Copyright © 1992 by Nancy Kress, All rights reserved. First appeared in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, April 1992. For the personal use of those who have purchased the ESF 1993 Award anthology only.

THE MOUNTAIN TO MOHAMMED

Nancy Kress

“A person gives money to the physician.

Maybe he will be healed.

Maybe he will not be healed.”

—The Talmud

When the security buzzer sounded, Dr. Jesse Randall was playing go against his computer. Haruo Kaneko, his roommate at Downstate Medical, had taught him the game. So far nineteen shiny black and white stones lay on the grid under the scanner field. Jesse frowned; the computer had a clear shot at surrounding an empty space in two moves, and he couldn’t see how to stop it. The buzzer made him jump.

Anne? But she was on duty at the hospital until one. Or maybe he remembered her rotation wrong…

Eagerly he crossed the small living room to the security screen. It wasn’t Anne.

Three stories below a man stood on the street, staring into the monitor. He was slight and fair, dressed in jeans and frayed jacket with a knit cap pulled low on his head. The bottoms of his ears were red with cold.

“Yes?” Jesse said.

“Dr. Randall?” The voice was low and rough.

“Yes.”

“Could you come down here a minute to talk to me?”

“About what?”

“Something that needs talkin’ about. It’s personal. Mike sent me.”

A thrill ran through Jesse. This was it, then. He kept his voice neutral. “I’ll be right down.”

He turned off the monitor system, removed the memory disk, and carried it into the bedroom, where he passed it several times over a magnet. In a gym bag he packed his medical equipment: antiseptics, antibiotics, sutures, clamps, syringes, electromed scanner, as much equipment as would fit. Once, shoving it all in, he laughed. He dressed in a warm pea coat bought second-hand at the Army-Navy store and put the gun, also bought second-hand, in the coat pocket. Although of course the other man would be carrying. But Jesse liked the feel of it, a slightly heavy drag on his right side. He replaced the disk in the security system and locked the door. The computer was still pretending to consider its move for go, although of course it had near-instantaneous decision capacity.

“Where to?”

The slight man didn’t answer. He strode purposefully away from the building, and Jesse realized he shouldn’t have said anything. He followed the man down the street, carrying the gym bag in his left hand.

Fog had drifted in from the harbor. Boston smelled wet and grey, of rotting piers and dead fish and garbage. Even here, in the Morningside Security Enclave, where that part of the apartment maintenance fees left over from security went to keep the streets clean. Yellow lights gleamed through the gloom, stacked twelve stories high but crammed close together; even insurables couldn’t afford to heat much space.

Where they were going there wouldn’t be any heat at all.

Jesse followed the slight man down the subway steps. The guy paid for both of them, a piece of quixotic dignity that made Jesse smile. Under the lights he got a better look: The man was older than he’d thought, with webbed lines around the eyes and long, thin lips over very bad teeth. Probably hadn’t ever had dental coverage in his life. What had been in his genescan? God, what a system.

“What do I call you?” he said as they waited on the platform. He kept his voice low, just in case.

“Kenny.”

“All right, Kenny,” Jesse said, and smiled. Kenny didn’t smile back. Jesse told himself it was ridiculous to feel hurt; this wasn’t a social visit. He stared at the tracks until the subway came.

At this hour the only other riders were three hard-looking men, two black and one white, and an even harder-looking Hispanic girl in a low-cut red dress. After a minute Jesse realized she was under the control of one of the black men sitting at the other end of the car. Jesse was careful not to look at her again. He couldn’t help being curious, though. She looked healthy. All four of them looked healthy, as did Kenny, except for his teeth. Maybe none of them were uninsurable; maybe they just couldn’t find a job. Or didn’t want one. It wasn’t his place to judge.

That was the whole point of doing this, wasn’t it?

# # #

The other two times had gone as easy as Mike said they would. A deltoid suture on a young girl wounded in a knife fight, and burn treatment for a baby scalded by a pot of boiling water knocked off a stove. Both times the families had been so grateful, so respectful. They knew the risk Jesse was taking. After he’d treated the baby and left antibiotics and analgesics on the pathetic excuse for a kitchen counter, a board laid across the non-functional radiator, the young Hispanic mother had grabbed his hand and covered it with kisses. Embarrassed, he’d turned to smile at her husband, wanting to say something, wanting to make clear he wasn’t just another sporadic do-gooder who happened to have a medical degree.

