I was in bed. It wasn’t my bed. It smelled funny. Like plastic.
I opened my eyes. A fluorescent room. Sterile. I tried to turn my head, but a blast of pain stopped me and I gasped.
“Why, hello there, you. Take it easy, okay? Good to see your eyes open. Just take it easy.”
A vampire. It was a vampire woman talking to me. That’s what I saw. My head throbbed and my vision went blurry for a moment, but I definitely wasn’t imagining the vampire. Unless she wasn’t there. Maybe I was dreaming? If I was dreaming, why did my head hurt so bad?
“Hurts wicked bad,” I said.
“Okay, honey, just take it easy,” the vampire woman said.
The fluorescent lights flickered and went out. The vampire looked up anxiously. The lights came right back on. She turned and walked away.
From behind she looked like a nurse.
I craned my neck and looked around. I was in a hospital bed, in a room with a bunch of other beds, all of them occupied. I was in a paper gown. The nurse was in a vampire costume.
“Halloween,” I said.
“Tomorrow, honey,” the nurse said over her shoulder. “You won’t be going trick-or-treating this year.” She laughed. She thought that was hysterical, the vampire nurse did.
There was an IV in my left arm and monitor leads on my chest. Something covered the top of my head. I lifted my right arm, felt it. Bandages. A big wad of ACE bandages, like a character in a Saturday morning cartoon who’d got clocked on the noggin.
“Wicked bad,” I said again.
“That’s the spirit, honey,” said the nurse.
I tried to sit up. Jesus, but it was hard. “Where am I?”
“Still in the emergency room.”
San Francisco General Hospital. I recognized the grimy windows, the rickety old operable beds. The walls were absolutely crawling with Halloween decorations. It was... What was it?
“Unseemly,” I said.
“Just take it easy, honey.”
“Wha happen?”
“You took a blow to the head.”
Man, did it hurt. And I was so woozy. I wondered if they’d given me a sedative or something. I tried to ask, but it came out gibberish, and the nurse just said again, in that deathly patronizing way they have, that I should take it easy.
I took a moment and concentrated. I looked the nurse in the eye, and spoke slowly. “How long was I out?”
“Please, honey, you don’t need to worry about—”
“I’m an MD. What’s my Glasgow Coma Scale?”
The vampire nurse sighed and trundled over to a computer. “Well, Doctor. You were unresponsive to stimuli for an hour, and the paramedics scored you a GCS of three. When you came to, you were in a minimally conscious state at a GCS of ten, and graduated up to eleven—but then you became combative right after the CT scan, and had to be restrained and sedated.”
So I was gorked out on sedatives. I could shake that off. A head injury was a different story.
The nurse clicked another page in my electronic medical chart. “Says here that you were responding to verbal stimuli sporadically, mostly in Russian.”
“Polish. What’d the CT show?”
“I don’t know. You can ask the radiologist later, if you’d like.”
“What time is it?”
“Four.”
“In the morning?”
“Yes, honey, in the morning.”
“How long have I been here?”
The nurse checked the chart.
“Four and a half hours. Now, will you please take it easy? Don’t tax yourself...”
“How come you have lights? Is the power back up? What’s going on with the quake...?”
The lights flickered again—then went out. The darkness was total for a few seconds, long enough for somebody at the far end of the crowded ward to start screaming about another earthquake, and then the power came back on.
“Darn generator,” the vampire nurse muttered.
A generator. I remembered another detail from my disaster protocol training: San Francisco General Hospital has its own emergency power plant.
The Office of Chief Medical Examiner does, too.
“I have to get out of here,” I announced. I forced myself up. The pain got worse, but it was only pain. The room wasn’t spinning. I wasn’t nauseated. My ears weren’t ringing.
“Whoa, hold it, there.”
“Take out this IV. I have to go.”
“No way. You have a head injury—”
“I’m a first responder. And I’m fine to ambulate out of here, so pull this IV line right now.”
“Need help?” a man’s voice said from somewhere.
“No, Doctor, I’ve got it,” said the vampire nurse.
“Doctor—!” I yelled. “Are you the attending?”
A man appeared from around the flimsy privacy curtain between my bed and the next one. He wasn’t in costume—not unless ugly-ass glasses and a blond weasel of a haircut counts as a costume.
