The etiology of lupus is infinitely complex and has been endlessly debated, but all students agree with the contention of Muller and Imamura in the study for which they won their first Nobel prize, SLE— the Ecological Disease: lupus represents the auto-intoxication of the human race in an environment ever more hostile to the existence of life. A minority of specialists went on to say that the chief cause of the disease’s proliferation had been the collateral growth of modern pharmacology. Lupus, by this theory, was the price mankind was paying for the cure of its other ills.
Among the leading proponents of the so-called “doomsday” theory was Dr. E. Kitaj, director of Bellevue Hospital’s Metabolic Research unit, who now (while Chapel bided his time in the television room) was pointing out to the resident and interns of heaven certain unique features of the case of the patient in Unit 7. While all clinical tests confirmed a diagnosis of SLE, the degeneration of liver functions had progressed in a fashion more typical of lupoid hepatitis.
Because of the unique properties of her case, Dr. Kitaj had ordered a liver machine upstairs for Miss Schaap, though ordinarily this was a temporary expedient before transplantation. Her life was now as much a mechanical as a biologic process. In Alabama, New Mexico, and Utah, Frances Schaap would have been considered dead in any court of law.
Chapel was falling asleep. The afternoon art movie, a drama of circus life, was no help in keeping awake, since he could never concentrate on a program unless he knew the characters. Only by thinking of Ab, the threats he’d made, the blood glowing in his angry face, was he able to keep from nodding off.
In the ward the doctors had moved on to Unit 6 and were listening with tolerant smiles to Mrs. Harrison’s jokes about her colostomy.
The new Ford commercial came on, like an old friend calling Chapel by name. A girl in an Empire coupe drove through endless fields of grain. Ab had said, who said so many things just for their shock value, that the commercials were often better than the programs.
At last they trooped off together to the men’s ward, leaving the curtains drawn around Unit 7. Frances Schaap was asleep. The little red light on the machine winked on and off, on and off, like a jet flying over the city at night.
Using the diagram Ab had scrawled on the back of a transfer form, Chapel found the pressure adjustment for the portal vein. He turned it left till it stopped. The arrow on the scale below, marked P P, moved slowly from 35, to 40, to 50. To 60.
To 65.
He turned the dial back to where it had been. The arrow shivered: the portal vein had hemorrhaged.
Frances Schaap woke up. She lifted one thin, astonished hand toward her lips: they were smiling! “Doctor,” she said pleasantly. “Oh, I feel…” The hand fell back to the sheet.
Chapel looked away from her eyes. He readjusted the dial, which was no different, essentially, from the controls of his own Yamaha. The arrow moved right, along the scale: 50. 55.
“… so much better now.”
60. 65.
“Thanks.”
70.
“I hope, Mr. Holt, that you won’t let me keep you from your work,” Joel Beck said, with candid insincerity. “I fear I have already.”
Ab thought twice before agreeing to this. At first he’d been convinced she was actually an investigator Macy’s had hired to nail him, but her story about the computer checking out the obits and sending her here was not the sort of thing anyone could have made up. It was bad enough, her being from the Times, and worse perhaps.
“Am I?” she insisted.
If he said yes, he had work to do, she’d ask to tag along and watch. If he said no, then she’d go on with her damned questions. If it hadn’t been that she’d have reported him (he could recognize the type), he’d have told her to fuck off.
“Oh, I don’t know,” he answered carefully. “Isn’t it me who’s keeping you from your work?”
“How so?”
“Like I explained, there’s a woman up on 18 who’s sure to terminate any minute now. I’m just waiting for them to call.”
“Half an hour ago you said it wouldn’t take fifteen minutes, and you’re still waiting. Possibly the doctors have pulled her through. Wouldn’t that be wonderful?”
“Someone is bound to die by twelve o’clock.”
“By the same logic someone was bound to have died by now—and they haven’t.”
Ab could not support the strain of diplomacy any longer. “Look, lady, you’re wasting your time—it’s as simple as that.”
“It won’t be the first time,” Joel Beck replied complacently. “You might almost say that that’s what I’m paid to do.” She unslung her recorder. “If you’d just answer one or two more questions, give me a few more details of what you actually do, possibly we’ll come up with a handle for a more general story. Then even if that call does come I could go up with you and look over your shoulder.”
“Who would be interested?” With growing astonishment Ab realized that she did not so much resist his arguments as simply ignore them.
While Joel Beck was explaining the intrinsic fascination of death to the readers of the Times (not a morbid fascination but the universal human response to a universal human fact), the call came from Chapel.
He had done what Ab asked him to.
“Yeah, and?”
It had gone off okay.
“Is it official yet?”
It wasn’t. There was no one in the ward.
“Couldn’t you, uh, mention the matter to someone who can make it official?”
The Times woman was poking about the morgue, fingering things, pretending not to eavesdrop. Ab felt she could decipher his generalities. His first confession had been the same kind of nightmare, with Ab certain all his classmates lined up outside the confessional had overheard the sins the priest had pried out of him. If she hadn’t been listening he could have tried to bully Chapel into…
He’d hung up. It was just as well.
“Was that the call?” she asked.
“No. Something else, a private matter.”
So she kept at him with more questions about the ovens, and whether relatives ever came in to watch, and how long it took, until the desk called to say there was a driver from Macy’s trying to bring a body into the hospital and should they let him?
“Hold him right there. I’m on my way.”
“That was the call,” Joel Beck said, genuinely disappointed.
“Mm. I’ll be right back.”
The driver, flustered, started in with some story why he was late.
“It’s skin off your ass, not mine. Never mind that anyhow. There’s a reporter in my office from the Times— ”
“I knew,” the driver said. “It’s not enough I’m going to be fired, now you’ve found a way—”
“Listen to me, asshole. This isn’t about the Newman fuckup. And if you don’t panic she never has to know.” He explained about the city desk computer. “So we just won’t let her get any strange ideas, right? Like she might if she saw you hauling one corpse into the morgue and going off with another.”
“Yeah, but…” The driver clutched for his purpose as for a hat that a great wind were lifting from his head. “But they’ll crucify me at Macy’s if I don’t come back with the Newman body! I’m so late already because of the damned—”
“You’ll get the body. You’ll take back both. You can return with the other one later, but the important thing now—”
He felt her hand on his shoulder, bland as a smile.
“I thought you couldn’t have gone too far away. There’s a call for you and I’m afraid you were right: Miss Schaap has died. That is whom you were speaking of?”