Precious Blood (16 page)

She listened, stroking his hair. And she cried, and her tears made him feel foolish and weak. And she tilted her head against his, and held on to him, and held him under the blanket with her when he felt he couldn’t stay there anymore.

When it had finished, standing by that aching, empty space at Ground Zero for the ceremony marking the end of the recovery, dry-eyed as they led the riderless horse up out of the pit, he thought he was okay. That he’d got through it in one piece.

But he had stopped sleeping. On his days off, he walked through the city, away from his own little vortex, watching to see how it had changed. He became very sensitive to triggers—when a plane flew low over the city, he always imagined the trajectory continuing, smashing straight into one of the Midtown skyscrapers.

He slept less and less; nights gradually became tidal, the darkness rolling in quickly, then slowly rolling out, Jenner sitting wrapped in a blanket, staring at the paling sky through open windows. And eventually his career began to wind down.

One day, as the sun was beginning to show over the East River, Jenner gave up on trying to sleep and went in to the office. Whittaker was already there, triaging the day’s autop-142

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sies. Apologetically, Jenner explained that he wasn’t really sleeping, and asked for an easy day; he wanted to leave early and get a prescription for something to help him sleep.

It had been four years since Julie had chosen Jenner instead of him, but Whittaker never missed an opportunity for payback. There were five autopsies, and Whittaker could easily have cut him loose; he didn’t even glance at Jenner as he assigned him two cases.

Jenner convinced himself he was getting a second wind during the first case, a jeweler who had dropped dead in front of his shop, but by the second, he could barely stand.

The decedent was a cachectic transsexual with advanced AIDS. She’d had the disease for almost fourteen years, and her physicians had sent her home to die, but the family demanded an autopsy, insisting that the public hospital had treated her poorly.

It happened right at the end. He’d completed the autopsy proper and was removing her breast implants so they wouldn’t burst during cremation. The scalpel slipped from his fingers, almost numb under three pairs of gloves, the textured fingertips slick with blood.

The scalpel tumbled from the table, landed almost vertically, and then bounced back up off the floor toward him.

There was a brief white flash of steel as he felt the blade slice through the leg of his scrub pants and cut into his skin.

He pushed back from the table, cursing, amazed by the freakishness of the cut. Fuck. He’d cut his hands before—

they all had—but this just seemed incredibly unfair. Fuck.

HIV.
Fuck.

Tearing off his gloves, struggling to pull off the bunching, snagging gown, he went to the sink, jammed the hot tap on full, pulled up the pant leg, and began to squeeze the skin, milking blood from the fine half-inch cut, trying to wash out the tainted blood.

He called to Brooklyn Frank for bleach, but they couldn’t find any. Finally, Antwon Terry found some powdered stain-Precious Blood

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less steel cleanser, and Jenner slapped some onto the wound; it stung, and caked the blood almost immediately.

He tried gripping his hands around his upper calf like a tourniquet, but it made no difference. Then Tree came in with a brown plastic bottle of hydrogen peroxide. Jenner splashed it on neat, and it frothed the steel cleanser and burned like a bitch, but it felt like it was doing something.

“Go on, Doc. Put on some more. Use it up.”

He sagged into a chair and looked down at his shin. He had rinsed off all the powder and blood, and the wound now barely fizzed with each new application, the edges pale and feathery, the surrounding skin now pink, the center of the cut liver brown.

“You okay, Doc? Was it HIV?”

Jenner looked up at Tree and gestured weakly toward the body. An old Public Enemy song ran through his mind, Flava Flav saying, “
Yo, Terminator—meet the gee that killed me.
”

“I went over to the Bellevue ER, where they gave me a two-month preventative supply of AIDS drugs. And then I had to wait to see if I was infected. I was fine, but the medication made me really ill, and I became anemic. I stopped taking it after a month, but it took me months to recover from the anemia—months of pure exhaustion.

