WHAT HAPPENED TO OUR BABY?

THIS IS THE STORY of how I met Rachel.

I was working at one of the hospitals downtown at the time. They needed extras for training and disaster drills and the like. My job was to be a victim.

On my first day, a nurse made me get into a gown and lie on a bed in the hall — all the rooms were full, she said — and then the doctor in charge of the exercise came to see me. He was drinking coffee from a Starbucks mug.

“When the interns come, I want you to hold yourself here,” he said, pointing to a spot on my stomach. “Make a lot of noise whenever anyone touches it.”

“What’s wrong with me?” I asked.

“Oh, it could be any number of things,” he said.

“How about cancer?” I said. “Everybody gets cancer.”

“If you like.”

“What exactly are the symptoms?” I asked.

“It doesn’t really matter,” he said, watching a passing nurse and sipping from his mug.

“But how are they supposed to know what I’m dying from if I don’t even know the symptoms?” I asked.

“This isn’t that kind of exercise,” he said. “You can’t actually tell what’s wrong with someone just by feeling their stomach.”

“Then why are we doing this?” I asked.

“We’re not testing them to see if they know what’s wrong with you,” he said, looking at his watch. “We’re testing them to find out if they know the procedure.”

I WORKED AT THE HOSPITAL once or twice a week. I was always suffering from some sort of deadly condition — brain tumors, strokes, heart attacks, that kind of thing. I researched them all in the library downtown so I could perform the symptoms properly. It was like I actually was dying. I could have been.

I usually worked the same shifts as Rachel. She specialized in acting out mental disorders. She told me one day that I was one of the best patients she’d ever seen. We were lying in beds across from each other in a room on the children’s ward, which was the only floor they had space on that day. “If they gave away Oscars for this business,” she said, “you’d have my vote.” She was chewing on something that made her mouth froth, and foam was running down her chin. She’d told me earlier that it had something to do with the condition she was supposed to have, but I thought it made her look rabid.

When the doctor brought the interns in, Rachel started to shake and shudder in her bed. She spat more foam out of her mouth and down onto her breasts, rolled her eyes back so I couldn’t see anything but white.

The doctor stepped aside and waved in one of the interns, a young man with glasses and a goatee. He bent down beside Rachel and slipped his finger into her mouth. “Her airway seems to be clear,” he said to the doctor, but that was all he managed because then he was swearing as Rachel bit his finger.

“That’s why it’s best to use pens to check airways,” the doctor said as the intern clutched his hand to his chest. “Not the plastic ones, though. They can bite them in half, and then you get ink everywhere.”

The next intern took a step toward the bed but then stopped as Rachel threw back her head and let out a long scream. It was so loud I actually had to cover my ears with my hands. The interns all looked at each other, but none of them stepped any closer. Then Rachel curled up into the fetal position and began to shake. She did that for a few seconds, then unrolled her eyes and winked at me.

How could I not fall in love with her?

SOMETIMES I DID my research at the hospital. I went around the wards and watched patients in their rooms or in the hallways, wherever I could find someone who had a condition I wanted to learn about. I was in there at all hours of the day, but the nurses didn’t seem to mind. It was like I was a real patient. Some of them even commented on my acting.

“You’re not dragging your legs enough,” one of them told me when I was practicing my MS walk with some crutches I’d borrowed from a supply closet.

“Try taking off your clothes,” another one said when I was sitting in the waiting room, working on my Alzheimer’s look. “They like to take off their clothes when there are nurses around.”

Even some of the patients gave me advice. A man who’d lost his legs in some sort of industrial press accident taught me how to use a wheelchair like I’d been in it for years. We spent the entire night racing up and down one of the halls, until I crushed the air hose of a woman on oxygen who’d come out of her room to complain about the noise. The nurses wouldn’t let me back onto that floor for a week, and when I came back, the man in the wheelchair was gone.

Once, the nurses left a dead man on a bed in the intensive care hallway because they were too busy to take him down to the morgue. Someone was having a heart attack or something like that in the room at the end of the hall, so they were all in there. I lay down on an empty bed across from the dead man and studied him for a while, then tried to make myself look like him. He’d been left with his eyes open, so I stared at the ceiling for as long as I could without blinking, tried not to move at all. I only breathed when I absolutely had to. I could actually feel my heartbeat slow down. I wondered if this was what meditation was like.