“I think the system stinks. The insurance companies should never have been allowed to deny health coverage on the basis of genescans for potential disease, and employers should never have been allowed to keep costs down by health-based hiring. If this were a civilized country, we’d have national health care by now!”

The Hispanic had stared back at him, blank-faced.

“Some of us are trying to do better,” Jesse said.

It was the same thing Mike—Dr. Michael Cassidy—had said to Jesse and Anne at the end of a long drunken evening celebrating the half-way point in all their residencies. Although, in retrospect, it seemed to Jesse that Mike hadn’t drunk very much. Nor had he actually said very much outright. It was all implication, probing masked as casual philosophy. But Anne had understood, and refused instantly.

“God, Mike, you could be dismissed from the hospital! The regulations forbid residents from exposing the hospital to the threat of an uninsured malpractice suit.

There’s no money.”

Mike had smiled and twirled his glass between fingers as long as a pianist’s.

“Doctors are free to treat whomever they wish, at their own risk, even uninsurables.

Carter v. Sunderland.”

“Not while a hospital is paying their malpractice insurance as residents, if the hospital exercises its right to so forbid. Janisson v. Lechchevko.”

Mike laughed easily. “Then forget it, both of you. It’s just conversation.”

Anne said, “But do you personally risk—”

“It’s not right,” Jesse cut in—couldn’t she see that Mike wouldn’t want to incriminate himself on a thing like this?—“that so much of the population can’t get insurance. Every year they add more genescan pretendency barriers, and the poor slobs haven’t even got the diseases yet!”

His voice had risen. Anne glanced nervously around the bar. Her profile was lovely, a serene curving line that reminded Jesse of those Korean screens in the expensive shops on Commonwealth Avenue. And she had lovely legs, lovely breasts, lovely everything. Maybe, he’d thought, now that they were neighbors in the Morningside Enclave…

“Another round,” Mike had answered.

Unlike the father of the burned baby, who never had answered Jesse at all. To cover his slight embarrassment—the mother had been so effusive—Jesse gazed around the cramped apartment. On the wall were photographs in cheap plastic frames of people with masses of black hair, all lying in bed. Jesse had read about this: It was a sort of mute, powerless protest. The subjects had all been photographed on their death beds. One of them was a beautiful girl, her eyes closed and her hand flung lightly over her head, as if asleep. The Hispanic followed Jesse’s gaze and lowered his eyes.

“Nice,” Jesse said. “Good photos. I didn’t know you people were so good with a camera.”

Still nothing.

Later, it occurred to Jesse that maybe the guy hadn’t understood English.

# # #

The subway stopped with a long screech of equipment too old, too poorly maintained. There was no money. Boston, like the rest of the country, was broke.

For a second Jesse thought the brakes weren’t going to catch at all and his heart skipped, but Kenny showed no emotion and so Jesse tried not to, either. The car finally stopped. Kenny rose and Jesse followed him.

They were somewhere in Dorchester. Three men walked quickly towards them and Jesse’s right hand crept towards his pocket. “This him?” one said to Kenny.

“Yeah,” Kenny said. “Dr. Randall,” and Jesse relaxed.

It made sense, really. Two men walking through this neighborhood probably wasn’t a good idea. Five was better. Mike’s organization must know what it was doing.

The men walked quickly. The neighborhood was better than Jesse had imagined: small row houses, every third or fourth one with a bit of frozen lawn in the front. A few even had flowerboxes. But the windows were all barred, and over all hung the grey fog, the dank cold, the pervasive smell of garbage.

The house they entered had no flowerbox. The steel front door, triple-locked, opened directly into a living room furnished with a sagging sofa, a TV, and an ancient daybed whose foamcast headboard flaked like dandruff. On the daybed lay a child, her eyes bright with fever.

