"Marcus Eubanks - Selections from the New World" - читать интересную книгу автора (Eubanks Marcus)

Selections from the New World
by Marcus Eubanks

The recurrent thought, looping over and over again like a mantra: Of all the stupid ways to die.


I come back to myself when it dawns on me I'm clutching shards of blood-slick glass in my hand. It seems I managed to forget the beer I was holding until the slender pilsner flute collapsed under my grip.

"Fuck!" Oblivious to the neighbors, I eloquently express my discontent as the pain hits me. I've cleverly cut myself to ribbons -- though some remote part of me notes clinically there's nothing deep enough to merit sutures. For the life of me, I can't tell if I'm irritated more because I've wasted several ounces of excellent beer (which in my mind represents flagrant alcohol abuse) or because I've opened my hand to the possibility of infection. The fact that the glass was fine lead crystal is irrelevant.

Not that it matters. I wipe my bleeding hand on my Levi's and laugh. It doesn't matter either way.

I kick the broken pieces into a corner of my third floor balcony and grab the bottle, which is still roughly half full. After three long swallows I toss it over with the shattered glass.

I blot my hand again on my jeans as I walk into the house to grab a six-pack to restock the outside fridge. I pry the cap off one with an elegant opener that Vicram gave me a while back -- one of the first to be made from one of those insanely strong ceramics they started coming out with a few years ago. He had thought it hysterically funny that a technology which could spin bridges from thin silken strands was being used to make trinkets to open beer-bottles.

Back on the balcony, reclining in the bristling wet summer heat on a teak deck-chair, I thumb the system's remote so music from inside washes over me. I'm imagining my friends here, leaning against the rail to torment passers-by or maybe to seduce them into joining us: "Hey you - yeah, you. Wanna beer? No no, you gotta come up and talk to us while you drink it. No drink and run here, no sir!" - or just milling about in endless conversation.

There, squatting by the railing, should be Francois, messing with one of the candles. Frankie of the dry dangerous wit, fresh out of a prestigious fellowship in cardiothoracic surgery. In spite of the unpredictable schedule of transplant work, he always managed to find enough time to make the Fearsome Foursome complete at least a couple of times a month.

Dean would be sitting in one of the chairs, or sprawled out on the decking with his back to the three-story drop, doling out beers from the weathered little fridge he rested his feet on. He was a master of the absurd, helping all of us to avoid the grim pitfall of taking ourselves too seriously.

Finally, there was Vicram, laughing and harsh. He would be needling one of us about something, leaning up against the building's exterior wall with his legs stretched out along the wide rail on which he perched. Vic always pushed his assault right up to the line, but only rarely beyond. Paradoxically, he was strangely astute and gentle when any of us was upset about something important, like women or work.

Francois bit the big one because of some obscure strain of strep that one of his patients, who happened to be a smack addict, had growing on the valves of his heart.

I remember Frankie joining us that night down on South Side, observing in numb shock that the resident working under him that day had slipped spectacularly with a needle while they were closing a chest after a valve-replacement. He had managed to breach the wonderfully thin but resilient gloves that the surgeons were using back then, reinforced densely with strands of Kevlar. Later that night he'd joked about it, showing us the line of sutures marking the deep laceration the cutting edge of the heavy needle had opened in the web of his thumb.

"I'm probably going to come down with that new strain of Hepatitis G - you know, the one they couldn't isolate well enough to cover in the vaccine," Frankie had said, looking at Dean. "And one of you goddamned internal medicine fleas is gonna end up filling me with gunk up to my yellow eyes so my liver doesn't fry my brain."

It's drizzling now, rain dropping on the roof of my carefully restored townhouse on Pittsburgh's north side and falling into the alleyway. That was what, '04? We barely had a fucking clue, even then. Viruses? Ebola had been a name to conjure with, especially after the fiasco in Cairo, and Bible-thumping assholes were agitating to set up quarantined ghettoes for victims of HIV. Prions were nasty to be sure, but turned out to be almost impossible to transmit unless you were eating infected meat. Still, we remained blindly panicked about the so-called scourge of immunology even then. We were idiots, all of us, even those of us who knew.

