"I have to inhale this stuff somehow, is that it?"
"Not quite. It's too dense to be inhaled. In any case, we don't want it to enter your sinuses." He frowned. "We have to decant the fluid into your lungs, gently."
"I see."
"We fit a thin tube through your mouth and down past the epiglottis. The end of the tube will have a local anesthetic, so you should not feel the pain in the epiglottis very long.... You must remain quite still during the procedure, try to relax fully, and breathe only on my order."
Alex nodded.
"The sensations are very unusual, but they are not dangerous. You must make up your mind to accept the procedure. If you choke up the fluid, then we have to begin again."
"Doctor," Alex said, "you don't have to go on pet.~ suading me. I'm not afraid. You can trust me. I don't stop.
I never stop. If I stopped at things, I wouldn't be here now, would I?"
"There will be some discomfort."
"That's not new. I'm not afraid of that, either."
"Very well, Alex." Dr. Mirabi patted Alex's shoulder. "Then we will begin. Take your place on the manipulation table, please."
Concepciôn helped Alex to lie on the jointed leather table. She touched her foot to a floor pedal. A worm gear whined beneath the floor. The table bent at Alex's hips and rose beneath his back, to a sharp angle. Alex coughed twice.
Dr. Mirabi drew on a pair of translucent gloves, deftly unwrapped one of his canvas-bound machines, and busied himself at the switches. He opened a cabinet, retrieved a pair of matched, bright yellow aerosol tanks, and inserted both tanks into sockets at the top of the machine. He attached clear plastic tubing to the taps on the tanks and opened both the taps, with brief pneumatic hisses. The machine hummed and sizzled a bit and gave off a hot waft of electrical resistance.
"We will set the liquid to blood heat," Dr. Mirabi explained. "That way there is no thermal shock to the tuberdes. Also heat will dissolve the chronic mucus more effectively. Efficiently? Is it 'efficiently' or 'effectively'?"
"They're synonyms," Alex said. "Do you think I might throw up? These are my favorite pajamas."
Concepción stripped the pajamas off, then wrapped him briskly in a paper medical gown. She strapped him against the table with a pair of fabric belts. Dr. Mirabi approached him with the soft plastic nozzle of the insert, smeared with a pink paste. "Open widely, don't taste the anesthetic," he warned. Alex nevertheless got a generous smear of the paste against the root of his tongue, which immediately went as numb as a severed beef tongue on a butcher's block.
The nozzle slid its way down a narrow road of pain along his throat. Alex felt the fleshy valve within his chest leap and flap as the tube touched and penetrated. Then the numbness struck, and a great core of meat behind his heart simply lost sensation, went into nothingness, like a core mechanically punched from an apple.
His eyes filled with tears. He heard, more than saw, Dr. Mirabi touching taps. Then the heat came.
He'd never known that blood was so hot. The fluid was hotter than blood, and much, much heavier, like fizzing, creamy, molten lead. He could see the fluid moving into him through the tube. It was chemical-colored, aqua blue. "Breathe!" Dr. Mirabi shouted.
Alex heaved for air. A bizarre reverberating belch tore free from the back of his throat, something like the cry of a monster bullfrog. For an instant he tried to laugh; his diaphragm heaved futilely at the liquid weight within him, and went still.
"El nina tiene un bulto en la garganta," said Concepcion, conversationally. She placed her latex-gloved hand against his forehead. "Muy doloroso."
"Poco a poco," Dr. Mirabi said, gesturing. The worm gear rustled beneath the table and Alex rose in place, liquid shifting within him with the gut-bulging inertia of a nine-course meal. Air popped in bursts from his clamped lips and a hot gummy froth rose against his upper palate.
"Good," said Dr. Mirabi. "Breathe!"
Alex tried again, his eyes bulging. His spine popped audibly and he felt another pair of great loathsome bubbles come up, stinking ancient bubbles like something from the bottom of LaBrea.
Then suddenly the oxygen hit his brain. An orgasmic blush ran up his neck, his cheeks. For a supreme moment he forgot what it was to be sick. He felt lovely. He felt free. He felt without constraint. He felt pretty sure that he was about to die.
He tried to speak, to babble something-gratitude perhaps, or last words, or an eager yell for more-but there -was only silence. His lungs were like two casts of and bonemeal, each filled to brimming with hot ber. His muscles heaved against the taut liquid bags two fists clenching two tennis balls, and his ears road and things went black. Suddenly he could hear his straining to beat, thud-thud, thud-thud, each coau shock of the ventricles passing through his liquid-filled lungs with booming subaqueous clarity.
And then the beat stopped too.
ON THE EVENING of May 10, Jane Unger made a reconnaissance of her target, on the pretext of buying heroin. She spent half an hour in line outside the clinic with desolate, wheezing Yankees from over the border. The customers lined outside the clinic were the seediest, creepiest, most desperate people she'd ever seen who were not actual criminals. Jane was familiar with the look of actual criminals, because the vast network of former Texas prisons had been emptied of felons and retrofitted as medical quarantine centers and emergency weather shelters. The former inhabitants of the Texan gulag, the actual criminals, were confined by software nowadays. Convicted criminals, in their tamper-proof parole cuffs, couldn't make it down to Nuevo Laredo, because they'd be marooned on the far side of the Rio Grande by their 6overnment tracking software. Nobody in the clinic line wore a parole cuff. But they were clearly the kind of people who had many good friends wearing them.
All of the American customers, without exception, wore sinister breathing masks. Presumably to avoid contracting an infection. Or to avoid spreading an infection that they already had. Or probably just to conceal their identities while they bought drugs.
The older customers wore plain ribbed breathing masks in antiseptic medical white. The younger folks were into elaborate knobby strap-ons with vivid designer colors.
The line of Americans snaked along steadily, helped by the presence of a pair of Mexican cops, who kept the local street hustlers off the backs of the paying clientele. Jane patiently made her way up the clinic steps, through the double doors, and to the barred and bulletproof glass of the pharmacy windows.
There Jane discovered that the clinic didn't sell any "brown Mexican heroin." Apparently they had no "heroin" at all in stock, there being little demand for this legendary substance among people with respiratory illnesses.
Jane slid a private-currency card through the slit beneath the window. The pharmacist swiped Jane's card through a reader, studied the results on the network link, and began to show real interest. Jane was politely abstracted from the line and introduced to the pharmacist's superior, who escorted her up to his office. There he showed her a vial of a more modern analgesic, a designer endorphin a thousand times more potent than morphine. Jane turned down his offer of a free trial injection.
When Jane haltingly brought up the subject of bribery, the supervisor's face clouded. He called a big pnvatesecurity thug, and Jane was shown out the clinic's back entrance, and told not to return.