Sofa, TV, headboard vanished. Jesse felt his professional self take over, a sensation as clean and fresh as plunging into cool water. He knelt by the bed and smiled. The girl, who looked about nine or ten, didn’t smile back. She had a long, sallow, sullen face, but the long brown hair on the pillow was beautiful: clean, lustrous, and well-tended.

“It’s her belly,” said one of the men who had met them at the subway. Jesse glanced up at the note in his voice, and realized that he must be the child’s father.

The man’s hand trembled as he pulled the sheet from the girl’s lower body. Her abdomen was swollen and tender.

“How long has she been this way?”

“Since yesterday,” Kenny said, when the father didn’t answer.

“Nausea? Vomiting?”

“Yeah. She can’t keep nothing down.”

Jesse’s hands palpated gently. The girl screamed.

Appendicitis. He just hoped to hell peritonitis hadn’t set in. He didn’t want to deal with peritonitis.

“Bring in all the lamps you have, with the brightestest watt bulbs. Boil water—”

He looked up. The room was very cold. “Does the stove work?”

The father nodded. He looked pale. Jesse smiled and said, “I don’t think it’s anything we can’t cure, with a little luck here.” The man didn’t answer.

Jesse opened his bag, his mind racing. Laser knife, sterile clamps, scaramine—

he could do it even without nursing assistance provided there was no peritonitis. But only if…The girl moaned and turned her face away. There were tears in her eyes.

Jesse looked at the man with the same long, sallow face and brown hair. “You her father?”

The man nodded.

“I need to see her genescan.”

The man clenched both fists at his side. Oh, God, if he didn’t have the official printout…Sometimes, Jesse had read, uninsurables burned them. One woman, furious at the paper that would forever keep her out of the middle class, had mailed hers, smeared with feces, and packaged with a plasticene explosive, to the President.

There had been headlines, columns, petitions…and nothing had changed. A country fighting for its very economic survival didn’t hesitate to expend front-line troops. If there was no genescan for this child, Jesse couldn’t use scaramine, that miracle immune-system booster, to which about 15% of the population had a fatal reaction.

Without scaramine, under these operating conditions, the chances of post-operation infection were considerably higher. If she couldn’t take scaramine…

The father handed Jesse the laminated printout, with the deeply-embossed seal in the upper corner. Jesse scanned it quickly. The necessary RB antioncogene on the eleventh chromosome was present. The girl was not potentially allergic to scaramine. Her name was Rosamund.

“Okay, Rose,” Jesse said gently. “I’m going to help you. In just a little while you’re going to feel so much better…” He slipped the needle with anesthetic into her arm. She jumped and screamed, but within a minute she was out.

Jesse stripped away the bedclothes, despite the cold, and told the men how to boil them. He spread betadine over her distended abdomen and poised the laser knife to cut.

# # #

The hallmark of his parents’ life had been caution. Don’t fall, now! Drive carefully! Don’t talk to strangers! Born during the Depression—the other one—

they invested only in Treasury bonds and their own one-sixth acre of suburban real estate. When the marching in Selma and Washington had turned to killing in Detroit and Kent State, they shook their heads sagely: See? We said so. No good comes of getting involved in things that don’t concern you. Jesse’s father had held the same job for thirty years; his mother considered it immoral to buy anything not on sale.

They waited until she was over 40 to have Jesse, their only child.

At 16, Jesse had despised them; at 24, pitied them; at 28, his present age, loved them with a despairing gratitude not completely free of contempt. They had missed so much, dared so little. They lived now in Florida, retired and happy and smug.

“The pension”—they called it that, as if it were a famous diamond or a well-loved estate—was inflated by Collapse prices into providing a one-bedroom bungalow with beige carpets and a pool. In the pool’s placid, artificially blue waters, the Carlsons beheld chlorined visions of triumph. “Even after we retired,” Jesse’s mother told him proudly, “we didn’t have to go backwards.”

“That’s what comes from thrift, son,” his father always added. “And hard work.

No reason these deadbeats today couldn’t do the same thing.”

