Bellevue

Chapter 28

Thursday, July 4, 9:05 a.m.

The next thing Mitt became aware of was the sound of knocking on his on-call room door. It was soft knocking, which was why it took a relatively long time to rouse him from his coma-like sleep. “Just a second,” he managed, finding his voice and then having to clear his throat. He uncrossed his legs, which apparently had been crossed for the nearly four hours he’d been comatose, and threw them over the side of the bed to help him sit up. Immediately he could tell his right leg remained “asleep” from having its circulation compromised. As he massaged the involved calf, he called out: “Hang on! I’m coming.”

“No problem,” came back through the door.

Mitt instantly recognized Andrea’s voice and assumed she was responsibly checking in with him to start her on-call status. When Mitt felt his leg was capable of bearing weight and would be reasonably responsive to commands, he stood up. He then had to weather a short-lived spate of dizziness. When that passed, he staggered a few steps on a leg that still felt wooden and opened the door.

“Oh my gosh, you look like you’ve been through the wringer,” Andrea said, but her tone was cheerful. She then followed up with a teasing verbal once-over as she stood in the doorway, pointing out his bloodshot eyes, his rumpled white coat, and his hair, which stuck out at odd angles the way terrified cartoon characters were drawn.

“Thanks for all the compliments,” Mitt said. In sharp contrast to his own appearance, as per usual she looked rather chic, as if she were heading out on a date rather than starting what might turn out to be a grueling twenty-four-hour on-call stint as a first-year surgical resident. He couldn’t help but notice she was back to wearing her trendy, bright red dress under a clean and starched white coat. On top of that, her dark, bobbed hair had been scrupulously attended to, and she was even wearing a small amount of makeup. Despite feeling decidedly outclassed, he added: “Do you want to come in for a few minutes and chat?”

“I’d like to hear about your night,” Andrea said. “But only if it won’t bother you. You do look exhausted. Maybe you should just go back to sleep, and we can talk later?”

“No, it’s okay! I want to get up,” Mitt said. “I prefer to get out of here, go back to my apartment, and get some real sleep.”

“Fair enough,” Andrea said as she stepped into the room.

Mitt let the door go, and it closed on its own accord. While Andrea sat in the lone reading chair, he went back to the bed and sat down.

“I’m sorry to have awakened you,” Andrea said. “The way you look, it seems cruel in retrospect. In my defense, I did debate with myself for a few minutes. Ultimately I thought it behooved me to find out if there was anything particular that I should know as part of a responsible handoff.”

“It’s okay,” Mitt said. He ran both hands through his hair, trying to tame it to a degree. “Seriously! I’m glad you woke me. As I said, I’ll appreciate getting home. As for the current inpatients, ‘All’s Quiet on the Western Front,’ at least at the moment.”

“That’s good to hear, which reminds me: I haven’t had anything to eat yet. Want to grab a bit of breakfast together?”

“Thanks for the invite, but to be honest, I’m not hungry in the slightest.”

“Fair enough,” Andrea said. “Sounds like you didn’t get much sleep. Otherwise, how was your night?”

“Pretty terrible,” Mitt said, nodding as he spoke.

“Bummer,” Andrea said. “What made it bad? Did you have emergency surgery in the middle of the night?”

“No surgery. I wouldn’t have minded that. Instead, all three of my remaining patients died.”

“What?” Andrea loudly blurted. She was plainly shocked. “Oh, come on! I hope you are trying to make what would be the world’s most tasteless joke.”

“I wish I were,” Mitt said. “Elena Aguilar had a cardiac arrest in the ICU, which I suppose wasn’t so startling as she had been doing poorly since her surgery. But just before that happened, Latonya Walker, my breast biopsy, also had an arrest, which was a huge surprise for everyone because she’d been doing perfectly fine and had no cardiac history whatsoever.”

“Unbelievable! What about the last one? Was that the thyroidectomy you were so hyped about?”

“Exactly,” Mitt said. “In some respects, the third one was the most disconcerting of all. His name was Diego Ortiz. He’d been doing fine, too, but then out of the blue he suffered an off-the-charts thyroid storm.”

“Whoa! I’m not sure I’ve even heard of a thyroid storm, but I guess it’s self-explanatory.”

“It is self-explanatory. The body’s metabolism just goes berserk, and the patient kind of burns himself up from the inside.”

