Mercy 6

Nearby, an ambulance siren blared and drew closer. The bus lurched to the right and halted. From someplace farther, another ambulance siren began. This one sounded from all directions. Its blue and red reflections caught against a high glass building. The first ambulance passed the bus. Its speed indicated urgency, not a drunk with the DTs, not an invalid with low BP, not anything precautionary. The engine had that high grind of overdrive, chassis in full tilt. She wanted to go with it, to quit what she was trying to do and relieve herself with work.

Another siren called, far ahead, along the bus route, maybe coming from County. One of the three reached its destination, the siren making that final whoop. She always heard it as a question.

Mendenhall hurried to the front of the bus.

“Not a stop,” said the driver. “Go back.” He started spinning the wheel, ready to swing the bus into traffic.

She nodded to his stash, eyed it, eyed him.

He cranked open the door. She exited with the sound of the brake release, the driver’s stare hard between her shoulders. She jogged to the center of the sidewalk, avoided looking back when she heard the driver yell, “Hey!”

Only seconds later did she think his call could be meant for someone else, someone dismounting after her, someone following her. She turned and scanned the sidewalk for anyone who could’ve been one of the other passengers, one in back she hadn’t seen or recorded. The people seemed oddly static, not pedestrians, a mix of loitering and exchange. It all felt pooled, as in a marketplace.

Swaths of the city proper were like this, she knew, where most of the population waited. For nothing possible, really, except death. Not for someone, not a lottery ticket, not opportunity, not life. Sunny parts shown in movies and TV, stuck in the minds of travelers and cynics, were insignificant slivers within the morass.

She got the morass. That was what came to her. That was what she found without trying, jumping on a bus with a certain number and location on it. She hated most movies, most TV, most books.

She hated what she’d become — a person who loved an awful job, a hideous job. A person who worked as a voyeur, who was paid to peer and invade, see the undignified ways people die. Mendenhall never cured them or even really treated them. The doctors — and nurses — beyond her did that, the noble stuff.

Even now, she thought, look what I’m doing.

The ambulances went silent. The mingling crowd along the sidewalks gave no sense of event, no direction toward any of the emergencies. Mendenhall felt aimless, useless; she longed for the ER. People sang so many bad songs about this city, so many misconceptions and preconceptions. But she knew one good song about it. One that measured the hardness of dreams, dead grass, and concrete spaces, cut the ideals, and then gave the refrain “Don’t you wish you could be here, too? Don’t you wish you could be here, too?”

She regained focus and decided to use Mullich’s money for cabs.

The boulevard was jammed. She grew heated just looking at the traffic, saw no cabs. Did this city even have cabs? No one around her had ever hailed a taxi. That she could see.

Mendenhall counted her money on the elevator to the fifth floor of Physical Sciences. She didn’t have nearly enough to make it back to Mercy General. One professor and two lab techs rode up with her. The techs wore lab coats. The prof wore a tracksuit, not unlike Mendenhall’s. He looked at Mendenhall, his eyes lingering on her ball cap.

“I’m going to see Dr. Covey,” she explained.

“Are you one of Covey’s collectors?”

“Yes.” She lied for strength and conviction. She needed both in order to continue.

“Which post?”

Mendenhall blushed, then understood what he was asking.

From Covey’s website, she recalled the different collecting stations from around the world. “Molokai,” she replied.

“You look so pale. I would have guessed the Oslo one.”

The elevator stopped at the fifth floor.

“I’m indoors all day.” Mendenhall held the door so that she could finish her lie. “I only go out at night.”

She could tell from the anxious bend in his brow, his tender fist gripping, that he was about to ask her out for a coffee. Had he been better-looking, not dressed in a tracksuit, a bit more clever, maybe she would have held the door longer, upped the proposal to a drink, seduced the professor to the very brink of this lie.

51

Covey was not in his office, though the door was open. A tech stood just inside, her lab coat nicely tailored, flattering her thin waist and graceful hips. The young woman seemed aware of this, the way she stood, as though about to dance. She was counting gel samples lined along a bookshelf, using the eraser end of a pencil.

She flashed Mendenhall a look and, unimpressed, returned to her task.

Mendenhall leaned into the doorway, checked the office. She was hoping for some volunteer information. The tech ignored her.

Mendenhall thought she might be humming, though it could’ve just been her look.