“I’m the chief resident.”
“Good enough. I’m Dr. Teska, Deputy Chief Medical Examiner, and I need to get out of here. I have mandated disaster duties at the morgue, and we’re short-staffed on a good day. Get this IV out of my arm.”
“You don’t remember me?” the resident said.
“No.”
“I stitched up your head.”
“Oh...! Oh, right. That was you.” I put my hand up to my bandage, palpated it. “I couldn’t see you all that well.”
That was a lie. The resident wasn’t fooled, but didn’t want to call me on it.
“You’ve sustained a traumatic brain injury, Dr. Teska. We’ve had a busy night and we’re short on trauma beds, but we’ve got you on the list. You need to remain under observation for at least the rest of today and maybe one more overnight.”
“No way. Nope. What kind of TBI? Show me the scans.”
“The scans?”
“You did CT imaging. Show it to me.”
“You’re a pathologist, right?”
“I interpret radiology every single day, Doctor, just like you do. You want me to believe I’ve got a brain injury? Prove it.”
The young doctor with the weasel hair tried to stare me down. I outlasted him. He shrugged, went to the computer, and conjured a bunch of black-and-white blobs onto the monitor.
“Okay. Come on over and we’ll take a look.”
I swung my legs over the side of the bed. The pain in my head came back, but I ignored it. I couldn’t get my feet on the floor, though—the IV line in my arm and the monitor leads on my chest got all tangled up.
“Elissa,” the doctor said to the nurse, “would you help her, please.”
Oh, you crafty bastard, I thought. It was a trap. He was assessing my neurological status.
“No, thank you,” I said to Elissa the vampire nurse. “I’m fine on my own.” I calmly arranged the tubes and wires, and grabbed hold of the IV stand to roll it with me.
I hobbled four steps. My head threatened to explode. I pretended not to feel it. I wasn’t dizzy or weak in the knees. The trouble was only in my head. There was a whole crew of little tiny construction workers crammed in there. They were all built like the muscly young man at the SoMa Centre gate, and they were all swinging sledgehammers against the inside of the left side of my skull, except for the pair with the jackhammers and the one little fucker who I swear to God was wiring up a dynamite charge.
I made it to the computer scanner and studied it with what I hoped was a suitably thoughtful and professional mien. I clicked over the CT images of my very own skull and brain.
“This all looks normal,” I said, and pointed with the computer mouse to one spot with a thick gray band over the thin white bone. “A little soft tissue swelling on the scalp here.” I reached up and touched the spot under the bandage. “So it’s a scalp laceration with sub-Q edema. No big deal.”
“Oh, come on.” The chief resident was losing patience. “Not all TBIs present with intracerebral hemorrhage. You walk out of here, you could develop a brain bleed. They never taught you that in autopsy school?” He stuck his ugly glasses closer to my face and spoke very slowly. “Brain bleed bad. Right?”
I had several violently unkind thoughts. I buried them, and smiled as sweetly as the pain in my head allowed. “Watch,” I said. I walked toe-to-heel, balancing in a steady line, back to the bed. I sat on it and turned to nurse Elissa. I held out both my hands, fingers stretched wide. “Test my motor strength,” I told her. “I dare you.”
The nurse balked and looked to the doctor.
“Hey, lookit this...!” I stuck my tongue way out. “Intact cranial nerves!”
The ER doctor scowled.
“What’s the story with the two other casualties that came in just before me?” I said.
“What do you mean?”
“Are they expected to survive.”
The ER resident was taken aback. “Yes.”
“Good—that’s two fewer cases for us to handle at the morgue. We already have plenty. Am I getting through to you, Doctor? I need to get over to the OCME and get to work, and I’ll sign out against medical advice if I have to. I don’t give a damn.”
The doctor came to the bed and pointed a penlight in my eyes, told me to squeeze his fingers with both hands, and all that. Garden-variety neurological assessment. Apparently I passed. He returned to the computer, typed something, and said, “Elissa, we need this bed. Would you please get this woman out of my emergency room?” Across the room, I heard a printer whine.
The nurse gave me one last look up and down, more in sorrow than in anger, and went off in the direction of the printer.