“Good God! I’m blown away! This means that every single one of the patients you’d been assigned so far has died.”

“I’m afraid so.”

For a few beats, the two friends just stared at each other. Mitt longed to bring up the extraordinary idea that he was being targeted by the ghosts of Bellevue because of the sins of his forebearers, but he couldn’t get himself to do it. Once again, if the situation were the other way around, and Andrea was trying to tell him that malevolent spirits were targeting her patients because of her ancestors’ behavior, he’d think she’d gone off the deep end. At the same time, he was desperate to talk with her and feel a connection with a friend and colleague to help him deal with a difficult emotional situation. If nothing else, he wanted reassurance that his plan to return to the psychiatric hospital to borrow the records behind Lashonda Scott’s back wasn’t taking advantage of her good graces and personal generosity.

“How are you handling this amazing coincidence?” Andrea asked with obvious concern. “I hope you are not taking it personally?”

“It’s difficult not to,” Mitt said as his shoulders visibly sank. “Seven out of seven is just pushing the limits of probability.”

“But you are only a first-year resident,” Andrea exclaimed. “We talked about this. You haven’t made any of the decisions nor done the surgeries. It can’t be your fault. There’s no way.”

Mitt shrugged his shoulders. Once again, he wanted to talk about the apparitions he’d been seeing, especially now that he’d visited the psychiatric hospital where they all apparently resided, but he dared not. “Something else very disturbing happened last night,” he said, thinking about where he could take the conversation and remain on reasonably safe subjects.

“As bad as three of your patients dying?”

“I suppose not, but pretty bad just the same.”

“Okay, lay it on me.”

“I got specific confirmation from two actual cases that Dr. Harington was correct about my Bellevue ancestors being on the wrong side of history.”

“I’m not sure what you mean?”

“Exactly what I said. My ancestor Homer Fuller amputated a leg in mid-thigh in 1854 and chose not to use anesthesia, which was obviously available at the time. And Clarence Fuller, the psychiatrist, attempted to do a lobotomy in 1949 on an eight-year-old girl with what was probably a behavioral disorder, which she probably would have outgrown, and killed her in the process supposedly because of an aberrant cerebral artery.”

“Holy crap! That is pretty bad. And how is it you got confirmation of all this in the middle of the night?”

“It’s a moderately long story. Do you really want to hear?”

“Yes, of course, but if it is a moderately long story, I’d like to revisit the breakfast idea. Are you sure you’re not game?”

“You know, now that I’ve been upright and conscious for a few minutes, I do feel a bit hungry. Let’s do it.”

After Mitt had splashed some cold water on his face and tamed his hair a tad with a brush, he and Andrea left the on-call room. Out in the lounge, he also took the time to exchange his soiled and seriously wrinkled white coat for a clean, starched one. This effort improved his appearance enough for Andrea to joke that she now wasn’t all that embarrassed to be seen with him.

Twenty minutes later, they were in the cafeteria seated at a table for two with breakfasts in front of them. Although Andrea had the works — scrambled eggs, bacon, and toast — Mitt was content with juice, cold cereal, and skim milk.

“Okay, enough of the suspense,” Andrea said. “Out with it! How on earth did you learn such specific details about your relatives in the middle of the night?”

“What happened was... I was introduced to a trove of old Bellevue Hospital records going back several hundred years. It’s somewhat of a long story that happened by a strange sequence of events. I’ll try to explain it all provided I can count on your strict confidence.”

“Of course,” Andrea said. “Don’t be silly. That’s a given.”

“I don’t know exactly how many records are involved, but it’s a lot. I’m guessing in the hundreds. They’d been collected by my great-grandfather Clarence Fuller, the psychiatrist, and hidden away out of circulation back in 1975 by a hospital administrator after Clarence retired. Although I’ve only had a chance to quickly skim two of them so far, I understand most, if not all, of them are records of patients treated by my relatives. The key thing is that they are not flattering, to say the very least.”

Andrea, who had been eating with gusto, stopped and put down her flatware. Leaning forward, she stared at Mitt with unblinking eyes. “Wait a second! Are you suggesting that these records have never seen the light of day?”

“That’s exactly what I am saying.”

“I’m fascinated. And they go back to the nineteenth century?”

“Early nineteenth century.”

“Okay,” Andrea remarked mostly to herself, ostensibly to reorient her brain. She took a deep breath, leaned back in her chair, then looked directly at Mitt. “Out with it! Let me hear this long story.”