Jesse looked around their tiny yard at the plastic ducks lined up like headstones, the fanatically trimmed hedge, the blue-and-white striped awning, and his arms made curious beating motions, as if they were lashed to his side. “Nice, Mom. Nice.”

“You know it,” she said, and winked roguishly. Jesse had looked away before she could see his embarrassment. Boston had loomed large in his mind, compelling and vivid hectic as an exotic disease.

# # #

There was no peritonitis. Jesse sliced free the spoiled bit of tissue that had been Rosamund’s appendix. As he closed with quick, sure movements, he heard a click. A camera. He couldn’t look away, but out of sudden rush of euphoria he said to whoever was taking the picture, “Not one for the gallery this time. This one’s going to live.”

When the incision was closed, Jesse administered a massive dose of scaramine.

Carefully he instructed Kenny and the girl’s father about the medication, the little girl’s diet, the procedures to maintain asepsis which, since they were bound to be inadequate, made the scaramine so necessary. “I’m on duty the next thirty-six hours at the hospital. I’ll return Wednesday night, you’ll either have to come get me or give me the address, I’ll take a taxi and—”

The father drew in a quick, shaky breath like a sob. Jesse turned to him. “She’s got a strong fighting chance, this procedure isn’t—” A woman exploded from a back room, shrieking.

“No, no, noooooo…” She tried to throw herself on the patient. Jesse lunged for her, but Kenny was quicker. He grabbed her around the waist, pinning her arms to her sides. She fought him, wailing and screaming, as he dragged her back through the door. “Murderer, baby killer, nooooooo—”

“My wife,” the father finally said. “She doesn’t…doesn’t understand.”

Probably doctors were devils to her, Jesse thought. Gods who denied people the healing they could have offered. Poor bastards. He felt a surge of quiet pride that he could teach them different.

The father went on looking at Rosamund, now sleeping peacefully. Jesse couldn’t see the other man’s eyes.

Back home at the apartment, he popped open a beer. He felt fine. Was it too late to call Anne? It was—the computer clock said 2:00 a.m. She’d already be sacked out. In seven more hours his own 36-hour rotation started, but he couldn’t sleep.

He sat down at the computer. The machine hadn’t moved to surround his empty square after all. It must have something else in mind. Smiling, sipping at his beer, Jesse sat down to match wits with the Korean computer in the ancient Japanese game in the waning Boston night.

# # #

Two days later, he went back to check on Rosamund. The rowhouse was deserted, boards nailed diagonally across the window. Jesse’s heart began to pound. He was afraid to ask information of the neighbors; men in dark clothes kept going in and out of the house next door, their eyes cold. Jesse went back to the hospital and waited. He couldn’t think what else to do.

Four rotations later the deputy sheriff waited for him outside the building, unable to pass the security monitors until Jesse came home.

COMMONWEALTH OF MASSACHUSETTS

SUFFOLK COUNTY SUPERIOR COURT

To Jesse Robert Randall of Morningside Security Enclave, Building 16, Apartment 3C, Boston , within our county of Suffolk. Whereas Steven & Rose Gocek of Boston within our County of Suffolk has begun an action of Tort against you returnable in the Superior Court holden at Boston within our County of Suffolk on October 18, 2004 , in which action damages are claimed in the sum of $2,000,000 — as follows:

TORT AND/OR CONTRACT FOR MALPRACTICE

as will more fully appear from the declaration to be filed in said Court when and if said action is entered therein:

WE COMMAND YOU, if you intend to make any defense of said action, that on said date or within such further time as the law allows you cause your written appearance to be entered and your written answer or other lawful pleadings to be filed in the office of the Clerk of the Court to which said writ is returnable, and that you defend against said action according to law.

Hereof fail not at your peril, as otherwise said judgment may be entered against you in said action without further notice.

Witness, Lawrence F. Monastersky, Esquire , at Boston, the fourth day of March in the year of our Lord two thousand four.

Alice P. McCarren

Clerk

Jesse looked up from the paper. The deputy sheriff, a soft-bodied man with small, light eyes, looked steadily back.

“But what…what happened?”

The deputy looked out over Jesse’s left shoulder, a gesture meaning he wasn’t officially saying what he was saying. “The kid died. The one they say you treated.”