One of the nurses came out of the room at the end of the hall and rolled the dead man and his bed into the elevator. I stayed where I was, not moving. A few minutes later, another nurse came out of the room and started pushing my bed toward the elevator. She screamed and jumped away from the bed when I sat up.

“Did I have you fooled?” I asked.

“I thought you were that dead guy,” she said.

“Thank you,” I said.

SOMETIMES, WHEN RACHEL and I were waiting for our shift to start, we’d get coffees from the cafeteria and wander around the hospital. We liked to make up stories about what was wrong with the people in the rooms we passed.

“Flesh-eating disease,” I said of a man whose entire body was covered in bandages. “The nurses are afraid to touch him.”

“Cancer,” Rachel said when we went past a room with a woman on a lung machine. “But she never smoked a cigarette in her life.”

“Attempted suicide,” I said of a young woman who sat in a wheelchair by a window, drooling. “She took all the pills in her apartment when her boyfriend left.”

“Self-inflicted gunshot,” Rachel said of the same woman. “There was no boyfriend.”

Rachel liked the intensive care ward the best. This is where they kept all the critically injured people, and we were only allowed in there during visiting hours. Most of the people in here were young, and many of them were dying from wounds they’d sustained in accidents and that sort of thing. They had a whole other wing for people who were dying of old age or disease.

“Imagine,” Rachel said as we walked through here one day, “the lives of all these people are still going on.”

I looked into a room at a man who appeared to be in a coma. He’d been asleep for as long as I’d worked at the hospital, and there were tubes going into both his arms. “I don’t know about that,” I said.

“I don’t mean in here,” Rachel said. “I mean outside. All these people have lives waiting for them out there. They have family, jobs, houses, cars, money, everything you can think of, just waiting for these people to get better and come back.”

“But some of them aren’t going to get better,” I pointed out.

“Imagine if you could take their place,” she said. “Just step into their lives and take over from them.”

“I think there are laws against that sort of thing,” I said.

“You could be anybody you wanted to be.”

ON ONE OF OUR WALKS, Rachel and I found ourselves in the part of the hospital where they keep the babies. There was a room full of them on the other side of a glass wall, each one in its little incubator. Nurses wandered around the room, making sure they were all right. The babies closest to the glass waved their arms and feet at us.

“It’s like we’re their parents or something,” Rachel said.

“But we’re not,” I pointed out.

“If it wasn’t for the nurses, we could just probably take them and go, and they’d never know the difference.”

“There are easier ways of getting children,” I said.

“Are there?”

We watched as a nurse lifted one of the babies from its incubator and took it into a back room. There was a woman in a bathrobe sitting in a wheelchair back there, and before the door closed, we saw her hold out her arms for the baby.

“What do you think we’d be like if we were the parents of some of these kids?” Rachel asked.

“What do you mean?” I said.

She pointed at the nearest baby, a dark-haired thing with a face that looked as if it had been pushed down with sandpaper. “Who would we be if we were this kid’s parents?”

I looked at the baby for a moment. “I’d be a lawyer,” I finally said. “Corporate. You’d be …”

“An accountant,” she said. “We’d have a big condo downtown.”

“And two cars,” I said. “New ones.”

“And a cottage on a lake somewhere,” she said.

“And we’d vacation in the Caribbean every winter,” I said.

She pointed out a baby that wouldn’t stop crying. “What about that one?”

“With lungs like that,” I said, “I’d have to be some sort of musician. Maybe even a rock star.”

“I’d be your manager,” she said. “We started out working together, and then we fell in love.”

“On a tour of Europe,” I said.

“We live in an estate outside the city,” she said.

“I have gold albums and everything.”

“We have maids and people who do our lawns.”

“And more money than we can ever spend.”

Rachel pointed to a baby at the back of the room. This one was tiny, half the size of the others, and it was in a different kind of incubator, one that was all enclosed in glass and had tubes running into it from machines. The nurses checked on this baby every few minutes, and they stopped smiling whenever they did.