I looked around for my personal belongings. The little men in my skull were still hammering away, but I was getting used to them.
I needed my cell phone flashlight to make it safely across the carriageway circle in the hospital courtyard. I thought sunrise should be due around 7:30, but there was no hint of it. The city felt like it was hunkering down, waiting out the stifling Diablo winds that still hadn’t let up.
The cab stand was empty. I pulled out my phone to get an Uber. It took a few seconds of puzzled peering at the thing before I remembered it was good for nothing without signal or Wi-Fi or some other tether to the vast ocean of data that the world outside the disaster area floated across.
A man in a rent-a-cop jacket stood next to a dinky white car with a security logo. His hands were buried in his pockets and he wore a black watch cap. I hobbled over to him. We were the only souls around.
I showed him my badge, gave him my spiel about being a first responder. “We’re in a state of emergency. I need you to drive me to the medical examiner’s office down at One Newhall.”
The security guard thought about it. On the one hand, we both knew he didn’t need to do one damn thing for me, badge or no. On the other hand, it was cold out and he was bored as shit.
“Okay,” he said, finally, and climbed into the dinky car.
It was a scary drive. The roads were still ink black and the security guard took it slow. I spotted the OCME from a mile away, lit up like a ship in a dark sea. It was only when we’d pulled right up in front that it occurred to me I had another problem to solve.
“Hey,” I said to the security guard. “I’ll give you ten bucks for that hat.”
He put the car in park and looked at me, amused. His eyes went to the bandages on my head. No fool, this guy.
“Let me see that badge of yours again,” he said. I held it out. He admired it. “Gold shield. That means you’re brass, huh? Management?”
“I’m the deputy chief.”
“Okay, then,” he said. “Twenty bucks.”
Bałwan. I pocketed the badge and opened my wallet. The security guard smiled.
I went straight to Dr. Howe’s office and was relieved to find him there, presiding over the usual clutter of paperwork and stray bits of old evidence spread across his huge oak desk.
“Where have you been?” he barked.
I didn’t even need to lie. “I was at the General.”
He grunted. “What’s going on over there?”
“Two guys they pulled out of the rubble of the King Street viaduct collapse are doing okay, expected to live.”
“That’s good. We’ve got ten other bodies out of there to deal with, right now—but there are multiple eight-oh-one calls all across the city, and we’re going to have a lot more coming. We’ve got radio comms back, at least. Dr. Nguyen is here, but Yarina can’t...”
Howe’s eyes drifted north of mine. “Why are you wearing that hat?”
“It’s cold in here,” I said.
Again Howe grunted. “The damn HVAC. It’s still wonky, running hot and cold, never quite right.”
“It’s probably the generator power supply. Messes with the computer controls.”
“I don’t care what the reason is. This is not a good time for a climate-control malfunction in the morgue!”
Dr. Howe debriefed me on the logistical nightmares that had followed the earthquake. Most of the OCME’s staff lived outside San Francisco and couldn’t get into the city. The Bay Bridge was shut down for evaluation. The BART subway, too. The freeways had jammed up and road rage had devolved into gunplay so fast that CHP had decided to close most on-ramps. Some drivers had tried to run around the roadblocks and nearly got themselves shot.
“The 2578s are reporting that it’s not quite martial law yet, but it’s close,” the chief said. “Phones are still mostly down, but texting is starting to work. I got word to UCSF that they should send us some medical students to work as emergency morgue techs. A couple are gowning up now.”
Howe looked tired and anxious. I didn’t like it. Lord knows I have issues with that man. He’s a managerial bully and a Machiavellian political operative. But he’s also a fine doctor and a personally decent human being; most of the time, at least.
I crossed the room to his desk and surprised the hell out of the old goat by chucking him on the shoulder.
“Then what are we waiting for, Chief?” I said.
Luckily I had the women’s locker room to myself when I doffed my twenty dollar hat and pulled a surgical cap over the bandages. The headache was still there, and still bad. I kept worrying whether that ER resident was right. The pain could be a sign of a delayed subdural hemorrhage growing slowly into a hematoma. If that’s what was going on, the blood could keep pressing my brain against my skull until I blacked out and died. I pictured myself falling over, right on top of whatever corpse I was cutting into.