“I went back to work, but I was pretty much done, physically, emotionally. I kind of didn’t know how to stop working. Didn’t know what I would have done with myself. The deputy chief was fucking me over because his girlfriend had left him for me—each day, he’d load me up and sit around watching me burn out.

“And finally, I missed a murder. An old lady in her eighties, long history of heart disease, found fully clothed, lying on her bed. I didn’t do an autopsy because she’d had heart attacks in the past. I shouldn’t have been there, I knew I was too ill to work, really, but it was my call, and I chose to be there.

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“Anyway, I looked at her under poor light, and I noticed her face was a bit purple, but I thought it was because of her position.

“I certified her death as due to natural causes, and would have sent her on her way if the morgue tech hadn’t spotted a bruise on her neck. I did an autopsy and found the woman had been strangled. There were no external injuries on the neck—it was very subtle. But she’d been murdered, and I had missed it.” He paused. “And the thing is, I just didn’t care . . .

“The next day, I asked to meet with the chief and Whittaker to tell them what happened and to ask for a break. I figured Whittaker would push for my dismissal, but the chief would be on my side. And there was a lot of understanding about stuff in the post–9/11 period.

“But I realized I’d had enough. It was harder and harder just showing up at work each day. And not just because I was ill. I’d loved this city so much, and now it seemed like it was gone forever, and each day was just another day where something horrible could happen.

“I knew my work wasn’t good for me, and I wasn’t good for my work. So I went to the meeting, and I resigned.”

“And that was that?”

“Some people tried to get me to stay, but they didn’t understand where I was. I just couldn’t be there anymore, couldn’t do it anymore.”

They lay there quiet for a long while. And finally he realized she was right: it
was
different now.

In the ruined factory on the river, the man was trying to get warm. The blankets hanging over the main window, sodden from the rain, kept pulling out their moorings, the brick so rotten it shattered when he tried to drive a nail with his nail gun.

He gave up and huddled in the corner, clutching his knees
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to his chest, all of his bedding wrapped around him as he tried to fight off the damp. He looked around the room. It was pathetic.

He’d been someone once, someone important. He had created FMedbase, an innovative database program, and for a while, his name appeared frequently in tech-sector newslet-ters and trade magazines. But just as quickly as he had risen, he had foundered, overtaken by younger, better companies with younger, better programmers.

In an instant it seemed as if all his success had just been illusion, his company just another entrepreneurial blip. After the long summer where his failure became too obvious for him to deny, he had given up. Early that September, he made his way to the same big glass building in downtown Manhattan where just three years earlier he’d signed his incorporation papers. The appointment was early, a quick mercy killing before his lawyer got on with making real money from real entrepreneurs.

The lawyer, impatient with his client’s slow reading of routine documents, pushed his fountain pen into the man’s hand and began to read aloud his own copy. The man sat silent at the conference table as his attorney went down the bankruptcy form, nodding his head slowly as he initialed each line, then signing and dating the bottom. The ink gleamed on the white paper, the bright morning sun gilding the final proof of his failure.

“You understand that with Chapter Eleven . . . ,” the lawyer said, and then his voice was drowned out by the roar of engines and the clatter of the shuddering windows. He turned, confused, to the window just in time to see the impact. The man was falling to the ground when the blast hit, spraying the room with shards of tinted glass.

When he pulled himself to his feet, the lawyer was sitting against a partition, mouth gaping and shutting, blood pouring from his scalp. The man bent stiffly, picked up the bankruptcy papers, and went into the hall. At first he was
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deaf, but the roaring sound soon gave way to pandemonium, the sound of screams and car alarms. The stairwells were packed with panicked secretaries and lawyers.

On the street, traffic had instantly become snarled. He saw flames rolling up the sides of the tower. It was obviously impossible, some kind of illusion—special effects from a Hollywood B movie.

He stood at the corner for a while, leaning on a lamppost, his hearing fading out and coming back as he worked his jaw. He decided to walk home. He had just started east when the roar of the second plane flooded the area, followed by the explosion of its impact.