“What about that one?” Rachel asked. “Who would we be if we were that baby’s parents?”

“I’d be worried,” I said.

I WAS ACTING OUT so many deadly diseases and conditions that I couldn’t even tell when I was acting and when I was really sick. Once, I woke with what I thought was a real pain in my stomach. I’d been researching stomach cancer that week, and I knew all about the low survival rate, so I mentioned it to the doctor in charge of the training exercises when I went in that afternoon.

“I don’t know,” she said, “I was planning to test them on head injuries today.”

“But I think this is a real pain,” I said.

“Are you sure it isn’t in your head?” she asked me.

When she brought the interns in, the first one shone a light in my eyes. “Are you feeling any pain or nausea?” he asked. The question was directed at me, but he was looking at the doctor.

“I have a pain in my stomach,” I said.

“You mean your head,” he said.

“No,” I said, “it’s in my stomach.”

He looked at the doctor. “I thought we were doing head injuries today.”

“But I’m not acting,” I said. “I’m really in pain.”

“I didn’t study for abdominal pains,” he went on. “This isn’t fair.” One of the other interns laughed.

The doctor checked her watch. “Let’s move on,” she suggested.

“But I think there’s something really wrong with me,” I said.

THE NEXT TIME we went back to the room with all the babies, the sick baby was still in its incubator with all the tubes hooked up to machines. It didn’t look any bigger, and it didn’t cry or wave its arms and legs like the other babies. It just lay there, looking up at the fluorescent lights overhead.

“Do you think it’s going to live?” Rachel asked.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Where are its parents?” Rachel asked, looking around. “What it needs are parents.”

“Maybe they’re sick too,” I said. “Maybe they’re in their own special incubators somewhere.”

Rachel looked at me, then back at the baby.

“It’ll grow if it thinks it has parents,” she said. “It just needs to feel loved.”

“Well, what can you do,” I said.

“We’ll be its parents,” she said. She tapped on the glass. “Hello, baby,” she said.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Wave to baby,” she told me. She kept on tapping the glass, and the baby looked in our direction, as did one of the nurses.

“That’s not our baby,” I said.

“It doesn’t know that,” Rachel said. “It’s still young enough that maybe it’ll imprint on us.”

“It’s not a chicken,” I said.

“Wave to baby,” she said, “or it’ll think you don’t care.”

I looked at the baby. It stared back at me, unmoving except for its shallow breaths. I lifted a hand and waved.

A FEW MONTHS after I started working as a victim, a pharmaceutical company hired Rachel and me for some drug trials. It took place in an old wing of the hospital that wasn’t used any more. The hospital had sealed off the wing because it had been scheduled for demolition and rebuilding, but then the funds for the project had been cut off, and the wing had been left to collect dust, until they moved us in there.

There were maybe a dozen of us in total, all in one big room so the doctors could keep an eye on us. We lay in beds along the walls and watched a television they’d put in the middle of the room. All it played was commercials. Some of the others were normal people like me and Rachel, but some were actually sick. The guy in the bed beside me told me he was dying of cancer.

“Shouldn’t you be in another ward then?” I asked him.

“They can’t do anything about it,” he said. “It’s in my head. They’d have to cut out most of my brain to get at it. Then where would I be?”

“Is that a rhetorical question?” I asked.

“I’m hoping maybe these new drugs might do something,” he said, but then he sighed and shook his head.

The trial ran for the weekend, and they gave us pills every four hours. They even woke us up if we were sleeping to make sure we took them. The pills all looked the same, tiny and blue, but the doctor in charge said that some of them were placebos.

“Please don’t give me any of those,” the man beside me said. “That’s the last thing I need.”

“I’ll take his placebos if he doesn’t want them,” I said.

“That’s not the way it works,” the doctor said. “It’s all random.”

“Don’t I know that,” the man beside me said.

The water had been turned off in this part of the hospital, so we had to go back to one of the other wings if we wanted to use the washroom. One of the women in our group needed help walking there because the drugs she took made her fall down, and another guy lost control of his bowels in his bed, but I figured they were giving me placebos because there was nothing wrong with me.

But when I went to the washroom, I couldn’t find my way back. I wandered the halls of the closed-down wing for what seemed like hours before I finally gave up. I lay down on the floor of one of the empty rooms and tried to go to sleep.