Saves on transport, anyhow.
Ted Nguyen and I had to do five fatalities each from the viaduct collapse. Two others were ordinary cases, a suicide and a maybe-overdose, left over from the regular prequake caseload. Dr. Howe himself suited up in PPEs to cut those cases, clearing the way for me and Ted to do the more important quake-related ones—the ones the media and the politicians would be asking about. I felt for the poor med student Dr. Howe picked to assist him, but was delighted to find that the other student was Patty Alvarez, the quick-witted one with the excellent hair.
Howe finished fast and headed out to visit the viaduct disaster area, which he hadn’t yet seen. Alvarez and I started on the disaster victims. Our first two were men who had died of overwhelming blunt trauma, with evisceration of brain material and disarticulation of limbs. The third, a woman, was less horrible, but no less dead. There was concrete dust in her hair, and bits of it embedded in her scalp. She’d suffered a single blow to the head. It had cracked her skull and caused a giant subdural hemorrhage. Pulling off that woman’s sawn-off skullcap and seeing the fatal pool of blood inside her head made my headache much worse, and I had to take a break. I lied to Alvarez and said I was probably just dehydrated. I lied and said I’d be fine in a minute.
We decided to conjure up a lunch break around noon. In the locker room, I managed to slip the watch cap back over my bandages without Alvarez noticing. Howe returned from his visit to the disaster scene and found the four of us, doctors and students, in the Ops Shop, ravenously snarfing old pizza out of the communal fridge. The chief was glad that we’d decided to take a break. Glad, he told us, because we were going to have to pace ourselves. More corpses were coming.
“The viaduct collapsed onto a homeless encampment,” he said, waving off the offer of a cold slice. “PD thinks there were between thirty and fifty people under there last night. They’re shoring up the structure so they can continue working, but for now it’s still being designated a rescue, not a recovery.”
“What’s that mean?” Patty Alvarez asked.
“Rescue is when the fire department has made the determination there may still be living people trapped under there. Recovery phase is when everybody’s dead.”
“Oh,” said Alvarez, and looked despondent.
Dr. Howe smiled gently. “That’s a valid question, and it relates to our role going forward. The viaduct collapse—the homeless camp—seems to be the only multiple-fatality scene. This was a serious quake, but it’s not the Big One.”
“The Big One,” the other medical student repeated, mostly to himself. I remembered his saying he was from the Carolinas somewhere.
“How about the power grid and stuff?” Ted wanted to know.
“Retail electrical and gas service are still down, but traffic signals are back, so getting around by car is...well, less-impossible. Still no BART trains. Freeway access is limited, especially now that they’ve got crews out there assessing the safety of...”
“Hello...?” said someone from the hallway behind the Ops Shop.
“In here!” shouted Howe.
Denis Monaghan appeared. Howe glared his most ferocious glare.
“Right, so,” said Monaghan, and started rocking back and forth on his feet. He was dressed in overalls and carried a bright orange toolbox. I offered him a slice of pizza. He demurred.
“Your damned HVAC is fubar again,” said Dr. Howe, quietly.
“Ah,” said Monaghan. “And ye must be very busy today?”
“You could say that.”
“I’ll get right on it, then.”
“You do that.”
“Right. I’ll...just get me things, and start with the main unit...”
He looked from one to the other of us, for further instructions, or encouragement, or something. Howe wasn’t offering any, that was for sure.
“Thank you for coming out here, under the circumstances, Denis,” I offered. “It can’t have been easy driving in.”
Monaghan smiled gratefully and said, “Oh, it wasn’t so bad. I was on a job nearby, and I don’t fancy going home until they’ve got the lights sorted.”
He nodded a nervous goodbye to Dr. Howe, and left. Howe went back to looking exhausted and worried. I realized his bad attitude had been an act to drive the contractor out of the room as quick as he could. “A lot more cases are coming in,” he said, looking at each of us to assess how we would handle that news.
“From the viaduct?” I said.
He nodded. “When I left, they were pulling bodies out one after another. They haven’t even managed to get tents down there, so they’re laying them out in the sun till they can get them transported. It’s going to be all hands on deck around here. We’ll be working through the weekend, and I want you to be prepared for what you’re going to see—blunt trauma, evisceration, disarticulation, and accelerated decomposition from the environmental exposure.”
