The Measure(15)

And it was settled, Maura had convinced herself of that. What good would it do Nina to learn that Maura was having doubts?





Hank




On the first day of May, nobody at New York Memorial Hospital could have predicted the large-scale tragedy that would occur there in just two weeks’ time. At the beginning of the month, the doctors and nurses and patients were still preoccupied, as always, with the tragedies unfolding on smaller scales all around them.

That morning alone, Hank had seen three people come into the hospital with tears in their eyes, faces pale with fear, desperately begging to speak with a doctor about their short strings.

In the early weeks, back in March and April, Hank and his colleagues would invite these short-stringers into the hospital and run a series of tests: blood panels, MRIs, ultrasounds, EKGs. Sometimes they would find something of concern and the patient could return home, if not with hope, then at least with an answer. It was far more difficult to send someone away with no explanation at all.

But the short-stringers appeared with greater frequency as the weeks passed and more people became convinced that the strings were real. And so, by the first of May, after the government had confirmed what everyone had feared, the hospital board decided that short-stringers exhibiting no present symptoms could no longer be “indulged.” The sick and injured would never be turned away, of course, but the otherwise healthy couldn’t be admitted solely because of their string, which could equally imply an imminent accident as it could a medical ailment. The emergency room was too crowded already, and the legal team worried that doctors who released short-stringers with a clean bill of health might be flirting with a lawsuit.

Hank had just stepped into the ER lobby to discuss a patient’s results with his family, when he saw a man arrive, box in hand, and approach the triage nurse screening patients at the entrance.

“My name is Jonathan Clarke,” the man said frantically. “I need help.”

“Can you tell me what’s wrong?” the nurse asked, warily eyeing his box.

“No, but . . . it’s so short,” Jonathan pleaded. “It’s so soon. You’ve gotta stop it.”

“Are you currently experiencing any symptoms, sir?”

“I don’t know. No. I don’t think so,” Jonathan stammered. “But you don’t understand, it’s almost done. Somebody’s gotta help me!”

“Sir, if you aren’t experiencing any symptoms, unfortunately I need to ask you to leave.” The nurse gestured toward the exit. “We have patients here who need immediate attention.”

“I need immediate attention!” Jonathan shouted. “I don’t have any time!”

“Sir, I sympathize with your situation, but unfortunately there’s nothing we can do. We recommend making an appointment with your primary care doctor instead.”

“How can you say that? This is a fucking hospital! You’re supposed to help people!”

A few of the patients and families waiting in the ER had turned to watch the scene, riveted like rubberneckers on a roadside, but most locked their eyes on the floor, both embarrassed and saddened for the man.

“Sir, I need you to calm down,” the nurse said firmly.

“Stop calling me that!” Jonathan shook his box in the air. “I’m gonna die!”

One of the nearby security guards, a former wrestler, was coming over now as backup.

“How can you do this to me?” Jonathan was screaming. “How can you just let me die?”

“Sir, we know this is a difficult situation,” said the guard, “and we don’t want to call the police, but if you don’t leave, we’re going to have to.” His hand hovered near the baton at his waist.

Jonathan fell quiet, and his eyes scanned the lobby, eventually settling upon Hank, the only white-coated figure in the room.

“Fine,” Jonathan said. “I’m leaving.”

He looked back at the nurse and the towering guard. “I don’t want to spend my last days in a fucking jail cell,” he said. “Maybe another hospital will have a goddamn heart.”

From his post in the ER, Hank felt like he had been watching the world move through the stages of grief, inching closer and closer to some form of acceptance, a new notion of normality. But it seemed to him that, at every stage, more and more people had been left behind, trapped within each phase, unable to transition out.

Some were stuck in the early throes of denial: A few blocks from Hank’s apartment, a dozen demonstrators often gathered to shout their assertions that the strings were a hoax, a government ruse, and that any accurate string predictions were merely self-fulfilling prophecies, testaments to the weak human spirit so easily swayed.

The bargainers pleaded with God to lengthen their strings, promised to turn their lives around. And perhaps those still refusing to open their boxes were engaged in a kind of bargaining as well, Hank thought. Every day that they didn’t look at their strings, they bought themselves more time in an unaltered life.

But the people imprisoned in the more emotional stages, mired in anger or depression, were the easiest to spot and painful to watch. Jonathan Clarke belonged to the angry.

Hank waited as the sullen man exited the ER, and the feeling that had been growing inside of him since all of this began—a virulent sense of his own impotence—seemed to boil over in that moment.