Mitt proceeded to tell her about his sudden unexpected hunger after Ortiz’s thyroid storm, his chance meeting with Lashonda Scott in the cafeteria, her telling him about the records hidden by her mother in the basement of the now-deserted psychiatric building, and what the records represented.

“Okay,” Andrea suddenly repeated, interrupting Mitt’s monologue. “Hold up for a freaking second! Are you suggesting that this supposed night-shift housekeeping supervisor just offered all this to you essentially out of the blue?”

“Yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying. She’d seen me earlier after Suárez’s death and was aware of my family’s association with Bellevue because her family has an even closer association with the institution. She thought that I should know about the records.” Mitt didn’t tell Andrea anything about Lashonda and him being portals.

“Wow!” Andrea commented, rolling her eyes as she was wont to do. “This is one strange story.”

“I agree,” Mitt said. “And it gets stranger. What she had told me had certainly fanned my curiosity. I felt I had to see these records, and she offered to take me to see them. Well, maybe I asked. Anyway, that’s what we ended up doing around four a.m. Since her mother and she had worked in the building back when it was a functioning psychiatric hospital, she still has the key. Luckily she also had a key for a padlock on the outer gate.”

“You guys went into the deserted psychiatric building last night?” Andrea asked incredulously.

“We did. With flashlights, and it wasn’t for very long, mind you, but long enough for me to scan the two records.”

“What’s the place like after being closed up for decades?”

“It’s pretty weird,” Mitt said, knowing that was a gross understatement. “Even after all this time, it’s not completely cleaned out. I saw some old furniture in a couple of the first-floor offices as if people expected to return. But what really caught my attention was that the interior has weirdly decorative architectural details, reminiscent of its exterior and certainly unlike any hospital I’ve ever been in.” In his mind’s eye he could again see the unique yellow barrel vaulting in the first-floor hallways.

“What an absolutely crazy night for you,” Andrea commented. She rolled her eyes yet again. “No wonder you looked as frazzled as you did when I woke you.”

“It was one of the worst and weirdest nights in my life,” Mitt admitted. “But, again, all this is for your ears only. Okay?”

“Yeah, sure, okay,” Andrea responded.

“And there is a reason I’m particularly interested in telling you all this,” Mitt continued. “I’d like to get your opinion and even your reassurance about something I plan to do.”

“Oh?” Andrea questioned.

“Yes. I feel compelled to read more of these records but not while I’m standing up in the dark with a flashlight. It doesn’t do them justice. The problem is that they’re all located in the back closet of a distant storeroom down in the building’s basement, and there’s no electricity. My plan is to somehow find a way back into the building on my own this afternoon, which shouldn’t be that difficult, and bring a box or two of the records back to my apartment. They’re all stored in a half dozen or so cardboard bankers boxes. When I’m finished going over them properly, maybe even photographing a few, I will return them and possibly exchange them for more. I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it.”

“How are you going to get into the building?”

“That I don’t know yet, but I can’t imagine it will be too difficult. A very small section involving a couple of floors of one wing along Thirtieth Street down near the East River is being used as a homeless shelter. It has its own entrance from Thirtieth. I’ll check that out first. I’d be surprised if there wasn’t a way to get into the building proper through there since it’s all the same building.”

“Why not just borrow the keys from Lashonda and go in the same way you did last night?”

“That would be the easiest,” Mitt admitted. “But there’s a rub. When Lashonda’s mother was originally tasked to hide the records, she made a binding promise that she would not give the records to anyone, and she in turn made Lashonda agree to the same, and this is a family that takes such promises to heart. To obviate making Lashonda feel like she’s violated her vow, I’ve decided not to tell her my plans. But I feel a little guilty since I truly respect her and am genuinely thankful for her efforts on my behalf. What’s your take?”

“I see your point, but if you are just borrowing some of the records for a few hours and will return them, it seems okay to me, particularly since your interest is personal, and she already showed you the files.”

“Thank you,” Mitt said. “That’s what I thought, but it’s nice to have reassurance.” He finished the last spoonful of cereal, then lifted the bowl to drink the remaining milk. Replacing the bowl, he stood. “And now I have to get home and clock some serious shut-eye. Thanks for listening to me, and I hope your day and evening aren’t too bad.”

“I hope so, too,” Andrea said. “Good luck this afternoon.”