Ted Nguyen stretched his arms and cracked his knuckles. “Okay. We’d better get back to it, then.”
I tried again to text Anup and give him that news. I’d made a bunch of attempts, but they all bounced back. This time, though, it went through. I learned that he’d gone home to his own place and was bunkering there. His mother, God bless her, had driven all the way up from Cupertino to bring him food.
Yr folks ok? I texted.
Yes no damage
Thx 4 watching Bea last night, I’ll be back b4 her walk 2nite
I brought her 2 my place, she here now
Oh gr8 thx!!
You come here get dog after work pls
Will do. Luv u
Luv u 2
Getting through to Anup made it easier for me to gown up again and go back into the autopsy suite. That was another item I recalled from my emergency protocol training as deputy chief: a supportive home environment contributes mightily to a first responder’s resilience in a disaster’s aftermath.
Two more medical students had arrived to help out as technicians, so the afternoon autopsies went faster than the morning ones. Howe wasn’t exaggerating—the bodies were mutilated and decomposing, and got more so as the day wore on. To make matters worse, the air-conditioning had gone off again.
Denis Monaghan let himself into the morgue, toolbox and stepladder at the ready. “Sorry for the interruption, there,” he said. “I had to shut down the main unit before I can diagnose this bloody beast again.” He erected the ladder and reached up to pop open the same ceiling panel where he’d been working the day before.
“Don’t say ‘bloody’ in a morgue, Denis,” I said. “It’s bad luck.”
He blanched, frozen, with his arm in the air. “Christ... I didn’t—”
“She’s pulling your leg,” Ted said.
“Oh, Christ,” Monaghan said again. I felt kind of bad. Then he stepped down off the ladder with one leg to steady himself, and he laughed until he turned pink.
“Fierce funny, that is,” he said.
“Don’t encourage her,” Sunshine Ted snapped right back at him, which only made Monaghan laugh harder. The four medical students did, too—one after another, like they were wired in series. Then I started up myself. Soon everybody but Nguyen was laughing.
It felt good.
But it didn’t last long. We got back to work, documenting as best we could the result of unmeasured tons of elevated roadway crashing down on unsheltered human beings. Monaghan got the HVAC working again. Nguyen finished an autopsy and struggled to fit the body on its gurney into the cold storage room.
“Almost full in there,” he said, wheeling out his last case of the day.
Monaghan popped his head back down when he heard that. “You ever have that many, ah, deceased in there all at once?” he asked. I told him no, we definitely had not. “We’d better make sure the system can handle the load, then. No fooling with the temperature in that space, right?”
“No fooling,” I agreed.
Monaghan came down off the ladder, grabbed his toolbox, and stopped in front of the cooler’s stainless-steel door. He paused nervously, then grabbed the heavy handle, pulled it, and went in. After five minutes the door reopened and he came back out, wearing an expression of relief and waving an electronic instrument.
“Operating within expected parameters.”
“Good,” I said. I had just finished a case, and pushed the loaded gurney toward the cooler. The gurney didn’t want to cooperate—they’re damned heavy, and this one had developed a wonky wheel, like a beat-up shopping cart.
“Hang on, now,” said Monaghan, and bent to look at the wheel. He opened his toolbox, pulled out a couple of things, tinkered with the gurney, and, presto, fixed it. I thanked him.
“Dr. Teska,” he said, “I meant what I said the other day. I admire what you are doing here. It’s a hard task, and I imagine a thankless one—except to the families. To the families, what you’re doing must mean everything.”
I didn’t have the heart to break it to him that, so far, several of our disaster victims had turned out to be John Does and Jane Does. People who are reduced by circumstance to living under a bridge sometimes have family who are worried about them—but often, in my experience, they do not.
I told Denis I appreciated the sentiment. And I meant it, too.
Ted finished his last autopsy at five thirty. I finished mine at six—a twelve-hour day on the heels of a night in the hospital, unconscious and head-injured, fueled only by stale cold pizza. Plus I had a transportation problem—my BMW was still over by the viaduct collapse site, where I’d parked it before getting clonked on the head. I asked one of the day-shift 2578s if he would give me a lift to retrieve it. It was about time for the shift change, so I figured he’d be on his way home, too.