“Died? Of what? But I went back…” He stopped, filled with sudden sickening uncertainty about how much he was admitting.

The deputy went on staring over his shoulder. “You want my advice, doc? Get yourself a lawyer.”

Doctor, lawyer, Indian chief, Jesse thought suddenly, inanely. The inanity somehow brought it all home. He was being sued. For malpractice. By an uninsurable. Now. Here. Him, Jesse Randall. Who had been trying only to help.

“Cold for this time of year,” the deputy remarked. “They’re dying of cold and malnutrition down there, in Roxbury and Dorchester and Southie. Even the goddamn weather can’t give us a break.”

Jesse couldn’t answer. A wind off the harbor fluttered the paper in his hand.

# # #

“These are the facts,” the lawyer said. He looked tired, a small man in a dusty office lined with second-hand law books. “The hospital purchased malpractice coverage for its staff, including residents. In doing so, it entered into a contract with certain obligations and exclusions for each side. If a specific incident falls under these exclusions, the contract is not in force with regard to that incident. One such exclusion is that residents will not be covered if they treat uninsured persons unless such treatment occurs within the hospital setting or the resident has reasonable grounds to assume that such a person is insured. Those are not the circumstances you described to me.”

“No,” Jesse said. He had the sensation that the law books were falling off the top shelves, slowly but inexorably, like small green and brown glaciers. Outside, he had the same sensation about the tops of buildings.

“Therefore, you are not covered by any malpractice insurance. Another set of facts: Over the last five years jury decisions in malpractice cases have averaged 85%

in favor of plaintiffs. Insurance companies and legislatures are made up of insurables, Dr. Randall. However, juries are still drawn by lot from the general citizenry. Most of the educated general citizenry finds ways to get out of jury duty.

They always did. Juries are likely to be 65% or more uninsurables. It’s the last place the have-nots still wield much real power, and they use it.”

“You’re saying I’m dead,” Jesse said numbly. “They’ll find me guilty.”

The little lawyer looked pained. “Not ‘dead,’ Doctor. Convicted—most probably. But conviction isn’t death. Not even professional death. The hospital may or may not dismiss you—they have that right—but you can still finish your training elsewhere. And malpractice suits, however they go, are not of themselves grounds for denial of a medical license. You can still be a doctor.”

“Treating who?” Jesse cried. He threw up his hands. The books fell slightly faster. “If I’m convicted I’ll have to declare bankruptcy—there’s no way I could pay a jury settlement like that! And even if I found another residency at some third-rate hospital in Podunk, no decent practitioner would ever accept me as a partner. I’d have to practice alone, without money to set up more than a hole-in-the corner office among God-knows- who…and even that’s assuming I can find a hospital that will let me finish. All because I wanted to help people who are getting shit on!”

The lawyer took off his glasses and rubbed the lenses thoughtfully with a tissue.

“Maybe,” he said, “they’re shitting back.”

“What?”

“You haven’t asked about the specific charges, Doctor.”

“Malpractice! The brat died!”

The lawyer said, “Of massive scaramine allergic reaction.”

The anger leeched out of Jesse. He went very quiet.

“She was allergic to scaramine,” the lawyer said. “You failed to ascertain that.

A basic medical question.”

“I—” The words wouldn’t come out. He saw again the laminated genescan chart, the detailed analysis of chromosome 11. A camera clicking, recording that he was there. The hysterical woman, the mother, exploding from the back room: noooooooooo… The father standing frozen, his eyes downcast.

It wasn’t possible.

Nobody would kill their own child. Not to discredit one of the fortunate ones, the haves, the insurables, the employables…No one would do that.

The lawyer was watching him carefully, glasses in hand.

Jesse said, “Dr. Michael Cassidy—” and stopped.

“Dr. Cassidy what?” the lawyer said.

But all Jesse could see, suddenly, was the row of plastic ducks in his parents’

Florida yard, lined up as precisely as headstones, garish hideous yellow as they marched undeviatingly wherever it was they were going.

# # #

“No,” Mike Cassidy said. “I didn’t send him.”