“Thank you. I’ll give you a call later and let you know how I’ve made out if you’d like.” He picked up his tray.

“I’d definitely like,” Andrea said. “I’ll be wondering what’s up with you all day!”

“Okay, I’ll keep you informed of my progress. I promise.”

“What about those three patients you have been assigned for surgery tomorrow? Do you want me to do the admission histories and physicals?”

“Oh damn, I forgot all about them, but thanks for reminding me,” Mitt said. He put his tray back down to think for a moment, recognizing it would be best not to be associated with any patients for their own safety, at least until he decided what he was going to do vis-à-vis the residency. “You know, under the circumstances, I would really appreciate if you do them provided you are not too busy. One way or the other, let’s be sure to talk as the day progresses.”

“Sounds like a plan,” Andrea said. “I really don’t mind since I have to be here anyway.”

“You are a true friend,” Mitt said with all sincerity.

Andrea stood up and offered one cheek and then the other. Mitt was more than willing to comply. He then carried his tray over to the soiled-dish window before heading out of the cafeteria. Just before leaving, he waved back at Andrea and she returned the gesture. He felt lucky to have her as a friend.

Mitt was eager to get back to his apartment. As wired as he was after his conversation with Andrea, he worried he might have a problem falling back to sleep even though he was exhausted and mentally strung out. As he hurried through the hospital atrium on his way out, he couldn’t help but search for Charlene since he’d seen her there the previous morning. He didn’t see her, although surprisingly there seemed to be just about the same number of people coming and going and milling about as yesterday, despite it being the Fourth of July, a national holiday. It was living proof that Bellevue Hospital was a magnet for all types, no matter the date or time of day.

When he emerged onto the street and turned north, he was struck by how much warmer it felt than it had a few hours earlier just before dawn when Lashonda and he had hurried back from the psychiatric hospital. And when he walked out of the shadow of the Bellevue high-rise, the sun beat down on the back of his neck with such surprising intensity that he picked up speed by reflex.

Coming abreast of the psychiatric building’s padlocked gate on First Avenue, he couldn’t resist the temptation to stop and peer in at what he now knew was a faux entrance to the old hospital. Doing so brought back with disturbing clarity all the moments of surprise and terror he’d experienced on his recent visit. Despite how unnerving that had been, merely thinking about it had the benefit of forcing him to more seriously consider how he was going to get back inside that afternoon.

As he told Andrea, he was more or less counting on the homeless shelter to provide the route, but now he wasn’t as confident as he had been. He’d assumed there’d be a passable connection into the building proper just because it was the same structure, but now that he thought about the idea, he questioned what possible function such an access would have. On the contrary, he could think of a lot of reasons why it would be better to have none, considering the population the homeless shelter was serving.

With a rather sudden sense of disappointment, Mitt stepped back from the padlocked gate and looked up and down the wrought iron fence. Even it was a formidable obstruction, meaning there was no easy way for him to get over the fence, much less into a disused building that had been locked and boarded up for forty years. But then he thought again about the homeless shelter, but in a new way. The fact that the shelter existed and had for a number of years told him something else. It needed heat and power. He was also confident that the psychiatric hospital did not have its own furnace. Like any building in a major complex like Bellevue, the heat and other utilities had to come from a central source, and since the homeless shelter needed heat, the connection had to be still active and, more important, still open.

With a sudden sense of excitement, Mitt remembered something else that he’d learned somewhat by accident while he was in medical school at Columbia’s College of Physicians and Surgeons. That entire complex of multiple hospitals, academic buildings, and residences was connected underground by a maze of passageways and tunnels, which carried all the utilities, and when he thought about it, he couldn’t imagine that Bellevue would be any different. Suddenly it seemed to him that perhaps the best way to get into the mostly empty psychiatric hospital would be to meet a friendly but knowledgeable member of the engineering or maintenance staff and flatter him or her into giving up the info needed.

With a revived sense of resolve, and even a bit of newly found optimism, Mitt broke away from the psychiatric hospital and its imposing fence. Out of the corner of his eye, he’d caught the traffic light at 30th Street and First Avenue changing in his favor, so he took the opportunity to dash across the busy avenue. Reaching the other side, he kept up the power-walk momentum. From there, he only had another half block to go. Suddenly the idea of slipping into his bed naked after a quick shower completely engulfed his tired brain.