All the buildings in the area were emptying. Police and fire department and EMS vehicles were fighting their way through the gridlock. He reached the park in front of City Hall and realized he had to sit. He rested for a little, but the hysteria of the crowds upset him, so he stood again and moved toward the Brooklyn Bridge, dazed, his movements treacle-slow and painful.

He was on the bridge when the first of the towers went down. He didn’t look, just saw the faces, heard the screaming, and knew.

When he reached the Brooklyn side, a Hasidic man told him he was bleeding, and wiped his wounds with a dishcloth wet with bottled water; it was nothing, scratches from the shower of glass. He blotted his injuries with the bankruptcy paperwork, then threw all the soiled papers into the garbage. He made to leave, but concerned people made him sit. He waited in the shade of the off-ramp for an hour, then continued on through the lazy flurry of paper and ash now floating down from the sky, walking toward the factory in Williamsburg that had housed his dead business, walking on toward home.

sunday,

december 8

Jenner winced as he poured the champagne into the orange juice—a waste of a good bottle—but she wanted a mimosa, and so he’d made her a mimosa. And another.

And was now working on a third. He misjudged, swearing as he lifted the dripping champagne flute up.

Alcohol or not, she seemed to be doing better. Lying in bed that morning, she’d talked about her future for the first time. She did want to go back to school, eventually. She’d take some time off, maybe travel, get it all out of her system.

Maybe she could work for Uncle Douggie for a while; she was actually a pretty good photographer.

He wiped the counter, then put the glass down. He tipped a scoop of coffee beans into the mill and listened to her sing in the shower, a shifting, grisly medley of Coldplay and Brit-ney Spears.

He pulsed the coffee, stopping when he heard a knock.

Jun with more fucking bad news, no doubt. He opened the door to find Douggie Pyke, deep tan and weary, red-rimmed eyes. Jenner stepped back in surprise.

He walked past Jenner into the loft, sniffing. “Afternoon, Jenner. Am I in time for coffee?”

“Hey, Douggie. Just about.” The shower was still on full blast.

“Can you believe this rain? I had to take the train up from D.C. They closed LaGuardia early this morning.” His eyes scanned the loft. “Where’s Ana?”

“She’s just washing up, I think. How was your trip?”

Jenner heard her shut off the shower.

“How’s she doing?”

“Good days and bad days. Pretty much how you’d expect.

How was the trip?”

“Rough—D.C. to New York was actually the easiest part.

It took forever to get back to Yaoundé. On the trek back, we
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came across a poacher camp. I got some incredible shots of butchered gorillas, saddest thing I’ve ever seen.”

Pyke walked over to the counter and peered into the mill.

He popped the cover and sniffed it. “What is this? Kenyan?

It’s still way too coarse.” He pressed on the cap, and the loud rattle of the grinding chamber filled the room again.

Ana walked into the room, naked except for a towel tied into a turban on her head. “Jenner, do you have any moistur-izer? My face is dry as—”

Then she saw Douggie, pivoted and ran back into the bathroom, her arms across her breasts.

Douggie took his hand off the coffee mill. He looked at Jenner, then walked over to the couch and sat.

He didn’t speak for a minute or so.

“So this is your idea of looking after her?”

Jenner said nothing.

“She’s half your age.”

“Douggie, I’m sorry, but you don’t know what it’s been like. You have no idea what’s been going on.”

“Oh, I think I have a pretty good idea.” He stood and called toward the bathroom, “Ana? Can you get your things?

I’ll wait for you in my studio.”

He walked over to the bathroom, tapped on the door, and repeated himself.

“I can’t come out,” she said. “I don’t have anything to put on.”

Pyke turned to Jenner.

“Get her some clothes. Tell her to get her things and come downstairs. She can stay with me now.”

“Douggie, she’s—”

Pyke cut him off. “I don’t want to hear anything from you right now.”

Jenner said, “Jesus, Douggie.”

Pyke turned and walked over to him. “
What?
Go ahead, say something—I’m
this
fucking close to punching you in the fucking mouth.”

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