They stood in the hospital parking lot. Snow blew from the east. Cassidy wrapped both arms around himself and rocked back and forth. “He didn’t come from us.”

“He said he did!”

“I know. But he didn’t. His group must have heard we were helping illegally, gotten your name from somebody—”

“But why?” Jesse shouted. “Why frame me? Why kill a child just to frame me?

I’m nothing!”

Cassidy’s face spasmed. Jesse saw that his horror at Jesse’s position was real, his sympathy genuine, and both useless. There was nothing Cassidy could do.

“I don’t know,” Cassidy whispered. And then, “Are you going to name me at your malpractice trial?”

Jesse turned away without answering, into the wind.

# # #

Chief of Surgery Jonathan Eberhart called him into his office just before Jesse started his rotation. Before, not after. That was enough to tell him everything. He was getting very good at discovering the whole from a single clue.

“Sit down, Doctor,” Eberhart said. His voice, normally austere, held unwilling compassion. Jesse heard it, and forced himself not to shudder.

“I’ll stand.”

“This is very difficult,” Eberhart said, “but I think you already see our position.

It’s not one any of us would have chosen, but it’s what we have. This hospital operates at a staggering deficit. Most patients cannot begin to cover the costs of modern technological health care. State and federal governments are both strapped with enormous debt. Without insurance companies and the private philanthropical support of a few rich families, we would not be able to open our doors to anyone at all. If we lose our insurance rating we—”

“I’m out on my ass,” Jesse said. “Right?”

Eberhart looked out the window. It was snowing. Once Jesse, driving through Oceanview Security Enclave to pick up a date, had seen Eberhart building a snowman with two small children, probably his grandchildren. Even rolling lopsided globes of cold, Eberhart had had dignity.

“Yes, Doctor. I’m sorry. As I understand it, the facts of your case are not in legal dispute. Your residency here is terminated.”

“Thank you,” Jesse said, an odd formality suddenly replacing his crudeness.

“For everything.”

Eberhart neither answered nor turned around. His shoulders, framed in the grey window, slumped forward. He might, Jesse thought, have had a sudden advanced case of osteoporosis. For which, of course, he would be fully insured.

# # #

He packed the computer last, fitting each piece carefully into its original packing.

Maybe that would raise the price that Second Thoughts was willing to give him: Look, almost new, still in the original box. At the last minute he decided to keep the playing pieces for go, shoving them into the suitcase with his clothes and medical equipment. Only this suitcase would go with him.

When the packing was done, he walked up two flights and rang Anne’s bell. Her rotation ended a half hour ago. Maybe she wouldn’t be asleep yet.

She answered the door in a loose blue robe, toothbrush in hand. “Jesse, hi, I’m afraid I’m really beat—”

He no longer believed in indirection. “Would you have dinner with me tomorrow night?”

“Oh, I’m sorry, I can’t,” Anne said. She shifted her weight so one bare foot stood on top of the other, a gesture so childish it had to be embarrassment. Her toenails were shiny and smooth.

“After your next rotation?” Jesse said. He didn’t smile.

“I don’t know when I—”

“The one after that?”

Anne was silent. She looked down at her toothbrush. A thin pristine line of toothpaste snaked over the bristles.

“Okay,” Jesse said, without expression. “I just wanted to be sure.”

“Jesse—” Anne called after him, but he didn’t turn around. He could already tell from her voice that she didn’t really have anything more to say. If he had turned it would have been only for the sake of a last look at her toes, polished and shiny as go stones, and there really didn’t seem to be any point in looking.

# # #

He moved into a cheap hotel on Boylston Street, into a room the size of a supply closet with triple locks on the door and bars on the window, where his money would go far. Every morning he took the subway to the Copley Square library, rented a computer cubicle, and wrote letters to hospitals across the country. He also answered classified ads in the New England Journal of Medicine, those that offered practice out-of-country where a license was not crucial, or low-paying medical research positions not too many people might want, or supervised assistantships. In the afternoons he walked the grubby streets of Dorchester, looking for Kenny. The lawyer representing Mr. and Mrs. Steven Gocek, parents of the dead Rosamund, would give him no addresses. Neither would his own lawyer, he of the collapsing books and desperate clientele, in whom Jesse had already lost all faith.