As soon as I closed my eyes, though, all the commercials that I’d watched on that television in the ward room started playing in my head. Only now Rachel and I were in them. We drove down a coastal highway in a gleaming new car, we met each other’s eyes across a crowded bar and I slid a drink down the counter to her, we played one-on-one basketball against each other in a dark alleyway. I still don’t know if it was all caused by the drugs or just a dream.

One of the security guards found me around dawn. He shone a flashlight in my eyes and kept it there even after I’d stood up. “We’ve been looking all over for you,” he said. “We even checked the morgue downstairs.”

“What would I be doing in the morgue?” I asked him.

“What are you doing here?” he asked, looking around the empty room.

When he took me back to the room where I was supposed to be, Rachel was just waking up.

“Where were you?” she asked me.

“I went to the washroom,” I told her, climbing back into bed.

“I had this dream,” she said, shaking her head. “We were living together.”

“I want your drugs,” I said.

RACHEL AND I STARTED checking on our baby whenever we were in the hospital. We’d stand on the other side of the glass and wave and smile and make faces. Once, Rachel even bought a silver helium balloon from the hospital’s gift shop. It said Get Well Soon on one side, and the nurses tied it to one of the incubator’s hoses. The baby waved its arms.

“Look,” Rachel said. “It’s like baby’s trying to reach it.”

“It’s getting better,” I said. I put my arm around her.

She didn’t take her eyes off the baby. “It really is,” she said.

Our baby grew stronger with each passing day. Soon it was waving its arms and legs together, and once I thought it even smiled at us, although Rachel thought it was just gas.

“I think it’s going to live,” I told her one day.

“But what kind of life is it going to have?” she asked. “That’s the question.”

“It’s going to be an athlete,” I said. “It’s going to overcome all the odds and go on to become one of those success stories you see on television.”

“I’ll be happy as long as it’s not in a wheelchair or anything like that for the rest of its life,” she said. “I couldn’t stand it if it was crippled.”

“Even then, it’d still be a hero,” I said. “Like that guy who rode his wheelchair all around the world.”

“Imagine that,” Rachel said, tapping her fingers on the glass. “Our baby, a hero.”

BUT ONE DAY we showed up and our baby was gone. The special incubator was empty, and now the nurses didn’t even look at it. The helium balloon was still attached to the hose, but it hung half-deflated in the air.

“Oh no,” Rachel said, putting her hands over her mouth. “What’s happened?”

“Hey,” I said, pounding on the glass to get the nurses’ attention. “What have you done?”

All the other babies started to cry at the noise, and one of the nurses waved at me to stop.

“Oh oh oh,” Rachel said, staring at the empty incubator.

“It’s okay,” I said. “Don’t worry, it’s all right.” I didn’t know what else to do, so I pounded on the glass some more.

One of the nurses came through the door that led into the room. “Who do you think you are,” she said, “upsetting the babies like that?”

“What happened to it?” Rachel asked. She put her arms around me, and I held her. “Is it all right?”

“What happened to what?” the nurse asked.

“What happened to our baby?” I said.

THE LAST TIME I worked as a victim was when the hospital staged a disaster simulation. It took place in the parking lot of a mall, on a Sunday morning. There were twenty of us, all made up with different injuries by professional makeup crews. We sat on the asphalt while they painted wounds on us. I asked for a bullet in the chest, but the woman who worked on me said it wasn’t that kind of disaster. “It’s an explosion of some sort,” she said. “With toxic gas and all that.” She did something to my head that made it look all burned and black, then ripped the top of my shirt open.

“Am I getting reimbursed for that?” I asked.

“Do you think you can vomit?” she asked, rubbing fake blood into my chest. Her hands were warm and strong, like a masseuse’s. “We don’t have any of the simulated vomit left, and they wanted everyone throwing up from the gas.”

“What kind of gas is this anyway?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” she said. “All they said was gas.”

“I don’t think I can vomit,” I said. “Maybe I should just take off my shirt and you can put blood all over me instead.”

“I think we’re about done here,” she said. She turned to Rachel and worked on her for a while, giving her a slashed throat and covering one of her eyes with melted skin.