“Home?” he scoffed. “I’m not going home. We’re implementing a two-hour shift overlap, subject to extension.”
I’m not a taxi service, and you should be staying here till we’ve cleared all the quake cases, Doctor, his body language and tone chided. Denis Monaghan witnessed the exchange.
“Where d’you need to go, Jessie?” he asked. I told him. “Ah, that’s no problem at all. I’d be happy to take you.”
I told him I was grateful, and followed him out to the parking lot. Our building was still the only one in the immediate vicinity that seemed to have power. Monaghan put his toolbox and ladder in the bed of a shiny new pickup truck, opened the passenger door, and closed it behind me after I stepped up. Old World chivalry.
“Thanks again,” I said, when he climbed in.
“Don’t mention it a bit.” He put the truck carefully onto the street. “It’s a pleasure to have your company.” He looked over at me and smiled in a suitably charming way.
Monaghan wore a Claddagh ring. It was an unusual one, bigger than most, the hands and heart and crown more expressive than the cheap, two-dimensional silver Claddaghs that every Irish kid in my hometown seemed to get around their fourteenth birthday. I commented on it. Monaghan was surprised that I knew what it was.
“I’m from Boston,” I said.
“That explains it,” he replied.
Yes, I know what the Claddagh ring is, and what it signifies. A pair of hands holding a heart, the heart wearing a crown—friendship, love, and loyalty. If the heart faces inward, then your heart is taken. If the heart faces out, then your heart is open. The heart on Monaghan’s Claddagh ring faced out. That made me feel better about his flirting with me. He wasn’t married, not a creep. He seemed, in fact, a perfectly decent man. He was handsome, fit, charming, and funny in a bone-dry way. His accent was sexy as hell. His offer to chauffeur me to my Beemer was generous, and he wasn’t giving me any bad vibes while I was alone with him, in close quarters, in his vehicle. He was a careful driver. Doing what I do for a living, I appreciate careful drivers.
Monaghan’s Claddagh ring made me think about my own fingers. No rings at all, what with gloves always going on and off and on again. Besides, I had no need of rings. I wasn’t married, and Anup hadn’t offered me a diamond.
Denis Monaghan seemed to read my mind. “Are you hungry?” he said. “I know a good place near here. My treat.”
“They’ll be closed.”
“Never know until you try.”
I declined, and he shrugged affably.
Maybe some other time, I didn’t say. But I nearly did.
Monaghan gave me a sly side-eye while the truck glided along, up through Dogpatch and into the Mission Bay condo zone. “You’ll want to take good care of that noggin, Jessie.”
“What—?” And my hand shot up to the wound under the watch cap, without my meaning it to. Monaghan chuckled. I said, “How’d you know...?”
“Plenty of head injuries in my line of work. I’ve caught people trying to cover up bandages before. I send them home when I do.”
“Good thing home’s where I’m going, then.”
“Amen. You know what to watch for? Warning signs that you need to go straight to the hospital...?”
“Denis,” I said, “I’m a doctor.”
“You are, you are...but I’d have to point out to you, Doctor, that all your head-injured patients are dead.” The truck stopped at one of the functional red lights across Third Street. Monaghan turned to me. His gray-sky eyes were kind, and delved into mine with true concern.
“Take care of yourself. Promise?”
“I can only promise I’ll try,” I said.
The light went green, and he turned back to the road. “I supposed that’ll have to do.”
As we got closer to the collapsed roadway, we started to see flashing emergency lights. It wasn’t the blinding riot it had been when I’d first come to the scene, fresh after the disaster, but, still, Denis knew well enough to keep away. I directed him around the back way, down Berry Street. I was relieved to see my BMW 235i was right where I’d left it.
It had a parking ticket on the windshield.
“You have got to be kidding me!” I hollered, and leaped out of the truck. Red zone. One hundred ten dollars.
I let loose a string of Polish curses that would’ve given my mamusia, were she nearby, a coronary and a half. Monaghan found all of this extremely amusing.
“Get out of here, you,” I said.
