Mercy 6

The line of Mullich’s god particle. Not the elegant God Particle, the math of subatomic forces, but the blatant straight line of an architect. On Seven, a fluorescent tube explodes above Enry Dozier as he reaches down from his ladder perch. He collapses over the top step, dies, his shoulders and arms posturing from the pulse that disconnects his brain stem. Within the same second, the same pulse, on fourth floor recovery, Lana Fleming falls across the body of her roommate, dies, her fingers holding a cup of tea, her last breath a dead breath, a residual puff from the spasm in her bronchus. On third floor ICU, Richard Verdasco stares at the ceiling and dies, pretty eyes open, nerve endings just beginning to fizz and break the thinnest of capillaries in the softest organs. In a storage closet on second floor surgery, Marley Peterson holds her last cigarette and dies, the neuropaths throughout her entire body firing.

On the first floor ER — her ER — Albert Cabral crouches near a bed curtain, practicing shadow puppets on the gauzy surface. What does he feel? Is it an emotion? A sudden sadness? A loss of heart?

Of meaning? The butterfly silhouette on the curtain reduced to nothing more than the shadow of his hands?

In the subbasement boiler room, she is Lual Meeks. The fluorescent above the boiler relic explodes, and she is struck through her shoulder and left lung. Her last instinct is to slide into the warm copper palm beneath her.

To Mullich’s microscopic God Particle, surfaces are liquid or gas, the first state of matter irrelevant due to velocity. Cinder block and bone are hollow matrices. Metal, glass, skin, and vessel walls part and collapse, ripple and recompose. Water. She knows there is a fourth state of matter. And a fifth. But she is ER, trauma, molecular, as rough in matter as the architect’s line.

Mendenhall released the button on the laser pen. She backed out of the copper relic, sought distance, looked at the dark panel covering the dead fluorescent and the hard surface of the boiler tank.

A virus is not the thing we see in the electron microscope, hiding in protein folds. That is a virion, a first and necessary cause, a particle that is neither alive nor dead. It is a-life. Other causes and conditions must occur to create the virus. A virus is an event, a collection of actions and reactions between the virions and the involved cells. You do not have a virus. You experience it. You can’t see it; you see its effects. You adjust. You try. You live. You die.

She aimed the laser at the dark half of the fluorescent panel. The red beam sparkled into thousands of pieces as it refracted through the shards of the shattered tube. They lay scattered across the inside of the translucent panel, reminding her of a kaleidoscope.

“I’m no crazier than Thorpe,” she said, firing the stolen laser pen.

She was alone and speaking to the ghost of Lual Meeks.

37

It had been twelve hours: 0736. Seven thirty-six a.m. on her six-dollar running watch. According to protocol, a meeting had to be ordered. Mendenhall was summoned as the physician who had called containment. She had thought Thorpe would assume this position. She was also summoned as Floor One leader, a position she had thought she had deferred to Dmir, or somebody like him, somebody dressed like him.

The meeting was held in one of the old lecture theaters, a cupped room with stage and podium, used when Mercy had still been a teaching hospital. Years ago, before her time, it had become an informal storage space, its floors and aisles convenient for big equipment and stuffed files, its nooks ready for illicit cigarette breaks.

Someone had prepared the room. The podium stood off center next to a table set up for a panel. An old surgical light cast a serious yellow glow over the stage. The aisles remained dim, a single thin light high above, seemingly unattached in the darkness up there.

Old equipment had been pushed toward the ends and rear, looming, craning, containing. Mullich.

She spotted him in the back row, in a lab coat along with the rest of the audience, laptop glowing blue. In the rest of the scatter — no one sitting side by side, no one in the first two rows — she recognized only Claiborne and a guy from Surgery. On the panel, she recognized only Dmir. The panel chair closest to the podium was empty.

Mendenhall was terrible at meetings, never ready when she was supposed to speak, always speaking when it was best to hunker down and shut up. She climbed past old equipment — a steel X-ray with sharp joints and snagging wires — and took the seat next to Mullich. If not for the blue of his laptop, she would have been invisible.

She returned his laser pen, cuffing it back to him, a passed note.

He raised an eyebrow at the pen, slid it into the pocket of his lab coat. “I think you’re supposed to be down there.” He spoke softly as he nodded toward the stage.