“How do I look?” Rachel asked me when the makeup woman was done.

“Perfect,” I told her.

The hospital had hired a professional film director, a man by the name of Eden, to stage the event. He listed off all the films he’d worked on, but I’d never heard of any of them. He arranged us around a burned-out tanker truck they’d parked in one corner of the lot.

“This was in a real accident,” he told us. “Two or three people got killed. So try to play off that, uh, realistic feeling.”

Rachel put up her hand. “What do you mean, ‘two or three’?” she asked.

“The fire department guys told me two bystanders died when it blew,” Eden said, “but they never found the driver, so they’re not sure what happened to him.”

I looked at the cab of the truck. It was all melted, the metal fused together so tightly you couldn’t see inside it. I wondered if the driver was still in there.

Eden spread us out around the truck and told us to lie down until the ambulances arrived. He walked among us, adjusting people’s limbs and telling us to show more pain, that sort of thing. A couple of times he stopped and looked at the scene through a little lens hanging from his neck.

“All right,” he said, when he was done, “I’m going to call the ambulances now. Try to stay in character when they get here.”

Beside me, Rachel lay back and looked up at the sky, practised her moaning.

Eden walked over to the snacks table and grabbed a gasoline container from underneath it. He took it over to the burned-out truck and poured gas all over the hood and the cab. Then he tossed the can aside and took a lighter from his pocket, lit the truck on fire.

Rachel stopped her moaning and looked up. “There’s no gas left in the truck, is there?” she asked.

“Are there going to be fire trucks too?” I called out, but Eden shook his head.

“No, this is just for, uh, effect,” he said. “I thought it would make things look more real.”

“He thought?” Rachel said, watching the smoke from the fire rise up into the sky. “Does the hospital know about this?”

“So no one’s going to put out the fire?” I asked.

Eden didn’t answer, though, because he was talking into his cell phone now. “Everybody’s in places here,” he said. “We’re ready for the take.”

I looked around the parking lot. People were pulling into parking spots around our taped-in area and getting out of their cars, wandering into the mall. Some of them looked our way, but no one actually stopped.

Eden frowned as he put away his phone. “Attention, people,” he shouted. “There’s been a delay. It seems there’s been a real disaster in a chemical plant on the other side of the city, and our ambulances got sent there by mistake. They thought it was the exercise.” People around Rachel and me groaned, but Eden held up his hands. “I want you all to stay in position,” he said. “They’re going to come for us as soon as they realize the mistake.”

We lay there for a while longer, until the sun was almost directly overhead. I began to sweat, but I stayed in place. The smoke from the fire drifted down over us, and everyone began to cough.

“What if they don’t realize it’s a mistake?” Rachel wondered after maybe half an hour of this. “What if they think that other disaster is really the exercise all along?”

“Well, they’d better figure it out soon,” I said, “because my makeup is starting to melt.”

Just then we heard the sirens. “Thank God,” Eden said and turned in the direction of the mall entrance. But it wasn’t ambulances that drove in, it was fire trucks.

“No no no,” Eden said.

There were three fire trucks in total, two regular ones and one of those smaller kind that the paramedics drive. They wound their way through the parking lot, honking their horns at the people going in and out of the mall as they tried to find their way to us. They had to circle around us once before they discovered a path through the parked cars. They drove into the exercise area, the lead truck going through the tape as it did so.

“Hey,” Eden shouted, running at the truck. “You’re breaking the scene integrity.”

The trucks stopped, and firemen in full gear climbed out. One of them pushed Eden out of the way and started shouting at a group of others who were unrolling a hose. He pointed at the truck, which was still burning, and they dragged the hose toward it.

“I thought this was an exercise for the ambulance staff,” I said to Rachel.

She shrugged. “As long as we get paid,” she said. She closed her eyes and started to moan again.

The firemen turned on the hose and began spraying the truck. “No!” Eden cried and put his hands in the air. And now other firemen were kneeling beside the closest victims, looking at their fake wounds and reaching into their first aid kits.

“I don’t think these guys know this is an exercise,” I said.