He never saw Kenny on the cold streets.

The last week of March, an unseasonable warm wind blew from the south, and kept up. Crocuses and daffodils pushed up between the sagging buildings.

Children appeared, chasing each other across the garbage-laden streets, crying raucously. Rejections came from hospitals, employers. Jesse had still not told his parents what had happened. Twice in April he picked up a public phone, and twice he saw again the plastic ducks marching across the artificial lawn, and something inside him slammed shut so hard not even the phone number could escape.

# # #

One sunny day in May he walked in the Public Garden. The city still maintained it fairly well; foreign tourist traffic made it profitable. Jesse counted the number of well-dressed foreigners versus the number of ragged street Bostonians. The ratio equaled the survival rate for uninsured diabetics.

“Hey, mister, help me! Please!”

A terrified boy, ten or eleven, grabbed Jesse’s hand and pointed. At the bottom of a grassy knoll an elderly man lay crumpled on the ground, his face twisted.

“My Grandpa! He just grabbed his chest and fell down! Do something!

Please!”

Jesse could smell the boy’s fear, a stink like rich loam. He walked over to the old man. Breathing stopped, no pulse, color still pink…

No.

This man was an uninsured. Like Kenny, like Steven Gocek. Like Rosamund.

“Grandpa!” the child wailed. “Grandpa!”

Jesse knelt. He started mouth-to-mouth. The old man smelled of sweat, of fish, of old flesh. No blood moved through the body. “Breathe, dammit, breathe,” Jesse heard someone say, and then realized it was him. ” Breathe, you old fart, you uninsured deadbeat, you stinking ingrate, breathe—”

The old man breathed.

He sent the boy for more adults. The child took off at a dead run, returning twenty minutes later with uncles, father, cousins, aunts, most of whom spoke some language Jesse couldn’t identify. In that twenty minutes none of the well-dressed tourists in the Garden approached Jesse, standing guard beside the old man, who breathed carefully and moaned softly, stretched full-length on the grass. The tourists glanced at him and then away, their faces tightening.

The tribe of family carried the old man away on a homemade stretcher. Jesse put his hand on the arm of one of the young men. “Insurance? Hospital?”

The man spat onto the grass.

Jesse walked beside the stretcher, monitoring the old man until he was in his own bed. He told the child what to do for him, since no one else seemed to understand.

Later that day he went back, carrying his medical bag, and gave them the last of his hospital supply of nitroglycerin. The oldest woman, who had been too busy issuing orders about the stretcher to pay Jesse any attention before, stopped dead and jabbered in her own tongue.

“You a doctor?” the child translated. The tip of his ear, Jesse noticed, was missing. Congenital? Accident? Ritual mutilation? The ear had healed clean.

“Yeah,” Jesse said. “A doctor.”

The old woman chattered some more and disappeared behind a door. Jesse gazed at the walls. There were no deathbed photos. As he was leaving, the woman returned with ten incredibly dirty dollar bills.

“Doctor,” she said, her accent harsh, and when she smiled Jesse saw that all her top teeth and most of her bottom ones were missing, the gum swollen with what might have been early signs of scurvy.

“Doctor,” she said again.

# # #

He moved out of the hotel just as the last of his money ran out. The old man’s wife, Androula Malakasses, found him a room in somebody else’s rambling, dilapidated boardinghouse. The house was noisy at all hours, but the room was clean and large. Androula’s cousin brought home an old, multi-positional dentist chair, probably stolen, and Jesse used that for both examining and operating table.

Medical substances—antibiotics, chemotherapy, IV drugs— which he had thought of as the hardest need to fill outside of controlled channels, turned out to be the easiest. On reflection, he realized this shouldn’t have surprised him.

In July he delivered his first breech birth, a primapara whose labor was so long and painful and bloody he thought at one point he’d lose both mother and baby. He lost neither, although the new mother cursed him in Spanish and spit at him. She was too weak for the saliva to go far. Holding the warm-assed, nine-pound baby boy, Jesse had heard a camera click. He cursed too, but feebly; the sharp thrill of pleasure that pierced from throat to bowels was too strong.