“Not till I see you started,” he said.
“Huh?”
He pointed to the Beemer. “I’m not going anywhere until I see that your engine turns over.”
I grumbled about the line between Old World chivalry and male chauvinism, and got in the Beemer. It started.
“Happy?”
Denis Monaghan smiled and saluted, and turned back to his pickup truck. Before he got in, he said, “I hope your HVAC system holds up for good, now—but I do hope too that we meet again, Jessie.”
I couldn’t help smiling back at him. “Yeah. I wouldn’t mind.”
I drove, carefully, crosstown to Anup’s apartment in the Outer Sunset. I had to take surface roads; the freeway entrances were still blockaded by police. Streetlights had come on in some places but were out in others. Under a pool of light somewhere in the Lower Haight, I saw a man heaving orange tiles out of his front yard. They’d come off his Spanish-style roof and his neighbor’s and several more, in a line, like a barnstorming plane had taken them out. Across the road, all the houses looked fine. They seemed the same vintage as the ruined ones, but their roof tiles were still in place.
A local in my neighborhood dive bar had once told me that earthquakes can be like tornadoes, devastating one side of the street and sparing the other, depending on soil composition, buried creeks, minor fault lines. The ground is not solid under your feet, she said. I thought at the time she was drunk. She may have been—but, as I was seeing, she sure wasn’t wrong.
I got to Anup’s around seven o’clock. Pragmatic Anup had bought solar-powered lanterns for his stoop, and now they were paying dividends. All the other houses on the avenue were dark, but at least I could climb his stairs without cracking my skull any worse.
Bea the beagle greeted me at the door with even more hyperactive joy than she greeted me when I came home to my own place. Anup was on the couch in the living room. I said hello. He looked through me and didn’t answer. He’d lit some candles, but the mood wasn’t romantic.
He got up and moved to the dining room and I followed. If Anup was giving me the silent treatment, I knew something was seriously wrong. He didn’t do it like most men do, out of petulance. He goes silent because he’s thinking, processing, and not ready to talk about what he’s come up with. The dining room had a lit candelabra, and a place setting for one.
“You’re not eating?” I asked.
“I did already.”
I sat down. Anup took my plate, disappeared into the kitchen, and came back with a heaping pile of curry over rice. The fragrance, before he’d even set the plate down in front of me, made my stomach growl.
I put my nose to it and let myself enjoy a couple of deep breaths. “Your mother’s?”
“Yes.” He sat down at the other end of the table.
“She’s a saint, driving all the way up here with it. The freeways are closed, you know that? I can’t imagine how long it took her—”
“They didn’t get hit that hard down on the Peninsula.”
“That’s a relief.”
“Yes.”
I dug in, and asked Anup if he wouldn’t like to have seconds or something. “I feel like I’m in a zoo, you watching me like that,” I joked.
His expression didn’t change. “I have to make sure you eat.”
“Make sure I eat? What d’you mean?”
“You don’t take care of yourself. I have to make sure you get food into you.”
I laughed it off and shoveled some more curry.
Anup didn’t laugh. He was monitoring me like a subject in a deposition. I didn’t like it.
“That’s not fair,” I said.
He shrugged again. “I think it is.”
“Oh really.”
“Really. What do you have in your fridge, right now, over at your place?”
I thought back to Mahoney Brothers #45 and the ancient nickel-handled refrigerator that came with my cable-car cottage. He was right. It was probably pretty pathetic in there. I didn’t press the point. I ate. Anup watched. When I was done, I told him I’d really like him to thank his mother profusely, on my behalf, for the excellent meal.
Still he said nothing.
My head was aching again. I hadn’t really slept the night before (traumatic unconsciousness is not sleep), and I had worked more than thirteen hours doing autopsies on five mangled people, three of them as yet unidentified. On top of that, some zealot in the city’s parking enforcement squad had continued, in the immediate wake of a motherfucking earthquake, to write tickets for red zone violations—even though I have a placard in my vehicle identifying it as belonging to the deputy chief medical examiner, on official business.
I do not have a long temper even in the best circumstances. I know this about myself. Anup knows it, too. I suspected he was picking a fight, itching for one. I could feel it coming off him, an electric current barely held in by his skin. I didn’t want to close the circuit between us.