Rachel opened her eyes and watched the firemen for a moment. Another group had unrolled a second hose and they began spraying water on the victims closest to the truck. The makeup melted away under the water, and Eden screamed and threw himself in the way.

“Someone else must have called them,” Rachel said.

“So should we be playing our parts or not?” I wondered.

“We’d better ask Eden,” Rachel said.

“Do you really think we should break the scene?” I asked.

But she was already on her feet and walking over to Eden, so I got up and followed her.

Eden was on his knees when we reached him, staring at the firemen as they started loading people onto stretchers. He held his hands clasped to his chest, like he was praying. There were more sirens in the distance now.

“What should we do?” I asked him.

“Are we still getting paid for this?” Rachel asked at the same time.

“Hospital,” Eden said, only it came out more like a gasp.

“What about it?” I asked.

“Take me,” he said, making that same gasping noise.

It was only then I realized that he wasn’t praying, he was holding his chest. “I think he’s having a heart attack,” I said to Rachel.

Eden nodded and caught my hand with one of his. “Hospital,” he said again. “Take me.”

“I don’t think so,” I said, trying to push his hand off mine. “They’ll take care of you here.”

“Help,” Rachel called, waving her arms at the firemen. “We need some help here.” But none of them looked at us, because they were all busy with the other victims.

“Please,” Eden said, squeezing my hand just a little.

“We’re victims, not …” I didn’t know how to finish.

“I’ll pay you,” Eden gasped.

WE DRAGGED EDEN through the parking lot, to my car. “How much exactly are we getting paid for this?” I wanted to know as we drove around, looking for an exit.

“Hundred bucks,” Eden gasped.

“Each?” I asked.

He shook his head. “Only have hundred,” he managed.

“A hundred bucks to save your life?” I shook my head.

“And we’re still getting paid for the exercise, too, right?” Rachel asked.

Eden didn’t answer, just turned his head and looked out the window at the last bit of smoke rising from the truck. “Would have been perfect,” he sighed.

We found the way out and went down the street in the direction of the hospital. More fire trucks drove past us, and I could hear sirens in all directions.

“This is really not a professionally run operation,” Rachel said.

“Maybe we should start a union or something,” I said.

“Maybe we should look for another job,” she said.

“What would we do?” I asked.

“Something with benefits,” she said. “In case we ever really get sick.”

When we turned into the hospital entrance, I started to head for the parking lot, but Eden stopped me.

“Hey,” he moaned from the back seat. “Emergency!”

“But I can’t park in Emergency,” I said. “It’s just for ambulances and stuff.”

“Emergency,” Eden said again.

“I think you can park long enough to bring someone inside,” Rachel said. “You just can’t leave it there.”

“All right,” I said, “but I better not get towed.”

None of that mattered, though, because as I drove into the Emergency area, I collided head-on with an ambulance coming the other way.

In the second before we hit, the ambulance driver and I stared at each other through our windshields. He opened his mouth to say something. Rachel screamed. Then the steering wheel came up and hit me in the face, and I couldn’t open my eyes for a while.

When I finally managed to force them open once more, I saw Eden staggering through the Emergency doors. In the ambulance, the driver was slumped back in his seat, unconscious or dead, I couldn’t tell. The other paramedic was standing in the rear of the ambulance, holding his head with one hand and the inside wall of the ambulance with the other.

“We’d better get out of here,” I said, but when I looked over at Rachel, I saw that she was injured too. She was slumped back in her seat, and the windshield was cracked from where her head had hit it.

“Help!” I called out. I tried to undo my seat belt, but it was stuck. “Help!” I called again, this time to the paramedic who was conscious. He was out of the ambulance and stumbling around to the front of the vehicle now. He looked my way, then opened the driver’s side door of the ambulance and dragged out the other paramedic. I pounded on the horn, but he didn’t look back as he carried the other man through the Emergency doors.

I looked at Rachel again. I couldn’t even see if she was still breathing or not. “Don’t worry,” I said. “I won’t let you go.” I leaned across as best I could with the seat belt holding me back, and I pinched her nostrils shut, blew air into her mouth. “I’ll keep you alive until someone can save you,” I told her. I kept it up until the nurses came out and took her away from me.

That was the first time we kissed.

© Peter Darbyshire

 
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