Frankie was just fine until he developed the vicious streptococcal heart disease the same time he came down with intractable pneumonia. Strep - the very same bug kids everywhere had been getting penicillin or amox for at first sign of a scratchy throat for the past forty years. Apparently the bug had been sitting semi-comatose, probably on one of the valves of his heart, for the three months since the needle-stick. It had waited patiently for his immune system to sag for a moment, and then it seeded his lungs.

After that, Frankie DuBois started dying aggressively of a grim combination of pneumonia and heart failure, which even ten years before could have been cured with a course of antibiotics. Hell, the cardiac part wouldn't have happened at all, or at least not that soon, but the bug had somehow found a way to make itself look even more like heart tissue to the body's own defenses. As a result, his own immune system chewed up his heart in the process of trying to beat the infection.

So at the tender age of thirty-four Frankie had been hacking up bloody gobbets of lung, rattling obscenely with every breath. We smuggled beer into his bay in the intensive care unit daily in an attempt at forced good cheer until the morning the unit team decided that he needed a tracheostomy tube so he could be placed on a ventilator.

The next afternoon Frankie had mimed for pen and paper and scribbled in tortured letters "KCl, 40 mEq IV push." He looked up at us in naked feverish pain, begging. Two and a half hours later he suffered cardiac arrest when a tragically mislabeled vial of potassium chloride was pushed into his circulation. We looked on dispassionately, three visiting attending physicians, as the residents and students on the unit team tried futilely to revive him.

We spent the rest of the day back here on my balcony, profoundly drunk. It turned into one of those startlingly mild late October evenings, and my candles finally remained unmolested. Dean had gone on a tirade about the laissez-faire street economy which made antibiotics available indiscriminately.

"They are taking away everything I have, dammit!" he said with the precise diction of the thoroughly impaired. "War on drugs? Jesus!" He stopped and turned such an ugly glare toward us that I had to remind myself forcibly that this was one of my best friends; that it wasn't meant for us. "If they're so hell-bent on keeping us from killing ourselves with drugs, then why the fuck don't they interdict the dangerous shit, like Keflex and Biaxin?" He lapsed into silence, staring morosely at his beer.

It was an old complaint. As far back as the early '80s it was known the unrestricted use of antibiotics in Asia, Africa, and Central America was selecting out some frighteningly vicious strains of common bugs like strep and TB. It was also happening in our own inner cities, but no one wanted to think that we might somehow share the blame. It had proven impossible, of course, to get people in positions of power to take any notice of it. When the nets reported that a small hospital in Sioux Falls had isolated a strain of Vancomycin-resistant staph from a patient's wound back in '98, surgeons and infectious disease people all across the country collectively soiled themselves. The world as they knew it was over, their last line of defense against this ubiquitous organism was blown to hell in the time it took to read one preliminary journal abstract.

Even then, the Feds turned a blind eye, busy as they were with isolationist economic policy and internal power struggles. Besides, it was all taking place in shitty third-world countries and American inner cities. Their unspoken policy was along the lines of, "Whatever those people get is their own fault anyway, right?"

We used to joke about it in school. Dean observed one evening a lot of it was our doing as well: "I figure North Philly is like my own private petri-dish. I'm doing an experiment - figure I'll create a nice resistant strain of, oh I dunno, gonorrhea or uh, pneumococcus. 'Cause I'm a humanitarian. Yeah, that's it, I adore the human race. Yeah. So here's some pink stuff for you, some Biaxin for you, and for this lucky dog over here, Unasyn. Big guns, kiddies. You can have the biggest, nastiest antibiotic I've got, even though you don't need it. Heh. Enjoy."