Blood Test

The next morning I drove east on Sunset under a sky streaked with tin-strip clouds and thought about last night’s dreams — the same kind of spooky, murky images that had plagued my sleep when I first started working in oncology. It had taken a good year to chase those demons away and now I wondered if they’d ever been gone or had just been lurking in my subconscious, ever ready for mischief.

Raoul’s world was madness and I found myself resenting him for drawing me back into it.

Children weren’t supposed to get cancer.

Nobody was supposed to get cancer.

The diseases that fell under the domain of the marauding crab were ultimate acts of histologic treason, the body assaulting, battering, raping, murdering itself in a feeding frenzy of rogue cells gone berserk.

I slipped a Lenny Breau cassette into the tape deck and hoped that the guitarist’s fluid genius would take my mind far away from plastic rooms and bald children and one little boy with henna-colored curls and a Why Me? look in his eyes. But I could see his face and the faces of so many other sick children I’d known, weaving in and out of the arpeggios, ephemeral, persistent, begging for rescue...

Given that state of mind, even the sleaze that heralded the entry into Hollywood seemed benign, the half-naked whores nothing more than big-hearted welcome wagoners.

I drove through the last mile of boulevard in a blue funk, parked the Seville in the doctors’ lot, and walked through the front door of the hospital with my head down, warding off social overtures.

I climbed the four flights to the oncology ward and was halfway down the hall before hearing the ruckus. Opening the door to the Laminar Airflow Unit turned up the volume.

Raoul stood, bug-eyed, his back to the modules, alternately cursing in rapid Spanish and screaming in English at a group of three people:

Beverly Lucas held her purse across her chest like a shield, but it wouldn’t stay in one place because the hands that clutched it were shaking. She stared at a distant point beyond Melendez-Lynch’s white-coated shoulder and bit her lip, straining not to choke on anger and humiliation.

The broad face of Ellen Beckwith bore the startled, terrified look of someone caught in the midst of a smarmy, private ritual. She was primed for confession, but unsure of her crime.

The third member of the audience was a tall, shaggy-haired man with a hound dog face and squinty, heavy-lidded eyes. His white coat was unbuttoned and worn carelessly over faded jeans and a cheap-looking shirt of the sort that used to be called psychedelic but now looked merely garish. A belt with an oversized buckle in the shape of an Indian chief bit into a soft-looking middle. His feet were large and the toes were long, almost prehensible. I could tell because he’d encased them, sockless, in Mexican huaraches. His face was clean-shaven and his skin was pale. The shaggy hair was medium brown, streaked with gray, and it hung to his shoulders. A puka shell necklace ringed a neck that had begun to turn to wattle.

He stood impassively, as if in a trance, a serene look in the hooded eyes.

Raoul saw me and stopped his harangue.

“He’s gone, Alex.” He pointed to the plastic room where I’d played checkers less than twenty-four hours ago. The bed was empty.

“Removed from under the noses of these so-called professionals.” He dismissed the trio with a contemptuous wave of his hand.

“Why don’t we talk about it somewhere else,” I suggested. The black teenager in the unit next door was peering out through the transparent wall with a puzzled look on his face.

Raoul ignored me.

“They did it. Those quacks. Came in as radiation techs and kidnapped him. Of course, if anyone had possessed the good sense to read the chart to find out if radiologic studies had been ordered, they might have prevented this — felony!”

He was boring in on the fat nurse now, and she was on the verge of tears. The tall man came out of his trance and tried to rescue her.

“You can’t expect a nurse to think like a cop.” His speech was just barely tinged with a Gallic lilt.

Raoul wheeled on him.

“You! Keep your damned comments to yourself! If you had an iota of understanding of what medicine is all about we might not be in this mess. Like a cop! If that means exercising vigilance and care to insure a patient’s safety and security, then she damn well does have to think like a cop! This isn’t an Indian reservation, Valcroix! It’s life-threatening disease and invasive procedures and using the brain that God gave us to make inferences and deductions and decisions, for God’s sake! It’s not managing a reverse isolation unit like a bus terminal, where people come in and out and tell you they’re someone they’re not and whisk your patient away from under your lazy, sloppy, careless nose!”

The other doctor’s response was a cosmic smile as he zoned back out into never-never land.