In August he lost three patients in a row, all to conditions that would have needed elaborate, costly equipment and procedures: renal failure, aortic aneurysm, aneurism, narcotic overdose. He went to all three funerals. At each one the family and friends cleared a little space for him, in which he stood surrounded by respect and resentment. When a knife fight broke out at the funeral of the aneurysm, the family hustled Jesse away from the danger, but not so far away that he couldn’t treat the loser.

In September a Chinese family, recent immigrants, moved into Androula’s sprawling boarding house. The woman wept all day. The man roamed Boston, looking for work. There was a grandfather who spoke a little English, having learned it in Peking during the brief period of American industrial expansion into the Pacific Rim before the Chinese government convulsed and the American economy collapsed. The grandfather played go. On evenings when no one wanted Jesse, he sat with Lin Shujen and moved the polished white and black stones over the grid, seeking to enclose empty spaces without losing any pieces. Mr. Lin took a long time to consider each move.

In October, a week before Jesse’s trial, his mother died. Jesse’s father sent him money to fly home for the funeral, the first money Jesse had accepted from his family since he’d finally told them he had left the hospital. After the funeral Jesse sat in the living room of his father’s Florida house and listened to the elderly mourners recall their youths in the vanished prosperity of the 1950’s and ‘60’s.

“Plenty of jobs then for people who’re willing to work.”

“Still plenty of jobs. Just nobody’s willing any more.”

“Want everything handed to them. If you ask me, this collapse’ll prove to be a good thing in the long run. Weed out the weaklings and the lazy.”

“It was the sixties we got off on the wrong track, with Lyndon Johnson and all the welfare programs—”

They didn’t look at Jesse. He had no idea what his father had said to them about him.

Back in Boston, stinking under Indian summer heat, people thronged his room.

Fractures, cancers, allergies, pregnancies, punctures, deficiencies, imbalances. They were resentful that he’d gone away for five days. He should be here; they needed him. He was the doctor.

# # #

The first day of his trial, Jesse saw Kenny standing on the courthouse steps.

Kenny wore a cheap blue suit with loafers and white socks. Jesse stood very still, then walked over to the other man. Kenny tensed.

“I’m not going to hit you,” Jesse said.

Kenny watched him, chin lowered, slight body balanced on the balls of his feet.

A fighter’s stance.

“I want to ask something,” Jesse said. “It won’t affect the trial. I just want to know. Why’d you do it? Why did they? I know the little girl’s true genescan showed 98% risk of leukemia death within three years, but even so—how could you?”

Kenny scrutinized him carefully. Jesse saw that Kenny thought Jesse might be wired. Even before Kenny answered, Jesse knew what he’d hear. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, man.”

“You couldn’t get inside the system. Any of you. So you brought me out. If Mohammed won’t go to the mountain—”

“You don’t make no sense,” Kenny said.

“Was it worth it? To you? To them? Was it?”

Kenny walked away, up the courthouse steps. At the top waited the Goceks, who were suing Jesse for $2,000,000 he didn’t have and wasn’t insured for, and that they knew damn well they wouldn’t collect. On the wall of their house, wherever it was, probably hung Rosamund’s deathbed picture, a little girl with a plain, sallow face and beautiful hair.

Jesse saw his lawyer trudge up the courthouse steps, carrying his briefcase.

Another lawyer, with an equally shabby briefcase, climbed in parallel several feet away. Between the two men the courthouse steps made a white empty space.

Jesse climbed, too, hoping to hell this wouldn’t take too long. He had an infected compound femoral fracture, a birth with potential erythroblastosis fetalis, and an elderly phlebitis, all waiting. He was especially concerned about the infected fracture, which needed careful monitoring because the man’s genescan showed a tendency towards weak T-cell production. The guy was a day laborer, foul-mouthed and ignorant and brave, with a wife and two kids. He’d broken his leg working illegal construction. Jesse was determined to give him at least a fighting chance.

End

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