But, in the end, I didn’t see any way to avoid it. When Anup Banerjee is determined to do something, he does it.
“Okay,” I said. “Spill it.”
“Spill it?”
“What are you so mad about?”
“You can’t guess? I’m not a dog sitter, Doctor.”
“That’s what you’re so pissed off about—? It’s one night. You don’t have to do it again.”
“You think I wanted to sit around here in the dark, wondering when you’d come?”
“You didn’t have to.”
“I did have to. Like I said, I had to make sure you fed yourself. No joke.”
“Jesus, Anup. I’m not a child!”
“You’re doing one hell of a job adulting.”
“Says the man who enjoys mommy’s home cooking.”
The stern lawyer face Anup had worn since I’d darkened his door dropped off, and he showed how much that jab stung. I shouldn’t have thrown it. Well, too damn bad.
“You know how many people are dead out there, Anup? You know what I’ve been doing since you last saw me?”
“Your big important job.”
“Damn right! You have no idea...and here you are, complaining that—”
“Why are you wearing that ridiculous hat?”
Kurwa. He had me there. I whipped off the watch cap. His eyes went wide. He rose and came over to me, hands out toward my head. I brushed him off.
“Let me see,” he said.
“Why? You don’t care.”
Anup planted himself in the chair right next to me. “That’s where you’re wrong, Jessie.” He pulled out his cell phone, turned on the light, and shined it up and down my neck, my arms. “You’ve got cuts and bruises and a bandaged head. What happened?”
I told him about the King Street off-ramp, the bodies, the aftershock. I told him about waking up in the ER. Then he began cross-examination.
“You were wearing the hat to hide your injury?”
“Anup...”
“From Dr. Howe? You were hiding a head injury from your boss? Holy shit.” He looked away from me, off in the middle distance somewhere, gazing into the gloom like he’d just seen a ghost vanish into it.
What could I tell him? That I’d been afraid Howe would kick me out of the morgue and send me home if anybody at work knew about my visit to the ER? That I was willing to risk my health to get into work in the wake of the disaster, when I was most needed there—when I was irreplaceable? Should I tell him that I was willing to risk my life to do my job?
It was the truth. The ghost he was watching in the dark middle distance was the realization of it.
Finally he turned back to me. “Why?” he said.
I was suddenly bone tired. I pushed the chair back and slumped. “I couldn’t let him send me home.”
“I don’t see why not. I really don’t.”
“You didn’t see those bodies in the rubble, either.”
“You could’ve ended up next to them in the morgue.”
“They have families, Anup! Loved ones, waiting for them.”
Anup shook his head but didn’t take his eyes from mine. “So do you.”
“Oh, very clever. Well played.”
“I’m not playing,” he shot right back. He wasn’t, either. “I don’t want to lose you. I didn’t know if you were alive or dead, and now you’re telling me I had damn good reason to worry...? I don’t want to do that again.”
Over by the door, Bea started whining. I swear, that damn dog has the worst bladder timing of anyone I’ve ever met.
“Try to imagine what I told my parents, when I finally got a phone line to them,” Anup continued, his eyes still locked on mine. “I lied to them. I had to. I don’t like lying to my parents.” He waved around the room. “There’s damage here, you know. Your place, too. I spent all day cleaning up both of them—picture frames off the walls, dishes and broken glass all over the kitchen. I found new cracks in the plaster that worry me. One of my neighbors, down on the corner, you know the one with all the garage doors? Their place has so much damage that they’re afraid to go back inside. They grabbed birth certificates, bank records, some clothes, and that’s it. It’s leaning. Their house is leaning. It’s probably going to be red-tagged and demolished, and they’re homeless now.” He pointed out the window. “Right there—three doors down the hill.”
He stood and took my dirty plate off the table. “You aren’t the only one hit by this disaster.”
I went to Bea by the door and collected her leash. She started yelping.
“Thanks for cleaning up my house and walking Bea, and thanks for the meal.”
I opened the door and went out.
Behind me, Anup said, “Jessie. Don’t expect me to take care of you. I’m not here to take care of you.”
I didn’t answer that. I closed the door and followed the dog down the steps in the dim solar lights.