever make us happy is the fulfillment of childhood desires.
But you do what you’re there to do. You look at the razor-wire bunkhouses, the gallows, the random-death guard towers. The medical experimentation building. The crematoria. You ask yourself the questions: Would I clean out the gas chambers to keep myself alive for one more month? Would I pack the ovens?
You feel fucking awful.
Eventually you start to wonder why there’s a bunkhouse dedicated to the victims of every nationality you’ve ever heard of—Slovenians, for example—but Jews aren’t mentioned anywhere. You ask a guard. He points you across the street.
You find Bunk 37, and realize the guard was half right. It’s a combo bunk, the only one at Auschwitz: Slovakians (the original exhibit; you can tell from the signs) and now also Jews. Though the whole thing is closed, with a chain around the doorknob. Later you find out that this particular bunk has been closed more often than it’s been open, for example not opening once between 1967 and 1978. The Hasidic family from the bus stands looking at the chain forlornly.
Naturally you stomp the fucking padlock off and push the doors open, letting the Hasidic family go first.
Inside, you see a lot of bad shit. So many Jews died at Auschwitz that the things they left behind—the hair, the wooden legs of the veterans who had fought for Poland in the First World War, the children’s shoes, and so on—fill whole glassed-off rooms, in which they rot and stink. Compared to these, the casually evil museum plaques—on which “Polish” has been scratched off “Polish Jews,” and the National Socialists are said to have been “reacting to an overrepresentation of Jews in business and the government”—barely get to you. Even though the “over-representation” line is your favorite Jew-hater stereotype, because every time someone kills off half the Jews on earth, like they did in WWII, the survivors are suddenly twice as “over-represented.”